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POPSMark Steyn: Due Diligence Never Done on Obama
... and toss it down the toilet just in complying with federal paperwork. Obama and the great toxic alphabet soup of federal regulation – EPA, OSHA, SEC, DHSS – want to take that 10 percent and crank it up to 12, 14, 15 percent. Three years on, nothing has changed. Obama is proposing to raise taxes because of some cockamamie yarn Warren Buffett has been peddling about his allegedly overtaxed secretary. Yet the court eunuchs of the media persist in taking Buffett seriously as a archetypal exemplar of the "American business community" rather than as an especially well-connected crony. Sometimes, Obama cronyism is merely fiscally wasteful, as in the still underreported Solyndra "green jobs" scandal. One sympathizes with reporters assigned to the story: It's hard to get all the public monies and Solyndra-exec White House visit logs lined up in digestible form for the casual reader. But sometimes Obama cronyism is murderous: Eric Holder, a man unfit to be attorney general ...
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POPStheCL Report (October 17, 2011) When the law says that it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. Otherwise, what the hell did you guys bother having a revolution for? Say what you like about George III, but he didn’t prosecute the Boston Tea Party for unlicensed handling of beverage ingredients in a public place. -- Mark Steyn
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POPSFree Speech Disaster in Australia Free speech is under assault in the West. Mark Steyn; "If you're not in favor of free speech you find offensive, repellent and loathsome, you're not in favor of free speech at all and you're on the side of creeping totalitarianism." The conviction of Andrew Bolt for writing about Aboriginal identity politics, is based on an impossible legal criterion namely the degree of offence experienced in the mind of the claimed victim. Bolt wrote that we should strive to find the things that bind Australians, not those that divide us . We maintain that what Bolt wrote in this newspaper and online was not based on race, but the way race was used by those who took such offence. Free Speech Disaster in Australia Must see vid Freedom of speech is dead in Australia - James Delingpole
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POPSMark Steyn ... American Autumn That’s your “American Autumn”: an America that constrains the next Steve Jobs but bigs up Van Jones. Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: They’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for. read full article American Autumn by Mark Steyn http://bit.ly/pPCDdQ http://www.nationalreview.com — Mark Steyn , a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn
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POPSThe Downgrade Begins By Mark Steyn It never occurred to any of the parties or the play-by-play commentators that their dramatically negotiated plans for – what was it now? – $7-12 billion of cuts in FY2012 would not be taken seriously by the world. That’s the heart of the S&P critique - its remarks about ”the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions”. In other words, the “deal” only confirmed the nature of the problem. Now that it’s happened, it’s hard to argue that there was anything very obviously triple-A about America in 2011. So ask yourself this: If in 2013 we’re still talking in the terms of this week’s deal, you want to bet we’ll still be AA+*? (*Oddly enough, $&P have downgraded the US to the initials of my book. Thanks, guys!) The Downgrade Begins By Mark Steyn http://bit.ly/nuZzhs http://www.nationalreview.com
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POPSMark Steyn ... A Post-American Planet Around the world, most folks have to work harder than that to save $9 trillion. That’s roughly the combined GDPs of Japan and Germany. But in America it’s an accounting device. This is something to bear in mind when you’re listening to the amount of “savings” touted by whatever triumphant bipartisan deal is announced at the eleventh hour in Washington. So I find myself less interested in “life on this planet as we know it today” than in life on this planet as we’re likely to know it tomorrow if Nancy Pelosi and her chums decline to reacquaint themselves with reality. . . . As the old gag goes, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem. If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet’s No.1 economy by 2016. That means whoever’s elected in November next year will be the last president of the . . .
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POPS Mark Steyn The Debt Mountain Labored and Brought Forth a Mouse Maybe North Korea will accidentally nuke the South Sandwich Islands and we’ll be expected to chip in for reconstruction. That leaves now. And, in terms of spending now now now, the entire political class has made itself a global laughingstock. A month of shuttling back and forth between the Capitol and the White House for “a real, enforceable cut” of $1-7 billion? Boehner might as well have gone to the Turks & Caicos for July and worked on his tan. Downgrade’s a-comin’.
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POPS Mark Steyn: Obama the man Without a Plan They're passing austerity budgets so austere they've spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street – and yet they're still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more – and nobody's downgrading them. Well, don't worry. It's coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional . In the debt-ridden treasuries of Europe, they're talking "austerity." In the debt-ridden treasury of Washington, they're talking about more spending . .
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POPSGANG OF SIX PLAN A TOTAL JOKE “Obviously it’s appealing to Democrats: It accepts their view that 25 percent of GDP should be the new baseline for national . . . government spending. But what’s in it for Republicans?” he writes. Read more on Newsmax.com: Steyn: ‘Gang of Six’ Plan 'Total Joke' Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!
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POPSSteyn Argues for GOP Anger on Debt Ceiling: ‘Accepting the terms of this debate is nuts’ Is the Republican Party missing the point of these debt ceiling negotiations — that is, have they allowed the Democratic Party to define what the debate is really about, which is to increase the debt ceiling to expand the role government? Columnist Mark Steyn says the answer is yes. Steyn explained the debt ceiling is not just a mechanism for allowing government to survive, but one that will allow it to continue to grow. “What we’ve been talking about today is not really the debt ceiling because I don’t accept that as a kind of legitimate way of looking at it because the only issue — the only issue that matters is the size of government,” Steyn said. “The bigger government gets, the more wasteful , the more unproductive it gets, the more stupid it gets,” he explained. “And that’s why we shouldn’t be talking about it in terms of the debt ceiling and the debt limit. The world will set America’s debt limit, and the world is already doing that.” He said there is not any . .
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POPSMark Steyn ... Selective Shaming Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn’t bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians. If, by this stage, you’re wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners — that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control. Real people are dead. Yet nobody’s going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn’t yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards . .
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POPSMark Steyn On Fast And Furious . . . and tried to portray the scandal as a political vendetta against Eric Holder, largely perpetrated by the NRA. Mara Liaison, the other liberal member of the panel, agreed that it is a genuine scandal but suggested that it was due in part to the fact that there has not been a director of the ATF for 4-5 years, alleging that this was because the NRA didn't approve of anyone nominated by Republicans or Democrats. Sigh. And in the "How Tone-Deaf Are These Guys Anyway?" department, we learn from Fox News (http://bit.ly/ph2a80) that the Justice Department and White House are working hard on gun control measures that they plan to release in the near future. Perhaps it would help if the Obama Administration stopped preventing federal law enforcement officers from doing their jobs, didn't stonewall and lie to Congress, and stopped giving guns to murderous foreign and domestic criminals? Read this one only if you have taken your blood pressure medication and have secured . . .
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POPSSpeechworld vs. Realworld by Mark Steyn “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” Gee, thanks. If America were a Kandahar wedding, that would be the cue to fire your rifle in the air and grab the cutest nine-year-old boy. Naturally, not everyone sees eye to eye. Like Afghanistan, ours is a fractious land. But as Obama said: “Our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong, no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.” The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along. Remember Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla.? “I never thought this day would ever happen,” she gushed after an Obama rally in 2008. “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” In Speechworld, nation-building can be done through flatulent rhetoric. In Realworld, nations are built by people . . .
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POPSWhy Pakistan Knew it Could Hide Osama Pakistan, our "ally," hides and protects not only Osama but also Mullah Omar and Zawahiri, and does so secure in the knowledge that it will pay no price for its treachery – indeed, confident that its duplicitous military will continue to be funded by U.S. taxpayers. When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. Not a lot of that today. It's hard to imagine Osama's noggin as an attractive centerpiece at next year's White House Community Organizer of the Year banquet, and entirely impossible to imagine America's "educators" teaching the tale approvingly . . .
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POPSHitting the Real Debt Ceiling by Mark Steyn The other day Paul O’Neill said that . . . Oh, wait. I suppose I ought to explain who Paul O’Neill is. A decade ago, he was President Bush’s first Treasury secretary. I have no very clear memory of him except that he toured Africa with Bono and they were photographed in matching tribal dress looking like Colonel Qaddafi’s Mini-Me twins at a Tripoli sleepover. Other than the dress-up fun, I’ve no idea why they were in Africa, but you paid for it, so I’m sure there was a good reason. Anyway, Secretary O’Neill popped up the other day on Bloomberg Television to compare debt-ceiling holdouts to jihadists. “The people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling,” he said, “are our version of al-Qaeda terrorists. Really.” Really? Absolutely. “They’re really putting our whole society at risk by threatening to round up 50 percent of the members of the Congress, who are loony, who would put our credit at risk.”
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POPSLindsey Graham Proved Himself A Clown Graham would have been much better off not even responding to Steyn's and Stuttaford's criticisms than to essentially provide credence to what some people are thinking - that he's a threat to free speech and that General Patraeus is just as bad. Steyn absolutely nails it when he says they're telling our enemies the more they tread on our toes the more we'll pretend not to notice and try to "waltz them gaily round the floor one more time." It only encourages ever-more violence, intimidation, and manipulation.
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