Tuesday, July 23, 2013

ROBERT HALL 07/23/2013 CONSERVATIVE

University of California: The Bubble of Bureaucracy
Excerpt: While the nomination of Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Homeland Security Department, as the next chancellor of the University of California may have been a surprise, it isn't a comedown. The system has almost 240,000 students and an operating budget that exceeds $24 billion, almost triple the state budget of Arizona, for example…Yet UC's annual spending exceeds that of most state governments -- amounting to roughly $100,000 for each of its students. Much of this is unrelated to instructional function. The university's bureaucracy is famously monumental, centralized and costly:

Pentagon Lays Out Options for U.S. Military Effort in Syria
Excerpt: The Pentagon has provided Congress with its first detailed list of military options to stem the bloody civil war in Syria, suggesting that a campaign to tilt the balance from President Bashar al-Assad to the opposition would be a vast undertaking, costing billions of dollars, and could backfire on the United States. (That won’t stop the idiots in Congress and the media from waving their hands in the air and screaming, “Do Something!” ~Bob.)

Congressional panels approve arms aid to Syrian opposition
Excerpt: The House and Senate intelligence committees have approved CIA weapons shipments to opposition fighters in Syria, allowing the Obama administration to move ahead on the stalled program, senior congressional and administration officials said Monday. (Nothing surer than that some of these weapons will be used eventually to kill Americans, Israelis and other kuffer. ~Bob.)


Just Fricken Beautiful: Iraq jailbreak highlights al-Qaeda affiliate’s ascendancy
Excerpt: Hundreds of extremists were feared to be on the run in Iraq on Monday after al-Qaeda’s affiliate in the country launched a major assault on the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, offering a fresh boost to the group’s resurgent fortunes in Iraq and in Syria. (If you're wondering, no, no one has ever escaped Guantanamo Bay. -- Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt.)

Al Qaeda is alive and Detroit is dead.

Report Finds Gradual Fall in Female Genital Cutting in Africa
Excerpt: In Egypt, for example, where more women have been cut than in any other nation, survey data showed that 81 percent of 15- to 19-year-olds had undergone the practice, compared with 96 percent of women in their late 40s. (No foreign aid to any country where more than 20% of the girls are “cut.” End the Muslim War on Women, supported by liberals. ~Bob.)

Truth, Ethos, & A Reply to Comment on - 'A Public Letter to the Commandant of the Marine Corps'.
By Andy Weddington
Excerpt: Today's commentary could easily have been written as a personal but public follow-on to my public letter, published a month ago yesterday, to our commandant. But I opted to craft it otherwise as the greater audience of Marines, friends of Marines, and the public seemed more fitting as addressee; the Commandant of the Marine Corps one amongst us. Perhaps he will read.

Detroit. By Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt
Excerpt: No, Seriously, A Giant Pile of Money Would Not, In Fact, Help Detroit. Not Really, Anyway Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that there's talk of a federal bailout for Detroit. It's a terrible idea, but we shouldn't be surprised by it. What is surprising is that the advocates are so blithe about how little a bailout would fix. Really. Let's assume the federal government didn't have $16 trillion in debt and had an extra $18 billion lying around. Assume that the whole country had a bipartisan spirit of generosity, eager to help out a city that had, for years, gone to a domed stadium on Thanksgiving Day to watch their football team lose to some visiting team. Once Washington writes a check to Detroit to cover the city's $18 billion in debt . . . then what? You still have the same moribund economy, the same 78,000 abandoned structures, the same two-thirds of ambulances not in service, the same failing schools, the same shrinking population, the same shameful police response time, the same terrifying violent-crime rate, the same 40 percent of street lights not working . . . and likely, the same failed leaders, with the same failed philosophies and viewpoints that got the city in this mess in the first place. Conservatives outside the city like to point to it as decades of liberal policies run amok, but let's be fair: They can't even get liberalism right. Nearly half of the owners of Detroit's 305,000 properties failed to pay their tax bills in 2011. It's the trifecta of liberal policies and incompetence and corruption that set up the city as a vortex of urban failure so intolerable that almost anyone who could afford to leave did. The city has to change — the question is what kind of change the remaining residents collectively embrace. They need to give people who live elsewhere a reason to live there: If you bring back residents, you'll bring back customers, who will bring back businesses, who will bring back jobs. That virtuous cycle will bring back the tax base, putting money back into the city's coffers so it can finally afford all those things it got used to buying back when one bondholder after another kept buying their municipal bonds.

19 U.S. cities have proportionately bigger workforces than bankrupted Detroit

Car Rescues: Zimmerman 1, Kennedy 0

If only Zimmerman had rescued a black lesbian illegal immigrant on her way to get an abortion, MSNBC would have imploded.

Facing Facts about Race: Young black males are at greater risk from their peers than from the police or white civilians. By Victor Davis Hanson
Excerpt: Is it ethical for the president to weigh in on a civil-rights case apparently being examined by his own Justice Department? The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. If that were not true, they might well be given no more attention as supposed suspects than is accorded to white, Asian, or Latino youths. Had George Zimmerman been black, he would have been, statistically at least, more likely to have shot Trayvon Martin — and statistically likewise less likely to have been tried.

Excerpt: Last week Detroit became the largest city in American history to declare bankruptcy. Last year, five California cities, burdened by an upsurge in illegal Mexican residents, also declared bankruptcy. In Detroit's case the road to bankruptcy began fifty years ago when Blacks started burning down their five year old public housing projects in order to voice their disdain for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. The explosive Black crime rates drove White tax-paying, law-abiding residents out of the city and into the suburbs and elsewhere. The flight of Whites from Detroit cleared the way for Blacks to take control of city and county government. And, as the years passed, these corrupt Black leaders pilfered from public funds to pad their own bank accounts and those of their conspirators. Soon one Black mayor after another was caught, sent to prison, only to have the Black populace elect another crook to run the place.

What President Obama Left Out of His Talk on Race. By Bernard Goldberg
Excerpt: What the president did not do is examine these humiliations from the view of the wary shop owner, or the frightened people in the car, or the suspicious woman on the elevator. What they all know is that young black men commit a disproportionate amount of crime in this country. That's why they're suspicious of African American males of a certain age. Black people know this too, since they're the ones most likely to be victimized by young black men. It's worth repeating Jesse Jackson's observation of some years back about race. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved."

Random Thoughts. By Thomas Sowell
Excerpt: Random thoughts from wise thinkers:

KKK turns in man who threatens Obama! FBI arrests two men accused of plotting to kill Barack Obama 'with home-made X-ray weapon'
Excerpt: In August 2012, Mr Crawford travelled to North Carolina to request funding for his plan from a top official in the Ku Klux Klan, of which he claimed to be a member. The KKK informed the FBI, which sent two undercover agents posing as KKK members to meet Mr Crawford.

D.C. Politicos block Walmart, help special interest, hurt the poor. By Star Parker
Excerpt: Why, when there is no question that nothing has created more wealth and eradicated more poverty than capitalism, do left wing politicians hate it so much? After all, it’s supposed to be the left that cares about the poor. The latest chapter in this ongoing saga of economic perversity is action being taken in Washington, DC, to prevent Walmart from opening stores there.

The Eagle has Landed. By Daniel Greenfield.
Excerpt: No one who was born after 1935 has walked on the moon. That period is swiftly becoming a historical relic. A thing that men did who lived long ago.

What will give Egypt’s ruler ‘legitimacy’? 
Does legitimacy arise purely from how a leader is elected, or from how he or she governs once in office? How big does a crowd of protesters have to be to indicate an elected leader is no longer the voice of his people? When do self-interested or authoritarian policy decisions go so far as to invalidate the mandate of an elected government? (Though long, this is a fine piece of journalism—so fine, I’m surprised it turned up in the Boston Globe. Reading it online may be a pain in the ass due to the Globe’s ads, but the author has identified the problem correctly though he offers no solutions. This is also a possible explanation of why so many leftists expect to be able to “rule by fiat” once an election has been won, regardless of how large or small the majority. Though the left they claim to want to protect “minorities”—as long as they either agree with or can ignore them—they HATE minorities that disagree with them and that cannot be ignored (like us, for example). The beauty of our Constitution is that the rights of minorities ARE protected from abuse by the majority. I seem to recall Robert Heinlein once suggested that law should only be passed if they had a majority of three quarters or more, and that laws should be repealed if 40% of those voting opposed it, because anything opposed by that large a minority was obviously a problem. --Ron P.)

Anthony Weiner Confirms Authenticity Of New Sex Chats
Excerpt: Nightlife site "The Dirty" posted images of conversations that allegedly came from Weiner to a 22-year-old woman under the pseudonym "Carlos Danger."

This week: Carlos Danger, Joe Biden threatened by ravenous monkey pack, Zimmerman rescues family from burning car. It's only Tuesday.

Obama Throws Blacks the Trayvon Race Bone. By Crystal Wright (Conservative Black Chick)
Excerpt: President Barack Obama using the White House Press Briefing Room July 19, 2013 to speak about Trayvon Martin’s killing was beneath the office of the presidency. Did the four Americans slain by terrorists in Benghazi get this much attention from Obama? More like avoidance. Since when did the death of one black teen rise to the level of a national crisis? Since the race hucksters and pimps like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson decided it so and Obama obliged.

Quants: The maths geniuses running Wall Street [Fake tweet plunges Dow Jones 140 points and wipes out $200 billion in capital].  Sarfraz Mansoor
Excerpt: A few minutes later the report [a fake tweet that Obama had been injured by explosions in the White House] was exposed as a hoax and the markets quickly returned to their pre-tweet levels. But, to many, the idea that one fake tweet could have such an enormous impact on the financial markets was incredible. Who was running Wall Street?

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