Links and Minifeatures 2009 02 20 Friday

I love this story: Man steals burglars' car as they try to rob his home

>Rosario was greeted with high-fives from responding deputies

That's resourceful. Somebody needs to offer that man a job (he just got laid off). I'll bet he'll do well for you.

Obama warns mayors not to waste stimulus money

Invoking his own name-and-shame policy, President Barack Obama warned the nation's mayors on Friday that he will "call them out" if they waste the money from his massive economic stimulus plan.

Mr. President: Sixty percent of the nation told you your "stimulus" was wasted money before it passed. How much effect did it have upon you?

Obviously, not much

"If a federal agency proposes a project that will waste that money, I will not hesitate to call them out on it, and put a stop to it," he said. "I want everyone here to be on notice that if a local government does the same, I will call them out on it, and use the full power of my office and our administration to stop it."

Why should anyone else pay any more heed?

Activists 'shocked' at Clinton stance on China rights

Amnesty International and a pro-Tibet group voiced shock Friday after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed not to let human rights concerns hinder cooperation with China.

Why? Nothing has changed for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

Eric Holder wants a conversation on race. Heather Macdonald gives him a real conversation on race

Not only do colleges, law schools, almost all of the nation's elite public and private high schools, and the mainstream media, among others, have "conversations about . . . racial matters"; they never stop talking about them. Any student who graduates from a moderately selective college without hearing that its black students are victims of institutional racism--notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of black students there will have been deliberately admitted with radically lower SAT scores than their white and Asian comrades--has been in a coma throughout his time there.

Q and O adds some great commentary on the same subject. After correctly lambasting the New York Post for the chimp cartoon, (and others for defending it) he segues to why people don't talk about race

Well, we probably don't talk enough about race. We don't have those frank exchanges of racial views. Indeed, we don't even have humorous public statements about race, even tangentially. Because all it takes is for Dom Imus to say something on the radio like, "That's some nappy-headed hos right there," and he's done. Al Sharpton comes around with a group of lusty, gusty fellows to demand your firing, as soon as he hears about it. And you lose your livelihood, because he'll get it.

If you're white, there's no upside to having a talk about race. You run the risk of accidentally or unknowingly saying something insensitive, at which point the best thing that can happen to you is that you'll be publicly reviled as some sort of bigoted troll. Why take the risk?

Is that cowardice, or simply the result of a prudent calculation of risks and benefits?

No, the only time we talk about race, is when some buffoon like Sean Delonas makes a public faux pas that can't be ignored. And I don't see that changing any time soon.

Read the whole thing

Sane perspective on current events and the Depression from Victor Davis Hanson

FEC Investigation Confirms Obama Received Discount Mortgage

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has "closed the file" on Judicial Watch's complaint against Senator Barack Obama for allegedly accepting a below market rate mortgage loan in 2005 not available to the general consumer. In its factual and legal analysis the FEC confirms Obama obtained a discounted loan but said no laws were violated.

Let me get this straight: Someone sitting on the Senate Finance Committee (overseeing mortgage lenders) gets a sweetheart deal and no laws were broken?

As Judicial Watch noted in its complaint, Northern Trust has supported Barack Obama's political campaigns for elected office since 1990. Moreover, Northern Trust Vice President John O'Connell essentially admitted the company provided Obama preferential loan terms because of his position in the U.S. Senate. "A person's occupation and salary are two factors; I would expect those are two things we would take into consideration," O'Connell told The Washington Post [emphasis added]. "This was a business proposition for us."

We have already established that they would not have treated someone else in the same manner. What is different except that Barack Obama is an elected official, evidently bought and paid for?

Must be nice to be able to order the case dropped from the White House.

Q and O on the assault on free speech.

One of the most defining phrases in the history of America free speech is "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

It has never been "I don't like what you say and it sounds like "hate speech" to me so you should be silenced".

Hate Speech is really all about shutting down debate. And the irony is that those using it are guilty of more hate speech, more often and in worse ways, than the ones they are using the argument against.

The entire concept of Hate Speech needs to be the subject of a Supreme Court decision eliminating it as a criterion for censorship. Let the KKK talk - and we know exactly how subhuman they are, and how much their opinions are worth (which is to say, precisely zero if not some negative amount). I've read the Constitution several times, including the amendments, and I cannot find anything protecting someone from being offended, if for no other reason than you can always manufacture something to be offended about (something the Founders were quite well aware of). Since you can always manufacture offense, this becomes a movable goalpost and highly useful for shutting down the other side in a debate.

We can start using Hate Speech against the Hate Speech Police. But far more effective, and correct, would be to eliminate Hate Speech entirely.

Let's see how long before this is banned as offensive hate speech:

"Create or Save"

The expression "create or save," which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius. You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus.

Not that anyone sane and rational would believe such a claim. But if he can tell people who want to believe in him that "Four million more of you still have jobs because of the stimulus" they'll all believe he's talking about their job.

(Some of) Our Critics & Their Imaginary Conservatives

As I often noted on this blog and elsewhere, "It's easier to be gay among conservatives than it is to be conservative among gays." Conservatives don't vilify me when I come out as gay, but when certain gay liberals learn of this blog, they're convinced I support a political party (and/or philosophy) made up mostly of people who hate me because of the nature of my .

Simply put, our actual experiences don't register to these people.

These guys seem to be living in a world which hasn't changed since Harvey Milk rose to prominence, a time when there were almost no openly gay elected officials and when coming out as gay could compromise your career. No wonder they're all so enamored with the film. And they accuse us of living in the past and having retrograde ideas.

It's a cherished illusion that makes them believe they're crusaders for Truth and Justice.

Lot of people on the political left think they don't know any conservatives, or any Republicans, which are not the same thing. For that matter, social conservatives are not the same thing as fiscal conservatives.

In reality, I have met many examples so hateful towards conservatives that the people they know who are conservative mostly keep quiet. About a year ago, I heard one person say something truly rude in a room of about eight or ten people they knew - but I knew that only one other person in that room was not a conservative. It's not like we have to wear some kind of scarlet letter (yet). Furthermore, I'm pretty certain that not one of the other people in the room acted in the way alleged.

The next time you're about to say something bad about conservatives, ask yourself if saying the same thing about Jews (or Black people or homosexuals or women) would make you uncomfortable. If the answer is "Yes", maybe you should reconsider.

For conservatives, maybe the time is here where we should start speaking up "I'm conservative, and I don't believe that."

Not that this will remove the guilty party's ability to rationalize it. "You're okay. But those other conservatives are all eeevil" (among other responses). Jews have been getting this treatment for roughly the last two thousand years. It's amazing how well people evade the central truth, which is that their internal picture about the accused group is wrong. But we can stop enabling it by our silence.

Instapundit:

FREE SPEECH IN THE AGE OF OBAMA: "An Oklahoma City police officer wrongly pulled over a man last week and confiscated an anti-President Barack Obama sign the man had on his vehicle." Plus this: ""When I was on my way there, the Secret Service called me and said they weren't going to ransack my house or anything ... they just wanted to (walk through the house) and make sure I wasn't a part of any hate groups." Since when do government officials search homes to ensure the absence of impure political thoughts?

If something like this had happened with Bush, it would have been proof that fascism was descending had descended upon America.

Congress Stymies Investigations With Hidden Provision

When Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a longtime champion of inspectors general, read the words "conduct or refrain from conducting," alarm bells went off. The language means that the board -- whose chairman will be appointed by the president -- can reach deep inside a federal agency and tell an inspector general to lay off some particularly sensitive subject. Or, conversely, it can tell the inspector general to go after a tempting political target.

Manufacturing Guilt?

Reason recently obtained shocking video from another Hayne and West collaboration that may shed light on the question. In 1993, the two conducted an examination on a 23-month-old girl named Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe, Louisiana, who had drowned in her bathtub. The video shows bite marks mysteriously appearing on the toddler's face during the time she was in the custody of Hayne and West. It then shows West repeatedly and methodically pressing and scraping a dental mold of a man's teeth on the dead girl's skin. Forensic scientists who have viewed the footage say the video reveals not only medical malpractice, but criminal evidence tampering.

People that need to go to jail if not be sentenced to death.

Obama Stimulus Saves Microsoft Billionaire Hundreds Of Millions

As opposed to the $8 per week the working stiffs are getting.

It's starting to enter public consciousness that the real patrons of the Democratic Party are really big businesses who don't want smaller businesses to be able to compete with them.