Links and Minifeatures 2009 04 08 Wednesday

A Message to the Rich

So let me now send a personal message to The Rich in America...

As an American and a patriot, I implore you - I go to my knees and beg you - LEAVE NOW.

Leave. Just go away. Retire to the Cayman Islands or Bermuda or wherever, but do it now, please, while you still have some love for this country. Close your companies, fire your employees, shutter your factories and offices, sell your property, and take all of that somewhere else... better yet: somewhere scenic but poverty-stricken. Somewhere that could use some wealth creation. Somewhere that people simply are grateful to have a job in the first place. Somewhere where you will be appreciated.

You are not welcome in America any more. Take your wealth and prosperity and inventiveness and hard work and vision and insight and bold risk-taking and joy in seeing growth and wealth creation and just go away - right now, before it's too late. Because if you stay, Joel Berg and Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Chris Dodd will continue to come after you for more and more and more and they will not ever stop - not ever - until you are forced to flee. And when that day comes, you will go with not with fond remembrances and a desire to return home, but rather a black heart and hard and bitter memories.

Read the whole thing.

What happens if the wealthiest 1% takes him up on it

Stevens case closed, case against prosecutors open

A federal judge dismissed the corruption conviction of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens on Tuesday and took the rare and serious step of opening a criminal investigation into prosecutors who mishandled the case.

"In nearly 25 years on the bench, I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case," U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said.

Ted Stevens is still corrupt, but he shouldn't have been subjected to this kind of trial. As close as the election was that he lost only days after his conviction, I don't think anyone should doubt he would have won had his trial been conducted honestly.

Subjects of the probe are Brenda Morris, the lead prosecutor in the Stevens case and the No. 2 official in the Public Integrity Section; Public Integrity prosecutors Nicholas Marsh and Edward Sullivan; Alaska federal prosecutors Joseph Bottini and James Goeke; and William Welch, who did not participate in the trial but who supervises the Public Integrity section.

Has anyone checked their voter registrations? Could it be that there was a political motivation?

Another in the sad litany of abuses by the Saleh regime in Yemen: Yemeni MP Imprisoned Despite Immunity

It happens here, too. It could happen a lot more if people don't start waking up to the fact that a government with the power to give you everything you want can also take it away.

Obama said he'd meet the leaders of Iran without preconditions. Problem is, the leaders of Iran want preconditions

While we're on the subject, Iran nuke plan revealed in NYC indictment

John Bolton accused Bush critics within American intelligence of cooking the books in order to gain control of American policy.

Looks like Bolton pretty much got it right. The UN bans a number of materials from being sold to Iran to keep the mullahs from getting the bomb. Among the material sold to Iran through this ring are a special alloy of aluminum chiefly used for long-range missiles, maraging steel rods used in nuclear-bomb casings, and the tungsten copper plate needed for missile guidance. Even better, this ring operated from 2006 to 2008, right at the time when the brilliant minds at Langley tried to convince everyone that Iran had stopped pursuing nuclear weapons years before.

It really does make the "intelligence" in Central Intelligence Agency seem ironic, doesn't it?

Congress should demand hearings into the politicization of the intelligence processes that produced that NIE. Since Democrats benefited the most from the perversion of intel, though, don't hold your breath waiting for it.

Richard Fernandez nails the only modern change this video needs

Stop Spending Our Future

Obama, Pitchforks, and a Couple of History Lessons

Community organizers were instrumental in forcing banks to give subprime loans to unqualified minority borrowers by using the "pitchforks" tactics -- protesting in front of the banks, camping on the lawns of the bankers' family houses, intimidating families, and suing in courts. After the bankers were sufficiently roughed up, a community organizer would show up at their office to "negotiate" the bank's surrender in the form of bad loans and money for community organizations that pay community organizers for their "services."

The Great Repression

Last week, proponents of this repression accounting got their way. They persuaded Congress to use its political will to meddle in the traditionally professional and independent business of setting accounting standards. Setting accounting standards is usually the province of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), an independent expert body set up to be outside the reach of Congressional influence, precisely to insulate it from the latter's political passions.

But now Congress has pressured FASB into letting assets be reported not according to prevailing economic realities but according to what they would be worth if the economy were growing and asset prices stable or rising. In short, Congress has prescribed repression as a solution to repression. They wish to sustain, not confront, The Great Repression.

This is what is known as a recipe for disaster. Mark to market rules were there for a lot of reasons, primary among which is the ability to con the unsuspecting if you don't follow them.

Another transparency problem for the Obama administration

Obama's word play

President Obama had a grand time in Europe. He wowed the press, met the queen, gave some wonderful news conferences and got virtually none of the major policy concessions he wanted. But he did do a lot of talking, for what that's worth.

And for Obama, that's worth a lot. During the campaign, then-Sen. Obama made it clear that he thought words meant a great deal. "Don't tell me words don't matter," Obama proclaimed. " 'I have a dream' -- just words? 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal' -- just words? 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself' -- just words? Just speeches?"

The issue is that if you can't translate words into actions, you've got a problem. And you can talk forever in stirring, soaring rhetoric that touches the soul of all who hear it, but if people won't do what you need them to as the result of that talk, you have failed.

Right now, Obama's getting a lot of positive press because the press is determined to support him. But when it comes to actual accomplishments, the emperor has no clothes. The American public has two years to figure out the difference between PR and actual accomplishments. Seeing as how increasing numbers are already figuring it out, the prognosis does not look good for Mr. Hope and Change.

Newt Gingrich lays it all out

Even Obama doesn't pay much attention to his own words to his own supporters, and many of those early supporters are most unhappy with him over it. He threw them some red meat words, and they thought he meant it. The actions that one would expect to follow if he did mean it have not materialized. Obama's current position is closer to right than the people he led on like Peter the Hermit, but the point is words versus actions.

PS: Characterizing something as "extremist" or otherwise denigrating it is a way to avoid debate, not a way of being even-handed and rational.