It doesn’t bother me that Mittens has a lot of money. What he does with it is something else again.
Here’s the Vanity Fair article mentioned in the video.
There is also the mystery of Mitt’s IRA account.
His IRA raises two key questions, both of which his campaign has consistently declined to answer: How, despite a $6000 legal limit on annual contributions to an IRA, did Romney’s IRA grow to over $100 million? And did he avoid any U.S. taxes on its enormous returns?
Curiouser and curiouser.
I don’t know if everyone who lost power in last week’s storms has had power restored, but many people were cut off from electricity for seven or eight days, at least. David Frum wrote last week,
While you enjoy your air conditioning, you might want to take a minute to consider: Why do Americans tolerate such outages?
Outages are not inevitable. The German power grid has outages at an average rate of 21 minutes per year.
The winds may howl. The trees may fall. But in Germany, the lights stay on.
I’m no expert on how Germany handles its power grid, but from what I could sniff out online the government regulates it all pretty tightly.
Mark Steyn is in Scotland bemoaning America’s dysfunctional utility companies but blaming government, not the companies, for the outages.
America is seizing up before our eyes, and the action necessary to reverse the sclerosis is stymied at every turn by rapacious unions, government micro-regulators, dependency-spreading social engineers, and crony capitalists who know how to weave their way through the bureaucracy.
But I’d be willing to bet that the UK and Germany and most of Europe regulates its energy infrastructure a lot more than the U.S. does. I know that Germany has much bigger and stronger unions. Somehow that never registers in a rightie brain. It also doesn’t register that “free markets” might be the problem, not the solution. Steyn writes,
America’s dysfunctional utility companies have a zillion explanations for this, but years ago I rode through the outskirts of D.C. with a Dutch tourist who marveled at the men digging up the sidewalk in densely populated neighborhoods to bury the new cable-TV wires while the sagging electric lines overhead continued to string their way from pole to pole dodging tree branches across town.
Steyn, genius, explain why Comcast would bother to bury Pepco electric company’s cable? Maybe in The Netherlands the government steps in and regulates that all the cables are buried together, but not here.
Private utility companies say they don’t bury cable because it’s too expensive, btw.
See also the Angry Black Lady.
Some time today or tomorrow, click on www.dns-ok.us to be sure your DNS resolution is OK and correctly looking up IP addresses. This is why. If you don’t click on the link, on Monday there may be black helicopters hovering over your house. Worse, your web browser might not work.
This may only apply to computers in the U.S., but if you aren’t in the U.S. it doesn’t hurt to check it out.
A member of the Louisiana House of Representatives who eagerly supported Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plan to fund private schools has had an epiphany: Muslim schools might start getting taxpayer money!
Rep. Valarie Hodges, a Republican who represents East Baton Rouge and Livingston, now says she wishes she hadn’t voted for the Jindal voucher bill.
“I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America’s Founding Fathers’ religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools,†Hodges told the Livingston Parish News.
“I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school,†Hodges added.
The newspaper reported that she “mistakenly assumed that ‘religious’ meant ‘Christian.’â€
Once again, your standard wingnut doesn’t know the establishment clause from eggplant. This lady’s testimony shows us an intention to violate the First Amendment by using taxpayer dollars to promote Christianity.
A private Islamic school in New Orleans applied for vouchers under Louisiana’s voucher program, and the state legislature freaked out. The Islamic school has since withdrawn its application.
However, other religious schools are ok:
New Living World, which says it can accept more than 300 vouchers, is one such school. The campus has no library, and classrooms are often adorned with little more than a TV on which biblically-themed DVDs recite the day’s lesson. Another, The Upperroom Bible Church Academy, is housed in a windowless building with no playground. They can accept more than 200 students, and would stand to receive as much as $1.8 million. Eternity Christian Academy (135 vouchers) doesn’t permit the teaching of evolution.
This is how ignorant yahoos reproduce; they infect the schools.
Another terrifying glimpse into the fathomless abyss of the rightie brain — In Ohio, a sobbing woman thanked President Obama for the Affordable Care Act. Four years ago this woman, Stephanie Miller, had lost a sister to colon cancer. The sister had been uninsured and did not get proper treatment, according to Miller.
So how does the genuinely demented Jim Hoft react? BUSTED! he screams. He has proof that Stephanie Miller is an Obama supporter. Her Twitter handle is @obamasbestfan, and he has a photograph of her wearing an “I (heart) Barack” T-shirt.
This is the sort of thing that makes a rational person feel like Alice floating down the rabbit hole. You can search Hoft’s post in vain for any indication that Miller is anything but an enthusiastic Obama supporter. So what is she “busted” for? Existing?
And what does this tell us? Righties think disagreeing with them is immoral.
Elsewhere in Ohio — clearly the place to be yesterday — an anti-Romney protester is assaulted at a Romney rally. The protester was holding a sign and chanting when the Romney supporter tried to shut him up by stuffing a handkerchief in his mouth. The protester calmly spit out the handkerchief and kept chanting.
Bobby Jindal and Tim Pawlenty were the headliners at the rally, and protesters were chanting “Pawlenty Go Home.” Why they were giving Jindal a pass, I have no idea. Hoft’s reaction? “OBAMA GOONS Provoke Attack at Romney Campaign Rally.” That Hoft is a pistol.
On the long continuum between mildly addled and certifiably psychotic, I say Montana State Representative Krayton Kerns has hit the latter end and is about to topple off into the abyss. (Hat tip Charles Pierce) On his blog, Kerns writes,
This winter, under the cloak of darkness and against Montana Code, 60 bison were relocated from the quarantine facilities of Yellowstone National Park (YNP) to the Fort Peck Reservation along the Missouri Breaks. This is the second of a four step process to crush the republic and bring our populace into perfect dependence on big government—just as Karl Marx dreamed. If you missed steps one and two, you will likely refuse to acknowledge steps three and four, but I will explain them anyway.
According to Kerns, the first step was Bambi. Bambi persuaded us that animals deserve compassion, which established environmentalism as a religion. “Simultaneously and incrementally, government schools began promoting the religion of environmentalism until eventually state sponsored worship of the earth and creation surpassed worship of our Creator.”
Step two, the “US Senate discussed legislation to designate the bison as our national mammal, while activists quietly acquired conservation easements and commandeered Montana water rights through the Clean Water Act. The noose of federal control quietly tightened around massive tracts of Montana’s Missouri Breaks, and just as planned, 60 YNP bison appeared on the Fort Peck Reservation.” He’s talking about federal territory administered by the Bureau of Land Management, plus the Fort Peck Reservation, a reservation for the Assiniboine and Sioux nations.
In Step Three, the bison will overpopulate and stampede across the badlands or the prairie or whatever they’ve got in Montana that bison can stampede over, and then we reach Step Four:
The world’s economy will grind to a halt due to instability in the Middle East driving the price of gasoline over $25 per gallon. In desperation, America will attempt to develop the massive Bakken oil reserves of Montana and North Dakota only to learn a future leftist president has issued a moratorium on all oil exploration to protect the habitat of our national mammal, the noble, YNP-origin, American Bison. Think about it.
Think about it. I say we round up all those bison and attach ’em to giant turbines and make ’em stampede round and round and round. Who needs oil?
Seriously, I am something of an aficionado of goofy conspiracy theories, and this is probably the most awesome goofy conspiracy theory I’ve come across in a long time. There’s a kind of perverse genius to it. Kerns needs to be medicated, of course.
You might remember that after Hurricane Katrina, forces on the Right closed down many public schools in New Orleans and rammed a voucher system into place to replace the old system.
Louisiana officials insist that the voucher program is delivering a better education to Louisiana students. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu says that reform has been made possible by sapping the power of the teachers’ unions, because you know how teachers just hate education.
However, as Freddie deBoer points out,
As several commenters on the post discuss, a population decrease of somewhere between a quarter to a third of a city’s residents would make apples to apples comparisons a bit difficult, wouldn’t you say? Especially when the three demographic features most consistently correlated with educational outcomes—economic class, race, and parents’ education level—each had a significant post-Katrina swing towards the groups most likely to score highly. Might be worth mentioning!
If only we had some sort of systematized guidelines for how to accurately evaluate sociological data….
In May some reporters visited a private school in the voucher program. Turned out the school had no library, and the curriculum appeared to consist of showing the kids Christian DVDs. The school also intended to charge voucher students higher tuition than non-voucher students.
In other words, the school didn’t come close to meeting the requirements for teaching the 315 voucher students the state said it could accept. Asked about the lax oversight, the state education department said it would let parents decide if their children were being educated or not.
Now other reporters have turned up emails between State Superintendent of Schools John White and officials in Gov. Jindal’s administration about how this little mess might be spun away. The idea was to “muddy up” the newspaper narrative somehow.
The bottom line is that this voucher nonsense was imposed on poor Louisiana by players in the private education industry — who are profiting, no doubt — plus Christian conservatives. Providing better education has nothing to do with this. See also “Jindal’s Louisiana Vouchers Face Growing Legal Backlash.”
Related — last week Gov. Jindal signed a budget that eliminates all state funding for public libraries.
Articles to read together — see “The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia” by Matt Taibbi (and also recent posts on Taibbi’s blog at Rolling Stone) and also “Rigged Rates, Rigged Markets” at the New York Times. The behemoth global financial houses are rigging the system in a way that is “virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business,” Taibbi writes.
When you’re done with that, see Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation.