Free kibbles

SOCIALISM:

Ninty percent of Long Island Rail Road union workers retire with disability. Standard socialist corruption.

ECONOMY:

US exports are up, cutting the trade deficit. That's a very rare and welcome piece of good economic news.

I don't know whether the people or Politico are getting this wrong:

"A majority of Americans see an increasingly large gap between rich and poor, and want the federal government to intervene in an attempt to address the disparity, according to a new poll on Wednesday."

Government intervention in the economy is the cause of this wealth gap, not the solution.

TAX AND SPEND:

Republican Bloomberg wants to raise taxes on everybody. There goes his chances at winning federal office.

It looks like the municipal bond meltdown is beginning. I wouldn't call it anybody's dream.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Greece names former central banker as PM. The bankers are coming out behind the throne and sitting on it.

The cost of a traditional Thanksgiving meal has increased by 13 percent since last year. But hey, it's worth it to pay more for everything in return for all the economic growth we're getting from the Fed printing money, right? Thanks Fed.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

New study shows Greenland has been warmer than at present several times during civilization.

Obama administration busted for lying about Solyndra.

Reprint of a global warming alarmist article from January 2007 claiming that 4.5 billion people could die from  global warming by 2012. Back in reality, the world population just hit seven billion. How much you want to bet the people who made that prediction still have a job?

POLICE STATE:

It turns out the 1998 allegations were also referred to the police, but no chargers were filed.

"The grand jury also noted that the 1998 report involving Sandusky and boys in the showers was reviewed by University Police and Child Protective Services, with the blessing of Wendell Courtney, who at the time served as University Counsel and was (and remains) counsel to The Second Mile - though no criminal charges were ever pursued."

The more I read, the more disgusted I am with the vendetta against Paterno. What's amazing about this article is that the government stooges who held the press conference, the Pennsylvania Attorney General and Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner, basically presented the entire grand jury report to the press. In general, it's illegal to publicize grand jury information. This is to protect the defendant. The defendant has no power to challenge testimony in a grand jury, the prosecutor has all the control, and because of that the prosecutor can famously indict a ham sandwich. Maybe it's legal to publicize this stuff in Pennsylvania. If so, that's an abominable law. If not, these stooges broke the law. Prosecutors have immunity for all their illegal actions during a prosecution. In other words, there are no laws restricting the actions of prosecutors. And there was no reason relating to justice to have this big press conference in the first place. They could have quietly made their arrests and kept their mouths closed to give the defendants a better chance at a fair trial. But that's not what they wanted. They used the media to whip up a rush to judgment that guarantees the jury will be heavily biased in favor of the prosecution. They also are using Penn State and Joe Paterno to boost their own standing. This is government and media collusion and manipulation of the public in order to advance the police state at its worst.

Here's some info on grand juries.

"Access to state grand jury transcripts varies. In California, transcripts of grand jury testimony become public record once an indictment is returned, unless a defendant can show a reasonable likelihood that release of part or all of the transcripts would prejudice his right to a fair trial."

Maybe the same is true in Pennsylvania. But when wouldn't the release of grand jury testimony harm the defendant? In pretty much every trial I've ever participated in, the grand jury information was sealed. The defense couldn't even get access to it to challenge prosecution witnesses. So grand jury secrecy is another vague law the state uses to advance its own interests. The state keeps grand jury testimony secret when it advances its agenda, and it publicizes it when that advances its agenda.

"When the media seeks disclosure of a grand jury transcript, a court balances the government’s interest in secrecy against the public’s interest in disclosure."

Notice the defendant's interests don't matter.

Just to back this up, Nixon's grand jury testimony from 1975 was released today.

Libertarian making fun of Penn State fans for being angry over this. He's got it wrong. This fiasco at Penn State is the best publicized government-media collusion manipulating the people to advance the police state I can remember. I love it that people are angry at how the government stooges called a press conference, leaked all the grand jury info, and whipped up a media lynch mob against the alleged perpetrators and Paterno. I think the scales fell from the eyes of tens of thousands of people. Hopefully more. This is the silver lining to a bad situation. If it took a beloved football coach being scapegoated to make this happen, so be it.


The lynching of Joe Paterno continues with this report he contacted a lawyer. Given the way he's been treated by the media and the regents and the way government goons are using this case to their own advantage, that's the only intelligent thing to do.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:

How Obama deals with illegal immigration and transparency.

"Chris Crane, president of the union that represents the nation’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, has provided the House Judiciary Committee and Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) with what Crane says are internal ICE emails that back up testimony he gave in July and October that ICE headquarters had verbally ordered officers in the field not to arrest illegal aliens who did not have prior criminal convictions--even if they were fugitives evading deportation orders or were individuals who had illegally re-entered the United States after being deported and were thus committing a felony.“Increasingly, ICE headquarters leadership refuses to put directives to supervisors, agents and officers in the field regarding law enforcement operations in writing,” Crane told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration in written testimony submitted on July 26.
“Orders and directives are given orally to prevent the activities of ICE's leadership from becoming public,” Crane, president of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council 118, testified. “Agents and officers in the field are frequently under orders not to arrest persons suspected of being in the United States illegally."

He'll get away with it like he gets away with everything else.

POLITICS:

Rick Perry ripped for another cosmetic mistake. Who cares if he couldn't remember the name of one bureaucracy for a few minutes? Substance should matter, not style.

The daily rundown of Occupier violence.

Ann Coulter makes an interesting observation about Herman Cain and his accusers:

"Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country -- Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but never in Chicago. 
So it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod."

"Herman Cain has never lived in Chicago. But you know who has? David Axelrod! And guess who lived in Axelrod's very building? Right again: Cain's latest accuser, Sharon Bialek."

In other words, these political dirty tricks have Obama's finger prints all over them.

Our political process has become so corrupt and so manipulated by the media and the people who use them as tools, you can't tell whether any insider reports are true or not. This story about insiders wanting Cain to fire his campaign manager is a perfect example.

"“Mark Block has to go,” prominent conservative blogger Ed Morrisey of Hot Air wrote Wednesday morning. “If he’s not gone by tomorrow, no one will take this campaign seriously again — nor should they.”
A former Cain staffer agreed. “Mark Block has no regard for basic ethics or accounting practices,” said the staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak frankly. When asked if Block was hurting Cain’s campaign and should be fired, that former staffer said, “yes.”"

So we're told that if Cain doesn't fire Block, we will not take his campaign seriously. They're telling us what to do as well as Cain. Maybe Cain is that bad a judge of character. Or maybe the other people are the bad characters. Most likely they're all bad characters.

MEDIA:

I'm also angry at the role the media played in pressuring the Penn State regents to make Paterno a scapegoat. If it wasn't for the rabid lynch-mob response of the media, Penn State could have let Paterno retire, and the institution would have been largely unscathed by these allegations. The guilty would have been punished. The institution would have moved on. But instead they crippled themselves to satisfy the media lynch mob. Who wants to coach at Penn State now? Who wants to play there? If these allegations are false, Penn State will probably never recover, and rightfully given how badly the regents treated Paterno. But true or false, the media lynch mob will remain high and mighty. But being the government's lynch mob sells.