Quickies

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A round-up of articles, news items, columns and blog posts that caught our eye this past week.





Hack writer at the Associated Press, while breathlessly celebrating a drop in unemployment from 9.0% in November to 8.6% in December, waits 14 paragraphs to acknowledge the drop is due in large part because over 300,000 people simply gave up looking for work and thus were no longer counted among the unemployed.






B-Daddy on Newt Gingrich's immigration reform plan and specifically what is to be done with long-term illegals:

I'm not sure what those who oppose Gingrich's plan would do with the current illegals. They need a legal status and deporting 11 million people is frankly impracticable. Do conservatives really want a government powerful enough to round up 11 million people for deportation? Do we really want the federal government getting practice at interning that many people? If not, then we better deal with the situation at hand. We need these people out of the shadows and paying taxes and drawn into a law abiding culture. Isn't that a worthwhile conservative or libertarian goal?

At same link there is this from Thomas Sowell touching the cultural third rail of, uhhh, culture.

When you import people, you import cultures, including cultures that have been far less successful in providing decent lives and decent livelihoods. The American people have a right to decide for themselves whether they want unlimited imports of cultures from other countries.

Nativist or a simple, real-world acknowedgement that we, as Americans, have a constitutionally-engrained culture of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, free markets, universal suffrage and respect for property rights that is absent or found lacking in commitment in other cultures?

We believe it's the latter.

It's important to remember that being an "American" is not tied to ethnicity as is being a German or Filipino rather a belief in the shared values stated above.






How's that whole "Arab Spring" thing working out?

Judges overseeing the vote count in Egypt's parliamentary elections say Islamist parties have won a majority of the contested seats in the first round. The judges spoke on condition of anonymity because official results are expected to be released later Thursday.

They say the Muslim Brotherhood could take 45 percent of the seats up for grabs. The liberal Egyptian bloc coalition and the ultra-fundamentalist Nour party are competing for second place.

More on this below.







John Nolte on the 6 signs that the establishment liberal-left (but we repeat ourselves) has left #OWS (Obama's White Squatters) out to dry.

Don’t get me wrong; this doesn’t mean I’m going to stop ridiculing them, but as you look over the lay of the land, it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Occupy Wall Street. They’re really just useful idiots and aggrieved Frankenstein monsters raised on promises their statist creators never intended to keep. And now that they’ve raped, pooped, and vandalized themselves into a political liability for their creators, they might actually have to take a bath and get a job.

It bears repeating that like the #OWS movement, we too are vehemently opposed to the corporate bailouts, subsidies and the crony capitalism that is the hallmark of the current administration but we have seen enough to also know that not far below the surface of OWS rhetoric is not opposition to the bailouts on principle but rather an annoying whine that they did not get a bailout themselves.

On the business end of this whining is a Marxist redistributionism which represents the involuntary confiscation of others' wealth and property which, of course, runs counter to the free market/limited government principles of the tea party.

The scene from San Diego's Balboa Park's Christmas Festival December Nights and the "Santa Lucia Procession", a Swedish Christmas tradition.






Amnesty Interational continues to beclown themselves calling for the arrest of Bush:

Amnesty International is calling for the arrest of former President George W. Bush while he is traveling overseas in Africa.

The human rights group issued a statement Thursday calling for the governments of Ethiopia, Tanzania or Zambia to take the former president into custody. According to Amnesty, the 43rd president is complicit in torture conducted by the United States during his administration and should be held pending an international investigation.

"International law requires that there be no safe haven for those responsible for torture; Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia must seize this opportunity to fulfill their obligations and end the impunity George W. Bush has so far enjoyed," said Amnesty senior legal adviser Matt Pollard in a statement.

Don't hold your breath waiting for any calls for the arrest of the sitting President as AI apparently has no problem with the assassination of U.S. citizens as ordered by said Commander-in-Chief.

Far from being the aloof and disengaged personality he is criticized for, he certainly becomes quite a locked-in and focused individual when it comes to rubbing people out, be it foreign dictators or his fellow countrymen. It's the Chicago way!

And don't be holding your breath waiting for any full-throated outrage from his outrageously hypocritical supporters that certainly would've greeted his predecessor should he have committed the same acts.




The Sunshine State dominates the list of America's saddest cities.





#OWS planning a west coast port shutdown on December 12?

Or just more evidence that #OWS has been high-jacked by labor unions?

Given the similarities of their ideologies, does it really matter?

Because nothing says sticking up for the 99% like shutting down day-to-day commercial activity at our nation's sea ports.

The Occupy San Diego crowd is set to convene in Chicano Park early on the 12th. We work just a few blocks from that locale so we may swing on by to see what's happening.


Sarah B. at Lipstick Underground adds this:

Anyone remember when the Longshoremen went on strike in 2002, shortly after 9/11? Shutting down our ports was a painful kick in the teeth to our already fragile economy. Everything from oil to bananas was stranded off our coast for weeks. Big corporations may have felt the pain a bit, but it was main street and working families that suffered in the wake of supply shortages and price instability.

And it looks like port workers are threatening to strike again...just when we are hurting most.

This must mean Newt is the GOP front-runner...

WaPo writer crowd-sourcing for dirt on Gingrich.

Shame this intellectual curiosity didn't extend to the Democratic front-runner back in 07/08.






Similar to our skepticism of the hacks in the establishment media cheerleading a drop in the unemployment rate from 9.0% to 8.6%, B-Daddy notes the labor participation rate dropped from 64.2% to 64.0%.

He adds this regarding our chronic long-term unemployment numbers:

This is a big problem for the long term, as these folks start to see themselves, and employers see them as unemployable. We have some serious problems with entitlements starting to be a huge drain on the federal budget. One way to alleviate part of the problem is for people to work longer into retirement. But the large number of long term unemployed and the declining labor force participation rate makes that outcome less likely.

KT with more on that Arab Spring, the Egyptian election results and the problem with Marx's Historical Evolution.

It was a fair election and he lost. Maybe next time, we could actually try, you know, like understanding the people we're dealing with rather than fitting them into our own personal fantasies.

And tens upon tens of million dead people and we still don't have that class-less society to show for it?




OK, gang, that's it for today. We'll catch up with you all tomorrow with some Fast and Furious news.