The Blog of Record

Life in the dying communes of  aging “radical feminist separatist lesbians”.

 USA Today reports:

Criminal gangs in the USA have swelled to an estimated 1 million members responsible for up to 80% of crimes in communities across the nation, according to a gang threat assessment compiled by federal officials.

The major findings in a report by the Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center, which has not been publicly released, conclude gangs are the “primary retail-level distributors of most illicit drugs” and several are “capable” of competing with major U.S.-based Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

And this is hardly surprising:

Assistant FBI Director Kenneth Kaiser, the bureau’s criminal division chief, says gangs have largely followed the migration paths of [illegal] immigrant laborers.

Just doing work Americans won’t do, I suppose.

“Do no evil, but if you must do evil, then have the “delete evil” button close to hand.”

It’s real.

Another day, another hideous surprise found in the Democratic Wet Dream Stimilus Bill of 2009:

Buried deep inside the massive spending orgy that Democrats jammed through the House this week lie five words that could drastically undo two decades of welfare reforms.

The very heart of the widely applauded Welfare Reform Act of 1996 is a cap on the amount of federal cash that can be sent to states each year for welfare payments.

But, thanks to the simple phrase slipped into the legislation, the new “stimulus” bill abolishes the limits on the amount of federal money for the so-called Emergency Fund, which ships welfare cash to states.

“Out of any money in the Treasury of the United States not otherwise appropriated, there are appropriated such sums as are necessary for payment to the Emergency Fund,” Democrats wrote in Section 2101 on Page 354 of the $819 billion bill. In other words, the only limit on welfare payments would be the Treasury itself.

“This re-establishes the welfare state and creates dependency all over the place,” said one startled budget analyst after reading the line.

In addition to reopening the floodgates of dependency on federal welfare programs, the change once again deepens the dependency of state governments on the federal government.

No wonder Obama wants the bill passed ASAP, before too many people realize what unbelievable things it’s stuffed full of.

It took four years for Google to address the “miserable failure” Bush Google bomb, but only a few days to defuse a similar attack on President Obama.

With President George W. Bush gone, the Democrats need a new bogeyman to scare voters with, and their choice seems to be Rush Limbaugh:

Do you think this week’s back-and-forth between the Obama administration and Rush Limbaugh is an accident? Or did the Democrats welcome an opportunity to make the conservative talk radio host the symbol of opposition to Obama’s stimulus proposal? A look at what little polling data exists on Limbaugh says that accident or not, Democratic strategists are probably happy to see Limbaugh’s profile rise.

(Via Ben Smith.)

Victor Davis Hanson sees four problems with President Barack Obama’s first official TV interview.

Michael Barone sees more evidence for his recent suggestion that a sharp decline in illegal immigration may be coming:

Remittances to Mexico in calendar year 2008 fell by 3.6 percent, which apparently was twice as much as experts projected. This is a big hit to Mexico’s economy; remittances are Mexico’s second biggest source of hard currency, after oil exports.

Race, gender, and sexual orientation quotas are threatening to stifle American charitable giving:

American philanthropy is the envy of the world. Since colonial times, when Benjamin Franklin’s Junto Society, a proto–think tank of public-minded Philadelphia citizens, developed volunteer fire departments and a lending library, Americans have evolved a unique civic culture of giving and entrepreneurial problem solving. From 1995 to 2002, charitable donations as a percentage of GDP were nearly six times higher in the United States than in France and 14 times higher than in Germany. In 2007, America’s charitable giving amounted to $306 billion. No wonder that European universities and arts organizations look first to their American alumni and patrons for support when their government funding dries up.

Yet American generosity is under fire. A growing number of activists and politicians argue that foundations should meet diversity targets in their giving and on their staffs. If foundations fail to diversify “voluntarily,” threaten the race, ethnicity, and gender enforcers, they risk legislation requiring them to do so. In other words, the diversity police, having helped bring on the subprime meltdown through mortgage-lending quotas, now want to fix philanthropy. And instead of rebuffing this power grab, the leaders in the field have rolled over and played dead.

They hope the new U.S. president will not run a protectionist administration. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission:

Certain leaders in the developing world, most of them on the left, have told me privately that they would have preferred a Republican candidate to win. That’s because they fear the protectionist policies of a Democratic President and Democratic Congress. I hope that President Obama will not yield to this protectionist temptation. I believe that would be bad for us all, in particular for Europe. We are the largest exporter in the world. Sure, it is in the interest of all us to defend our interests, but from the perspective of keeping inter-dependence open for us. Globalisation is about openness and interdependence.

(Via Mensa Barbie.)

TechCrunch found a 1981 KRON report predicting the rise of news reporting on the Internet:

“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem.”

Why making a great show of announcing new ethics rules if you have no intention to abide by them?

Contrasting the shrinking everywhere in the general economy with what happened with the Internet in 2008:

• The number of websites increased by 20%.
• The number of domain names increased by 19%.
• Not to mention that there were more than 1.4 billion people on the Internet, a number that will keep growing.

So, while everything else shrinks and decreases, the Internet just keeps growing. It probably isn’t growing as fast as it would if the overall world economy was blossoming, but it IS growing at a healthy rate.

This would indicate that the Internet as a whole operates on a separate level from the general economy.

Don’t listen too much to the sky-is-falling news; there are still opportunities out there; this is not the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

(Via Dr. Mark J. Perry.)

It’s basically the same as the “Don’t Talk Too Damn Much” rule:

During the first 30 seconds of an utterance, your light is green: your listener is probably paying attention. During the second 30 seconds, your light is yellow-your listener may be starting to wish you’d finish. After the one-minute mark, your light is red: Yes, there are rare times you should “run a red light:” when your listener is obviously fully engaged in your missive. But usually, when an utterance exceeds one minute, with each passing second, you increase the risk of boring your listener and having them think of you as a chatterbox, windbag, or blowhard.

People don’t like listening, much less waiting, and talking to someone forces him to do both of these unpleasant things at the same time. When you’re talking, your listener is waiting for you to finish so he can talk.

Thankfully, it’s different with writing and reading.

(Via Lone Gunman.)

For something that’s supposed to be dead, capitalism works remarkably well – as this chart of 1800-2008 real GDP per capita demonstrates.

When politicians are pimps, who are the prostitutes?

Time.com has the scoop. This is interesting:

When [the president's interviewer Hisham] Melhem mentioned that he shared Obama’s love of Chicago Blues music, the President beamed with satisfaction as White House aides tapped their feet impatiently. “There we were, two Blues fanatics, sitting there talking about Muddy Waters,” Melhem says.

Whether it was chemistry with the journalist or Obama’s scripted intention, Melhem came away with an interview that amounted to an unprecedented reach-out to the Muslim world by an American president. Unprompted, Obama spoke about his own Islamic connections, noting that some of his family members are Muslims and that he had lived in the largest Muslim country, Indonesia.

Presidential interivews of such importance must be scripted to the last word. It makes you wonder just how much thought went into the decision to do that interview and into what was said in it. And who knows what other things, prompted or not, the president could have said had it not been for the first lady:

Obama’s aides cut Melhem off before he could finish all his questions, explaining the President had a dinner date with his wife.

First things first.

The Wall Street Journal can’t quite believe what it found in the stimulus bill the Democrats are pushing through Congress:

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.”

So said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in November, and Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart. The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic “stimulus,” but now that Democrats have finally released the details we understand Rahm’s point much better. This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

This is not an investment in the economy – it’s the Democratic Party investing in its future by showering gobs of public money on every Democratic voting block in the land, not forgetting big Democratic campaign contributors. It’s the Democratic Porkfest Bill of 2009.

It seems that some people tried to derail the Queen’s train by placing a large log on the rails during her visit to Australia in 1970. Luckily, the train was not moving fast enough to become derailed.

Do only men who have professionally endured war have the moral standing and the experiential authority to advocate war?