Muda69

Kim Foxx, the State's Attorney Who Let Jussie Smollett Go, Has a Lot of Explaining to Do: http://reason.com/blog/2019/03/28/kim-foxx-jussie-smollett-prosecutor So it appears that as with much in life it's who you know as opposed to what you did. If you are a mid-level celebrity in Chicago, at least.

Cardi B Is A Vile Crook Who Should Be In Prison: https://www.dailywire.com/news/45245/walsh-cardi-b-vile-crook-who-should-be-prison-matt-walsh Sad.

http://reason.com/blog/2019/03/28/betsy-devos-is-right-feds-shouldnt-be-fu This isn't the first year that DeVos called for cuts to the Special Olympics and there is very little reason to believe the reductions will go through. But even if they did, the organization and its beneficiaries would still be in excellent shape. Founded in 1968 by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the Special Olympics is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, meaning that deductions to it are tax deductible. According to its 2017 financials (the most-recent available on the web), the organization had total revenues of about $149 million, including $15.5 million in federal grants. It's not a stretch to assume that if federal funding disappears, the resulting outcry would lead to record donations. This sort of flap is political theater at its most transparent and unhelpful by diverting attention from more important topics. There are serious questions to be asking about the size, scope, and spending of the federal Department of Education and whether it should even exist. It was established in 1979, and Ronald Reagan campaigned on a promise to kill it if he took the White House. Not only didn't he kill it, he expanded its budget throughout his presidency. Yet student achievement, the most-basic measure of educational productivity, has not improved since the department was created and began effectively controlling more and more aspects of the K-12 curriculum. Agreed. It is not constitutional for the federal government to fund everything. let alone the Special Olympics. And it is refreshing to see a cabinet secretary, even if the department they head is blatantly unconstitutional, actually be somewhat serious about cutting spending.

Jussie Smollett's lawyer suggests Osundairo brothers wore white makeup during attack, brushes off FBI probe: https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/jussie-smolletts-attorney-not-at-all-concerned-over-possible-doj-fbi-investigation-nothing-improper-was-done This just keeps getting more bizarre.

Why was SWAT involved with this?

Study Estimates the Green New Deal to Cost $93 Trillion — That's a Conservative Estimate: https://mises.org/wire/study-estimates-green-new-deal-cost-93-trillion-—-thats-conservative-estimate So, using the above chart and averaging out the three goals that have a variable cost, I come up with $507,010 per house hold over 10 years, or $50,701 dollars a year. I'm sure all of us have this kind of cash laying around, especially elderly households.

Russian Hackers:

I'll take Don Lemon vs. Joy Behar in the final match.

Yes, I believe it would. And while Mr. Peele's reboot of TTZ sounds interesting I'm not sure I want to shell out $X for another streaming service at the moment.

The Jussie Smollett Disgrace: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/jussie-smollett-case-prosecutors-drop-charges/

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Police Superintendent Still Think Jussie Smollett Is Guilty—and Are Furious He’s Going Free: http://reason.com/blog/2019/03/26/rahm-emanuel-jussie-smollett-police Gee, internal politics/bad blood in Chicago city/county government allowing an attempt at justice to get thrown out the window. I'm really shocked.

The Socialist Fantasy. Central planning always fails.: http://reason.com/archives/2019/03/27/the-socialist-fantasy/ Wise words. Too bad the liberal progressives will never heed them, after all they know better than the rest of us.

The Southern Poverty Law Center Is in a State of Moral Collapse: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-in-a-state-of-moral-collapse/ In the pages that followed, he described a place with an “uncomfortable” racial dynamic where female staffers were “warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women.” He described how another former writer called the place a “ a virtual buffet of injustices” with problems “racial, sexual, financial.” On March 19, the SPLC announced that it was hiring an outside lawyer to “review its workplace environment and policies.” Three days later, Richard Cohen, the president of the SPLC, stepped down. And yesterday, the New York Times published an almost 2,000-word report on the SPLC’s “intolerance within”: Oh, I disagree. Given the intolerance and bad faith it exhibited in its evaluations and assessments of all too many conservatives and Christians, I’d argue that the SPLC has embraced exactly the values it champions. It’s intolerant through and through. Intolerant and fraudulent, in fact. In a scorching piece in Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson points out the hysterical exaggerations in the SPLC’s assessment of hate groups. It essentially manufactures fear. This paragraph is amazing: What’s to be done? The SPLC can sort itself out. Hopefully it can rediscover its roots and focus its efforts on combating white supremacy and renew its commitment to poverty law. There was a time when it would represent indigent death-row inmates, for example, and there remains ample opportunity to do good for America’s poorest citizens. The SPLC has an almost half-billion-dollar endowment. You can hire a lot of lawyers with that kind of cash. But the rest of the world should move on. The rest of the world should recognize that a corrupt organization has generated corrupt assessments of its fellow citizens, and it should be ignored. We don’t need the SPLC to spot white supremacists, and we certainly don’t need the SPLC to evaluate religious doctrines — be they Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. This organization has devolved from helping people to hurting people, but it only has the power that the media and progressive corporations give it. Now, every single time a media organization or a company uses the SPLC’s listings, it should be held to account. There is no excuse. The emperor has no clothes. The SPLC is in a state of moral collapse.

http://reason.com/blog/2019/03/26/jussie-smollett-charges-dropped-hate-cri#comment

So Mr. Smollett did commit felonies, he was just able to pony up enough cash to get out of it. 'Tis the American Way.

Jussie Smollett won't be prosecuted on charges he faked attack: https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/jussie-smollett-wont-be-prosecuted-on-charges-he-faked-attack An interesting development.

The Electoral College and Slavery: A Reality Check: https://spectator.org/the-electoral-college-and-slavery-a-reality-check/ According to Congressman Cohen’s biography, he was educated at Vanderbilt University. His comments suggest that his parents must have paid a hefty bribe to get him enrolled in that once-respected institution. Cohen’s statement reveals a breathtaking level of illiteracy regarding American history in general and the Electoral College in particular. For example, Cohen obviously believes that, when the Constitution was ratified, slavery was limited to the southern states. In reality, slavery was ubiquitous throughout the fledgling nation—both north and south. Yes, you read that correctly. The 1790 census reveals the following: More than 6 percent of New York’s population consisted of slaves. Likewise, 6.2 percent of the people living in New Jersey were slaves. The number of slaves in Delaware totaled 15 percent of its population. Maryland’s slaves accounted for a whopping 32 percent of its population. The census also found that New England states like Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire had significant slave populations. Even Pennsylvania had a few. Only Massachusetts had none. In other words, the “slave states” included all but one. There was no need for them to impose their will on the other states represented at the Constitutional Convention. Cohen’s claim that the “slave states wanted equal representation in the Senate because they wanted to keep slavery” and the implication that this somehow drove the debate over the Electoral College is equally absurd. The decision to allow each state two senators regardless of size was an effort to ensure that the large population states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, and New York (all slave states at the time) would not be able to undermine the will of the voters in low population states. The “two senator” structure actually reduced the power of the large slave states. In other words, Congressman Cohen has it exactly backwards. Another of Cohen’s uninformed assertions goes thus: “The slave states wanted to have an Electoral College… where the slaves counted as two-thirds.” Here, he not only fails history but arithmetic as well. What he is blindly groping for is the three-fifths compromise. Like a lot of people who slept through their history and government courses, Cohen never learned that this often misrepresented compromise was not supported by the big slave states. It was supported primarily by the small states, the majority of which were located in the north, and it had nothing at all to do with the Electoral College. As Tara Ross points out in the Daily Signal: Cohen finishes off his remarks with the following claim: “So the slave states didn’t want a popular election because their slaves wouldn’t count towards voting and the slave states would have less votes.” Once again, he has it backwards. Cohen mistakenly believes the slave-to-white ratio at the time of the Constitutional Convention was equal to what it became after the invention of the cotton gin. It was, in fact, the smaller northern states who most feared direct popular vote. The large slave states had enough white voters to swamp the small states. Virginia alone had as many eligible voters as Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire combined. It was because of that large disparity that opponents of slavery tended to favor the Electoral College. It is commonly believed that it was first proposed at the convention by James Madison, whose comments on the matter are routinely taken out of context by the people who peddle the canard that the institution was designed primarily to perpetuate slavery. This, as it happens, has no basis in fact. The use of some system of electors rather than a direct popular vote to choose the President was first suggested by delegates to the convention well known for their lifelong aversion to slavery. To quote Tara Ross of the Daily Signal again: The notion that the Electoral College was designed to perpetuate slavery is nonsense. Most Democrats who make this claim, like Cohen and (inevitably) AOC, know little about American history and less about the institution they wish to abolish. Its more crafty critics, like Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, just lie. The obvious reason they dislike the Electoral College is that they can’t win playing by the rules. This is why the Framers designed it as they did — to preclude the tyranny of the majority. During the past 230 years, the number of states has increased and population centers have shifted, but demagogues haven’t changed much.

In New Zealand, Terrorism Is Winning: https://spectator.org/in-new-zealand-terrorism-is-winning/ “Acted on their own”? While there are certainly arguments to be made against sharing video of the attack, the shutting down of entire forums by industry for the sake of a single video is eerily reminiscent of the practices of the Chinese and Iranian governments. Or, for that matter, American tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. In the digital age, free speech lies more in the realm of the private sector than it does the public, and citizens are sadly at the whim of companies’ political leanings. And the Christchurch massacre provided the perfect camouflage for the region’s tech companies to flex their muscles and police speech, in this case absent a request from the government. 1984, anyone? But perhaps not even Orwell could imagine a leading New Zealand bookseller removing famed psychologist and pundit Jordan Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos from its shelves. Never mind the fact that the book includes a chapter critically addressing the motivations of mass shooters and prescriptions for preventing such events from happening in the future. As Ardern warned, however, the powers-that-be in New Zealand are just getting started. They have even gone so far as to ban the shooter’s manifesto, a work that, while vile, should remain in the marketplace of ideas solely for its potential for ridicule. It seems that Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law, namely that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, is playing out in real time as New Zealand’s powers-that-be are finally achieving a level of control that would make the gunman green with envy. The people would be wise to not let their emotions cloud the ramifications of government, and corporate, overreach. For just as taxes are never repealed, rights are rarely restored. As of yet there have been no large-scale protests or significant calls for resistance; of course, one can hardly blame the people of New Zealand for focusing more on the victims than policy in the immediate aftermath of the attack. But when the dead are buried and the smoke clears, it may well be too late.

Guess what: Energy production is getting better and cleaner, and not as a result of the fiat of some central-planning committee.: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/natural-gas-energy-production-cleaner/

Sound like more and more this country needs a third-party candidate elected as POTUS, and not a member of the uni-party.

lol, isn't this the truth. A few year ago we hosted the rehearsal dinner for our child and fiance's wedding at our home. The fiance had a couple relatives drive in from Maine to attend the wedding so they were invited to the dinner as well. About mid-afternoon a bad stormed rolled in; torrential rain, lighting, thunder, then finally the county tornado sirens went off. While we Hoosiers are standing out on the front porch watching the spectacle the relatives from Maine were nervously asking "Shouldn't we be going down to the basement or something?" They and a few others eventually did head down to the basement for a few minutes, but most stayed upstairs.