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Sweden prohibits home schooling, requires all children from age one to go to state-run daycare.

William A. Jacobsen of Legal Insurrection marks Newt Gingrich's imminent withdrawal from the race with a Thank you, Newt:

"Is there anyone Romney would rather have on his side than Newt? Oh yes, Newt will go there so that Romney doesn’t have to. Newt will speak the truth about Obama in language and with a clarity a nominee can’t in the age of the Obama-adoring mainstream media."

Verily.

"Was there anyone on the campaign trail who had more fun? Who spoke of what America can do in more glorious terms than Newt? Who reminded us of what we once were and what we can be more poetically than Newt? Newt started his climb to the top in the fall with a positive message, and a relentless refusal to attack other Republicans."

Barack Obama is featured, yet again, on the cover of the Rolling Stone...

http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Obama-s-Rolling-Stone-treatment-politics-to-pop-3507241.php

Which brought this to mind...

Given Barry's frequent appearances in Rolling Stone I figured this article should have a theme song. With my apoligies to Shel Silverstein and Dr. Hook...

I'm a Harvard ringer, attached to golden string'ers
And they're pulled by George Soros
I preach about Change and I preach about Hope
While the debt, it does explode
I pass Healthcare bills
that excite the shills
But the thrill that never gets old
Is the thrill that'll get ya, when the shills put my picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone

(refrain)

Rolling Stone
Gonna see my picture on the cover
Rolling Stone
Gonna charge five copies to another
Rolling Stone
Gonna see my smilin' face
On the cover of the Rolling Stone

I got a freaky First Lady with the class of Slim Shady
Who tells us what to eat
I got my grey haired Muslim step-daddy
Fryin' fido meat
Now it's all designed to sway weak minds
But their minds won't really get swayed
Like the sway that'll get ya when I get my picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone

(refrain)

I've got a lot of usefull idiots
That'll do anything I say
And a genuine racist preacher
Teaching us the commie way
I've got all the fools that your money can buy
Even Ay-ers and Dohrn
My cronies keep gettin' richer and I get my picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone

(refrain)

I’ve been preaching the first part of this article, with calculations and graphs, to my family and friends for years. CO2 cannot do what we are told. I stumbled on this article a few days ago and thought – “AH HA!”

It is a few years old, may have been posted, but I’ll post it again.
http://www.vho.org/tr/2003/2/Nettesheim131-135.html

@syncro (wild applause) thanks!

Highly recommended: Vladislav Inozemtsev's essay "The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy".

h/t Foseti

Frank Carsten's response to his interviewer's question "What kind of political ideology is embodied in democracy?"

"It’s clearly collectivism, the idea that we need to decide upon things collectively – note that this could really be anything – and the outcome of these processes need to be followed by everyone, also those who don’t favor it.

"In a democracy every voter is inclined to collectivise his personal goals. And politicians want more power and money and collectivisation of society offers that. Civil servants, as the great economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, tend to vote pro-state and this is a self-reinforcing mechanism. It leads to ever more people being dependent on the State and thereby favorable of it. The same applies to the welfare system into which ever more people are drawn. History has shown this. All democracies suffer from it.

"A good way to look at politics is to view politicians and the State as human farmers and citizens as the livestock. The human farmers (i.e. the Republican and Democratic Parties) do indeed have opposing interests but not towards the livestock, as the latter seems to think. They both are in the business of exploiting citizens but disagree strongly on who should collect the billions or trillions in proceeds. Both Republicans and Democrats have greatly expanded taxes, expenditures, debts and government meddling in the lives of companies and individuals while both have regularly claimed to reduce government."

Later,

"The problems of democracy are inherent. It’s like having dinner with a million people and deciding up front the bill will be split evenly. Everyone has a strong incentive to order more than he would individually, resulting in a huge bill that everyone deplores but no individual could do anything about. Democracy therefore has a very limited self-cleansing capability. Our politicians have a natural short-term outlook since they are only temporarily in office. They will overspend, overtax and overborrow knowing their successors will have to deal with the negative consequences. Besides that, they spend other people’s money anyhow."

The whole thing here.

Thanks yerself Walter...

Kate's response to the question "What kind of political ideology is embodied in democracy?"

Safety valve-ism. Democracy was invented so that we need not kill our leaders to get rid of them.

What? We can't kill them?...jeez...

True enough, Kate. Of course, if a majority of citizens in a committedly democratic society vote in perpetuity for enforced collectivism, killing whoever the latest leader is wouldn't have the desired effect anyway.

A caller to Dennis Miller's Show related how his son asked him to explain the difference between conservatism and Leftism. He summarized it in 10 words:

Conservatives believe in equal opportunity.
Leftists believe in equal results.

"What we saw at the 'Occupy the Justice Department' rally in D.C."

The Sound Of Settled Morality:

National Post - Separated lesbian couple [ordered by judge to] divide assets – including 13 tubes of sperm

I'm going to vote for the cool guy that looks like Urkel, wears mom jeans, eats dogs, throws like a girl and has Mr Potato Head ears.

Maybe not.

So in the end they only got 6 1/2 each?...

Apparently the next "war on xyz" outrage ramping up from the Obama team is the war on illegal immigrants. Moveon.org has opened the assault by saying that using the word "illegal" to describe people who sneak into the US is a hate crime. Look for this to spew forth from more surrogates in the coming weeks.

@syncrodox Bravo. Quit your day job. Call Weird AL.

It's too bad that safety-valveism doesn't apply to the bureaucracy.

Neo-AGW PR Report:

Ich Bin Ein "brutal phase".

...-

"Setting Sun"

"Eastern Germany Hit Hard by Decline of Solar"

"The global solar industry has entered a brutal phase of consolidation and nowhere are the effects as dramatic as in eastern Germany." Several companies have already declared bankruptcy, leaving towns and cities in the region struggling with job losses and tax revenue shortfalls. The future bodes ill.

The sun, it was said, was going to save Frankfurt an der Oder, a city of 60,000 on the Polish border. After years of post-reunification economic doldrums, whose nadir came with the 2003 failure of a much-ballyhooed microchip factory project, the burgeoning German solar industry took an interest in the down-on-its-luck city.

In 2006, solar-panel manufacturer Conergy moved into the never-used computer chip factory, joining Odersun, already headquartered in the city. In 2007, the United States solar giant First Solar opened a factory as well, followed by a second one last year.

Now, though, the future suddenly looks decidedly dark."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,830188,00.html

From Now to the End of May.

What a difference a parliamentary majority makes.

...-

"Tories refuse to separate changes from budget bill"

"OTTAWA — A massive rewriting of Canada’s environmental laws will remain buried in the Conservative government’s budget bill.

Opposition parties are demanding the changes be excised from the budget to be debated and voted on separately, but the government refused Friday.

“They’re destroying environmental law in Canada. And they’re going to get away with it,” said a frustrated Elizabeth May, leader of the Green party."

http://thechronicleherald.ca/canada/90971-critics-slam-feds-environment-process

Excellent piece on the anniversary of the "Rodney King Riots" with some good advice for the civil authorities in Québec:

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc0427hm.html

re. EBD @10:03 - that's truely frightening. Totalitarian.

EBD @ 10:03, Black Mamba is right, that is frightening and totalitarian.

Lawrence Solomon talks about censored science and the latest findings regarding global warming, climate cooling and Darwin's evolution theories.

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/04/27/lawrence-solomon-censored-science/

Socialism: a dead-end wasteland.

...-

"Debt crisis lays waste to European governments"

"A likely change of power in France. No confidence votes in Romania and the Czech Republic. The Dutch government's resignation. Since the start of the debt crisis, 16 nations in the EU have seen a change of government.

Since the spring of 2010, the governments of more than half of the European Union's 27 member states have fallen or been voted out of office. In most cases, a direct line could be drawn between the government's exit and the austerity measures put in place because of the economic situation.

After Great Britain, Spain and Italy, France could be the next large EU member to see a change of the guard. Socialist presidential candidate Francois Hollande has a good chance of replacing current conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy when the French take to the polls in a second round of voting on May 6.

Only Germany, Poland and smaller states - including Lithuania, Estonia, Austria, Luxembourg and Malta - enjoy stable governing parties or coalitions.

Leaders in the rest of the EU have turned into victims of the economic crisis. On Friday, Romania's government collapsed after failing a no-confidence vote. Voters in the Netherlands will vote in the second set of early elections since the crisis erupted."

http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15915310,00.html

How dirty politics killed a libertarian revolution in Alberta

I don't like the idea of burying changes to environmental legislation in a budget bill. In principle it's better to keep like things together and unlike things separate.