“All I had to do was press the button. I pressed it.”
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
BC Blue: “Postmedia issues “clarification” for Stephen Maher’s false Conservative donor story”
The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire
Barbie’s Lowered Expectations House.
Put that thing in Flyover Country and cue the Palin jokes. Put it in northeast DC and it magically becomes a fashion statement.
It’s odd… You only read stories about how great it is to be poor, how empowering it is to settle for less, when a Democrat is president. If a Republican was in charge, would WaPo be doing stories about how awesome it is to live in a breadbox?
They’re just trying to prepare you for the inevitable crash. Their ideas don’t work and they know it, so now all they can do is try to make you think their failure is somehow a statement of principle.
QOTW
“I feel very much for Miss Provost but unfortunately being shot does not make you an expert in firearms or firearms control any more than being run over by a car makes you an automotive engineer.”
h/t Mark
Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Now that the election is is safely behind them;
The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.
The New York Times hastens to add…
No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September.
They say that as though there was an investigation.
Via Hot Air;
It’s Probably Nothing
Why Is Hartford Buying Back $5 Billion of Annuity Contracts They Worked So Hard to Sell?
Retirees who thought buying an annuity was the last investment decision they’d ever have to make are having to go back to the calculators one more time.
The Hartford is the latest annuity carrier to offer the customers it fought hard to capture incentives to take their money and go home.
Do We Live in a Free Society or a Slave Society?
Reader Tips
In tonight’s Tips music selection, written 72 years ago in London during The Blitz, playwright, author, singer, and all-around wit Noël Coward sings the praises of London Pride.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
The Bomb Sight Project
The astonishing interactive map that shows every bomb dropped on London during The Blitz
This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society
Torrance County Sheriff Heath White said that, in the recent case, [Debra] Swenerton was caught in the act — tossing the dogs one by one from the driver’s side window of her vehicle — by deputies who had been alerted by the puppies’ owner.
To make matters worse, authorities suspect that this isn’t an isolated incident – that Swenerton has been dognapping for years, and may be tied to nearly 60 reports of missing dogs:
Edgewood animal control officer Mike Ring said the arrest of 59-year-old Debbie Swenerton ‘really cracked the case’ of some 60 dogs that have gone missing over the past few years.
Ring believes that Swenerton stole the dogs and then gave them to shelters, saying that they were strays she had rescued. He added that there is a possibility that Swenerton belongs to a larger group of animal activists that are concerned over the treatment of pets.Furthermore, according to Torrance County Undersherriff Martin Rivera, Swenerton repeatedly called in cases of dog abuse on owners who were taking perfectly fine care of their pets…
Pharma Shrugs
Drugmakers are currently in survival mode as patents on existing blockbuster drugs expire, forcing Big Pharma companies to parachute off the proverbial patent cliff. This legal escarpment means the end of patent protection on various blockbuster drug products, opening the market to generic substitutes. What makes the current timing so interesting is the large quantity of hugely profitable drugs whose patents have expired in the last few years or will expire soon. Over the past few years, the patents have expired for Enbrel, Zyprexa, Plavix, Arimidex, and Lipitor. This year, Seroquel, Actos, Singulair, and Lexapro have gone or will go off patent. In the coming two years, drugs including Oxycontin, Cymbalta and Nexium will expire. With the loss of patent protection on so many blockbuster drugs, Big Pharma’s financial outlook is unsteady.
Oh, boo hoo! More cheap generics!
Fat boy on the balcony
Richard Fernandez on that low-level rumbling sound:
A number of reports suggest that North Korea may be in internal crisis. The signs are vague but pervasive. The Wall Street Journal reports that pamphlets are circulating in the North disparaging the current Kim and “praising Ri Yong Ho, the former military chief who was ousted in July”. Other telltales include vandalizing of Kim statues, acts which have been blamed on South Korean agents, and orders to the police to round up restive elements…Some analysts have even mooted the possibility of a North Korean Spring and note that a spike in arrests would suggest the current Kim is losing the power to automatically command respect.
Blog Notes
Yes, I’m aware that certain aspects of SDA, in particular the loading of comments, have been slow to load in recent weeks.
The server has been under heavy pressure due to waves of spam attacks – it’s the price I pay for having an open comments policy. I’ll be looking at a blog platform upgrade soon, which may alleviate the problem.
Until then, I’ll remind readers here that this is not a chat forum and that your comments should be relevant to the topic. Every comment you post requires a page rebuild, which consumes server resources, which slows loading of the site for others. So, if your comment is a one liner, a retort to a troll, or something equally pointless, please keep it to yourself.
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
I am Washington correspondent for Dispatch International, a new weekly newspaper that appears every Thursday in English, Danish, Swedish and German. Our motto from Thomas Jefferson is our raison d’etre: “Freedom of the press cannot be limited without being lost.” Thus, the paper — helmed by journalist and free- speech-hero Lars Hedegaard of Denmark and the equally strong journalist Ingrid Carlqvist of Sweden — is committed, indeed, came into exstence to print news the rest of media will not. These include stories about Islam, government corruption, immigration, crime and other urgently important features about our life and times that the MSM seek to ignore and deny.
This helps explains why severe and massive cyber attacks on Dispatch International are originating in part from MSM organizations in Sweden!
Related! Kathy Shaidle’s co-hosting CHRW’s ‘Just Right’ radio show this morning at 11am Eastern, despite the efforts of a woman-hating leftist bully.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Scant Evidence That Salt Raises Blood Pressure;
in 2011, the Cochrane Review published two studies finding little or no relationship with all-cause mortality and salt reduction. The Lancet criticized both the Cochrane Library and the authors, saying, “They have seriously misled the press and thereby the public.”
One of those reviews had concluded that “after more than 150 randomized controlled trials and 13 population studies without an obvious signal in favor of sodium reduction, another position could be to accept that such a signal may not exist.”
Bayer and colleagues cited several studies that could not find a link between salt intake and elevated blood pressure, including a 1967 study of the Framingham cohort, and Japanese and Scottish reports in the 1980s totalling 15,000 people that concluded the association between sodium and blood pressure is “extremely weak.”
The researchers noted that most of the evidence pointed to the weakest of correlations between salt and blood pressure. Yet, the cause to reduce salt was taken up by government agencies with special speed.
[…]
Advocates for salt reduction questioned the science behind studies that didn’t conform to their opinion, and proponents partially blamed the food industry because it was in their best interest to muddy the waters and keep the debate going.
It’s the new “scientific method”.
h/t Huck
QOTD
Am going to totally ROFLMAO when Obama sends troops to secure Syria’s chem weap0ns and finds “Made in Iraq” stamped on the crates.
— Bill Hobbs (@billhobbs) December 6, 2012
Reader Tips
Back in 1958 Mighty Sparrow wanted those Soviet politicians and scientists to be sent to prison for sending up that poor little puppy in the Russian Satellite.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Forward!
Fifty-seven percent of Mexican immigrants on welfare. (h/t EBD)
Might it not be the perfect time for U.S. Conservatives to break free?
In 1987, Preston Manning and like minded colleagues created the Reform Party of Canada. They were fed-up with the Liberal-lite, Conservative-In-Name-Only mentality of those in the Progressive Conservative (PC) party at the time.
Reform achieved their first electoral success in 1989 with the election of Deborah Grey in a by-election. Then just 4 years later, in 1993, they had 52 members elected when, at the same time, the PCs were almost obliterated from Parliament, retaining just 2 seats.
They continued gaining power over the next 7 years, renaming themselves the Canadian Alliance in 2000 and having the PCs merge with them in late 2003 into what would then be called the Conservative Party of Canada. In 2006, under the leadership of Stephen Harper, the Conservatives gained power as a minority government, competing with 3 other parties in the House of Commons. Ever since, they have continued to gain MPs and finally achieved majority government status on May 2, 2011.
From October 31, 1987 until January 23, 2006 is most certainly a long time to change the political environment in a nation, but it had to begin somewhere.
This brief history lesson may serve as an important primer for conservative Americans who are now learning that the heads of the Republican Party have betrayed them. With discussions now emerging of Michelle Obama running for President in 2016, there may very well be no time like the present for real conservatives to break free from the GOP and provide American voters with a real choice.
Note: Much thanks to Brian & Tim for clarification on historical events & dates.
Scratch a Leftist
Human Rights Watch is the George Soros-funded operation that has outsize influence in governments, newsrooms and classrooms world-wide. Some at the nonprofit want to denounce Iran’s regime for inciting genocide. “Sitting still while Iran claims a ‘justification to kill all Jews and annihilate Israel’ . . . is a position unworthy of our great organization,” Sid Sheinberg, the group’s vice chairman, wrote to colleagues in a recent email.
But Executive Director Kenneth Roth, who runs the nonprofit, strenuously disagrees.