Sunday, August 25, 2013

The Right Lane update 8.28.13



The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom and individual liberty
"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington
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Woman accused of murdering  boy and burning his body says: 'I am not a monster... I love kids'  - UK Daily Mail
Mona Nelson, the woman accused of murdering Texas boy Jonathan Foster, spoke for the first time since being arrest - proclaiming her innocence. Nelson, 44, told reporters that she would never do anything to harm a child, and that she has five grandchildren of her own  'I'm not a monster... I love kids,' she told a local TV station from her prison cell. Although Nelson is adamant that she would not harm any child, it is not a view shared by police, who believe the 12-year-old Foster may not be her only victim. The boy was reported missing from his home on Christmas Eve, after his mother claims she received a strange call at her workplace from a gruff-sounding woman.  Jonathan's mother, Angela Davis, initially told police that he was with a babysitter. But she later admitted that he was home alone.

His burned body was discovered on Tuesday in a roadside ditch in Houston, not far from where he lived. Nelson told to local KTRK TV that a member of Jonathan’s family gave her $20 to dump a plastic container on Christmas Eve.  She claimed she was drunk on vodka and didn’t know what was inside the container. The badly burned body of Jonathan Foster was found dumped in a roadside ditch in Houston She said she chose a random Houston ditch to dump the container in. But police revealed that Jonathan’s burned body was not discovered in a plastic container. Nelson insisted: 'I’m not a monster. I have five grandkids and I love kids.' She admitted having a cutting torch, a welding instrument that police say she used to burn the body, but she said she needed it for her job as a welder. When asked if she used it on Jonathan, she said: 'I would never do that.'

Police allege that Nelson’s truck was spotted on surveillance footage dumping something in the ditch where the body was found. In addition, investigators say they’ve discovered evidence at Nelson’s apartment that allegedly links her to the crime, including burned carpet and twine similar to that used to tie Jonathan’s hands. Houston Police Department Homicide Detective Mike Miller called Nelson a 'cold, soulless murderer who showed an absolute lack of remorse in taking the life of Jonathan Foster'.” He called the boy’s death 'an absolute tragedy that can’t be put into words'.
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Another Phony Scandal? - The case of the missing Benghazi missiles  By: John Hayward
The UK Daily Mail reports on the claim by an attorney for Benghazi whistleblowers that four hundred American-made surface-to-air (SAM) missiles were stolen from Libya during the attack, to end up in the hands of al-Qaeda.  And it’s probably not whatever sub-division of al-Qaeda President Obama now claims he really meant when he was shoveling all that fertilizer about having them “decimated” and “on the run” during the 2012 campaign.  (Has anyone turned up a single documented instance of Obama specifying that “core” al-Qaeda was in bad shape, but all the franchises were doing great, from prior to Election Day?)
Joe diGenova, whose wife Victoria Toensing – a former deputy assistant attorney general – also represents Benghazi witnesses and others with knowledge of the terror attack, told WMAL radio that the loss of those missiles is also one the reason the U.S. State Department shut down 19 embassies across the Middle East last week. ‘A lot of people have come forward to share information with us,’ he said during the radio station’s ‘Mornings On The Mall’ program Monday morning.
‘We have learned that one of the reasons the administration is so deeply concerned’ is that ‘there were 400 surface-to-air missiles stolen, and that they are … in the hands of many people, and that the biggest fear in the U.S. intelligence community is that one of these missiles will be used to shoot down an airliner. 400 missiles, surface-to-air missiles, taken from Libya.’ Asked if the missiles are now ‘in the hands of al-Qaeda operatives,’ DiGenova replied, ‘That is what these people are telling us.’

Well, you can see why Barack Obama wouldn’t want the American people to know about something like that during his re-election campaign.  The “spontaneous video protest” nonsense his Administration was peddling suddenly seems a lot less nonsensical.  This would also explain the “unprecedented attempt” by the CIA to keep the activities of the “dozens of people” it had on the ground that night under wraps, as CNN reported in early August.  It might also shed some light on why it took so long for FBI investigators to reach the “crime scene,” in addition to the grouchy disposition of a Libyan government that found Obama’s fairy tales about YouTube videos extremely insulting. diGenova said the missing Benghazi missiles are the reason 19 American embassies across the Middle East were shut down last week.
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Associated Press Admits Obamacare Is Killing The “Recovery” by Mark Holmes
Finance reads like something from the alternative media. Meet Teresa Hartnett: “Hartnett was getting enough steady business that she was ready to take on 60 employees. ‘I was particularly excited about offering benefits,’ she says. That enthusiasm died when Hartnett met with her accountant to be sure she could afford the expansion. Hartnett was faced with the prospect that, once she had 50 workers, she’d be subject to the ACA. She considered expanding her company with part-timers who wouldn’t be covered under the law, or keeping her staff below 50. But none of those options would help her meet the goals she set for her business. ‘I couldn’t even figure out what health care I could offer without it being a problem,’ says Hartnett, whose company is based in Alexandria, Va. Her solution was to stay a very small business, with just a handful of freelancers. She’s turning down offers of business. ‘I’m going to ratchet it down for a while,’ she says.” This is one of several stories about how businesses are trying to survive Obamacare. Some of thinking they might be able to survive if they trim bonuses. Others are cutting services and letting some employees go. A restaurant owner is considering terminating his delivery service. Others are hoping they can raise prices to meet the new expenses. In this economy, I don’t think that will work. Consider: even Wal-Mart can’t keep profits up: “The chain on Thursday cut its annual profit and revenue outlook for the year after reporting second-quarter results that missed Wall Street estimates. The company’s stock fell nearly 3 percent on the news. Wal-Mart’s sober assessment adds to worries about consumer spending that arose when Macy’s Inc. lowered its profit expectations for the year after reporting disappointing results on Thursday and Kohl’s Corp. did the same on the following day even after posting solid results. But Wal-Mart’s results are even more troubling because it is considered an economic bellwether, with the company accounting for nearly 10 percent of nonautomotive retail spending in the U.S. Wal-Mart’s latest performance appears to show that many people continue to struggle in the U.S. and abroad.” So good luck raising prices! The AP story does not simply give anecdotes. These are not isolated cases: “A survey of owners taken last month by the advocacy group National Small Business Association found that 20 percent have held off on implementing a growth strategy because of rising health care costs. Thirty-six percent said they had refrained from raising salaries and 26 percent have held back on hiring.” And yet Obama is demanding a “grand bargain” from Congress that allows him to perpetrate on the United States more “stimulus.” The president wants to drive us further into debt to mask the damage wreaked on the economy by the President’s health care law. Will AP do a follow up story as small businesses go bankrupt? How much honesty does AP allow itself? Time will tell. But anyone who can think and see at all should know that Obamacare, far from being a breath of oxygen to a suffocating economy, is functioning as a chokehold.
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Memory Hole Dredged: Melanie Phillips’ 2008 Article on Obama  by Gary North
Melanie Phillips wrote a widely quoted article in late 2008 on Obama’s ideological connections. It was published in the British newspaper, The Spectator. She ended it with this widely quoted statement.
"You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so."
It has long since disappeared from the easily accessed Web. The Spectator dropped it down the memory hole. But Archive.org has an exact copy posted. Click the link below. The article lets us contrast the enormous distance between Obama in 1990 and Obama as President. He does not have much legislation to show for it. Pelosi got ObamaCare through the House. She was the ramrod. He got the credit.
The presidency is confining, except in a time of crisis. Clinton accomplished little in eight years, despite a war in Bosnia. He was far better on spending than anyone since Eisenhower. Bush was elected with the promise of avoiding nation-building abroad, but he centralized power more than anyone since Lyndon Johnson. He got the nation into two wars. You can’t judge a presidential book by its campaign cover. Franklin Roosevelt at Pittsburgh in 1932 was not what he was after March of 1933. Not one of them has ever dismantled the warfare-welfare state that was handed to him by his predecessor. Not one of them has spent his presidency cancelling all of the executive orders of his predecessors. They now total over 13,600. Presidential campaigns before a person is elected are the grand illusions of American life. They are filled with promises and hope. Then comes the shattering of both, and endless excuses by the deceived supporters, who truly believed. First-term presidential campaigns conform to Samuel Johnson’s observation 250 years ago regarding second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.

Lame duck Presidents are not lame because they have no power. They can always sign executive orders. They do not need Congress. They are lame ducks because almost no one believes in them anymore. They become time-servers. The one exception was Franklin Roosevelt. No one has ever centralized federal power more than he did. Obama is in time-serving mode. Hope is gone. That’s why the political chatter has turned to Hillary. The Book of Proverbs says this: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life” (13:12). When it comes to Presidents, it is all hope and no fulfillment.
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U.S. Government Workers Best Paid in World
Federal employees in the United States receive significantly higher total compensation than do central-government workers in other developed nations, according to a new analysis of income data.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) provides figures showing how central-government workers are paid in the world's developed, high-income countries.
The OECD looked at the salaries, benefits, and paid leave for government employees and combined the values to compute total compensation in four main categories of public employees. In the senior management category, top-level employees are classified as being at the D1 and D2 levels. The D1 designates an employee just below cabinet level, and public employees at this level in the United States receive average compensation of $248,438 a year, compared to $228,832 for employees in 18 other OECD countries. That’s according to Andrew G. Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, whose analysis was published by National Review Online.

American government workers' salaries are not outrageously higher than those in other countries, but their benefits are. U.S. federal employees' total benefits add up to 37 percent of their wages, compared to 16 percent for employees in Australia, 27 percent in the U.K., and 23 percent in the OECD as a whole.  On average, American federal government workers receive 16 percent higher total compensation than do similar workers in other OECD nations, even after differences in the countries' average income levels are taken into account.

Yet Biggs points to several factors suggesting that U.S. federal employees are on average less skilled than their foreign counterparts. "Federal taxpayers should be able to feel confident that they are not overpaying for the services they receive," Biggs concludes. "Liberals who favor activist government should support pay parity as a means to maintain support for government programs, just as budget hawks should do so to contribute to deficit reduction.  "But the evidence, from a variety of different angles, suggests we are still far from that goal."
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No denying the Muslim migration to the U.S. - State Of Michigan Food Stamp Application instructions

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"To prevent crimes, is the noblest end and aim of criminal jurisprudence. To punish them, is one of the means necessary for the accomplishment of this noble end and aim." James Wilson, Of the Study of the Law in the United States, 1790
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From the Left: Are we turning back to 1963?  E.J. Dionne is a columnist for the Washington Post..

The things we forget about the March on Washington are the things we most need to remember 50 years on.  We forget that the majestically peaceful assemblage that moved a nation came in the wake of brutal resistance to civil rights and equality. And that there would be more to come. A young organizer named John Lewis spoke at the march of living “in constant fear of a police state.” He would suffer more. On March 7, 1965, Lewis and his colleague Hosea Williams led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. They were met by mounted state troopers who would fracture Lewis’ skull.

As we celebrate Lewis’ ultimate triumph and his distinguished career in the House of Representatives, we should never lose sight of all it took for him to get there. We forget that the formal name of the great gathering before the Lincoln Memorial was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Jobs came first, an acknowledgement that the ability to enjoy liberty depends upon having the economic wherewithal to exercise our rights. The organizing manual for the march, as Michele Norris points out in Time magazine, spoke of demands that included “dignified jobs at decent wages.” It is a demand as relevant as ever.

We forget that many who were called moderate – including good people who supported civil rights – kept counseling patience and worried that the march might unleash violence. King answered them in the oration that would introduce tens of millions of white Americans to the moral rhythms and scriptural poetry that define the African-American pulpit. “We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” King declared. “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” How often has the opiate of delay been prescribed to scuttle social change?

King’s dream speech was partly planned and partly improvised, as Taylor Branch reported in “Parting the Waters,” his book on the early King years. One reviewer of the speech, a principal target of King’s persuasion, pronounced it a success. “He’s damn good,” President John F. Kennedy told his aides in the White House. He was. King’s genius lay in striking a precise balance between comforting his fellow citizens and challenging them. Like Lincoln before him, King discovered the call for justice in the promises of our founders. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” King said. “This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

King’s dream was the latest chapter in our story. “It is a dream,” he insisted, “deeply rooted in the American Dream.” We also remember how profoundly colorblind King’s dream was. He looked to a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls.” We forget that the passage immediately preceding his description of those happy children was a sharp rebuke to the state of “Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification.’ ” He was referencing discredited states’ rights notions invoked to deny the rights of Americans of color.

I intend no offense here toward Alabama. But we should recognize the origins of slogans still widely used today to thwart the advance of equal rights. And at a moment when voting rights are again under threat, the historian Gary May’s new book on the Voting Rights Act, “Bending Toward Justice,” reminds us of what King said in 1957, at another Lincoln Memorial rally. Without the right to cast a ballot, King said, “I cannot make up my own mind – it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped enact – I can only submit to the edict of others.”

Are we turning back to such a time?  King called our country forward on that beautiful day in 1963, but he also called out our failings. He told us there could be no peace without justice, and no justice without struggle. We honor him best by sharing not only his hope but also his impatience and his resolve.
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Progressive agenda harms blacks  Walter E. Williams is a syndicated columnist.
Sometimes I wonder when black people will reject the patronizing insults of white progressives and their black handmaidens. After CNN’s Piers Morgan’s interview with the key witness in the George Zimmerman trial, he said: “Rachel Jeantel is not uneducated. She’s a smart cookie.” That’s a remarkable conclusion. Here’s a 19year-old young lady, still in high school, who cannot read cursive and appears to be barely literate. Morgan may have meant Jeantel is smart – for a black person.

Progressives treat blacks as victims in need of kid glove treatment and special favors, such as racial quotas and preferences. This approach has been tried in education for decades and has revealed itself a failure. I say it’s time we explore other approaches. One approach is suggested by sports. Blacks excel – perhaps dominate is a better word – in sports such as basketball, football and boxing to such an extent that blacks are 80 percent of professional basketball players, are 66 percent of professional football players and, for decades, have dominated most professional boxing categories.

These outcomes should raise several questions. In sports, when have you heard a coach explain or excuse a black player’s poor performance by blaming it on a “legacy of slavery” or on that player’s being raised in a single- parent household? When have you heard sports standards called racist or culturally biased? I have yet to hear a player, much less a coach, speak such nonsense.

The standards of performance in sports are just about the most ruthless anywhere. Excuses are not tolerated. Think about it. What happens to a player, black or white, who doesn’t come up to a college basketball or football coach’s standards? He’s off the team. Players know this, and they make every effort to excel. They do so even more if they have aspirations to be a professional player.

By the way, blacks also excel in the entertainment industry – another industry in which there’s ruthless dog-eat-dog competition. Seeing as blacks have demonstrated an ability to thrive in an environment of ruthless competition and demanding standards, there might be some gains from a similar school environment.

Maybe we ought to have some schools in which youngsters are loaded up with homework, frequent tests and demanding, top-notch teachers. There would be no excuses for anything. Youngsters cut the mustard, or they’re kicked out and put into some other school. I’m betting that a significant number of black youngsters would prosper in such an environment, just as they prosper in the highly competitive sports and entertainment environments. Progressives’ agenda calls for not only excuse-making but also dependency. Nowhere is this more obvious than it is in their efforts to get as many Americans as they can to be dependent on food stamps; however, in this part of their agenda, they offer racial equal opportunity.

During President Barack Obama’s years in office, the number of people receiving food stamps has skyrocketed by 39 percent. Professor Edward Lazear, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2006-09, wrote in a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Hidden Jobless Disaster” (June 5) that research done by University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan suggests “that because government benefits are lost when income rises, some people forgo poor jobs in lieu of government benefits – unemployment insurance, food stamps and disability benefits among the most obvious.” Government handouts probably go a long way toward explaining the unprecedented number of Americans, close to 90 million, who are no longer looking for work.

This is all a part of the progressive agenda to hook Americans, particularly black Americans, on government handouts. In future elections, they will be able to claim that anyone who campaigns on cutting taxing and spending is a racist. That’s what Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said in denouncing the Republican 1994 call for tax cuts. He said, “It’s not ‘spic’ or ‘nigger’ anymore. (Instead,) they say, ‘Let’s cut taxes.’ ” When black Americans finally recognize the harm of the progressive agenda, I’m betting they will be the nation’s most conservative people, for who else has been harmed by progressivism as much?




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