Time for another Texas vs. California update:
Texas vs. California Update for March 12, 2015
March 12th, 2015Greece Snarls At The Hand That Feeds It
March 11th, 2015Angela Merkel tamped down a party revolt to extend the Greek bailout terms by four months. And her reward for extending that lifeline? Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras reviving demands that Germany pay World War II reparations to Greece.
Before Syriza came to power, the rest of the EU and the Troika seemed content to play along with the Greece farce (extending further loans in exchange for yet more empty promises of reform) at least a little while longer. However, Syriza’s virulently anti-EU and anti-Germany rhetoric seem to have finally exhausted their patience with the show. It seems even Europeans have limits to the abuse they’re willing to take from perpetual welfare recipients. It’s bad enough to underwrite a freeloader, but evidently having to put up with constant insults from them was too much.
At this point, everyone knows Greece will neither reform nor pay back their debts to the Troika (or anyone else). That’s why Europe has finally started taking a real hard line with them, insisting on inspectors on the ground to see reforms are actually implemented.
Either Tsipras has severely overplayed his hand (quite possible), or he is deliberately preparing to use Germany as the theoretical scapegoat for exiting the Euro.
To say that Tsipras and Syriza has no plan B to escape the crisis is misleading, since their cunning “insult our creditors into giving us more money” doesn’t even count as a plan A.
A bailout from Russia? It’s not like Putin is rolling in dough following a fall in oil prices and his continuing isolation over his invasion of Ukraine. Let Putin subsidize Greece all he wants. (And I doubt a Greek navel base would give him any advantage over what he has in Sevastopol.)
Greece could have avoided all this many years ago if their government had just stopped spending more money than they took in. Given their addiction to a bloated welfare state, this is the one thing they have proven singularly unwilling to do.
I doubt Syriza has thought through just how nasty a divorce from the Eurozone might turn out. Never mind asking they repay their debts, I’m thinking a complete halt to all bank transfers between the Eurozone and Greece, and international foreign exchanges refusing to list a newly floated drachma. People hate having their welfare benefits cut, but they really, really hate being unable to buy food…
Greece has finally reached the stage of socialism where they’re run out of other people’s money, and the results are not going to be pretty.
Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn from no other…
NRA Forces Obama To Cry Uncle on AR-15 Ammo Ban
March 11th, 2015The National Rifle Association (NRA) was instrumental in stalling the Obama Administration’s initial attempt to ban commonly used ammunition for the most popular rifle in America, the AR-15. The announcement that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) will suspend its proposed framework to ban M855 ammunition validates the NRA’s assertion that this effort was nothing more than a political maneuver to bypass Congress and impose gun control on the American people.
“Today’s announcement proves what we have said all along — this was 100% political. President Obama failed to pass gun control through Congress, so he tried to impose his political agenda through executive fiat. But every gun owner in America needs to understand Barack Obama’s hatred of the Second Amendment has not changed,” said Wayne La Pierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association.
BATFE first floated the ban on February 13, and unlike Obama’s other bad executive orders, this one ran straight into the buzzsaw of an active, articulate, organized bloc of voters.
From Fast & Furious to Mayors Against Illegal Guns Moms Demand Action Everytown USA Gun Sense to the latest ammo ban, has there been a single national gun control attempt under the Obama Administration that hasn’t ended in miserable failure?
Previously Bankrupt Stockton Suddenly Has Enough Money for an Affordable Housing Development
March 10th, 2015As part of my regular Texas vs. California updates, I’ve been keeping close tabs on the city of Stockton, which just emerged from bankruptcy proceedings last month.
So what’s one of the first thing Stockton does after exiting bankruptcy? Would you believe spending $14 million for 40 units of affordable housing? For a city that owes $1.6 billion in pension debt to CalPERs, that’s like someone who can barely afford food deciding to buy spinning rims for his 19-year-old Civic.
To my mind, this has all the hallmarks of a politic payoffs.
The project would evidently entail “renovation of the 123-year-old Cal Weber Building and the 88-year-old McKeegan Building.”
Who controls the Cal-Weber building? Dan Cort.
Who controls the McKeegan building? Dan Cort.
Who’s Don Cort? A Stockton commercial real estate developer and “urban renewal expert.” He was also Mayor of Pacific Grove (which is a good two and a half hours away from Stockton) until he resigned in advanced of a recall election in 2009. Pacific Grove, like many California cities, got in financial trouble due to outrageous public employee pension costs, and bond debt to cover same.
Is Cort tied-in to Stockton’s City Council? Given that six of the seven members, including the Mayor and Vice Mayor, are among Cort’s Facebook friends, I’m going to answer “Yes.” (The seventh, Dan Wright, has only been in office since January.)
None of this is conclusive proof that underhanded financial shenanigans and/or kickback are going on. But it is an indication that reporters, bloggers and Stockton taxpayers should be taking a good, hard look at this project.
Also, I can’t imagine that Franklin Templeton, the mutual fund company and Stockton bondholder which was forced to take a haircut in bankruptcy hearings can be too happy about it either…
Scott Walker Signs Right-to-Work Bill Into Law in Wisconsin
March 9th, 2015“Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday signed into law a measure that prohibits requiring a worker to pay union dues, striking another blow against organized labor four years after the state effectively ended collective bargaining for public-sector employees.”
National unions poured tens of millions into Wisconsin trying to defeat Walker, and only succeeded in making him stronger and losing worse than they would have otherwise.
Another Day, Another Muslim Child Rape Ring in the UK
March 9th, 2015“As many as 373 children may have been targeted for sex by gangs of men in Oxfordshire in the last 16 years, a serious case review found.”
All the men were from “Muslim backgrounds”.
It’s infuriating that political correctness and fears of offending Muslim sensitivities have caused so many officials to repeatedly look the other way and fail to investigate child rape cases in the UK. As in Rotherham, the officials that let this happen should end up in prison.
Rotherham was disturbing enough. To find out that there was another Muslim child rape ring operating in the UK (albeit one with only one-third the victims) rather staggers the moral imagination. It also begs the question: How many more Muslim child rape gangs in the UK remain to be uncovered?
Boko Haram Pledges Alliegence to the Islamic State
March 7th, 2015So Boko Haram (or Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad, if you prefer the full name) has now pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. It’s like the Voltron of Radical Islamic Lunatics.
Significance? Maybe very little, unless every other Sunni Islamist group starts pledging fealty to the Islamic State as well, in which case future historians may pinpoint the declaration as the official start of World War III.
In either case, it’s yet another foreign policy triumph for the Obama/Clinton/Kerry team. Expect them to issue a denouncement in the form of a strongly worded hashtag any time now..
#TangoDown: Anonymous vs. ISIS
March 7th, 2015Here’s something that falls into the category of “undernews,” i.e. potential significant events occurring below the detectable threshold of the mainstream media.
Hacking group Anonymous (or a certain fraction thereof; things are always murky in the cyberunderground) have decided to purge Twitter of ISIS supporters in Operation #TangoDown.
This follows ISIS threatening to kill Twitter employees over blocking ISIS-related accounts.
Within seconds of Anonymous-related accounts @CtrlSec, @CtrlSec0, @CtrlSec1 or @CtrlSec2 designating a Twitter account as an ISIS-supporting account, those accounts are getting suspended.
This follows previous pro-Islamic website hacking attacks, and resulting Anonymous counterattacks, following the Charlie Hebdo attack.
One need not approve of all Anonymous’ actions (they’ve targeted Israel over Gaza) to see the elimination of the accounts of several thousand (my estimate) supporters of a designated terrorist irganization as a good thing.
If members of the Islamic State really want to live in the 7th century, they should just step away from Twitter (and computers, and cell phones, and indoor plumbing) entirely…
(Hat tip: @ColorMeRed’s Twitter Feed.)
Wisconsin Assembly Passes Right-to-Work Legislation
March 6th, 2015So it was foretold, and so it has come to pass.
Wisconsin lawmakers voted Friday to make their state the 25th to enact right-to-work legislation, pushing a fast-tracked bill through the Assembly after an overnight debate and sending it on to Gov. Scott Walker for his promised signature.
The Republican governor, a likely 2016 presidential candidate who rose to national prominence by taking on public-sector unions four years ago, plans to sign it Monday. Walker planned to be in Iowa for an agriculture summit on Saturday that’s attracting other likely Republican presidential candidates.
The Assembly passed the bill 62-35 after a marathon session that included about 20 hours of debate. It was a straight party-line vote, with no Democrats backing the measure.
You come at the king, you best not miss…
LinkSwarm for March 6, 2105
March 6th, 2015Welcome to Friday! With so much being written about Hillary Clinton’s secret email server (well, secret to mere peasants like you and me, if not foreign governments…) and the King v. Burwell ObamaCare hearings, I didn’t include anything on them in this LinkSwarm. Maybe later…
The Washington Post reported last week that the tax-exempt foundation run by Bill and Hillary Clinton accepted money from seven foreign governments while Hillary served as U.S. Secretary of State (it’s unclear how much foreign money the organization accepted while Hillary was a U.S. Senator). Super shady, right? It’s worse than that, though, because Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution actually bans foreign payola for U.S. officials.
The constitutional ban on foreign cash payments to U.S. officials is known as the Emoluments Clause and originated from Article VI of the Articles of Confederation. The purpose of the clause was to prevent foreign governments from buying influence in the U.S. by paying off U.S. government officials. Here’s the text of the clause:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
Does any sane person look at #ISIS burning people alive and go "Oh, they'd never dare use nuclear weapons"? @jihadwatchRS
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) March 3, 2015
