Speaking Truth To Power

No Pasaran posted this from Instapundit:

Free Pussy Riot

Quote O'The Day

Aint it funny how small business owners didn’t do it themselves but Obama was the one who got Bin Laden?

Found here.

Lizard Logic

Douglas Adams on democracy: Vote for the less wrong lizard!

"And then I didn't speak up when they came for the rich" Or Something Like That . . .

A paraphrase of a quote from the past: "We voted for Mitterrand because he said he would tax the rich, then he told us we were the rich."

From Sovereign Man: "France is about to experience a mass exodus of wealthy elite" which references a NY Times article: "Indigestion for ‘les Riches’ in a Plan for Higher Taxes"

Perhaps a cautionary tale for the 99% in the USA.

Better Europe Than California?

From Peggy Noonan: A Nation That Believes Nothing

But he and his supporters should drop the argument that if we don't change our ways we'll wind up like Europe. That's a mistake because Americans like Europe, and in some complicated ways wouldn't mind being a little more like it. In the past 40 years jumbo jets, reduced fares and rising affluence allowed a lot of Americans, especially the sort who vote, to go there. The great capitals of Europe are glamorous, elegant and old, the outlands are exquisite. What remains of the old Catholic European ethic that business isn't everything, life is everything and it's a sin not to enjoy it, still has a lure. Americans sometimes think of it as they eat their grim salads and drink from their plastic water bottles.

When Americans go to Europe they see everything but the taxes. The taxes are terrible. But that's Europe's business and they'll have to figure it out. Yes what happens there has implications for us but still, they're there and we're here.

What Americans are worried about, take as a warning sign, and are heavily invested in is California—that mythic place where Sutter struck gold, where the movies were invented, where the geniuses of the Internet age planted their flag, built their campuses, changed our world.

We care about California. We read every day of the bankruptcies, the reduced city services, the businesses fleeing. California is going down. How amazing is it that this is happening in the middle of a presidential campaign and our candidates aren't even talking about it?

Mitt Romney should speak about the states that work and the states that don't, why they work and why they don't, and how we have to take the ways that work and apply them nationally.

Barack Obama can't talk about these things. You can't question the blue-state model when your whole campaign promises more blue-state thinking.

h/t: NewsWatchCanada ~ world news & views from a Canadian perspective

Tangentially Related: Ed Driscoll is on board to Repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!

A History of Home Foreclosure in Ramsey County

Trimming The Muscle from the local economy:

The first wave was froth and had the economy rebounded, that would have ended it. The second wave was fat – people who shouldn’t have had loans anyway – but the third wave is the muscle and bone of the economy. These are prudent borrowers who raised families in their homes and now have lost their life’s savings. That’s going to have a lasting impact on our economy far beyond this election.

This is the Obama Recovery.

The British Discuss Sports and Education

Team GB chief: dominance of public schools is unacceptable

Lord Moynihan said that about 50 per cent of the medals won by Team GB in Beijing in 2008 were secured by athletes educated in the independent sector, who made up just seven per cent of the population. He described it as “one of the worst statistics in British sport”, and said all Olympic sports should seek to be more like football, where the proportion of privately-educated players was seven per cent, mirroring society as a whole.

A translation is in order, because we are "a people divided by a common language": (GB) "Public School" = (USA) "Private School"

Follow the discussion in the comments.