Canadians now richer than Americans, more likely to have a job

Via Slate:

Economic times here in America are pretty tough, but things aren’t so shabby for our neighbors to the north.

Over the past five years, the net worth of the average Canadian has crept up, overtaking the average American’s wealth for the first time. These days, Canadian households are about $40,000 richer than American ones.

Read the rest of this post...

Oh so now govt spending DOES create jobs

Funny how when it's defense contractors who stand to lose, suddenly federal spending DOES create jobs. Read the rest of this post...

After sucking up to corporate America, corporate America still hates Obama

Typical. From the Wash Post:

President Obama has repeatedly embraced three titans of American commerce, General Electric, Boeing and JPMorgan Chase, showering their chief executives with praise and adopting policies that benefit the companies.

His economic stimulus package awarded $200 million in contracts to GE, according to the company, and he has traveled the world selling Boeing airplanes — even joking that he should receive a gold watch for how many he has sold. Obama rejected calls from some economists to break up the biggest banks after the financial crisis, leaving JPMorgan, the biggest of them all, whole.

Yet these companies — from the C-suite to the rank and file — have shown little enthusiasm for the president.

Top executives have repeatedly criticized his rhetoric and his policies or have declined to support some of his most significant proposals. Employees, in a contrast to 2008, have scaled back financial support for Obama’s campaign

No, really, thank YOU. Read the rest of this post...

Wash Post editorial on Michele Bachmann's loony racist attack on Hillary staffer

Washington Post:

TO CONSPIRACY theorists like Rep. ­Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the Obama administration’s approach to the Arab world is the product not of considered diplomacy but of wicked “influence operations,” traceable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its agents. Exhibit A among those agents with murky “ties” to the Muslim Brotherhood, Ms. Bachmann warns darkly, is Huma Abedin, a longtime aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Ms. Bachmann’s accusations are in the squalid tradition of McCarthyism and other shameful chapters of our history in which politicians have slandered their rivals as un-American, allied with enemy forces or guilty by association with shadowy forces. Her tactics are no less ugly than those of her predecessors.

Read the rest of this post...

Video: Dog leans out car window, tries to bite passing cars

My little Sasha is one step away from being this dog. (She has this little hang up about motorcycles.) This is a quick and simple video that's absolutely hysterical, and if you know dogs, absolutely understandable.

Read the rest of this post...

Seriously inappropriate Tweet from the NRA this morning

It's gone now.

Read the rest of this post...

Standing up to GOP extremism

Check out what happens when a Republican stands up to the crazies in their party's midst. Read the comments below this post from Matt Lewis criticizing Michele Bachmann's racist attack on a top Hillary staffer simply because the woman is Muslim-American.

Here are two samples of the comments - welcome to the modern Republican party:

InRussetShadows
The DC needs to fire Matt Lewis NOW. His head is so far up his anus he can't see the sun. You will rue the day you excreted the words "if there were such a thing" because we'll bring it up in every article you post.
Of course, maybe it's just survival talking. You don't want to get death threats at 2 am like Robert Spencer does, do you? And you sure don't want to meet Theo Van Gogh's fate. Even being escorted by cops and living in safe houses (like Gert Wilders has to do) is unappealing.
So, how to keep your own skin safe? Deny creeping Sharia. There's a good little dhimmi. The Muslims will kill you last, but kill you they will.
You think that there is no such thing as "creeping Sharia" law?

Wow.

CAIR may want to know about that.
Whomever is pushing all food to be halal-certified would want to know, too.
Whomever got Christians stoned up in Dearborn, MI, should know that, too.
And oh, don't forget the taxi drivers who refuse to transport blind people or people with alcohol.
Then don't forget whomever is railing for Muslim prayer accomodations in airports, when there are no such accomodations for Jews or Christians or anyone else.
And let's not forget the textbook wars, that expunge the truth about Islam to whitewash it instead, or the public school systems, where children are being indoctrinated as Muslims in role-playing sessions.
And don't forget about Sharia courts which are already in place in Canada and the UK.
And didn't Obama allow a whole host of Muslims to immigrate here a year or so ago? Wonder what that was about.
Then you have Muslim judges that refuse to punish people who attack those expressing their first amendment rights.
Then you have the army of lawyers who are busy carving out special exemptions for Muslims whenever they can.

But I'm sure there's nothing going on.

I mean, it's not like lawfare has any evidence, for it, you know?

It's like you've never read Pamela Geller's blog or something, and you have never heard of Nonie Darwish, Gert Wilders, Theo Van Gogh, or Robert Spencer.

Please educate yourself.

Read the rest of this post...

Sen. Pat Leahy's "clear conflict of interest"— or How to buy the IP law you want

The Republic Report is on fire, a must-read site for corruption news.

Staples in their coverage (and ours) are tales of bought congressmen and bought laws. It's why I call Congress the House of Retainers; like all retainers, congressmen work for a living, doing the bidding for those who don't.

Latest is Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont). You probably think of him as a "good guy" because ... well, you probably aren't sure, are you. Maybe "from Vermont" has something to do with it; it's certainly part of his branding ("Pat Leahy, liberal from Vermont"). Fund-raising, like all sales, is all about branding.

But Leahy, in his role as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is one of the main reasons that our side lets all but the worst of MoveCon judges onto the bench, while their side blocks almost every one of ours.

In other words, Leahy is one of the reasons the courts are so stacked against us. (Do click; it's one of Ms. Lithwick's best discussions of the modern court system.)

And now for a little quid pro quo. I've often said that corruption, the real thing, doesn't have to involve money, just abuse of power to benefit someone who hasn't earned what's handed to him. For example, is a referee in a college football game, one in which one side is loved by the ref and the other side hated, corrupt for taking no money at all for five bad game-changing calls?

What do you call it when an IP Big gives gifts to the chair of a Senate committee with "wide sway over IP law"? Corruption, one might say.

And what gifts. Lee Fang reports (my emphasis and paragraphing):

Corruption comes in many forms. Sometimes special interests attempt to buy influence through disclosed campaign donations, but too often, influence is purchased through unorthodox giveaways to our politicians, from discounted mortgages, to free yachts, and promises of future jobs. ...

Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT) is chair of the powerful Judiciary Committee, which has wide sway over intellectual property law.

This Friday, Leahy, a “lifelong fan” of the Batman comic book series, will make his second cameo in a Batman movie when “The Dark Knight Rises” opens in theaters.

As Demand Progress notes, Leahy’s appearance is a clear conflict of interest, given the movie industry’s intense lobbying for stricter intellectual property laws covering their products.

Fang has the quid and the quo:

Leahy ... has received over $900,000 in campaign contributions from the movie and music industry[.] ... He was the guest of Warner Brothers Studio CEO Barry Meyer — the same Meyer whose company and its association (called the MPAA) has spent millions lobbying Leahy’s committee.

In 2010, Meyer testified in front of Leahy on intellectual property legislation. His company is particularly interested in dual legislation known as SOPA/PIPA, which has attracted widespread criticism for its potential to give new powers to industry and government to broadly censor the Internet. ...

Fang's report is filled with this stuff; do read.

Are you getting that "liberal" Pat Leahy is an eager SOPA/PIPA supporter? Markos Moulitsas, quoted here, says:

Democratic Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy is inexplicably leading the charge in the Senate with the Protect IP Act [PIPA].

Inexplicably? Doing his master's bidding, I would say.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
  Read the rest of this post...

Why does Mitt Romney respect John McCain more than the American people?

When Mitt Romney wanted John McCain to give him the VP job in 2008, he provided McCain with 23 years of tax returns.

But when Mitt Romney wanted the American people to give him the presidency in 2012, he gave us only two years (conveniently skipping 2009).

Is the vice presidency more important than the presidency? Is John McCain more important than the American people?  And why didn't Mrs. Romney call John McCain "you people" when he asked for Mitt's returns?

I guess only the little people release their tax returns. Read the rest of this post...

Video: 14 dead, 50 wounded in shooting rampage at theater near Denver

KUSA-TV reports that one wounded victim is only 3 months old.

More from MSNBC:

"People were coming out of there screaming, some of the people were coming out of there bleeding. ... People were coming out with their shirts covered in blood," he said.

As he left the theater, eyewitness Hayden Miller told KUSA said people ran up to him and said "there was a gunman setting off bombs and shooting people. ... He wasn't giving anyone a chance to get out ... It hasn't really hit me. I’m in shock. it’s insane that this can happen in a movie theater where people had gone to have fun."

Another eyewitness, whose name was not given, told KUSA that he "saw at least 4, maybe 5 people limping, slightly wounded. ... I saw one girl covered in blood.

"I don’t know whose little girl that was, but my heart goes out to them. ... A cop came walking through the front door ... holding a little girl in his arms and she wasn't moving, she wasn't moving," the young man, whose voiced cracked as he spoke, told KUSA.

____________

Ban em all.

America needs to confront its culture of violence, which is only fed by the GOP (there are Muslims in our midst!) and the NRA (guns don't kill people, except they often really do). This kind of thing doesn't happen nearly this frequently, if at all, in the rest of the developed world. This is not "normal" life in modern society.  It's only normal in America.  And Beirut.

It reminds me of working on crime issues in DC around 2002, back when we were the murder capital again.  The mayor at the time, and his public safety person, kept trying to sell people the line that people getting shot on the corner of really nice neighborhoods was the price of living in the big city.  It was something out of a bad movie.

I kept standing up and having to explain to them that it's really not a prerequisite of "city living" to be shot walking home from a bar in a really nice neighborhood.  That was a DC specialty, among a few other key American cities.

Our leaders would like us to believe, accept, that violence is the unfortunate but inevitable collateral damage of living in America.  And it is.  But it doesn't have to be, it shouldn't have to be.

Someone shot video of everyone evacuating.

Read the rest of this post...

Video: Mr. Wizard's a dick

A video compilation of Mr. Wizard correcting children. God this made me laugh.

Read the rest of this post...