RadioActive with Steve Mitton: June 2012

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

CURL: Obama’s a domestic enemy of the U.S. Constitution

“Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation — I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.*

“* Unless, you know, 224 years from now, whoever happens to president simply decides he really doesn’t want to do that.”

— Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of Barack Obama’s U.S. Constitution

Socialist or Fascist

It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.

Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.

The folly of Obamacare

We pay our presidents for judgment, and President Obama committed a colossal error of judgment in making health-care “reform” a centerpiece of his first term. Ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — and regardless of how the court decides — it’s clear that Obama overreached. His attempt to achieve universal health insurance coverage is a massive feat of social engineering that, by its sweeping nature, weakens the economic recovery and antagonizes millions of Americans.

Let’s review why the ACA (“Obamacare”) is dreadful public policy:

(1) It increases uncertainty and decreases confidence when recovery from the Great Recession requires more confidence and less uncertainty. The ACA isn’t highly popular; the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 44 percent of Americans now view it unfavorably and 37 percent favorably. Given the ACA’s complexities, people can’t know where they’ll get insurance and what it will cost. In 2014, the ACA requires all employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide insurance or pay fines (“the employer mandate”). On the one hand, formal economic studies conclude that most employers now offering insurance will continue to do so; on the other, in direct surveys of firms, 30 percent or more say they might drop insurance and pay fines. Uncovered people must buy insurance (“the individual mandate”) or face penalties, though government will subsidize households with incomes up to four times the poverty level ($92,200 for a family of four in 2012).

(2) The ACA discourages job creation by raising the price of hiring. This is basic economics. If you increase the price of labor, companies will buy less of it. Requiring employers to buy health insurance for some workers makes them more expensive, at least in the short run. Particularly vulnerable are low-skilled workers, notes economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute. Because the employer mandate exempts firms with fewer than 50 workers, there’s a huge incentive for firms to stop at 49, she says.

The U.S. has never before had a President who thinks so little of the American people that he imagines he can win re-election running on the opposite of reality. But that is the reality of President Obama today.

Waving a planted press commentary, Obama recently claimed on the campaign stump, “federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any President in almost 60 years.”

Peggy Noonan aptly summarized in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal the take away by the still holding majority of Americans living in the real world:

Lawless and He Knows It

ven he knows better, or at least he should. That man, Barack Obama. After all he claims to be a Constitutional Law professor. But, on Friday, the President blew it.

I understand that there are at least as many different ideas of how to fix the illegal immigration problem as there are Members of Congress. So, it comes as no surprise that the President also has some thoughts on the subject – particularly as the election draws near.

But, when I heard him announce his executive order which changes existing law, I bristled. The Constitution is very clear about separation of powers; the Congress makes laws, the executive branch administers them.

Obama knows it, too. In September 2011 in response to pressure to take this same action he said, "this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally in just not true…there are laws on the books that I have to enforce…we live in a democracy. You have to pass bills through the legislature, and then I can sign it."

How Romney Can Win the Presidency - This Week

Obama is perhaps the most divisive President in modern U.S. history. The country is in severe economic crisis -- history books will someday call this the Obama Great Depression. Yet our President doesn’t see fit to deal with the economy in general. He doesn’t make big announcements to save Americans in general. He doesn’t have a plan to create jobs for all Americans. Because for Obama it isn't about America...or the economy...or jobs. It's all about cold, hard, heartless politics.

Obama sees politics as divided by race. Everything he does is about division. Obama divides rich vs. poor (with his Buffett bill and proposed massive tax hikes on the rich), black vs. white (with his Trayvon comments), gay vs. straight (with his gay marriage announcement), women vs. men (with his demand that women receive free contraception from private insurers). And Obama’s newest “minority of the month announcement” was Friday’s policy aimed at illegal immigrants, particularly young Latinos.

Florida politics produces very few no-brainer issues. There are even fewer when you can choose whether you want to side with logic or with criminal behavior.

Today’s no-brainer is the progressives’ argument against voter identification, perhaps the most irresponsible position in Florida politics today.

Gov. Rick Scott is not backing off a pledge to clear Florida’s voter rolls of non-citizens who illegally registered to vote. When the governor received word that the U.S. Department of Justice intends to sue Florida to stop its efforts to “purge” voter rolls, he announced he would sue the Obama administration to force the Department of Homeland Security to give Florida access to an immigration database that can confirm an individual’s citizenship status. A defiant Scott, stonewalled for nine months, is demanding that DOJ and other federal agencies immediately provide Florida with the tools it needs to identify dead and foreign voters still on the rolls.

“We want to have fair, honest elections in our state, and we’ve been put in a position where we don’t have a choice but to sue to get it,” Scott said. “I have a job to defend the rights of legitimate voters.”

The election results from Greece are in and the pro-bailout forces have won, but just barely. It is being projected that the pro-bailout New Democracy party will have about 130 seats in the 300 seat parliament, and Pasok (another pro-bailout party) will have about 33 seats. Those two parties have alternated ruling Greece for decades, and it looks like they are going to form a coalition government which will keep Greece in the euro. On Monday we are likely to see financial markets across the globe in celebration mode. But the truth is that nothing has really changed. Greece is still in a depression. The Greek economy has contracted by close to 25 percent over the past four years, and now they are going to stay on the exact same path that they were before. Austerity is going to continue to grind away at what remains of the Greek economy and money is going to continue to fly out of the country at a very rapid pace. Greece is still drowning in debt and completely dependent on outside aid to avoid bankruptcy. Meanwhile, things in Spain and Italy are rapidly getting worse. So where in that equation is room for optimism?

Right now the ingredients for a "perfect storm" are developing in Europe. Government spending is being slashed all across the continent, ECB monetary policy is very tight, new regulations and deteriorating economic conditions are causing major banks to cut back on lending and there is panic in the air.

Unless something dramatic changes, things are going to continue to get worse.

Is (Disposable) Joe Biden 'The Leaker'?

Now that any thinking person can see that the sensitive security information leaked to the NY Times in an apparent effort to aggrandize the President's national defense credentials had to have come from Obama's inner circle -regardless of how much feigned offence he purports to take at the suggestion- even Dianne Feinstein is at her wits' end.

As for the identity of that highly-damaging mystery leaker.. there's plenty of reason to suspect it just might be VP Joe Biden.

Not only is Biden the most dispensable member of the President's cabinet, Slow Joe also fancies himself a foreign policy expert -never mind the fact he's consistently been on the wrong side of history for 40 years now- and is widely known as a guy who doesn't know when to shut his mouth, type-cast for taking the fall when the time comes- but note that he's been awfully quiet lately.

Last time we stuck our toe just a bit into the history of the terms “liberal” and “conservative”. In this article, let us expound a bit more.

In order to articulate a larger point, let’s focus on a single right, the right to own property. We acknowledge of course that the topic of conservatism is much broader and multi layered than just property ownership. But remember, these articles are to be more of a conservatives cliff notes. Volumes have been written on this topic by greater minds by far. In these articles I want to provide something with depth but that are brief enough that you will have time to read them. So the focus is the right to own property. I would present to you that, politically speaking, this is THE most important of our rights. Even as I write this, North Dakota is voting on an amendment that would actually abolish property taxes because some North Dakotans believe that that tax is a violation of their right to property ownership.

In going back to our discussion in part one of this series, let’s agree that conservatives want to conserve. In this case, they want to conserve the right to own property. We will not go so far as to say that liberals want to abolish this right but they certainly want to diminish and weaken it. I should clarify that I am not only making an abstract point here. I am articulating something that is actually occurring in reality throughout our culture.

House Moves to Hold Holder in Contempt on Fast and Furious

The House of Representatives is moving forward with proceedings to hold Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress — a major escalation in the separation-of-powers battle over “Fast and Furious,” the Obama administration’s botched gun-walking operation.

Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says Congress needs to examine records regarding the Justice Department's conduct following public disclosures in early 2011 that hundreds of guns illicitly purchased at gun shops on the U.S. side of the border wound up in Mexico, many of them at crime scenes.

The hearing is scheduled for June 20.

Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky (R) talks to Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of Conference on Security Policy at the 48th Conference on Security Policy in Munich February 5, 2012. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

Eugene Kaspersky, whose lab discovered the Flame virus that has attacked computers in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, said on Wednesday only a global effort could stop a new era of "cyber terrorism".

"It's not cyber war, it's cyber terrorism and I'm afraid it's just the beginning of the game ... I'm afraid it will be the end of the world as we know it," Kaspersky told reporters at a cyber security conference in Tel Aviv.

"I'm scared, believe me," he said.

Father Who Killed Man Molesting Daughter 'Unlikely to be Charged'

The father of a 4-year-old girl reportedly killed a man, who was seen allegedly molesting the child in Lavaca County, Texas on Saturday, said Lavaca County Sheriff Micah Harmon.

Harmon told the Associated Press that the accused molester, a 47-year-old man, died at the scene, but his name has not been released because his next of kin has not yet been notified.

So far, the father, whose name has not been released, has not been charged with any crime. The case will be presented to a grand jury to determine if any charges will be filed.

However, authorities say the man has expressed regret for the killing and said it was an accident. Thus far, there's no evidence to cause officials to doubt his story. The girl's grandfather says he believes the death was an accident as well.

Sheriff Harmon said the father and daughter were at their barn with several other people to groom and care for horses. The 47-year-old man came with some of the other people, but was not known to the father and child.

I’m a Mormon, Not a Christian

THANKS to Mitt Romney, a Broadway hit and a relentless marketing campaign by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormons seem to be everywhere.

This is the so-called Mormon Moment: a strange convergence of developments offering Mormons hope that the Christian nation that persecuted, banished or killed them in the 19th century will finally love them as fellow Christians.

I want to be on record about this. I’m about as genuine a Mormon as you’ll find — a templegoer with a Utah pedigree and an administrative position in a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am also emphatically not a Christian.

Laffer and Moore: Obama's Real Spending Record

President Obama shocked us the other day when he said, "Since I've been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years." Having heard him champion the "multiplier effects" of deficit-financed stimulus spending, we saw him as an enthusiastic supporter of throwing other people's money at just about any problem.

Thus began our quest to see where we had strayed from the straight and narrow. Here's the picture.

In the chart nearby we've plotted federal government spending on a National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) basis as a share of total U.S. GDP from 1990 to the present. The NIPA numbers are used here as opposed to appropriations or outlays to capture the actual periods when production occurs. The stories the chart tells are amazing.

Rugged Individualism Fades from National Character

“That’ll be the day!”

John Wayne’s gravelly, dry voice connected with millions who recognized in its tenor something of America’s pioneer character. In dozens of popular movies, Wayne— who died on this day in 1979—played the no-nonsense, self-reliant cowboy who had an innate and profound, if not quite scholarly, understanding of justice. Wherever he found himself, he was in his own way a force for good, for law and order.

Wayne’s favorite setting on the big screen represented a period when hundreds of thousands of Americans headed west. Despite violence, disorder, natural obstacles, and a civilizational void, they forged ahead. Adventure-seeking individuals, enterprising businessmen, fervent missionaries, and ordinary families looking for a new beginning established towns and communities across the American West.

A Pre-Revolutionary Situation

Once upon a time, there was a nation that had trouble paying its bills. The people were restless. So the king called for his advisors, and they advised a little inflation to stimulate trade. A few months passed, and the people were still restless. So the king called for his advisors once again and asked them what was wrong. It's those extremists and radicals, they said. They are sowing radical ideas and extremism among the people.

Wouldn't you know, the bookstores are groaning these days with pompous titles about the radicalism of the Republican Party. Court pundit E.J. Dionne, Jr. is out with Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent. He argues that Republicans have abandoned any thought of community in a mad crush on individualism. In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, E.J. worried that the Tea Partiers owe too much to the ideas of the John Birch Society and have reneged on the "long consensus" about the role of government in society.

I think they emphasize our individualistic side, which is very much part of us, the individual liberty side, to the exclusion of that side of us which both believes profoundly in community, and sees it as essential to preserving liberty.

Swedish party wants sit-down urination

Party members of a Swedish county council said they want to encourage men using the council's toilets to sit during urination.

The Left Party in Sormland said it wants the Sormland County Council to pass a motion requiring toilets reserved for stand-up urination to be labeled, Swedish news agency TT reported Monday.

The party said sit-down urination is more hygienic and reduces the risk of bathroom users having to negotiate their way around puddles en route to the toilet.

New Data on Same-sex Parenting Challenges Gay Orthodoxy

The Washington Times reported on Sunday that two new studies indicate that children raised by gay parents might not benefit from the experience like kids raised by married mother-father parents.

"The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go," University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus said in his study in Social Science Research.

Regnerus's study involved 3,000 randomly selected young adults in the U.S. These young adults' lives were measured for "social, emotional, and relationship outcomes."

Unions and the Path to Irrelevancy

The Wisconsin recall election was about many things, ranging from American voters’ willingness to back significant fiscal reform, their dislike of using recall mechanisms for anything but the most serious of derelictions, to confirming the growing polarization of Americans that has accelerated since the realities of “Hope-’n-Change” were unleashed in January 2009. But if there is one group among whom the failed recall effort should provoke significant soul-searching, it is unions — and not just public-sector unions, but the union movement throughout the West in general.

The evidence for declining union membership across the developed world is overwhelming. According to the OECD’s Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, just 11.9 percent of American employees were unionized in 2008, compared to peak numbers of about 35 percent in the 1950s. The same report specified American unions were also experiencing an overall decline in membership numbers.

U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites, leaked docs show

The United Nations is considering a new Internet tax targeting the largest Web content providers, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, that could cripple their ability to reach users in developing nations.

The European proposal, offered for debate at a December meeting of a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, would amend an existing telecommunications treaty by imposing heavy costs on popular Web sites and their network providers for the privilege of serving non-U.S. users, according to newly leaked documents.

The documents (No. 1 No. 2) punctuate warnings that the Obama administration and Republican members of Congress raised last week about how secret negotiations at the ITU over an international communications treaty could result in a radical re-engineering of the Internet ecosystem and allow governments to monitor or restrict their citizens' online activities.

Obama’s Third-Party History

On the evening of January 11, 1996, while Mitt Romney was in the final years of his run as the head of Bain Capital, Barack Obama formally joined the New Party, which was deeply hostile to the mainstream of the Democratic party and even to American capitalism. In 2008, candidate Obama deceived the American public about his potentially damaging tie to this third party. The issue remains as fresh as today’s headlines, as Romney argues that Obama is trying to move the United States toward European-style social democracy, which was precisely the New Party’s goal.

In late October 2008, when I wrote here at National Review Online that Obama had been a member of the New Party, his campaign sharply denied it, calling my claim a “crackpot smear.” Fight the Smears, an official Obama-campaign website, staunchly maintained that “Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party.” I rebutted this, but the debate was never taken up by the mainstream press.

Recently obtained evidence from the updated records of Illinois ACORN at the Wisconsin Historical Society now definitively establishes that Obama was a member of the New Party. He also signed a “contract” promising to publicly support and associate himself with the New Party while in office.

Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times? The real story

Ronald Reagan may have presided over the most significant tax reform effort in our nation’s history, yet historical revisionists are attempting to besmirch that legacy — while using him as a straw man against modern Republicans.

Saying Ronald Reagan raised taxes is like saying Michael Jordan was a guy who struck out a lot — or that he was a failed baseball player: It’s factually correct, but misleading, nonetheless.

I’ve decided to examine Reagan’s tax cuts and tax increases in order to set the record straight and end this tomfoolery.

Big Labor's Other Disaster: California

Voters in San Diego and San Jose, the 8th and tenth biggest municipalities in the United States, decisively voted to redistribute income from the rich (public employees) to the middle class taxpayers who earn far less on average. Both cities have strong Democratic registration majorities, indicating that the general public has fully absorbed the lesson that government jobs are wildly overpaid, and that it is necessary to choose between using money to serve the taxpayers, or using it to benefit the bureaucrats.

Craig Gustafson of the San Diego Union-Tribune describes the measure approved in San Diego with 69 percent of the vote:

Uncertainty Paralysis

President Obama would do us all a big favor if he'd ask himself this: "Would I start or expand a business without knowing what regulations or taxes government will impose next year?"

If he'd just stop and ask that, he'd have a sense of what's wrong with the economy. He'd understand why a country that must create 120,000 new jobs each month just to absorb newcomers created only 69,000 last month.

Past recoveries were quicker. Something is different. What could it be?

France hits back at Obama over Europe debt crisis

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius gives a press conference with his Italian counterpart on June 5, 2012 following their meeting at Villa Madama in Rome (AFP PHOTO/ALBERTO PIZZOLI)

ROME: French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Tuesday hit back at comments by US President Barack Obama about the threat of the European debt crisis, saying it had originated in the United States.

"The crisis did not start in Europe... Lehman Brothers was not a European bank," Fabius said after talks with his counterpart Giulio Terzi in Rome.

"We should not shift responsibility. We're all in the same boat," he said.

Obama said Saturday that Europe's economic woes were causing trouble for the United States' own economy, after the US unemployment rate rose for the first time in almost a year, spelling trouble for his reelection bid.

Post image for Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know – from fifty feet away – what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

RICHARD RUSSELL: This Is Going To Be A Nasty Decline, And I'm Afraid It Has A Long Way To Go

Richard Russell, the bearish author of the Dow Theory Letters, recently warned that a major primary bear market signal had been confirmed and that stocks were headed lower as a result.

In his latest Dow Theory Letter, he warns that equities could have quite a distance to fall from here.

Via King World News, Richard Russell:

“How far will the bear market carry? No one knows. Already all of 2012's gains have been wiped out. There's a number down there to where the bear market is heading. I don't know what that number is. Dow 8,000? Dow 6,000? Dow 4,000? Dow 2,500?”

Defecting From Obama

President Barack Obama is racing down the trail blazed by Sen. George McGovern, who in 1972 was buried by the largest popular vote landslide in American history. (President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 won a slightly higher percentage of the popular vote than Richard Nixon did in 1972, but LBJ's margin over Sen. Barry Goldwater was smaller.) Sen. McGovern was too far to the left, swing voters thought, and not very competent -- an image reinforced by the shambles his supporters made of the Democratic national convention.

Swing voters are forming a similar opinion about President Obama, who sometimes seems as if he's deliberately trying to dismantle the coalition that elected him in 2008.

• Mr. Obama won the Jewish vote by an astounding 52 percentage points. But -- thanks chiefly to his policies toward Israel and Iran -- he's lost more support among Jews (16 percentage points) than among any other ethnic group, according to a Pew survey in February.

• Mr. Obama won the Catholic vote 54 percent to 45 percent. Four years earlier, Sen. John Kerry got only 47 percent of Catholic votes -- and he's Catholic.

Please Excuse My President

Few things are more difficult in politics than confronting failure and learning from it. It is especially difficult when a leader you have championed, and in whom you have placed your highest hopes, turns out to be less than he seemed.

Such is the dilemma facing liberals in the age of Obama. Barack Obama entered the presidency with his sights and standards very high, and many liberals believed he could be the transformative figure they had been awaiting for generations. But by now it is clear that, by any reasonable measure (including those set out by Obama himself at the beginning of his term), his presidency has been a failure.

Consider the economy. President Obama has overseen the weakest recovery on record. He is on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era. The standard of living for Americans has fallen more dramatically during his presidency than during any since the government began recording it five decades ago. As of this writing, unemployment has been above 8 percent for 38 consecutive months, the longest such stretch since the Great Depression. Home values are nearly 35 percent lower than they were five years ago. A record 46 million Americans are now living in poverty.

SECTIONS 404 and 406 of the Dodd-Frank law of July 2010 add up to just a couple of pages. On October 31st last year two of the agencies overseeing America’s financial system turned those few pages into a form to be filled out by hedge funds and some other firms; that form ran to 192 pages. The cost of filling it out, according to an informal survey of hedge-fund managers, will be $100,000-150,000 for each firm the first time it does it. After having done it once, those costs might drop to $40,000 in every later year.

Hedge funds command little pity these days. But their bureaucratic task is but one example of the demands for fees and paperwork with which Dodd-Frank will blanket a vast segment of America’s economy. After the crisis of 2008, finance plainly needed better regulation. Lots of institutions had turned out to enjoy the backing of the taxpayer because they were too big to fail. Huge derivatives exposures had gone unnoticed. Supervisory responsibilities were too fragmented. Dodd-Frank, named after its co-sponsors, Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, attempted to address these issues (section 404 is one of those aimed at excessive risk exposure). But there is an ever-more-apparent risk that the harm done by the massive cost and complexity of its regulations, and the effects of its internal inconsistencies, will outweigh what good may yet come from it.

Connecticut's Red Ink

The Nutmeg State will be funding the Communist Party.

Yep, despite massive debt and a mushrooming deficit, Governor Dannel Malloy, with the obedient Democrat legislature in tow, will convene the State Bond Commission on June 4th and push through a $300,000 “grant-in-aid to Progressive Education and Research Associates to finance renovations to the New Haven Peoples Center at 37 Howe Street.” The masquerades of Progressive this and People that aside, 37 Howe Street happens to be the headquarters for the Connecticut Communist Party, run by Joelle Fishman, who also happens to be the regional bureau chief for the infamous Peoples World. Which, yes, also happens to be located at 37 Howe Street.

So here we have a state that is awash in red ink, consciously increasing its red ink, to directly send taxpayer dollars to a place that publishes Red ink.

China condemns U.S. gun ownership as human rights violation

A report issued by the State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China has included U.S. gun ownership among a list of human rights violations, Law Enforcement Examiner Jim Kouri reported yesterday. "The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011" was published last Friday on the PRC’s Consulate General in New York website.

“The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over the protection of citizens' lives and personal security and exercises lax firearm possession control, causing rampant gun ownership,” the report claims. “The U.S. people hold between 35 percent and 50 percent of the world' s civilian-owned guns, with every 100 people having 90 guns [and] 47 percent of American adults reported that they had a gun.”

Investors Position for a Synchronized Global Slowdown: El-Erian

The insufficient job creation, stagnant earnings and alarming long-term unemployment highlighted by May’s disheartening jobs report underscore America’s persistent unemployment crisis. The numbers also speak to a synchronized slowdown that is now taking hold of the global economy — a phenomenon that is being signaled by virtually every other data release out of Europe, the U.S. and emerging countries.

Getty Images

The realization of lower global growth, together with increasing financial instability in some parts of the world (particularly Europe), is an important driver of the recent sharp selloff in equities and other risk assets. It has also turbocharged the collapse in yields on higher quality government bonds, with the 10-year U.S. bond at a record close of 1.46% on Friday (and Germany even lower).

The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate

A US government-funded survey has found that Americans with higher levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge are more sceptical regarding the dangers of climate change than their more poorly educated fellow citizens.

The results of the survey are especially remarkable as it was plainly not intended to show any such thing: Rather, the researchers and trick-cyclists who carried it out were doing so from the position that the "scientific consensus" (carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous) is a settled fact, and the priority is now to find some way of getting US voters to believe in the need for urgent, immediate and massive action to reduce CO₂ emissions.

A theory exists among some psychologists, sociologists and other soft "scientists" that it should be possible to convince the ordinary citizenry to accept the various huge costs advocated by environmentalists, by simply raising the level of scientific knowledge and numeracy. People would then be able to understand that there is a terrible danger facing the human race and so would support action to address it. Certainly it appears to be a fact that very few people in the general public – or indeed, in various architecture and industrial-design faculties – have enough basic physics and numeracy to join the debate at all (as the recent rash of human-powered "crowd farm" generator projects illustrates all too plainly).

Former Hedge Funder’s Fearful Forecast: We‘re Looking at ’The Biggest Economic Shock the World Has Ever Seen’ & There’s Nothing We Can Do to Stop It

Former co-manager of the GLG Global Macro Fund Raoul Pal has joined the growing chorus of economists who believe the global economy is headed in the absolute wrong direction.

What does the Goldman Sachs alumnus see on the horizon?

Mr. Pal, who writes for The Global Macro Investor, a research publication intended only for larger institutions, hedge funds, and family offices, believes that a global banking collapse and massive defaults will bring about “the biggest economic shock the world has ever seen” — and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

Well, that’s pretty dire. Does he have anything to back up his claims?

Former Hedge Funder’s Fearful Forecast: We‘re Looking at ’The Biggest Economic Shock the World Has Ever Seen’ & There’s Nothing We Can Do to Stop It

Former co-manager of the GLG Global Macro Fund Raoul Pal has joined the growing chorus of economists who believe the global economy is headed in the absolute wrong direction.

What does the Goldman Sachs alumnus see on the horizon?

Well, that’s pretty dire. Does he have anything to back up his claims?

A worker destroys a weapon confiscated by the police during a news conference in Caracas May 18 2012.

Venezuela has brought a new gun law into effect which bans the commercial sale of firearms and ammunition.

Until now, anyone with a gun permit could buy arms from a private company.

Under the new law, only the army, police and certain groups like security companies will be able to buy arms from the state-owned weapons manufacturer and importer.

The ban is the latest attempt by the government to improve security and cut crime ahead of elections in October

Venezuela saw more than 18,000 murders last year and the capital, Caracas, is thought to be one of the most dangerous cities in Latin America.

Ten game changers that could decide the race between Obama and Romney

Ten potential game changers loom over the presidential race and could determine whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney wins in November, according to political experts.

Both campaigns and their networks of allies have plotted strategy for months but as the military adage holds, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

In this campaign, which is a referendum on Obama, the uncertainties of the battlefield extend from Europe and the Middle East to how the candidates respond under the television spotlight of the first debate.

“Does Obama blink? Does the late night call come and the caller gets voicemail?” said Terry Holt, who served as a strategist to the 2000 and 2004 Bush-Cheney campaigns. “Voters still have questions about Obama’s decisiveness and ability to be a strong leader. That’s his vulnerability.

Come on now. Is Obama really a “psychopathic megalomaniac”?

I learned of Obama’s problems today. Not from Ron Paul supporters. Not from Glenn Beck‘s Drudge wanna-be news site The Blaze. I read about Obama’s psychosis from left wing Democrats.

Everyday I get emails from former members of Move On, a pro-Democratic Party group that was famously active during the build-up to the Iraq War in 2003. They’re complaining about one man: President Obama.

In these emails, one thing is apparent. When it comes to the left wing liberals, Obama is being left behind.

Washington Post Tougher on Romney than Hezb'allah Killer of 241 Marines

The Washington Post recently used the word "troubling" in a headline describing Mitt Romney's behavior as a teenager, and insisted in a subsequent column that his conduct in 1965 plays a vital role in providing clues to his current character.

Remarkably, this is the same newspaper that has featured commentaries by terrorist kingpins and never used a term as negative as "troubling" to identify them.

Defending the paper's lengthy, less-than-reliable coverage of Romney's long-ago behavior, Post ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton wrote:

I think biographical stories on presidential candidates are fair game even if controversial incidents contained in them are far in the past. Of course we all change and mature. But these stories give clues to the character of the flesh-and-blood human beings we pick to lead us.