Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Is This The Democrats' Real Strategy In Launching Recounts?

Is This The Democrats' Real Strategy In Launching Recounts? | Zero Hedge
"Over the past couple of days we've written numerous times about Jill Stein's recount efforts in WI, MI and PA (see herehere and here).  
recount-nrd-600And while it's clear that Stein intends to move forward with recounts in all three states (she's now up to $6.1mm in donations), what is unclear, and quite perplexing, is exactly why she's pursuing these recounts in the first place.  Here are the potential justifications from Stein's perspective, as we see them:
  1. Personal self-interest? - Obviously, No.  With less than 1% of the vote in WI, MI and PA, Stein obviously has no shot of winning any of the states in question.
  2. Hopes of recount tipping states to Hillary? - No.  Multiple experts and even Hillary campaign insiders have admitted that overturning election results with a margin of victory of several 1,000 votes is extremely unlikely.  To win, Hillary would have to flip WI, MI and PA even though she trails by ~20k, ~12k and ~70k votes in each of those states, respectively...not going to happen.
  3. Exposing voting machine hacking? - No.  Even the Obama administration has confirmed the the election was "free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective" and that votes "accurately reflect the will of the American people."  By failing to present even a shred of evidence of vote tampering in her WI recount petition, instead choosing to focus on wild conspiracy theories, Stein effectively also admits that there was no "hacking" of voting machines.
  4. Fundraising scam to get millions in donations from disaffected Hillary voters? - Maybe.  As of right now, Stein has raised ~$6mm of the $7mm she says she needs to fund recount efforts.  Assuming Stein goes through with recounts in all three states and her cost estimates are reasonably accurate then she won't really have that much money left over to be added to the general Green Party coffers.
So, with no practical reason for forcing recounts, what exactly is Jill Stein up to?...
Read on!

Trump administration will pressure foreign states to probe Clinton Foundation

Trump administration will pressure foreign states to probe Clinton Foundation | New York Post
"Foreign governments will be encouraged to investigate the Clinton Foundation’s finances, as many are already turning off money spigots to the scandal-scarred group, The Post has learned.
A source close to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team told The Post that the new administration plans to pressure the US ambassadors it will name to bring up the foundation with foreign governments — and suggest they probe its ­financial dealings.
Image result for Clinton foundation cartoonTrump said last week that he would not order an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server or her role in the foundation.
But Trump’s statement didn’t preclude the backroom moves to investigate the group.
“Haiti and Colombia will be key diplomatic posts for this ­because of all the money ­involved,” said the source.
In Haiti, recently leaked ­e-mails indicate “Friends of Bill” Clinton may have been given priority from the State Department as it prepared to spend some
$10 billion in aid after a devastating earthquake hit the country in 2010.
...The Australian government last week announced that it would end its decade-long affiliation with the Clinton Foundation — a commitment that had amounted to as much as $25 million, according to the foundation’s Web site.
Norway is also scaling back.
The country donated about $25 million in 2015.
Foundation donations dropped by 37 percent to $108 million last year.
Hillary Clinton left the foundation to run for president in April 2015 but Bill and daughter Chelsea Clinton remained on the board of directors.
It’s not clear whether Hillary will ­resume her role on the board."

Lunch video-----A Word To The Criminal Migrant

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Students Fed Up with Politically Biased Professors Are Hitting Back with a New Weapon: Professor Watch List

Students Fed Up with Politically Biased Professors Are Hitting Back with a New Weapon: Professor Watch List:

"Boasting 1000 plus chapters nationwide and a presence in all 50 states, the four-year-old organization prides itself on developing conservative activists who stand up to big government in and out of their universities. The Professor WatchList is a culmination of years of information gathering from conservative students who feel that radical leaning professors give no space for unpopular thinking in the classroom. Think of the website as the new ratemyprofessor.com but for conservative, libertarian-leaning students."

In "other news"-----Shootings spike over Thanksgiving holiday weekend: 8 killed, 62 wounded

Shootings spike over Thanksgiving holiday weekend: 8 killed, 62 wounded - Chicago Tribune:
"Chicago saw one its most violent Thanksgiving holidays in years, with eight people killed and 62 others wounded between late Wednesday afternoon and early Monday.
The toll towers over the number of shootings in the previous two Thanksgiving holiday weekends, according to data kept by the Tribune.
In 2014, five people were killed, including a woman inside the Nordstrom's store on Michigan Avenue, and 14 others were wounded. Last year, eight people were killed, including a 16-year-old boy, and 20 were wounded, the data show.
This year's tally does not include the three people shot dead by Chicago police over the holiday period.
In one of those shootings, authorities said officers fired at a man who had just shot two people, one of them fatally, early Friday in the Homan Square neighborhood on the West Side.  In another shooting Sunday night, authorities said an officer shot and killed a man who wounded a pregnant woman in West Garfield Park.
Early Saturday in the South Chicago neighborhood, a 20-year-old man was killed and five others were wounded at a house party, police said.
The number of people shot in Chicago this year is around 4,000, more than 1,000 above this time last year, according to Tribune data.

Development bills are crony capitalism on steroids

Development bills are crony capitalism on steroids | MLive.com:
"A Michigan Senate committee last month took a quick vote to pass several bills that could offer massive financial payouts to real estate developers, including Dan Gilbert, the law's chief private-sector advocate.
The legislation, Senate Bills 1061-1065, resembles tax increment financing laws on steroids.
TIF allows for collection of revenues — usually local property taxes — generated from alleged growth of a particular development.
The proposed legislation would also allow local personal income taxes and sales and use taxes to be earmarked for private developers.
This proposal is old wine in new skin.
Programs such as this are designed to do one thing: 
Transfer wealth from the many to a few. 
Michigan has had and continues to operate many programs that do this.
The crony capitalists who benefit most are typically well-connected politically. 
They often they get what they ask for: Red Wings owner Mike Illitch persuaded state and local governments to help him finance his new hockey stadium, and $250 million of it is expected to come from a TIF arrangement.
The chief argument supporting this new legislation is that "but for" special treatment, such development would not happen.
This talking point was repeated ad nauseum by apologists for the Michigan Economic Growth Authority, a business subsidy program.
The assertion is tough to disprove, since lawmakers tend to give the business projects what they ask for, making it hard to know what might have been.
  • MEGA was the state's highest-profile business incentive program. The Snyder administration stopped giving out new awards, but the state is still paying out about $1 billion this year on old refundable tax credits. It's a hefty price tag, but the jobs promised rarely materialized — only 2.3 percent of awards met or exceeded projections. Lawmakers should be skeptical that these schemes improve the state after reading what the economic literature says about them. Of the five scholarly studies done on the MEGA program, four found a zero to negative impact and the fifth only showed a small positive one.
  • The TIF literature is equally unflattering. A 2015 Ball State University study found that TIF districts in Indiana were actually "associated with less employment, less taxable income and slightly higher tax rates." A 2010 University of Chicago Law Review article finds, "There is little clear evidence that TIF has done much to help the municipalities that use it, and it is also a source of intergovernmental tension and a site of conflict over the scope of public aid to the private sector."...

99% Muslim, 43,000 Somali refugees settled in US under Obama

99% Muslim, 43,000 Somali refugees settled in US under Obama | Washington Examiner
The Obama administration resettled 8,858 Somali refugees in the United States last year, and nearly 43,000 during Obama's eight years, a huge number that is now raising concerns after a Somali refugee led a one-man attack spree on the campus of Ohio State.
Like Syrian refugees, there is no adequate way to check the backgrounds of the Somalis, according to the head of the Center for Immigration Studies.
...The Center also reviewed other data Monday and told Secrets that some 97,000 Somali refugees have been resettled in the United States since 9/11. 
Of those, 99.6 percent were Muslim, and 28,836 (29.7 percent) were males between the ages of 14 and 50.
"We have no way of vetting people from any of the failed states of the Islamic world, whether Somalia or Libya or Yemen or Afghanistan or Iraq. 
The latter two actually we have more intelligence on, having ruled them for a number of years, but even that information is of limited use; we admitted two Iraqis as refugees who, we only discovered later, had been [improvised explosive device] makers back in Iraq.
And the FBI fears dozens more such terrorists have been admitted as refugees.
"Oh, and we resettled nearly 9,000 Somali refugees last year."

Democratic Party Lost Governors & State Legislature Seats in 2016 Election | National Review

Democratic Party Lost Governors & State Legislature Seats in 2016 Election | National Review:

"The Democrats, on the other hand, are becoming more ideological, or at least more openly and self-consciously ideological, as the party’s progressivism becomes more and more a catechism. This has the effect of making the Democratic party less democratic. American progressives have a long and genuine commitment to mass democracy, having supported not only various expansions of the franchise but also many instruments of direct democracy such as the ballot initiative,"

Fix teacher retirement crisis today

Fix teacher retirement crisis today:
"Here in Michigan — and in Detroit especially — we’re far too familiar with what happens when we leave retirees’ future in the hands of politicians.
Underfunding.
Benefit cuts.
Bankruptcy.
In the aftermath?
Michigan taxpayers always get stuck paying for the politicians’ mess.
Well don’t look now, but the same warning signs the politicians ignored for years in the Motor City are on full display in the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System.
...Without action, the entire retirement system is in serious jeopardy.
There’s a crisis coming for Michigan’s educators, the kids they teach, and the parents who pay their salaries.
Michigan’s public teacher retirement system — commonly referred to by Lansing insiders as MPSERS, or “mipsers”—is so dramatically underfunded that teachers’ pensions are at risk, current efforts just to catch-up are taking more than $700 per pupil out of the classroom each year, and new teachers understandably worry that the their benefits may not be there when they retire.
The massive pension system is facing a staggering $26.7 billion unfunded liability.
To fully fund the benefits Lansing has guaranteed our teachers, the fund needs $67.7 billion in the bank.
 There’s only $41 billion in the fund..."

AM Fruitcake


History for November 29


History for November 29 - On-This-Day.com:
Louisa May Alcott 1832, Busby Berkeley 1895, C.S. Lewis 1898
Image result for Louisa May Alcott Quotes

Suzy Chaffee 1946 - Skier, Garry Shandling 1949 - Comedian, actor, Howie Mandel 1955 - Actor, comedian


1890 - Navy defeated Army by a score of 24-0 in the first Army-Navy football game. The game was played at West Point, NY.

1892 - A patent was issued to Almon Brown Strowger for the rotary dial.


1929 - The first airplane flight over the South Pole was made by U.S. Navy Lt. Comdr. Richard E. Byrd.


1961 - The Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft was launched by the U.S. with Enos the chimp on board. The craft orbited the earth twice before landing off Puerto Rico.


1975 - Bill Gates adopted the name Microsoft for the company he and Paul Allen had formed to write the BASIC computer language for the Altair.


1981 - Actress Natalie Wood drowned in a boating accident off Santa Catalina Island, CA, at the age 43.


1987 - A Korean jetliner disappeared off Burma, with 115 people aboard.


1994 - The U.S. House passed the revised General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Monday, November 28, 2016

Donald Trump’s Election: Progressivism Rebuked | National Review

Donald Trump’s Election: Progressivism Rebuked | National Review:

"For some 150 years, the loudspeakers of progressivism boasted of the meritocracy of the college-educated, political policy by “experts,” and steady increases of the power of the federal government for the sake of “progress.” At the same, progressives disparaged the American founding, individual achievement, and business corporations. (Progressivism could be true only if the American founding were wrong.) The legend held that progressivism would lead to disinterested government — whereas corporations were the sole incubator of self-interest. Good and evil were easy to define: Good was more government, evil was more corporate power."

Dark money donations fuel ads meant to influence voters; lawmaker fights to keep donors secret

Dark money donations fuel ads meant to influence voters; lawmaker fights to keep donors secret - WXYZ.com:
"LANSING, Mich. (WXYZ) - This election season, donors are shelling out millions of dollars to help produce ads designed to sway you, startle you and, most importantly, influence your vote.
While the intent of the ads are clear, the men and women paying for them is anything but.
"It is a license to corruption," says Rich Robinson, Executive Director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.
In Michigan, "issue ads" are given special protection under the law.
These commercials don’t explicitly tell you who to vote for, but they are designed to make you feel a certain way about a candidate and influence your vote.
When he was a candidate for Governor, Rick Snyder said this kind of “dark” money is dangerous because it conceals who’s “...trying to influence policy and for what reasons.”
"It’s a way to influence an election, without pretty much anyone knowing?" asked Channel 7's Ross Jones.
"That’s right, that’s right," Robinson said.
Secrecy, says Robinson, is the big appeal to donors, some of whom write checks totaling millions. While you can find out if someone seeking a contract or favorable law wrote a check to a politician’s campaign, you won't know who gives to these groups.
Since 2006, they've flooded Michigan airwaves with nearly $70 million in ads..."

Inside Fidel Castro’s life of luxury and ladies while country starved | New York Post

Inside Fidel Castro’s life of luxury and ladies while country starved | New York Post
"With his shaggy beard and rumpled, olive-drab fatigues, Fidel Castro presented himself to the world as a modest man of the people.
At times, he claimed he made just 900 pesos ($43) a month and lived in a “fisherman’s hut” somewhere on the beach.
But Castro’s public image was a carefully crafted myth, more fiction than fact.
“While his people suffered, Fidel Castro lived in comfort — keeping everything, including his eight children, his many mistresses, even his wife, a secret,” wrote Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, Castro’s longtime bodyguard.
Sanchez’s book, “The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Líder Maximo,” describes his former boss’s hidden life of political ruthlessness, mistresses and greed.
Castro, who died Friday night at 90, made a personal fortune offering safe haven to drug traffickers, bedded a bevy of women over the decades, and once threatened his own brother, Raul, with execution when the brother lapsed into alcoholism in the ’90s, Sanchez’s book reveals.
...Castro kept 20 luxurious properties throughout the Caribbean nation, including his own island, accessed via a yacht decorated entirely in exotic wood imported from Angola, Sanchez wrote.
But while he made good on some of his promises to educate and care for his people — building free schools and hospitals with the help of his Soviet sponsors — Castro’s legacy was also one of repression and hypocrisy.
Deep poverty persisted — teen prostitution, crumbling houses, food rations. 
Political opponents were executed by the thousands by firing squad, or sentenced to decades of hard labor...
Read on.
Disgusting monster.
Favorite of American libs.
Remember both!

Thoughtcrime: Germany To Prosecute Online 'Hate Speech' | Daily Wire

Thoughtcrime: Germany To Prosecute Online 'Hate Speech' | Daily Wire:

"In an attempt to control the recent uptick in xenophobia and racism, largely exacerbated by sudden demographic shifts linked to Berlin’s refugee-intake program, German authorities are now prosecuting arbitrarily-defined “hate speech,” otherwise known as free speech, with what appears to be de facto blasphemy laws.

On Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel backed a federal program to monitor and police internet activity on popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  "

Castro’s Socialism and Death

Castro’s Socialism and Death | Frontpage Mag:
"In the fall of 1962, Fidel Castro urged his Soviet allies to wipe out the United States.
The Butcher of Havana told Khrushchev to “to eliminate this danger forever”. 
By that he meant destroying the United States of America in a nuclear assault.
“However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other,” he reasoned.
The Soviet leader replied warning of a “war of extermination” with “millions of deaths". 
He called Castro’s proposal, the “start of a thermonuclear world war”.
Khrushchev flinched from an orgy of death that would have wiped out most of the US, the USSR and Cuba. 
Castro did not. 
He was willing to see the world die rather than yield power.
Now the dictator who liked to shout, “Socialism or Death” is dead and out of power.
Castro’s slogan was “Socialism or Death”. 
But his real legacy was “Socialism and Death”..."
Send to you friends who buy into the Castro-lie.
Read on.

48 Organizations Now Have Access To Every Brit's Browsing Hstory

48 Organizations Now Have Access To Every Brit's Browsing Hstory - Slashdot:
"schwit1 quotes a report from Zero Hedge on Great Britain's newly-enacted "snoopers' charter":
For those who missed our original reports, here is the new law in a nutshell:

  • it requires telecom companies to keep records of all users' web activity for a year, creating databases of personal information that the firms worry could be vulnerable to leaks and hackers. 
  • Civil liberties groups say the law establishes mass surveillance of British citizens, following innocent internet users from the office to the living room and the bedroom. 
  • They are right. Which government agencies have access to the internet history of any British citizen? 
  • Here is the answer courtesy of blogger Chris Yuo, who has compiled the list

Click through to the comments to read the entire list...."
Big list!

Lunch video-----5 Stories That Prove Black Friday Just Turns People into Violent C...

Noon-toon