Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible.
Edward Teller
Chart of the Day
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| US #2 in net total social spending/%GDP via The Register |
Public Pension Abuse Fact of the Day
Via Reason:
Dead men can't cash checks.My Final Bad Elephant of the Year 2014 Nominations
But someone did for retired New Castle police Officer Joseph Zwiefel. And the New York state pension fund lost $346,000 by mistakenly sending him monthly checks for 28 years after his death, The Journal News has learned.
The checks stopped in 2005 after one was returned by the post office. But other than confirming the following year that Zwiefel was dead, the state Comptroller's Office did little investigating into where the money had gone and has since run out of time to recoup the cash.
His widow continued living in the couple's Orlando, Florida home but claims not to know what happened to the checks.
Any GOP misdeeds through the end of the year will be factored into next year's mock award.There was a time early in the blog when I was swayed by claims that enhanced tactics were grossly exaggerated, infrequently applied, and had been productive/timely. Since then I have seen too many reports challenging that perspective, and even taking into account certain partisan aspects to the recent Senate report (and inadequate testimony), I was particularly troubled by reports that the CIA did not disclose specifics of details for 3 years to Bush, although it's possible Bush didn't want to be briefed. What's very clear is that the Bush Administration was not in control of a rogue agency:
The report lays out compelling evidence that the agency's directorate of operations and its counterterrorism center lied to its own lawyers and inspector general; that they kept congressional intelligence committees in the dark; and that they contracted out many interrogations (at enormous expense) to inexperienced psychologists of a sadistic bent, ignoring dissent not only from FBI agents (who often eked out more useful information with gentler techniques) but also from the CIA's own chief of interrogations, who wrote a memo, back on Jan. 21, 2003, expressing "serious reservations" about their techniques, adding, "This is a train wreck waiting to happen, and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens."Seeing blurbs from Dick Cheney that he would do it all again knowing what he now knows is very troubling; Karl Rove trying to justify rectal feeding tubes just nauseates me. Excuses that unlike the US, which has ratified the Geneva Convention, terror groups have not, and thus we are entitled to do whatever enhanced techniques just don't wash; we must abide by the rule of law. Hence, Rove and Cheney are my final nominees in this category.
Facebook Corner
(in a Libertarian Republic thread)
I'm a fusion libertarian-conservative, and Ingraham doesn't speak for real conservatives. Anyone who understands American conservatism remembers the Old Right of the 1930's and 1940's. Conservatives must be understood in the context of a tradition.
As per the Mises wiki: "Age of Enlightenment ideas of individual liberty, constitutionally limited government, peace, and reliance on the institutions of civil society and the free market for social order and economic prosperity were the basis of what became known as liberalism in the 19th century. While it kept that meaning in most of the world, modern liberalism in the United States began to mean a more statist viewpoint. Over time, those who held to the earlier liberal views began to call themselves market liberals, classical liberals or libertarians. While conservatism in Europe continued to mean conserving hierarchical class structures through state control of society and the economy, some conservatives in the United States began to refer to conserving traditions of liberty. This was especially true of the Old Right, who opposed The New Deal and U.S. military interventions in World War I and World War II." Many of us fusionists consider ourselves as an updated version of the Old Right; we are fiscal conservatives who view bloated government with suspicion on both domestic and defense matters.
Political Humor
HT Lawrence Reed
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of the original artist via the Independent Institute |
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| Via Patriot Post |
The Three Tenors, "Wiegenlied (Brahms's Lullaby)"
