Abortion "Protestors"

After the murder of George Tiller, an LGF commenter remembers:

They decided to go after me after I began volunteering as a NOW clinic escort in my home town of Pensacola, a town in which abortion clinics have been firebombed nearly a dozen times, and in which two doctors and one clinic escort have been murdered by two different people - Michael Griffin and the Methodist preacher Paul Hill. I just happened to drive by one day and saw women being beaten with wooden protest placards as they tried to enter or leave the clinics, so I began helping them in and out, shielding them with my body, and taking the blows intended for them on my own head and shoulders. The vicious and abusive protesters were bussed to the clinic on a weekly basis from a Southern Baptist and an Assembly of God church.

First, they illegally accessed my college transcripts, to help them build a profile to help them phone harrass me more effectively. I received sometimes hundreds of calls a day, for weeks on end, from many different phone booths by many different people, condemning and threatening me. When that didn't work, they began surveilling my home, trailing me wherever I went, and then they sabotaged my car. Finally, they strangled my family cat to death and hung it from a tree in my backyard by a noose around its neck, and safety pinned a note to its belly reading YOU'RE NEXT, BABY KILLER! But I never stopped helping those women.

Memorial Day

Colin Powell:

[F]ar from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II. We were willing to do it, glad to do it. We went to Korea. We went to Vietnam. All in the interest of preserving the rights of people.

And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say, "Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us"? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No, the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are.

Obama Eyes Socialism

Dinocrat notes that hedge funds are unhappy after donating heavily to the Obama campaign.

The Administration's desire to regulate their pay just might get their attention.

A Democratic former SEC Chairman is critical:

...Arthur Levitt warned the Obama administration and U.S. regulators against attempting to change the way executives at financial firms are compensated.

“Government can jawbone, but for government to regulate I think is overkill and very mistaken because you don’t know where it’s going to end,” Levitt said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. Efforts by the Obama administration to change Wall Street pay practices are “totally wrongheaded,” he said.

The people pushing this are very mistaken, but I fear they do know where they intend it to end--and it won't be just with the financial services industry.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party continues its principled opposition: opposition to Charles Darwin, Roe v. Wade, and gay marriage. Note to the GOP: an armageddon indeed is taking shape, but not the kind you apparently have in mind.

Advice for a Lost Elephant

Reuters:

President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday nearly doubling funds to enforce U.S. tax laws next year, with an aim of more than quadrupling funding for tax compliance to $2.1 billion within five years.

How about explaining to the public that the enforcement budget will not focus on wealthy people who have the resources to contest the IRS? No, Middle America, it will go toward shaking down you.

It's imperative that the GOP develop a positive constructive message, but something like this is too obvious to pass up.

The Peasantry is Disgruntled

According to Rasmussen polling, half the general population has a favorable view of the recent tea party protests; 81% of the political class has an unfavorable view. 25% of Americ an adults know someone who attended a tea party; less than 1% of the political class do.

Tinfoil Hats for All?

This guy is applying brain scanning to advertising.

Will this start being done remotely? Not just for data gathering, but during negotiations? What about interrogations?

This Guy Has Guts

Clifford Asness.

Addendum 20090523. He has lost control of his temper before, and his funds (apparently) are emerging from a bad time.

I Hope Warren Buffett Was Misquoted

At his recent shareholders' meeting, Buffett on the recession:

“I think that virtually everybody associated with the financial world contributed to it,” Buffett said of the crisis. “Some of it stemmed from greed, some from stupidity, some from people saying the other guy was doing it.”

At CNBC a month or two earlier, Bueffett on the recession:

Well, we went wrong originally because we had a belief that--and everybody had the belief. I had it, the government had it, mortgage lenders had it, borrowers had it, media had it, everybody thought house prices could go nothing but up and--or at least they couldn't go down a lot.

I'd have a lot more confidence in the CNBC Buffett than in the other one.

Mercy...No...Oh Please, Mercy...

Apparently this is not a joke:

Jeb Bush to help party rebuild
Former Gov. Jeb Bush and other Republican leaders are holding the first of a series of town hall meetings aimed at remaking the party's image.

Not everyone agrees:

''Jeb may be a better spokesman for the Republican Party than Rush Limbaugh, but that's a very low bar,'' quipped Democratic state Sen. Dan Gelber of Miami Beach...

The new group also includes Republican presidential nominee John McCain, prompting the national Democratic Party to circulate a blogger's snarky observation that 'things are really humming along when your `rebranding' effort is led by your recently crushed presidential nominee and your discredited party leader's brother.''

Sayfie called that a ''cheap shot.'' He added, ``People judge the governor on his record and the president on his record.''

It might be a cheap shot, but it's a direct hit too.

Oh, and the story says that Mitt Romney is in on it too.

Stem Cells in China

In view of recent biotech fraud, this should be taken with salt:

The U.S. is a bit late to the global stem cell research game. Japan’s Dr. Shinya Yamanaka demonstrated the ability to reprogram adult cells to behave as embryonic stem cells as early as 2007. But it is in China’s Guangdong Province that there have been almost miraculous strides in actually using stem cells to treat and cure diseases such as blindness, cerebral palsy, and spinal cord injuries.
...
Regenerative medicine is the future. Asia will be at its center. More and more western scholars and doctors are coming to China to collaborate.

Nevertheless, it shows how the wind is blowing.

If I were the Chinese, I'd donate heavily to American creationists and Western environmental extremists.

I'd prefer America to lead humanity into the future, but progress is more important than who makes it.