Cook Perfect Rice Without a Rice Cooker (and Store It for Quick Reheating) [...

Cook Perfect Rice Without a Rice Cooker (and Store It for Quick Reheating) [Food]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 12/5/11

Most people who make a lot of rice swear by rice cookers, but food blogger Darya Pino (and me, actually) have had mixed experiences. So, instead of relying on inconsistent rice-cooker results, Pino set out to find how to cook perfect rice without a rice cooker. More »

Why can't lefties be honest about the First Amendment? | Mark Tapscott | Columnists | Washington Examiner

Link:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/11/why-can-t-lefties-be-honest-about-first-amendment

... leftists like Reich have been apoplectic since the Citizens United decision, which among much else, affirmed the First Amendment rights of individual Americans associating with each other in corporations (and unions, a fact that Reich conveniently forgets to acknowledge).

Leftists like Reich – and President Obama, with his demagogic attack on the high court as the justices sat in the congressional chamber listening to his 2010 state of the union address – endlessly repeat the falsehood that Citizens United created a new corporate right.

In fact, the Supreme Court has held nearly two dozen times since FDR was in the White House that corporations are associated persons who have constitutional rights. In 1978, for example, the Court said in First National Bank of Boston v Bellotti that it found in the context of ballot measures "no support for the proposition that speech that otherwise would be within the protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply because its source is a corporation."

....

Indeed, it is only a short distance between advocating limits on political speech in order to avoid "the appearance of corruption" - or,  as Cass Sustein, Obama's regulatory czar, argues, to correct or prevent "conspiracy theories" in the general populace - and endorsing such limits on newspaper editorials, opinion columns, or Talk Radio commentaries because they, too, allegedly create such an appearance.

Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault

Link:
<https://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=my#stream/user%2F11614470787439797294%2Flabel%2FJJR>

Dear members of the moderate left,

America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.

You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.

Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You've greased the corporatist machine every chance you've gotten. You've made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.

We told you this would happen, but you wouldn't listen. You complain, rightly, that regulatory agencies are controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to constrain. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create power—and you people love to create power—the unscrupulous seek to capture that power for their personal benefit. Time and time again, they succeed. We told you that would happen, and we gave you an accurate account of how it would happen.

You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

It's not rocket science. It's public choice economics. You recognized, rightly, that public choice economics was a threat to your ideology. So, you didn't listen, because you didn't want to be wrong. Public choice predicted that the government programs you created with the goal of fixing problems would often instead exacerbate those problems. Well, the evidence is in. You were wrong and public choice theory was right. If you have any decency, it is time to admit you were wrong and change. Stop making things worse.

You spent the past fifty years empowering corporations and the most unscrupulous of the rich. You created rampant moral hazard in the financial sector. You created the system that socializes risks but privatizes profit. You created the system that creates a revolving door between Obama's staff and Goldman Sachs. There's a reason why Wall Street throws money at Obama. It's because you, the moderate left, are Wall Street's biggest supporters. Oh, I know you complain about Wall Street. But your actions speak louder than your words.

SOURCE

How Congress Occupied Wall Street

Link:
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204323904577040373463191222.html?mod=djemITP_h>

The legislature comprises less than 1% of the people, and are uniquely advantaged.  They spend large sums of money to get and keep their offices, because they reap much more in profit from having been elected.  Maybe the Occupy Random Places crowd is targeting the wrong 1%?

Mark Twain famously wrote, "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." Peter Schweizer's new book, "Throw Them All Out," reveals this permanent political class in all its arrogant glory. (Full disclosure: Mr. Schweizer is employed by my political action committee as a foreign-policy adviser.)

Mr. Schweizer answers the questions so many of us have asked. I addressed this in a speech in Iowa last Labor Day weekend. How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.

The money-making opportunities for politicians are myriad, and Mr. Schweizer details the most lucrative methods: accepting sweetheart gifts of IPO stock from companies seeking to influence legislation, practicing insider trading with nonpublic government information, earmarking projects that benefit personal real estate holdings, and even subtly extorting campaign donations through the threat of legislation unfavorable to an industry. The list goes on and on, and it's sickening.

Astonishingly, none of this is technically illegal, at least not for Congress. Members of Congress exempt themselves from the laws they apply to the rest of us. That includes laws that protect whistleblowers (nothing prevents members of Congress from retaliating against staffers who shine light on corruption) and Freedom of Information Act requests (it's easier to get classified documents from the CIA than from a congressional office).

The corruption isn't confined to one political party or just a few bad apples. It's an endemic problem encompassing leadership on both sides of the aisle. It's an entire system of public servants feathering their own nests.

None of this surprises me. I've been fighting this type of corruption and cronyism my entire political career. For years Alaskans suspected that our lawmakers and state administrators were in the pockets of the big oil companies to the detriment of ordinary Alaskans. We knew we were being taken for a ride, but it took FBI wiretaps to finally capture lawmakers in the act of selling their votes. In the wake of politicos being carted off to prison, my administration enacted reforms based on transparency and accountability to prevent this from happening again.

We were successful because we had the righteous indignation of Alaskan citizens on our side. Our good ol' boy political class in Juneau was definitely not with us. Business was good for them, so why would they want to end "business as usual"?

The moment you threaten to strip politicians of their legal graft, they'll moan that they can't govern effectively without it. Perhaps they'll gravitate toward reform, but often their idea of reform is to limit the right of "We the people" to exercise our freedom of speech in the political process.

I've learned from local, state and national political experience that the only solution to entrenched corruption is sudden and relentless reform. Sudden because our permanent political class is adept at changing the subject to divert the public's attention—and we can no longer afford to be indifferent to this system of graft when our country is going bankrupt. Reform must be relentless because fighting corruption is like a game of whack-a-mole. You knock it down in one area only to see it pop up in another.

What are the solutions? We need reform that provides real transparency. Congress should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act like everyone else. We need more detailed financial disclosure reports, and members should submit reports much more often than once a year. All stock transactions above $5,000 should be disclosed within five days.

We need equality under the law. From now on, laws that apply to the private sector must apply to Congress, including whistleblower, conflict-of-interest and insider-trading laws. Trading on nonpublic government information should be illegal both for those who pass on the information and those who trade on it. (This should close the loophole of the blind trusts that aren't really blind because they're managed by family members or friends.)

No more sweetheart land deals with campaign contributors. No gifts of IPO shares. No trading of stocks related to committee assignments. No earmarks where the congressman receives a direct benefit. No accepting campaign contributions while Congress is in session. No lobbyists as family members, and no transitioning into a lobbying career after leaving office. No more revolving door, ever.

This call for real reform must transcend political parties. The grass-roots movements of the right and the left should embrace this. The tea party's mission has always been opposition to waste and crony capitalism, and the Occupy protesters must realize that Washington politicians have been "Occupying Wall Street" long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.

This, by the way, was written by a female former governor of Alaska.

We Can Care Without Riding The Short Bus. › 2.0: The Blogmocracy

We Can Care Without Riding The Short Bus. › 2.0: The Blogmocracy

We, here in America are somewhat victimized by our own success. Many of us here, feel that we were just lucky to have been born in a Nation which controls 67% of the world’s GDP and wealth. Many of us feel that for this to have happened, it means that the remainder of the world is forced to do without. The fact is, that wealth and productivity were created by our great grandparents and grandparents who worked hard and made sacrifices on our behalf. The U.S., way back in its infancy, was in fact a third world nation. it was the economic freedom, and the very restrictions placed on authoritarians which made the industrial revolution and subsequent increase in living standard possible. There is a reason why we here in America, even with our latest economic crisis, continue to feed most of the remainder of the world. Bear in mind also, that most of this aid is in the form of aid, and not compensated for properly.

Stop and search blamed for riots

Deciding oneself to be a victim seems to be the root of a lot of evil.

Stop and search blamed for riots

via Samizdata.net by (Rob Fisher (Surrey)) on 12/5/11

Here is what London's Metropolitan Police say about stop and search:

Being stopped does not mean you are under arrest or have done something wrong. In some cases, people are stopped as part of a wide-ranging effort to catch criminals in a targeted public place. A police officer, or a community support officer must have a good reason for stopping or searching you and they are required to tell you what that reason is.

Reasons include that the police officer thinks you are carrying drugs, or there has been violence or disorder in the vicinity.
It is safe to say that stop and search is a really bad idea. It is reasonable to expect to be left alone by the authorities when you are going about your lawful business. However:

Of the Reading the Riots interviewees, 73% said they had been stopped and searched in the past 12 months – they were more than eight times more likely than the general population in London to have been stopped and searched in the previous year.

Reading the Riots is a report by the Guardian and the London School of Economics who interviewed 270 rioters to find out why they said they rioted. One could argue that cause and effect are reversed; the rioters are criminals and that is why they get stopped and searched a lot.
Theodore Dalrymple, who I do not think is right about everything but is right about a lot, analyses what he calls the underclass in his book Life at the Bottom. Reading through some of the quotes from rioters in the Guardian, his analysis rings true. The essence of it is that people have decided that bad things just happen to them and it is not their fault. Their view of themselves as victims is reinforced by their social workers who get their ideas from articles in the Guardian.
From the Guardian's report of the research:

Rioters identified a range of political grievances, but at the heart of their complaints was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money, jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social: how they felt they were treated compared with others.

This sense of being treated unfairly is exactly the victimhood mind-set. As for jobs, Dalrymple writes:

the unemployed young person considers the number of jobs in an economy as a fixed quantity. Just as the national income is a cake to be doled out in equal or unequal slices, so the number of jobs in an economy has nothing to do with the conduct of the people who live in it but is immutably fixed. This is a concept of the way the world works that has been assiduously peddled, not only in schools during 'social studies' but in the media of mass communication.

So stop stopping and searching because it is a good idea anyway, but they will find other excuses to riot.

Dead Movement Walking: Top Ten New Media Moments That Brought Down #OccupyWa...

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ancient Cookery

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ancient Cookery

http://www.aspiringluddite.com/

http://www.godecookery.com/

A list of medieval cookery sites...

Dead Movement Walking: Top Six Signs the Left and the MSM Have Hung Occupy o...

Dead Movement Walking: Top Six Signs the Left and the MSM Have Hung Occupy out to Dry

via Big Journalism by John Nolte on 12/1/11

Let's back up a little bit before we get to the list…
A few weeks ago in Denver I had the opportunity for some up close and personal time with the Occupy movement, and what I saw was about what you would expect. These are marginal and marginally intelligent people who have grown up conditioned by public educators and the welfare state to believe that they're something special and entitled to the good life just because they're special and entitled to the good life. And they've also been brainwashed to believe that if America doesn't acknowledge their specialness and if, indeed, they're not enjoying the good life, the problem must be a corrupt America.

Occupy is all about greed, self-actualization, and narcissism. The fastest and easiest way to feel superior is to assume the role of a victim … because a victim is always superior to his or her oppressors.
Occupy is also an army the left and Alinksy-style community organizers like Barack Obama have been breeding for decades. The formula is simple: feed enough self-esteem to those who don't deserve it and you create an entire generation of entitled crybabies desperate to direct the frustration of their unfulfilled lives at whomever.
The left thought they had found the right moment to launch their Army of the Frustrated. With Obama's poll numbers in the tank and the crippled economy unable to leap on a white stallion to save him, the idea was to launch Occupy in the hopes it would change the 2012 election conversation and media narrative from Obama's failed record to ground upon which he might be able to win reelection: income inequality and those evil one-percenters on Wall Street who destroyed the economy.
And so the filthy, frustrated, and brain-fried, under the direction of their Adbuster Masters (more about this below), took to the streets, and for a few weeks the plan went perfectly. High-profile Democrats, including President Obama, endorsed and encouraged them, while the corrupt MSM worked overtime to cover up the movement's hundreds of subhuman misdeeds (literally) and held it up as an example of all that is pure and righteous in America.
But then something happened the left and their media allies didn't expect. They had woefully underestimated the power of New Media to expose the truth, and expose the truth we did, until the Occupy dream all came crashing down in an overwhelming narrative (overwhelming because it was true) involving Occupy's frightening tolerance for rape, violence, vandalism, and public masturbation and defecation.

Occupy Wall Street was a pretty important pre-season game leading up to the 2012 election, and Obama and his Media Palace Guards haven't even started licking their wounds from the New Media ass kicking they took. And the bad news for Occupiers is that they're now scampering off the field, tail tucked between their legs, and desperate to untie themselves from the political liability these Occupiers have become.

If you don't believe me, Occupy, here are six undeniable signs that the same media and leftist elites who promised you air cover in the revolution that would finally fulfill your frustrated dreams have just left you swinging in the wind, fully exposed and more than a little humiliated with nowhere to go:

1. MSM Is No Longer Infatuated With Occupy: Other than the big stories surrounding Occupy evictions, the mainstream media's all but stopped covering the Occupy movement. 12 to 14 hours a day the cable nets are on in my office, and even leftist CNN and far-left MSNBC have ceased trying to use the Occupiers as a way to jump-start Obama-friendly narratives about taxing the rich and how Wall Street is to blame for Obama's failed economy.
No more on-the-street profiles of earnest young Occupy faces just looking to make the world a more fair and equal place.
And I can pinpoint the day this occurred. The day after GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich suggested Occupy take a bath and get a job, both CNN and MSNBC went apoplectic in the hopes this "ugly"  statement would backfire on the Speaker. When just the opposite happened, that was pretty much all the proof the left-wing media needed that Occupy was hurting the left, not helping.
2. Jon Stewart Guts Occupy: On November 17, "The Daily Show" took the "cool" out of Occupy with a devastating report (see above) that exposed the movement for the Orwellian Animal Farm these kinds of movements always become (which of course was Orwell's point). No one in media understood better how useful this movement could've been to Barack Obama than Jon Stewart, but he's also smart enough to know when it's time to fire off a flare warning Obama to stay away — and that's exactly what this segment was meant to do, and did.
3. AP Pretends Democrats Never Supported Occupy: On November 18, the Associated Press laughably and transparently attempted to memory-hole the Democrats' very public and energetic embrace of all things Occupy.
Gee, I wonder why?
4. Slate Freaks Over Ad Connecting High-Profile Democrat To Occupy: Slate's Libby Copeland was so panicked over a political ad that truthfully and effectively laid out Elizabeth Warren's once-proud connection to the Occupy movement that she made a public fool of herself labeling the ad as "sexist."
That's desperate. And more than a little funny.
5. New Yorker Bares Occupy's Astro-turf For the World To See: Even though Big Government exposed all of this over a month ago, the fact that the New Yorker would, in a major feature piece, finally put to bed the lie that Occupy was just some sort of organic, grassroots organization like the Tea Party, is the final nail in the movement's coffin.
After all, someone has to take the blame for this.
6. Liberal Cities Evict Occupy: Mayors of some of the most liberal cities in America (Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia) are playing Bull Connor to all those wonderful little hippies who only want "social justice." Furthermore, in their latest reports, the MSM has even stopped trying to make the cops look bad during these evictions. The coverage can best be described as obligatory.
Democratic mayors of big, urban liberal cities don't evict popular movements, do they? They wouldn't even evict a movement popular with the Obama's base.

—–

Don't get me wrong; this doesn't mean I'm going to stop ridiculing them, but as you look over the lay of the land, it's hard not to feel a little sorry for Occupy Wall Street. They're really just useful idiots and aggrieved Frankenstein monsters raised on promises their statist creators never intended to keep. And now that they've raped, pooped, and vandalized themselves into a political liability for their creators, they might actually have to take a bath and get a job.
The horror, the horror.

New at Reason: Greg Beato on Pepper Spray’s Progressive Origins

New at Reason: Greg Beato on Pepper Spray’s Progressive Origins

via Hit & Run on 12/1/11

Pepper spray is in the air. In late September, a New York cop started spritzing Occupy Wall Street protestors with the predatory zeal of a Macy's fragrance demonstrator dispensing free samples of Kim Kardashian's latest perfume. Then, Seattle's finest chemically neutralized an 84-year-old grannie. Next there was Lt. John Pike in central California, quelling a very quiet riot on the campus of UC Davis.
Now, perhaps, may not seem like the most auspicious time to champion pepper spray as a populist triumph, the eye-searing embodiment of some of America's most cherished ideals. But as Greg Beato reminds us, the government's favorite air freshener is also a tool of individual empowerment.
View this article.

Jesus Wants a Little Governmental Forgiveness

Jesus Wants a Little Governmental Forgiveness

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Doug Bandow on 12/1/11

I always knew that the United Church of Christ was, shall we say, a bit lax on theology.  Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, a UCC-ordained minister, writes on faith for the Washington Post.  And she has determined that God wants the government to forgive student loans.  Based on the Lord's Prayer:

Currently, I'm advocating debt forgiveness. It is the moral thing to do and it is the right civic thing to do. This is what Jesus actually meant; real debts, real debtors, forgiving and forgiven. This is what government is actually about-of the people, by the people, for the people. We still have a chance to show young people that democracy can work for the common good.

It's a novel interpretation, never before proposed in the two millenia since Jesus walked the earth.  (Thanks to Ken Shepherd of NewsBusters for publicizing this.)  But I guess that is what good, innovative theologians do.  Come up with heretofore unrecognized (cynics might say implausible, silly, and nonsensical, but not I!) interpretations of traditional texts.
But why stop at student loans?  I've been meditating on the word and I believe God believes in a lot more forgiveness.  To start, he would have the government forgive my taxes.  I'm not getting good value for my money, could use the money better myself, and have been feeling unloved recently.  Some tax fortgiveness would be a very good thing.
Government also should forgive us our duties to fill out census forms.  Government shouldn't pry, and time is money, as we all know.  So when I repeat the imprecation to "forgive us our debts," it should apply to the census.
Also, entrepreneurs should be forgiven their legal duty to pay the minimum wage.  Economists long have recognized that setting wages discourages the hiring of the least skilled, educated, and experienced workers.  It also punishes people hiring the most vulnerable and disadvantage.  Sounds like a good opportunity for some governmental forgiveness to me!
In fact, there are a lot more regulations with which all of us should be forgiven having to comply.  Many are special interest measures intended to enrich the special interests who often gain control of expensive and expansive government.  When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray he obviously was telling us that government should forgive us following other arbitrary rules and laws.
I'm sure there are some areas that I'm forgetting.  I mean, God is a God of forgiveness.  Think of all the other areas where God obviously wanted government to forgive us!

Adam Carolla Explains the OWS Generation

NSFW, not Family Friendly, but spot on.

Adam Carolla Explains the OWS Generation

via Big Government by MRC TV on 11/30/11

If you feel no one has quite captured how you may feel about the 'Occupiers', look no further than this. There are seriously no words for how much awesome is packed into this 9 minute rant. That's really all that can be said about it.
That and I guess we should warn you there's some foul language contained throughout.
Enjoy as Adam verbally rips them to shreds, explains the problem, then provides us with a solution. (Language Warning…once again for good measure)



Follow MRCTV on Facebook and Twitter.

"Support that at your own risk"

"Support that at your own risk"

http://wizbangblog.com/2011/11/22/support-that-at-your-own-risk/

A clear concise piece describing why you have to be ignorant or gullible to be supportive of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

What is remarkable to me is how otherwise observant, thoughtful individuals have excused the endless stream of criminal acts perpetrated at and by OWS crowds. The line, as it goes, is: All causes or political movements are going to have fringe elements, and they are going to behave badly or stupidly. But you can't judge the whole based on the actions of those few. Their overall message is sound, and you can't discredit the people or their message, or allow yourself to be distracted from that message because of these acts.
There are two problems with this position. First of all, their message, their position, their entire ideology is far from sound. Don't let hypnotic, deadpan, monotone NPR radio announcers lull you into a sense of apathy or, worse, comfort over these people. The OWS people will tell you there is this system and it is designed to work against you, but there really is no "system." There are numerous, individual agreements between adults to exchange value: effort as any combination of talent, physical labor or intellectual skill for currency. And it's not exploitative; it is mutually beneficial. Suppose you make a lot of money; you can then hire me, as an employee, or as a vendor to help you make more, and if your business does well and I'm an investor, I make money when your stock goes up; when you make more money, you can open more stores so I have better selection, lower prices, and a closer, more convenient trip to make. In America and countries like it, quality, hard work and acceptance of personal responsibility results in success–if not now, certainly for your future. However, since this does leave out everyone who does not do those things, Occupy Wall Street finds its opening with such persons.
OWS asserts that, currently, the power is in the hands of the wealthy but that it should be the hands of academics and other people smarter than you and, therefore, know better than you what's best for you and everyone else. So their stated mission is replace the system with a new one that is leaderless. However, this is not an honest statement because it is incongruous with their perception of society. Social justice implies someone is being wronged (perhaps exploited or outright stolen from), and that there is a judicial punishment. Therefore, people that stratify society by classes of victims according to gender, race or even sexual orientation are doomed to seek supremacy, not just opportunity equality, for these victim classes. When you see someone demanding social justice, they are looking to shift the class for whom they see as the owner of social power; a shift that moves power from the so-called "haves" to the so-called "have-nots." It sounds like a good idea, but it isn't, and history proves it.
Look at the legacy of Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez and Venezuela or Fidel Castro's Cuba, the revolution that brought the Ayatollah to power in Iran or Kim Jong-Il and Mao's famine-stained brand of Communism in North Korea and China. The reality is, the only place where Communism ever "works" is when it is brought about through intimidation, fear, actual torture and death. While propaganda from the American Left perpetuates conspiracy concepts around the so-called military-industrial complex accusing the CIA and the Pentagon of all sorts of "black helicopter" or "men-in-black" tactics to silence political dissidents, you have actual oppression throughout Islamic Arab countries, Socialist Central and South American banana republics, and communist regimes in parts of Africa and Asia. Actual kidnappings, rapes, murders of people and their families, including children for preserving power.
In that world, there is no constitution that limits the government. There is no legislative representation. There is no due process. There is just the way of the state and what the intellectuals have decided for you, as an adult, what is best and right for you. Socialism is the creed of shared misery. Communism is the philosophy of outcome equality through universal failure. And they sell it on the concept that if nobody is rich, then there can be no one in a class above you. But that is the biggest lie of all, because the advocates of that system want to be in the class above you that tells you what you can or cannot drive, eat or buy, or how much money you are allowed to earn. The road to hell was paved with good intentions and the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement is no exception.
Then, there is the "every political movement has a fringe element" excuse. This does not fly because in another well-known political movement called the Tea Party protests, you did not have numerous felonies. Tea Parties have not hosted shootings, murders, dead bodies, sexual assaults including rape, public masturbation, public fornication, vandalism–including defecation on police vehicles, open use of illegal narcotics, trespassing, battery of journalists and peace officers, theft of private property, public health code violations and untold economic damage to the local businesses whose customers do not want to risk blood and urine being thrown at them while standing at a hot-dog cart. You can Google every single last incident I've named to find they've happened at least once in every single city where OWS has darkened the pavement.
There are too many of these incidents to call them one-offs in the same way that out of the 1.2 Million tea party protesters that showed up in Washington, D.C., you might have had a few dozen people hoisting racially incentive picket signs directed toward the President. However, not only were there very few outsiders willing to explain them away as minor, fringe elements that do not represent the core values of the Tea Party, there is former President Jimmy Carter claiming that the heart of their opposition to the President is based in racism. At Tea Party protests, parks have been left in nicer condition than before they arrived. Will we be able to say the same when the OWS crowd is eventually evicted from the parks and lawns of public buildings in our cities? If it was anything like the union losers that tried to occupy the state capitol in Wisconsin when Scott Walker tried to institute fiscal sanity in that state, the answer will be: of course not.
So, certainly, crony capitalism between Democrats in Congress and in the White House financial institutions–either through collusion or severe legal pressure–that nearly destroyed the American economy in 2008 is bad. However, the only thing worse than a problem is a bad solution. There are good solutions to that problem, and, it would be one thing if the OWSers were just too stupid to avoid bad solutions. But this is exploitation. The Occupy Wall Street people are gunning for the most important American value that there is, Individual Liberty, and they are exploiting the misery caused by Left-wing, big government policy to advance a cause that will end Individual Liberty.
Support that at your own risk.

--

The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle

Elizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

Link: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/perspective/elizabeth-warren%e2%80%99s-non-sequitur/?utm_source=The Freeman&utm_campaign=3319b04bde-Freeman_Jan2010_Issue&utm_medium=email (via shareaholic.com)

Fwd: books

Recommended books for Wicca

"Wicca for Beginners" by Thea Sabin is my first choice for any seeker. Written by a 3*BTW HPS, for beginners. There's nothing in it that I wish seekers weren't exposed to, as is often the case, and it covers all the basics in a way that is compatible with BTW practice.

The Elements of Ritual by Deborah Lipp thorougly explains the mechanics of circle casting. Actually explains WHY. Very helpful.

I really like what David and Sorita are putting out via Avalonia Press. 'Toward A Wiccan Circle', 'Circle of Fire' and 'Wicca Magical Beginnings'. In turn these books cover practical 101, conceptual/symbolism and History.

As for beginners, but not at the total start, I still heart Vivianne Crowley's "Wicca - the old religion for a new century".

One of my up-line elders, Eileen Smith, wrote a couple of books. The first, "Earthgard Wicca" was published almost a decade ago and the second, "A Witches Heart" was published only a couple of years ago. She was also the teacher at the Wicca 101 that got me started in all this.

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The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle

When Propaganda Burns More Than Pepper-Spray

When Propaganda Burns More Than Pepper-Spray

via Big Journalism by Liberty Chick on 11/30/11

Today, students, faculty and supporters at the University of California, Davis, have called for a general strike to protest tuition hikes and to demand the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after police pepper-sprayed eleven protesters who blocked a public access way at an #OccupyUCDavis event on November 18th. Students maintain it was Chancellor Katehi who requested the police remove the Occupy encampment and clear access to the facility.  The incident sparked a firestorm of media all across the world and has become a viral phenomenon, and now even an Internet meme.

We stand behind those calling for Chancellor Katehi's resignation.  But not for the reasons they might think.
The events of UC Davis and the way in which the pepper-spray was handled has set a number of dangerous precedents.  In the setting of academia, the rights of the majority of students are being trampled on to appease the tyranny of a minority.  Further, the very system of law and order and its public servants instituted to protect the rights of the public at large have been undermined by incompetent leaders, unable to withstand the growing pressure of a noisy minority and the corrupt media that supports it.  Most importantly, propaganda has established a foothold that is now stronger than ever, and far more dangerous than the short-term effects of pepper spray.
Over the last week, we have seen the media pick up the UC Davis story and run with it, always highlighting the same twenty seconds of one Officer Pike, methodically pepper-spraying eleven "peaceful protesters," while onlookers gasp and scream in horror and dismay.  The public was almost undivided in its immediate condemnation of the act.
But just as Winston Churchill once said, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."  Perhaps in this case, it's not so much a lie, but a lot of omissions.
We know now that the Davis 11 locked arms to block the public access way, creating both a safety hazard and barring other students and the public from gaining access to facilities beyond that point.  What the media has never explained is that the protesters were repeatedly warned to clear the path.  Video shows officer Pike, the one with the pepper spray, informing each protester one last time that they would be "subject to the use of force" if they did not voluntarily move.  The protesters acknowledge the warning and hunker down for the consequences.

The media also never provides an accurate portrayal of why the students were protesting in the first place, and what prompted them to block the access way.  In an interview with Democracy Now, UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture student Elli Pearson, one of the protesters in the blockade who was pepper sprayed, reveals the truth.

She describes that the students were there to stand in solidarity with UC Berkeley students and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and to "protest tuition hikes that are happening at public universities all across the nation." Pearson goes on to explain:

"We linked arms and we sat down peacefully to protest their [riot police] presence on our campus, and then at one point we had encircled them [police] and they were trying to leave and trying to clear a path, and so we sat down and linked arms, and said that if they were trying to clear a path they would have to go through us."
When asked if the student protesters were given any sort of warning by police, Pearson responds:
"I believe they told maybe one student or maybe had some dialogue, but certainly not everyone could hear, it wasn't like an announcement that was made."

They intentionally encircled the police and blocked them in.  In doing so, the Davis 11 created a very serious public safety hazard.  But you'd never see that from the same twenty seconds of video splashed across every media outlet.  Not until other bloggers began to delve into the story did the more complete versions of the incident begin to crop up on video.
But by then, the damage was done.
Police Chief Annette Spicuzza and two officers, including Lt. John Pike, have already been placed on administrative leave, and petitions calling for their resignation have been collected.  Videos and internet memes of the "Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop" have gone viral.  The hacktivist collective Anonymous posted Pike's information online and encouraged people to call and harass the officer.  YouTube has since removed the video for violating its policies, so the transcript of the video is as follows:

Greetings police forces of the world. We are Anonymous.
Since the beginning of the Occupy movement we have watched as police violence toward the otherwise peaceful protestors has steadily increased. Your brutalization of our citizens is both unjust and uncalled for. Your raids on our encampments and the illegal actions of corrupt officers within your ranks will no longer go unpunished.
Any officer found to be guilty of these crimes against peaceful protestors will be doxed and have their personal information released to the public. It is time you take a dose of your own medicine and stop hiding behind your badge.
U. C. Davis Campus Police, Lieutenant John Pike, Records Unit Manager.
You pepper sprayed a crowd of peaceful students sitting on the ground. You are a coward, and a bully.
A tool of the corrupt. A puppet for your masters.
Citizens of the world, flood his home phone at [REDACTED].
Flood his cell phone at [REDACTED].
Flood his email at, [REDACTED].
Flood his home with pizza deliveries and junk mail at [HOME ADDRESS REDACTED].
Flood his skype at [REDACTED].
Flood his phones, email and mailbox to voice your anger.
Flood the campus of U.C. Davis.
Flood the streets of the world and stand up for your rights, and against injustice.
We are Anonymous. We Are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us!

All of this before anyone could hear or see the other side of the story.
Other law enforcement personnel have explained that pepper spray is often used as a compliance tool when necessary.  "People don't consider what it takes to break up an unlawful assembly if the protestors refuse to disperse. It always takes some kind of force," said one law enforcement worker we spoke with.  The officers needed to remove the protesters, who'd linked arms to form a blockade.  Reaching in to manually break them apart would have required the use of physical force, while leaving the officers' weapons vulnerable to seizure.  In that case, most procedures indicate that pepper-spray is justified and the most humane of all options.  While it creates temporary discomfort for the protestors, it enables the officers to safely contain, and in this case, arrest the protesters in order to remove them from blocking the public's access.  Protesters have since admitted, they intentionally surrounded the police and blocked them in.  While the video footage shown on mainstream media may not appear this way, the complete footage that has since surfaced clearly backs up the officers' claims.
Police officers are public servants, they are people too.  Where are they supposed to turn when a situation has become so politicized that they aren't supported by their own chain of command?  Did these officers not have a right for the full video to be reviewed and an investigation conducted before being judged?
In March, some of the very same protesters encountered similar events during the March 4^th Day of Action to Defend Public Education (video & photos), when protesters blocked a major California highway in a standoff with police, then went on to "Occupy" buildings and classrooms at UC Davis.  One of those participants listed was Kase Wheatley, the same protester featured in the high-end raincoat and overalls at the November 18^th event as one of the Davis 11 in the video that's appeared all over the media.  Clearly, Kase is no stranger to such conflict, and apparently came prepared.
You see, Kase and other students like him have been at this for some time, supporting union causes like unionized teaching assistants at UC Davis and protesting union busting on behalf of AFSCME.

"The UC system has actually hired one of the premiere union busting firms in the country to basically break up the unions on campus," Wheatley said.  "They're all connected, it's happening all over the world. It's happening with riots and protests in Tunisia and Egypt, and all the way to the United States."

Instead of pointing out Kase's activism experience to provide balance, media outlets like MSNBC have exalted Kase to martyr status, where he was most recently heralded by Michael Moore, who calls the incident an iconic moment in the Occupy movement akin to "Tiananmen Square."

The ramifications of the pepper spray incident reach further than the topic of the use of force.  Too many fail to realize that 200 protesters in a school of over 30,000 tuition paying students is a tiny minority, less than 1 percent.  What about the 99 percent in this case?  The 99 percent who want to go about their daily routines, be safe on their college campus, not be afraid to voice their own opinions, and want to attend the classes they're paying for?
There is no better example of this majority than a young woman and a young man who spoke up at a Town Hall meeting that was held with Chancellor Katehi and other administrators from UC Davis.  As the woman so eloquently stated:

"My concern is what the events of the last week have been doing to the quality of our education. I know that myself personally I've already had two days worth of classes canceled by the professors, I expect to have more classes canceled on Monday with the general strike and I don't think I'm alone in this.  As was just stated, we have midterms coming up, we have finals coming up, and it's both ironic and sad that one of the initial starting points of this movement was to defend the right to education by not making it a classist place, and I do feel as though within the last week we have had some of those rights taken away from us.  Not only are we not able to attend class because of noise, but classes are actually being canceled, we don't have the option to go."

Back to the 1930s

Back to the 1930s

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Green Lantern on 11/29/11

There's an old saying popular among liberals and leftists: "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid." The aphorism attempts to account for the troubling resemblance of the main propaganda line for socialism -- there is a small, infinitely powerful, infinitely wealthy cabal at the center of society that controls the entire economy -- with the other propaganda line that there is a small, infinitely powerful, infinitely wealthy, Jewish cabal at the center of society controlling everything. According to this flippant dismissal, only a stupid person would distort the shining truths of socialism by muddying them with theories about race or religion.
Somehow it never occurs to liberals that the equation also runs the other way. Socialism is the anti-Semitism of the intelligentsia.
The political dialogue of the "1 percent versus the 99 percent" that currently consumes the liberal press is beginning to take the aura of the 1930s. That was the era, of course, when the world was divided into the "plutocrats" and "the masses," when the Monopoly board's depiction of "the rich" as a portly, tuxedo-and-top-hat-wearing breed apart was perceived as social reality. It was the 1930s, after all, that gave us Daddy Warbucks, that billionaire-who-could-do-anything, who was, let us not forget, a friend of President Franklin Roosevelt.
So why anyone would want to revive the politics of a "low, dishonest decade," as W.H. Auden described it, that led directly to the outbreak of World War II? It seems beyond comprehension. Nevertheless, thanks to the distorted scholarship of liberal scholars and the New--Dealification of the economy under President Barack Obama, here we are back in 1935.
The Occupy Wall Street crowd, as anyone who has studied 1930s history can see, is only one or two steps away from becoming the Brown Shirts of our era. The run-up to World War II was fought in the precincts of Berlin and other European capitals by political gangs that had abandoned electoral politics and decided to win their case "into the streets." By comparison, the Occupy-Whatever movement has so far been relatively benign. There is the usual agitprop of trying to provoke the police into overreaction so that the aggressors can celebrate themselves as "victims of the establishment who have unmasked the iron fist of the establishment," etc. etc. (Why is it that every movement that starts out denouncing billionaires ends up fighting $35,000-a-year cops from Queens?)
In any case, the Occupiers' form of extra-political violence isn't likely to reach true 1930s levels until it abandons the relative safety of urban parks and college campuses and goes out to Iowa, where they are promising to "Occupy the Iowa Republican Caucuses." At that point things are likely to get nasty. While the relatively tame urban police forces have learned their lessons from the 1960s on how to deal with protesters, inexperienced folks out in the Midwest are not likely to be as tolerant of political thuggery.
So how did we get to a point most sensible historians had assumed we left 80 years behind us? There are two answers: President Obama's politics and liberal scholarship.
The Occupiers have the germ of a case -- just as did the inhabitants of Hoovervilles and the Bonus Army that descended on Washington in 1932. (They had written promises of bonuses for their service during World War I that Congress had failed to honor.) The economy stinks. There are few jobs to be had. Yet except for James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, no news commentators have yet used the term "Obamaville" to describe the tent cities that have popped up around the country. Our President has managed to fashion the worst economy since the 1930s -- one that may soon eclipse the 1930s if Europe follows the present trend and goes under. Yet his only response has been to cartelize the economy in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt and then follow by emulating the worst demagogues of that era. Try this for example:

According to the tables which we have assembled, it is our estimate that 4 percent of the American people own 85 percent of the wealth of America and that over 70 of the American people don't own enough to pay the debts they owe. How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat. The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of the grub he ain't got no business with.

Is this Obama addressing a group of dewy-eyed freshmen in Colorado? No, it is Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, "The Kingfish," delivering his "Share the Wealth" address to an assembly of Congressional staffers in the Capitol Building in 1935. The Hill staffers applauded rapturously as Long went on to propose stripping John D. Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and the rest of the millionaires of all their wealth and redistributing it to the American people:

We say to America 125 million, none shall be too big, none shall be too poor… but… that America will become a land, sharing the fruits of the land, not for the favored few, not to satisfy greed but that all may live in the land in which the Lord has provided an abundance sufficient for the luxury and convenience of the people in general.

All that's missing is Obama's customary invocation of "folks."
But it isn't just the President's channeling of the demagogues of the 1930s that has created the poisonous mood. Liberal scholars have labored long and hard to bring about this moment. Two of the most noteworthy are Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, a pair of French Marxists who parachuted into Berkeley in the 1990s and without ever bothering to check out the neighborhood started dissecting income tax records trying to prove that America has as much inequality as France in the days of Louis XVI. All this has since been fought out in the academic journals, with Alan Reynolds standing toe-to-toe with Piketty and Saez, critiquing their work every step of the way. Suffice to say that P&S are the main source of the "1 percent" argument that has become the touchstone of Democratic politics.
Here's how P&S arrived at their conclusions:
1. First, they looked at individual tax returns, rather than households or families. Individual returns reflect every teenager who earned $3,000 at a summer job. Not taking account that people share income and support each other naturally skews things toward the lower end.
2. P&S took no account of government transfers, which now make up a huge portion of the income of poorer households. Welfare payments, SSI, food stamps, housing vouchers and Medicaid -- all are non-taxable and constitute a major source of income to most poor families.
3. A vast number of "the rich" who show up at the top end of the income scale are Subchapter S corporations, not individuals. The 1986 tax reform raised corporate taxes to 36 percent while lowering personal rates to 28 to 35 percent. This set off a stampede out of Schedule C corporate filings and into Subchapter S, where a corporation's earning can be shared by up to 100 individuals. Almost half the corporations in America now file "personal" income taxes. Banks making $10 million in revenues now file under Subchapter S. This makes it appear as if there are fabulously rich individuals roaming the land when in fact they are small and mid-sized corporations. By failing to take this into account, P&S decided there has been a huge and growing "inequality gap" since 1986.
All this is lost in the shuffle, however, as the campaign to scapegoat the "1 percent" becomes an obsession of the liberal obsession. The New York Times now runs a front-page story almost every day highlighting the comparison between "the 1 percent and the other 99." The one before Thanksgiving featured a lament of how the 99 percent must camp out in front of Targets and Wal-Mart "racing for bargains at ever-earlier hours while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home." Three days before that it was how "the gap between first class and coach" on international flights "has never been so wide."

Carriers… are offering private suites for first-class passengers, three-star meals and personal service once found only on corporate jets. They provide massages before takeoff, whisk passengers through special customs lanes and drive them in a private limousine right to the plane. Some have bars. One airline has installed showers onboard.
The amenities in the back of the cabin? Sparse.

That these luxury passengers are paying $15,000 a seat and provide more than half the revenues from each flight did not seem to make much difference.
Finally last Sunday the Times found an éminence grise in former Republican mayoral candidate Ron Lauder, who spearheaded the campaign to impose term limits on New York City politicians. Pictured in front if a $135 million painting in light that made him look like a German baron who supported the Nazis in 1933, Lauder was stigmatized as a manipulator "now worth $3.1 billion" who is making "shrewd use of the tax code [to achieve] deductions worth tens of millions of dollars in federal income taxes." Lauder's sin is that he has donated paintings from his personal collection to establish the Neue Galerie of Austrian and German art in Manhattan. When the New York Times starts pillorying art galleries, you know you're in a new era.
Still, all this hasn't been enough for Paul Krugman, the only certifiable lunatic ever to win a Nobel Prize. Last Friday Krugman informed readers that aiming at the 1 percent is all wrong. They should be raising their sites:

If anything… the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent's gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent -- the richest one-thousandth of the population.

Dismissing the objection that the .01 percent might include some "job creators" (Times style is now to put ironic quotation marks around "job creators"), Krugman goads his followers to action:

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about "job creators" and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

Seriously, what's the point of singling out the "0.1 percent" if not to hate them? But let's go Krugman one better. I'll bet it's not just the 0.1 percent or the 0.01 percent or the 0.0001 percent that's responsible for this country's ailing economy. I'll be there's one individual behind it all, one sinister billionaire who is manipulating the system, thwarting poor old President Obama efforts to bring prosperity to the people. I'll bet we even know his name. It's Goldstein, Emmanuel Goldstein.

Why Does The Media Hate The Police?

Why Does The Media Hate The Police?

via Big Journalism by Accuracy in Media on 11/28/11

From Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid:

Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News attacked the police at UC Davis during a recent broadcast. He said the demonstrators were just "sitting on a sidewalk peacefully protesting" when they were pepper-sprayed. Inviting members of his viewing audience to take the side of the protesters, he said, "Imagine those are your kids sitting on the sidewalk." In fact, some of those "kids" were non-student agitators. They were locked arm-in-arm and had refused reasonable and repeated requests to move. They were threatening the educational atmosphere on campus by erecting a tent city that was luring increasing numbers of criminal outsiders. They wanted a confrontation and got it. What's more, they got it on film, making sure they could portray the police in the worst possible light, without context or background to the confrontation that should have been avoided.
Doesn't Brian Williams have the ability to get facts on the ground before going public with sensational and wild allegations against the police?

Sitting in the comfort of his New York studio, Williams ignored the statement issued by Linda P.B. Katehi, the Chancellor of UC Davis, when she noted that "…on Thursday a group of protesters including UC Davis students and other non-UC Davis affiliated individuals established an encampment of about 25 tents on the Quad." Notice the reference to "non-UC Davis affiliated individuals," including outside agitators.

Katehi said, "The group was reminded that while the university provides an environment for students to participate in rallies and express their concerns and frustrations through different forums, university policy does not allow such encampments on university grounds."
So the radicals were there in violation of university policy, interfering with the rights of others. The head of a college or university clearly had a responsibility to act under those circumstances.

The chancellor went on:

"On Thursday, the group stayed overnight despite repeated reminders by university staff that their encampment violated university policies and they were requested to disperse. On Friday morning, the protestors were provided with a letter explaining university policies and reminding them of the opportunities the university provides for expression. Driven by our concern for the safety and health of the students involved in the protest, as well as other students on our campus, I made the decision not to allow encampments on the Quad during the weekend, when the general campus facilities are locked and the university staff is not widely available to provide support."

So the chancellor wanted to keep the campus safe on the weekend, for the benefit of the real students who were there. Was she expected to let more and more outsiders assemble on campus, to the detriment of the students paying to get an education?

She continued:

"During the early afternoon hours and because of the request to take down the tents, many students decided to dismantle their tents, a decision for which we are very thankful. However, a group of students and non-campus affiliates decided to stay. The university police then came to dismantle the encampment. The events of this intervention have been videotaped and widely distributed. As indicated in various videos, the police used pepper spray against the students who were blocking the way."

Clearly, Brian Williams of NBC News misled his viewers about what these "kids" really did. They flouted the law, interfering with the rights of others.
Veteran FBI agent Rick Hahn said he had a response to Williams' request for parents to judge the "students." He said:

"I want my child to obey the law. Therefore, if my child is ordered by police to clear an area, I expect my child to respect that and obey the law. If my child does not obey the law, then, I expect my child to be arrested. Why?  Because my child did not obey the law. And if my child resists arrest, I expect the police to forcibly affect the arrest. Why? Because that is their duty."

In order to make the point that the police were somehow going beyond their lawful duty and authority, Brian Williams said they were "methodically spraying students with debilitating law enforcement-grade thick pepper spray that's meant to cover like spray paint." Notice the use of the inflammatory language designed to incite public sentiment against the police, who were being encircled by the demonstrators as they tried to move the offenders.
As Rick Hahn points out, the use of pepper spray was designed to reduce problems caused by the physical relocation of the protesters. He says:

"If the police choose to forcibly effect the arrest not by merely physically engaging my child, an action that could lead to serious injury to both my child and the police officers involved, but rather by taking another step to diminish the physical ability of my child to resist arrest, say by dispersing pepper spray or tear gas, I accept that. After all, my child has broken the law by refusing to comply with a police order and has escalated the situation by resisting arrest. Is it therefore reasonable to hope that rather than engaging my child in physical combat, wrestling, punching or worse using billy clubs or truncheons, that the police disperse a chemical to make my child less resistant and, hence, less likely to be injured? My answer is yes, by all means it is reasonable."

Hahn, a veteran of the FBI's battles against domestic terrorists and communists, added, "Perhaps Brian Williams and much of his audience are too young to remember the beatings by fisticuffs and billy clubs that marked the various confrontations between police and demonstrators in the 1960s, but I remember well. Heads were beaten, arms were broken, and people were kicked, bitten and bloodied in physical contests of arrest and resist between police and demonstrators. It was ugly, and I'm sure that many of the demonstrators and police still carry the damage from those wounds to this day."

Some of those confrontations were engineered by members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose leaders had been to Cuba to learn tactics of confrontation and even guerrilla warfare. It is time to examine who and what is behind the "Occupy" movement and why billionaire George Soros is financing it.

By attacking the police for their rational and reasonable response to unlawful protests, media coverage of the kind demonstrated by Brian Williams makes it almost certain that there will be more escalation. Chancellor Katehi is already on the defensive, apparently thinking that pandering to the protesters will save her job.

The situation is dire: the campus police chief and two police officers were put on administrative leave, Chancellor Katehi was shouted down at a demonstration while trying to apologize, and the radicals have erected their tents again. The mobs are taking over UC Davis.
The losers will include real students there for a real education, unless they organize quickly to safeguard their rights. Katehi should take a strong stand in favor of law and order on campus, support the police and quickly reinstate the chief and the officers unfairly and hastily put on leave. That is the only way to restore public confidence in her running of the university.

Were Wall Street Banks Bailed Out?

Were Wall Street Banks Bailed Out?

via Power Line by John Hinderaker on 11/26/11

(John Hinderaker)
What kind of a question is that? Doesn't everyone know that the great bailout of the last decade was of "the big banks"? Isn't that why small groups of Occupiers are shivering in public parks and plazas across the country? Isn't the bailout of Wall Street the reason why millions of Americans have lost faith in both their government and private enterprise?
I used to think that revisionist history could be written only after lots of people who know better have died. Over the years, however, I have realized that this isn't true. It is common to see history rewritten before our eyes. Still, even in that context, the myth of the Wall Street bailout is remarkable. A very smart reader with decades of experience in finance writes:

The continuous noise from the left, the MSM and, of late, the Occupy Wall Street rabble and their enablers about "banks" being "bailed out" has now gone beyond normal bounds of exaggerated political rhetoric and verged into financial Luddism and demonization. In fact, the left and MSM have so successfully seized the dominant narrative that it is taken now as an immediately obvious fact that the "Wall Street banks" were "bailed out" by taxpayers.
But is it true? Were the banks really "bailed out"? The image suggested is that the U.S. government just "gave" money to large banks, no questions asked…and thereby rescued them, apparently by making them whole on losses incurred in a corrupt process.
But this picture of the TARP program in 2008-9 is completely false, especially compared to actual bailouts made to Democratic constituencies that DO conform to the "bank bailout" image: the auto industry quasi-nationalization and UAW payoff and the exercise of FNMA/FHLMC guarantees. The bank programs were nothing like the bailout of GM or Chrysler, which were actually given money both directly and indirectly, through special tax legislation creating a loophole worth about $45 billion in foregone taxes, most of which will never be recovered. And at the same time an irregular process robbed senior creditors–now THAT's a bailout!
But in what sense were "the banks" bailed out? They weren't in fact "given" any of our money. Indeed, most of the largest banks which were perfectly healthy were forced to take TARP funds so that there would be no stigma attached to the few large unhealthy banks…and the MANY unhealthy small community and regional banks.
Banks in a fractional reserve system are uniquely fragile. They don't actually "have" any of their "own" money, of course; they have mostly other people's money–deposits, CDs and wholesale funds (interbank loans and other debts) on a relatively small capital or equity base to fund their assets (loans). NO bank is or can be solvent if the public thinks it is not. That's why a run is a self fulfilling prophecy.
The Fed and Treasury were acting as lenders of last resort to the entire banking system which was experiencing a classic run. This is EXACTLY what they are supposed to do: offer short term liquidity facilities in an emergency–loans, not grants–collateralized by illiquid but valuable assets. Indeed, in a bit of irony–or double standards–agencies like the FDIC and the Federal Reserve System, collectively designed to prevent and ameliorate runs on the banking system, were formerly proclaimed as Progressive and New Deal triumphs precisely because they prevented harm not to "the banks" but to their creditors and borrowers and the economy as a whole.
Virtually all of loans made to the large "Wall Street banks" were repaid in short order–and profitably!–again, exactly what you would expect. In fact, the 30 largest institutions got about a quarter of the program amount and the balance went to hundreds of small, regional banks, notoriously unstable particularly from exposure to commercial real estate lending. They were the principal lenders to the real estate developers who were actually building all the bubble housing. In fact, it is exactly the SMALL banks, the homely, patriotic, local, "It's A Wonderful Life" community banks who are the scofflaws–the reckless lenders to real estate developers–who remain "bailed out", not "Wall Street."

From SIGTARP Report 10/31/2011:

A common misperception is that most of the 707 TARP banks have paid back TARP, when really only the largest banks have exited TARP. Smaller and medium size banks are not exiting TARP with the same speed as the larger banks, with approximately 400 still in TARP. Of these, nearly half are not paying their TARP dividend and in some cases, the banks are operating under an order by their regulator. Compared to larger banks, community banks may face an uphill battle to exit TARP. Community banks do not have the same access to capital as the larger banks. They are more ex­posed to distressed commercial real estate related assets and non-performing loans.

The "Wall Street banks" weren't "bailed out." Depositors, lenders and the entire financial system–one could say, the 99%–were bailed out. This includes, of course, those 99%-ers who successfully flipped houses with sub-prime financing (one third of sub-prime loans in California in '06 – '08) and those 99%-ers who sold at the top of the bubble at inflated prices and had enormous windfalls of capital gains.
So in what sense were "banks" "bailed out?" They weren't "given" anything–and certainly not by the 47% paying no income taxes! Large banks were forced to take liquidity loans by the lender of last resort to prevent a bank run, protecting the 99%…while their equity holders got mercilessly hammered in the market, essentially wiped out. Most "bankers" had huge amounts of their bonuses and net worth in options or in equity in the bank, respectively, which also became nearly worthless. Hundreds of thousands of "bankers" lost their jobs and will never work in finance again, most likely. This is a "bailout?"
Look closely at who REALLY got bailed out, defined as having government grants or equity infusions or long term unremitted TARP or government guarantees funded, together with anticipated permanent losses. The largest single holders of government funds remaining are:

It's all a convenient distraction from the government sponsored and engineered housing bubble, which was aided and abetted by a huge and pervasive real estate industrial complex in every Congressional district lavishly maintained by lobbying and funding from FNMA and FHLMC to keep the game going. After all, where did the loan proceeds GO? ANSWER: to developers, brokers, construction unions, contractors, landowners, lawyers, appraisers, servicers, local governments and boosters, real estate agents…AND homeowners. And house flippers, getting windfall gains.
That's where the wealth transfers from the bubble overwhelmingly ended up. The fees "Wall Street bankers" made (2% – 3%) and the net interest spread and returns expected by investors–but subject to losses–pale in comparison to the application of proceeds to the other beneficiaries. It is impossible for it to be otherwise. You might call them the 99%. Sure, the banks got fees but the 99% got the aggregate net principal from the loans. In the end there was, indeed, a wealth transfer, ultimately from taxpayers (and to a lesser extent from investor losses) paying for FNMA/FHLMC and other government agencies. But the wealth transfer was primarily TO the 99%, not to the "Wall Street banks".
The real story here, as the numbers show, is the disastrous role and huge bailout of FNMA/FHLMC–Friends of Bill (Clinton) and Friends of Barry O and Barney (Frank) and Chris (Dodd). FNMA/FHLMC is government directed industrial policy for the housing and real estate sectors. Banking and finance is always a derivative or "following" activity, led by the "real" economic sectors. Banks certainly accommodated the housing bubble and in the process kept it going, but they didn't create it. The government did, responding to and developing further long-standing New Deal/Great Society housing initiatives.
Of course, the banks large and small made as much money as they could from the process, as did everyone else, and did become reckless. They're hardly innocents in this sad tale, but they weren't "bailed out" in the commonly understood sense. And taxpayers will end up holding the bag for the government which directed allocation of capital to housing and to automobile worker unions, not to Wall Street.
But we shouldn't hold our collective breath for an Occupy FNMA/HUD, or Occupy GM, or Occupy Local Friendly Bank, or Occupy Barney any time soon. For the left and the MSM, the story line of the "Wall Street banks" is just too good to check.

The large banks ("Wall Street") are being demonized for accepting loans which some or most of them did not want, and which they repaid quickly with interest. I am not sure whether it has been publicly reported, but the CEO of one of the largest banks–one that recently was besieged by "Occupiers"–repeatedly refused to accept TARP money, and was finally told that he would not be permitted to leave the room until he signed a TARP agreement.