Jim Moran, Racist Pig

Michelle Malkin

Congressman Jim Moran is an old white Democrat from Virginia who thinks he can judge whether we minority conservatives are acting sufficiently non-white enough. Moran's an inveterate bully, a brawler, a crook and a bigot. And not one of his civility-preaching liberal colleagues has the courage to call him out.

Responding on cable news to GOP Rep. Allen West's blunt criticisms of President Obama this week, Moran derided the retired U.S. Army colonel, who is black, as "not representative of the African-American community." Moran then launched into the kind of tired race-traitor tirade I've heard from progressives of pallor for more than 20 years.

How dare we "people of color" stray from the left's ideological plantation? If we choose personal responsibility over entitlement, capitalism over statism or self-determination over identity politics, presumptuous white liberals appoint themselves spokespeople for our forefathers and deciders of our true destinies.

To wit: Lt. Col. West "just seems clueless now that he has climbed aboard ship," Moran fumed. "He's climbed this ladder of opportunity that was constructed by so many of his ancestors' sweat, sacrifice, blood, you know, they did everything they could for his generation to be successful. But now that he's climbed on board ship, instead of reaching down and steadying the ladder, he wants to push it off."

West, his father, his mother and his brother all dedicated their lives to military service; four consecutive generations of his family served in the U.S. armed forces. As a freshman congressman, West's message has been a compelling agenda of self-empowerment. For this, he is savaged by a House colleague as a racial saboteur?

But Moran was just warming up. Next, he contrasted conservative West with big-government savior Barack Obama, who he said acted in proper accordance with his ancestors "by reducing college tuition and training our workers, trying to get a decent job for everybody" and leaving a "constructive legacy."

Er, how's the savior's near double-digit unemployment, record food stamp enrollment, re-inflation of the housing and higher-education bubbles, and massive redistribution of wealth from the working class to the Wall Street bundler class working out for you?

Moran hailed Obama as "our Lion King" and compared his Republican detractors to the "hyenas in the background trying to cause trouble" for the White House. This bumbling chief of political correctness apparently is unaware that those hyenas in the Disney movie have been criticized for perpetuating negative stereotypes about blacks and Hispanics. Dog-whistle politics, anyone?

Do Moran's constituents in Virginia's 8th district support his incessant race-baiting? Last year, he accused Tea Party activists of racism for sweeping out entrenched Democrats in the November 2010 midterm elections. It "happened for the same reason the Civil War happened in the United States. It happened because the Southern states, the slaveholding states, didn't want to see a president who was opposed to slavery," he ranted to Arabic-language television network Alhurra. "(A) lot of people in the United States don't want to be governed by an African-American, particularly one who is liberal, who wants to spend money and who wants to reach out to include everyone in our society."

Yet, only two short years before, this hopelessly racist nation put Obama in the Oval Office with a landslide victory. Logic never was the demagogue's strong suit.

The aptly named Moran, an 11-term incumbent, continues to be rewarded by voters for his extravagant spending habits, self-dealing and diarrhea of the mouth. As I've reported previously:

-- While on the Alexandria (Va.) City Council, he was charged with casting a vote that helped a developer friend win a bid for a lucrative plot of public land. A special prosecutor concluded that Moran had violated the state's conflict-of-interest law. He sobbed as he pleaded no contest to a felony charge of vote-peddling. He received a year's probation for a reduced conflict-of-interest misdemeanor charge and was forced to resign.

-- In 1995, he had to be subdued by Capitol Hill police when he threw a punch at California Republican Rep. Randy Cunningham on the House floor. After the incident, Moran blamed "talk radio" for creating a hostile environment in Washington. That same year, he screamed "I'll break your nose" at Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton during a hearing.

-- In 2002, Moran revealed in financial disclosure statements that he accepted a $50,000 loan in January 2001 from an "old friend," billionaire America Online co-founder James Kimsey. The congressman claims to have paid the business mogul back at 15 percent interest over three months, and his spokesman emphasized the loan came with no accompanying quid pro quo.

-- Kimsey's gift came on the heels of Moran's disclosure that he had received another Big Business-tied loan: $25,000 from "old friend" Terry Lierman, a drug industry lobbyist representing Schering-Plough. After getting that unsecured loan at a lower-than-market interest rate, Moran co-sponsored a bill that would extend the patent on Schering-Plough's allergy medicine Claritin -- and prevent generic drug manufacturers from offering inexpensive alternatives.

Liberal busybodies are an annoyance. Liberal race-card abusers who lambaste patriotic minority conservatives to cover their own dirty deeds make my brown skin crawl.

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TSA agent accused of passenger theft

US police say a Transportation Security Administration agent stole $US5000 ($4690) in cash from a passenger's jacket as he was going through security at John F Kennedy International Airport, the latest in a string of thefts that has embarrassed the agency.

Alexandra Schmid took the cash from the jacket of a Bangladeshi passenger as it went along an X-ray conveyor belt about 8pm on Wednesday, said Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's police force.

"In viewing the surveillance video, we observed her removing the currency from the victim's jacket pocket," Della Fave said.
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The video showed Schmid wrapping the money in a plastic glove and taking it to a bathroom, he said.

The money hasn't been recovered, Della Fave said. Police are investigating whether Schmid gave it to another person in the bathroom.

The 31-year-old Schmid was arrested on a charge of grand larceny and suspended pending an investigation..

Schmid, who lived in Brooklyn, had worked for the TSA for four-and-a-half years, TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said.

"We do hold our officers to very high standards, and we have a zero tolerance policy for theft in the workplace," Farbstein said.

It's the latest in a series of recent theft allegations against TSA employees:

- Last month, an agent who worked searching checked luggage at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport was suspended after the owner of a stolen iPad used the tracking feature on the device to locate it at the agent's home. Police found seven other iPads there.

- Also in January, authorities charged an agent at Miami International Airport with swiping items and luggage and smuggling them out of the airport in a hidden pocket of his work jacket. He was arrested after one of the items, an iPad, was spotted for sale on Craigslist.

- Two other former TSA agents at JFK were sentenced on January 10 to six months in jail and five years' probation for stealing $US40,000 from a piece of luggage in January 2011. The agents, Coumar Persad and Davon Webb, had pleaded guilty to grand larceny, obstructing governmental administration and official misconduct.

- Last year, a TSA supervisor and one of his officers pleaded guilty in a scheme that lifted $US10,000 to $US30,000 from passengers' belongings at Newark Liberty International Airport. A federal judge sentenced the supervisor, Michael Arato, to two-and-a-half years in prison and his subordinate, Al Raimi, to six months of home confinement.

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The land of the regulated

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." He was probably correct, although it seems in today's increasingly intolerant society, a large number of people aren't too crazy about other people being entitled to opinions that are different from their own.

And maybe when Mr. Moynihan made that statement, facts were facts, and opinions were opinions, but the lines are kind of blurred today. Nowadays the difference between the two can be decided by a number of factors, often by which side of an issue a person is on. We are getting ready for an election this fall, and we are hearing a lot of claims, usually presented as facts, from all sides of the political spectrum.

In the past couple of weeks, I've read and heard stories claiming that our economy is getting better, and stories that our economy is getting worse. I've also heard that we have more jobs now than we had 3 years ago, along with a few stories claiming that we fewer jobs than we had 3 years ago. Often those stories involve explanations and qualifiers about the differences between then and now, and comparisons between private and public sector jobs.

It's not very often that one of those stories starts or ends with the phrase, "In our opinion".

Over in Indianapolis, our legislators have been spending a lot of time debating the so called "Right to Work" law. There certainly are a lot of different opinions on the law, with Republicans generally holding the opinion that it's a good law, Democrats holding the opinion that it's a bad law, and Libertarians holding the opinion that it's none of the governments business. I think that might be an example of the "opinions" Mr. Moynihan was speaking about.

But the Indiana Chamber of Commerce claimed personal income increased in Right to Work States, and the Economic Policy Institute claimed personal income decreased in Right to Work states. I'm pretty sure both of them considered their claim to be a fact. I'm also pretty sure one of them is mistaken.

I make my best effort not to be offended by other peoples' opinions, even though there are some real crazy ones out there. Admittedly, I would prefer that a lot of people keep some of the crazier ones to themselves, but as long as they don't try to force their opinions on me, I've always figured that we could work out a way to at least be civil to each other.

Unfortunately, mixing opinions and government doesn't usually work out that way. If a group of politicians and bureaucrats are of the opinion that businesses need to be subsidized with your tax dollars in order to improve the economy, you can pretty well bet that their opinion is going to become a law.

Over the years, our government has developed the opinion that it needs to be in control of every aspect of our lives. From how we distribute our income, to how we save for our retirement, to what we eat and drink. Who we marry, how big the windows are in our homes, even who cuts our hair.

Just to make a point, I've asked several people in the last few years to name 3 things that the government doesn't tax or regulate. Most people can't. And that's a fact.

SOURCE

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Reports Of Capitalism’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Klaus Schwab, a German academic and founder of the World Economic Forum, recently proclaimed the death of capitalism as we know it — a curious critique coming from the head of an organization whose motto finds “entrepreneurship is in the global public interest.”

“Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us,” Schwab declared at the most recent installment of his globalist gathering in Davois, Switzerland, adding that the world’s business and political leaders “have failed to learn the lessons from the financial crisis.”

The latter half of this observation is indisputable. The doctrine of chasing good money after bad has reached dangerous dimensions on both sides of the Atlantic — yet leaders continue to plow ahead with new deficit spending and fresh bailouts regardless.

But is refusing to acknowledge the increasingly-costly failure of this ever-escalating interventionism really an indictment of capitalism? It would be easy to condemn Schwab for conducting a botched autopsy on the capitalist economic model, but what he’s really done is more intellectually dishonest — he has misidentified the “victim.”

Capitalism is far from dead. As proof we need only examine the ongoing rise of the global black market — which employed 1.8 billion people (half of the world’s work force) and did $10 trillion worth of business in 2009. Within a decade, this “shadow economy” will employ two-thirds of the global work force and represent the largest economy on the planet.

More conventionally we ought to consider China — which has embraced free market reforms and seen its economy expand 16-fold over the last 30 years. In the last two decades this rising tide has lifted an estimated 440 million Chinese out of poverty.

Meanwhile in India — another country which has abandoned central planning — an estimated 230 million people have been lifted out of poverty over the last five years alone.

Not only is capitalism very much alive, as long as there is supply, demand and self-interest in the world it cannot be killed. But it can be severely constrained — as we are witnessing.

The fact that the European economy is unable to perpetually prop up an overextended banking system responsible for underwriting the unsustainable expansion of the continent’s sovereign governments is not an indictment of capitalism.

Instead it is an indictment of botched command economic planning and the unchecked expansion of the welfare state — which are conspiring to undermine the ability of the free market to create wealth.

Therein lies Schwab’s fundamental error — the economic system he’s attempting to pen an obituary for isn’t capitalism, its pseudo-socialism.

Rather than permitting the invisible hand of the marketplace to optimally apportion resources — thereby creating a naturally-ascending cycle of innovation, expansion, creative destruction and reinvention — sovereign leaders have chosen to put the doctrine of Keynesian intervention on steroids.

Rather than permitting the free flow of ideas, goods and services within the economy, these leaders create new taxes, new mandates and new activist bureaucracies — all while manipulating currencies and making speculative investments with public money.

On a more fundamental level these leaders have completely shredded the notion of equal opportunity — one of the basic building blocks of the capitalist system — and replaced it with a presumption of entitlement.

The promise of a “fair shake” has been replaced by the expectation of receiving one’s “fair share,” which of course is predicated on government’s desire to redistribute wealth evenly among the masses while simultaneously preserving a well-connected government-financial oligarchy.

So on the one hand we have corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and labor leaders manipulating the welfare state’s purse strings in an effort to expand the reach of the dependence economy.

On the other we have select corporations and global financial institutions eliminating their own risk through a variety of taxpayer-funded guarantees and bailout mechanisms — pocketing the winnings from good investments while passing the debt from bad investments onto the shoulders of already-overburdened taxpayers.

Again, that’s not capitalism, but pseudo-socialism — a system the world has already conclusively discredited.

If Schwab’s organization truly intends to foster entrepreneurship around the globe, then it must first correctly identify the forces that are working against it. Beyond that it must advance policies that seek to reinvigorate the free market as opposed to repressing it further.

SOURCE

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