BBC tries to pin Boston bombings on conservatives!

What reading matter you have proves nothing.  I have a copy of the Communist manifesto.  Does that make me a Communist?  And the 9/11 "truthers" are mostly Democrats who believe that George Bush did it!  Hardly Right-wing!  And concern about drones and Guantanamo are also common Leftist themes.   And an article saying that Hitler had a point is these days much more likely to be Muslim than anything else

One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learnt.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories.  He also had reading material on mass killings.

Until now the Tsarnaev brothers were widely perceived as just self-styled radical jihadists.

Panorama has spent months speaking exclusively with friends of the bombers to try to understand the roots of their radicalisation.

The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were government conspiracies.

Another in his possession was about "the rape of our gun rights".

Reading material he had about white supremacy commented that "Hitler had a point".

Tamerlan Tsarnaev also had literature which explored what motivated mass killings and noted how the perpetrators murdered and maimed calmly.

There was also material about US drones killing civilians, and about the plight of those still imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

More HERE

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A Leftist chicken



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1%: Average Annual Economic Growth Under Obama

In the 21st century, during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. economy has not shown the ability to grow that it did in the last two decades of the 20th century, according to data released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

In fact, real average annual economic growth has been nearly cut in half so far this century compared to the last two decades of the last century; and specifically during President Obama’s time in office it has dropped to an average of just over 1 percent.

In the decade from 1981 to 1990, according to the BEA, average annual growth in real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 3.36 percent. In the decade from 1991 to 2000, average annual growth in real GDP was 3.45 percent. In the twenty years from 1981 to 2000, average annual growth in real GDP was 3.405 percent.

By contrast, in the decade from 2001 to 2010, average annual growth in real GDP was only 1.67 percent, and, so far, in the 21st century (from 2001 through 2012), average annual growth in real GDP has been only 1.775 percent.

During just the years that President Barack Obama has been in office (2009 through 2012), average annual growth in real GDP has been only 1.075 percent.

The 1.075 percent average annual growth in real GDP under Obama equals less than a third (31.57 percent) of the 3.405 percent average annual growth in real GDP the United States saw in the last two decades of the last century.

SOURCE

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Why Obamacare Is Bad Medicine

My good friend Mark Kot is the real Hamptons Doctor. He doesn’t make house calls because his Southampton Urgent Medical Care facility is where everyone goes for the best medical care in the Hamptons.

I asked him for his take on Obamacare. Yesterday he sent me the little ditty below, and I need to share it with you today.

He got it off the Internet. Which means it’s true. No, I’m not kidding. Well, at least this time I’m not kidding. This Internet ditty is true.

Before I share it with you, let me tell you why it is so true and so frightening…

Dr. Kot used to be an emergency room doctor at the local hospital, but he saw too many things there that weren’t in patients’ best interest. He saw long waits for people who needed immediate attention. He saw people getting billed huge amounts just because they had good insurance that would pay the tabs. He saw inefficiencies in the layers of bureaucracy that envelop hospitals. He saw a lot of things that needed changing, but he couldn’t change what he wasn’t able to control.

So in 2003, he went into private practice. He’s the only doctor in his stylish and beautifully appointed facility. His welcoming room – you just can’t call it a “waiting room” – is like a Hamptons house living room. He employs (as in created jobs, very good-paying jobs) 18 people at the year-round office.

No one waits more than a handful of minutes to get in. Everyone gets the best care for what they need and no “add-ons” or bill-padding, ever. Not that hospitals would ever do that (except for the ones that have been caught doing that).

They take some insurance, they have to. But most folks pay “out-of-pocket,” whether it’s the TV anchor paying by check, an area waitress paying with cash, or a poor-wee-bugger scraping along in life that Mark doesn’t charge.

What that does, Mark tells me, is make his office more efficient. He doesn’t have to wait long periods for reimbursements. He can manage his extensive payroll and other expenses more efficiently, which means he charges his patients less and he can pay his people more and run a better medical care facility.

That’s why his reputation and the facility’s reputation are renowned in the Hamptons.

Only there’s a problem.  Obamacare may put him out of business.

Why? He’s lectured me on what Obamacare will eventually create, and frankly I don’t understand all the nuances he’s explained, but he’s board certified and been a practicing doctor for 26 years. He knows his business.

So, rather than explain it all to me again, he sent me this little ditty.

Obamacare is going to screw up the already screwed-up American medical care industry because:

"We’re being “gifted” with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don’t, which purportedly covers at least ten million more people, without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, who have recently demonstrated their objective and professional integrity, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that didn’t read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a President who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we’ll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Post Office all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke!!!!!  What the hell could possibly go wrong?"

It’s not that the local hospital isn’t a good facility; it’s just that no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. And the insurance companies want it that way. Eventually they will raise premiums to pay for all the care that people are going to get, because everyone has to pay for the whole scheme.

And as far as creating good full-time jobs goes, you can count that out. Part-time help will be cheaper for employers who can’t afford the added costs they’ll have to pay. I’ve already heard anecdotes of workers who are getting their hours slashed in anticipation of the new laws taking effect.

There’s a lot wrong with Obamacare. There’s a lot wrong with the way it was shoved down our throats.

We’re being told it might taste bad going down, but it’s going to help us.

That’s not true. It’s just bad medicine.

SOURCE

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Fish Don’t Know They’re Wet

By  Mark Krikorian

The Post story on its sale to Jeff Bezos notes toward the end that the owner of Amazon “has given little indication of his ideological leanings over the years.” It then goes on to say that “he and his wife have regularly donated to the campaign of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash)” and that he is in “the top ranks of financial backers of gay rights in the country.” I think that gives a pretty clear indication of his ideological leanings. His leftism is no surprise, given the political inclinations of our elites, but it’s hilarious that the reporter, Paul Farhi, and his editors could list those data points and then not draw the obvious conclusion. I don’t think it was disingenuous — they just see liberalism as the natural state of thinking people, and not as any kind of ideological leaning. And that’s why, despite Bezos’s business acumen, the Post will likely continue down the path of clueless, parochial liberalism, and keep hemorrhaging readers.

SOURCE

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Obama's False History of Public Investment

Entrepreneurs built our roads, rails and canals far better than government did

For almost five years now, President Obama has been making the argument that government "investments" in infrastructure are crucial to economic recovery. "Now we used to have the best infrastructure in the world here in America," the president lamented in 2011. "So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads? And let Europe build the best highways? And have Singapore build a nicer airport?"

In his recent economic speeches in Illinois, Missouri, Florida and Tennessee, the president again made a pitch for government spending for transportation and "putting people back to work rebuilding America's infrastructure." Create the infrastructure, in other words, and the jobs will come.

History says it doesn't work like that. Henry Ford and dozens of other auto makers put a car in almost every garage decades before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. The success of the car created a demand for roads. The government didn't build highways, and then Ford decided to create the Model T. Instead, the highways came as a byproduct of the entrepreneurial genius of Ford and others.

Moreover, the makers of autos, tires and headlights began building roads privately long before any state or the federal government got involved. The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway for cars, pieced together from new and existing roads in 1913, was conceived and partly built by entrepreneurs—Henry Joy of Packard Motor Car Co., Frank Seiberling of Goodyear and Carl Fisher, a maker of headlights and founder of the Indy 500.

Railroads are another example of the infrastructure-follows-entrepreneurship rule. Before the 1860s, almost all railroads were privately financed and built. One exception was in Michigan, where the state tried to build two railroads but lost money doing so, and thus happily sold both to private owners in 1846. When the federal government decided to do infrastructure in the 1860s, and build the transcontinental railroads (or "intercontinental railroad," as Mr. Obama called it in 2011), the laying of track followed the huge and successful private investments in railroads.

In fact, when the government built the transcontinentals, they were politically corrupt and often—especially in the case of the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific—went broke. One cause of the failure: Track was laid ahead of settlements. Mr. Obama wants to do something similar with high-speed rail. The Great Northern Railroad, privately built by Canadian immigrant James J. Hill, was the only transcontinental to be consistently profitable. It was also the only transcontinental to receive no federal aid. In railroads, then, infrastructure not only followed the major capital investment, it was done better privately than by government.

Airplanes became a major industry and started carrying passengers by the early 1920s. Juan Trippe, the head of Pan American World Airways, began flying passengers overseas by the mid-1930s. During that period, nearly all airports were privately funded, beginning with the Huffman Prairie Flying Field, created by the Wright Brothers in Dayton, Ohio, in 1910. St. Louis and Tucson had privately built airports by 1919. Public airports did not appear in large numbers until military airfields were converted after World War II.

No matter where you look, similar stories come up. America's 19th-century canal-building mania is now largely forgotten, but it is the granddaddy of misguided infrastructure-spending tales. Steamboats, first perfected by Robert Fulton in 1807, chugged along on all major rivers before states began using funds to build canals and harbors. Congress tried to get the federal government involved by passing a massive canal and road-building bill in 1817, but President James Madison vetoed it. New York responded by building the Erie Canal—a relatively rare success story. Most state-supported canals lost money, and Pennsylvania in 1857 and Ohio in 1861 finally sold their canal systems to private owners.

In Ohio, when the canals were privatized, one newspaper editor wrote: "Everyone who observes must have learned that private enterprise will execute a work with profit, when a government would sink dollars by the thousand."

In all of these examples, building infrastructure was never the engine of growth, but rather a lagging indicator of growth that had already occurred in the private sector. And when the infrastructure was built, it was often best done privately, at least until the market grew so large as to demand a wider public role, as with the need for an interstate-highway system in the mid 1950s.

There is a lesson here for President Obama: Government "investment" in infrastructure is often wasteful and tends to support decaying or stagnant technologies. Let the entrepreneurs decide what infrastructure the country needs, and most of the time they will build it themselves.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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