Posted by Richard on March 15, 2014
Did you see the poster of a “bad boy” version of Sen. Ted Cruz? The Senator did, and responded with humor:
Saw this, but noticed an error. So I wanted to make one thing clear: I don’t smoke cigarettes http://t.co/3nn2740kkP pic.twitter.com/tPFNqg9vu8
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 15, 2014
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: humor, politics, ted cruz | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 15, 2014
I saw a brief story on the news tonight about demonstrations in Moscow both for and against Putin and Russian intervention in Ukraine. Not much detail. AFP had more information:
Around 50,000 people marched through central Moscow on Saturday in protest at Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, a day before the Crimean peninsula votes on switching to Kremlin rule.
Waving Ukrainian and Russian flags and adopting the chants of Ukraine’s popular uprising, prominent and ordinary Russians urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull troops back from ex-Soviet Ukraine.
Marchers carried placards reading “Putin, get out of Ukraine” and others comparing Kremlin’s decision to send troops to Crimea with the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland as Europe rushed headlong into World War II.
…
Members of anti-Kremlin punk Pussy Riot compared Russia’s invasion of Crimea that plunged the country into a Cold-War style confrontation with the West to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
“How can a referendum under the barrels of guns be legitimate and fair?” Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina asked during a rally after the march, a Russian flag in her hand.
The Blaze has the AP story and some of the pictures tweeted from the protest march. As for the pro-Putin counter-demonstration (emphasis added):
Not far away near the Kremlin, several thousand people dressed in matching red costumes marched in formation to show their support for Russian intervention in the region.
Sounds like a real spontaneous grass-roots demonstration, doesn’t it?
What’s the Russian word for “astroturf”?
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: protests, russia, ukraine | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Richard on March 15, 2014
In a Slate article this morning, Jeff Wise presented evidence suggesting that Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 may have been hijacked and flown to somewhere near the border of Kyrgyzstan and the Chinese province of Xingiang. He noted that:
A violent separatist Uyghur separatist [sic] movement is active in that area. Two weeks ago, eight knife-wielding Uyghur separatists attacked passengers at a train station in Xinjiang, killing 29 people. According to its manifest, 153 of the 227 passengers aboard MH370 are Chinese.
He failed to provide any information about the Uyghurs (a.k.a. Uighurs) beyond their separatism, so I’ll fill in the blank for you. At least some of them are radical Islamists.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: air travel, hijacking, jihad, malaysia | 2 Comments »
Posted by Richard on March 15, 2014
In a recent Cato Policy Report, Brian Domitrovic contrasted the growth of government in the past 15 years with the comparable period before that, and suggested that what this country needs is another tax revolt:
For about 15 years now, the federal government, in all its myriad activities, has been in major expansion mode. The Federal Reserve, the regulatory apparatus, the tax code, the police and surveillance machinery of the state — all of these extensions of the government have broadened their reach, power, and ambition in significant fashion since the late 1990s.
The basic metric that reflects all this is the level of federal spending. In 2013 the government of the United States spent 55 percent more money — in real, inflation-adjusted terms — than it did in 1999. Economic growth in that 14-year span has been 30 percent. …
…
The moment is apt, then, to reclaim a tradition of our recent history, a tradition that the big-government 21st century is striving to suppress. This is the great successful effort to slow Leviathan of a generation and a half ago — the effort that gave us the Ronald Reagan revolution of the 1980s.
By all means, read the whole thing. But this graph clearly illustrates one of the key points:
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: big government, economics, economy, reagan, tax cuts | Leave a Comment »
