AK-47

News reports say the Austin shooter was carrying an AK-47 but others claim it was a MAK-90 like this one.

Obama’s faith

Here’s what Obama had to say about his faith just the other day:

“…the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead: being my brothers’ and sisters’ keeper…”

That struck Scott as a questionable interpretation of the Christian message, but let’s leave that aside for the moment. A comment by David Bugnon on Twitter reminded me that Obama actually has a brother, a half-brother anyway. He’s living in a shack in Kenya:

Seriously, why won’t the President do something for this guy? Is he afraid he’d be criticized for sending a few bucks to a family member? I don’t know, maybe he has done so under the radar. But he hadn’t, apparently, when this interview was done last year. So even assuming he’s doing something now, the whole time he was a Senator…nothing?

Just saying. If being his brother’s keeper is Obama’s idea of faith in action, he doesn’t seem to be doing that great a job.

Source

Illinois

Illinois’ nightmarish budget situation could get even scarier in the not-too-distant future… Amid the huge backlog of bills and unpaid pension obligations, the state also has borrowed more than $2.2 billion from the federal government to pay unemployment benefits to laid-off workers.

And now, the bill for that borrowing — an estimated $250 million in interest — is about to come due.

In the next few months, Illinois and other states will have to figure out how to repay the money to the feds, while also attempting to craft a plan to replenish their depleted unemployment insurance trust funds.

…”It really is the ticking time bomb,” says Mark Denzler, government relations chief for the Illinois Manufacturers Association, which represents large business interests in the Capitol.

Full story here

Insurgency

Mass political movements often begin with a single, striking event. The Insurgency began in the fall of 2008, when President Bush, Senator Obama, and Senator McCain appeared together to endorse the TARP bailout. At that moment the lights came on for many Americans. It was glaringly obvious that both political parties jointly operated the system, and the system existed to protect the well connected at the expense of everyone else. The public opposed the TARP bailouts; the banks got their money anyway. The Insurgency, long brewing, began.

The Insurgency is a movement of citizens directed against unsustainable government taxation and regulation, and spending, both of which benefit insiders rather than ordinary people. The target of the Insurgency is a leviathan in Washington, D.C. that will ruin us all if it is not dismantled.

The Insurgency is part of a long tradition of mass political movements in our history. It has the potential to make a fundamental change in American life—for the better.

More here

Sports trivia

A study on which states have the most former high school football players in the NFL has Louisiana ranked sixth, and first in the nation when ranked by the per-capita rate.

While California ranks first in the total amount of NFL players who went to high school in the state with 211, Louisiana’s total of 68 is a much higher percentage of its population. That per-capita rate is 1 in 65,720, followed by Mississippi (1 in 76,883) and Hawaii (1 in 80,769). California, on the other hand, is 1 in 175,163

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The Rich

“The rich keep getting richer because they do things that make them rich, the poor keep getting poorer for a similar reason.”

— Neil Bootrz

Flooding sewers

Every year, old sewers flooded by stormwater release more than 27 billion gallons of untreated sewage into the New York Harbor alone… An inadequate sewage treatment infrastructure jeopardizes the viability of current and future businesses, stymies economic growth and threatens the quality of life for New York State residents.

More here

Lies and truth

“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

— H. L. Mencken

Slaves

On the subject of the treatment of American slaves, your readers may be interested to know that during the Depression someone had the idea of sending people to the South to interview the last remaining blacks who had been slaves–all then in their 80s and 90s. Someone named George P. Rawick has compiled these narratives into a 19-volume collection called The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, which is published by Greenwood Press.

Several books have been based on these interviews, and a few years ago I read one called Before Freedom: 48 Oral Histories of Former North and South Carolina Slaves. It was edited by Belinda Hurmence, and published by Mentor (Penguin) in 1990. I recall that of these 48 interviews only two could be called hostile to former masters, slavery, or whites. Some were more or less neutral, but certainly the largest number expressed a positive attitude toward former owners and to slavery. Here are some excerpts…

Rest of the story

Voter Fraud

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) member Steve Caddle of Houston, Texas has been caught registering 23,207 fake voters in Harris County alone due to the hard detective work of Catherine Engelbrecht and her “True the Vote” project.

This is one of the best examples of what good citizen activism inspired by Tea Party principles can do for their community.

Catherine Engelbrecht was sick and tired of the vote fraud perpetrated by unions and Democrats and set out to expose it herself. Along with many friends who donated their time, computers, and sweat, they’ve uncovered thousands upon thousands of illegal Democrat “voters” in Texas.

More here