Be sure to scroll down; there were overnight and early morning posts.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:35 AM | Comments (194)
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An armed intruder in his 30s, breaking in at 5:22 in the morning, who also shot back at the elderly man defending himself, his wife and 13 year old grandson.

At about 5:20 a.m., the homeowner and his wife, also in her 80s, discovered the intruder entering their home through a back door. The homeowner, who had a gun, confronted and killed the burglar on the doorstep, police said. Cops said the intruder also fired his gun during the struggle.

"It's a good thing they had a gun, or they might be dead," said Curtis Thompson, who lives next door to the couple, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

He may run afoul of Chicago's law outlawing possesion of handguns, which is being challenged after the DC decision. An attorney named Joel Brodsky has already offered to defend him pro bono* if authorities pursue charges.

* I forgot that little detail, thanks RG.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:28 AM | Comments (99)
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Depressions aren't normal business cycles, they're caused by naive/misguided public policy.

"ItÂ’s frightening," said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. "The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly," he said.

The US authorities have an entirely different explanation for the failure of stimulus measures to gain full traction. They are opting instead for yet further doses of Keynesian spending, despite warnings from the IMF that the gross public debt of the US will reach 97pc of GDP next year and 110pc by 2015...

..."Fiscal policy does not work. The US has just tried the biggest fiscal experiment in history and it has failed. What matters is the quantity of money and in extremis that can be increased easily by quantititave easing. If the Fed doesnÂ’t act, a double-dip recession is a virtual certainty," he said.

Mr Congdon said the dominant voices in US policy-making - Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, as well as Mr Summers and Fed chair Ben Bernanke - are all Keynesians of different stripes who "despise traditional monetary theory and have a religious aversion to any mention of the quantity of money"...

...However, Mr Ashworth warned against a mechanical interpretation of money supply figures. "You could argue that M3 has been going down because people have been taking their money out of accounts to buy stocks, property and other assets," he said...

I suspect by "other assets", this Ashworth buffoon means things like guns, ammo, gold and MRE's.

The grave error all the Obama administration wonks made was in treating this recession/depression like previous ones where some Keynesian government largess DOES give things a kickstart. Keynes was not entirely wrong on that count, but even his writings suggest he'd have realized our current situation was atypical; not one that could be easily Bondo'd over by stock/naive "spending" prescriptions.

John f'ing Kerry thinks things are just dandy though and the government needs to just "sell" the shit sandwich harder to the public.

..."We've come back," he says of the nation, Wall Street, and the economy. "This is an amazing resurgence." ....the Democrats should change their communications strategy "to better sell what we've done."...

I think the Democrats have done a very fine job of selling what they've done.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:07 AM | Comments (140)
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Watch the video below to see what happens to a dog who got himself hung up on a wire fence. Watch the video to the end and get your "Awwww face" ready. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:36 AM | Comments (77)
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When your outgo exceeds your income sounded awfully hick, but plain and true, didn't it?

ROME (Dow Jones)--Italy is adopting EUR25 billion in austerity measures because public spending is "no longer sustainable," Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Wednesday at a press conference in Rome.

The expansion of "cradle-to-grave social protections" had triggered uncontrolled spending trends that went beyond serving true needs and now had to be reined in, he said.

His government approved the 2011-12 budget, which includes spending cuts worth that amount on Tuesday evening. The measures should reduce Italy's budget deficit to 2.7% of gross domestic product in 2012, as required by the European Union, Berlusconi said.

At some point you'd like to believe that general government spending (not just the Italian government, let's say, any government.. California, New Jersey, Boogerlump Mississippi) would adjust to the realities of lower top line revenues. Kinda like, oh I don't know, businesses, or families (economically pretty much the same thing) who have lost income and have had to adjust. In good times we tend to let it roll, in bad times we suck it in, that sort of thing.

Perhaps govt. leaders who must do arithmetic with numbers followed by six zeroes are capable of doing the same calculations as those of us who deal with only a zero or two.

You can move the decimal point to the left or right. The math is pretty much the same.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 07:33 PM | Comments (106)
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Good evening and happy Hump Day all.

Meet The Super Cute Baby Sloths!
Sure they're kinda slothful with some species barely moving more than a few feet during an entire day, but they sure are cute. These baby sloths are from the Aviaros del Caribe sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica which is the world's only sloth orphanage.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:03 PM | Comments (932)
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You've got to be pretty hard core to fight against the death penalty in the case of an eight-time serial strangler (seven time rapist, too).

Especially when the rapist-murderer himself doesn't want to fight his execution any further.

You've got to be really hardcore to bully the guy's lawyer into signing a motion for a stay of execution that the client didn't want but you wanted to sign.

Admitted. Guilty as sin.

So why this fight for a rapist-murderer's life?

Obama's nominee thought he was the "least culpable" of all death row inmates, because, he feels, a tendency towards sexual sadism as he had should be a mitigating factor, not merely against the death penalty, but conviction, too.

You know who else is motivated by sexual sadism? All other serial killers in history.

But, you know, we can't even convict him; because he wanted to rape and strangle women to death proves he suffered from sexual sadism syndrome (or whatever) and therefore he's innocent. Must be -- if you have a desire to do this therefore you're too sick to punish therefore, effectively, it's not against the law to strange and rape eight women to death.

To commit the crime is de facto proof of innocence of the crime, in this guy's understanding of the law. If you commit serial rape and murder, you must have some sexual sadism tendencies, and therefore, of course, you don't have the necessary competency to be convicted and certainly not executed.

Posted by: Ace at 03:20 PM | Comments (326)
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Long life, almost as long a career.

Larry King interviewed him at age 93, and, I'm not saying this to be funny, he doesn't look a day over 70. He does not look like any 93 year old I've ever seen; he's all there.

Posted by: Ace at 02:50 PM | Comments (64)
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More at Hot Air, including the interesting tidbit that this woman seems to be making more than she's demanding as a fair wage. (Assuming the right person was found, which seems likely.)

(I know Dave hit this, but here's video.)

Posted by: Ace at 02:18 PM | Comments (144)
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I'm going to link him this time because there's too much to just copy.

He's alleging these SMS texts establish that he really was dealing with this huge storm of disclosures so his heroic, integrity-scarred hand was forced.

They establish nothing except one political operative was asking him about this, and the AP was asking.

However this shakes out, I'm not going to let this scumbag attempt to pretend this is anything but a bought-and-paid-for political hit, or the vengenace of a jilted stalker.

That said, the texts get just up to the line of proving an affair -- in that Nikki Haley's campaign manager (Tim Pearson) doesn't dispute that an affair occurred when give the opportunity, but speaks in a way that's congruent a belief that one did. He doesn't say "hey let's keep this affair I know for a fact occurred a big secret," but he also doesn't say anything that would contradict that, either.

Then again, we know that Will Folks is a fan of selectively quoting emails, as he did in his domestic battery case. (See the end of that post.)

Also the AP reporter and political operative speak of it as if it were true, but that's not really surprising, as we already knew Sic Willy was either planting this false story or blubbering a why-did-she-dump-me story a year ago. So, the story originates with him, and those guys heard it, and now they repeat his story back to him, and he agrees.

Not complete proof, but you know what? I would start looking for another candidate, if I'm being honest.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:50 PM | Comments (373)
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