Tacky Hollywood halfwits

‘Modern’ fight over flight

Those peaceful leftist OWS elites.

Greenwich Village couple busted with cache of weapons, bombmaking explosives: sources

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,’’ sources told The Post yesterday.

People who know Greene say his political views are “extreme,” the sources said.

Morgan Gliedman

Susyn Schops Gliedman

Paul Gliedman

William Farrington

Morgan Gliedman, daughter of Realtor Susyn Schops Gliedman and prominent doctor Paul Gliedman, was busted at this building with her OWS boyfriend.

Do you think the radical left has any intention of giving up their guns?

A detective discovered a plastic container with seven grams of a white chemical powder called HMTD, which is so powerful, cops evacuated several nearby buildings.

Police also found a flare launcher, which is a commercial replica of a grenade launcher; a modified 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun; ammo; and nine high-capacity rifle magazines, the sources said.

Cops also allegedly uncovered papers about creating homemade booby traps, improvised submachine guns, and various handwritten notebooks containing chemical formulas.

The couple’s arrest Saturday was a sharp turn from their privileged backgrounds.

Gliedman, who grew up on Park Avenue, graduated from Dalton in 2002. Her dad, Dr. Paul Gliedman, is director of radiation oncology at Beth Israel Hospital, Brooklyn Division.

Paul Gliedman — who was included in New York magazine’s list of top doctors in 2011 — received his medical degree from Columbia University.

Morgan’s mother, Susyn Schops Gliedman, is a realtor with Prudential Douglas Elliman.

Greene attended Harvard as an undergraduate and did his graduate work at the university’s Kennedy School of Government.

He has five prior run-ins with the police, with the charges including, assault, and weapons possession, sources said.

Cops found the stash in the couple’s West Ninth Street home Saturday when they went there to look for Gliedman, 27, who was wanted for alleged credit-card theft.

More Guns, Less Crime

Some statistics.

First they came for my tank top...

Glenn Reynolds:

IT’S NO DUMBER THAN AN “ASSAULT WEAPON” BAN: Swaziland Outlaws “Rape-Provoking” Clothing. In both cases, you’re blaming inanimate objects instead of treating humans as moral agents.

Warren Buffet is immune from criticism.

Manassas News & Messenger prints final edition

Sunday - 12/30/2012, 11:16pm  ET

The Manassas News & Messenger printed its final edition on Dec. 30. (Kathy Stewart/WTOP Photo)

Kathy Stewart, wtop.com

WASHINGTON - The Manassas News & Messenger is no more. The paper printed its final edition after 143 years of covering the news in Prince William County, Manassas and Manassas Park Sunday.

The paper's parent company, the Warren Buffet-owned World Media Enterprises, decided to close the paper and its websiteInsideNoVa.com in November, saying the paper was losing money, was in a competitive news market, and "had a tough time finding the sense of community that a community newspaper needs to prosper."

World Media Enterprises purchased the paper, as well as several others, from Media General in June. The News & Messenger has been the only paper closed after the purchase so far.

All employees lost their jobs, and 72 other jobs have been cut in the company.

Two local weekly print newspapers were created within weeks of the announced closing to fill the void left by the News & Messenger.

Times Community Media will launch the Prince William Times on Jan. 9, 2013. Prince William Today will print its first edition on Jan. 10, 2013.

Northern Virginia Media Services, which owns Prince William Today, now owns the InsideNoVa website and Facebook page.

It's okay for Mr. Buffet to obey the rules of economics but don't you dare try.

The Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator

If you love reading the deep thoughts of Thomas Friedman, now you can generate them whenever you like with this Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator. Indistinguishable from the original.

Zero-Sum Doesn't Add Up

P.J. O'Rourke:

Given that hypocrisy is an important part of diplomacy, and diplomacy is necessary to foreign policy, allow me to congratulate you on winning a second term.

I wish I could also congratulate you on your conduct of international affairs. I do thank you for killing Osama bin Laden. It was a creditable action for which you deserve some of the credit you've been given. Of course the intelligence was gathered, and the mission was undertaken, by men and women who, although they answer to your command, answer to duty first. And it is difficult to imagine any president of the United States who, under the circumstances, wouldn't have ordered the strike against bin Laden. Although there is Jimmy Carter. Thank you for not being Jimmy Carter.

But even though it violates the insincere amity that creates a period of calm following national elections, no thank you for the following, and it is only a partial list:

• Telling the Taliban to play by the rules or you'll take your ball and go home;

• Leaving Iraq in a lurch (and in a hurry);

• Watching the EU go down the sink drain and into the Greece trap and wanting to take America along on the trip;

• Miscalculating human rights and strategic engagement in the Chinese arithmetic of your China policy;

• Being the personification of bad weather during the Arab Spring with your chilly response when you encountered its best aspects and your frozen inaction when you encountered its worst;

• Playing with Russian nesting dolls, opening hollow figurine after hollow figurine hoping to find one that doesn't look like Vladimir Putin;

• Sitting and doing nothing like a couch potato watching a made-for-TV movie as the Castro and Chávez zombies continue their rampage;

• Hugging the door on your date with Israel;

• Putting the raw meat of incentives in your pants pocket when you go to scold the pit bulls of Iran and North Korea;

But the worst thing that you've done internationally is what you've done domestically. You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney's argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we've got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take from the rich and give to the . . . Well, actually, you didn't mention the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of. So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy Sheriff.

But never mind. The evil of zero-sum thinking and redistributive politics has nothing to do with which things are taken or to whom those things are given or what the sum of zero things is supposed to be. The evil lies in denying people the right, the means, and, indeed, the duty to make more things.

Or maybe you just find it easier to pursue a political policy of sneaking in America's back door, swiping a laptop, going around to the front door, ringing the bell, and announcing, "Free computer equipment for all school children!"

However, domestic politics aren't my first concern here. The question is whether you want to convince the international community that zero-sum is the American premise and redistribution is the logical conclusion.

I would argue that the world doesn't need more encouragement to think in zero-sum terms or act in redistributive ways.

Western Europe has done such a good job redistributing its assets that the European Union now has a Spanish economy, a Swedish foreign policy, an Italian army, and Irish gigolos.

The rest here.

Tyranny rising

OBAMA SEIZING SOLE AUTHORITY FOR US DEFENSE

In an attempt to seize total control over national security and bypass congress, a frightening new step by the Obama Administration is coming into play. As noted in Friday’s Wall Street Journal in an op-ed by John Bolton and John Woo, a State Department advisory group that is run by former Secretary of Defense William Perry is advising that the U.S. and Russia both reduce nuclear weapons without a treaty, as a treaty would require ratification by Congress. This would allow Obama and his executive branch to unilaterally cut our nuclear weaponry and ignore the treaty clause of the Constitution.

As Bolton and Woo point out, the US has a greater global responsibility than Russia; Iran and North Korea, neither of which is far from Russian interests, can only be countered by U.S. military strength. In addition, they note that Russia is not a trustworthy partner in weapons reduction; it has violated many arms-control agreements, such as the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives.

Some of the inherent problems in the seizure by this executive branch of decision-making power is Barack Obama’s desire to deeply cut our nuclear forces. A joint decision with Russia would place long-term limits on our cache of arms, thus placing constraints on us catching up if Russia decides to go ahead and build and the blurring of the lines deliberately drawn by the Constitution’s Framers separating the executive and legislative branches power.

Obama has made no secret of his desire to dismantle our nuclear capacity; the New Start Treaty he championed in 2011 forced the U.S. to observe a ceiling of 700 strategic delivery vehicles and 1,550 strategic warheads, and this past March he stated his desire to cut our arsenal further:

“ … a step we have never taken before – reducing not only our strategic nuclear warheads but also tactical weapons and warheads in reserve.”

It is naïve to assume that Obama is simply blind to the results of his actions and trusts the world around him to act with generosity. There has been too much evidence of Russia’s support of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and Russia has cunningly avoided supporting sanctions on North Korea for its rocket launches; in December, Georgy Toloraya, Director of Korean Research at the Institute of Economics, simply said:

"In Russia we believe that resolutions must be observed and UN decisions must be implemented. We think that North Korea has the right for space explorations but only after all the issues linked with the UN sanctions banning rocket launches with the use of ballistic technologies are settled. It is necessary to divide two aspects - we support the discussion of the rocket launch issue by the UN Security Council but we don’t think that this must automatically mean tougher sanctions against Pyongyang.”

Obama knows all this. His step-by-step evisceration of the United States is not confined to its economic system but its national defense as well.

Someone else is tired of celebrities and their simple minded emotional outbursts

Demand A Plan - Demand Celebrities Go Fuck Themselves

Isn't that convenient? Now, if this were the old USSR we might think something nefarious was afoot

Hillary Clinton in hospital with blood clot after fall

Your tax dollars at work, or not.

Could you spend $500 on food at this bodega? A welfare recipient claimed to!

Most people run to the corner bodega for a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread, but some welfare recipients are plunking down $500 at a time in suspicious transactions, The Post has found.

Welfare users are only allowed to use their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards to buy food, yet they are rung up like fat cats in tiny stores in The Bronx and Brooklyn where the priciest item is usually an $8 pound of ham.

Earlier this year, an owner and a cashier at Glenwood Food Corp. in Canarsie, Brooklyn, were arrested for ringing up bogus transactions.

A federal sting found the bodega was recording phony purchases on EBT cards, handing customers about 70 percent of the amount in cash — and pocketing the rest. Goods were rarely exchanged in the scam, which defrauded taxpayers out of $985,000 in two years.

The Post found dozens of mysterious high-value “purchases” in low-end stores in a state database of 1 million EBT transactions.

Sheridan Mini Mart in Morrisania, The Bronx, rang up single sales of $543.40 and $473.50 on June 4, 2012, alone. That’s a lot of bread for a store where the most expensive item is an $11.99 jug of cooking oil.

At Tremont’s Palenque Supermarket Corp., ETB where the priciest product is an $18.99 gallon of olive oil, transactions reached as high as $400 last year.

Desi Grocery, a tiny East New York store now known as Anchor Grocery, racked up a $585 sale and several $400 sales through June 2012.

When the feds replaced paper food stamps, welfare recipients began receiving their benefits electronically on an EBT card, which operates like a debit card, to buy food at stores authorized by the US Department of Agriculture.

A single recipient gets $200 a month, and the head of a four-person household gets $668. Eligible individuals must make less than $14,532 annually, and the head of a family of four less than $29,976.

They swipe their cards, enter a PIN and the amount of the food purchase is deducted from their allowance and credited to the retailer.

Moe Mozit, a co-owner of Sheridan Mini Market, denies his store cooks up counterfeit sales.

He said he had no record of the $543 transaction The Post found in state documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request, and was shocked anyone could spend that much at his shop.

“This amount is crazy,” Mozit said. “Sometimes you get shoppers that spend $200, but once in a blue moon. This is absolutely a mistake.”

The owner of Palenque could not be reached for comment. A counterman said, “No, that doesn’t happen.”

Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation called the USDA’s anti-fraud procedures “a joke.”

“There’s virtually no oversight or effort from the USDA to stop this at all,” Rector said. “A store gets disqualified from the program and miraculously it’s back in business in the next two weeks with a new name on the front door.”

The USDA works with city and state investigators to weed out fraud by chasing down tips and flagging sizable transactions, a spokeswoman said.

The agency penalized 196 city stores in 2012 for phantom sales or selling ineligible items like booze and tobacco — and 137 were permanently disqualified.

“Due to increased oversight and improvements to program management . . . the fraud trafficking rate has fallen significantly over the last two decades,” from 4 cents on the dollar to 1 cent, said spokeswoman Regan Hopper.

The Courage to Do Nothing

Louis Woodhill

As a parent with only one child, the massacre at the Sandy Hook elementary school was so horrific that I couldn’t even make myself follow the story.  But the incident raises significant-enough questions of policy that I feel that it is worth applying unconventional logic to the aftermath.

Here is what America must have the wisdom and courage to do about the Sandy Hook incident: nothing—nothing at all.

It is a progressive fantasy that the world can be made perfect if only we pass enough laws and hire enough bureaucrats.  It can’t be.  Laws can only impact the conduct of the law-abiding.  And, sane, law-abiding citizens don’t commit mass murder.

Chicago has draconian gun laws, while in Houston, any citizen with no criminal record can get a permit to carry a concealed weapon out on the street.  And, the murder rate in Chicago is 29% higher than it is in Houston.

Chicago’s strict gun control laws have had no impact on gun murders in Chicago, because the killings are being done by criminals, who don’t obey laws.

But wait a minute!  The idea of a suicidal madman walking into a school and shooting little children dead is absolutely terrifying.

Yes, exactly.

Although Adam Lanza did not yell “Allah Akbar!” as he pulled the trigger, he might as well have.  His act was a terrorist attack.  What he did was no different than hijacking an airliner and flying it into a building filled with innocent people.  His intended victims died, he died, and his act attracted a lot of media attention.

Yes, Lanza was serving a cause that existed only in his demented mind, but were the young men that perpetrated 9/11 any less insane?  What difference does it make whether homicidal/suicidal insanity is caused by religious fanaticism or by a virus that attacks the brain?

In his 1957 science fiction novel, Wasp, author Eric Frank Russell explained the essence of terrorism, with the following analogy.

Of itself, a wasp can be little more than an annoyance to a (non-allergic) human being.  The average person outweighs a wasp by a factor of 1.4 million.

However, occasionally, a wasp will fly in through the window of a speeding car, and the end result will be the death of everyone in the vehicle.  Can a single wasp kill four or five adult human beings?  No, but a human driver’s panicky reaction to a wasp can cause their deaths.

The goal of a terrorist is to provoke his target into taking defensive measures that do more damage than the terrorist is capable of inflicting on his own.

Was forcing airline passengers to perform self-service strip searches in perpetuity a logical response to 9/11?  No.  Simply reinforcing the cockpit doors of airliners and arming the pilots would have been sufficient to ensure that what happened on September 11, 2001 could never happen again.  By inflicting TSA on ourselves, we made terrorism work.

Is assigning armed guards to defend every school in the country (as suggested by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre) a logical response to the Sandy Hook incident?  No.  All it would do would be to make Adam Lanza’s form of terrorism work.   Posting guards would be hugely expensive, and it would merely make a guard the first target for the next Adam Lanza.

Despite his nutty recommendation, Wayne LaPierre is not the problem.  The NRA is not the problem.  The threat to American society regarding Sandy Hook comes not from the political right, but from the political left.

Progressives are now seeking to exploit the Sandy Hook tragedy to further their long-standing agenda of disarming the American people.  Their first target will be high capacity magazines (e.g., clips that hold 25 rounds of ammunition), but their ultimate goal is to ban and confiscate all privately owned guns.

Would passing a ban on large bullet clips prevent the next Sandy Hook?  No.  There are already lots of such ammunition clips in circulation, and they are not hard to make.  A new law would not stop criminals and crazies that want such items from obtaining them.

The rest here.

We know what a country run by the Taliban is like

Pakistan militants kill at least 20 kidnapped troops

The Pakistani tribal police force operate in the semi-autonomous tribal region

Continue reading the main story

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Militants in Pakistan have killed at least 20 of the paramilitaries they seized from checkpoints near Peshawar, officials say.

Two men are said to have escaped. One is reportedly in a critical condition.

The troops, from the tribal police force, are reported to have been shot by their captors, who are thought to be from the Pakistani Taliban.

The men were seized following attacks on three checkpoints south of Peshawar, close to the border with Afghanistan.

About 200 armed militants had overrun two of the positions on Thursday, seizing the troops, taking weapons and setting fire to the buildings.

Two tribal police officers were killed in the attacks.

The Pakistani military launched an operation to recover the men and convened a meeting of local tribal elders.

A local government official, Naveed Akbar, said the bodies had been recovered about 4km (3 miles) from where the troops had been abducted.

It is the third attack on targets around Peshawar this month. Suicide bombers launched a raid on the city's airport two weeks ago, killing four people.

Last Saturday a senior politician of the Awami National Party was killed in an attack on a political rally. Seven others died in the blast.

'Peace talks'

On Friday the head of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, released a video in which he offered to open negotiations with Islamabad.

But he refused to lay down his weapons and demanded that Pakistan break ties with the United States before talks could start.

The Pakistani Taliban operates mainly from within the semi-autonomous tribal region along the border with Afghanistan.

The Pakistani government says more than 35,000 people have been killed in attacks blamed on Islamic militants since the attacks of September 11.

It launched an offensive against the group in 2009 in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, since when attacks by the Pakistani Taliban have decreased.

Union thugs. Obama folks

Phila. police tie construction-site arson to union sabotage

The site where Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting is building a new meetinghouse was damaged by arsonists during Christmas week, and police are now "absolutely" sure the attack was the result of a dispute between members of a Philadelphia construction union and the project's nonunion contractor.

Although no suspects have been identified in the Dec. 21 incident, Lt. George McClay of Northwest Detectives said Friday that he was certain the small Quaker building on East Mermaid Lane was targeted because it is being built with nonunion labor.

"I absolutely think it is a union issue," McClay said.

If union members were involved, the attack would be the second violent incident in Philadelphia this year related to the use of nonunion construction workers. This spring, union protesters clashed with nonunion workers renovating the former Goldtex factory tower at 12th and Wood Streets for Post Bros., an apartment developer.

Unlike that high-profile development, the meetinghouse is a modest undertaking. The total cost for the building, which will include a work by the nationally recognized light artist James Turrell, is expected to run just over $6 million. Of that, about $3.5 million is being spent on construction.

Employees arriving for work Dec. 21 said they found the site in disarray. The cab of a large, mobile building crane had been completely burned. Vandals had also used the torch to shear off the steel bolts on nearly a dozen columns. Three others were hacked halfway through at the base, as if someone were trying to cut down a tree.Police nevertheless believe that it is unlikely that a random vandal carried out the attack on the Chestnut Hill site, where the steel outline of the future meetinghouse is visible. The vandals used an acetylene torch, which requires a skilled operator who must wear a special mask and gloves.

McClay said police had no leads. "There is not a whole lot to go on. There were no witnesses, no video," he said. The attack has been declared an arson.

Contractor Robert N. Reeves Jr. said he was convinced union members were involved.

"I don't think this was a spontaneous group of kids who did this," he said during a tour of the site Friday. "We're really talking about the bad behavior of union bullies."

He estimated that the cost of the damage could run over $500,000.

His company, Abington-based E. Allen Reeves, is one of many suburban firms that maintains an open shop, hiring both union and nonunion subcontractors. He said he had tangled with union members over his hiring practices.

There had been no organized picketing at this site, Reeves said. But several days before the attack, he said, representatives of several construction unions appeared at the site to discuss hiring their members. They were rebuffed, and afterward the representative from the ironworkers union "basically said to the superintendent that 'he would do what he had to do,' " according to Reeves.

Ed Sweeney, business manager for the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers, could not be reached for comment Friday. He told the Philadelphia Daily News last week that he had not heard about the arson.

"I was up there last week and said hello to the guy, and asked if he wanted to hire any ironworkers, and he didn't even talk to me," Sweeney said.

The project is believed to be the first new Quaker meetinghouse in Philadelphia in more than a half- century. A statement by Chestnut Hill Friends said that the project was insured and that the damages were likely to be covered.

Jesse Jackson has spent his life deflecting reality

SCATTERED SHOWER OF JOURNALISM? CNN CONFRONTS JESSE JACKSON OVER CHICAGO’S HIGH GUN VIOLENCE DESPITE DRACONIAN GUN LAWS

Longtime listeners of Glenn Beck know the radio host has a recurring bit he does when the mainstream media — seemingly out of nowhere — performs a tough interview or asks tough questions. He calls it “scattered showers of journalism.” And it was pouring on the CNN set on Friday.

During a segment on Chicago reportedly hitting the sad milestone of its 500th homicide in 2012 (there is now a discrepancy), the Rev. Jesse Jackson was asked to explain how gun violence in Chicago can be so high despite the Draconian gun laws. Additionally, the host pointed out that if such gun laws were enacted on a larger scale, couldn’t we expect a similar rise in violence in other big cities?

Jackson squirmed, and even oddly tried to blame gun ranges for the massacre: “You know, I think about Newtown, for example, they have three or four gun ranges. Now, there are no gun ranges in Chicago.  [They] have almost no unemployment. … Newtown is so different than the complexity of the urban crisis.”

But the host didn’t back down.

“Rev. Jackson, I’m going to make one more turn at this question, because the original question was, Chicago has some of the strictest and most tough gun laws in the country,” he said boldly. “If this level of gun laws doesn’t work in Chicago, and you still have the guns coming from outside the city in, and now you got 500 homicides this year, what is the argument to extending this nationally and to other cities?”

Jackson responded that “the guns are not coming from Chicago,” but the host noted that Chicago still isn’t working as a model for gun control considering 87 percent of the homicides were gun-related.

“Chicago is in a bubble as the manufacturer — we’re a target market for gun flow. And they exploit the poverty and the pain,” he said, before expanding the blame on “lack of education and lack of dreams.”

In other words, he seemed to admit that stopping violence isn’t really all about guns.

Watch the exchange below via Mediaite: