Will our legal attaches (usually FBI agents) be PNG’d on the assumption that we are acting to enforce OUR laws on THEIR soil? (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)

Will US servicefolk in transit around the world be arrested at X airport and tried for ‘crimes’ that were not committed on the host country’s soil, but in Iraq and Afghanistan — based on the precedent that we are now setting?  How many countries can you imagine where this could happen?  Even some countries in Europe would be candidates for this idea.

If we can try people in our civilian courts for crimes that were committed on another country’s soil, then other countries may decide that they can, too.

What would Hugo Chavez do with that idea?

Would Obama be strong enough to resist successfully in such an action?  (I think we know - he would always side with the prosecutors; especially if the protagonists are members of our military he loves so much).

With Obama prodigiously displaying his weakness on so many international stages, this could become the new international blood sport of third-tier nations.

Even if someone lent him a hand, he could only count to 25.

Even if he could blame the AMA in a situation where he could have easily asked a staffer to take a count, we really can’t blame him for not asking ‘who are they?’ when he was allegedly told that a bribe to the AMA would result in 27 conservative votes to spend over $200 billion ‘off budget’.

Schiff’s own Congressional web page had nothing on the event: schiff.house.gov (although the most recent entry in his blog does mention it).

So I googled ‘Schiff townhall’ and got my advance intel prep!  What great information is available - I love the www!  It’s amazing to me how the liberals publish theiur unsavory agenda in front of God and everybody.  It’s as if they think the only folks that will be reading their posts are ones with opinions like their own.  Ya think?

The very first 2 links returned by Google:

From the Democratic Underground web site:
Support healthcare reform - Adam Schiff town hall, Aug 11, Alhambra CA - Democratic Underground.

We must be sure we are not crowded out by those intending to disrupt the proceeding and that our voices are heard. Congressman Schiff was one of the President’s earliest supporters and committed to his Health Care Reform goals. By being in attendance we protect and support him in his efforts on our behalf.  To help us track numbers and make contact please rsvp for the event at mybarackobama.com. (emphasis mine)

Which links to the second article returned by Google: a related story at mybarakobama.com (”bring your ID”, etc)

Only residents of district 29 will be let inside. (BRING YOUR ID) HOWEVER, we need a lot of support outside the event from those of you who are not in 29. We expect a large overflow of people. We will have “myth buster” information sheets, Declaration of Support sheets, and we will have medical professionals and all of you answering what questions we can. We need a Truth Squad if you will! (emphasis mine)

Needless to say, I’m going to get there about 4:30 and take my pocket HD video cam…

First, to answer the question if there is a legal defense fund for Palin the answer is yes, and the official one appears to be at http://www.thealaskafundtrust.com organized on April 22 of this year.

Sarah’s official (SarahPAC), semi-official, and fan sites all seem to link to this site.

By googling ‘Palin Legal Defense Fund’ I discovered not only the fund web site itself but also news reports stating that the fund has already raised over $100,000 in one week.

Note that anybody can set up a trust anywhere and declare that the purpose of the trust is to pay Palin’s (or anybody else’s) legal fees. Or for any other purpose. But the purpose we are discussing is a legal de3fense fund for Palin and an official one does exist. The Alaska Fund Trust was organized and filed as a legal entity in the state of Alaska, curiously enough. Sarah Palin (not ‘the Governor of Alaska’) is explicitly named as a ‘Covered Individual’ who can benefit from the trust. Other ‘Covered Individuals’ may benefit from the trust, too, at the trustee’s discretion. No others are named in the original document however.

The sole trustee and settlor in the trust document is declared to be Kristan Cole who is a real estate broker in Wasilla. She appears to be a business and community leader in the area if you google her name. She appears to have done all the legal organization of the trust on her own (besides the attys and witnesses, notaries, etc. needed to make the trust instrument fully legal).

As I note above, anybody can set up a trust for any legal purpose and even if Palin wanted to, she could not prevent friends or even strangers from setting up a trust to raise funds for her benefit. It is currently, ‘somewhat’ of a free country, although we see that rapidly diminishing!

Examining the trust document available on the web site, I did not delve too deeply into it, but simply satisfied myself that Palin herself is not one of the trustees. She is not. There is only one trustee and that is Cole.

I’d also note at this point that unless Palin was foresighted enough to include such a provision in her agreement to retain legal the services that the State of Alaska cannot provide for her, her counsel probably has the option to accept payments on her behalf against her legal bills at their own option. I know I would be pleased to do so if I were representing her. They would then render her a credit on her next bill and her legal fee balance owing would be reduced accordingly. I would not be at all surprised if this turns out to be the eventual case for most of the firms representing her (there may be more than one, as there are so many complaints).

One very nice feature of the AFT web site is that the visitor is given the opportunity to compare the Alaska Fund Trust with the trusts creating the legal defense funds of Kerry, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Stevens, DeLay and Gephardt. According to the web site’s claim, no other legal defense fund compared has more restrictions on who can contribute, or how much, than AFT does, and the presented comparison does indeed seem to be accurate.

I highly recommend reading the list of restrictions on contributing to AFT. It is obviously intended to be a grassroots effort and is so structured.

The contribution limit is $150.00 and contributions are accepted ONLY from individuals, not companies, PACs, unions or other entities.

Why should we expect her to have to rely on a legal defense fund?
Because if she establishes a record of paying the lion’s share of the legal fees herself, then the liberal exploding heads will shout with glee and file even more trivial ethics complaints and eventually bankrupt her. Everybody else uses legal defense funds, and so should she.

Why isn’t the State of Alaska paying her legal bills?

Because that would produce even more ethics complaints against her. No sense in inviting more trouble. Politicians must defend themselves from most ethics complaints, and you can bet that the complaints actually filed are designed to be ones that the State of Alaska is legally prevented from defending her from.

After all, if you were Soros or one of his clever minions, would you not prefer to file ethics complaints where Alaska law says defendants cannot be defended with public funds? If you were the attorney filing such a complaint would you expect to get such work again if you chose a complaint that could be defended with public funds? Would you be considered worthy of your fee if you did not advise your liberal exploding head client that the proposed complaint could be defended with public monies before the complaint was actually filed?

C’mon folks, think! The other guys obviously are. I think those atty types call this due diligence.

Why does she need outside counsel?

Because defending against ethics charges is a process of law, and you need your own attorneys to investigate the facts, gather testimony, investigate the opposition, discover documents that relate to the defense, and refute documents that incline towards the opposition. You can’t use phone bank volunteers to do this, you must have attorneys to file answers in court for you.

As stated above, trying to get the State of Alaska to defend her would result in even more ethics complaints and would be a good example of a self-licking ice cream cone.

In a final google search to determine if there were any counterfeit sites claiming falsely to be the official Palin defense fund site, it did not discover any apparent imposters, but I did discover a report on the Huffington Post that an ethics complaint had been filed in Alaska against Gov. Sarah Palin that her lagal defense fund is in itself an ethics violation (it is not – if Clinton, Clinton, Rangel, Dodd, Kerry and all the others can have legal defense funds accepting $10,000 - $15,000 a pop from anyone including corporations, unions and so forth, then Sarah can have on accepting $150 from individuals only. Besides, Sarah could not have prevented organization of this trust even if she had wanted to) (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/27/palin-legal-fund-challeng_n_192044.html).

This complaint shows just how far the opposition will go to try to paralyze the Palin administration. I think she was wise to resign, whatever her later ambitions for service or privacy may be in the future.

Alaska can back to the enjoyable task of being Alaska now.

I think we would be very wise to contribute to her defense fund if we would like to see her in public life in the future.

Ron Robinson
(cross-posted from red state comments)

Did your precinct vote the ‘wrong way’ in the last election?  Look for trouble on the power grid in your neighborhood as a result.  Elections have consequences after all.

For those of us of the persuasion who see political manuevering behind ACORN funding, the recent IG firing, the DOJ dropping ’sure thing’ prosecutions of electioneering miscreants, political closings of profitable car dealerships and much much more discussed in these spaces, picture this scenario:

Your precinct just happens to vote to toss out your Democrat congressman in 2010.  A week later, your neighborhood is experiencing blackouts and brownouts, day in and day out.  The power company cannot explain the problems, but eventually blames the victims for ‘messing with their smart meters’.

OK, let’s walk through this carefully.  ACORN is already appropriated billions and billions more from our Treasury than the $800,000 they got from Obama’s campaign.  Americorps and other ‘Civilian National Defense Corps’ organizations that are ‘just as powerful, just as well funded as our military’ now has billions and billions to spend on ’social entrepreneurism’.

I’m suggesting that it’s not going to be a long reach for a few program managers to decide that they have the budget to engage in a little ’social entreneurism’ with ‘risk capital’ (your money) to see what positive outcomes can be obtained by hiring a few clever script kiddies (young, semi-literate semi-programmers) who can’t make a successful adjustment to college life.  Yeah, those guys.  Hire them to see what can be done on the internet to shut down right-wing web sites.  And adjust voting results electroncally.  Oh yeah, and manipulate the power grid.  After all, the enabling technology (or lack of it rather) is already there.  Why not explore it?

We have seen it far too many times already in this adminstration: give the government unprecendented control over something and it is immediately used to deliver political retribution to its perceived enemies.  Same with the proposed ’smart grid’ which already has $3 billion.

And this one is a slam dunk, technically.  You don’t even have to be a programmer anymore to be a successful hacker - especially as it would apply to hacking the power grid (see link above).

Time was when you had to be a programmers (or a semi-programmer capable of making a few mods to some existing code you downloaded).  But no more - in search of those ever elusive ‘bragging rights’, hackers now provide pre-compiled hack modules you can download from their web sites free.  Would you like that hack in Unix or Windows flavor?  Click here to download.

Quick and easy activity for a non-programmer social malcontent who is working for ACORN for a measly $1200 a month (after all, he is still living with Mom).

Grassroots ingenuity and creativity has always been the amazing miracle of our political system.

On the conservative side, we usually see it in new ways to create wealth through offering the maretplace amazing new goods and services.

On the liberal side, we see it manifest in social entrepreneurism where our public treasury provides risk capital for additional creative and stimulating ideas that will guarantee political control.

Of course, this is all after the offshore power grid attack.  And after you replaced your air conditioner because the smart grid reduced power to your household after noting that you were using too much pwer during a peak period.

I’d say more at this point, but I’m having to work on getting Norton Security installed on my smart electric meter.

Politico has the full story (H/T Hotair.com) Sarah Palin in, then out, back in -and now again out of fundraising dinner.

It’s all well and good that Sessions reasonably wants to honor Gingrich for the hard work he has put in over the years.  But the Republican party, in this season, shouldn’t be entirely about honoring vigorous party luminaries whose most productive time for the party is behind them.  The Republican party, if they wish to represent Conservatives in the next couple of elections, should be putting forth every popular personality who can advance the conservative cause on behalf of the party.  That means at the very least avoiding offending Sarah and her supporters.

Of course, we all realize that Sarah’s honesty, integrity, and straightforwardness interferes severly with the ‘rebranding’ of the Republican party as the visionaries currently running the party conceive of how the party must position itself toward the center - except the ’senter’ has been moving left and the ‘Republican’ leaders intersted in ‘re-branding’ end up moving leftward of (and abandoning) the most vigorous and fruitful part of their base.

I think Sarah’s time will come, and I hope it is she who snatches the Republican nomination in 1012.

She should be able to quite easily murdalize Obama in 2012 and assume the White House.

That will mean she will also be the de facto head of the Republican party and she will begin appointing her people to the positions of power within the party apparatus.

Then we will begin to have a Republican party that we can respect again.

In any event, Obama obviously believes that national governments can either generate or produce wealth when, as Smith goes on to tell us in his book, they cannot.

You see nations, as entities per se, do not and cannot produce wealth.  Nations acquire or accumulate wealth by spoiling on the successful economic activity of their residents and citizens.  It’s a symbiotic and parasitic relationship.  If the host (the population of the nation) prospsers then so does the parasite (the government of the nation).  If the host suffers, then so does the parasite.  The host that the USA nation spoils upon is suffering and is about to suffer much, much worse.

It is, indeed, just as if Obama were killing the goose that has laid so many golden eggs to make us the richest nation in history.  It’s as if he intends to cut the goose open to get all the golden eggs inside at once.

Although it’s probably not true for the last 2 or 3 generations, almost every schoolchild 40 years ago could have told you a little bit about Adam Smith and his ‘invisible hand’ that magically compels any product or service to eventually settle at it’s true price through market mechanisms.  As communists and socialists have historically learned to their sorrow, market distortions and displacements can be introduced and temporary advantages gained, but the market, even in command economies, will eventually force almost every market distortion to settle at it’s true value to the marketplace, even if it takes a black market to do it. 

Command economies have historically dealt with this using a measure called tyranny.

That ‘invisible hand’ is about to smack Obama and the US economy really hard.  The mechanism, of course, is escalating debt and monetary destruction.  The result will be misery and suffering for millions of the US population.

Signals are already coming from the bond markets and our efforts at quantitative easing.  Neither are working and the market is seeking solutions (safer havens for excess capital).  Obama’s treatment of the GM bondholders just made the situation much, much worse.  If he will enthusiastically give GM bondholders the shaft, what does he have planned for other bondholders, whatever their flavor?

We (our Treasury) are seeing our bond sales undersubscribed (we are not able to borrow enough of the newand huge amounts of money at reasonable interest rates on the bond markets).  In order to try to stimulate demand (attempting to create a ’shortage’ and thus higher demand) for our bonds and lower the interest we must pay for this borrowing, the treasury has been ‘buying’ our own bonds.  Except, of course, when the treasury is ‘buying’ it’s own debt (bonds) it doesn’t really have to pay for them.  Nor does it really have to ‘pay them back’ or redeem them.  The net effect is the creation of new money - ‘printing money’ if you will - but this ‘quantitative easing’ activity is much more efficient and creative than simply running the presses all night, every night, at full speed.  

It’s like taking a year’s US currency production from the presses and making it magically appear in an instant with a couple of simple computer transactions at the Treasury Department.  No paper and ink required - who would be so stupid as to waste time printing money?

The documentation of a 24% shortfall in expected IRS revenues in April (the month when our government expects the highest revenues) just adds to the pressure.  Borrow more.  At a higher interest rate, so carrying and servicing the debt is more expensive.  More debt on the debt.

As we borrow more, and interest rates rise from this excessive borrowing, we pay more and more of each month’s revenues just in interest.  Pretty soon, it will take all, or almost all our revenue just to service the debt.  With nothing left over for essential government services like police, fire, ports, roads, and defense.  Or the redistribution of wealth.

But of course, we will continue to print money and engage in the quantitative easing illustrated above to get the new funds to continue.  In historical terms, it’s always been called debasing the currency.  They tried it in Rome and it didn’t work.  They tried it in the Weimar Republic and it didn’t work.  

Plenty of other historical precedents obtain, and always the result has been disaster and misery for the governed.

It means, of course, more and more dollars chasing fewer and fewer goods and services through our economy which means inflation.  BIG  inflation on the scale we are discussing here.

This is bad enough, but it gets much, much worse.

So let’s consider for a moment those ‘fewer goods and services’ because this is where the squeeze really comes in.   The production of goods and services - all the thingsd you and I want and need to buy from bread to gasoline require capital to produce.  And capital is fleeing our shores.  Just google ‘offshore domicile’ and you will see the burgeoning industry growing around helping even the smallest company domicile itself offshore or provide safe investments for dollars that wish to flee US jurisdiction.  And foreign capital which used to rush to our shores is now vigorously avoiding us.

Obama wants ’social justice’ and ‘economic justice’ and wants to ‘redistribute the wealth’ but it must all be done in just the right way don’t y’see?  Cars must be green (and I’m not speaking of their color here).  We have seen how this government is going to stimulate our auto and our energy industries.   Every industry in the country is going to come under cap-and-trade and Obama will deliver on his promise to make energy prices skyrocket.  With Obama’s green industrial and economics policies, we are seeing unemployment soar during a recession (we would probably be emerging from the recession now if now for his policies) we are seeing our economy wither.

Add to that that our new ‘Smart Power’ is alienating our friends who are threatening trade wars and ignoring genuine security threats in Iran, North Korea, Israel and many other places, and you have a formula for global depression - with the US mostly to blame.

Obama thinks he can fool and command the market, but he will discover to his sorrow that he cannot.  While he is currently successful at commanding and fooling the mainstream media, that is not the same as fooling and commanding the global economy.  Many in the political corpus (the voters) are willing to allow Obama to take a swing at this foolishness, hoping that Obama’s success will mean ‘free money’ and ‘wealth’ for those who choose to be economically unproductive.

The actual result will be global depression, and an absence of the reliable rule of law, which will simply further delay the recovery after a serious period of diminished productivity and wealth creation.

Because of this, thank goodness, Obama will be a one-term president.  But the damage he will do to every global citizen will take much longer than 4 years to repair.

Shame.  Michelle links here for the actual numbers.

UC Profs making over a million dollars.

Highest paid CA State Workers.

If they are this careless with our money over salaries, where else are they careless with our money?

Or until the blockade sinks some N Koprean shipping… at which point they will come across 38N into S Korea.

Obama might be able to get their attention if he deploys the 82nd and the 101st to the DMZ.

Michelle Malkin » North Korea’s fireworks show continues: Missile launch number three.

There was an unattended registered voter list posted at the door to the polling place. I stopped and looked at the list to see which voter I would ‘be’ once I walked on in.

When I spoke the name I had decided to use, I was not asked for any ID or proof (or suggestion) of who I am. I signed a squiggle next to the name on the list, and was handed my ballot.

The place was pretty much deserted, only 1 person in line ahead of me. Voters were outnumbered by the workers present.

FYI, the name I picked from the list was my own; however it obviously did not need to be - I could have voted as ‘anyone’.