As it comes from al Jazeera via the Guardian, I take this with a grain of salt…but it is something to be looked in to:

Armed westerners have been filmed on the front line with rebels near Misrata in the first apparent confirmation that foreign special forces are playing an active role in the Libyan conflict.

A group of six westerners are clearly visible in a report by al-Jazeera from Dafniya, described as the westernmost point of the rebel lines west of the town of Misrata. Five of them were armed and wearing sand-coloured clothes, peaked caps, and cotton Arab scarves…

If they aren’t American, then they are no direct concern of ours – but if they are American, then we get in to all sorts of legal issues stemming from the War Powers Act. The French and British do have plenty of good special forces to do this sort of thing, so it does no good to jump to conclusions…but if Obama has US troops on the ground in Libya after he’s ignored the time limit in the War Powers Act, then we’d have one heck of a problem. We’ll have to see where this leads.

From the Washington Times:

t’s no secret that members of Congress qualify as political insiders, but a new report strongly suggests that they also may be insiders when it comes to trading stocks.

An extensive study released Wednesday in the journal Business and Politics found that the investments of members of the House of Representatives outperformed those of the average investor by 55 basis points per month, or 6 percent annually, suggesting that lawmakers are taking advantage of inside information to fatten their stock portfolios…

I know you are just shocked, shocked to hear this news.

But does everyone, now, begin to understand? Can’t you see it? Can you see why there is such a powerful effort to preserve and expand Big Government? It is because those who are juiced in to it make bags of money off it. Sure, they’ll throw the regular folks a welfare bone, but that is just to keep them thinking that the purpose of Big Government is to help the people. Its not – the purpose, from start to finish and without exception, is to enrich those on the inside.

It is said that democracies perish when the people figure out they can vote the property of others in to their pockets. This is not exactly accurate – democracies perish when small minorities of people figure out how to bribe the majority in to ignoring the fact that the small minority is having a rake-off. Think of it – if we voted to have the Federal Reserve print up $3 trillion and divvy it up amongst the people, we would essentially be stealing from ourselves and each of us (ever man, woman and child) would have got $10,000. That would have been bad, but at least fair…but what happened was that the $3 trillion was that it was diced up among probably just a few million people…with the rest of us getting either nothing, or a few hundred a week in unemployment benefits. But all those who said “don’t do it” were accused of wanting to stop the unemployment benefits. It worked like a charm.

This bit of sharp practice in the stock market is just a tiny portion of the money being stolen by the Ruling Class. Honestly, it is probably the least destructive bit of theft they engage in. Vastly larger sums are taken by unionized government contractors; colleges and universities; Non-Government Organizations; people and corporations who donate heavily to politicians.

The cure for this is not a thicket of new laws or a new government organization – all that would do is bring more people in to the scam to steal. What needs to be done is to reduce the size of government. The fewer things government does, the fewer people government needs, the less they can steal. This does not have to mean cutting the amount of direct benefits to the American people – it just means that government should not be disbursing the benefits; should not be over regulating the market place; should not be continually tinkering with the tax code. If, for instance, you want to provide health care for the poor then your best bet is to ask the charity hospitals out there to get together and map out the amount of resources they need to provide basic and major medical care to the poor…and then just give them the money. You can rely on it that more poor people will get better care at far less cost than it is today…because there won’t be a bureaucrat and/or a crony capitalist having a rake off between taxpayer and beneficiary.

The solution is simple, though very difficult – anyone who thinks it over knows that the solution is to get the government out of the way. The hard part comes in where those who live off of government don’t want to go away…and that they have managed to convince millions that if the government doesn’t take care of them, they will die. But the trick can be done – and, as a matter of fact, it must be done…we’re bankrupt; all our money has been stolen and there’s simply none left. They say the thought you are to be hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully…hopefully the fact that we’re teetering on the edge of financial ruin will concentrate our minds.

Can a chick in leather who rides a bike become President? Time will tell…

UPDATE: From the comments over at Hot Air:

Something most people will not say is this. At this point Palin is not indebted to any special interests. She has made no deals for cash, no quid pro quo. all of her money more or less has come form small donors, she funded her 2010 campaign with small doners, she is funding this RV tour with small donations etc. She owes nothing to no special interest yet. She can do what she wants if she gets the nomination. And that more than anything is what scares the power brokers. they don’t have a leash ove rher because she doesn’t need them yet…

Precisely – and they are afraid of her. The entire Ruling Class – including the GOP part of it. They are frightened out of their wits that she – or someone like her – will get in to power and not give a hoot about the system.

Remember why they fought and what they died for:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. – Abraham Lincoln

Heck of a job, Barry. Of course, our liberals would say that if we’d only spent another three trillion it all would be better…

HAT TIP: Zero Hedge

From the AP:

There’s less money this summer for hotel rooms, surfboards and bathing suits. It’s all going into the gas tank.

High prices at the pump are putting a squeeze on the family budget as the traditional summer driving season begins. For every $10 the typical household earns before taxes, almost a full dollar now goes toward gas, a 40 percent bigger bite than normal.

Households spent an average of $369 on gas last month. In April 2009, they spent just $201. Families now spend more filling up than they spend on cars, clothes or recreation. Last year, they spent less on gasoline than each of those things…

The recent drop in gasoline prices will help on this, but I believe the reprieve is temporary. This is because the Federal Reserve will, in my view, likely do some sort of “quantitative easing” after the current round ends in June…just can’t afford, in the bankster view, a risk to Obama’s re-election effort. Stop the money printing and we slide back in to full-blown recession…so, something will be done to keep the “free” money flowing to the banks…and thus to commodities, like oil. The bottom line, though, is that people are having to spend more for the basics than they did before – and for some people the amount they spend for the necessities is coming out of a lower overall budget. This means that there is less money to spend on non-essentials…like vacations, new cars and a replacement washer/dryer.

The damage is in large measure already done – just as the damage of $4 a gallon gasoline in 2008 didn’t show up for several months, so will this current bit of damage not show up in the official statistics for a little while. Think of the Spring’s run up in gasoline prices as a sudden tax increase – and a tax increase which fell most heavily on the poor and middle class. The worst part of it is that this was generated by an effort to save the wealth of those who have the very most – and, yes, it was a bi-partisan effort, but it was massively advanced by liberals like Obama; the GOP, for the most part, seems to have learned its lesson. The Democrats haven’t – or, at least, they simply don’t care because their entire focus is on winning the White House in 2012, and if it takes policies which will bankrupt us in 2013, it is a price they are willing to have us pay.

I’m telling ya, boys and girls, the President is being held in ever greater contempt by the American people. Not only can we beat him, we can beat him very easily…if we nominate someone who is a stark contrast and who will get down in the trenches and fight. Its really a matter of winning with Cain/Palin/Santorum/Palenty/Etc or losing with a McCain retread…

HAT TIP: PJ Tatler

From The Aspen Times:

Aspen Mountain will reopen for skiing this weekend with a better base depth of snow on Memorial Day than it had on New Year’s Day.

The base depth has hovered around 70 inches at the mountaintop since the Aspen Skiing Co. announced last week it will extend the skiing season. The base was 38 inches on Jan. 1…

Meanwhile, the average high temperature for Las Vegas, NV on May 29th is 93 degrees – the forecast high for tomorrow is 67.

As is usual these days, one horrible thing tends to drive out another. We’ve had a pretty long string of disasters lately, natural and man-made, so it is easy to forget this hideous things which were going on just before the latest bout. George Clooney and John Prendergast over at the Washington Post remind us of what has been happening in Sudan:

…the list of dishonored agreements and massive human rights crimes in Sudan is shocking in scope. In Darfur, the Khartoum regime has cleared millions from their lands, allowing ethnic groups allied with the government to move into the deserted areas. In the oilfield areas of southern Sudan in the 1990s, the regime strategically killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of indigenous residents to facilitate Chinese oil exploitation. In the Nuba mountains during the late 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority of locals were forcibly displaced by Sudanese government attacks, and hundreds of thousands died.

The international community threatened real consequences during and after these incidents and after other targeted crimes against civilian populations. But the consequences never came…

Clooney and Prendergast are, of course, good liberals and thus don’t advocate – at least right now – any military action against the Sudan regime. To that I ask, why not? Both men clearly know what a bestial regime it is, both know that no peace agreement will be honored by the regime. So, why not demand a punitive expedition against the regime? Because we’re afraid – plain and simple, we’re just afraid to do it.

This is not, by the way, a liberal or conservative thing – we’re all afraid. Right down to the ground, we’re cowards – we got a yellow streak a mile wide running down our backs. People have been, are and will be butchered by the Sudanese and other such regimes and we’ll do nothing, or next to nothing, about it (Libya being a demonstration of “next to nothing”). But it isn’t physical cowardice that holds us back – after all, even if any one of us does suffer from that, we’ve clearly got the men and women who can do the job. No, our cowardice is moral – as we have become a less and less moral people we have become progressively less willing to do the right thing.

Oh, sure – here come the objections. From some conservatives we’ll get the “we can’t nation-build” nonsense, while from some liberals will come the “we can’t be an arrogant power” silliness. From others there will be the objection that we’ll have another Iraq or Afghanistan on our hands. Yadda, yadda, yadda…all designed to ensure that we don’t do what we know is right. Remember, people are being mass murdered – women and children as well as men (and the women often raped in to the bargain). Suppose some group settled itself upon your community and started butchering all the people and burning the town? What would you do? What, moreover, would you demand that your fellow citizens do to help you? You know darn well you’d want it stopped…and you’d fully expect your fellow Americans to rush to your aid. But it changes because the people being killed are far away and foreign?

We know darn well it doesn’t. “They are foreign” is just a different way of saying “I’m too craven to help, so I’ll just look away and pretend it isn’t happening”. Right is right – we are supposed to do what we can, when we can. God doesn’t expect us to solve all problems in the world…but any problem we can solve, we should solve. And, yes, we should always see first if there is a peaceful way out. But once we’ve tried and tried and tried and the evil people keep being evil, then it becomes not a matter of “should” we go to war, but only a matter of “can we?”. If we have sufficient forces then we should do it – invade and conquer, and then kill all those responsible for the butchery…and without being too particular about rules of evidence. In such an action we are teaching a lesson – we would be instructing barbarians on the rules of civilization and that there comes a time when we’ll have enough of their beastly business, and we’ll start killing them all.

This is what moral men and women do – or, at least, used to do. More than a century of moral erosion and now its not something which is done. And, after all, they’ll soon be starting up the preliminaries for next year’s American Idol and Celebrity Apprentice…we’ve got things to do and places to go. So, who cares if some poor girl in Sudan is going to be raped and murdered today as a part of official government policy?

Heard Rush on this very point on Friday morning as I was driving out to Pahrump – the Virginian neatly encapsulates it:

In Obama we have a candidate with a record that includes:

20% under/unemployment.

$4.00 – $5.00 gasoline.

Skyrocketing food prices.

Dropping home prices…

Skyrocketing deficits measured in trillions, not billions.

ObamaCare that most people hate.

Promises of higher taxes.

Medicare going bankrupt.

Social security going bankrupt…

I would add to that an emboldened Islamism, Russia and China treating us as if we didn’t matter in the world and alienated allies. We’ve also got in Obama, himself, a man who is becoming an increasingly negligible quantity in affairs…other than those still blinded by The One, people are increasingly contemptuous of Obama. I hear it just walking down the street and listening to people talk. For instance, lots of Presidents go and visit foreign lands…but there is anger out there that Obama was (badly) toasting the Queen while Americans were suffering unique and devastating loss in Joplin.

People are tuning him out – and I think that Democrat leaders (if not Obama, himself) realize this. Their talk of being delighted at the prospect of a Palin nomination is just so much bluster. They are worried that their man is exceptionally vulnerable – and they know they have to make the issue of 2012 anything but Obama…if Democrats run on Obama’s record, they’ll lose; and they know it. They need to run, instead, on a theory that whomever the GOP nominates is so bad that even four more years of Obama is better…a hard sell, indeed.