[Posted By Jake]

An annual rite of spring, like Bob frolicking through the woods in celebration of Gaia the Earth Mother, is Steve and I reviewing the Eagles' draft. Basically, I'm a skeptic when it comes to Andy Reid's choices, but I'm happy to start off by saying, so far, this draft is not as bad as last year. Faint praise, I know, but even that was hard to spit out.

Fletcher Cox was the consensus best defensive lineman and the Eagles went up and got him. That's a good first round. I'm perfectly willing to overlook the fact that the last consensus d-lineman they went up and got was Broderick Bunkley. It can't happen twice...it can't happen twice...

At least we didn't have the geek squad of Joe Banner and Howie Roseman pulling their usual nonsense. No selections have been made so far that stroke their outsized egos, trying to prove how much smarter they are than everybody else. All the picks in the first, second and third rounds are players selected where their worth was generally indicated.

In the second round, linebacker Mychal Kendricks from California is a gamer. PAC-12 defensive player of the year, his 4.47 40 is the fastest time by a linebacker since 2007. Where this choice goes bad is when the Eagles try and tell us that this 5'11" defender is going to solve their problems covering other team's tight ends, who normally go 6'4" or better. That's just crazy. What the real story is that Kendricks is an insurance policy in case DeMeco Ryans doesn't fully return to form from his torn achilles injury, common to 70% of the cases.

The next second round pick is where the Eagles screwed the pooch. Their biggest problem is left tackle after Jason Peters' torn achilles injury (remember that 70% figure). They signed a free agent and re-signed a backup, but youth and talent to develop are needed at tackle. Sitting there was Mike Adams, a 6'7" 323 lb stud from Ohio State. He had fallen into the second round because he tested positive for marijuana at school and the combine. Perfect...his screw-up matched the Eagles' needs. Instead the Eagles traded back and the Steelers, a team who drafts pretty well, snatched him up. Now rather than keeping Michael Vick upright, Adams will keep Ben Roethlisberger from getting dirty, at least on the field. Nothing can keep Big Ben from getting dirty off the field.

The Eagles waited and said that their choice, Vincent Curry, a defensive end from Marshall, was the best athlete available. He's a good player who grew up as an Eagles fan, but they have two Pro Bowlers and a first round pick on the roster at defensive end. Curry is a luxury pick, and a team that missed the playoffs has to get impact players in the early rounds. The only way this pick makes sense is if the Eagles believe that Graham, their injured and unproven first round pick from two years ago, is a bust.

The quarterback in the third round is interesting. Good size and good arm, but not particularly mobile. They say he's a prototypical West Coast system qb, but generally those guys have good feet and move pretty well. A quarterback pick after the first round is always a longshot, so you still have to wonder why they didn't get offensive tackle help, the big red zone receiver they needed, a safety who hits, a kick returner, or a goal line running back? These are all things they need more than an extra defensive end and clipboard jockey.

So now we sit back today and listen how the Eagle geniuses struck gold in the sixth round. I'm hoping for the best, but history says the draft will not get this team to the Super Bowl.


Update: Nice fourth round pick in kick returner Brandon Boykin from Georgia. Also like their sixth round pick Brandon Washington, a guard from Miami. Seventh rounder is Bryce Brown, a running back who's been out of the game, with good size and speed. It's worth a flier this late in the draft to try to steal a talented, but troubled skill player. There's other checkered pasts in the Eagles' free agent signings, too.

When a law-abiding citizen brings a gun to a knife fight bad things stop happening. Thank you law-abiding citizen.

The American Prospect's Paul Waldman thinks Barack Obama is the epitome of "cool." Others disagree. So do I.

This is NOT cool.

The Democrats war to frighten women continues, with Sen. Robert Casey repeating the absurd claim that 20 percent of American women will be raped in their lifetime. In an OP-ED in today's Daily Times, Casey writes:

One in five: that’s how many women will be raped in their lifetime. One in six: that’s how many women will be victims of stalking in their lifetime. 1.3 million: that’s how many women were raped in 2009. Twenty-four people per minute are victims of sexual assault, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States, and women are disproportionately affected by these crimes.

Casey goes on to push the popular Democrat meme that on college campus sexual assault is rampant:

According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, young women age 20 to 24 also experience the highest rates of rape and sexual assault, followed by those 16 to 19.

This is quite simply ridiculous. As Heather MacDonald explains in this piece, which begins:

Imagine that there were a “terrible and alarming trend” of sexual violence on college campuses against female students. Imagine that 20 percent of college women were victims of rape or attempted rape — a rate of sexual assault astronomically higher than anything seen in America’s most violent cities (in Detroit, for example, there were 36.8 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2009, a rate of 0.037 percent). If 18-year-old girls were in fact walking into such a grotesque maelstrom of sexual violence when they first picked up their dormitory room key, parents and students alike would have demanded a radical restructuring of college life years ago. There would have been a huge surge in all-girls colleges to protect female students from these outrageous levels of sexual violence; those colleges that did still admit boys and girls together would have been forced to prove to worried parents that the boys they were admitting were not rapists — perhaps allowing parents to interview these aspiring monks before they were accepted. Just to be on the safe side, administrators would provide round-the-clock protection for their female students.

Instead, over the last decade or so, the proportion of female students in co-ed colleges has skyrocketed, so that there are now more girls than boys in most of the nation’s co-ed schools. Parents relentlessly push their daughters into the most prestigious schools they can get into; competition among female students to enroll in co-ed colleges has never been higher. None of those girls demand bodyguards as a condition of acceptance; instead, their parents feel fortunate to cough up tens of thousands of dollars a year to keep their daughters on campus, where they are free to boogie through as many drunken frat parties as they can before passing out from overinhalation of Kahlua and Crème.

Who sounds like they have a better handle on this issue more sensible? The hysterical senior senator from Pennsylvania or MacDonald, one of the nation's foremost experts on crime and policing?

But don't blame Bob Casey. He's running for reelection and he is, as I've been told by a number of political insiders, a bit of a dim bulb. Maybe he really believes this claptrap. (Yes, forget hard FBI crime statistics when you can rely on some agenda-driven, politically-motivated survey.) But its obvious, Democrat strategists are pushing the "women as victims" theme to the limit in this election year.

It's gotten to the point where the federal government is requiring universities to lower their standards in finding male students guilty of sexual misconduct on campus. KC Johnson, the professor who first exposed the incredibly bad investigation and ideological thinking that led to the Duke Men's Lacrosse members being falsely charged with a crime that never happened, writes about the U.S. Department of Education's new edict.

This is appalling and especially so, in a country that is supposed to cherish due process and the rights of the accused.

The Democrats are attempting to manufacture a crisis, where none exists. If they don't like the behavior of college students, their binge drinking and drunken hook-ups, they should move to outlaw coed education. Not criminalize the entire male college-age population.  

Upper Darby school officials say there is a lot of misinformation circulating through the community about the $4 million in program cuts in announced recently.

From the story comes this nugget:

“We’re fighting over 15 hours of instruction. The average elementary music, art, physical education and library teacher works 3.33 hours a day, yet, they are paid the full teacher salary as years of service dictate on a salary schedule with full benefits.”

Anybody see anything wrong with that picture?

There will be no third party investigation into the fight between Chester Upland school board member Wanda Mann and a district school teacher.

Good. Why waste the money. The police already investigated and cited Mann with a summery offense. The teacher is free to sue her personally and the district for her actions. No one will be shocked if she does.

A responsible adult would have apologized and resigned their position. But when it comes to the CUSD, there is a notable shortage of responsible adults.

The district will muddle on with or without Mann manning-up.  

According to Rolling Stone, Obama plans to make climate change a big issue during his reelection campaign.

If true (and not just a sop to Rolling Stone's liberal readers) the Romney campaign will love that. Just another example of the president taking his eye of the ball and swinging for tree-hugger vote, when he should have been focused on the economy. It will give Romney the chance to revisit Obama's corrupt support of Solyndra - and other failing green energy companies - with taxpayers dollars. Money that went to companies whose biggest investors were some of his biggest campaign contributors.

Obama's failure on the Keystone XL pipeline will be hung around his neck like a millstone. And so will the chilling words of the EPA bureaucrats whose strategy to "crucify" the oil and gas industry is straight out of days of the Roman empire.

Here's EPA official Al Armendariz explaining things to his colleagues:

“I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said:

“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean.  They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them.

“Then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”“It’s a deterrent factor,” Armendariz said, explaining that the EPA is following the Romans’ philosophy for subjugating conquered villages.

This is the sort of government and its workers over which Obama has been presiding and with which he has been in sympathy, if not flat-out directing.

The Romney campaign must be salivating to have this argument in order to point out the arrogance of a power-hungry government.

So, I'm willing to bet while the president may pay a little lip service to the supposedly dire threat climate change on the campaign trail, he won't waste any money on TV ads promising to do more about it if he's given another four years. It's loser. And the All This President's Men surely know it. If they don't. They're dumber than anyone gave them credit for.

Michele Malkin asks...

Who is Rashad Robinson? And why has his fringe, race-baiting organization been able to pressure several major corporations into abandoning a pro-limited-government legislative association — all for a few cheap social-justice brownie points?

Read this and find out.

Wait a minute? On the right, that's ME!

Obama bundler Jon Corzine may not be quite as bad as John Edwards, but he's close... And after his checkered past and multiple failures, he's still in the game.

Jonah Goldberg ruminates...

Police catch the woman who picked up $2300 - dropped by the guy in front of her at a convenience store - and bolted.

Sez UD's top cop:

"Obviously there is no moral character here and that's the sad thing when you look at society. You'd like to think that somebody drops money, you tap them on the shoulder, you dropped your money - here's your money, the guy probably would have given her a reward," Chitwood said.

Don't blame society. Society has laws against this kind of thing. Besides, I think most people would have returned the money. Tell me I wrong.

Anyway, ya' gotta love security cameras. The more the better.

When a foreign country's government operates on a bribe-for-license basis, what's a multi-national corporation to do?

Holman Jenkins  explains how Wal-Mart executives got in trouble in Mexico but ended up doing Mexican consumers a favor.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, the late Irish diplomat, once explained the alarming arithmetic of a certain kind of corruption for poor countries.

Take the agriculture minister who approves the import of $20 million in tractors his country can't use and that will rust in the fields. He does so in order to receive a $200,000 bribe from the tractor salesman. Had he simply been paid $200,000 to render an honest decision not to import the tractors, his country would have been $19.8 million better off.

Not to risk an angry letter or a caning, but such thinking has long led the benign despotism of Singapore to pay its officials six- and seven-figure salaries. It tamps down corruption.

Most poor countries with lots of officials find such an approach prohibitive. Their solution is to pay their officials almost nothing and expect them, down to the local traffic cop, to supplement their incomes with graft.

This is the world Wal-Mart and other American businesses sometimes face when they invest abroad, and occasionally when they invest in the U.S.

Read it all.

Spent the morning and afternoon going from Middletown to Chester, talking to voters and election workers about the new voter ID law.

There didn't seem to be any problems and both voters and election workers liked the new requirement.

Here's a taste of tomorrow's column:

Florence Hasson was on her way out of the Edgemont building at the Madison Senior Apartments in Chester when a younger woman on her way in called out to her.

"Don't forget to vote," said the younger woman, smiling.

"Oh, I won't," replied Hasson heartily. "You can be sure of that."

She was in her wheelchair and about to be hoisted up into a Community Transit van when I caught up with her.

I asked her if she had a photo ID.

"I got everything," she said.          

But she wasn't on her way to vote. She had a doctor's appointment. Later, she said, they'd come back and pick up a bunch of her fellow residents and take them over to the polls.

She has a state ID, she said. And when it comes to voting, "I never had a problem," she said. She didn't expect any today.

I asked her if any of her friends had concerns about the new Voter ID law? 

"No," she replied. Everybody's got everything they need. Then off she went to the doctor. 

Monique Jackson is the property manager at the senior community. She said she hasn't heard anyone raise a concern about not having a photo ID. She said the residence council has been pretty much on top of the issue. Everybody who wants to vote, she said, would be picked up and taken to the polls.

Evelyn Martinez, however, hadn't made up her mind yet whether she would vote. Her main problem being she wasn't sure if she was registered as a Republican or a Democrat.

"I've always been a Democrat in the past," she recalled. "But everything's changing so fast these days."

The one thing she was sure of is that she has a state photo ID.

UPDATE: Here's the rest.

David Brooks suggests a lesson from multi-millionaire Peter Thiel -  Don't be a competitor be an innovator.

His lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.

Tough to teach creativity. Especially tough for non-creative people in one of the most stultifying and retrograde systems in the free world: the U.S. public school system.

Our loss is their gain...

While US Northeast refineries such as ConocoPhillips’ (COP) Trainer as well as Sunoco’s (SUN) Girard Point and Marcus Hook are on the verge of shutting down if a buyer is not found, the historic Port Arthur refinery near Sabine Lake in East Texas is about to complete a massive expansion.

Could overly cumbersome environmental regulations in the Northeast have anything to do with this?

Deep in the woods of North Carolina... 

... if you listen closely you can actually hear the trees snickering.

Joe Sestak will not go quietly into that good night. My Sunday print column is up.

Mike Barone remembers something about the old economy that liberals have forgotten.

I don't know how many times I've seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement.

As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.

More evidence of the GOP's "War Against Women."

From USA Today: Women Lag in Life Expectancy Gains

Women's life spans in the USA are improving at a slower pace than men's and are shorter in many U.S. counties than they were 20 years ago, according to a report released Thursday. 

The trend is cause for alarm even though women are still expected to outlive men by four years, says the report by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a health research center at the University of Washington. The study is based on mortality data by age, sex and county from 1989 to 2009.

So, women are still outliving men but not by nearly as much as they should. This must be the handiwork of Dick Cheney.

Theodore Darymple on the collapse of civil society in Britain.

A few days ago at a crowded bus-stop in the city of Nottingham, a fat youth of about 13 started to throw food at a friend. Some of it nearly hit me and landed on the ground just beyond me, making a mess.

"Excuse me," I said to the youth, "could you pick that up?"

"Shut the f— up!" he snarled, with real hatred contorting his face.

Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, in England, come—obscenities. No one at the bus stop dared say, much less do, anything. For increasingly, the English are a people who know neither inner nor outer restraint. They turn to aggression, if not to violence, the moment they are thwarted, even in trifles. And those who are neither aggressive nor violent are by no means sure that the law will take their side in the event of a fracas. It is better, or easier, for them to pretend not to notice anything, even if it means living in constant fear.

Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that, according to a survey recently conducted by Lloyds Bank, a fifth of all people with assets of more than $640,000 are thinking of leaving the country. Personally I am surprised it is so few. Other surveys have shown that at least 50% of the population wants to leave, in the main to flee the other 50% of the population.

What's happening there is happening here... only a little more slowly, as Charles Murray has noticed.

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan notices too!

Upper Darby makes arrest in barber shop killing. That was quick. The suspect is claiming the shooting was an accident, not "ground standing." As predicted in my print column.

A. He just hit the Megabucks lottery for $180 million.
B. His wife just gave birth to twins.
C. He was just elected to his local school board.
D. He just found out that after murdering 77 people, mostly children, he might get a mere 21 years in prison.

Answer here.

State Rep. Ron "Muddy" Waters (Philly/Declo) took to the pages of the Daily Times to urge a repeal of Pa.'s Castle Doctrine and more gun control laws in response to the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin a thousand miles away.

Readers weren't buying. And neither was I. My print column is up.

Jay Leno: "President Obama released his tax returns. It turns out he made $900,000 less in 2011 than he did in 2010. You know what that means? Even Obama is doing worse under President Obama."

Yea! Earth Day's almost here.

Earth Day Network president Kathleen Rogers said the theme of Sunday's rally is "Mobilize the Earth." The organization is urging people worldwide to perform one billion "acts of green" and the event will feature a countdown to the goal, which organizers hope will be reached on Earth Day...

... "My favorite was a guy who broke up with his girlfriend because she wouldn't recycle, we counted that as an act of green," Rogers said. 

Was the guy's name Ira Einhorn?

Recently posted on Craigslist:

Did we hook up at the Megadeth/Motorhead concert? - w4m - 28 (Aragon Ballroom)

Me: Blue hair, silver tube top, fishnets, Knee high black biker boots.You: Red mohawk, black pentagram gauges, viper piercings.

I was grinding on you in the pit, then we went to the bathroom, and got (bleeped) up. You had a nice (body part) and I was wasted so I let [you] raw dog it in the stall. You were really good and you had to gag me so I would make too much noise.
Anyway I'm pregnant. It's yours. contact me if you want to be part of your child's life.

Sounds like a love match. And out pops... The Anti-Christ! What real man wouldn't want to be part of that?

 These guys look familiar.

Republicans hate women. Democrat adviser Hilary Rosen hates Mitt Romney's wife. President Obama thinks getting a rich woman into the Augusta National Golf Club is important... and his business.

My print column is up.

UPDATE:

That's the question John Lott has for Florida state's attorney Angela Corey.

The charges brought against George Zimmerman sure look like prosecutorial misconduct. The case as put forward by the prosecutor in the “affidavit of probable cause” is startlingly weak. As a former chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission, I have read a number of such affidavits, and cannot recall one lacking so much relevant information. The prosecutor has most likely deliberately overcharged, hoping to intimidate Zimmerman into agreeing to a plea bargain. If this case goes to trial, Zimmerman will almost definitely be found “not guilty” on the charge of second-degree murder.

But then maybe Lott, the author of "More Guns, Less Crime" has an axe to grind. But his research is backed up by Prof. Gary Kleck who, a number of years ago estimated that 2.5 million crimes a year are prevented by "defensive gun use," which can include just brandishing a firearm and discouraging a crime from being committed.

Gun crime remains a serious problem in the U.S. but mostly it's a localized problem. Gun control activists are seizing on the Trayvon Martin case to promote stricter gun control laws. If not for George Zimmerman being allowed to lawfully carry a gun, both men would probably be alive today. They are most likely right about that.

But then if the old man in the video below had been prevented from carrying a gun, Joyce Cordova probably not be alive today either.

(The audio starts at about the 14-second mark, so stay with it.)

Salon's Joan Walsh proclaims the arrest of George Zimmerman is win for "social justice." She quite apparently finds "social justice" far superior to the sort of "blind justice" we try to find in American courthouses.

If not for the Justice for Trayvon "movement," ginned up by the likes of Al Sharpton and a variety of other race hustlers - both black and white - George Zimmerman would never have been arrested, sez Joan. How she knows this, she doesn't say. But it could be true. It is hardly beyond that realm of possibility that a  prosecutor would put her finger in the air and figure out which way the wind was blowing.

This is something, Joan Walsh, thinks should be cheered. You have to wonder if back in the day, Ms. Walsh cheered on the allegations and lies against police and prosectors in New York made by Tawana Brawley and pimped by Rev. Sharpton as a "win for social justice."

In her writing about the Trayvon Martin, Walsh has shown a complete lack of concern for getting even the most basic facts of the of the case right.

As she wrote just two weeks ago:

A 17-year-old was shot to death, and no one was taken to a police station to be questioned about it. It then took police three days to locate the dead boy’s family... 

Wrong. As the video of a hand-cuffed George Zimmerman being brought into the Sanford police station that night, clearly proves.

And no, it did not take the police three days to locate the dead boy's family. When Trayvon didn't come home that night, his father filed a missing person's report the next day. Police drove to his house that day and notified him of his son's death.

But such falsehoods have been reported and re-reported by Walsh and her ilk of social-justice seekers. With no corrections and no apologies. Seeking social justice means never having to say you're sorry.

Walsh finds the right-wing reaction to the incompetence and bias of the left-wing media covering this story to be "stunning."

Well, she would. She dismisses a piece by that well-known, right-wing kook and former editor of the New York Times Bill Keller to be "remarkably prissy and poorly informed..." for criticizing race-baiters like herself. 


Has anyone been prissier or more poorly informed than Walsh when it comes to the facts of this case? 


But then Joan Walsh has always been a rather clueless dope. Here she is on the MSNBC's Morning Joe mystified that there might be such a thing as "extreme voices on the left."




This was before Keith "The Meltdown" Olbermann left MSNBC for the greener pastures (turned scorched earth) of Current TV.

If Joan Walsh wants to see another example left-wing extremism, all she has to do is look in the mirror.

UPDATE: Pat Buchanan pens a very discerning column on the case and its political implications for the upcoming election.

With the election on, the case has begun to divide the nation along racial lines. And Obama's allies are doing it. It is Jesse Jackson and the Black Caucus crying that Trayvon was "hunted down like a rabid dog in the street," that he was "murdered and martyred," that it was a "hate crime."

"It's a disgrace that man (Zimmerman) hasn't been shot yet," says Mike Tyson. The New Black Panther Party has put out a poster offering a $10,000 reward that reads, "Wanted: Dead or Alive."

The face on the poster is George Zimmerman.

Trayvon is the victim here, but George Zimmerman is beginning to look like a victim -- of lynch law and mob rule.

With the Panthers and Tyson calling for vengeance and vigilante justice, where is Attorney General Eric Holder? Out congratulating Al Sharpton for bringing political pressure on Florida to indict.

Is this how justice is advanced in Obama's America?

The answer to question is "yes." At least when it comes to a liberal's idea of justice. It's all social, baby. 

The affidavit of probable cause to arrest George Zimmerman and charge him with Second Degree Murder is a skimpy document, not quite two pages, double-spaced.

It claims a number of things that seem in conflict with not only with the reported facts, including one assertion not supported by the 911 recording that evening.

According to the affidavit: "When the police dispatcher realized Zimmerman was following Martin he instructed Zimmerman not to do that..."

What the dispatcher actually said was "we don't need you to do that."

The affidavit is incredibly vague about the details of the alleged crime, it insinuates much but offers very little in the way of hard facts to support the charge. The standard for probable cause is low so a judge will probably let the prosecution get away with this but this is paper thin.

Alan Dershowitz thinks so too:  



UPDATE: The affidavit mentions information taken from "sworn" witnesses. Was one of them the man who claimed to have Trayvon Martin on top of Zimmerman and Zimmerman yelling for help.

According to Tampa Bay Fox affiliate WTVT-TV, what the witness says he saw could bolster Zimmerman’s claim that he shot Martin in self-defense:

“The guy on the bottom who had a red sweater on was yelling to me: ‘help, help…and I told him to stop and I was calling 911,” he said.

Trayvon Martin was in a hoodie; Zimmerman was in red.

The witness only wanted to be identified as “John,” and didn’t not want to be shown on camera.

His statements to police were instrumental, because police backed up Zimmerman’s claims, saying those screams on the 911 call are those of Zimmerman.

“When I got upstairs and looked down, the guy who was on top beating up the other guy, was the one laying in the grass, and I believe he was dead at that point,” John said.

Did this guy tell the state's attorneys office a different story? Was he interviewed at all? In the affidavit the investigators cite Trayvon Martin's mother as recognizing her son's voice yelling for help on a 911 tape. That seems to conflict with this man's statement. And he was supposedly at the scene.


Will this guy be a witness for the prosecution or the defense. If he sticks to the above story, it's hard to see how it won't damage the prosecution's case. 


Dershowitz imagines a possible plea bargin. I can too. Even if Zimmerman was legally justified in shooting Martin, he might well still feel some guilt over his own part in creating this tragedy. That might help induce him to plead to a much lesser charge. He has been vilified as a racist and wanton killer of a young black man. If the incident went down as he reportedly told police on the night of the shooting, if I were him I would want the world to know it. 

Upper Darby School District is planning cuts in staffing and programs to the tune of $4 million. But that doesn't mean that actual spending is going down.

That's what I learned in my conversation with UDSD business manager Ed Smith yesterday. I learned some other things too.

My print column is up.

MSNBC isn't the only cable network falling down on the job of getting the facts straight in the Trayvon Martin case.

On FOX, Greta Van Sustern had a couple of criminal defense attorneys, a Bernie Grimm and a Ted Williams, on her show to discuss the charging of George Zimmerman with Second Degree Murder.

From the transcript:

BERNIE GRIMM, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Right. They can always overcharge and sort of give you the dump truck indictment. And that's because if the injure (sic) compromises they will compromise to the lesser charge. And the lesser charge may in fact be what happened, but they'll over charge it just to do that.
But I was talking to Ted before the show. I've never had a homicide in 25 years where my client got his gun back. I said, Ted, how many homicide investigations did you investigate --
VAN SUSTEREN: He got the gun back?

WILLIAMS: The allegations we (hear) is he got the gun back. Not only did he get the gun back, but they didn't take his clothes that night. There's a lot of physical evidence that a good defense attorney would be able to work with in this case.

Van Sustern should know by now that the "allegation" that the cops gave Zimmerman his gun back that night is completely bogus. Even the far-left Mother Jones magazine knows this. And still it's being carelessly repeated again and again by nitwits.

Van Sustern should have been able to correct both her "guests" on this point. That she didn't is her own lame fault.

Grimm is quite right about one thing. Prosecutors frequently overcharge defendants with crimes they have no intention of trying to prove. They do this with both black and white (and white-Hispanic) defendants. It is a despicable practice and prosecutors should be called on it more often.

UPDATE: More foolishness from Mr. Williams:

WILLIAMS: But you can't bring a gun to a fistfight. It's as simple as that... 

What a dope! In Florida, and in other pro-gun carrying states, you can not only bring a gun to a fistfight, you can bring one to a cocktail party. The question here is when you can actually, reasonably and legally use it to defend yourself against bodily injury.

Williams goes on to voice concern that Zimmerman might manage to beat this murder rap ala Casey Anthony. And Williams is a defense attorney. God help his clients.

What do Newspaper Reporters, Oil Rig Workers, Soldiers, Dairy Farmers and Lumberjacks have in common?

We all do the least desirable jobs in America.

Barron's has the Top 5 most desirable jobs, the Bottom 5 least desirable and the 190 in between.
Here are the Top 5:

1	Software Engineer
2	Actuary
3	Human Resources Manager
4	Dental Hygienist
5	Financial Planner

The bottom five, are listed above. Yes, these are tough, thankless jobs, - especially oil rigging and lumber-jacking - but somebody has to do them. And all of them beat the unemployment line.

DNC operative declares War on Women; specifically stay-at-home moms, and in the person of Ann Romney!

Even the White House claims to be offended.

What a buffoon!

UPDATE: The video on the link was taken down. Here it is for your viewing pleasure.



UPDATE II: Rosin's claim that the Obama administration has not been pushing the meme of a GOP led "War Against Women" is simply a lie.

Joe Biden did it again just the other day. The very Democrats who pay Rosin to for her wonderful campaign advice, have been pushing this false story for months. From Maxine Waters to Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

After creating a firestorm, that has even has the White House criticizing her, Rosin has now apologized for her patently stupid remark. People can judge the sincerity of her apology for themselves.

UPDATE III: Just received this email spam from one Kelly Ward who identifies herself the political director of the DCCC.

Friend --

There’s no question about this.

The Republican War on Women is real, and it’s extremely dangerous

Blah, blah, blah... So much for Hilary Rosen's lame denials.

President Obama is campaigning for his beloved Buffett Rule that will raise taxes on millionaires. How should the GOP response?

This sounds reasonable and will raise even more money for our poor, indebted government.

The Republicans could say, sure, we’ll go along with the Buffett Rule if you Democrats will agree to the Reynolds Tax, a 50% surtax on the increased incomes of former government officials when they move into the private sector, working for the same companies they once regulated. Or Republicans could offer an amendment incorporating the Clooney Rule, based on the fact that actors and actresses are such advocates of higher taxes: a new, 80% tax rate on all income in excess of $1 million earned by acting in any film or theatrical production. Or they could counter with the K Street Rule, an 80% tax on all income in excess of $1 million earned by lobbying. Or the Ambulance Chaser Tax, an 80% levy on all lawyer contingent fee income in excess of 10% of a recovery. (That one would provoke howling from coast to coast, from one of the Democrats’ prime constituencies.)

George Zimmerman has finally been charged with a crime: Second degree murder, in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

That's bad news for Zimmerman. But it's good news for people who want to find out what actually happened that night in Sanford, Florida.

The prosecution will have to prove that Zimmerman acted with a "depraved" mind. That's what Second Degree Murder requires.

Based on the reported evidence a manslaughter charge  - The unjustifiable, inexcusable, and intentional killing of a human being without deliberation, premeditation, and malice - would seem more appropriate. And even that will be difficult to prove in court.

We will see.

There has been enough prejudging and misrepresentation of the facts of this case already. A young man is dead and his killer, who claims he acted in self defense, will stand trial.

May justice prevail.

UPDATE: Wait a minute... THIS is Zimmerman?

I thought THIS was Zimmerman...

Joe Biden praises Al "Stuart Smiley" Franken as a "leading legal scholar."

And Eric Holder praises race-baiter, tax-evader, slanderer and Tawana Brawley hoaxter, Al Sharpton.

Wow. If this isn't desperate political base-building I don't know what is.

Legendary newsman Mike Wallace died the other day at the age of 93. He did a lot of impressive work over the course of his career. This, however, was far from his finest moment.

An interesting twist in the Trayvon Martin case:

MIAMI—The lawyers for George Zimmerman, the member of a neighborhood watch group who killed an unarmed teenager, said they were withdrawing as his legal counsel, a surprise twist in a case that has riveted the nation.

"We've lost contact with him," attorney Craig Sonner said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon. "He's gone on his own." Mr. Sonner said the last time he had communicated with his client was on Sunday. Since then, Mr. Zimmerman hadn't returned phone calls, text messages or emails, he said.

Is your school district serving your children "Pink Slime" in their burgers? If you care, you're part of the problem.

My print column is up.

UPDATE: Pink Slime good! Green Slime bad!

Rick Santorum drops out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination. Rich Lowry calls his effort "valiant."

He started this campaign basically with his convictions and a shoestring. He got amazingly far, all things considered. He came within a few points of dealing Romney a grievous blow in Michigan and upending the race. But he never had the money and organization to compete with Romney–and those things matter. Despite his working-class pitch, he was never able to extend his reach enough beyond his evangelical base. At times his message was compelling and fresh, but by the end it seemed to boil down to a critique of Romneycare (and increasingly over-the-top attacks on Romney). The downside to his passion and sincerity was a lack of discipline and a weakness for bluster. For all those reasons, he couldn’t catch Romney. But Santorum is a man of principle who lives his convictions and is never afraid to defend them.

Sounds about right.

Have you heard about this stuff "pink slime"? Sounds awful doesn't it? It's part of a cow that the government allows the meat industry to use even though it has to be treated with ammonia gas to make sure its safe enough to eat.

And can you believe it? Some schools were actually feeding it to your kids.

Thank God, the media has investigated and brought national attention to this disgusting but legal practice.

Holman Jenkins, however, takes a different view...

Supreme Court more popular after Obamacare hearings. Apparently, the public enjoys watching liberals  reduced to hysterics and legal claptrap.

Some money is missing from the Chichester Baseball League.

The “this” Savage-Sykes referred to was information swirling among members since early February regarding the initial discovery of missing bank statements.

When obtained they allegedly showed withdrawals totaling more than $5,000 at places that included Harrah’s and Wawa, she said.

At least at Wawa the league wasn't charged a transaction fee. 

The state senate is entertaining a new bill that would exempt new cars (cars less than 2 years old) from having being inspected.

“For purchasers of today’s new cars, the annual inspection is a pointless ritual that serves no purpose,” said state Sen. John Wozniak, D-Cambria County, the bill’s sponsor. “Owners of new cars have already paid dearly for a vehicle equipped with the latest safety technology. Requiring a state inspection is overkill.”

Oh my God! A politician looking to roll back regulation. And Democrat no less. This is small potatoes but at least, it's a tiny step in the right direction.

... meet your new Masters champion... and his posse.



UPDATE: Mrs. Spencerblog thinks this is even better:

Tucker Max, (drunkard, sex addict, author) loves Planned Parenthood. When he was younger and poorer, he and his girlfriends availed themselves of its abortion services many, many times.

Now that he's rich, he wanted to donate half a million dollars to this august "women's health" organization in return for having an abortion clinic named after him.

Planned Parenthood told him "no thanks." But these two deserve each other.

My print column is up.

White Supremacists head for Sanford:

Neo-Nazis are currently conducting heavily armed patrols in and around Sanford, Florida and are "prepared" for violence in the case of a race riot. The patrols are to protect "white citizens in the area who are concerned for their safety" in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting last month, says Commander Jeff Schoep of the National Socialist Movement. "We are not advocating any type of violence or attacks on anybody, but we are prepared for it," he says. "We are not the type of white people who are going to be walked all over."

Because nothing diffuses racial tension like gun-toting racial separatists patrolling an already on-edge community.

Maybe they can all get jobs at MSNBC after the race war is over.

UPDATE: It seems we was had.

Classic Mark Steyn on "Our Contemptuous President."

The eunuchs of the palace media gleefully piled on: As the New York Times sees it, were the justices to take an “unprecedented” step so unprecedented there are two centuries’ worth of precedents going back to 1803, they would be fatally damaging “the Court’s legitimacy.”

All that’s unprecedented here is the spectacle of the president of the United States, while the judges are deliberating, idly swinging his tire iron and saying, “Nice little Supreme Court you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.”

NBC fires the news editor who edited the audio tape of George Zimmerman talking to a police dispatcher that made Zimmerman look like a racist.

Amazing stuff.

The NBC employee has not been named. But a whole lot more people should lose their jobs for their inaccurate reporting and slander before this thing is over.

More here.

Heh!

UPDATE: Arby's corporate manager is finding out that it may have taken the wrong side in the Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Fluke controversy. 

(Posted by Dannytheman)

I've used up all my Change!!

Media attorney and law professor Art Donato explains why the President of the United States was wrong to say that a Supreme Court decision invalidating Obamacare would be "unprecedented." 

I explain why the Affordable Care Act is stupid, expensive and incomprehensible.

My print column is up.

As promised, Bob "The Daily Howler" Somberby examines MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell's nauseating anti-Mormon bigotry and the dishonest way he's using it to discredit Mitt Romney.

Lawrence O’Donnell is a real piece of work.

Last night, he did a segment on the killing of Trayvon Martin. His basic misstatements were legion.

This will never stop.

But at least he stopped playing the Mormon card on last evening’s Last Word. On Monday and Tuesday nights, O’Donnell had toyed with this card, diddling himself as he did and showing the soul of the bigot.

Read it all.

S.E. Cupp explains the Republican's Gender Gap: Women prefer big government! And that's too bad.

Women, it seems, are falling for the left’s “we’ll take care of you” economic paternalism, the insistence that women need the state, or wealthy taxpayers, to rescue them from a life of oppression, squalor and servitude. 

And Obama knows it. In a campaign speech in Vermont last week, he tried to convince voters that they really, really need the government — and the wealthy — to take care of them. “I am my brother’s keeper,” he pleaded. “I am my sister's keeper. That’s a value.”

There are plenty of men who look to the government to take care of them too. They're called bureaucrats, special pleaders, progressives and politicians.

As P.J. O'Rouke once observed, conservatism is a tough sell because in essence, the conservative candidate is saying "Vote for me, I'll do less for you." But it can be sold. Ronald Reagan sold it. Even though he couldn't shrink the size of our federal leviathan, he appealed to America's can do spirit and said things like "Government isn't the solution to our problem. Government IS the problem." As I recall, he did pretty well with female voters.

Then again, maybe female voters have changed since 1980. More are single and divorced and they find themselves in need of government help to raise their children and now even to provide them with free birth control.

It seems to me that Democratic leaders are constantly insulting women while pretending to flatter them. Always focusing on their "issues." You never hear politicians talking specifically about men's health or inequality issues. Women now make-up 60 percent of college undergraduates and yet they are still treated like some, disenfranchised minority that needs affirmative action to succeed.

Feminists and male liberals still portray women as victims of an unjust, violent and patriarchal society. As women and especially, black women, make greater and greater strides in our society, outpacing men in various fields, we read about the difficulty they're having finding a suitable male to marry. So many of the men are in jail, unemployed, and beneath them socially and educationally. What's a women to do?

Fortunately, there is still a considerable number of women out there who get it. Women like S.E. Cupp who push back against an overweening and intrusive government. Women who don't need men like Barack Obama and Harry Reid to buy their contraceptives for them.

These grown-up, conservative/libertarian women are a force to be reckoned with and a growing force in America. Younger women are increasingly listening to them on college campuses and elsewhere. The Gender gap may help re-elect Barack Obama this November. But it didn't help him in the 2010 mid-term elections, when male and female voters replaced his Democratic majority with Republicans.

There is still plenty of time for a Republican presidential candidate to convince female voters that out-of-control government spending, deficits and a sluggish economy is not in really good for anybody. Them included. We'll see.