Thursday, April 26, 2012

Carter endorses Romney. We're doomed.

I'd rather have a democrat but I would be comfortable. Romney has shown in the past, in his previous years as a moderate or progressive that he was fairly competent as a governor.

 

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/the-daily-rundown/47188747

Monday, April 23, 2012

Rent Control

From: larry.r.trout
Rent Control

'The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a challenge to the constitutionality of New York City's rent regulations. As is customary, the court's order gave no reasons, and there were no noted dissents.

The case was brought by James D. Harmon Jr. and Jeanne Harmon, the owners of a five-story brownstone on West 76th Street near Central Park. They live on the lower floors and rent out six apartments, two to a floor, above them.

Three of the apartments are subject to New York's rent-stabilization regulations, meaning that the government sets the maximum permissible rent increases and generally allows tenants to renew their leases indefinitely. The Harmons say the rent-stabilized tenants pay rents about 60 percent below the market rate.

The Harmons said that forcing them to accept below-market rents amounted to an unconstitutional taking of their property. The regulations subjected them, they told the Supreme Court, to the "unconstitutional burden of involuntarily and permanently renting a part of their residence to tenant-strangers whom the Harmons must subsidize for the rest of their lives."

The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment says that private property shall not "be taken for public use, without just compensation." The Supreme Court has said that government regulation of private property can be "so onerous that its effect is tantamount to a direct appropriation or ouster."

But the court has upheld rent regulations, most recently in a unanimous ruling in a 1992 case concerning a mobile-home park in Escondido, Calif. The justices reasoned that regulation of the terms of a lease did not amount to the sort of complete government takeover of property that is barred by the takings clause.

Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled against the Harmons. In an unsigned summary order, a three-judge panel of the appeals court said the couple knew what they were getting into when they acquired the building.

The panel added that the couple retained important rights under the regulations: they could in some circumstances reclaim the apartments for their own use; they could demolish the building so long as they did not replace it with housing; and they could "evict an unsatisfactory tenant."

All of that meant, the panel said, that the city's regulations did not amount to "permanent physical occupation of the Harmons' property."

New York City's rent regulations cover almost half of the city's roughly 2.2 million rental housing units. (Another million units are occupied by their owners.)

Last month, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed a bill extending the regulations for another three years by re-declaring a state of housing emergency. The emergency has been in effect for more than 40 years.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/us/supreme-court-declines-to-hear-rent-control-challenge.html

Sunday, April 15, 2012

north korea concentration

From: Larry Trout

To understand North Korea, you must first wrap your mind around the utter horror of its gulag system. More than 200,000 men, women and children are currently interned in these concentration death camps. Only 3 people have ever escaped. Fox News interviewed one of them this week.

The man's name is Shin Dong-hyuk. He was born inside Camp 14, the notorious labor camp for political dissidents just south of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

"The first rule was that you cannot escape," Shin said. "And there were other parts to that first rule such as if you attempt to escape you will be shot to death and those that sought the attempt to escape another prisoner and failed to report, they themselves would be shot as well."

But at the age of 22 Shin did manage to escape. After plotting with a fellow inmate, who had grown up on the outside, Shin Dong Hyuk and his friend made a run for the electric fence as they were gathering wood. His friend was electrocuted on the fence. That allowed Shin to climb over the body and avoid injury.

Shin said he was willing to risk death for the chance to be free.

"My feeling at that time, even if I were to get shot and die, was that I would want to experience even just for one day of that freedom and that life that this prisoner had told me so much about. Unfortunately, it was only I who was able to escape successfully."


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/04/13/inside-north-korea-concentration-camp/#ixzz1ryZd2tO8'

Fwd: Deep thoughts

Henninger: Demolishing Paul Ryan

The Left launches on warning against any challenge to its ideological fortress.

  

Fwd: north korean concentration camp


Friday, April 13, 2012

Fwd: France

From: <larry.r.trout

'Sarkozy and Hollande are almost certain to be the finalists, but polls say Sarkozy is behind Hollande by a substantial margin. Meanwhile, Hollande, who has soared in popularity as he has made increasingly ludicrous promises to the French people about reversing austerity and opening the floodgates of government spending, is getting pressure from his left in the person of a comically retro figure named Jean-Luc Melenchon, who wants to party like it's 1789.

Voters love it when Mélenchon, running on the Left party ticket, talks about simply confiscating all individual income above 360,000 Euros a year, leads a symbolic "march on the Bastille" (which was torn down more than two centuries ago) and calls his supporters "sans-culottes" after the Revolution's notorious bloodthirsty peasants. His fans, noted a Sunday Times reporter, were baffled at a rally when he started referring to April as "Germinal," in a nod to the wacky Revolutionary calendar that renamed all the months. He advocates an increase in public spending of more than $150 billion, a minimum-wage hike of more than 50 percent, a referendum on the EU austerity package agreed to in March, and the illegalization of worker layoffs at profitable firms. Lately he has doubled his support, to 15 percent.'

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2012/04/11/econimically-inept-france-crawls-toward-an-election-disaster/


Fwd: dichotomy

From: <larry.r.trout