‘As Easter looms, police prepare
Police in the wider Wellington region are gearing up to take a hard line on the roads this holiday weekend.
Last year, there were nine fatal crashes resulting in 12 deaths during the Easter weekend. This number included a fatal crash in the Central District on the Desert Road where two people lost their lives.
Police say any driver caught exceeding the 4kmh tolerance will be stopped and fined….’
Stuff News NZ

This is crap. Obssessive concentration on the speedo reading on the part of drivers doesn’t do a damn thing to promote good driving. The reverse, in fact. While plenty of useful road safety initiatives go begging, these dishonest bastards choose instead to give the appearance of doing something while at the same time raising revenue. And how is it that when the holiday road toll is lower than usual, the effing police take credit for it yet when there’s a spike in accidents, it’s the driver’s fault?
Pricks.

“Barack Obama’s budget address last week ranks among the most dishonest and dishonorable presidential speeches in generations. It contained an avalanche of false and misleading statements. It was shallow and bitterly partisan…”        source

‘An electrician faces the sack for displaying a small palm cross on the dashboard of his company van.
Former soldier Colin Atkinson has been summoned to a disciplinary hearing by the giant housing association where he has been employed for 15 years because he refuses to remove the symbol.
…….Despite the company’s treatment of Mr Atkinson, the boss of the depot where he works in Castleford has been allowed to adorn his office with a poster of the Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara.
Denis Doody, who is WDH’s environmental manager, also has a whiteboard on which are written several quotations by the Marxist guerrilla leader, who was a key figure in the Cuban revolution in the Fifties…’

‘And now as we are on the threshold of the deliberate collapse of the United Socialist States of America, pay close attention. The “system” is building a scenario that will allow for the rise of the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of America – sans that pesky charter of negative liberties. In place of inalienable rights from our Creator, we will have “human rights” bestowed by government. We will no longer absolutely own ourselves, our labor, that which we obtained from that labor, nor will we even have a right to life, without permission of our sovereign government.

At that point, the noble experiment of the republican form will be over, and the world will not see its like again. For no other nation has a government that recognizes that the people are sovereigns, not subjects. America was the only nation on earth that had a republican form, and its people squandered its birthright, in ignorance and apathy.

Our posterity will curse our names and memories, for the bitter chains they will bear, because of our failure….’                                             here

‘A peace activist has been found hanged in an abandoned house in the Gaza Strip just hours after he was paraded on YouTube by his abductors.
Vittorio Arrigoni, 36, was blindfolded and had been badly beaten before the broadcast. A hand was seen pulling his head up by his hair to face the camera.
The video, posted just hours after the pacifist was kidnapped, sparked a frantic race against time to track him down before he was killed.
But though Hamas security forces quickly received a tip-off about his whereabouts in Gaza’s Sheikh Rudawan district, they arrived too late to save him.
……..He was abducted by an Al Qaeda-linked Jihadist group, who were attempting to put pressure on Hamas, which runs the enclave, to release its leader Hesham al-Sa’eedni.
In the Arabic text that accompanied the YouTube video, his kidnappers described Italy as ‘the infidel state’ and said that Mr Arrigoni had ‘entered our land only to spread corruption.’….’

And one computer is down…grrr..  Posting and commenting will be light for a few days. Thanks Gantt, for holding the fort. Will be back soon with beer and ammunition.

Thomas Sowell:
‘The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States. In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched.
When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy.
Whites are also fleeing the big northeastern liberal, welfare states like Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as the same kinds of states in the midwest, such as Michigan, Ohio and Illinois…’
H/T The Woodpile Report

‘It’s time to take on the Aussies, says English
More competition, rather than collaboration, should drive the transtasman economic relationship, Finance Minister Bill English says.

The fundamental competition is for capital, including Australian capital, he said, and over the next few years New Zealand’s advantages would become more apparent.
“One is the wage differential. We have a workforce that is better educated, just as productive and 30 per cent cheaper,” he said. Another is a better regulatory environment.”

Another is an infinite capacity for bullshit, apparently. That’s three lies in one sentence.

‘Prime Minister John Key has done an about-face after denying he had a discussion with MediaWorks bosses before the Government decided to give the company a $43.3 million helping hand.
He has now admitted meeting then-MediaWorks boss Brent Impey two months before, when Mr Impey pressed his case for a scheme the Government initially turned down….’
He sure loves throwing taxpayer money around.

‘…..But elections will only prevail over bloodshed for as long as the great majority of Americans continue to trust in their verdicts. Should we come to despise the ballot, our recourse must be to the bullet.
The courts will be no help. America’s courts are now as thoroughly politicized as everything else. Judges routinely set aside the unambiguous meaning of the black-letter law, often on grounds of “fairness,” a concept mentioned nowhere in any Constitution or charter. The Emanuel and Torricelli decisions, and the decision of Wisconsin judge Maryann Sumi to intervene extra-jurisdictionally in the recently passed state law, should give ample evidence to that effect.
…..Law is being replaced by the whims of high officials. Elections are falling to a state beneath contempt. And ever more Americans are asking what the next step must necessarily be….’
The Shape Of Things To Come Part 10: Temblors