Underwear Bomber Changes Plea to Guilty

In a surprise move, Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the accused underwear bomber who tried to take out a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day 2009, switched to a guilty plea on all counts today in Detroit federal court. He is representing himself (i.e., pro se) in the trial.

Timing of Iran Terror Plot Announcement

Is it a coincidence that the Justice Department released the info about the alleged Iranian plot against the Saudi ambassador right around the time that AG Holder was about to be subpoenaed by Congressman Darrell Issa and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in the Fast and Furious investigation? Is it possible that the administration held this indictment for political purposes or are we being too cynical?

Strange New Respect for the Tea Party

Politicians flip flop all the time, and the media seems to be following suit. After initially dismissing the movement and then trying to smear the Tea Party with fake allegations, have you noticed how the media echo chamber is trying to validate the Occupy Wall Street by making comparisons to the Tea Party? Any parallel is particularly inappropriate in that the Tea Party wants less government handouts while OWS demands more.

The Daily Caller noticed another aspect to the coverage:

Mark Meckler, the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, struck a similar note, saying that when the tea party protests first began, “we were ignored, mocked, and then attacked by the media” and “called ‘Astroturf,’ ‘fringe,’ ‘racists’ and ‘Nazis.’”

“Yet today, the leftist media seemingly cheers for a group of lawbreaking miscreants who have openly committed a variety of illegal acts,” Meckler said.

Boston Red Sox Like Fried Chicken and Beer

Like a lot of people, we have to admit that fried chicken is one of our guilty pleasures. That doesn't justify professional athletes in the midst of trying to qualify for the playoffs eating fast-food fried chicken, playing video games, and swilling beer during games as the Red Sox starting pitchers apparently did during the team's September collapse. This revealing Boston Globe article also among other things identifies some serious personal problems that may have distracted former manager Terry Francona from coming to grips with disarray in his clubhouse.

The story of Boston’s lost September unfolds in part as an indictment of the three prized starters. But the epic flop of 2011 had many faces: a lame-duck manager, coping with personal issues, whose team partly tuned him out; stars who failed to lead; players who turned lackluster and self-interested; a general manager responsible for fruitless roster decisions; owners who approved unrewarding free agent spending and missed some warning signs that their $161 million club was deteriorating.

Here is CGI studio Next Media Animation's take on the Red Sox September downfall:

Speaking of takeout (or "takeaway," as they call it in Britain) food and related issues, the woman in this U.K. video apparently freaked out over customer service (which can be spotty) in a KFC restaurant because she was denied extra butter.

Congress Likely to Subpoena AG Holder Over Fast and Furious

How long before Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General (whose politicized Justice Department refuses to prosecute voter intimidation and voter fraud), decides to spend more time with his family?





In the meantime, the LA Times reports that "High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF's Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars."

Got Raw Milk? Los Angeles Fights Dairy "Crime Wave"

The state of California is nearly bankrupt. Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States, is dealing with a huge violent crime wave. So where are the prosecutors directing their limited resources? A raw milk private membership club known as Rawesome Foods.

About one thousand pages of documents turned to over to Rawesome's lawyers as part of the legal discovery process indicates, according to NaturalNews.com's Mike Adams, that...

The depth of this evidence reveals that LA County has spent millions of dollars conducting the most aggressive, vindictive and downright abusive surveillance campaign against a food distribution club that has ever been recorded in human history.

The level of resources that has been directed against Rawesome vastly exceeds the resources typically used against murderers, rapists or organized crime mob bosses. Under the excuse of protecting the public from "fresh milk," LA County has spent millions of dollars and countless thousands of hours conducting the kind of surveillance that would sensibly only be reserved for hard-core violent criminals such as serial killers.

According to Adams, the real culprit is prosecutor Kelly Sakir who he describes as a "rabid environmentalist" and a MoveOn.org supporter who threw Rawesome's owner James Stewart in jail:

What's clear from this is that Kelly Sakir is out for blood and is on some sort of bizarre punitive rampage against James Stewart in particular and health freedom in general. And she's using taxpayer resources in LA County to bankroll her personal vendetta against fresh milk and anyone involved in distributing it.

Read Adams' entire article here. More information on the case here.

Surprise: Sarah Palin was Correct about Obamacare Death Panels

Conventional, western medicine tends to rely too much on expensive surgery and pharmaceutical drugs. With that said, in a free society no government bureaucrat should ever interfere with the relationship between doctor and patient, which is the likely outcome of government-run healthcare. Private insurance companies are hard enough to deal with, aren't they?

With that in mind, remember how Sarah Palin was ridiculed for raising the possibility of “death panels” in connection with Obamacare despite that fact that rationing is the likely outcome of socialized medicine.

But as the mainstream media has reported last week, the former Alaska governor has essentially been vindicated:

The National Academy of Sciences said Thursday that the federal government should explicitly consider cost as a factor in deciding what health benefits must be provided by insurance plans under President Obama’s health care overhaul, and it said the cost of any new benefits should be “offset by savings” elsewhere in the health care system.

Moreover, it said, in defining “essential health benefits,” the government should try to guarantee that the average premium would not exceed benchmarks that would be set by the secretary of health and human services. [New York Times]

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An advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that the Obama administration emphasize affordability over breadth of coverage when it comes to implementing a key insurance provision of the 2010 health-care law.

Obama officials charged with stipulating what “essential benefits” many health plans will have to cover should make it a priority to keep premiums reasonable, even if that means allowing plans to be less comprehensive, counseled the committee of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM). [Washington Post]

Socialized medicine is in effect in the U.K. in the form of the failing, near-bankrupt National Health Service. Readers of the British press know that the equivalent of death panels have already been implemented there. This is what we have to look forward to if the Supreme Court and/or Congress allows Obamacare to fully become implemented.

Added: British physician Lesley Kirkpatrick describes in the Daily Mail the lengths to which she had to fight through the NHS bureaucracy to obtain treatment options after she herself was diagnosed with cancer.

I’d worked in the NHS all my life — and yes, I felt guilty. But being a patient made me see things differently. I felt alone, uncared for, and forced to make things happen myself....

I should be dead, but here I am still running 40 miles a week. and it’s all because I fought every step of the way. But I’m struck by the thought — what happens to patients who don’t have my medical training and determination?

NHS rationing is hurting the patients who need it, and the wrong areas are being cut. We have management and ethnicity surveys, while patients are denied proper scanning and fast responses.

And according to the London Telegraph, "The number of patients who waited longer than the recommended 18 weeks for NHS hospital treatment has risen by almost 50 per cent over the past year."