The Orlando Sentinel assigned longtime reporter Scott Powers to cover the event. But when he arrived, Biden staffers decided they didn’t want him mingling with the 150 guests who had forked over $500 to meet Biden, so they locked him in a closet! A member of the Biden advance team even stood guard outside the door to prevent Powers from escaping.The arrogance continues. Perhaps the Orlando Sentinel will apologize for having endorsed these clowns for office. But I'm not holding my breath.
Powers has all the details, even pictures of the inside of the closet where he was held; but it appears the Sentinel editors have refused to let him report on all the details of what some are calling a kidnapping! There was a very brief, and very “vanilla” mention of the incident in Thursday’s paper. One attendee later emailed the Sentinel to say “I was in attendance at the Fundraiser and enjoyed a nice lunch. If I had known there was a reporter stuffed in the closet, I would have been compelled to stand up and demand answers. I would also like to know if this is actually legal to treat people like caged animals. I’m disgusted by these actions.”
Despite this outrage, Sentinel editors have dropped the story.
The chief executive of Caterpillar wrote a letter to Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn raising the possibility the heavy equipment company could move out of Illinois because of concerns that the direction the state is heading isn't favorable to business.Illinois taxpayers, both individuals and corporations, are viewed in Springfield as milch cows, serfs tied to the land who must work and give as much of what they produce to the state as the legislature may demand. But people are streaming out of Illinois in droves. Former State Senator Roger Keats, recently a candidate for Cook County Board president, recently announced that he and his wife were moving to Dripping Springs, Texas (a lovely place near Austin, I can assure you). It takes longer for a major corporation like Caterpillar to pull up stakes and go, but they can and will go eventually.
In a letter to Gov. Pat Quinn obtained Friday by The Pantagraph of Bloomington, Doug Oberhelman said officials in at least four states have approached Peoria-based Caterpillar about relocating since Illinois raised its income tax in January.
"I want to stay here. But as the leader of this business, I have to do what's right for Caterpillar when making decisions about where to invest," Oberhelman wrote. "The direction that this state is headed in is not favorable to business, and I'd like to work with you to change that."
Oberhelman wrote he has been called, cornered in meetings and wined and dined. He said he had never considered living anywhere else or the possibility of Caterpillar relocating.
"But I have to admit, the policymakers in Springfield seem to make it harder by the day," he wrote.
Quinn spokeswoman Brie Callahan said Friday the governor plans to discuss the letter with Oberhelman on April 5 when the two meet at a conference in Peoria.
"The governor welcomes frank and open exchanges between the business community and government, and we are always open to new ideas that can help our businesses grow, innovate and create jobs," Callahan told the Pantagraph.
Along with the letter to Quinn, Oberhelman sent correspondence the company has received from leaders of South Dakota and Nebraska.
"I stand ready to help convince you to relocate or expand in the fiscally conservative, low-tax Lone Star State," wrote Texas Gov. Rick Perry in a Jan. 24 letter.
Caterpillar spokesman Jim Dugan tells The Pantagraph the letter shows Quinn that Oberhelman wants to be involved in finding solutions that benefit the company, which employs 23,000 people in Illinois.
"I view it as an olive branch to offer our help," Dugan said.
While Oberhelman didn't single out a specific problem with Illinois' policies, Dugan said the recent income tax increase was major factor triggering the note. [Emphasis added.]
The man suspected of murdering PC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984 has been arrested by rebel forces in the country and is in custody in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.
Campaigners welcomed the arrest and expressed the hope that Omar Ahmed Sodani would face trial in Britain.
Sodani, a prominent figure in Muammar Gaddafi's regime who acknowledges that he was working in the embassy at the time of the shooting, insisted he had not killed 25-year-old Fletcher.
PC Yvonne Fletcher
Speaking in custody in Benghazi, he told Channel 4 News: "I was there but I wasn't at the scene when the shooting took place. I was in police custody before that. I had a quarrel with a police officer before the event, so I was detained and I was told while I was in the police station that a shooting took place and a police officer was shot."
Fletcher was helping to control a small demonstration outside the embassy in St James's Square on 17 April 1984 when shots were fired from the first floor of the building at the protestors. She was shot in the stomach and died in hospital.
Fletcher lay dying after being shot in 1984
Armed police surrounded the embassy in an 11-day siege. Gaddafi responded by sending forces to surround the British embassy in Tripoli. The sieges ended when staff in both embassies were allowed to leave. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Libya. Libyan embassy staff, who were expelled from Britain, claimed diplomatic immunity which meant they could not be questioned by police. Nobody has faced justice for the shooting.
For years I have fought my own nature, but no more.Pat correctly points out again, as we often have on this blog, that the old argument about whether or not gays are "born that way" is irrelevant. Not everything a man is born with is virtuous.
Ever since I can remember, I have felt this way. It has always been just below the surface, but I have done my best to push it down. Way down.
Also ever since I can remember, when my ‘tendencies’ would become obvious, people would tell me that it is wrong. My parents, my teachers, and especially my priests would warn me, you can’t act that way, that the Bible says that it is wrong.
Now I know otherwise. I have been denying my true nature. There is a long-standing social stigma against people like me. We are put down and people do not like to associate with us. But the one thing I know is true is that I didn’t ask to be this way. It is not, I repeat NOT something I have chosen. It is who I am. Everyone in my life, for my 44 years, has forced me to deny it. To pretend. And I have listened to them, until now.
I was born this way, the way God made me. No more denying it. I will embrace it and finally be who I was made to be, angry.
Yes, I am angry.
Ever since I can remember, anger has been there. This is not nurture, it is nature. I have always been angry. I could be going about my daily life, happy as a clam, and without warning and with the merest provocation, red-faced anger would envelop me.
Everyone always told me that I needed to get my anger under control, but why? Isn’t this the way God made me? Why should I pretend otherwise, because other people don’t like it? As long as I don’t hurt anyone, I should be as flaming angry as I was born to be, and all you fury-phobes can kiss my grits.
Think this is a stupid post? Yeah, me too. Somebody should tell Arthur Fitzmaurice, Director of the Los Angeles Archdiocesan Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Catholics. Here is what he had to say.In the final paragraph of a March 11 story about the 25th anniversary of the founding of the archdiocesan Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Catholics, ministry co-leader Arthur Fitzmaurice, citing "pain," "hurt" and "bitterness" over the adoption of Proposition 8, says the ministry focuses on "the pastoral side that says 'God made you this way. You’re welcome to participate in the Eucharist.'"
...amends the Illinois Ambulatory Surgical Center Act. Currently Illinois law exempts abortion clinics from the standards imposed on all other outpatient surgical centers in Illinois...The pro-abort side loves to tell us that they are the ones who are "pro-woman", that they oppose a return to their fictitious "back-alleys".
Last week, after hearing testimony from Thomas More Society's Peter Breen, the House Agriculture Committee passed that bill on a bipartisan 13-0 vote. With this amendment, abortion facilities would be required to meet the same health and safety licensing standards as any other outpatient surgical center, from appropriate hallway width for gurney transport to typical sanitation standards in operating rooms. In light of the "House of Horrors" clinic of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, regulations like these are long overdue in Illinois.
Ed Sullivan (R, Dist #51, 847-566-5115)Leave us a comment below to let us know how your state rep will be voting!
Mark Beaubien (R, Dist #52, 847-487-5252)
Karen May (D, Dist #58, 847-433-9100)
Carol Sente (D, Dist #59, 847-680-5909)
Rita Mayfield (D, Dist #60, 847-599-2800)
JoAnn Osmond (R, Dist #61, 847-599-6200)
Sandy Cole (R, Dist #62, 847-543-0062)
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| Michael Carbone |
Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil — and he's the typical product of money."Anyone with access to the internet, or even a newspaper, can easily see that Atlas is shrugging now. With a great cry of "how much is enough?" the people who produce are rising up against the never-ending burdens placed on their labors by their would-be rulers. Atlas Shrugged, Part I debuts in movie theaters nationwide on April 15th.
Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor — your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
This would be a link to Amazon, but,
ironically, Amazon has dropped Illinois
from its affiliate list because of a new
state tax on internet businesses.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is MADE — before it can be looted or mooched — made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of GOODS. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade — with reason, not force, as their final arbiter — it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability — and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality — the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Or did you say it's the LOVE of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money — and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it."
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another — their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich — will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt — and of his life, as he deserves.
"Then you will see the rise of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of DISARMED victims — then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion — when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing — when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors — when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you — when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.
"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while your damning its life-blood — money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves — slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers — as industrialists.
"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a COUNTRY OF MONEY — and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose — because it contains all the others — the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to MAKE money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide — as, I think, he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns — or dollars. Take your choice — there is no other — and your time is running out."
