No point in waiting for the sumbitch to die:

George Soros, enigmatic financier, liberal philanthropist dies at XX
By Todd Eastham | WASHINGTON, XXX | Thu Apr 18, 2013 5:41pm EDT

(Reuters) – George Soros, who died XXX at age XXX, was a predatory and hugely successful financier and investor, who argued paradoxically for years against the same sort of free-wheeling capitalism that made him billions.

So continues the greatest week in the history of journalism.

Representative Steve Stockman of Texas gets himself plenty riled up over the passing of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:

“While many mourn, Baroness Thatcher reminded us ‘I fight on I fight to win,’” Stockman said in statement. “The best way to honor Baroness Thatcher is to crush liberalism and sweep it into the dustbin of history.”

Annhilation. Extinction. Aaarghh. Curiously, in the middle of all this death, and ruin to come, the Republican shows a remarkable dainty side.

. . Baroness Thatcher inherited a country that was demoralized, economically broken and bankrupted by expansive government. Unlike Obama, Baroness Thatcher restored prosperity and optimism. Where Obama has failed, Baroness Thatcher succeeded. While Obama forges chains of dependency and government bloat, Baroness Thatcher took a sledgehammer to the machinery of liberalism. Baroness Thatcher’s record . .

Hoo the Baroness, and the Baroness, and the Baroness. I had no idea the same guys who enjoyed whittling the pig fat from their teeth could hold such respect for peerage. Had it been the Queen who died, they’d have had to wheel in a crane to pick Stockman from the floor. This too is a howler:

In a statement following the announcement of Thatcher’s death President Obama called the Iron Lady “one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend.”

A champion of liberty? In a swine’s eye. How about these doings, for freedom’s sake? Thatcher called the African National Congress “a typical terrorist organisation.” Their leader, Nelson Mandela, later negotiated the end of Apartheid, freeing millions from government oppression. He then became South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

Meanwhile she called herself “President Botha’s candid friend.” P.W. Botha was the last great champion of official state-sponsored racism. He suffered a stroke while trying futilely to preserve it, then resigned his presidency. Botha later refused to testify at the Truth and Reconciliation hearings because, among other atrocities, he’d have to confess to being a domestic terrorist. He authorized the bombing of the South African Council of Churches headquarters.

And:

The Thatcher government supported the Khmer Rouge keeping their seat in the UN after they were ousted from power in Cambodia by the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. Although denying it at the time they also sent the SAS to train the Khmer Rouge alliance to fight against the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea government.

This would be after, not before, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered two million Cambodians in a genocide. Given a situation where it wasn’t necessary to choose between evils, Thatcher chose to support the modern-day Nazis.

Maggie never cared for freedom. She favored authority. And rather than use that power to liberate the oppressed, she employed it to decimate her political enemies, like the union coal miners. Which is exactly why Rep. Stockman is such a big fan, with his ‘destroy all liberals’ schtick. Good luck with that.

When England was the whore of the world
Margaret was the Madame
And the future looked as bright and as clear
as the black tarmacadam

. . I never thought for a moment
that human life could be so cheap
But when they finally put you in the ground
they’ll stand their laughing and tramp the dirt down

The former New York mayor has gone and died.

“Of course, the vast majority of Muslims — there are a billion four hundred million — are not terrorists. But there are hundreds of millions who are. They want to kill every Christian, every Jew, every Hindu who won’t convert.”

Good riddance.

After the girlfriend of Notre Dame’s Manti Te’o died, he became the focus of immense amounts of national sports sympathy and attention this season. As the football team fought its way into the NCAA championship game, the tragedy surrounding and inspiring their best player was dramatically retold over and again. Today we find out that Manti never met the girlfriend, and she never existed.

– . . Manti realized [girlfriend] Lennay Kekua wasn’t dead when he got a phone call from her cell phone at an ESPN award show in December … months after her supposed death.
– Manti claims the woman who called from “Lennay’s” phone was the same person who he had spoken with during his relationship with Lennay.
– Manti says the woman informed him that Lennay was not dead … because she was not real.
– [A.D. Jack] Swarbrick says Manti met with a media team, who had planned to release the story to the media next week … but they were scooped by Deadspin.
– Manti told ND officials he had gone to Hawaii to meet Lennay in person on several occasions, but she never showed up.
– ND believes the [sic] Manti was targeted because he’s too nice of a guy … and the perps took pleasure in humiliating him.

After reading several sources, I’m actually considering that Manti may have been so sheltered a young man that he honestly thought Lennay existed. That won’t deflect people from becoming furious about the dramatic deception, or fans from accusing Manti and Notre Dame of being callous and calculating. Whatever Manti says to the press tomorrow, this story is set to blow up into an epic sports fiasco.

But first, or second, consider this:

Reagan Mauia, an Arizona Cardinals fullback, said he believes Kekua existed because he met her in person when he and other Polynesian teammates and Pittsburgh Steelers star Troy Polamalu went to do charity work in American Samoa in June 2011.

“This was before her and Manti,” Mauia said Wednesday evening. “I don’t think Manti was even in the picture, but she and I became good friends. We would talk off and on, just checking up on each other kind of thing. I am close to her family. When she was going through the loss of her father, I was — I offered a comforting shoulder and just someone to bounce her emotions off. That was just from meeting her in Samoa.”

Mauia said Tuiasosopo — whom Mauia believes is Kekua’s cousin — introduced the two. After the initial meeting, Mauia said he met her at an “after-party” for all of the athletes involved in the camp.

“She was tall,” he said. “Volleyball-type of physique. She was athletic, tall, beautiful. Long hair. Polynesian. She looked like a model … ”

He said it is his understanding that Kekua’s mother is operating her Twitter account. He said he’d never met her mother. When told by a reporter that she apparently might not have existed, Mauia said “No, she is real.”

If someone (Ronaiah Tuiasosopo) pulled a long-running scam on the Samoan football community and it punked a gullible nation, it’s historic. If Manti used the faux girlfriend to snare extra attention and Heisman Trophy press during a momentous championship campaign, it’s historic. If Notre Dame covered up the hoax to protect the highly mythologized football program (Penn State? Hullo?), it’s an NCAA epidemic. Whatever the case, sports fans will have their figurative hands full for the next couple weeks. Plenty of slime to go around.

For all the questions we have about the Sandy Hook shootings, it’s depressing that we have so few answers. ‘Why?’ and ‘WHY?’ being the pressing formers and ‘Who knows?’ being the latter. Unless you’re a pro-life scold of course. Then the confusion and pain swap places with humble wisdom and the willingness to impart Truth. For any and all questions within sniffing distance of evil or ethics or the over-browning of morning toast, the one answer is ‘Abortion.’

In this sort of moral vacuum, where even the most precious and basic freedom, that of life itself, is no longer respected, a society that is increasingly violent and barbaric is bound to arise. We see the effects of that culture daily, and that is the real problem we face. Even if all the guns in the world suddenly disappeared, the carnage would not cease.

But it would sink like a stone. It’s hard to run through a school and kill children at the rate of oh 50 per hour without a gun. Bullets are well-suited to the purpose. They’re easy to dispatch, accurate and difficult to dodge. Otherwise you might try grenading your targets, which could certainly work except for one thing: Grenades are hard to come by. Isn’t that weird?

The Chinese assailants [the lone slasher -- I the oblivious . .] had no guns, the Aztecs had no guns, and Planned Parenthood uses no guns. Perhaps the boy in Connecticut who killed his mother thought that if the law permitted his mother to kill him in, or on the way out of, her womb, he should have the same right.

So the mystery of “What the hell was he thinking?” is solved. Adam Lanza was obsessed with his legal rights in the wake of Roe v. Wade. Thank you Columbo.

Taste:

Twenty-two children were hurt by a knife-wielding man at a primary school in central China.

Min Yingjun, 36, stabbed an elderly woman before bursting into Chenpeng Village Primary School in the Henan province yesterday.

Seven of the students, aged between six and 12 years old, were taken to hospital, some with severed fingers and ears.

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.

Makes the difference, doesn’t it?

An internet film made by an Israeli American real estate developer from California and promoted by Koran-burning pastor Terry Jones of Florida has sparked violent protests in Egypt and Libya. An attack on the Libyan embassy in Benghazi yesterday killed the US ambassador and three others.

Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed Tuesday night when he and a group of embassy employees went to the consulate to try to evacuate staff. The protesters, angry over a film that ridiculed Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, were firing gunshots and rocket propelled grenades. All of the officials — three in all — hold senior security positions in Benghazi.

The President condemned the violence.

“I strongly condemn the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi, which took the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens,” President Obama said in a statement Tuesday morning. “Right now, the American people have the families of those we lost in our thoughts and prayers. They exemplified America’s commitment to freedom, justice, and partnership with nations and people around the globe, and stand in stark contrast to those who callously took their lives.”

In Egypt, protestors climbed the embassy walls in Cairo and tore down the American flag. It was replaced with one exalting Muhammad. Mitt Romney seized upon the mayhem and death to criticize the Obama administration.

“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi,” he said. “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

Romney was referring to the Egyptian consulate’s response to the growing controversy before the violence broke out. They “condemn[ed] the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” GOP chairman Reince Priebus similarly attacked the president, albeit personally. Priebus charged that Obama “symapathize[d]“ with the Egyptian rioters.

The Obama campaign shot back, calling the Republican criticism ugly politics:

“We are shocked that, at a time when the United States of America is confronting the tragic death of one of our diplomatic officers in Libya, Governor Romney would choose to launch a political attack,” Obama’s campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt said in a statement.

The “movie” that started this mess is essentially anti-Muslim trash. It’s a low-budget green-screen affair that portrays Muhammad as an idiot and his followers as homicidal child-molesting pagans.

The movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” was directed and produced by an Israeli-American real-estate developer who characterized it as a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam.

At least some of the movie, when it’s not calling Muslims gay donkeys, is sympathetic to Egyptian Coptics. After clips of it were dubbed into Arabic and redistributed online, the protests began.

Pictured (l to r): The President, Moe the bartender senator

“Why, when I find out who you are, I’m going to shove a sausage down your throat and stick starving dogs in your butt.”

Sad story. 27 year-old Brazilian actor Tiago Klimeck dies.

How? Playing Judas in a passion play. When he ‘hanged’ himself, the vest slipped and cut off his breathing. No one knew he was dying while he dangled there on stage.

The 27-year-old was taken to Santa Casa de Itapeva hospital and diagnosed with cerebral hypoxia. He lingered in a coma for two weeks before doctors declared him dead and withdrew life support on Sunday . .

The play was being performed in the town of Itarare, about 214 miles from Sau Paulo. Kilmeck and the cast had borrowed equipment from local firefighters, as they had in previous years. Klimeck was unsupervised in the preparation of the safety gear, said fire officials, because he had used it safely before.

This settles it. There is no God. The religious nuts swear His existence is borne out by how He forever plays favorites. He likes them over you, or Oklahoma City over faggot New Orleans. But The Almighty can’t loosen the vest of a young man while he’s blowing Jesus? Please.

The cynical artist with the facile hands and a powerful lust for business, Thomas Kinkade, has died. He was 54.

The controversial Christian and jillionaire will not be missed. It’s a sorry shame he didn’t die a day earlier. He was a gifted man who seduced and repulsed the world with his portraits of incandescent treacle. He trademarked himself “Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light.” He may have mass-produced and sold as many as ten million paintings.

Though he may have rivaled only Andy Warhol for success in the business of art, he was neither satisfied nor respected. He was angry at critics and frequently drunk.

[Kinkade's Media Arts Group executive John] Dandois also said of Kinkade, “Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn’t tell where the boundary was, and then he became very incoherent, and he would start cursing and doing a lot of weird stuff like touching himself.” On 11 June 2010, Kinkade was arrested in Carmel, California on suspicion of driving while under the influence of alcohol.

He thought Pablo Picasso was lame. Kinkade believed himself to be great because he outsold everyone else, as if that were important. Creating factories to produce his ‘paintings’ wasn’t relevant, but you’re welcome to admire that too. His art was licensed to the likes of Wal-Mart and Hallmark for calendars, puzzles, CDs, greeting and gift cards. Have some more:

His arrogance extended to creating entire Thomas Kinkade towns. In 2002, Salon‘s Janelle Brown visited “The Village at Hiddenbrooke, A Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ Community.”

Kinkade has parlayed his fame into an entire country-cottage industry of Kinkade-licensed products, as seen on QVC — home furnishings, La-Z-Boy chairs and sofas, wallpaper, linens, china, stationery sets, Hallmark greeting cards and so on . . The Village at Hiddenbrooke bills itself as the culmination of Kinkade’s vision: an actual manifestation of the quaint cottages, charming gazebos and inspiring landscapes in his artwork.

Except that it isn’t. What you find in the rolling hills behind Vallejo is the exact opposite of the Kinkadeian ideal. Instead of quaint cottages, there’s generic tract housing; instead of lush landscapes, concrete patios; instead of a cozy village, there’s a bland collection of homes with nothing — not a church, not a cafe, not even a town square — to draw them together.

Your first glimpse of Hiddenbrooke features four enormous satellite dishes and a radio tower, nestled in a green valley next to an oblivious troop of grazing cows from the adjacent farm. The second thing you see upon arrival in Hiddenbrooke is an endless stretch of the community’s semi-identical greige tract homes, squeezed in close.

Hiddenbrooke is still around. Many of his hundreds of exclusive galleries are not. While it may have cost franchisees $100,000 or more to buy into the Kinkade trade, they labored to make the sort of money they were promised. They frequently encountered competition from a seemingly unscrupulous business competitor: Thomas Kinkade.

Kinkade’s company, Media Arts Group Inc., has been accused of unfair dealings with owners of Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery franchises. In 2006, an arbitration board awarded Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello $860,000 in damages and $1.2 million in fees and expenses due to Kinkade’s company “[failing] to disclose material information” that would have discouraged them from investing in the gallery. The award was later increased to $2.8 million with interest and legal fees. The plaintiffs and other former gallery owners have also leveled accusations of being pressured to open additional galleries that were not financially viable, being forced to take on expensive, unsalable inventory, and being undercut by discount outlets whose prices they were not allowed to match.

The unfortunates felt victimized not only for the loss of income, but for a kind of spiritual betrayal.

Former gallery dealers also charged that Kinkade uses Christianity as a tool to take advantage of people. “They really knew how to bait the hook,” said one ex-dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity. “They certainly used the Christian hook.” One former dealer’s lawyer stated “Most of my clients got involved with Kinkade because it was presented as a religious opportunity. Being defrauded is awful enough, but doing it in the name of God is really despicable.” On June 2, 2010, Pacific Metro, the artist’s production company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, one day after defaulting on a $1 million court imposed payment to the aforementioned Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello. A $500,000 payment had previously been disbursed.

One more:

A.S. Hamrah, writing in The Baffler, detailed the impact his life would have on others:

“Kinkade is a living testament to how the triumph of kitsch values has repercussions in the marketplace, outside the world of taste.”

Thomas Kinkade, dead at 54. Bury him deep.

Wingnut blogger Ace of Spades pays tribute to Andrew Breitbart. It’s some measure of respect for the deceased battleaxe that the blogger feigns his best Antony for Caesar. This would be a Wingnut Antony, one less interested in rhetorical double-dealing and prone to sincerity in the severe. You remember that David Frum is Brutus. He, having had nothing to do with Andrew’s weak heart, is a shit.

How David did stab Andrew’s unsullied reputation in writing this:

And this is where it becomes difficult to honor the Roman injunction to speak no ill of the dead. It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous. When one of the leading media figures of the day achieves his success by his giddy disdain for truth and fairness—when one of our leading political figures offers to his admirers a politics inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas—how to withhold a profoundly negative judgment on his life and career?

Assassino. Our scene opens: Ace ascends the pulpit, knee-deep in thought, and Cheetos.

Andrew Breitbart died today . .

We shall say of them that their legacy consists of more than three words — “Axis,” “of,” and “Evil.”

We shall say of them that they were warriors, and not bitter Vichyites mourning their loss of — loss of? was it ever even possessed? — relevance and reach.

I get it. Andrew is to David as Adolf was to the surrender monkeys. Check. You shall say of them, “I want to ever loyally and sincerely serve my people and fatherland and be obedient to the Reichspräsident and to my superiors.” Each to their own heroes.

. . from the dawn of time the primitives in the woods envied and feared those with the Magic of Fire.

Err, yeah I remember. Our Neanderthal ancestors poked their misshapen heads from the reeds and witnessed the “Magic of Fire.” How they envied . . the burning forest. Unless the woodchucks knew plenty about flint stones. Plenty of something they were foolish to forget.

As I type this, Breitbart is more alive than David Frum has ever been.

I doubt very much that will change as the years march on.

It is the nature of the rat to envy the lion.

The rat thinks, “If only I could gorge myself on the careers of anonymous, well-meaning people. I could roll over and sleep in the sun. That would be something.” Oh, rat boy, dream away.

We should not fault the rat overly for this. For what else can the rat do?

Let’s see: “Rats have been used in many experimental studies, which have added to our understanding of genetics, diseases, the effects of drugs, and other topics that have provided a great benefit for the health and well-being of humankind. Laboratory rats have also proved valuable in psychological studies of learning and other mental processes (Barnett, 2002), as well as to understand group behavior and overcrowding (with the work of John B. Calhoun on behavioral sink). A 2007 study found rats to possess metacognition, a mental ability previously only documented in humans and some primates.” Rats are looking pretty good right now.

But we should say that there are lions, and there are rats. And they are easily distinguishable.

And they are as different from each other as the sun is from the mirror that reflects it.

Lions are hydrogen-rich sources of fusion radiation, whereas rats are nothing more than Galileo’s night watchmen. That sounds right. Okay, I’m sleepy, here.