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Saturday, December 10, 2011

Prizes - In Other Areas - They Work To

  It has been proven that when it comes to technical innovation offering prizes is 33-100 times more effective than conventional grant government funding. That governments nonetheless choose overwhelmingly to go for grants or government construction programmes suggests that "paying government employees and their friends" ) Pournelles's Iron Law, is indeed overwhelmingly the primary aim of government projects and the nominal aim no more than 3% as important.

   Prizes have the advantage of being available to anybody who can do the job and does not involve them having any government employee looking over their shoulder telling them how to do it. This incidentally proves that the Saltire Prize for developing a "commercial" sea turbine, though sold by Alex Salmond as an X-Prize isn't - the civil servants are involved at all stages in testing, their appears to be no technical specification of what "commercially viable" means (& I doubt such is possible) and a prize is going to be awarded to somebody come what may.

   So lets look at use of prizes in some other fields.

Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership
Awarded by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to African heads of state who deliver security, health, education and economic development to their constituents, and who democratically transfer power to their successor. It was sponsored by Mo Ibrahim, a businessman born in Sudan. According to Ibrahim, "Good governance is crucial." With a $5 million initial payment, plus $200,000 a year for life,

  Awarded
 2007 Joaquim Chissano for "his role in leading Mozambique from conflict to peace and democracy."
2008 Festus Mogae “President Mogae’s outstanding leadership has ensured Botswana’s continued stability and prosperity in the face of an HIV/AIDS pandemic which threatened the future of his country and people."

2009, 2010 No award

2011 Pedro Pires' "role in making Cape Verde a "model of democracy, stability and increased prosperity".

    Which at $15 million has probably done more to produce what passes for democracy and prosperity in Africa than most of the hundreds of billions in western "aid" has over the decades. A considerably smaller amount than Tony Blair, alone has received on the US lecture circuit and elsewhere from people who approve of his support for the invasion of Iraq, but arguably Britain is more important than all of Africa.

Jerry Pounrnelle did propose, perhaps not in complete earnest, that had America, instead of invading Iraq, offered a $1 billion prize to the winner of the first democratic election in Iraq it would have become a democracy without having to spend over a trillion dollars killing people.




Crimestoppers. It Works .
when an innovative Albuquerque police officer offered a reward and the promise of anonymity for any person who could provide information to help solve a local murder, Crimestoppers was born.
The non-profit, citizen-run organization spread quickly throughout the country and beyond the borders of the United States. Today, there are Crimestoppers organizations in all 50 states and in nearly 25 countries throughout the world.
The Greater New Orleans Crimestoppers was formed in 1981, serving Orleans, Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, St. John the Baptish, St. Charles, Plaquemines, and St. James parishes. In 26 years, the organization has helped solve more than 12,000 felony crimes and paid out more than $1,750,000 in cash rewards.
By comparison New Orleans proposes a "$119.6 million agency budget next year".  So by comparison, even if we assumed the bulk of the £1.75 million was paid in the last year the conventional policing budget would be 1000 times the reward budget. By comparison Felony crimes in NO reached "a peak of 4,100 in the first half of 2009" so over 26 years around 200,000 ie 16 times the ones crimestoppers was involved in.

    Now obviously this may not be a fair comparison - the police were also involved in making the arrests crimestoppers found out about and indeed in finding supporting evidence. I suspect that the crimestoppers crimes would average more serious, if only because that means more people would know about them, but I suppose it might be the opposite. There is also always the risk of "grasses" making something up for the reward, but then that risk is probably less than that of people doing so to get early release from prison. So it would be wrong to say this proves prizes in law enforcement are 62,5 times more effective (1000/16).

    But I think it does prove that it is likely to be considerably more effective and that if we want to clear up the more serious sorts of crime increasing rewards 10 fold would be more effective than doubling the number of beat policeman. Also much cheaper.

Scientific Integrity Act

I have written on this before. This is a scientific X-Prize but of a different nature to what is normally meant.

The prize is given for finding a mathematically based technical flaw in a hypothesis which it has been proposed government policy should be based on. The obvious example is catastrophic global warming - had such a prize been available Stephen McIntyre would have won it for demolishing Mann's "Hockey Stick" theory on which the IPCC based an entire "report" except that had such a prize been available it is highly likely that somebody else would have actually checked it, not least some of the IPCC scientists, before it was officially adopted.

Nobels, Pulitzers, Turner Prize, Booker Prize, Oscars etc

  These generally are not X-Prizes in that no specific technical achievement is solicited up front, nor can there be. Nonetheless they are very successful at what they do. Because they are awarded for subjective achievement they are likely to encourage the field to move in the direction the prize awarders wish and this is what we see. Personally I would say that the Oscars do tend to improve the standard of film making- most of which is, after all, aimed at the buck of hormonal teenagers. I would also say that the Turners encourage crap. These are subjective opinions (but perhaps not purely held by me). What is less subjective is that they generally succeed in doing it.

    What these prizes also do is reflect lustre on both the entire field and on the sponsors of the prize. If you want to get stamp collecting recognised as a high art or Al Gore as trustworthy the best way of doing it is to set up, a prize, of significant financial worth and an honourable name, invite the media and ensure it goes to the world's best stamp collector or whoever. The question of who will win makes it intrinsically more interesting than just hearing somebody has been given a bonus. This may encourage givingb the appearance of a competition when it is arranged in advance. For example when the RIBA held their architecture prize award in Edinburgh and the widow of the architect flew in in advance it was hardly a surprise that the prize awarded there was to our ludicrously useless Holyrood Parliament building.

   The fact that they get sponsored shows the sponsors think it better than advertising. The fact that people can believe there is an incentive to fix shows everybody thinks they work.

Here is the very limited total of mentions of X-Prizes in out Parliament

A worthwhile pdf on the potential of privately sponsored prizes

And a very worthwhile paper on why government chose grants over prizes

   Prizes were a common way to patronize basic research in the eighteenth century. Science historians say grants then won over prizes because grants are a superior institution. If different patron types tend to use different patronage forms, however, perhaps the patron types who tend to use grants just became more common. To test this hypothesis, I estimate the use of prize-like vs. grant-like funding among eighteenth century scientific societies. Societies with non-autocratic, non-local government patrons were especially likely to use grant-like funding. As these are today’s dominant patrons of basic research, eighteenth century data successfully predicts current patronage forms....

a statistical model has been constructed to predict the combinations of grant-like and prize-like patronage among eighteenth century scientific societies. This model successfully predicts today’s dominant form of basic research patronage, mostly grant-like and not prize-like, and such predictions rely more on patron types than on a proxy for scientific professionalization....I have suggested that such governments might prefer grant-like funding to prize-like funding because they were susceptible to distributive pressures from leaders of scientific societies, who preferred the “pork” of increased discretion over the money that passed through theirhands.
   My conclusion is that prizes generally are a superior way of achieving objective than government prepayment. There are building projects where there is one site and a choice must be made in advance, where fixed price contracts are the only applicable option. There are cases, like High Court Judges, where one would not wish money to be a consideration in decision making. However in general prizes should be the preferred option and in almost all fields some expansion of the proportion of resources spent on prizes vis a vis conventional funding should be made.

UPDATE - Jerry Pournelle, from whom I & I suspect everybody else, first learned of X-Prizes has linked to this and also given me a 2nd mention today.

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Friday, December 09, 2011

Remember That Irish Economic Collapse?

   Remember the coverage it got on our state media? Remember all the statist politicians who were so very smug that Ireland's low corporation tax, light government regulation economy had hit the buffers?

  I blogged previously on how Jack McConnell, when asked why, having so often promised to make growing the economy his "first priority|" had not done so, when Ireland had proven 7% annual growth achievable said "3 years ago that would have been a difficult question to answer" but Ireland's recession no longer made it difficult.

   In fact Ireland's collapse was nothing to do with the economic basics. It was because they (A) were stuck in the Euro, which in the good times led to lots of rich Germans deciding it was a good investment and (B) the Irish government making a very silly 100% guarantee of their banks so that when they collapsed the ordinary Irish had to pay off the rich Germans and being in the Euro were unable to devalue as normal countries (including us) do and had to accept lots of German bureaucrats vetoing anything their government wants to do.

   Well despite the collapse (a collapse to a GDP still higher than ours, though they started at 60% of our per capita GNP) and despite an enormous drain from the debt they accepted the basics are still good and growth is still there. Albeit not as high as it used to be but still far better than ours.
There are signs of improvement. Compared with the previous year, exports are up 5.4 per cent for the first nine months of 2011, fuelled by gains from Pfizer, Intel, SAP and other multinational companies that were drawn to Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s by its low taxes, well-educated English-speaking workforce and access to the European market.


New information technology companies like LinkedIn and Facebook have recently arrived.

Prospects for local technology companies are improving, too. Brian Farrell founded Tethras with a partner three years ago to develop mobile applications for smartphones.

He now has 16 employees and hopes to double his workforce in the next 18 months.

Gross domestic product grew 1.2 per cent in the second quarter from a year earlier, compared with a decline of 0.4 per cent for all of 2010 and seven per cent in 2009.
  Strangely enough the state controlled British broadcast media has been far less enthusiastic about reporting this evidence of free market success.

  Proof that economic freedom always works. There has been excuse after excuse by British politicians for not learning the lesson - Ireland's boom will end soon; they are just playing catch up and will stop when they get to our GNP; yes it would have worked had we started back then when they did but it won't now (Wendy Alexander|).

    For balance I should point out that the Irish government have downgraded their forecasts of growth, though still to better than ours, on the basis that the Euro's problems are not being solved. Britain did downgrade our growth forecasts, following a fall in "growth" but unlike their's our current lower forecasts are predicated on the Euro troubles being solved. Believe whoever you think more competent.

   This is not to say Ireland are doing everything perfectly. They should quit the Euro, let the currency fall and thereby inflate away the debt.

Economic Freedom + Cheap Energy = Economic Growth

   They have a serious problem that they are one of the very few developed countries with a worse GNP to electricity ratio than us (7.75 as against 6.14) because they are even more anti-nuclear than Britain and pouring money into windmills. If they do nothing this will get worse, if only because some of it comes from Hunterston in Scotland and not only is Scotland going to be short soon but Hunterston was due to close this year and cannot have its life extended by political fiat forever.  In the circumstances we are not in a position to enjoy schadenfreude over that.

   However if they could achieve 7% growth for years before entangling them selves in the Euro our politicians have no excuse for not doi8ng the same. And if they were seriously held back by an an energy policy (or more properly anti-energy policy) similar to ours they could change it and achieve even higher growth at any time.

   So could we.

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Thursday, December 08, 2011

Not Just The Norwegians Who Have Tunnels - Faroe Islands

  The Faroe Islands are run, autonomously, by Denmark. They are roughly mid way between Scotland, Iceland and Norway. They have a population of 49,276.

  They also have 18 separate tunnels connecting their communities and islands. This is the same number as I have proposed and the Scottish government have refused within Scotland. OK I grant most of mine are dual carriageways and average longer but then again Scotland's population is over 100 times larger.

Here is the list
Hvalbiartunnilin 1963 1,450 4,760 Hvalba and Trongisvágur

Árnafjarðartunnilin 1965 1,680 5,510 Klaksvík and Árnafjørður One of the pair of Borðoyartunlarnir that connect Klaksvík with the eastern side of Borðoy and with the island Viðoy. Single lane, no lights.
Hvannasundstunnilin 1967 2,120 6,960 Árnafjørður and Hvannasund/Norðdepil One of the pair of Borðoyartunlarnir. It has only a single lane and no lights. There's one priority direction, with a series of passing places on the other side.
Sandvíkartunnilin 1969 1,500 4,900 Sandvík and Hvalba
Norðskálatunnilin 1976 2,520 8,270 Norðskáli and the valley Millum Fjarða
Leynartunnilin 1977 760 2,490 Leynar and the valley Kollfjarðardalur
Villingardalstunnilin 1979 1,193 3,914 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
Ritudalstunnilin 1980 683 2,241 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
Mikladalstunnilin 1980 1,082 3,550 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
Trøllanestunnilin 1985 2,248 7,375 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
- 1979–85 220 720 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
Leirvíkartunnilin 1985 2,238 7,343 Leirvík and Gøta
Kunoyartunnilin 1988 3,031 9,944 Kunoy and Haraldssund
Kollfjarðartunnilin 1992 2,816 9,239 Kollafjørður and Kaldbaksbotnur
Sumbiartunnilin 1997 3,240 10,630 Sumba and Lopra
Vágatunnilin 2002 4,940 16,210 Leynar and Fútaklett
Gásadalstunnilin 2006 1,445 4,741 Gásadalur and Bøur
Norðoyatunnilin 2006 6,186 20,295 Klaksvík and Leirvík
Hovstunnilin 2007 2,435 7,989 Øravík and Hov

   Looking at the longest - the recently completed Norðoyatunnilin (Northern Isle's Tunnel) of 6,300 m, which is 2.5 times the length of current Forth Bridge. It connects the city of Klaksvik, pop 4615 with the mere town of Leirvik pop 876. Which sets Edinburgh, presumably a mere village, in its place.

Norðoyatunnilin
 
   So, bearing in mind that John Swinney said we couldn't cut a Forth tunnel for under £6.6 billion, how much did this tunnel cost. £395 million Danish Kroner which is £45.4 million, (£6.9 million per km) - more expensive than Norway, but then as anybody in the Scottish Highlands knows, costs in remote areas go up with "the freight" and this is very remote compared to even the most remote part of Scotland.. It is still 0.068 of what the Scottish government say they can do a tunnel,  half the length but dualled, for beside the capital city.
 
   Apart from the general pleasure of poking fun at our parasitic political numptocracy who are incapable of matching the achievements of communities less than 100th as large, is the fact that the Norwegian achievement has been matched elsewhere. Norway and Denmark are separate countries, albeit both Scandinavian (a club Salmond is eager to shoehorn Scotland into)and if they can both do it nobody can credibly claim it can't be done here.
 
  If the will is there.
 
  I know that Mike Russell's public support for tunnels is based on having seen the Faroes example. Perhaps all the Hollyrood MSPs, or at least the Transport Committee, should go and see the reality the civil servants say is impossible for themselves.
 
 Google Faroe tunnels images

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Wednesday, December 07, 2011

£60 Billion Promise From The SNP - What A Load Of Bollocks

  The big news yesterday was that SNP Minister Alex Neil promised. to spend £60 billion on infrastructure to get us out of recession.

   Over the next 20 years.

   Which suggests he expects a rather long recession and that he will be in power for a long time too. One might expect the former to reduce his slim chance of the later.

   Looking at the "key points" it seems to be dualling the A9 which has been on everybody's "first priority" list since before devolution, next generation broadband to all by 2020, largely the work of the free market and available already in places like Singapore, asking England to build a railway and rebuilding Scotland's millions of homes to keep them warm without being heated - at a rate of  6,000 a year.

    Fortunately this is all obvious political flannel.

    I say fortunately because, while infrastructure building is one of the very few ways governments can help an economy grow (mainly the best thing they can do is get out of the way) but in Britain government infrastructure spending is, by an overwhelming margin, wasted. The previous Forth Bridge cost £19.5 million, £320m in today's money, but the new one will cost £2,300 million. This means 7/8th of the price is going missing. I like, being a trusting sort, to think it is going into paperwork, but going it certainly is. Nor is this an unusual example. We have a parliament building that went more than 10 times over budget. Trams which, at the original price would have been 5 times more expensive than if built elsewhere but will now be half the length and twice the price.

    I did put in an FoI on the subject asking why and was told that this is because such government projects have an automatic inflation rate of 4% per annum above inflation which, while it explains an 8 fold increase in bridge costs over 53 years almost exactly, rather begs the question so I put in another FoI
FoI request, exactly why the Scottish civil service believes that inflation in their costs in tunnelling projects; bridge building projects, other construction projects; and those other areas of government who claim this applies, insist that the very long term rate of cost increases for things they do simply cannot ever be reduced to less than 4% above what applies to the rest of the world.

      To which I have now received another reply. The nearest it gets to giving a reason is that "over the last decade the construction industry has faced higher costs with significantly higher oil prices" which (A) applies to everybody and so does not explain why the government bureaucracy has a higher "inflation rate" & (B) doesn't explain over 50 years of it. I am, also helpfully advised that the growth in the costs of government projects is proven (I never doubted it the question was is there an excuse) and "evidenced by research carried out recently by Transport Scotland" which "is yet to be published".

     There have been cases where I have made FoIs where I was and am certain the failure to reply or provide information was deliberate. However I don't think this is one of them.

    I believe the inability to produce any outside justification for the cost of government work increasing 4% more than the rest of the world's is a responsive answer. There simply is no slightest excuse for this massive state parasitism and there is no slightest intention to control it. Not only is it expected that costs will be 8 times higher than they could be the rise in wastefulness is intended to continue. In another 5 years it will be 10 times and so on ad finitum.

     In which case there are no circumstances whatsoever under which it would be a good thing if Alex Neil's promises were to be worthwhile. In 20 years time government parasitism will be taking 17 times more than the engineering costs of projects. Overall, if government were actually to take £60 billion out of the economy or add it to the next generation's debts the benefit it would produce would be well under £6 billion. That is not a way to grow an economy it is (yet another as if our government hadn't produced enough of them) way to impoverish us.

     Now if the government actually wanted to grow the economy and had £60 billion to spare over the next 20 years all they would have to do is halve corporation tax (£1 bn a year), halve business rates (£1 bn) and cut income tax by "the Tartan Tax" 3p (£1 bn) and keep at it for 20 years. That would grow the economy even under Scotland's political nomenklatura.

     I will repeat what I said would be the inevitable conclusion if there were no technical reason for this price increase since clearly there isn't and thus clearly there is no other conclusion possible .

    
One obvious answer would be an enormous growth of government employees whose work adds zero, or less, to productivity. Another would be massive fraud. I do not insist it be either but it is clearly, at least in this case, not in any way an engineering cost and there must be otherwise some enormous, irreducable and generationally continuing reason or reasons for this....
Obviously this effect does suggest, overwhelmingly, that, whatever the reason, no activity should ever be left in government's hands over the long term where it could possibly be put into the free market, even if there were cases where government appeared to be currently doing it at less cost.

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Tuesday, December 06, 2011

We Could Get Out Of Recession In Days - 24 Point Programme Published

  I am pleased to say that Brian Monteith has chosen my suggested 24 point plan to get out of recession for his ThinkScotland site. This is despite the fact that it is really a UK plan not specifically a Scottish one. Please put any comments there.

    This plan and earlier versions has been around for several years and no elected politician, Westminster or Holyrood party, thinktank or media outlet to whom I have sent it has chosen to express an opinion.

    I had privately suggested that this may be because it is obviously wrong or, depending on how one views our political class, because it is unanswerably right, I don't see any other option being feasible.

   To anybody who accepts the overwhelming statistical evidence that economic freedom strongly correlates with economic success here or here there can be no dispute that Brian Monteith is the most economically competent person to ever serve as a Member of the Scottish Parliament so if he decides it isn't "obviously wrong" it obviously isn't.

   Brian has shown he is a genuine patriot with the integrity to stand, alone if necessary, for sense and against ripping off the Scottish people. After he left, the "parcel of rogues" who make up Holyrood voted unanimously to destroy the Scottish economy and sell the Scottish people into debt slavery, purely to get patted on the head by the UK/EU nomenklatura on the basis of what they all know to be a fraudulent scare. It is clearly impossible for any honest person to suggest that the treasonous and cynical Salmond, or any crony MSP possesses 1/1,000th as much true patriotism as he.

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Monday, December 05, 2011

Dalgety Bay - Scotsman Letter


  This letter in the Scotsman today
Dr John Cameron writes scathingly of the alleged radiation hazard at Dalgety Bay. SEPA's own consultants years ago told them that the radiation level there was "less than 2/3rds that of the typical Aberdeen Street"; that the amount of radium in the (water soluble) paint 60 years ago needed to paint all the numbers on the dials of these planes is likely to be well short of a gram; whereas in a foot of topsoil over any square mile anywhere there averages 8 tonnes of uranium and thorium and 1 gram of radium.
Despite SEPA's claims to have found "radium and its daughter elements" (radium's sole daughter element is radon, a gas which could not remain there) no actual chemical proof of radium has been found. The radiation at Dalgety Bay is overwhelmingly and possibly entirely background radiation, and far from the highest level found naturally. SEPA have been playing on an entirely unfounded public hysteria about radiation and ignorance thereof which has been promoted by political "environmentalists" for decades. 
  I have kept in a couple of very minor editings which improved it by tightening it up. Thank you Scotsman for at last publishing.

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Sunday, December 04, 2011

Herman Cain - A fine Candidate Who Could Only Be Removed by Smear

Herman Cain Drops Out of Presidential Race
Herman Cain, a professional mathematician and successful self made entrepreneur  - when did America or any western nation last have a more qualified leader, but not invulnerable to false smears.

  A few weeks ago Herman Cain was the front running candidate for the Republican nomination. His 9-9-9 tax reform )9% income tax, VAT and corporation tax which would certainly let America's economy grow fast) was popular, practical and hated by the parasites dependent on ever more government largess.

  Then out of the blue came some remarkably unspecific and unsupported allegations of "sexual misconduct" a long time ago.

   The allegers said there were 5 separate women claiming something but 2 are entirely unidentified which makes disputing any claims they might have made if they actually exist and are making claims, problematic.. 1 of the others amounts to making an unsubtle pass. 1 is of "making a gesture indicating his wife's height by holding his palm flat" which is a version of sex i am unfamiliar with. The last is a woman claiming to have had a 13 year affair with him. However it is difficult to believe such an affair would never have been witnessed or produced any evidence and when there is more attention and money making opportunities available to anybody making obviously ridiculous claims here than to anybody claiming to have been abducted by space aliens it is only surprising that there have been more of the latter..

   It is claimed that 2 of them  received severance settlements greater than they were legally due however in  However in America (& Britain) it is common to settle baseless dismissal suits with some pay off since that is cheaper than fighting and winning and neither payment is claimed to be above, or even matching the legal costs of winning such a case.

    So there it would stand. No evidence; no credible allegations; no history (as there was with DSK); no avocado stains; nothing but 2 non-credible allegations only the least so involving actual sex.

    That this non-story becomes the major "newsworthy" item in a campaign to decide the government of the USA, in a campaign where there are real policies being put forward (unlike so many campaigns) would seem to be a remarkable indictment of the triviality of the American media, not to say its obvious bias since it treated far more credible allegations against Clinton (also true ones) as unimportant as well as ones strongly supported by evidence of Obama's fraudulently getting money from Chicago's leading political/mobster lawyer.

    Were it not for some genuine investigative journalism from Ann Coulter.
Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country -- Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but never in Chicago.
So it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod.

The reason all this is relevant is that both Axelrod and Daley have a history of smearing political opponents by digging up claims of sexual misconduct against them.
John Brooks, Chicago's former fire commissioner, filed a lawsuit against Daley six months ago claiming Daley threatened to smear him with sexual harassment accusations if Brooks didn't resign. He resigned -- and the sexual harassment allegations were later found to be completely false.
Meanwhile, as extensively detailed in my book "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America," the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator -- allowing him to run for president -- is that David Axelrod pulled sealed divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama's Democratic primary opponent, and then against Obama's Republican opponent.
One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was way down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader.
But then The Chicago Tribune -- where Axelrod used to work -- began publishing claims that Hull's second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.
From then until Election Day, Hull was embroiled in fighting the allegation that he was a "wife beater." He and his ex-wife eventually agreed to release their sealed divorce records. His first ex-wife, daughters and nanny defended him at a press conference, swearing he was never violent. During a Democratic debate, Hull was forced to explain that his wife kicked him and he had merely kicked her back.
Hull's substantial lead just a month before the primary collapsed with the nonstop media attention to his divorce records. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.
Luckily for Axelrod, Obama's opponent in the general election had also been divorced.
Axelrod's courthouse moles obtained the "sealed" records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially "unseal" them -- over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.
Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!
A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).
With a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama's Republican opponent, Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate election, winning with a 43 percent margin.
And that's how Obama became a senator four years after losing a congressional race to Bobby Rush. (In a disastrous turn of events, Rush was not divorced.)
Axelrod destroyed the only two men who stood between Obama and the Senate with illicitly obtained, lurid allegations from their pasts.
In 2007, long after Obama was safely ensconced in the U.S. Senate, The New York Times reported: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece (on Hull's sealed divorce records) later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story."
Some had suggested, the Times article continued, that Axelrod had "an even more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story."

  The Daley-controlled Illinois Rerataurant Association works hand-in-glove with the National RA. And strangely enough, Cain's short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only period in his decades-long career during which he's alleged to have been a sexual predator....


Herman Cain has never lived in Chicago. But you know who has? David Axelrod! And guess who lived in Axelrod's very building? Right again: Cain's latest accuser, Sharon Bialek.
Bialek's accusations were certainly specific. But they also demonstrated why anonymous accusations are worthless.
Within 24 hours of Bialek's press conference, friends and acquaintances of hers stepped forward to say that she's a "gold-digger," that she was constantly in financial trouble -- having filed for personal bankruptcy twice -- and, of course, that she had lived in Axelrod's apartment building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive, where, she admits, she knew the man The New York Times calls Obama's "hired muscle."

Axelrod's courthouse moles obtained the "sealed" records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially "unseal" them -- over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.
Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!
A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).
With a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama's Republican opponent, Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate election, winning with a 43 percent margin.
And that's how Obama became a senator four years after losing a congressional race to Bobby Rush. (In a disastrous turn of events, Rush was not divorced.)
Axelrod destroyed the only two men who stood between Obama and the Senate with illicitly obtained, lurid allegations from their pasts.
In 2007, long after Obama was safely ensconced in the U.S. Senate, The New York Times reported: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece (on Hull's sealed divorce records) later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story."
Some had suggested, the Times article continued, that Axelrod had "an even more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story."
This time, Obama's little helpers have not only thrown a bomb into the Republican primary, but are hoping to destroy the man who deprives the Democrats of their only argument in 2012: If you oppose Obama, you must be a racist.
     So while there is absolutely no actual evidence of any wrongdoing by Cain whatsoever there is overwhelming evidence of a statistically impossible presence of Obama's "hired muscle" being behind the scenes here. There is overwhelming statistical certainty that on 3 separate occasions Obama's hired muscle has been used to dispose of opponents using largely or entirely false claims and in one occasion in a deliberate perversion of the law (ie breaching court records). Theoretically it is possible that the hired muscle acted without his boss's consent buy this is clearly far less likely, 3 times, than it was with Watergate & I don't find that remotely credible.

   Anybody think that is not hundreds of times more important for someone holding the office of President that he is found to be a politically corrupt, lawbreaking, liar, in league with what is widely g=known to be a gangster related political machine (Chicago's) than anything Cain has been even accused of?

   Anybody expect the US (or indeed British as it is reported here) media will not continue to censor, giving far less airtime to the real story than the smear, to promote the crook? Obama may be a gangster but he could not get away with this if the US media were not lying and censoring to help him.

    This is proving to be a dirty election. The thieving, lying, murdering nomenklatura who control the US government and media are fighting for their political  futures. Expect more and more such lies from Obama and his creatures. Next.

  How many more human sacrifices must there be?

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