Reuters – Wal-Mart Stores Inc said on Monday it is taking a controlling stake in Chinese e-commerce firm Yihaodian, as the world’s largest retailer seeks new revenue sources to fend off rising competition in the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
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Wal-Mart to take majority stake in China e-commerce firm
(Reuters)
Reuters – President Barack Obama kept up his attack on Chinese trade practices during a campaign-style visit on Wednesday to a Midwest factory, where his call to bring jobs back home was intended to resonate with voters in an election year.
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Obama takes fresh aim at China, touts "insourcing"
(Reuters)
Sarah Palin told the FOX and Friends crew this morning that Barack Obama “is not fit to hold office” because he never takes “responsibility for mistakes.” Agreed… Not to mention his policies are a complete disaster. Thanks to Media Matters for the video:
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Sarah Palin: Obama Is “Not Fit To Hold This Office” Because He Won’t Take “Responsibility For Mistakes” (Video)
Indonesian investors in coal miner withdraw their request but still back proposals for board changes at next board meeting in March
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Rothschild heads off call for Bumi EGM
Time magazine decided to publish a symposium on “What Is a Conservative?” in its February 13 edition employing “voices of — and experts on — the right,” including Erick Erickson, Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru, Ann Coulter, Grover Norquist, Pete Wehner, and libertarian Nick Gillespie. The obvious non-conservative “expert” in this group is Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Time failed to explain that this very puzzling inclusion is the man who just wrote a book in 2009 forecasting “The Death of Conservatism,” which in intellectual history is about as embarrassing as Geraldo Rivera standing in front of Al Capone's alleged vault. Tanenhaus naturally lectured that “Every ambitious Republican President since Abraham Lincoln” understood that calling for smaller government is meaningless. He began by quoting Harry Jaffa, touted as the writer of Barry Goldwater's “incendiary” acceptance speech at the 1964 GOP convention. “Calling for smaller government is essentially a meaningless idea, because what we need is not larger or smaller government but government that does the job it's supposed to do.” Tanenhaus doesn't square this with the author of “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He was lecturing the Tea Party: Every ambitious Republican President since Abraham Lincoln understood this, whether it was Theodore Roosevelt reining in the trusts, Dwight Eisenhower muscling through the interstate highway system or Richard Nixon, who began his first term in 1969 with a plan ” not to dismantle the Gret Society but to try and do it better,” to quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democrat whom Nixon recruited to lead his anti-poverty program. Nixon knew that Americans, much though they professed to dislike Big Government, still expected it to solve themost pressing social problems. Long ago, the archconservative Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” famous for battling the New Deal, spoke not of undoing government but of achieving “sound government.” He pushed for federally subsidized low-income housing and the promise of “reasonable material standards of living.” This was also the premise of the silly Tanenhaus “Death of Conservatism” book, that conservatism's goal should be to consolidate liberal statism when liberals lose elections. Tanenhaus proclaimed today's conservative movement was like “the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.” How on Earth would that make Time think he's an “expert on” conservatism? Clearly, they're all engaged in some very un-factual wishful thinking.
Having given up on pillorying Mitt Romney for plundering his way to vast wealth — because, unfortunately, it isn't true — the NFM (Non-Fox Media) seem to have settled on denouncing him as a rich jerk. Liberals are disgusted by people who made their own money, as Romney did at Bain Capital. But they admire ill-gotten gains, which is how John Kerry, John Edwards, Jon Corzine, John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and innumerable other spokesmen for the downtrodden amassed their fortunes. Democrats are very proud of the rich, patrician FDR — who inherited all of his money and then launched a series of federal entitlements designed to bankrupt America 60 years later. JFK also inherited his wealth, from a father who made his money as a bootlegger and stock manipulator. (In their defense, both men went on to create lots of jobs for bartenders and prostitutes.) Kerry is in a special category of the gigolo. He acquired his fortune by marrying someone, who married someone, who inherited the money — leading Kerry's children to refer to Teresa Heinz Kerry as their “step-money.” In what can only be described as sheer luck, Kerry's first wife was also an heiress. I've been diligently searching for the shrieks of horror from the media over John Kerry's tax returns when he ran for president eight years ago, but I can't find anything. (Although I did find a reference to Kerry's having served in Vietnam. Anybody else hear about that?) Even when Kerry refused to release his wife's tax returns in order to avoid the humiliation of revealing his allowance, the press was demurely silent. John Edwards made well over $50 million by shaking down hardworking doctors with junk science lawsuits — as The New York Times has since admitted. The highlight of his carnival sideshows was when he channeled unborn children in front of illiterate jurors. (In the Democrats' moral universe, the unborn have no right to life, but they're perfectly acceptable as witnesses for the plaintiff in a malpractice suit.) As I recall, Democrats were overjoyed with Wall Street financier-turned Democratic politician Jon Corzine. It was just three years ago, in 2009, when President Obama was hailing Corzine as one of the “best partners I have in the White House.” Today, prosecutors are trying to find out what Corzine did with hundreds of millions of his customers' money. The media do everything they can to avoid looking into these mountebanks when they are active politicians. Then, when they're out of office, the NFM summarily announce that they always knew the Democrats were sleazeballs, and why are we still talking about them?
It’s very totalitarian in my opinion. I mean, It smacks of forcing somebody to confront something that they have already decided they don’t want to deal with. I disagree. Forcing other Americans to pay for what you decide to do as a result of free will activities beneath the sheets is what is totalitarian. Murdering children is totalitarian. Via
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Sound Bite For The Day: Joy Behar: “Totalitarian” To Require Ultrasound Before Abortion
Reuters – China’s annual inflation spiked to a consensus-busting 4.5 percent in January as spending jumped during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday season, breaking a five-month softening trend and forcing a market rethink of policy easing expectations.
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China inflation spike pricks policy easing expectations
(Reuters)
Bottom falling from under Gingrich? Hot on the heels of Mitt Romney’s big win in Nevada come two more caucuses and another primary on Tuesday, in which no delegates will get directly assigned to any candidate. However, both offer opportunities to shape the media coverage of the overall primary campaign, and for Rick Santorum, this might mean some good news. Read this post
Two weeks ago Big Government reported that Facebook and Politico created a new partnership to reveal users’ public private messages–if and when they relate to their feelings about a political candidate–will be fed through a ‘sentiment analysis tool’ and potentially reported on Politico. Conservatives should understandably have concerns about Politico’s upcoming reporting since most Facebook users are young and supportive of Barack Obama–in fact Facebook’s own CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been rumored to be an Obama fan, too . But now there’s new criticism coming from the left: Christopher Calabrese of the The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Legislative Office posted a blog on January 13th stressing their concerns: Most troubling is Facebook’s willingness to search and collect users’ private political preferences and thoughts, preferences they may have shared only with their closest friend in a private email. This raises at least three concerns. The first is that many users may not want to be part of any “sentiment analysis” or poll. For example, they may be a firm supporter of Mitt Romney but find Ron Paul’s ideas interesting. Are they now going to feel hesitant to talk about Paul’s ideas out of awareness that it might be registered as support or boost a candidate they don’t like? Second, we don’t see any mention of user consent anywhere in Facebook’s announcement. How has Facebook decided that users agreed that their personal communications can and should be used in this way? Finally, what other uses might this information be put to in the future? Will it be used to serve users ads from politicians or manipulate voting preferences in some way? We can see the marketing materials from Facebook now: “Candidates, serve ads to secret supporters! No one knows about their preferences except their closest friends and us.” The real question here is what are Facebook’s motives? In the wake of its first public offering of an IPO at $5 billion, analysts are saying that the social utility is worth a total of $85 to $100 billion–the biggest Silicon Valley IPO ever. Last year Facebook earned a revenue of $3.71 billion up 88 percent from 2010. With such stunning financial success, why is such an invasive measure necessary? As mentioned earlier, Zuckerberg is rumored to be an Obama fan and it’s no secret Facebook data may misrepresent overwhelming support for the 44th president. When that information gets reported to the public via Politico there’s no telling what the impact will be. After all, everyone likes to feel like they’re on the winning side and voting for the candidate with the best chances of winning. Just how close is Zuckerberg to Obama? Zuckerberg has met the president on several occasions. Here he is featured having dinner with Obama last February along with several other technology leaders, but it’s Zuckerberg who is sitting right beside the president: Last April Zuckerberg also led a townhall discussion with the president , and most interesting: Just after filing with U.S. regulators to take the company public that could make Facebook $28 billion, Zuckerberg participated in an online town hall this morning with none other than the president himself . According UPI.com, Facebook awarded the IPO responsibilities to the Morgan Stanley financial services firm (the president’s number one campaign contributor is JP Morgan). Are Zuckerberg’s motives in this instance really financial–or are they political–and do they misrepresent nationwide support for President Obama?
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ACLU: Facebook-Politico Relationship Presents a Privacy Concern