Category Archives: Homeland Security

Montana Supreme Court Orders Judges to Lower Bail for Soulless Monster Who Boiled 5-Year-Old

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The boy lived but was in the hospital for three months with 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 40% of his body. The scum that did this, Juan Miguel Vasquez, deserves to die for what he did to that poor child. Instead, the judiciary ruled that judges in the case must take into account his financial means when setting bail. Apparently being poor mitigates being a child torturer:

Bail for a Whitefish man accused of forcing his girlfriend’s 5-year-old child into a bathtub full of scalding water, severely burning the boy, has been reduced to $50,000.

Juan Miguel Vasquez, 28, previously had been required to post $120,000 bail before being released.

Following an order from the Montana Supreme Court, Flathead County District Court Judge Stewart E. Stadler took Vasquez’s financial situation into account during the hearing Thursday.

Vasquez’s father testified briefly about the limited financial resources he and his family could contribute.

Should he post bond, Vasquez must appear in front of a judge before being released.

At a previous bond reduction hearing, Vasquez — who has limited mobility from a serious back injury and has extensive family connections in Northwest Montana — testified he was not a flight risk.

I’m sure. Odds are he’ll either kill the victim or jump bail as soon as he’s out. A man that would scald a child like this is capable of anything and needs to be remanded:

The Whitefish Police Department responded to the boy’s Ramsey Avenue residence on Oct. 24, 2008 and discovered the severely burned boy.

The boy, who suffered second- and third-degree burns to more than 40 percent of his body, was treated for three months at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

In interviews with a detective from the Seattle Police Department, the boy said that Vasquez put him in the bathtub of scalding water and then forced him to stay there, despite his screams.

According to court documents, a doctor and child-abuse expert at Harborview told investigators the pattern of burns on the boy’s body is consistent with forced immersion.

Vasquez is an animal. And unsurprisingly, the little prince’s crimes don’t end with torturing children:

Vasquez also is facing one count of fraudulently obtaining dangerous drugs, a felony.

He allegedly signed for three of his girlfriend’s prescriptions in her name at a Whitefish pharmacy while she was out of state at the hospital with her injured son.

Vasquez’s girlfriend told investigators she did not receive the prescriptions — which included painkillers and sleeping pills — and they were not found at their residence.

Am I wrong or does this mean he was stealing the boy’s painkillers? What kind of monster is this man?

Way to go, Montana. I’m glad the courts there are looking out for people like Vasquez, while not giving a crap about the financial burden the victims of his crime now have in medical bills, and if the victim’s mother is smart, firearms since she’s going to need some guns to protect her son from this animal when the Montana hug-a-thug-a-thon is over and Vasquez gets less time than it’ll take for the boy to recover. Maybe his bail will be higher when he murders the mother and her son?

h/t DodiaFae from Pagans Against Child Abuse

The Real Unemployment Rate is at 16% Says Fed Official

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I guess the stimulus hasn’t kicked in yet:

The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.

“If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.

He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did “do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee,” the policy-setting body of the central bank.

Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department’s monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent.

Lockhart, who heads the Atlanta, Georgia, division of the Fed, is the first central bank official to acknowledge the depth of unemployment amid the worst US recession since the Great Depression.

Lockhart said the US economy was improving but “still fragile,” and the beginning stages of a sluggish recovery were underway.

Not with 16% unemployment it’s not.

U.S. to Run Out of Sugar?

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I missed this report from a few days ago, but an eagle-eyed reader pointed it out:

The United States is facing a major sugar shortage, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required).

On Aug. 5, General Mills, Hershey Co, Mars Inc., and Kraft Foods alerted Thomas J. Vilsak, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, of their combined forecast of low sugar supplies. These food companies warned that if the Agriculture Department does not allow them to import more tariff-free sugar, “our nation will virtually run out of sugar” and they will be forced to raise consumer prices and lay off workers.

This comes as a major eye opener, but there’s more to this finding.

The WSJ states that the present trade quota places a limit to the number of tariff-free sugar that can be imported per year, with the exception of Mexico. This leaves major suppliers like Brazil out of the free trade mix. The fear looms that Brazil may not even have significant sugar supply for the U.S. because they are busy using large amounts of cane crop for ethanol use.

Another problem is the U.S. government; not a surprise. The U.S. artificially inflates domestic prices of sugar in order to support the incomes of farmers in the Midwest who are friendly with politicians who help them. Anything for a vote, right?

Economists state that sugar is part of the equation. Sugar is an active ingredient in almost all foods, and the impact of a price increase will be big. Food companies pay twice the world level for sugar because of government meddling.

Then there is this via SurvivalBlog. Sugar prices are expected to rise 80%:

Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) — Sugar may climb 80 percent to as high as 40 cents a pound on global supply shortages, said Singapore-based commodity hedge fund manager Michael Coleman.

“Sugar is caught in a perfect storm,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview. There is “a big hole” in world supply and no obvious solution in the next six to nine months, said Coleman, 49, managing director of Aisling Analytics, which runs a $1.4 billion fund invested in energy and agriculture.

The sweetener has already surged 88 percent this year, reaching a 28-year high, as India, the biggest consumer, had its driest June in 83 years and parts of Brazil, the largest grower, were drenched by rainfall four times more than normal, too wet to harvest. World demand will exceed output by as much as 5 million metric tons in the year ending September 2010, according to the International Sugar Organization.

“Is there a possibility of reaching 40 cents a pound? Certainly,” said Coleman, whose fund returned 24 percent in 2008. “From this point on, it depends how price affects demand.” Sugar reached a peak of 23.33 cents a pound in New York on Aug. 12 and ended at 22.21 cents yesterday.

Meaning the prices you pay will increase at least 80% but likely much more. Stock up if you have room in your pantry.

The “Only Idiots Think the Recession is Over” Link Round-Up

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All the “economists” who claim the recession is over do so ignoring signs of a looming crisis so obvious that it is clearly willful blindness for them to ignore. Don’t listen to what some shill in a Hope and Change t-shirt is saying, read the news and use your common sense:

Foreclosures Rose 7% from June to July –

“More than 360,000 households, or one in every 355 homes, received a foreclosure-related notice, such as a notice of default or trustee’s sale. That’s the highest monthly level since the foreclosure-listing firm began publishing the data more than four years ago.

Banks repossessed more than 87,000 homes in July, up from about 79,000 homes a month earlier.”

Retail Sales unexpectedly dipped in July–

The latest government reports reinforced concerns about how quickly consumers will be able to contribute to a broad economic recovery.

“There is really no positive spin to put on these numbers,” Jennifer Lee, an economist with BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a research note. “The U.S. consumer remains very weak. The jobs situation, while slowly improving, is still dismal.”

Wal-Mart posts flat profits but beats expectations– Another report that shows American consumerism, which is the engine of the global economy, is not going to drag companies out of this mess. As goes Wal-Mart so to the mom and pop shops in small towns everywhere.

The 10 Fastest Dying Cities met for a symposium– Here’s a little vignette to explain why there is no hope for these future ruins:

Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin ran to the podium for her talk. “If you look under the surface, you will see that we are developing a boutique city,” she said. She didn’t elaborate on what she meant.

But the city is working with hospitals, universities and a U.S. Air Force base to rebuild neighborhoods. About 500 abandoned structures will be razed this year with $3.5 million in federal stimulus money. Neighbors can annex the empty lots or the city will plant prairie grass and call them parks, said John Gower, Dayton’s director of planning and community development.

“We can’t go back and recreate the neighborhoods of the 1950s and 1960s, but we have a huge opportunity to create a new form for our cities,” Mr. Gower said. “People want to live in beautiful places near green space.”

Traders are bracing for a September collapse – You should be too!

The Fed purchased $6.6 Billion dollars in of its own treasuries – Hyperinflation here we come!

Billions of dollars in bad loans still threaten U.S. Banks.

Frequent government intervention to stop the bust part of capitalism’s natural boom and bust cycle have spared many generations minor pain by pushing all that economic pain down the road. This financial game of kick the can worked great for a time, but as the government tightens its control on the economy that can isn’t going to have anyone to kick it further down the line. Massive taxes coming down the pike to pay for the Democrats’ bribing, I mean spending, spree will destroy the last of the productive Americans including those businesses that make civilization possible like small farms which we are losing at an alarming rate.

So the economists may be right, we may be out of the “recession” and into something much worse.

More Democrat Thuggery! Union Goons Attack New Hampshire Patriot, HuffPo Advocates Brownshirt Tactics

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Via Gateway Pundit comes this report from GraniteGrok in which a Union thug attacks some Free Stater at the behest of the Democrat Gestapo:

It seems that one of the Free Staters was accosted by either an SEIU or AFSCME union thug.  The story, corroborated by several sources, is that the Free Stater said something that the Union thug did not like and hauled off and spit into his video camera

and then kicked him in the groin.

The camera was running so hopefully it will surface soon.

Meanwhile Huffington Post contributor, known historical revisionist, and Pro-Communist anti-Semite Joseph A. Palermo has called for Democrats to handle criticism of health care by enlisting large numbers of Union goons to intimidate them into silence:

So there’s a simple solution to these Republican astro-turf goon squads that are currently disrupting Democratic town hall meetings on health care. Do what Kennedy did. Speak before a crowd of supporters who have dirt under their fingernails and know how to win battles in the workplace. The fight over health care is no different from the fight over the eight-hour day or the minimum wage. At root is whether we as a nation are going to view health care as a human right or will we allow it to remain a privilege.

Democratic politicians facing town hall disruptions should seek the help of their working-class supporters. Make sure large numbers of people from the local unions come to these events. Then we’ll see if the Tea Bagger thugs can continue their bullying tactics on behalf of corporations seeking to block progress on health care.

Aside from the weird man crush Palermo has on what he thinks are rough around the edges Union bears who scare we Republicans with their “burliness” Palermo betrays what effete downwardly mobile White academics (Palermo is a college adjunct unsurprisingly) think of working class men.  In Palermo’s mind they are violent, easily led and exist to do the bidding of their “betters.”

Palermo should note that everyone attacked by a Union thug was sucker punched, a small person, or a woman. I am attending several South Carolina town halls next week and I can give you my personal guarantee that some union thug who spits on my camera or puts his hands on me will score a “full one” on the Muta scale. I can also guarantee that since I myself am “burly” no union thug will hit me no matter how many hateful things i say about their mothers, something which I can’t guarantee won’t happen.  I wonder if that would shatter his fantasy of being rescued from a mob of evil right wingers by a plaid shirted carpenter who sweeps him up in his strong arms and rushes him to his cottage in the woods to recuperate?

But I know a lot of people like Palermo, weak and fragile themselves they see the lazy, fat drunks that make up the union’s professional protest wing as the height of intimidation. Palermo’s the same person who crosses the street when he sees a Black couple or orders his lo mein in badly garbled Mandarin that he picked up on a vacation to China. Palermo is the very picture of what he himself would call White Privilege, that is the ability of people like him to insulate themselves from reality with a combination of his parents’ money and only coming into contact with minorities and working class people when they are fixing his toilet or serving him food.

Thus he sees union shops as workers’ armies waiting for an academic commissar to give them marching orders and anyone who disagrees with him is just a target of his unresolved father issues, sublimated through the lens of his adolescent fixation on Leninism. Palermo’s call for violence is a call for others to exert his absent masculinity and it is disturbingly sincere for all its eyebrow raising Freudian slippage. There are thousands of people like Palermo out there calling for violence, and if even 1% will act on it that’s a lot of crime coming our way.