Burlington Coat Factory riots;

Yesterday, we saw a perfect demonstration of how the welfare state works. In Columbus, Ohio, a woman named Linda Brown showed up in a limousine at a Burlington Coat Factory store (did someone say "limousine liberal") claiming to have won the lottery. She promised to pay for everyone's purchases. [But, like posturing Democrat politicians pretending to "get tough" on welfare recipients, she put limits on the giveaway - she promised to pay only for purchases up to $500.00.]

"Well, of course, people like to hear that," [police Lt.] Deakins said. "Apparently they were in line calling relatives who were not at the store and told them to come."

So she told the people what they wanted to hear, and they immediately called their relatives to get in on the free goodies. The inevitable then happened:

People flooded the registers as cashiers began ringing up purchase after purchase, but Brown had not yet paid the bill, Deakins said. At least 500 people filled the aisles and another 1,000 were outside trying to get in, he said.

This sounds eerily like our own welfare system, which has been overwhelmed over the past few decades. The difference is that it took longer than one day to overwhelm the welfare system. Because it has taken so long, it has been harder to notice and easier to get used to. Much like the government, our coat philanthropist had no actual money to honor the welfare promises:

"She was telling people she won $1.5 million," Deakins said. "But it ends up she didn't win anything. She had no money to pay for anything." About an hour later, Brown had the limousine driver take her to a bank to withdraw money, but she returned empty-handed, police Detective Steven Nace said. By then, store employees had called in two dozen police officers to handle the crowds.

The results were predictable and inevitable:

By the time employees realized Brown didn't have any cash to pay, police said, she already had taken off in the limo. That's when angry customers, realizing they weren't getting free coats, began throwing merchandise on the floor and grabbing clothes without paying for them, Nace said. "Everybody was like, 'I still want my free stuff,' and that started the riot," he said. "It looks like (Hurricane) Katrina went through the store." Police said they have no way of tracking down the customers who stole items and fled, but they're reviewing surveillance video.

emphasis added

Even though there was no money and it was not the store's fault, people still wanted their "free stuff." The promise of free goods had created an expectation among those who would not otherwise resort to theft. Linda Brown, much like the welfare system, turned law abiding people into thieves and rioters. Police eventually arrested Linda Brown on prior warrants:

She was jailed late Wednesday, but no charges had been filed against her related to the coat store chaos pending a mental health evaluation.

It is now too late to perform "mental health evaluations" on FDR, LBJ and the other creators of today's federal entitlement mess, but what can we say about those who would perpetuate this system, knowing that it is bankrupt.

According to WCPO (channel 9) in Columbus:

Police arrested her for fraud and inducing panic, because of the commotion in the store.

Can we arrest Congress and the President for "fraud and inducing panic." There is no doubt that the federal welfare system is fraudulent, seeing as how there is no money to pay for it. There is also no doubt that political leaders rely on fear and panic during election years every time a challenger suggests even modest reductions in the rate of increase in welfare spending. The ability to induce fear and panic among welfare recipients is the key weapon for incumbent politicians.

video from channel 10

What if the police, instead of quelling the riot, had promised the rioters that another lottery winner would soon show up? Would that have solved the problem? If not, how do we expect the federal welfare programs to be successful?

Watts riots - a lottery hoax on a grand scale and its aftermath

Winter of 2009-2010; hurricane season; more record cold

Snow is forecast for Pennsylvania. Record cold has hit Washington state and Montana:

We haven't just set new records, we've blown them out of the water. The lows have been 10, 11 and 8 the last three mornings in Missoula, and we've gone at least nine degrees lower than the old record each morning.

Record cold continues in Chicago.

Meanwhile, hurricane season this year has been the quietest in more than a decade.

Barack Obama's Nobel prize; Emperor Nero and the Olympics

By now, all of you are aware that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. And all of you are aware that the prize is a joke. I found a writing of historian Will Durant, in which he described a similar "honor" bestowed upon Emperor Nero:

. . . Nero left in 66 [A.D.] to compete in the Olympic games and make a concert tour of Greece . . . . At Olympia he drove a quadriga in the races; he was thrown from the car and was nearly crushed to death; restored to his chariot he continued the contest for a while, but gave up before the end of the course. The judges, however, knew an emperor from an athlete and awarded him the crown of victory. Overcome with happiness when the crowd applauded him, he announced that thereafter not only Athens and Sparta but all Greece should be free - i.e., exempt from any tribute to Rome. The Greek cities accommodated him by running the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games in one year; he responded by taking part in all of them as singer, harpist, actor, or athlete. He obeyed the rules of the various competitions carefully, was all courtesy to his opponents, and gave them Roman citizenship as consolation for his invariable victories. . . . . When he sang in a theater, says Suetonius, "no one was allowed to leave, even for the most urgent reasons. And so it was that some women gave birth there, while some feigned death to be carried out." . . . . Alarmed by further reports of uprisings and plots, Nero returned to Italy (67 [A.D.]), entered Rome in a formal triumph, and showed, as trophies, the 1,808 prizes he had won in Greece.

Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, 1944, pp. 282-283 (emphasis added)

Just as the Greek Olympic judges knew an emperor from an athlete, the Nobel committee knows an emperor wannabe from a truly deserving recipient.
Mark Steyn points out:

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy — for America and the world.

Obama has a ways to go before he equals Nero's 1,808 prizes, but give him time. Obama may yet achieve true "tragedy" faster than Nero did. We should be mindful of the lasting consequences from this administration even as we laugh at the seeming idiocy. As Durant wrote of the period immediately following Nero's accumulation of the 1,808 prizes:

Tragedy was rapidly catching up with his comedy.

p. 283

Rome would spend the next several years in alternating periods of revolt and bloody civil war, during which time Nero was deposed and assisted in suicide [Durant, p. 284]:

Many of the populace rejoiced at his death and ran about Rome with liberty caps on their heads. But many more mourned him, for he had been as generous to the poor as he had been recklessly cruel to the great. They lent eager hearing to the rumor that he was not really dead but was fighting his way back to Rome; and when they had reconciled themselves to his passing they came for many months to strew flowers before his tomb.

Durant, p. 284

Every bloated windbag of a tyrant has his sycophants and leaves a bloody legacy.

Nero

What will Obama's coin look like?

BBC questions "global warming;" MLB playoffs in Denver; early snow in Chicago.

These stories have all been featured and linked by Drudge, but I am reporting them anyway so that I can access them later more easily.

BBC has begun to ask the question, "What happened to global warming?":

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

Meanwhile in Denver, cold weather threatens the baseball playoffs.

In Chicago, the city is threatened with its earliest snow in history:

What’s worse than the snow is the below freezing temperatures that are expected to accompany it.

I ask once again, please do not destroy our economy in the name of fighting "global warming."

More evidence to disprove global warming

Cold temperature records were set or tied yesterday in Michigan:

It was colder this morning in Port Huron than it has been in more than seven decades.


The Port Huron waste water treatment plant recorded a temperature of 32 degrees at 8 a.m., one degree colder than the record low set Oct. 1, 1935, according to information from the National Weather Service in Oakland County’s White Lake Township.


Amos Dodson, a weather service meteorologist, said no records were broken elsewhere, including at Detroit Metro Airport in Romulus and in Flint.

and in Florida:

In fact, Daytona Beach International Airport reported a record-tying low of 58 degrees at 3:33 a.m. That tied the previous record set back in 2001, when we had another cool start to October.

Orlando officially dropped to 62 degrees, which is just one degree shy of the record, and Melbourne bottomed out at 65 degrees under some of those heat-trapping high clouds.

The cold has caused additional problems in Idaho:

With a quick flip from summer-like weather to freezing cold temperatures, homeless shelters we talked to have never been busier.

While this evidence is anecdotal, the evidence presented by global warming advocates is fraudulent and nonexistent.