Looks Bad In Iran

What appears to be an unconfirmed report at this point is saying that the opposition candidate for president of  Iran has been arrested by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was reportedly arrested Saturday following the reformist’s defeat at the polls by hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of Mousavi, the main challenger to Ahmadinejad, have responded to the election with the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade and claim that the result was the work of a dictatorship.

There have been a number of contradictory reports from Iran, in large part due to the heavy restrictions imposed on the media in the Islamic Republic and in particular on foreign reporters.

Mousavi’s arrest was reported by an unofficial source, who said that the presidential contender had been arrested en route to the home of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Pro-reform Mousavi has denounced the election as rigged and vowed he will not accept defeat. He and key aides could not be reached by phone Saturday.

There are also reports of severe unrest in the streets of several Iranian cities and even some reports of deaths.

Quite frankly, I have no clue which source to believe right now. It is very confused and very conflicted news that I am seeing thus far. But it looks a lot like Ahmadinejad just pulled off what amounts to a coup masked as an election. If Mir Hossein Mousavi was really arrested, I’d say that pretty well amounts to proof that Ahmadinejad stole the election.

Losing Jobs Fast

This week I heard several news reports that stressed that new unemployment claims had dropped by 24,000. What they left off, quite intentionally I’m sure, is that the figure had dropped only relative to the previous week’s figure.

In other words, new claims for unemployment were 601,000. But that is the “adjusted” figure. It is only by using adjusted figures that there was a “drop”, incidentally. Using unadjusted figures there was an increase of 76,312.

The number of people on unemployment rose again. There are more than twice as many people drawing money now than there were one year ago. And that is only the ones drawing checks.

How’s that hope holding up?

“A Society Of Adults-Turned-Children…

…Cannot survive”. Mark Steyn:

When President Barack Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence – i.e., they’re in the bathroom 12 times a night – wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making 12 trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.

As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” – which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

More importantly, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood – and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy…..

It is frightening to see how many people are willing to give their freedom away, to submit to bureaucratic control of every facet of their lives and vote themselves into bondage. Go read the whole thing.

What A Tangled Web

When even the truth is just another lie. I caught this item over at Memeorandum this morning. It seems a blogger built a big following with a completely fabricated series of lies:

By Sunday night, when “April’s Mom” claimed to have given birth to her “miracle baby” — blogging that April Rose had survived a home birth only to die hours later — her Web site had nearly a million hits.

There was only one problem with the unfolding tragedy: None of it was true.

Not the pregnancy, and not the photos posted on the blog of the supposed mother and Baby April Rose, swaddled in white blankets. The baby was actually a lifelike doll, which immediately raised the suspicion of loyal blog-followers.

“I have that exact doll in my house,” said Elizabeth Russell, a dollmaker from Buffalo who had been following the blog. “As soon as I saw that picture, I knew it was a scam.”

By Monday, outraged followers on dozens of Christian parenting Web sites unmasked “April’s Mom” as a hoaxer, and hundreds more vented their anger.

“She needs to be exposed and held accountable,” Russell said.

Sensing people were close to establishing her identity, “April’s Mom” on Monday raced in vain to delete her Web site and Twitter and Facebook accounts.

But it was too late. The online community found out her true identity: Beccah Beushausen, 26, a social worker from Mokena.

But the “truth” is just another lie:

In response to a June 12 article in the Chicago Tribune and a related Associated Press story about “April’s Mom”, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-baby-hoax-12jun12,0,5601624.story, the National Association of Social Workers has confirmed that the troubled young woman who created a huge online following with a fictitious account of her pregnancy IS NOT A SOCIAL WORKER. According to sources at the NASW Illinois Chapter, Beccah Beushausen is not licensed in the State of Illinois as a social worker and is not a member of the National Association of Social Workers.

The social workers are, understandably, quite angry at having this person counted among their ranks. They are demanding a correction from the Chicago Tribune.

People have been defrauded by this woman – and it is not over yet. At some point, some behaviors cross over into pathology. It appears that point was reached and passed some time ago by this woman.