The World's Youngest Drummer

Check out this 3-year-old Detroit boy who's been heralded as one of the world's youngest drummer. According to the Detroit News, the kid who has a 20-pierce custom drum set jams with a number of various musicians and well-known session players.
Go check out the videos of the kid in action.

What's exciting about this kid is that, at the age of 3 months, Julian Pavone started drumming while he was in his dad's baby sling, began to do drum rolls at the age of 9 months, landed his first contract gig at 15 months of age, and has performed at the House of Blues.

'He plays like a 30-year-old with such precision, definition and focus that it's incredible,' said Grammy Award-winning guitarist and producer Michael J. Powell.

Julian, dubbed the world's youngest drummer on his Web site, www.littledrummerbaby.com, gained national recognition for his skills at age 2 and will be featured next Monday on 'Oprah,' along with other extraordinary children.

'Playing the drums is so cool,' Julian said, grinning at his proud father, Bernadino Pavone, before slowing things down with Journey's 'Lights.'

It gets even better:

'You can tell he has a passion for it because he's never forced to play. He's always asking to get on the drums,' said Powell, who's producing and network-shopping a reality television show called 'Finding Julian's Band.'

...'He's a little too young to read music, so we're developing his ear for music, which is a great skill for any musician,' said music teacher Francesco Cavallini of the Flint Institute of Music. 'If you can't really hear music, you're just a robot when you play. We're working on rhythms and from there it will be melodies.'

'He's truly a brilliant kid because he can pick up the most difficult passages of music. When I first played with him at 19 months he was playing a 7/4 rhythm, which is seven beats a measure, and then started subdividing it. That's something most young musicians can't do,' added [Ralphe] Armstrong, a Detroit native who jammed with Julian and Powell earlier in the day.

What an incredible child! Here's a piece on his family.

Maryland to Metal Dealers: Submit to Taxation and Licensure Or Else

The collectivistic criminal gang known as the State of Maryland is coercing metal dealers who heat metal to recycle, which is actually good for the environment. However, its effort to stifle these peddlers is actually outrageous to the extreme. The state is attempting to slap a huge tax on the dealers, requiring them to be licensed if they want to continue their businesses, produce and keep detailed documentation of where they procure every ounce of metal that they melt, and comply with new required regulatory waiting periods before they engage in every business transaction.

Here's an excerpt of the uproar regarding the state's monstrosity:

Carmen Micucio Jr. thinks state lawmakers may have dealt a death blow to the recycling business he's spent 26 years building in Glasgow.

And he's not alone. Scrap dealers across the state are protesting new regulations that go into effect June 1 requiring, among other things, licensing, detailed documentation on all items bought and sold and waiting periods that will slow the sale of scrap metal in a time of turbulent prices.

'The law puts Delaware dealers at a competitive disadvantage because there are dealers just over the line in Chester, Pa., who are not subject to that law,' said Scott Sherr, president of Diamond State Recycling in Wilmington, the state's largest scrap metal processor.

The law, adopted a year ago, was designed to tighten regulation of scrap metal processors, pawnshops and secondhand dealers to help police stem the flow of stolen goods.

A second law passed in April further tightened regulations on the resale of copper after a slew of thefts this spring at homes, farms and construction sites fueled by the rapid jump in world copper prices.

Violations of the new law are misdemeanors punishable by $10,000 fines and the loss of the dealer's license.

Sherr and Micucio say legislators never visited them before writing the law to see how the business works and assess how the new regulations would hurt.

'They railroaded this through,' Sherr said. 'We're going back to Legislative Hall and tell them why it won't work.'

Police and lawmakers contend the law was needed to make sure dealers keep better records so police would be able to track people who pawned or sold stolen property.

The law also requires that dealers keep metals they buy on hand for 18 days before reselling them, a step police say is needed so stolen materials can be tracked -- and the seller identified -- before they are crushed or melted down.

Every scrap metal processor must specifically state on a form how all copper, silver, gold or brass was acquired. The forms must be kept for a year and provided to police upon request.

[Hat tip to LRC blogger Chris Brunner for alerting us freedom-lovers today.]

Don't You Dare Mention 'Tasers' In Your Autopsies!

From KTAR.com: The Valley's Home Page:

AKRON, Ohio - A medical examiner must change her autopsy findings to delete any reference that stun guns contributed to the deaths of three people involved in confrontations with law enforcement officers, a judge ruled.

Friday's decision was a victory for Taser International Inc., which had challenged rulings by Summit County Medical Examiner Lisa Kohler, including a case in which five sheriff's deputies are charged in the death a jail inmate who was restrained by the wrists and ankles and hit with pepper spray and a stun gun.

Kohler ruled that the 2006 death of Mark McCullaugh Jr., 28, was a homicide and that he died from asphyxiation due to the 'combined effects of chemical, mechanical and electrical restraint.'

Visiting Judge Ted Schneiderman said in his ruling that there was no expert evidence to indicate that Taser devices impaired McCullaugh's respiration. 'More likely, the death was due to a fatal cardiac arrhythmia brought on by severe heart disease,' the judge wrote.

Schneiderman ordered Kohler to rule McCullaugh's death undetermined and to delete any references to homicide.

The judge also said references to stun guns contributing to the deaths of two other men must be deleted from autopsy findings. Dennis Hyde, 30, died in 2005 after a confrontation with Akron police, and Richard Holcomb, 18, died the same year after being hit with a stun by a police officer in suburban Springfield Township.

L. Neil Smith: 'Time for A Purge?'

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner and The Libertarian Enterprise publisher L. Neil Smith has penned a new op-ed for TLE entitled "Time for a Purge?," which blasts the LP's recent press release calling for more federal oversight and urging state and local authorities to "cooperate" for the purpose of cracking down on the scourge of kiddie porn.

Neil writes:

[T]he first priority of any real libertarian is to ensure everybody knows and thoroughly understands that anyone who refuses to take the Zero Aggression Principle seriously, as the central, indispensable tenet of the movement—or in the case of the LP, to take the oath of zero aggression—should not be regarded as a libertarian at all, but just another thug reserving a right he mistakenly imagines he has to initiate force against his fellow human beings whenever he finds it convenient.

I don't know enough these days about the internal politics of the national LP to say whether these specimens have anything to do with the vermin who raped the party platform last time around (in the 70s, the platform called for the abolition of the FBI), but they are of exactly the same ilk, not 'moderate' libertarians, not 'gradualist' libertarians, not even 'neo' libertarians, but anti libertarians, whose effect—whether they intended it that way or not—is the single most destructive force against individual liberty that I know of.

If this was indeed meant to embarrass all those pesky radicals out of the party, then it's bound to misfire. The trouble is, by 'radical' this collaborationist trash means anyone standing on principle, rather than navigating by perceived political expedience (which, as I've demonstrated on numerous occasions, usually proves incorrect in a practical, as well as ethical sense). 'Radicals' have been fighting this particular fight (some of them for half their lives or more) for better than three decades. They are hardened to an extent their opponents can't conceive. If anybody's going to get embarrassed out of the party, it's going to be these Vichy Quisling concentration camp trustees.

If they really want to play it this way—accusing anyone they dislike of favoring child pornography—then let them stand accused in public of ethically signing off on Waco, Ruby Ridge, the FLDS raid, and every other evil, murderous thing the state has ever done to children.

On the other hand, if this sort of ugly struggle is to be avoided, what needs to be done—and immediately—is for the LP board of directors to hand Cory and Davis their walking papers, and then to publicly retract and apologize for their original anti-libertarian statement. If the board fails with regard to principal in this affair, they, too, should be replaced, at the upcoming national convention in Denver.

To that end, THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE is asking you to join us in rectifying this sorry situation. We will shortly have an online petition up. Check back for it, look it over, and add your name to those demanding what's right.

George Phillies: Sensible Answers to Tough Questions, Part 1

LP presidential contender George Phillies unveiled the first part of his "Sensitive Answers to Tough Questions," which he contrasts his positions with and disagrees with Mary Ruwart at the same time.

We Can Politely Disagree:

Sensible Answers to Tough Questions, Part 1

Having urged civil disagreement between candidates, I now enumerate a few points where Mary Ruwart and I take different stands on issues. The following are issues that have significant national interest: The National debt. National defense. Climate Change. Pollution. Our answers differ a great deal. Which do you prefer? That choice is up to you.

Dr. Ruwart describes herself as being from the libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party. I view myself as being from the centrist wing of the Libertarian Party: I'm not Republican Lite, and I'm not an anarchist.

#1 What is the Libertarian response to handling the National Debt?

*Ruwart* (pp. 91-92, Short Answers to the Tough Questions by Mary J. Ruwart): The national debt represents loans to government secured by its willingness to tax (steal from) its citizens. Thus, some Libertarians view buying government bonds as encouraging a thief and have no qualms about repudiating the debt. Others believe that government property (including over 40% of the U.S. landmass) should be liquidated to repay the debt, wholly or in part.

*Phillies*: Three choices for solving the national debt are paying it, selling assets, and repudiating it. I say that we should eliminate the National debt by paying it. Can we? It's exactly like paying off a house mortgage. If you want to
pay off a mortgage over 30 years, your monthly payment on the principal starts near a tenth of a percent of initial debt. We have nine trillion dollars of national debt. A budget surplus around $100 billion a year and constant future payments makes our funded national debt go away by 2040. What about alternative solutions?

Sell Federal lands? That won't work. Why? America has around a billion acres of Federal land. Parts of that land, such as the Grand Canyon, simply will not be sold. To pay off the national debt by selling the rest, we'd need to clear around $10,000 an acre. In contrast, in eastern Kansas and Western Missouri, real estate ads show farmland for one or two thousand dollars per acre. Selling all our Federal lands might raise, being optimistic about central Alaska, perhaps a trillion dollars, ignoring what happens to real estate prices if 40% of our land area hits the market. A trillion dollars is barely a tenth of the funded National debt.

Repudiate the national Debt? Ask yourself: What happens next? Huge numbers of Americans bought T-Bills for their retirement. Their retirement savings are wiped out. Foreign governments hold dollar reserves in Treasury bonds. The value of the dollar vanishes. Banks hold financial reserves in Treasury bonds. Those banks are insolvent; their doors close. The economy collapses. Furthermore, no one -- neither foreign governments nor our own citizens would be willing to lend the U.S. money again since by this point we would have established that we renege on our obligations.

My good friend Mike Badnarik always asks: 'Is it Constitutional?' No, repudiation is not constitutional. The 14th Amendment says so. And the opposition parties chant 'Repudiation is Theft'.

#2: Libertarian National Defense

*Ruwart*: Free trade is the best national defense we could ever have. No country bombs their trading partners. (page 77)

*Phillies*: A real defense requires real defenses. Trade is no defense. Countries that trade with each other go to war regularly. A few examples:

Consider the Latin American countries attacked and occupied, sometimes repeatedly, by their major trade partner, the United States. World War I was fought between countries that had traded substantially with each other. In 1937, Japan invaded major trade partner China. In 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, and 1945, when
Russia invaded Manjukuo, each country attacked a major trading partner. In 1943, Italy declared war on Germany, which had been not only its largest trade partner but its primary military ally.

National defense requires a real national defense policy, such as the national defense policy that I have previously proposed [here].

[Hip tip to TPW for its posting on this as well.]

Mary Ruwart: 'When We Will Ever Learn?'

Mary Ruwart, in an outstanding piece at Antiwar.com, posits how she would have dealt with al Qaeda on 9/11 and how we can get out of Iraq:

What should we have done after 9/11? Clearly, we had not only the right but the responsibility to track down and punish the aggressors behind the attacks and destroy their ability to conduct further attacks. We had the tools at hand to do so – the Rewards for Justice Program had previously been successful in bringing terrorists, including 1993 World Trade Center bombing architect, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, to justice. Bounties work, as we learned in our own history with the use of privateers and letters of marque and reprisal.

Instead, we invaded Afghanistan to pursue "regime change" and "nation-building." Nearly seven years later, the invasion has become an endless occupation, the new government we set up controls only 30 percent of the country, the Taliban menaces Pakistan – and al-Qaeda's leadership remains very much at large.

After that, we invaded Iraq to topple Saddam's Ba'athist regime – a regime that Osama bin Laden ranked second only to the U.S. as an enemy and a country in which al-Qaeda had no significant presence. Five years later, we continue to expend blood and treasure trying to bring peace to a nation we ourselves tipped into chaos. Our occupation provides the only remaining excuse for foreign al-Qaeda fighters to be tolerated by local populations. Indeed, while Shi'ite and Kurdish populations have always opposed Sunni al-Qaeda, even the Sunnis are turning against foreign al-Qaeda forces in areas where the U.S. forces have gotten out of the way. Let's get completely out of the way.

Mary's absolutely right. If we hadn't engaged in "nation-building" and government-approved "regime change," we could have sent mercenaries to take out the entire terrorists without so much as inflicting collateral damage in Afghanistan. We could have avoided the war in Iraq had we pursued this course of action.

Now it's imperative, more than ever, to restore our foreign policy of non-interventionism and not just ending the war in Iraq.

Ron Paul Answer Featured on 'Jeopardy'

The question that Alex Trebek asked during one segment of the game show Jeopardy! was: "This physician ran for presidnet as a Libertarian in 1988 & as a Republican in 2008." Then, one contestant identified as "Tom" answered "Bruce Paul," but Trebek, whom I doubt heard what the guy incorrectly said, affirmatively answered, "Ron Paul. Correct."

Either way, it's quite exciting, to say the least.

The Tax Protesters vs. the State

Tax protesters in the State of Minnesota bring their "there's-no-law-that-forces-me-to-pay-an-income-tax" case before the state's own court.

Here's an excerpt of the Star Tribune piece that covers tax protester Robert Beale's tax evasion trial:

But the conviction of [Robert] Beale this past week for evading $1.6 million in taxes, conspiracy and fleeing authorities marked what some see as a new chapter in such prosecutions. Like actor Wesley Snipes, who also was recently convicted, but unlike most tax protesters, Beale was wealthy.

'Snipes and Beale probably were worth more money than all the tax protesters in the country combined,' said author J.J. MacNab, who covered the case against Snipes.

MacNab is finishing a book on so-called tax deniers called 'Bombs, Taxes and Red Crayons' (many of them believe the government has no jurisdiction over something signed in red crayon).

Grand Theft Auto IV Police Recruitment Ad

This "ad"'s Liberty City is based on New York. (Hat tip to Lew Rockwell for his report on this.)

D.C. Madam Was Murdered

At least, that's what the building supervisor of the condo in Central Florida believes, considering it's where Deborah Jane Palfrey's body was found.

Read an excerpt of the story that's abuzz on the Net:

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The building manager of a Central Florida condo said he spent time talking to Deborah Jean Palfrey on Monday as she packed to go to her mother's house and she did not seem suicidal.

Deborah Jean Palfrey has many ties to Central Florida. For the past 12 years she's owned a condo at Park Lake Towers in Orlando.

The building manager, who did not want to show his face, talked with Palfrey Monday before she left for her mother's in Tarpon Springs. He strongly believes Palfrey's death was not a suicide.

'Jean Palfrey was a class act. She wore very good clothes. She was well educated. Her way out of this world certainly would not have been in an aluminum shed attached to a mobile home in Tarpon Springs, Florida,' he said.

Apparently, I now believe that I erred in thinking that she actually took her own life, considering the news reports were harping on the "fact" that she had taken herself out. After all, her clientele seemed to be a large number of political bigwigs in the Beltway, which have been documented in her much-publicized phone records, which have been available in a .tiff format. Even Senator Vitter (R-LA) was outted as a customer of hers during the course of Palfrey's federal investigation. After all, on July 9, 2007, the senator admitted to being a client of hers.

While it hasn't been officially proven that her death is more like murder than a "suicide by hanging," the circumstances surrounding her "suicide" are very fishy and disturbing by all accounts.

The War Within the LP Has Begun

Third Party Watch publisher and blogger (not to mention former Political Director of the national Libertarian Party) Stephen P. Gordon is exasperated with conservative Republican blogger and American Spectator news columnist/journalist Robert Stacy McCain's coverage of the LP with respect to LP Executive Director Shane Corey's immediate yet praiseworthy resignation that transpired yesterday and the escalating internal war brewing within the confines of the Party.

Gordon took various snippets of comments from posters from the comments section of the TPW blog and unveiled the following commentary with regards to the internal conflict:

I don’t know that mutiny is the correct word to use, as both sides in this debate have been hurling the 'p' word at each other: Purge.

LP co-founder David Nolan: '...Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Shane!'

'Guy Fawkes': 'Prepare for the purging of the anarchists. Three more weeks. Then…. goodbye… and good riddance.'

Todd Andrew Barnett: 'At least ['Guy Fawkes'] admits he’s a poser in the Party, just like his other colleagues.'

'The Democratic Republican': 'The fact that you can’t separate anarchy from libertarianism reveals your ignorance of the wider world around you.'

'Todd Andrew Barnett': 'I do NOT associate with despicable, thuggish pricks such as you, nor do I want to be associated with the likes of you.'

David Nolan: 'Bruce Cohen, you are an ass. You have always been an ass, and you always will be. You routinely misrepresent everyone and everything at every opportunity. Please go join the Republican Party, where your neocon, pro-war views will fit in nicely.'

Timothy West: 'The LP is a hopeless contradiction that cant succeed at anything until one faction or the other totally wipes out the opposition, and it really does not matter which one.'

There was one voice of sanity in the thread. My friend 'paulie' noted: 'Before everyone starts celebrating (or weeping and gnashing their teeth), kindly consider that you may change your opinion once you learn who’ll get the job next (and then see their performance in office).'

I already feel sorry for the next Executive Director, as I know what he or she will be forced to endure.

As Stephan may or may not be aware, I did make the statements that he quoted from me (as they are indicated above), and I stand by them 100 percent. The statements were made against a certain group of collectivists and statists who want to destroy the Libertarian Party (and are doing a very good job at it) and are hell-bent on destroying the entire libertarian movement as well.

However, Gordon is only cherry picking which statements were made and which weren't. There were more statements made in the comment section that highlight the psychotic and disgusting paradigms of the collectivists and the statists infesting the LP, including statements made by individuals such as the Committee for Clarity, Bruce Cohen, Eric Dondero, the Democrat Republican, and Geofrey the Liberator (to name a few). The psychopathic nature of these individuals is undetermined; however, the character assassinations and the ad hominems made by these people underscore one crucial point: these people are not libertarians, even though they are capital 'L' libertarians in the Libertarian Party. They are merely posers and losers who engage in thoughtless juvenile and anti-intellectual statements with nothing to back up anything they say in the long run.

By painting all purists in the Party with a very broad brush (such as saying that all of us are pedophile-supporting, child porn-loving Anarchists), they lose every ounce of their credibility. It's that simple.

No Toy Guns For You

A number of state legislatures have bills pending on the docket -- bills that would, if passed, make it illegal for anyone to wave a "fake firearm" -- a state-created euphemism for toy guns -- in a public place "in a threatening manner." Apparently 15 states now have proposals that, if signed into law, would crack down on toy guns that the statist law enforcement communities claim would be used in violent crime sprees and be threatening to public safety.

According to the Associated Press:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Concerns that realistic-looking toy weapons are confusing police and threatening safety have led 15 states to try going beyond gun control and cracking down on fake firearms.

Officer Micheal Hoover knows a fair amount about guns as a sniper instructor for a Tennessee SWAT team. He recalls the night two years ago when a car pulled up beside him on a highway and the passenger waved what looked like an Uzi.

'It scared me,' he said. 'If anyone is in their right mind, I don't see how it wouldn't.'

Hoover was off duty and called for police help. A 20-year-old man was charged with aggravated assault after police found a black plastic Uzi submachine gun under the car's passenger seat, but he was acquitted because jurors felt the officer should have been able to tell it was only a toy.

Lawmakers across the country are coming to a different conclusion, deciding that it is so hard to differentiate the toys from the fakes that public safety demands they take action.

Oh, it gets better. Read this next part:

Among those 15 states, seven bills limiting fake guns are pending this year and 21 have been enacted since 1990, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some states have enacted or are considering multiple measures. They range from prohibiting imitation firearms in vehicles to banning the toys from convenience stores.

Tennessee legislators are using a different tactic. This is what the AP notes about what they have in mind:

Tennessee lawmakers are considering a proposal by state Rep. John Deberry to make it a misdemeanor to intentionally display or expose 'an imitation firearm in a public place in a threatening manner.' Exceptions include justifiable self defense, lawful hunting, and displays such as a museum collection.

Remember the last part of that first statement in the above-quoted paragraph:

'[A]n imitation firearm in a public place in a threatening manner.'

What do the collectivists mean by "a threatening manner"? How do they define "threatening manner"? That's a pretty vague description. Does "threatening manner" mean that the toy gun will fire plastic bullets that will melt the alleged victim in such a way that's reminiscent of the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wizard of Oz? Really, what do they mean by this?

This is nothing more than gun control at the state levels. Do these cretins really believe that toy guns can ACTUALLY harm individuals, even be used in crimes like murder? Will the plastic pelts from the guns send a so-called victim to the ER because of multiple plastic gunshot wounds?

What's next? Do they ban plastic knives? How about plastic hammers? Oh yes, plastic toy knives will be hazardous to your health.

Microsoft to Withdraw Yahoo Bid

Microsoft is yanking its $33-a-share bid on Yahoo, saying that it will buy out the company "on its own terms."

An excerpt from a New York Times piece pretty much sums up the situation:

Microsoft insists that it would acquire Yahoo only on its own terms. Now it said that it will withdraw its offer, after the Internet giant rebuffed a sweetened $33-a-share bid.

But is Microsoft really going to walk away from the biggest deal of the software giant’s 33-year history?

The company has never denied that it would take a hard line in its negotiations with its target. In fact, Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, has regularly talked tough — and may now be adopting perhaps the toughest tactic of all.

The possibility of walking away was always present. Even in February, Christopher P. Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer and an architect of its Yahoo offer, has told The Times that he’s willing to play hardball. 'You have to be disciplined and ruthless,' he said. 'You have to be willing to walk away.'

More recently, Mr. Ballmer reiterated that dropping its bid was a possible strategy.

In recent weeks, many had expected Microsoft to escalate the fight by beginning a proxy fight. Mr. Ballmer has never shied away from brandishing that club, coupled with a tender offer.

But in a recent town hall with Microsoft employees, Mr. Ballmer seemed to suggest that a proxy fight was a relatively unpalatable option. 'There’s a lot of downsides and some upsides associated with that,' he said.

Mr. Ballmer’s letter to Jerry Yang of Yahoo suggests that he didn’t have the appetite for that kind of fight. He acknowledged that the Internet company would fight hard against such a move, and might take steps like linking up with Google.

The letter, to which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer alluded, says the following in its entirety:

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

* First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

* Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

* In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

* This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

* It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
Steven A. Ballmer

It appears to Yahoo that it got the short end of the stick.

In Microsoft's defense (and I'm not a fan of Microsoft), I think Yahoo should have taken up Microsoft's offer, if for no other reason. On the other hand, perhaps it would have been nice if Google put up a bigger bid for Yahoo and made it more of a better system than Microsoft could have handled.

The corporate world just keeps on getting more interesting as time goes on.

The Socialistic Scheme Against 'Global Warming' Is Fought At The Local Level

Apparently communities at the local level, in an exercise in futility, are organizing to fight the horrible bane we call "Global Warming" simply by "reducing greenhouse gases."

Read an excerpt from the Washington Post piece on this crud:

SEATTLE -- King County Executive Ron Sims has a simple test for every new public works project, building plan or government land purchase: Will it increase the region's total greenhouse-gas emissions, or reduce them?

'We are totally committed to reducing emissions, but it requires rethinking the way we do our activities,' Sims explained. 'People are saying, "But we've always done it this way." We're saying, "That way doesn't work in an age of global warming." '

Officials in King County and other places are rethinking the way their communities grow and operate, all with an eye toward reducing their overall carbon footprint. After decades of policies that encouraged people to move out to the suburbs in pursuit of larger homes and bigger back yards, some policymakers are now pushing aggressively to increase urban density and discourage the use of private cars.

In Massachusetts, the state demands that developers calculate and disclose the climate impact of their projects. In California, Attorney General Edmund G. 'Jerry' Brown Jr. has sued communities and power companies for failing to offset the greenhouse gases generated by their expansion plans. And Washington, D.C., officials are installing a new trolley line and bike rental kiosks in an effort to cut back on car trips within the city.

We have to thank the collectivistic clods from Greenpeace and Earth Liberation Front and socialist celebrities like Bill Maher who have successfully pulled off the Global Warming Chicken Little hysteria over this non-issue. It's not a surprise that more than 70 percent of the American people have been brainwashed by the establishment, the Left, and the envirowhackos within the Left to support these whacked "anti-Global Warming" policies.

Ron Paul: Obama Will Be President

Ron Paul predicts that Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama of Illinois will be our next president coming January 2009.

Here's an excerpt of the L.A. Times blog on his prediction:

Rep. Ron Paul, the House member from Texas who technically remains in the race for the Republican Party's presidential nomination against Sen. John McCain, predicts that Democratic Sen. Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.

According to the campus newspaper of Maryland's Goucher College, the 72-year-old Paul made the surprising statement during campaign remarks Thursday at a school presidential forum.

The newspaper report said the auditorium was overflowing with students and parents, who interrupted the congressman with applause nearly two dozen times during his speech.

Paul was very successful in political fundraising during the past year, amassing more than $34 million, more than twice the amount collected by more prominent candidates such as ex-Gov. Mike Huckabee.