Michael Jordan May Have Been a Portland Trail Blazer If This Player Hadn’t Told This Big Lie Before the NBA Draft

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The Portland Trail Blazers selected center Sam Bowie with the second overall pick of the 1984 NBA draft. One of the greatest players in NBA history was selected third — Michael Jordan.

However, Portland may have thought twice about passing on Jordan if they had known what Bowie was hiding in the days leading up to the draft.

Now, 17 years after he played in his final game, Bowie admits that he lied about how much pain he felt in the days before the NBA draft. And as a result, an unsuspecting Trail Blazers organization selected Bowie with the second overall pick. The Chicago Bulls ended up taking Jordan third and the rest is history.

Bowie admitted his big lie in the ESPN documentary “Going Big,” set to air on Dec. 20 on ESPNU. Yahoo! Sports was given a sneak peak at the documentary.

“I can still remember them taking a little mallet, and when they would hit me on my left tibia, and ‘I don’t feel anything’ I would tell ‘em. But deep down inside, it was hurting,” Bowie said.

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DeMint to Sit Out 2014 Elections at Heritage

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photo credit: gage skidmore

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), the tea party leader who raised his profile taking on his party establishment in Senate primaries, will sit on the sidelines during the 2014 midterms when he becomes head of the Heritage Foundation.

“I am anxious to get away from the political angles, the partisan angles and focus on just the ideas,” DeMint told POLITICO on Tuesday. “Hopefully candidates will embrace these ideas. But part of what we have to do is convince Americans that the ideas are right.”

Asked if he would endorse candidates in primaries, DeMint flatly said: “No.”

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UN LOST Treaty: The Return of Gunboat Diplomacy

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Last September, China deployed six surveillance ships in response to the Japanese government’s attempt to buy the disputed Senkaku islands, which the Chinese call the Daioyus, from their current owner, a wealthy Japanese family. Both countries are signatories to the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, better known as the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. LOST was supposed to settle disputes between countries over maritime boundaries, but China and Japan seem not to have gotten the memo.

More recently the Chinese province of Hainan ratified a new law that gives Hainanese officials jurisdiction to board vessels in an area where China currently has joint sovereignty alongside the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary General Surin Pitsuwan recently said that this new legislation could seriously aggravate tensions among these Asian nations and pose a threat to global trade.

American supporters of LOST argue that the treaty will reduce international tensions over disputed territories by helping to resolve potential conflicts. They also argue that the treaty will provide the legal certainty that U.S. companies need to exploit sub-sea floor resources that would otherwise go to competing nations like Russia and China, which are signatories to LOST. Five Republican former Secretaries of State—Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker III, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice—argued in a May 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “By becoming party to the treaty, we would strengthen our capacity to influence deliberations and negotiations in other nations’ attempts to extend their continental boundaries.” Yet, the problem lies in the treaty’s process itself.

LOST asserts jurisdiction over maritime boundaries that have been recognized and enforced for centuries. The treaty does this by creating a new global governing body—ominously named the Authority—for the high seas or “the Area,” which would remain “the common heritage of mankind.” To settle international disputes, LOST created the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS).

LOST was created to settle maritime disputes but has failed to do so. In fact, the dispute would probably not exist with LOST, which made the ownership of a group of small rocks a critical issue in determining the extent of the “exclusive economic zones” it sets out for signatory countries. Now it appears that at least one party, seemingly frustrated with the process, plans to return to gunboat diplomacy.

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NYC Sexual Assault Suit Against Former IMF Head Strauss-Kahn Could End in Deal

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NEW YORK (AP) — A hotel housekeeper’s lawsuit against former International Monetary Fund leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn may soon end without a jury ever saying who is right.

The maid, Nafissatou Diallo, is expected to be there, but Strauss-Kahn is not, when lawyers for both meet for a key court date at 2 p.m. (1900 GMT) Monday to update a judge on the status of settlement discussions.

If a deal is inked, it could be simply the product of a meeting of financial motives — getting compensated for an alleged wrong versus avoiding further legal expenses and the uncertainty of a trial. It might be fueled by legal calculus in a case with two key figures who could face uncomfortable questions on a witness stand, or by personal desires to move on. Or all of the above.

“There are a lot of factors that go into why someone settles a case when they do, and it really comes down to, in large part, the appetite that litigants have for being in litigation,” said Stuart Slotnick, a New York lawyer whose recent work includes representing American Apparel CEO Dov Charney in a sexual harassment case filed by an employee. “There are people whose lives are disrupted by virtue of the fact that they know they are being sued or are involved in litigation.”

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers acknowledged late last month there had been settlement talks, though they dismissed as “flatly false” a French newspaper report that Strauss-Kahn had agreed to pay $6 million. Diallo’s lawyers have declined to comment.

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What Soaking the Rich Gets Us: Deficits Forever

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Last week, the progressive think tank Center for American Progress (CAP) released their tax reform plan [pdf], supported by prominent left-wing budgeters and economists like Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. The net effect of this tax reform plan is a massive tax hike on “the rich” in order to fall far, far short of the revenue necessary to eliminate America’s deficit.

The CAP plan would eliminate deductions, close loopholes raise rates, implement new taxes, increase sales taxes, create new taxes… basically every form of a tax hike you can think of, all implemented on households with income above $250,000 per year.

What this gets, according to the Center for American Progress, is a tax system that barely raises Clinton-era levels of tax revenue, while the spending side of the ledger still projects to explode. CAP’s plan gets tax revenue of 20.3% of GDP, below the Clinton years’ high of 20.6% of GDP, with government spending projected to be significantly higher even under the most optimistic of situations. And by the 2030s, government spending is still projected to be over 25% of GDP in the most optimistic of scenarios. (You do not want to know what the pessimistic scenarios are. Something along the lines of an apocalypse.)

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Claim: Secret Camo Can Make American Soldiers Truly Invisible and the Photos Will Blow Your Mind! (+video)

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The Pentagon is betting big on a real life invisibility cloak for American solders, according to recent reports.

Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp, a Canadian company known for its innovative camo technology, is attempting to revolutionize the battlefield by providing true invisibility for soldiers. The special material being used is know as Quantum Stealth. The pictures posted on the company’s website of the fabric, which apparently bends light to create the effect, look as though they are straight out of a Harry Potter movie:

“There is no video yet of the technology in action since its development is considered highly secretive. However, Guy Cramer, CEO of Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp, told the Daily Mail that top military brass in the U.S. and Canada have seen it in action, and were amazed:

‘These groups now know that it works and does so without cameras, batteries, lights or mirrors…It is lightweight and quite inexpensive. Both the U.S. and Canadian military have confirmed that it also works against military IR scopes and Thermal Optics.’

In the same interview, Cramer imagines a group of battle tanks decked out with Quantum Stealth camouflage that could engage an enemy unit with no signs of their location except the sound of their engines and guns.

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Hillary Clinton: Iran ‘Exports Terrorism’ to Mexico

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(CNSNews.com) – Speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 30, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Iran “exports terrorism” in a global fashion that “stretches from Mexico to Thailand.

“We already know very well that the Iranian regime already exports terrorism, not only to Israel’s doorstep, but across the world,” Clinton said. “If we had a map I could put up there, I could show you what we track and plot on that map.

“The evidence of terrorism, mostly, thankfully, plots foiled or unsuccessful, unfortunately, as in Bulgaria, some that succeeded,” Clinton said. “But those plots, those activities of Iran directly or through their agents, stretches from Mexico to Thailand.”

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Sowell: Taxing the Poor

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With all the talk about taxing the rich, we hear very little talk about taxing the poor. Yet the marginal tax rate on someone living in poverty can sometimes be higher than the marginal tax rate on millionaires.

While it is true that nearly half the households in the country pay no income tax at all, the apparently simple word “tax” has many complications that can be a challenge for even professional economists to untangle.

If you define a tax as only those things that the government chooses to call a tax, you get a radically different picture from what you get when you say, “If it looks like a tax, acts like a tax and takes away your resources like a tax, then it’s a tax.”

One of the biggest, and one of the oldest, taxes in this latter sense is inflation. Governments have stolen their people’s resources this way, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life’s savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all. The Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s had thousands of printing presses turning out vast amounts of money, which the government could then spend to pay for whatever it wanted to pay for.

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$1.92B Settlement for ‘Too Big to Fail’ Bank Busted for Laundering Terrorist and Drug Cartel Money

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HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), Europe’s largest bank, agreed to pay $1.92 billion to settle U.S. probes of money laundering in the largest such accord ever.

The settlement includes a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the London-based bank said today in a statement. HSBC expects to complete an undertaking with the U.K. Financial Services Authority soon, it said, without providing specifics.

Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver’s attempts to reduce costs and improve profitability have been hurt by the U.S. probes and by compensation claims from U.K. clients. A Senate committee said in July that lax oversight by top HSBC executives gave terrorists and drug cartels access to the U.S. financial system.

“This has removed an uncertainty, though it doesn’t clear the path completely for HSBC,” Lewis Wan, Hong Kong-based chief investment officer at Pride Investments Group Ltd., said by telephone today, adding that his company doesn’t hold HSBC shares. “Regulators have been tightening oversight of banks. Lenders like HSBC will have to continue to strengthen their compliance.”

In a deferred prosecution agreement, the government allows a target to avoid charges by meeting certain conditions — including the payment of fines or penalties — and by committing to specific reforms, either under the guidance of a monitor, or the creation of an internal compliance panel.

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Liberalism’s ‘Anti-Science’ Problem

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Millions of Americans born around the time of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision are about to turn 40. They don’t realize what it was like to live before the Supreme Court ruling. Back then, most liberals had an open-minded view of abortion due mostly to a lack of medical knowledge. Early-term fetuses were thought to be hardly more than cellular formations, which doctors called “products of conception” or “blobs of tissue.” Lacking any real science on early fetal development, the main arguments against abortion tended to be religious. Things have changed.

Now four decades later, anyone can own beautiful videos that show every stage of the gestation process. Thanks to state of the art 4D Ultrasound scans, scientifically accurate special effects and microscopy footage, we can witness the unborn child forming fingers and toes. We can learn how science knows its gender, when its heart starts to beat, when it smiles, when it feels pain and much, much more. Plus, we can watch it all happen from the comfort of our living rooms.

I don’t think the abortion debate has caught up with the moral significance of this cataclysmic shift. The science of the unborn child isn’t just settled – it’s on TV!

And yet, there is still a great deal of ignorance on the meaning of it all. Liberals say they’re personally against abortion but believe that once impregnated, women have the right to decide whether or not to keep the child. But here’s the logical problem: An unborn child cannot be two things at once. It cannot be something precious and at the same time something worthless. When the British Royals announce a pregnancy, people celebrate “the baby”; they don’t celebrate “the choice.”

Common sense and reason tell us that a mother’s decision can’t change her baby’s reality any more than she can change a chair into a table just by wishing it so. This presents another problem for liberals: They know an unborn child isn’t worthless, but if they call it precious, that compromises their “abortion rights” position.

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