Texas Congressman Ron Paul emerged from the Minnesota state Republican Party convention in St. Cloud with a clean sweep, winning nearly all the national convention delegates available for his presidential campaign in addition to a party endorsement of the Paul-aligned U.S. Senate candidate Kurt Bills. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Paul’s campaign organized at the precinct, congressional, and state levels to win the 13 delegates chosen May 19 at the state convention. One Paul-aligned prospective delegate graciously stepped aside — resulting in Paul garnering 12 of the 13 available slots — so local Congresswoman and former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann could attend the Tampa national convention as a delegate.

Overall, including delegates won prior to the state convention, the Paul campaign has claimed 32 of the 40 national delegates selected in Minnesota, a state where Paul had handily lost the caucus to Rick Santorum.

But winning over GOP presidential delegates is only part of Paul’s agenda. He intends to influence local political races, in addition to independents and Democrats. “There is a revolution in ideas going on,” Representative Paul told the audience to raucous applause in a May 18 evening speech, “and isn’t a narrow revolution. It isn’t just a conservative group in the Republican Party. It’s much, much bigger than this. I am convinced that we have good support in the Republican Party for liberty ideas. But I am convinced … for every vote we get in the Republican primaries that there are at least two votes who are independent or even Democrats who will look at these serious principles of limited government, personal liberty, less war and doing something with the Federal Reserve system.”

While Paul’s presidential nomination by the GOP is not likely to happen, his movement has seen stunning successes in congressional primaries and nomination of state party leadership. “I was glad to see my son win,” Paul told the audience. “And I’d be glad to see Kurt Bills win.” Bills had received the endorsement of Congressman Ron Paul as well as the endorsement of Paul’s son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. Minnesota State House Speaker Kurt Zellers had also thrown his political weight behind Bills.

Apple has taken China by storm. A Starbucks can be found on practically every major street corner in coastal cities and beyond. From Nike to Buick to Siemens, Chinese consumers actively prefer Western brands over their domestic competitors. The rise of microbloggers, the popularity of rock bands with names like Hutong Fist and Catcher in the Rye, and even the newfound popularity of Christmas all seem to point toward a growing Westernization.

But don’t be deceived by appearances. Consumers in China aren’t becoming “Western.” They are increasingly modern and international, but they remain distinctly Chinese. If I’ve learned anything from my 20 years working as an advertising executive in China, it is that successful Western brands craft their message here to be “global,” not “foreign”—so that they can become vessels of Chinese culture.

Understanding China’s consumer culture is a good starting point for understanding the nation itself, as it races toward superpower status. Though the country’s economy and society are evolving rapidly, the underlying cultural blueprint has remained more or less constant for thousands of years. China is a Confucian society, a quixotic combination of top-down patriarchy and bottom-up social mobility. Citizens are driven by an ever-present conflict between standing out and fitting in, between ambition and regimentation. In Chinese society, individuals have no identity apart from obligations to, and acknowledgment by, others. The clan and nation are the eternal pillars of identity. Western individualism—the idea of defining oneself independent of society—doesn’t exist.

Judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, federal district and bankruptcy courts in nine Western states and two Pacific island territories, along with lawyers practicing in those courts, and court staff, will gather at the luxurious Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa from August 13 – 16, 2012 in what looks like a less than valiant attempt to ensure American justice is being served…at a cost to taxpayers of approximately one million dollars.

From tennis courts to the caddy shack and luau experience, justice will be served in a manner many Americans never get to experience. Breitbart News has reviewed a letter from the offices of the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Jeff Sessions, and the offices of Senator Chuck Grassley, the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with several detailed questions they want answered by the Ninth District.

The letter cites the 2010 version of the Ninth Circuit’s annual judicial conference that cost taxpayers over $657,000 in travel costs alone, along with $860,000 in combined travel costs for the Ninth Circuit’s 2008 and 2009 annual conferences in Monterey, California and Sun Valley, Idaho, respectively. It also provides evidence of the Ninth Circuit’s awareness of the Government’s budget challenges in the face of a still suffering Obama economy, going on to challenge why the Ninth Circuit seems determined to go on spending large amounts of money on plush conferences, when a more prudent approach could provide the same value for professional purposes.

What you are about to read is virtually unknown. Yet it is an old story.

I first read a version of this story in Douglas Hyde’s little book, Dedication and Leadership (1956). Hyde had been a Communist Party leader in Great Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. In the late 1940s he defected and joined the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote a fine autobiography, I Believed.

In 1962, he gave a seminar in front of priests and nuns. He called it Dedication and Leadership Techniques.  I own a photocopy of the minutes of that seminar. I have reprinted most of it. It isposted on my website,

www.GaryNorth.com.

This leadership training strategy, when coupled with Facebook (free), YouTube (free), WordPress.com (free), and Amazon S3 (dirt cheap), will work for Tea Party activists to begin to capture small counties that the Establishment ignores. There are over 3,000 counties in the United States. Most of them are like ripe fruit, ready to be picked.

This can be called the Wal-Mart strategy: build your organization in the sticks, where nobody notices until it’s way too late.

The political gurus who advised Mitt Romney to condemn a plan by a “super PAC” to use Barack Obama’s influential relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright against him in the 2012 campaign will lead the presumed Republican nominee to the same fate as John McCain four years ago, said talk-radio host Michael Savage.

“Romney’s finished,” Savage told his “Savage Nation” audience yesterday. “He’s a fall guy. I’m the only one in the media who told you.”

Savage said Romney was “being misdirected by the very same people who misdirected McCain – who should have won the last election.”

“McCain said, ‘No, I won’t go there, I won’t do that,’ and lost the election.”

Republicans in 2008 naturally voted for McCain, Savage explained, but the independents who decided the election “did not come out for him, because he was nothing but a two-faced RINO,” a Republican In Name Only.

No sooner did the literary agency brochure in which Barack Obama was said to be Kenyan-born surface than the media went to work to deep-six it.

“This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me – an agency assistant at the time,” Miriam Goderich, now a named partner in the literary agency, Dystel & Goderich, wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News, which was then picked up ABC News.  “There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.”

This confession rings false to the point of preposterous for any number of reasons.  Let us start with the obvious.  At the time, 1991, the Acton & Dystel agency listed 90 clients, Obama among its least significant.  How likely is it that Goderich would have remembered enough about a 1991 “error” to know it was hers, especially since it went uncorrected through several revisions until changed in 2007?  To make this claim credible, there would have to be an existing paper trail leading to an Obama submission in which he lists an Hawaiian birth.  I am confident that there is no such submission.

“The vast majority of money we spend in job training doesn’t go to job training, it goes to employ people in those job training federal programs,” Coburn said in an interview with Fox News. Some programs are brimming with fraud and abuse, with taxpayer-funded dollars being spent on affairs that are in no way associated with professional training. For example, the study reported:

• Some job training participants spent their days sitting on a bus.

• Some were trained for jobs that didn’t exist.

• Others were paid to sit through educational sessions about jobs they already had.

• High school students were knowingly exposed to the cancer-causing agent asbestos as part of a job training program.

• Funds were misspent to pay a contractor for ghost employees and to purchase video games.

• Job training administrators spent federal funds on extravagant meals and bonuses for themselves.

• In one state, workforce agency employees took more than 100 gambling trips to casinos mostly during work hours.

The resurfacing of the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, particular with the release of Edward Klein’s new book, “The Amateur,” has raised questions if Wright will be fair game in the upcoming presidential election.

On his Friday show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh blamed the media for not giving more scrutiny to issues like Rev. Wright, which the Obama campaign has declared off limits.

“There is a decent amount of corruption in this regime, and people are just now coming to that, hearing about that for the first time in their lives,” he continued. “The media essentially worked for Sen. Obama and helped him run right over Hillary Clinton.”

“By the way, I wouldn’t be surprised — I don’t know, I’m just speculating. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this ‘stuff’ that we’re now learning about Obama, maybe the Clintons are behind it. Bill said he wants to go back to the White House. Bill said he thinks Hillary ought to be in there.

America’s biggest banks and investment firms generously supported President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, but the same donors are putting their money on Mitt Romney in 2012.

Romney’s top five campaign donors are individuals and political action committees connected to the financial services sector, while Obama’s top five come from individuals and PACs linked to technology giants Google and Microsoft, and international law firms DLA Piper and Sidley Austin, according to the Boston Globe. None are connected to financial institutions.

In 2008, four of the five top Obama campaign donor groups were connected to financial institutions. Goldman Sachs held the top slot; JPMorgan Chase was third.

“There’s no doubt that there’s been a big diminution of support for the president,” Obama’s former chief of staff and former JP Morgan executive, William M. Daley, told the Boston Globe.

Michigan politicians met in downtown Detroit on May 14 to break ground on a new Whole Foods Market with hopes of boosting the area’s economy and bringing new jobs to the city.

The new store is said to be part of an incentive package that includes $4.2 million in state and local funds. The store will receive tax credits and promise to remain open for seven years after receiving the first installment, Spero News reported.

Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow and Detroit Democratic Mayor Dave Bing joined Whole Foods co-chief executive Walter Robb at the groundbreaking.