Tails82
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Post by Tails82 on Jun 15, 2013 6:36:40 GMT -5
Because population decline is not the sign of a prosperous nation? Liberals think whites are the super powerful, rich evil race that steals their votes. If they aren't doing well under Obamanomics, who is? And how long can we rely on immigration when the Democrats' economy sucks so bad we have people going back to Mexico? online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323734304578542981761557180.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopThe Internal Revenue Service has never been an agency much loved by the American people. With the IRS's targeting of conservative groups, its already bad reputation has now sunk to a new low.
But the scandal raises a critical question: If the IRS can't manage an increase of 1,700 applications for tax-exempt status that the agency said spurred its targeting of conservative groups, how will the IRS handle its massive new role in implementing ObamaCare?
Under the Affordable Care Act, premium subsidies—tax credits in ObamaCare designed to defray the cost of purchasing health insurance—will go to some seven million tax filers and flow to households earning as much as $94,000 a year. The credits are both advanceable and refundable, meaning the IRS will pay them first and verify the claims for them later, what some call "pay and chase."
Refundable tax credits are essentially a form of spending through the tax code, something the IRS has struggled to administer for years with other programs. That's why it's not far-fetched to say that these premium credits will go to a lot of people inappropriately, and that we can expect to see a lot of erroneous and fraudulent payments.
Look at the Earned Income Tax Credit. Whether you like this refundable credit or not, the Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration reported in April that improper payments account for 21% to 25% of total EITC payments in 2012. Take the percentage of improper EITC payments and apply it to the approximate $1 trillion we'll spend on ObamaCare premium credits in the decade beginning 2014. The math shows that we could see between $210 billion and $250 billion distributed to those who shouldn't get it—because the IRS has no system in place to verify reported household income.
Put all the potential fraud and improper payments with these credits on top of the already soaring budget for the premium subsidies and we're headed for a disaster.
As for the president's claim that his is the "most transparent" administration in history? Well, you try figuring out how the "Affordable Care Act" office at the IRS works: Who reports to whom, when, what they discuss and how the law will be implemented? Both Treasury's inspector general and the Government Accountability Office have tried to find out, and even they don't really know the reporting structure of this IRS department.
What we do know is that the person who headed the IRS division responsible for the targeting of conservative groups—Sarah Hall Ingram—now heads the division responsible for implementing the new health-care law. We also know that for some time she did both jobs. This is not comforting.blog.heritage.org/2013/06/14/the-magical-thinking-behind-the-u-n-arms-trade-treaty/When the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) opened for signature on June 3, 67 nations signed immediately. The U.S. was not among them, but U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the U.S. would sign “as soon as the process of conforming the official translations is completed satisfactorily,” which will take until late August.
The fact that the world is eagerly signing a treaty that is not yet available in all the U.N.’s official languages says a lot about the magical thinking behind it. It doesn’t matter what the treaty says: What matters to many treaty advocates is how the treaty makes them feel. Britain’s deputy foreign minister summed up the treaty’s magic with his claim that, “The force behind so many states wanting to conclude an arms trade treaty after so long meant something. The world is now different.”
No, it isn’t. Words on a piece of paper are meaningless until they are implemented. If the nations of the world wanted to have higher national standards on their import and export of arms, they could have had them without a treaty. As the U.N. itself acknowledged when the treaty negotiation process began, what the world’s nations wanted above all wasn’t higher standards: It was a treaty that acknowledged as inherent their national right to buy, sell, manufacture, and transfer arms. And that is what they got.
The problem with the world’s arms trade is not, as treaty defenders like Oxfam America President Raymond Offenheiser like to claim, that there are “loopholes in the current, irresponsible global arms trade.” The problem is that some nations deliberately sell arms to terrorists and dictators, and many others are corrupt. If a nation cannot maintain democratic law and order, it will not be able to implement the ATT. A treaty cannot make the incompetent competent. Nor can it make the malicious responsible.
The vitriol with which the treaty supporters attack their critics testifies to their underlying faith that they have found a magical solution to the world’s ills. Offenheiser offers a classic example of this with his condemnation of Senator Jerry Moran (R–KS) and Representative Mike Kelly’s (R–PA) concurrent resolution against the ATT, which he links with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as multilateral success stories.
The CTBT has never been ratified by the Senate. The U.S. is currently not in compliance with the CWC, and the CWC is, as Heritage has long noted, a classic unenforceable treaty. In any event, with North Korea busily testing nuclear devices, Iran pressing ahead with its nuclear program, and Syria gassing its own people, this is perhaps not quite the right moment to be praising the CTBT and the CWC as successes to be emulated.It's like Kellogg-Briand all over again. If the government says war can't happen, it won't. If Obama says there are no terrorists in Benghazi, there aren't. online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324688404578543824103846736.htmlBanning Background Checks
The EEOC says that screening for felonies is discriminatory.
Are criminal background checks racist? That's the startling new legal theory that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission unveiled this week in lawsuits against employers. It's another example of how President Obama's appointees are using regulation to achieve policy goals they can't get through Congress.
On Tuesday the EEOC accused retailer Dollar General and a U.S. unit of German car maker BMW of violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by using criminal checks as part of their employment decisions. The logic? Blacks have higher conviction rates than whites, and therefore criminal checks discriminate against blacks.
The EEOC alleges that BMW discriminated against blacks because it screened contractors in South Carolina for convictions for "Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations," and more blacks than whites are convicted of those crimes.
The suit says 70 black BMW contractors and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire them. The suit seeks redress, such as hiring the plaintiffs, back pay, legal costs and more, but only for the black contractors.
In its Dollar General suit, the agency says that 10% of blacks and 7% of non-black applicants failed the retailer's criminal screening. The EEOC calls that three-percentage-point difference a "gross disparity" that is "statistically significant" enough to qualify as discrimination.
We would have thought that criminal checks discriminate against criminals, regardless of race, creed, gender or anything else. Such criminal checks are legal and have long been part of the hiring process at many companies. You can argue that criminals deserve a second chance in life, or even a third or fourth, but business owners and managers ought to be able to decide if they want to take the risk of hiring felons.
The EEOC suit is part of the Administration's larger effort to redefine racism in America by using statistics, rather than individual intent or evidence. The Justice and Housing Departments have rewritten their rules and punished banks and counties like Westchester, N.Y., based on disparate statistical measures of lending and zoning. The EEOC signaled its plans in April last year when it rewrote its enforcement strategy, declaring that "an employer's evidence of a racially balanced workforce will not be enough to disprove disparate impact."
Mull that one over. Even if a company has a racially diverse workforce, it can still be sued if its applicant pool doesn't meet the EEOC's statistical tests. So a retailer that decides it would rather not have proven thieves manning its cash registers could be guilty of racism if the convicted thieves in its applicant pool are disproportionately minority.
Jacqueline Berrien, a former NAACP attorney who is now EEOC chairman, has been waiting for a Democratic majority on the five-member commission to gin up this agenda. Outlawing credit checks in hiring may be next on the agenda. The next three years are going to be a full-employment opportunity for labor lawyers, if not for the rest of America. |
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Post by Pyro ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔ on Jun 15, 2013 15:57:19 GMT -5
Baby boomers are getting into their 60's and 70's So of course there are going to be more poeple dying that being born. Thats the same of all the western countries including NZ. There are more old ass niggers than young sexy people. Why you're blaming something from the 40's and 50's on recent poloticz I don't know.
USAs population is still increasing anyway. And if you continued the birth rate trend back then your country would proply be an over crowded shit hole like India or something.
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Tails82
Lord of Terror++
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Post by Tails82 on Jun 17, 2013 7:24:29 GMT -5
We get top-heavy with a bunch of old people expecting entitlements and not enough young people to pay for them. Recent poloticz has failed us because we're supposed to have strong families, but have been undermined by bureaucrats who unintentionally or intentionally brought about the present situation. blog.heritage.org/2013/06/15/congress-obamacare-assaults-religious-freedom/Obamacare’s threats to religious freedom were denounced on the floor of the House of Representatives this week.
“All we’re asking is to take us back to where our Founding Fathers had us from the beginning,” said Representative Diane Black (R–TN). “eople came here to be able to practice their deeply held beliefs without having government intrusion.”
On August 1, however, government intrusion into the lives and faith of countless Americans will lock in. On that date, Obamacare’s coercive anti-conscience mandate will take effect in its final form, fully enforced against compassionate religious organizations, job-creating family businesses, and countless other Americans.
At the renewal of their health plan years, employers will be forced to provide or facilitate coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization—regardless of their religious or moral objections.
Under the mandate, employers must either violate their deeply held beliefs by complying with the mandate, resist the coercive rule and pay fines of up to $100 per employee per day, or drop health insurance altogether—harming their employees—and pay a fine of roughly $2,000 per employee per year.
Formal houses of worship are exempt from the mandate, but countless other employers, such as schools, hospitals, social service providers, and family businesses must comply with the rule. Under the mandate, only those deemed religious enough by the Obama Administration are afforded true protection of their religious freedom.
As Representative Joe Pitts (R–PA) explained on the House floor, giving such authority to government officials is not conducive to protecting Americans’ fundamental freedoms:
"The bureaucrats at the HHS may feel that they know what is best for all Americans, but being an American means having the freedom to decide on your own, to let your convictions guide your life. What kind of nation will we be when the IRS decides who gets to assemble, when the Department of Justice decides who reports the news, and when HHS decides what religious beliefs are worthy of First Amendment protection?"
Indeed, in exercising its new-found authority granted by Obamacare, the Administration has run roughshod over many employers’ religious liberty, violating Americans’ guaranteed freedom to follow their beliefs, whether at church or in their daily lives. www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/a-tale-of-two-speakersOf all the graduation controversies we've covered this year, Remington Reimer's may be the most shocking. The Texas valedictorian, who is still celebrating his acceptance to the U.S. Naval Academy, was stunned to hear that his high school principal would try to sabotage those plans after Reimer strayed from his "approved" remarks during graduation. When the Joshua High School senior started talking about his faith, the school surprised everyone by cutting off his microphone. As outrageous as that was, principal Mark Cochran was just getting warmed up. The next day, he warned Remington's parents that he was going to send a letter to the Naval Academy disparaging Reimer's character.
At that point, the Reimers contacted our good friends at the Liberty Institute, who have demanded the school's apology. "The principal said he wanted to try to ruin him for what he did," attorney Hiram Sasser said, "for talking about the Constitution and his faith." Although Cochran has retracted his threat, he hasn't responded to Liberty Institute's request for a meeting, public apology, and assurances that this kind of religious harassment would never happen to another student.
If Cochran doesn't respond by June 24, most experts believe the Reimers have a slam-dunk case. Interestingly enough, a new Texas law -- the Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act -- specifically protects the speech of students who speak during graduation. "Since the valedictorian's address occurs in a limited public forum," FRC's Ken Klukowski explains, "it violates [not only the First Amendment but] Texas law to require a speaker to say only whatever words the government approves... So legally, Joshua High School and its employees are in serious trouble."online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323728204578513662248894162.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopWalk into any American high school and nearly one in five boys in the hallways will have a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, 11% of all American children ages 4 to 17—over six million—have ADHD, a 16% increase since 2007. When you consider that in Britain roughly 3% of children have been similarly diagnosed, the figure is even more startling. Now comes worse news: In the U.S., being told that you have ADHD—and thus receiving some variety of amphetamine to treat it—has become more likely.
Last month, the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the bible of mental health—and this latest version, known as DSM-5, outlines a new diagnostic paradigm for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Symptoms of ADHD remain the same in the new edition: "overlooks details," "has difficulty remaining focused during lengthy reading," "often fidgets with or taps hands" and so on. The difference is that in the previous version of the manual, the first symptoms of ADHD needed to be evident by age 7 for a diagnosis to be made. In DSM-5, if the symptoms turn up anytime before age 12, the ADHD diagnosis can be made.
It's also easier to diagnose adult ADHD. Before, adults needed to exhibit six symptoms. Now, five will do. These changes will undoubtedly fuel increased prescriptions of the drugs that doctors use to treat ADHD: stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall...In this era of excessive prescribing, we seem to have forgotten the cautionary history of amphetamines in America—a history that shows how overprescribing stimulants leads to widespread dependence and addiction.
Since their introduction by the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline & French in 1937, amphetamines have been prescribed for maladies that had more to do with societal expectations than genuine mental illness. American soldiers received stimulants during World War II to boost morale and improve performance in combat.
Meantime, back at home, amphetamine was heralded as the first antidepressant, and shortly thereafter, as an ideal weight-loss pill. One 1955 advertisement for AmPlus amphetamine tablets assured users that they would be "beachable by summer." Decades would pass until research demonstrated the lack of long-term benefit for most cases of depression and weight loss, but the lack of proof didn't hold doctors back from liberally prescribing stimulants to millions of housewives in postwar suburbs.
By 1969, doctors were prescribing the equivalent of 120 mg of amphetamine for each American—a high-water mark of per-capita consumption we are only now about to surpass. By then, the addictive potential of prescription stimulants had attracted intense scientific and public scrutiny as evidence grew that many patients were becoming dependent on the drugs. Thirty percent of patients in one study conducted in New York state admitted to using their medications recreationally. Millions of people without prescriptions easily obtained diverted pills.
In 1968, the National Academy of Sciences organized an authoritative investigation into the stimulants' true benefits and risks. The consensus: These drugs had limited efficacy and real harms. Medical experts discouraged the use of stimulants for both depression and obesity, but the warnings had little effect on doctors' prescribing habits until the Controlled Substances Act of 1971 mandated that stimulants be placed in a tightly controlled category of medications, referred to as Schedule II.
Doctors were free to prescribe the drugs but had to report each prescription. Almost overnight, prescriptions for stimulants to treat depression and obesity plummeted: Medical use dropped 90% between 1969 and 1972.
Just when it seemed that amphetamine's days were numbered, doctors began to embrace the drug for treating Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood—what we now call ADHD. (It became the official name in 1987.) Concern about dependence and addiction, along with the watchful eye of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, kept prescriptions for ADHD at low levels during the 1970s.
But by the 1990s, experts and advocacy groups for ADHD, some funded by pharmaceutical companies, began to argue that stimulants did not lead to addiction when treating children for the disorder, and that the stimulants actually decreased the risk of future drug abuse. Their main argument was that ADHD itself is a significant risk factor for future substance abuse, and that stimulants, by treating the underlying illness, also reduced the likelihood of future drug use. Concerned parents were told that starting their children on stimulants when young would decrease the risks of future trouble with alcohol and drugs...Three months ago, the only randomized trial to study future substance abuse by ADHD kids refuted the notion that stimulants, when taken in childhood, have a protective effect.
We still do not have a single randomized trial to help determine if starting stimulants as an adolescent or adult further increases the risk of future substance abuse, although the long and checkered history of medical stimulants would suggest it does. Certainly, the risks from recreationally using stimulants are already well-documented.
In 2010, Adderall was second only in popularity to the painkiller Vicodin as a prescription drug of abuse among high-school seniors, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Adolescents often perceive prescription drugs as safer than illicit ones, but abusing prescription amphetamines can lead to seizures, psychosis and life-threatening heart disease.
Stimulants can certainly benefit some young children with truly disabling ADHD. However, history has already taught us that overprescribing stimulants to millions of Americans leads to dependence, addiction and overdose. By medicating children for wiggling in their chairs, losing their homework and shouting out answers, we are not teaching them vital coping skills to manage their behavior. Instead, we are teaching them to take a pill. One day, we'll look back and wonder: Why did we do this? Again.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323566804578549262039104552.htmlBehind Iran's 'Moderate' New Leader
Hassan Rohani unleashed attacks on pro-democracy student protesters in 1999.
So this is what democracy looks like in a theocratic dictatorship. Iran's presidential campaign season kicked off last month when an unelected body of 12 Islamic jurists disqualified more than 600 candidates. Women were automatically out; so were Iranian Christians, Jews and even Sunni Muslims. The rest, including a former president, were purged for possessing insufficient revolutionary zeal. Eight regime loyalists made it onto the ballots. One emerged victorious on Saturday.
That man is Hassan Rohani, a 64-year-old cleric, former nuclear negotiator and security apparatchik. Western journalists quickly hailed the "moderate" and "reformist" Mr. Rohani. The New York Times's Tehran correspondent couldn't repress his election-night euphoria on Twitter: "Tonight the Islamic Republic rocks Rohani style." A BBC correspondent gushed: "The reaction of the people showed how much they trusted the electoral system." Just hours earlier the broadcaster had condemned Iranian security forces for threatening to assassinate a BBC Persian journalist in London, but such is the Western media's hunger for good news from Tehran.
Turnout was high, with more than 70% of eligible voters casting ballots. That figure should be taken with a grain of salt, since voting is obligatory for many sectors of Iranian society. Still, some of the victory parties in Tehran and other cities did seem genuine, with voters taking to the streets to celebrate the end of a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad era that saw a rise in repression and in economic hardship caused by the regime's mounting international isolation.
But disillusionment with seemingly heroic new leaders promising change is a centuries-old theme in Iranian history. The current regime's theocratic structure—with a supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and numerous unaccountable bodies lording over popularly elected officials—will soon remind voters that this latest hero has little room to maneuver.
That is, if he's inclined to seek change in the first place...Mr. Rohani spent Iran's revolutionary days as a close companion of the Ayatollah Khomeini and would go on to hold top posts during the Islamic Republic's first two decades in power. For 16 years starting in 1989, Mr. Rohani served as secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. During his tenure on the council, Mr. Rohani led the crackdown on a 1999 student uprising and helped the regime evade Western scrutiny of its nuclear-weapons program.
As Mr. Rohani said at a pro-regime rally in July 1999: "At dusk yesterday we received a decisive revolutionary order to crush mercilessly and monumentally any move of these opportunist elements wherever it may occur. From today our people shall witness how in the arena our law enforcement force . . . shall deal with these opportunists and riotous elements, if they simply dare to show their faces."
Beyond Iran's borders, Mr. Rohani has largely favored "resistance" and nuclear defiance. During the campaign, he boasted of how during his tenure as negotiator Iran didn't suspend enrichment—on the contrary, "we completed the program." And on Syria, expect Mr. Rohani to back the ruling establishment's pro-Assad policy. "Syria has constantly been on the front line of fighting Zionism and this resistance must not be weakened," he declared in January, according to the state-run Press TV.
These inconvenient facts from the Rohani dossier should give pause to those in Washington and Brussels eager to embrace this smiling mullah. |
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Post by Pyro ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔ on Jun 18, 2013 1:17:35 GMT -5
We get top-heavy with a bunch of old people expecting entitlements and not enough young people to pay for them. Recent poloticz has failed us because we're supposed to have strong families, but have been undermined by bureaucrats who unintentionally or intentionally brought about the present situation. Then you need to stop sending young people to wars to be killed and also get rid of guns. 1000's of people are killed by guns in America each year. But then you're complaining that you're running out of white people and it's mostly niggers who are shot in their urban shoot outs so you don't care about them. Else you would wanna ban guns. So that just makes you a racist. Jesus dislikes racism especially since he was not white. And if you hate non white people you also hate jesus. Why do you hate Jesus? You're making baby Jesus cry, and adult Jesus mad. Teenager Jesus seems ok though. |
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Tails82
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Post by Tails82 on Jun 18, 2013 7:37:08 GMT -5
Then you need to stop sending young people to wars to be killed and also get rid of guns.The percentage of families with active service members has fallen for decades to the point where it's a fraction of a percent. Gun violence has also gone down. That's not the problem. 1000's of people are killed by guns in America each year. But then you're complaining that you're running out of white people and it's mostly niggers who are shot in their urban shoot outs so you don't care about them. Else you would wanna ban guns. So that just makes you a racist.Since you're running contrary to established facts as stated above, by your nonserious logic you should support more guns and more military ventures or you're the real racist. www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/reid-keeps-up-his-enda-the-bargainIn the midst of so many crises, it's comforting to know that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is focused on what matters: genderless bathrooms. Unfortunately, that's just one effect of a sweeping proposal that could destroy personal freedom in the American workplace. On Flag Day, Reid saluted the rainbow flag instead of Old Glory, becoming the 50th cosponsor of the Senate's latest Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), one of the most anti-business policies this Congress will consider...Although some people defend it as an innocent piece of anti-prejudice legislation, ENDA creates special employment protections solely on the basis of a person's sexual preferences. Businesses would be forced to comply (or face penalties), regardless of the impact on their organization.
"The gender identity provisions," FRC's Peter Sprigg warns in an op-ed for CNN, "undermine the right of employers to impose reasonable dress and grooming standards, by forbidding employers to use the most fundamental standard of all -- that people be dressed in a way [that's] appropriate for their biological sex!" Not too long ago, Sen. Reid's position -- which orders employers (like preschools) to hire transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens, and drag kings -- was considered "too radical" even for homosexual congressman Barney Frank!
And unlike past bills, Sen. Jeff Merkley's (D-Ore.) version doesn't include an exemption for bathrooms, which means that employers at daycares, public schools, and Christian businesses would all have to change their restroom and shower policies to accommodate men who dress like women and vice-versa. Can you imagine walking into your daughter's classroom and seeing her teacher dressed in drag -- or that same man using the ladies restroom with female students? Apparently Senate liberals can.
Apart from the bill's obvious problems, this legislation would be a magnet for lawsuits. "[W]ith the law in place, everyone who doesn't get hired or is removed for cause of any sort finds themselves with the opportunity to sue the employer under the new rules." HotAir goes on to talk about the financial drain this litigation would be on an already struggling and overregulated economy. "Dollars spent in such lawsuits and settlements are dollars not available to expand the payroll and get more workers off the unemployment lines."
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) challenged the wisdom of such a policy in a statement last week. "By and large, I think all Americans should be protected," he said, "but I'm not for any special protections based on sexual orientation." Kudos to Senator Rubio for recognizing that this bill would be just another government club to beat businesses with. It wasn't too long ago that homosexual activists said they just wanted "to get the government out of their bedroom." Now we know why: they want to put their bedroom in the workplace!online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323734304578541822111512316.htmlCalifornia's Cap-and-Tax Grab
Democrats raid carbon-emissions auction revenue to finance more welfare spending.
Democrats in Sacramento are taking a victory lap for balancing this year's budget without raising taxes (not counting the $6 billion retroactive hike voters approved at political gunpoint in November). The dirty little secret is they're instead tapping California's new cap-and-trade program.
California expects to generate $500 million this year from auctioning off permits to emit carbon, and between $2 billion and $14 billion annually by 2015. This rich new vein of revenues was supposed to flow to green programs (e.g., solar subsidies), but Governor Jerry Brown cut a deal with Democrats in the legislature to seize this year's proceeds to finance more generous welfare and Medicaid benefits. Environmentalists are suddenly stunned to discover that they're not exempt from Sacramento's generally accepted accounting principle of raiding internal accounts to backfill the budget.
Mr. Brown has vowed to repay the $500 million cap-and-trade "loan" in short order. But as a matter of law, he has until the California Air Resources Board (CARB) says it needs the cash to administer the cap-and-trade program. That may be never since CARB's expenditures are discretionary, and the quarterly auctions will produce gushers of revenues that guarantee the cap-and-trade fund never runs dry.
The board's chairwoman Mary Nichols, who's endorsing the raid, has tried to quell enraged environmentalists by reminding them that "the part about the cap-and-trade program that is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it's the cap," and "not the revenue that we get from the allowances."
Good point, and one which businesses are making in a lawsuit that contends the state is levying an unconstitutional tax under the guise of a "regulatory fee." California's Prop. 13 (1978) requires a supermajority vote of the legislature to raise taxes. CARB circumvented this requirement in 2011 by setting up a state-run auction to sell permits and calling the profits "regulatory fees" that would be used to mitigate emissions.
But as the state Supreme Court underscored in its 1997 Sinclair Paint Co. opinion, regulatory fees cannot "exceed in amount the reasonable cost of providing the protective services for which the fees are charged" or be imposed for "unrelated revenue purposes."
California has never quantified the "reasonable cost" to protect the public from carbon emissions, and it's hard to argue that spending cap-and-trade dollars on welfare checks advances environmental objectives. The state doesn't need to auction off permits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It could achieve its emissions targets by giving away permits for free and ratcheting the cap down over time.
In short, California Democrats are proving that the real point of cap and trade is to give politicians another revenue stream for income redistribution while dodging accountability for raising taxes. That's worth keeping in mind when liberals resurrect the scheme for the entire U.S.
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Post by Pyro ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔ on Jun 19, 2013 1:11:23 GMT -5
Then you need to stop sending young people to wars to be killed and also get rid of guns.The percentage of families with active service members has fallen for decades to the point where it's a fraction of a percent. Gun violence has also gone down. That's not the problem. 1000's of people are killed by guns in America each year. But then you're complaining that you're running out of white people and it's mostly niggers who are shot in their urban shoot outs so you don't care about them. Else you would wanna ban guns. So that just makes you a racist.Since you're running contrary to established facts as stated above, by your nonserious logic you should support more guns and more military ventures or you're the real racist. According to Jake Im a racist and a xylophone. But you're even worse because your racism is against non-white people. Jesus was not white. You're racist against Jesus. |
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Tails82
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Post by Tails82 on Jun 19, 2013 7:29:55 GMT -5
Typical Ally going off subject with her race problems and weird comparisons and something about Jesus now blah blah stuff no need to respond. online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578539453974685238.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopThe Young Won't Buy ObamaCare
It makes scant financial sense for them to subsidize others' care.
Mr. Alito pointed out that young, healthy adults today spend an average of $854 a year on health care. ObamaCare would require them to buy insurance policies expected to cost roughly $5,800. The law, then, isn't just asking them to pay for "the services that they are going to consume," he added. "The mandate is forcing these people to provide a huge subsidy to the insurance companies . . . to subsidize services that will be received by somebody else."
Since he puts it that way, why would they sign up for ObamaCare, especially since the alleged penalties will be negligible and likely unenforced?...any reasoned analysis shows that government policy is why we have such a byzantine payment system in the first place, in which an ever-inflating health-care bill is allocated among "payer" groups via opaque political bargaining.
Why isn't the same mess seen in other realms of the economy? In the automobile market, dealers publish prices on their websites and in ads that are always lower than the sticker prices. Why?
Independent websites like Edmunds.com, AutoTrader.com and Kelley Blue Book publish detailed pricing information for consumers and do so for free. Why?
The answer is obvious. Consumers want such information and businesses see opportunity in providing it, even for free, in order to attract eyeballs for advertising.
Such information doesn't exist in health care because consumers don't demand it, because somebody else is almost always paying for our health care. Those of us who aren't subsidized directly by Medicaid, Medicare and the Veterans Administration are subsidized through the tax code to channel all our aches and pains through a third-party payment mill, disguised as employer-provided "insurance."
The uninsured are painted as the payer group getting the worst deal from the health-care system since they don't enjoy insurer discounts. But judging by the 6% of hospital costs written off as uncollectable, the uninsured are actually getting the best deal (in a sense). A 2011 government study found that even relatively affluent families pay just 37% of their hospital bills in full.www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/06/18/amazing_message_from_a_former_democratRUSH: I have amazing sound bites coming up for you in just a moment. They are from Sunday, and they are from a black state senator in Louisiana. His name is Elbert Guillory, and he is a Republican, and he released a video message to his constituents about why he switched parties from Democrat to Republican...here are the three sound bites that we have for you.
GUILLORY: The Democrat Party has created the illusion that their agenda and their policies are what's best for black people. Somehow it's been forgotten that the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement with one simple creed: That slavery is a violation of the rights of man. Frederick Douglass called Republicans "the party of freedom and progress," and the first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was Republicans in Congress who authored the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, giving former slaves citizenship, voting rights, and due process of law. Democrats, on the other hand, were the party of Jim Crow. It was Democrats who defended the rights of slave owners.
RUSH: All that's true and all of it's never said except for the likes of us. But we're not black and we're not former Democrats. But this man's elected by African-Americans in his state in Louisiana. He switched parties, and he's giving people who venture to his website and look at his video (which, by the way, is on YouTube and has gone viral) a history lesson. Now, you've heard it on this program. You know pretty much all you're gonna hear from the man. But he is reaching an audience, his voters, who don't hear this kind of thing and need to hear more of it.
GUILLORY: At the heart of liberalism is the idea that only a great and powerful big government can be the benefactor of social justice for all Americans. But the left is only concerned with one thing: Control. And they disguise this control as charity. Programs such as welfare, food stamps? These programs aren't designed to lift black Americans out of poverty! They were always intended as a mechanism for politicians to control the black community. The idea that blacks -- or anyone, for that matter -- need the government to get ahead in life, is despicable. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers, who control us by making us dependent on them.
RUSH: Now, that's not news to you, obviously. You know this, and you've prayed that Democrat voters across the country would someday realize this. The reason I want you to hear this and the reason I think it's important is in the current climate, this just isn't the kind of thing that a Democrat, even a former Democrat, says. So I think the fact that people like State Senator Elbert Guillory from Louisiana are there and willing to speak at a time like this is hopeful. That's why I'm giving a wide audience to his comments. Here's the final sample. The whole video presentation he makes is worth it, but here's the final of the three we have.
GUILLORY: To be truly free is to be reliant on no one, other than the author of our destiny. These are the ideas at the core of the Republican Party, and it is why I am a Republican. So, my brothers and sisters of the American community, please join with me today in abandoning the government plantation and the party of disappointment so that we may all echo the words of one Republican leader who famously said "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last."www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/josh-duggar-accepts-new-role-at-frc-actionBaker Jack Phillips won't be behind the counter much longer if homosexuals get their way -- he'll be behind bars. The Masterpiece Cakes owner, who last year turned down a same-sex "wedding" order, is facing imprisonment simply for agreeing with his state's definition of marriage! And while the controversy is unfolding in Colorado -- not China -- the similarities are tough to ignore.
Using totalitarian tactics, homosexual couple David Mullins and Charlie Craig have recruited the state attorney general to treat Phillips like a common criminal, even going so far as to initiate a formal complaint ordering Phillips to "cease and desist." If Jack refuses, he faces fines and up to a year in jail for each time he refuses to participate in a same-sex ceremony. Back in July of last year, when Phillips's story first made headlines, the owners stood strong. "We would close down that bakery before we close down our beliefs," Jack told reporters. Since then, he said, positive feedback outweighs the negative "100 to one."
Unfortunately, that positive feedback won't help Phillips if Colorado officials decide to bring the full weight of the law against the 20-year-old shop. Like Arlene's Flowers in Washington State, Jack has been all too happy to serve homosexuals. He does, however, draw the line at participating in same-sex ceremonies that violate his Christian beliefs. (Beliefs, Fox News announced last week, that a majority of Americans still share.) "At its heart," said the Phillips' attorney, "this is a case about conscience. I don't think we should heighten one person's beliefs over and above another person's beliefs." Ironically, Colorado's constitution defines marriage the same way Jack does, but its anti-discrimination laws stubbornly refuse to offer religious protections for businesses.
For now, both sides will hold their breath until September, when the state's Civil Rights Commission will hear the case. If Jack is convicted, "It would force him to choose between his conscience and a paycheck," his lawyer explained. "I just think that's an intolerable choice." Regardless of what happens, Americans everywhere have been warned: Conform on marriage or be punished.blog.heritage.org/2013/06/18/kansas-teachers-split-with-nea/Teachers in Deerfield, Kansas, just did something unusual—they voted to decertify their union. The Kansas National Education Association (KNEA) no longer represents them.
Teachers disliking their union representation do not make news, but teachers actually leaving their union do: The law makes it very difficult for teachers to remove unwanted unions.
Unlike most public officials, unions do not stand for re-election, so their members cannot regularly hold them accountable. Workers can remove an unwanted union only by filing for decertification. But bureaucratic obstacles make it difficult to hold a vote on decertification. The hoops Deerfield’s teachers had to jump through illustrate this problem.
Joel McClure, the teacher who led the effort, submitted the appropriate paperwork to the Kansas Department of Labor in November 2012. But Kansas teachers can request a vote only in a two-month window every three years. KNEA officials contested the petition by claiming that the teachers missed the December 1 deadline. (The Department of Labor had misplaced the initial petition paperwork.) Then the KNEA objected that the teachers’ attorney was not certified in Kansas and that they did not have enough signatures. However, the teachers prevailed and voted out their union—in June, just eight months after the initial submission.
When asked why they went through such protracted effort, the teachers said their union ignored their concerns. They wanted instead to be actively involved in negotiations and work collaboratively with the school district. “The desire is for teachers to participate at the [bargaining] table, to have free access to information,” McClure said. “In our little school district, there’s no reason we can’t sit down at the table and work out our issues.”
Now they can. But most other teachers never get to choose their bargaining representatives. Their unions formed in the 1970s and have never stood for re-election since. In some of Kansas’s largest school districts, not one teacher voted for the current union. Teachers who do not want a prolonged legal battle get stuck with their union by default.
The law should give workers more choice about who represents them. Kansas legislators are reviewing Kansas HB 2027, which would require teachers unions to stand for re-election every two years and allow individual teachers to negotiate separate contracts. This would make unions more accountable to their members while allowing great teachers to negotiate for even better pay.
Americans trust teachers to educate our children. We should also trust them to choose who should represent them.washingtonexaminer.com/support-falling-in-polls-harry-reid-announces-rush-to-pass-immigration-bill/article/2532058With a new poll showing falling support for the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced an accelerated schedule in which the Senate would take a final, up-or-down vote on passing the bill by the end of next week.
Reid warned his fellow lawmakers that if they want to consider amendments to the Gang of Eight bill, they need to be prepared to work virtually nonstop between now and then. "This may not be one of our normal weekends,” Reid said. “We’ve got to move forward on this legislation.”
Why? Debate in the full Senate only started last week. Why is Reid rushing to pass such a sprawling, multifaceted piece of legislation in such a short period of time? Is there an emergency?
There is no obvious, pressing reason for Reid’s schedule. But as he spoke, there were signs that popular support for immigration reform is slipping. After months of polls showing widespread support for some elements of reform, a new CNN survey showed a bare majority, 51 percent to 45 percent, supports the Gang of Eight bill. Perhaps more ominously, the poll found strong support for prioritizing border security above a path to citizenship for currently-illegal immigrants. Independents favor security before a path by a two-to-one margin, and Republicans support it by a three-to-one margin. Democrats favored a path to citizenship over security, but by the barest of margins, 50 percent to 49 percent. Overall, CNN found that 62 percent of the public favors prioritizing security before a path to citizenship, while 36 percent favored a path over security.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323566804578553613885775452.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinionWe're inclined to disagree with the American Civil Liberties Union on the matter of the NSA, but Wendy Kaminer, writing at TheAtlantic.com, has an excellent point:
"If progressives had their way, the ACLU's latest challenge to the NSA's domestic surveillance would easily be dismissed. ACLU v Clapper, filed in the wake of the Snowden revelations, is based on the ACLU's First and Fourth Amendment rights, which, according to progressives, ACLU should not possess. It is, after all, a corporation, and constitutional amendments aggressively promoted by progressives would limit constitutional rights to "natural persons."
We've made similar points repeatedly, including in June 2011 after Rachel Maddow, who is sometimes called the thinking man's Keith Olbermann, shrilly and obliviously defended Acorn's rights under the Bill of Attainder Clause. The "natural persons" idea is probably the best evidence that progressives are more stupid than they are cynical.lol "You can't go to the courts for protection against an overreaching administration! The administration says you aren't people!" Remember the "Obama phone lady"? As we wrote in October, "this columnist both laughed and cringed" at the widely circulated video showing a middle-aged black woman with a loud, gravelly voice explaining that she supported President Obama's re-election because "Everybody in Cleveland [unintelligible] minority got Obama phone! Keep Obama in president, you know? He gave us a phone!"
As we wrote back then, she gave Obama too much credit: The Lifeline program, which subsidizes low-income subscribers, dates back to the 1980s. Juliet Lapidos, an editorialist at the New York Times, made the same point and then trotted out the left's favorite charge: "The Tea Party Victory Fund jumped on the 'Obama phone' video because it features a black woman. The ad fits into the narrative that minorities are moochers and that government programs transfer wealth from white people to black people."
Now there's a new video out by James O'Keefe, the conservative Alinskyite muckraker who brought down Acorn. As London's Daily Mail describes it:
Undercover video shot in May by a conservative activist shows two corporate distributors of free cell phones handing out the mobile devices to people who have promised to sell them for drug money, to buy shoes and handbags, to pay off their bills, or just for extra spending cash. . . .
When James O'Keefe, whose Project Veritas is a perennial thorn in the side of progressive policymakers, sent an undercover actor into a Stand Up Wireless location in Philadelphia, the man's stated purpose was to buy drugs.
"Once you guys give me this phone, it's my phone?" he asked an employee inside a Philadelphia brick-and-mortal [sic] Stand Up Wireless location. "I can, like, sell it and stuff?"
:Whatever you want to do with it," the worker replied.
"So I'm [going to] get some money for heroin," he offered.
The employee coolly responded, "Hey, I don't judge." |
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Post by kode54 on Jun 19, 2013 22:09:57 GMT -5
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Post by Chromeo on Jun 19, 2013 23:40:25 GMT -5
yeah, the western world is clearly turning corporato-fascist
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Post by Pyro ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔ on Jun 20, 2013 1:20:24 GMT -5
Typical Ally going off subject with her race problems and weird comparisons and something about Jesus now blah blah stuff no need to respond. online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578539453974685238.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopThe Young Won't Buy ObamaCare
It makes scant financial sense for them to subsidize others' care.
Mr. Alito pointed out that young, healthy adults today spend an average of $854 a year on health care. ObamaCare would require them to buy insurance policies expected to cost roughly $5,800. The law, then, isn't just asking them to pay for "the services that they are going to consume," he added. "The mandate is forcing these people to provide a huge subsidy to the insurance companies . . . to subsidize services that will be received by somebody else."
Since he puts it that way, why would they sign up for ObamaCare, especially since the alleged penalties will be negligible and likely unenforced?...any reasoned analysis shows that government policy is why we have such a byzantine payment system in the first place, in which an ever-inflating health-care bill is allocated among "payer" groups via opaque political bargaining.
Why isn't the same mess seen in other realms of the economy? In the automobile market, dealers publish prices on their websites and in ads that are always lower than the sticker prices. Why?
Independent websites like Edmunds.com, AutoTrader.com and Kelley Blue Book publish detailed pricing information for consumers and do so for free. Why?
The answer is obvious. Consumers want such information and businesses see opportunity in providing it, even for free, in order to attract eyeballs for advertising.
Such information doesn't exist in health care because consumers don't demand it, because somebody else is almost always paying for our health care. Those of us who aren't subsidized directly by Medicaid, Medicare and the Veterans Administration are subsidized through the tax code to channel all our aches and pains through a third-party payment mill, disguised as employer-provided "insurance."
The uninsured are painted as the payer group getting the worst deal from the health-care system since they don't enjoy insurer discounts. But judging by the 6% of hospital costs written off as uncollectable, the uninsured are actually getting the best deal (in a sense). A 2011 government study found that even relatively affluent families pay just 37% of their hospital bills in full.www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/06/18/amazing_message_from_a_former_democratRUSH: I have amazing sound bites coming up for you in just a moment. They are from Sunday, and they are from a black state senator in Louisiana. His name is Elbert Guillory, and he is a Republican, and he released a video message to his constituents about why he switched parties from Democrat to Republican...here are the three sound bites that we have for you.
GUILLORY: The Democrat Party has created the illusion that their agenda and their policies are what's best for black people. Somehow it's been forgotten that the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement with one simple creed: That slavery is a violation of the rights of man. Frederick Douglass called Republicans "the party of freedom and progress," and the first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was Republicans in Congress who authored the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, giving former slaves citizenship, voting rights, and due process of law. Democrats, on the other hand, were the party of Jim Crow. It was Democrats who defended the rights of slave owners.
RUSH: All that's true and all of it's never said except for the likes of us. But we're not black and we're not former Democrats. But this man's elected by African-Americans in his state in Louisiana. He switched parties, and he's giving people who venture to his website and look at his video (which, by the way, is on YouTube and has gone viral) a history lesson. Now, you've heard it on this program. You know pretty much all you're gonna hear from the man. But he is reaching an audience, his voters, who don't hear this kind of thing and need to hear more of it.
GUILLORY: At the heart of liberalism is the idea that only a great and powerful big government can be the benefactor of social justice for all Americans. But the left is only concerned with one thing: Control. And they disguise this control as charity. Programs such as welfare, food stamps? These programs aren't designed to lift black Americans out of poverty! They were always intended as a mechanism for politicians to control the black community. The idea that blacks -- or anyone, for that matter -- need the government to get ahead in life, is despicable. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers, who control us by making us dependent on them.
RUSH: Now, that's not news to you, obviously. You know this, and you've prayed that Democrat voters across the country would someday realize this. The reason I want you to hear this and the reason I think it's important is in the current climate, this just isn't the kind of thing that a Democrat, even a former Democrat, says. So I think the fact that people like State Senator Elbert Guillory from Louisiana are there and willing to speak at a time like this is hopeful. That's why I'm giving a wide audience to his comments. Here's the final sample. The whole video presentation he makes is worth it, but here's the final of the three we have.
GUILLORY: To be truly free is to be reliant on no one, other than the author of our destiny. These are the ideas at the core of the Republican Party, and it is why I am a Republican. So, my brothers and sisters of the American community, please join with me today in abandoning the government plantation and the party of disappointment so that we may all echo the words of one Republican leader who famously said "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last."www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/josh-duggar-accepts-new-role-at-frc-actionBaker Jack Phillips won't be behind the counter much longer if homosexuals get their way -- he'll be behind bars. The Masterpiece Cakes owner, who last year turned down a same-sex "wedding" order, is facing imprisonment simply for agreeing with his state's definition of marriage! And while the controversy is unfolding in Colorado -- not China -- the similarities are tough to ignore.
Using totalitarian tactics, homosexual couple David Mullins and Charlie Craig have recruited the state attorney general to treat Phillips like a common criminal, even going so far as to initiate a formal complaint ordering Phillips to "cease and desist." If Jack refuses, he faces fines and up to a year in jail for each time he refuses to participate in a same-sex ceremony. Back in July of last year, when Phillips's story first made headlines, the owners stood strong. "We would close down that bakery before we close down our beliefs," Jack told reporters. Since then, he said, positive feedback outweighs the negative "100 to one."
Unfortunately, that positive feedback won't help Phillips if Colorado officials decide to bring the full weight of the law against the 20-year-old shop. Like Arlene's Flowers in Washington State, Jack has been all too happy to serve homosexuals. He does, however, draw the line at participating in same-sex ceremonies that violate his Christian beliefs. (Beliefs, Fox News announced last week, that a majority of Americans still share.) "At its heart," said the Phillips' attorney, "this is a case about conscience. I don't think we should heighten one person's beliefs over and above another person's beliefs." Ironically, Colorado's constitution defines marriage the same way Jack does, but its anti-discrimination laws stubbornly refuse to offer religious protections for businesses.
For now, both sides will hold their breath until September, when the state's Civil Rights Commission will hear the case. If Jack is convicted, "It would force him to choose between his conscience and a paycheck," his lawyer explained. "I just think that's an intolerable choice." Regardless of what happens, Americans everywhere have been warned: Conform on marriage or be punished.blog.heritage.org/2013/06/18/kansas-teachers-split-with-nea/Teachers in Deerfield, Kansas, just did something unusual—they voted to decertify their union. The Kansas National Education Association (KNEA) no longer represents them.
Teachers disliking their union representation do not make news, but teachers actually leaving their union do: The law makes it very difficult for teachers to remove unwanted unions.
Unlike most public officials, unions do not stand for re-election, so their members cannot regularly hold them accountable. Workers can remove an unwanted union only by filing for decertification. But bureaucratic obstacles make it difficult to hold a vote on decertification. The hoops Deerfield’s teachers had to jump through illustrate this problem.
Joel McClure, the teacher who led the effort, submitted the appropriate paperwork to the Kansas Department of Labor in November 2012. But Kansas teachers can request a vote only in a two-month window every three years. KNEA officials contested the petition by claiming that the teachers missed the December 1 deadline. (The Department of Labor had misplaced the initial petition paperwork.) Then the KNEA objected that the teachers’ attorney was not certified in Kansas and that they did not have enough signatures. However, the teachers prevailed and voted out their union—in June, just eight months after the initial submission.
When asked why they went through such protracted effort, the teachers said their union ignored their concerns. They wanted instead to be actively involved in negotiations and work collaboratively with the school district. “The desire is for teachers to participate at the [bargaining] table, to have free access to information,” McClure said. “In our little school district, there’s no reason we can’t sit down at the table and work out our issues.”
Now they can. But most other teachers never get to choose their bargaining representatives. Their unions formed in the 1970s and have never stood for re-election since. In some of Kansas’s largest school districts, not one teacher voted for the current union. Teachers who do not want a prolonged legal battle get stuck with their union by default.
The law should give workers more choice about who represents them. Kansas legislators are reviewing Kansas HB 2027, which would require teachers unions to stand for re-election every two years and allow individual teachers to negotiate separate contracts. This would make unions more accountable to their members while allowing great teachers to negotiate for even better pay.
Americans trust teachers to educate our children. We should also trust them to choose who should represent them.washingtonexaminer.com/support-falling-in-polls-harry-reid-announces-rush-to-pass-immigration-bill/article/2532058With a new poll showing falling support for the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced an accelerated schedule in which the Senate would take a final, up-or-down vote on passing the bill by the end of next week.
Reid warned his fellow lawmakers that if they want to consider amendments to the Gang of Eight bill, they need to be prepared to work virtually nonstop between now and then. "This may not be one of our normal weekends,” Reid said. “We’ve got to move forward on this legislation.”
Why? Debate in the full Senate only started last week. Why is Reid rushing to pass such a sprawling, multifaceted piece of legislation in such a short period of time? Is there an emergency?
There is no obvious, pressing reason for Reid’s schedule. But as he spoke, there were signs that popular support for immigration reform is slipping. After months of polls showing widespread support for some elements of reform, a new CNN survey showed a bare majority, 51 percent to 45 percent, supports the Gang of Eight bill. Perhaps more ominously, the poll found strong support for prioritizing border security above a path to citizenship for currently-illegal immigrants. Independents favor security before a path by a two-to-one margin, and Republicans support it by a three-to-one margin. Democrats favored a path to citizenship over security, but by the barest of margins, 50 percent to 49 percent. Overall, CNN found that 62 percent of the public favors prioritizing security before a path to citizenship, while 36 percent favored a path over security.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323566804578553613885775452.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinionWe're inclined to disagree with the American Civil Liberties Union on the matter of the NSA, but Wendy Kaminer, writing at TheAtlantic.com, has an excellent point:
"If progressives had their way, the ACLU's latest challenge to the NSA's domestic surveillance would easily be dismissed. ACLU v Clapper, filed in the wake of the Snowden revelations, is based on the ACLU's First and Fourth Amendment rights, which, according to progressives, ACLU should not possess. It is, after all, a corporation, and constitutional amendments aggressively promoted by progressives would limit constitutional rights to "natural persons."
We've made similar points repeatedly, including in June 2011 after Rachel Maddow, who is sometimes called the thinking man's Keith Olbermann, shrilly and obliviously defended Acorn's rights under the Bill of Attainder Clause. The "natural persons" idea is probably the best evidence that progressives are more stupid than they are cynical.lol "You can't go to the courts for protection against an overreaching administration! The administration says you aren't people!" Remember the "Obama phone lady"? As we wrote in October, "this columnist both laughed and cringed" at the widely circulated video showing a middle-aged black woman with a loud, gravelly voice explaining that she supported President Obama's re-election because "Everybody in Cleveland [unintelligible] minority got Obama phone! Keep Obama in president, you know? He gave us a phone!"
As we wrote back then, she gave Obama too much credit: The Lifeline program, which subsidizes low-income subscribers, dates back to the 1980s. Juliet Lapidos, an editorialist at the New York Times, made the same point and then trotted out the left's favorite charge: "The Tea Party Victory Fund jumped on the 'Obama phone' video because it features a black woman. The ad fits into the narrative that minorities are moochers and that government programs transfer wealth from white people to black people."
Now there's a new video out by James O'Keefe, the conservative Alinskyite muckraker who brought down Acorn. As London's Daily Mail describes it:
Undercover video shot in May by a conservative activist shows two corporate distributors of free cell phones handing out the mobile devices to people who have promised to sell them for drug money, to buy shoes and handbags, to pay off their bills, or just for extra spending cash. . . .
When James O'Keefe, whose Project Veritas is a perennial thorn in the side of progressive policymakers, sent an undercover actor into a Stand Up Wireless location in Philadelphia, the man's stated purpose was to buy drugs.
"Once you guys give me this phone, it's my phone?" he asked an employee inside a Philadelphia brick-and-mortal [sic] Stand Up Wireless location. "I can, like, sell it and stuff?"
:Whatever you want to do with it," the worker replied.
"So I'm [going to] get some money for heroin," he offered.
The employee coolly responded, "Hey, I don't judge." |
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Tails82
Lord of Terror++
Loyal Vassal
still...sipping?
Posts: 34,351
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Post by Tails82 on Jun 20, 2013 7:22:56 GMT -5
Screw-the-poor progressives are out doing their thing blog.heritage.org/2013/06/19/morning-bell-congress-is-trying-to-fool-you-on-immigration/Here’s how they do business. A piece of legislation is going to cost trillions of dollars, but Members of Congress don’t want the public to see that. Instead, they have the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) look at the bill for just the first 10 years—and they move any costly items off into the future on purpose.
They did it with Obamacare—saved the budget bombshells for later. Now they’re trying to do it with immigration.
Despite promises of a secure border, the bill would slow future illegal immigration by only 25 percent, according to the CBO. In the next couple of decades, that means 7.5 million new illegal immigrants.
For legal American workers, the CBO estimates the bill would drive down their average wages.
The bill will burden taxpayers with trillions of dollars in welfare and entitlement costs for the newly legalized immigrants under amnesty. Heritage’s Robert Rector explains:
"S.744 provides only a temporary delay in eligibility to welfare and entitlements. Over time, S.744 makes all 18.5 million eligible for nearly every government program, including: Obamacare, 80 different welfare programs, Social Security and Medicare. When this occurs, spending will explode, but nearly all the real costs do not appear in the CBO score."
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, explained how the Gang of Eight purposefully hid the true costs of the bill:
"The bill’s drafters relied on the same scoring gimmicks used by the Obamacare drafters to conceal its true cost from taxpayers and to manipulate the CBO score. There is a reason why eligibility for the most expensive federal benefits was largely delayed outside the 10-year scoring window: to mislead the public. As Ranking Member of the Budget Committee, I asked CBO to provide a long-term estimate. Sadly, CBO did not provide the long-term estimate as requested."
Sessions added, “This bill guarantees three things: amnesty, increased welfare costs, and lower wages for the U.S. workforce. It would be the biggest setback for poor and middle-class Americans of any legislation Congress has considered in decades.”www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/06/19/interview_senator_cruz_on_the_amnesty_billTed Cruz talks about it. online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578539823614996636.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopSigns of ObamaCare's failings mount daily, including soaring insurance costs, looming provider shortages and inadequate insurance exchanges. Yet the law's most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, sometimes called a "death panel," threatens both the Medicare program and the Constitution's separation of powers. At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.
For a vivid illustration of the extent to which life-and-death medical decisions have already been usurped by government bureaucrats, consider the recent refusal by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to waive the rules barring access by 10-year old Sarah Murnaghan to the adult lung-transplant list. A judge ultimately intervened and Sarah received a lifesaving transplant June 12. But the grip of the bureaucracy will clamp much harder once the Independent Payment Advisory Board gets going in the next two years.
The board, which will control more than a half-trillion dollars of federal spending annually, is directed to "develop detailed and specific proposals related to the Medicare program," including proposals cutting Medicare spending below a statutorily prescribed level. In addition, the board is encouraged to make rules "related to" Medicare.
The ObamaCare law also stipulates that there "shall be no administrative or judicial review" of the board's decisions. Its members will be nearly untouchable, too. They will be presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed, but after that they can only be fired for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office."
The law allows Congress to kill the otherwise inextirpable board only by a three-fifths supermajority, and only by a vote that takes place in 2017 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 15. If the board fails to implement cuts, all of its powers are to be exercised by HHS Secretary Sebelius or her successor.
The IPAB's godlike powers are not accidental. Its goal, conspicuously proclaimed by the Obama administration, is to control Medicare spending in ways that are insulated from the political process.
This wholesale transfer of power is at odds with the Constitution's separation-of-powers architecture that protects individual liberty by preventing an undue aggregation of government power in a single entity.
The power given by Congress to the Independent Payment Advisory Board is breathtaking. Congress has willingly abandoned its power to make tough spending decisions (how and where to cut) to an unaccountable board that neither the legislative branch nor the president can control. The law has also entrenched the board's decisions to an unprecedented degree.
ObamaCare mandates that the board impose deep Medicare cuts, while simultaneously forbidding it to ration care. Reducing payments to doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers may cause them to limit or stop accepting Medicare patients, or even to close shop.
These actions will limit seniors' access to care, causing them to wait longer or forego care—the essence of rationing. ObamaCare's commands to the board are thus inherently contradictory and, consequently, unintelligible.
If the Independent Payment Advisory Board exercises these vast powers, political accountability will vanish. When constituents angrily protest, Congress, having ceded its core legislative power to another body, will likely just throw up its hands and blame the board.
The bottom line is that the Independent Payment Advisory Board isn't a typical executive agency. It's a new beast that exercises both executive and legislative power but can't be controlled by either branch. Seniors and providers hit hardest by the board's decisions will have nowhere to turn for relief—not Congress, not the president, not the courts.
Attempts to rein in government spending are laudable, but basic decisions about how and where to cut spending properly belong to Congress. In the 225 years of constitutional history, there has been no government entity that violated the separation-of-powers principle like the Independent Payment Advisory Board does.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324021104578553121165841946.htmlThe debut of a new truck engine rarely attracts much attention. But this spring Cummins Inc. released two new truck engines worthy of notice: They are designed to run on natural gas, not diesel. Natural gas is abundant, domestically produced, cleaner and cheaper than oil-derived diesel. It could help set America free of foreign oil.
The natural-gas-powered ISL G and ISX 12 engines are the latest sign of the country's fundamental shift in energy resources and infrastructure. It's not the shift that the Obama administration has tried to engineer by shoveling money at wind-power projects and electric cars. Cummins built its engines without a penny of government support—a reminder that free markets can solve problems that politicians argued about for decades but failed to fix.
Natural-gas reserves are plentiful but not always easy to recover. It took an individual entrepreneur, Texan George P. Mitchell, to perfect the technology of hydraulic fracturing beginning in the 1990s that has made so much more of the gas available. And fracking, it turns out, also can be used to recover oil from formations that could not previously be tapped.
Fracking technology is responsible for last year's 14% increase in oil production to 8.9 million barrels per day, the largest increase ever, and a massive, five-year increase in natural gas production, to 28 billion cubic feet a day from five billion in 2008. The increased supplies of both also are responsible for a drop in oil imports and declines in carbon-dioxide emissions to 1993 levels.
I have no idea what Mr. Mitchell's motivations were, but I'm confident that profits were at or near the top of the list. By serving his own interests, as Adam Smith put it more than 200 years ago, he served the interests of society.
The impetus for fracking cannot be found in four decades of presidential speeches about energy independence, or in any acts of Congress. Instead, it arose from economically painful spikes in oil prices engineered beginning in the 1970s by the OPEC cartel. High prices did what they always do—they set off a hunt both for substitutes and for more supplies to take advantage of high prices.
Fracking technology addresses both issues by increasing supplies of oil and of its cleaner, cheaper substitute, natural gas. These two forces—the search for substitutes and the rush to cash in on high prices—will change the nation's economy profoundly.
Another crucial factor contributed to the energy revolution. Plentiful oil and natural-gas reserves exist around the world, but the U.S. is far ahead of every other country in bringing those resources out of the ground and onto the market. The reason? America is one of the few countries where an individual or company can own the resources that lie beneath the ground.
Almost everywhere else—including even the United Kingdom—the rights to minerals of all kinds, including oil and natural gas, are claimed by the government. Unless the government wants you to drill, you might as well put your tools away. As a consequence, there is much less incentive to innovate. Why bother if you can't own what you produce, or you can't profit except at a bureaucrat's sufferance?
Today, because fracking is producing oil and natural gas at record levels, others are joining Cummins in getting into the act. Companies like T. Boone Pickens's Clean Energy Fuels are laying out a network of natural-gas filling stations on major U.S. highways so that trucks, using new engines, can fuel up. New pipelines, such as the one Spectra Energy proposes to connect New York and New Jersey, are in the works, in addition to the 16,000 miles of interstate natural-gas pipelines built over the past decade.
Most energy analysts, as well as big oil companies like Exxon, expect that the U.S. will become a net energy exporter between 2020 and 2030. When that happens, the $400 billion that Americans are on target to send overseas this year to pay for oil imports will shrink, perhaps to zero. A $400 billion swing from negative to neutral, or even to positive, in the energy trade balance is something no one would have predicted even a few years ago.
Letting markets do their work sometimes requires an act of faith. The temptation that many people have, especially in government, is to give those forces a shove in one direction or the other. But when people are allowed to use market signals to determine where and how to mobilize their creativity, resources, energy and effort, amazing things can happen. Abundant energy for the foreseeable future is one spectacular example. |
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Post by Jordan Ω on Jun 20, 2013 8:28:20 GMT -5
Well, well. So gay people could go to heaven after all? Hooray for Christianity!
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Post by Pyro ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔ on Jun 21, 2013 2:24:55 GMT -5
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Post by Pyro ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔ on Jun 21, 2013 2:59:22 GMT -5
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Tails82
Lord of Terror++
Loyal Vassal
still...sipping?
Posts: 34,351
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Post by Tails82 on Jun 21, 2013 9:54:13 GMT -5
www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/irish-turn-on-obamaIreland got its first taste of The Great Divider on Monday in a speech the President delivered to 2,000 young people in Belfast. There, in one of the tensest regions of the world, President Obama sowed even more dissention by suggesting that religious schools are somehow to blame for Northern Ireland's ancient conflicts.
Invoking "segregation," the President claimed that faith-based education is fueling the country's culture of fear and resentment. "If towns remain divided -- if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can't see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden -- that too encourages division and discourages cooperation." The American and Irish media pounced on the comment, calling it the "bitter clingers" moment of his second presidency -- a reference to the President's infamous middle America-bashing in 2008.
His comment took a lot of people by surprise in Ireland, especially since a local Archbishop had just commended Catholic schools for unifying students in a major speech a few days earlier. Perhaps, as several Irish people said, the President should get American schools in order before he criticizes other countries'...Essentially, the President is suggesting that Ireland needs more government schools -- which, at least in the U.S., are even more divisive due to multiculturalism and other poisonous ideas. Unfortunately, the White House's view continues to be that religion does more to estrange than unite. It's a revealing statement in many ways, given how aggressive the President has been lately in eradicating faith from our education, military, and political institutions. The reality is, Americans "cling to their religion," as President Obama so rudely put it, because true faith draws us together.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324577904578557550804014908.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinionBarack Obama is turning into a one-man gaffe machine. "Obama repeatedly called British finance minister George Osborne 'Jeffrey' at the G8 summit." Agence France-Presse includes this lovely deadpan observation: "The chancellor, 42, bears little resemblance to Jeffrey Osborne, a 65-year-old African-American hit singer-songwriter known for his 1982 classic 'On the Wings of Love.'"
Note also that Obama doesn't actually seem to know anything about Northern Ireland. Viewed in context, his comments are actually a homily about civil rights in America. His criticism of Catholic and Protestant "schools and buildings" is just a poorly thought out analogy: It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that while there's no good reason to segregate schools by race, there are differences in content between the education offered by Protestant, Catholic and secular schools.
So he delivered a banal lecture on American history to an audience in a foreign country, idly analogized his own country's history to theirs, and in the process inadvertently insulted Catholics, a group he has already alienated by way of deliberate attacks. No wonder they call him the World's Greatest Orator.I'll tell you what should unite us: blog.heritage.org/2013/06/20/the-legacy-of-the-victims-of-communism/“And we said nothing!” Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R–CA) told the small crowd of roughly 50 gathered for the sixth annual memorial for the victims of communism in Washington, D.C., last week.
As Rohrabacher paused in his speech about the massacre at Tiananmen Square a silence crept over the street. They were there to remember the victims of communism and to honor Dr. Yang Jieanli who was there to be awarded the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom. Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R–FL) and Jim Bridenstine (R–OK) and Mrs. Annette Lantos, wife of the late Representative Tom Lantos (D–CA), were featured speakers.
Those assembled could not have been more diverse. In attendance were representatives of 20 nations as well as American Cossacks and displaced Vietnamese. Among those in the crowd, there was no shared political agenda or linguistic heritage—and certainly not a shared religion, culture, or ethnicity. What they shared was an experience, a terrible nightmare. All those present were victims of communism.
As communist agitators and revolutionaries realize, there is a basic appeal in their rhetoric that speaks to all. They have used this appeal to manipulate, deceive, and inspire violence and revolution.
In contrast, those who stood against communism during its rise were armed with no inspiring slogans and no great promises of utopia. The White Army in Russia, Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists, the Batista regime, and countless others failed to hold back the revolutionary forces opposing them.
But modern opponents of communism have a weapon that their predecessors lacked—the evidence of its brutal history for nearly a century. Promises of socialist utopia can be countered by accounts of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Promises of brotherhood ought to be dismissed by evidence of the Gulag. Promises of equality should be refuted by testimony from escaped North Koreans.
We owe it to the victims of communism to tell their stories. The people who assembled at the memorial were there to remember the victims, but they were there also because they knew that the legacy of communism should never be forgotten.www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/irish-turn-on-obamaEvery time a Republican so much as utters the word "rape" in a public forum -- even defensibly -- the media begins a systematic smear campaign. Well, where were the big cameras and boom mics when Planned Parenthood claimed that "sex education is the cure for rape?" The comment was made last week in reference to a tragic story in Indiana, where a 13-year-old girl was violently raped in a car. Planned Parenthood linked to a local news report on its Facebook page and posted this in response, "Heartbreaking stories like this are all too common in Indiana, which ranks second in the number of teen sexual assaults. Comprehensive sex ed can make a difference in preventing sexual assaults."
Imagine if a conservative congressman had made the suggestion that teaching children less about sex would have prevented this little girl's rape. The Left would have drummed him out of politics! But because it's Planned Parenthood, the government's favorite purveyor of pornographic sex "education," (which probably provokes more assault than it prevents), no one says a word. Of course, the suggestion is all the more offensive coming from Planned Parenthood, since the organization has a long history of covering up statutory rape, especially in Bloomington and Indianapolis.
Even if Planned Parenthood's ridiculous theory were true, it certainly doesn't say a lot about the organization's effectiveness, considering that Planned Parenthood's presence in Indiana is double the national average. If more sex education is the answer, why does Indiana have the second highest teen sexual assault rate in the country?Yeah I know right? And it's always the left that brings up the rape questions. "You mean if I rape someone, I can't kill the baby?" "Nope" "You're crazy!" www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/06/20/obamacare_health_care_exchanges_are_democrat_party_front_organizationsI hate to do this to you, but the Investor's Business Daily had an editorial yesterday, and they have discovered the purpose of Obamacare. It has nothing to do with health care. The purpose of Obamacare got nothing to do with your health, and nothing to do with your insurance.
It's about building a permanent, undefeatable, always-funded Democrat majority. One example: The exchanges. We're being told that the government's running way behind on setting up the exchanges, and we're being told it's because the bill so complicated, big, unmanageable. Nobody could possibly get this done on time. IBD has tracked how these exchanges are being set up, and basically the health care exchanges in these states are going to be Democrat political action committees, funded with your tax dollars.
They're going to operate under the guise of selling you your health insurance when in fact what they're going to be doing is providing employment for Democrats and Democrat voters and Democrat operatives. They are going to use the exchanges to give out money to sympathetic Democrats and people who vote for other Democrats. I'll give you the details. It's on a par with how I've tried to explain that the stimulus was a money-laundering operation for Democrat campaign coffers. Because the vast majority of stimulus money went to keep government union employees working.
"The Obama administration granted a whopping $910 million to California to set up its insurance exchange. That money is not for bandages, surgery, nurses and doctors to care for the sick...Shockingly, the $910 million is slated for bureaucracy, including rich compensation packages for exchange employees." In fact, the executive director of the exchange in California will make $360,000 a year. The exchange money, this $910 million, is being used for computer equipment, public relations, and outreach.
"California lawmakers passed a law (Senate Bill 35) requiring that voter registration be part of the health insurance exchange." California lawmakers, again, passed Senate Bill 35 that requires voter registration be part of the health insurance exchange. Now, you think you're going to the exchange to pick your insurance policy. Guess what? You're gonna get pressured to register to vote, if you're not, and maybe even if you already are..."Of the 48 organizations that got grants, only a handful are health-care related." For example, Covered California announced $37 million in grants to 48 organizations to build public awareness about the opening of the health care exchange. Now, why in the world would the California NAACP get $600,000? But they did. The California NAACP got $600,000 of Obamacare money, California exchange money, to go door-to-door canvassing and registering voters, and to create presentations at community organizations, presentations about the Democrat Party, presentations about registering and supporting the Democrat Party and its candidates.
"Service Employees International Union, which says its mission is 'economic justice,' received two grants totaling $2 million to make phone calls, robo-calls and go door to door." Now, what in the world does a health exchange need a union going door-to-door for?...They're gonna be making robo-calls, phone calls all about getting out the vote. "The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO got $1 million for door-to-door, one-on-one education and social networking." For what? An insurance policy? "It describes its role as 'engaging in both organizing and political campaigns, electing pro-union and pro-worker candidates.'" That's the AFL-CIO. That's how it describes itself.
The same people who got stimulus money, folks. You didn't. Your shovel-ready job didn't. Your school didn't. Your road, your bridge, none of those things got it. Your job didn't get it. Democrat loyalists got the money. The same thing is happening with the Obamacare exchanges. Democrat supporting groups are being given millions of dollars to promote the Democrat Party, register Democrat voters, and get them to the polls on Election Day. The purpose? To set up a permanent one-party system in this country.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323393804578557802237872788.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopJohn Kerry's ObamaCare Boondoggle
A backroom deal he cut for Massachusetts hospitals has caused a bipartisan uproar in Congress.
Everyone remember the origins of the so-called Affordable Care Act? The Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, Gator-Aid, and other buyoffs for the votes of key Senate Democrats?
Three years on, yet another sweetheart deal has declared itself, this one inserted by the then-senator for Massachusetts. In Congress, it's becoming known as the Bay State Boondoggle.
At issue are the dollars that Medicare pays to hospitals for the wages of doctors and staff. Before the new health law, states were each allocated a pot of money to divvy among their hospitals. The states are required to follow rules in handing out the funds, in particular a requirement that state urban hospitals must be reimbursed for wages at least at the levels of state rural hospitals.
Enter Mr. Kerry, who slipped an opaque provision into the Obama health law to require that Medicare wage reimbursements now come from a national pool of money, rather than state allocations. The Kerry kickback didn't get much notice, since it was cloaked in technicality and never specifically mentioned Massachusetts. But the senator knew exactly what he was doing.
You see, "rural" hospitals in Massachusetts are a class all their own. The Bay State has only one, a tiny facility on the tony playground of the superrich—Nantucket. Nantucket College Hospital's relatively high wages set the floor for what all 81 of the state's urban hospitals must also be paid. And since these dramatically inflated Massachusetts wages are now getting sucked out of a national pool, there's little left for the rest of America. Clever Mr. Kerry.
The change has allowed Massachusetts to raise its Medicare payout by $257 million, forcing cuts to hospitals in 40 other states. The National Rural Health Association and 20 state hospital associations in January sent a panicked letter to President Obama, noting that the Massachusetts manipulation of the program would hand that state $3.5 billion over the next 10 years at the expense of Medicare beneficiaries everywhere. They quoted Mr. Obama's former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, admitting that "What Massachusetts gets comes from everybody else."
House Chief Deputy Whip Peter Roskam, a Republican co-sponsor, notes that his (and President Obama's) home state of Illinois has already lost $60 million. "It's a zero sum game that reinforces all of our worst fears about how the health-care law was drafted. Backroom negotiations, secret deals, and now this long con on Medicare reimbursement rates that is already doing real damage to Illinois hospitals," he tells me.
The episode is also heaping embarrassment on the American Hospital Association, a cheerleader for the health law that is now robbing most of its members blind. Rather than endorse current boondoggle-repeal efforts—which would require it to publicly admit its mistake—the AHA is hiding behind calls for more "comprehensive reform" of the wage-payment system.Thieves, all of them. Health care is being destroyed for the benefit of Democrat politicians. Dirty, stinking thieves. blog.heritage.org/2013/06/20/homeland-security-abandons-amnesty-background-checks/Last week, government watchdog Judicial Watch issued a report that showed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) abandoning ordinary background checks due to a surge in amnesty applications as a result of President Obama’s executive action last year.
If DHS cannot manage a few hundred thousand temporary amnesty applications, it is scary to think about how it will handle 10 million or more amnesty applications that would occur as a result of the Senate’s immigration reform bill...on November 9, 2012—three days after the re-election of President Obama—the entire agency was told to “put all DACA work on hold until further notice.” Judicial Watch received no other documents indicating how or when DHS resumed background checks—if they have even resumed at all.Is there a single agency free from scandal under Obama? Is there a single thing he can do right? As the nation continues to decline, I place the blame squarely on every idiot who voted for him.
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Spinning round and round like the deadly hands of a radium clock. 
