Conservatrolling Topic

[Pyro ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔]

The Pope? More like the Poop.

Oh you fly boys crack me up.

[Tails82]

Jul 1, 2013 13:45:47 GMT -5 @zetta said:

USA governmental laws don't involve the passing down of authority from one figure to the next, but a granting of authority from the people to a representative.
The President has power because we the people allow it, not because they have an inherent right to rule.

And there's a difference how?

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/justice-is-swerved

Instead of waiting for the Supreme Court's formal judgment to take effect (a process that usually takes 25 days), the judges for the Ninth Circuit ignored the law and gave the green light for state officials to start licensing same-sex "weddings" -- without ever having the authority to do so!

As FRC's Ken Klukowski pointed out, "Despite the Ninth Circuit having been explicitly informed by the Supreme Court that the higher court had not yet issued its order, and that at least 25 days would pass before such an order would be received, and all lawyers on both sides of the case were likewise informed, the Ninth Circuit dissolved its stay... striking down Prop 8, and gay 'marriage' began literally within minutes."

ProtectMarriage.com, the organization that sued on behalf of the 7,000,000 Californians who voted for the marriage amendment, was stunned. "People on both sides of this debate should at least agree that the courts must follow their own rules," said Andy Pugno, the group's chief counsel. John Eastman, a renowned legal scholar and professor at Chapman University, was equally frustrated. "It's part and parcel of the utter lawlessness in which this whole case has been prosecuted..."nyone who is concerned about the rule of law ought to be deeply troubled by what happened here." Yet the media, instead of reporting this outrage, acts as if the amendment is null and void -- ignoring the fact that the Ninth Circuit Court acted illegally to impose same-sex "marriage" on the state.

While the two sides try to sort through the chaos these judges created, the people of California will have to turn their attention to protecting the millions of people who object to homosexual "marriage." There, people are about to experience (if they haven't already) the profound loss of liberty that accompanies this march down the same-sex "wedding" aisle. Yesterday, "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer -- like so many Americans -- was surprised to hear that business owners (and wedding vendors in particular) are being persecuted, and in some cases prosecuted, for refusing to participate in a same-sex "marriage" ceremony..."I must say this is under my radar," Bob told me. "I haven't -- I haven't heard this." And he's not alone.

The media isn't covering the stories of these victims -- not because they don't exist -- but because liberals recognize their potential to swing the debate.

Gays are already complaining they don't get enough federal benefits btw

newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitlock/2013/07/01/nets-pull-their-punches-covering-liberal-alec-baldwins-anti-gay-rant

The three major networks devoted four times as much coverage to obsessing over Paula Deen's use of a racial epithet 30 years ago than they did of outspoken liberal Alec Baldwin's anti-gay rant on Twitter. Over the first three days of the revelation that Deen used the N-word in 1983, ABC, CBS and NBC featured the story for 32 minutes and 41 seconds. Over the three days since Baldwin's tirade, the same networks allowed a mere seven minutes and 49 seconds-- not counting nearly five minutes on ABC, wondering if there was a double standard in reaction to the two cases.

The biggest disparity came on CBS. The network covered Deen for almost seven and a half minutes, but a meager seven seconds for Baldwin. Over the first three day period, the CBS Evening News never discussed Baldwin...ABC on Saturday night and Sunday morning appeared hesitant to label Baldwin's remarks homophobic. On World News, David Muir referred to an "alleged slur." On Sunday's Good Morning America, co-host Dan Harris noticed an "apparently anti-gay" comment.

I'll just do half of what Baldwin does because the lesson for today is that it's all right.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2350267/Rare-bird-white-throated-needletail-killed-wind-turbine-crowd-twitchers.html

Rare bird last seen in Britain 22 years ago reappears - only to be killed by wind turbine in front of a horrified crowd of birdwatchers

lol

www.salon.com/2013/06/25/flat_earth_society_believes_in_climate_change/

In his big speech on climate change...President Obama mocked Republicans who deny the existence of man-made global warming by derisively referring to them as members of “the Flat Earth Society.”

As it turns out, there is a real Flat Earth Society and its president thinks that anthropogenic climate change is real. In an email to Salon, president Daniel Shenton said that while he “can’t speak for the Society as a whole regarding climate change,” he personally thinks the evidence suggests fossil fuel usage is contributing to global warming.

“I accept that climate change is a process which has been ongoing since beginning of detectable history, but there seems to be a definite correlation between the recent increase in world-wide temperatures and man’s entry into the industrial age,” he said. “If it’s a coincidence, it’s quite a remarkable one. We may have experienced a temperature increase even without our use of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, but I doubt it would be as dramatic as what we’re seeing now.”

“It’s unfortunate that Flat Earth Theory is what some people (President Obama, for instance) choose to reference when they need an example of something absurd,” he added.

double lol for climate nuts

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/01/climate-change-lessons-learned-from-around-the-world/

If it ain’t broke, the government will break it for you. That seems to be the lesson to draw from other nations that have implemented climate change energy plans similar to the ones Obama recently proposed in his Climate Action Plan.

Australia. Momentum for Australia’s carbon tax is waning as the costs and difficulties of administering the tax are sinking in. Many businesses already stretched by a tough economic climate were put over the edge with higher energy prices, in part from renewable mandates and the carbon tax. Last year, Australia saw 10,632 companies collapse, a record number for a single year. Nearly one-fifth of them were in energy-intensive manufacturing and construction. Tourism Accommodation Australia also expects the industry to pay $155 million annually in extra costs passed on from increased energy prices specifically due to the carbon tax. As a result, with September elections approaching, there is uncertainty that the tax will survive much beyond its first anniversary.

Germany. After the nuclear accident at Fukushima in Japan, the German government committed to replacing nuclear power with renewables, setting a goal of 40 percent of the nation’s electricity coming from renewables by 2020. Electricity prices have increased 10 percent since the current government took power, and the surcharge on utility bills to subsidize renewables is scheduled to again increase. Also increasing: the number of low-income and unemployed families being disconnected and firewood robbery from forests. In Germany, electricity is on the fast track to becoming a luxury. Meanwhile, relatively cheap energy prices in the U.S. have attracted at least one of Germany’s top chemical companies, BASF.

Spain. While the German government has put the costs of mandated renewable energy on energy users, Spain has put the burden on utilities. The combination of heavily subsidized renewable generation and requirements that utilities buy renewable electricity left utilities with a $7.3 billion deficit in 2012 to add to a running deficit of $34.04 billion over the past decade. On top of that, green jobs have yet to make a dent in Spain’s unemployment and in fact are calculated to have killed 2.2 jobs in Spain for every single “green” job created by the subsidies. Spain trails only Greece for the worst unemployment rate in the European Union. It’s no surprise, then, that the Spanish government has pulled back on exorbitant subsidies to wind and solar, popping the solar bubble and leaving those who invested in solar (including those who banked on near risk-free investments for retirement) high and dry.

Africa. Unlike other countries that have created their own problems, many African countries have fallen victim to carbon mitigation schemes. Carbon-emitting fuels have lifted billions of people out of poverty—but not in Africa, where some governments and environmental groups have worked with developed countries looking to “offset” their own carbon emissions to mark off land into “carbon farming” and forestry projects. In some cases, this has locked farmers into strict land use contracts that preclude them from more productive farming. Other programs have even kicked people out of their homes to make room for CO2-loving forests. Essentially, wealthy, developed nations have paid Africans to remain poor and help developed nations feel better about emitting carbon.

With the expected and unanticipated costs of climate change programs becoming apparent around the world, America should reject such economically foolhardy plans for otherwise unnoticeable environmental benefits from cutting carbon emissions. Someone always has to pay the bill, whether that’s businesses, consumers, taxpayers, or the politically powerless. That’s one reason why it makes sense to leave decisions about how our energy is made and how much it costs to the market—that is, businesses and their customers.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/07/01/change_democrats_double_student_loan_rates_use_the_money_to_fund_obamacare

Change: Democrats Double Student Loan Rates, Use the Money to Fund Obamacare

The argument, if you recall, centered around the usual Washington budget talk about how there was gonna be a "cut" in the student loan rate, when there wasn't going to be a cut in the student loan rate at all. All that was gonna happen was it was gonna remain the same, 3.4%. It was scheduled to go to 6.8% -- and it was the Democrats who wrote that in, by the way...The bottom line is that the student loan rate is going to double. It's gonna go from 3.4% to 6.8%, and here's the reason why: Congress has figured out they need that additional money to spend on Obamacare.

I have two stories. The first story is from a relatively new website called Campus Reform. "The Affordable Care Act is set to cost students enrolled in the government's loan program $8.7 billion in extra interest over the next decade according to a report published by the CBO." By the way, I got a couple or three stories in the Stack today about how health care costs are just skyrocketing.

There is one in particular that, in my mind, constitutes journalistic malpractice, because this was known. It was known during the debate on Obamacare. It was known what the cost of insurance was gonna do. It was known that premiums were gonna go up, when Obama was out there saying, "They're gonna come down $2500!" And, of course, the media is just an extension of the regime, and so whatever Obama was saying is whatever they were reporting.

They weren't challenging it, even though they knew.

There was no way any cost associated with Obamacare's coming down. Zilch, zero, nada. It's all going up. Now we're starting to get the truth, since there's nothing that can be done about it now. One of these stories involves the student loan program. The Affordable Care Act, Obamacare...By the way, have you noticed that in the Drive-By Media they're referring to it as "Obamacare" less and less now, and as the "Affordable Care Act" more and more?...The nearly $9 billion in increased student loan debt is being used to pay for Obamacare, and it is derived from $106 billion the government says it will save by administering student loans in house.

So while the government claims to be saving big money on student loans, your interest rate's going up...and I think the politics is now that the Democrats let this happen so that they can be the ones to magically ride in on their lower-cost white horse and claim they are going to cut the interest rates that the Republicans didn't care about.

One thing I do remember about this: The legislation that automatically raised the student loan interest rate to 6.8% today is Democrat legislation. Democrats wrote the bill, and it was one of those things probably that they thought would never happen. "We'll fix it as we get down the pike." But they had to do this. They had to write an increase in the student loan interest rate in order to come up with revenue to pay for something else that the CBO was scoring.

So it was all bogus...we've got the student loan industry taken over by the government, ostensibly to make it fairer, ostensibly to make it more financially sound. We got the greedy big banks out of it. But now you're at the total whim of the federal government -- whether you get a loan, what the interest rate's gonna be -- and the sad reality is that college graduates are coming out with lifetime debt before they've even earned a dollar.

The Democrats wrote this student loan bill so that the rate would double as a campaign issue in an election year. Details coming up. I want you to hear Obama, though, April 25th, 2012, in Iowa City. He's at the University of Iowa talking about student loan program.

OBAMA 2012: Now is not the time to double the interest rates on our student loans. Now is not the time to double interest rates. Now is the time to double down on start investments that build a strong and security middle class. Now is the time to double down on building an America that's built to last.

RUSH: Okay, so that's during last year's presidential campaign, April 25th in Iowa City. "Now is not the time to double interest rates." They were scheduled to double today, and they were using this as a campaign issue. Guess what? Interest rates doubled. Obama won reelection so it doesn't matter. They need the money for Obamacare.

They did this on purpose. They wanted the college student loan interest rate to double in an election year in the summer right before the conventions.

They were rolling the dice on this...They could have put the increase off forever, but they wanted to increase it and be able to blame it on the Republicans.

They used the high student loan interest rate, the fact that it was going to come back, as a bludgeon on the Republicans. So here we are now with the rate being reinstated anyway to 6.8%, and the news today as sort of an adjunct is that the Democrats are not unhappy with this as it turns out because there are no more elections that affect Obama. They need the money for Obamacare.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323393804578555143257421504.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

If you think the federal student-loan program looks like a bad deal for taxpayers, imagine how it would look with honest accounting. And now you don't need to imagine thanks to a new report that's receiving far too little attention. Turns out that the official "savings" for taxpayers of $184 billion over the next decade really add up to $95 billion in losses.

Here's the scam: Lawmakers peddle what is a massive subsidy for universities while claiming that student loans generate a windfall for the taxpayer. This phony windfall is conjured by creative accounting that politicians mandated via the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990. Specifically, the law requires a deliberate under-counting of the cost of defaults.

This is partly how a Democratic Congress and President Obama managed to enact ObamaCare in 2010 while claiming that their big entitlement expansion would reduce costs. The health plan was paired with legislation that made the U.S. Department of Education the originator of roughly 90% of all student loans, which in turn generated billions in imaginary budget "savings."

To its credit, the Congressional Budget Office has noted on various occasions that while the law forces it to use this Beltway math, CBO knows it's not accurate under fair-value accounting. And in a new report on the costs of student loans made in the decade ending in 2023, CBO quantifies the size of this discrepancy at $279 billion. CBO adds with its typically wry understatement that Washington's mandated accounting method "does not consider some costs borne by the government."

That's for sure. Now keep in mind that the $95 billion net loss for taxpayers happens under current law. This includes Monday's doubling of rates that pushed subsidized Stafford loans for undergrads up to 6.8% from 3.4%...someone at the White House budget office figured out that offering low fixed rates to students could be disastrous as the Treasury's own borrowing costs start to go north. Since Mr. Obama and Democrats have driven private firms almost entirely out of this market, the private lenders can't be squeezed anymore to pay for the next round of subsidies.

bitter-enders including Majority Leader Harry Reid still want to gore the taxpayer with a fixed 3.4% rate, financed by tax increases. When Congress returns after this week's recess, expect Mr. Reid to force a vote on a one-year extension of his sweetheart rate for colleges. Fortunately for taxpayers, the Senate will also likely vote on the bipartisan plan that moves toward market rates.

If Mr. Reid wins, a $95 billion taxpayer hit will look like a lowball estimate. Either way, you can count on politicians like him to keep claiming they're saving you money.

[Deleted]

Jul 2, 2013 6:30:21 GMT -5 Tails82 said:

Jul 1, 2013 13:45:47 GMT -5 @zetta said:

USA governmental laws don't involve the passing down of authority from one figure to the next, but a granting of authority from the people to a representative.
The President has power because we the people allow it, not because they have an inherent right to rule.

And there's a difference how?

If all it requires to be the pope is the will of the people, you abandon the entire premise behind having a pope (special authority from God passed down by St. Peter, et al) and admit there's nothing special about the person in the position.

[Tails82]

Again, is the president more special than the rest of us?

[Deleted]

...no? That's what I'm getting at, here.

[Tails82]

But has a position of authority stretching back to Washington and a significant role to play.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/02/its-official-administration-admits-obamacares-a-job-killer/

It’s Official: Administration Admits Obamacare Is a Job-Killer

Bloomberg News reported this evening that the Obama Administration is set to announce a one-year delay in enforcement of Obamacare’s employer mandate, a move the Treasury Department recently confirmed in a blog post.

However, the problem is not just Obamacare’s employer mandate—the real problem is Obamacare itself. The same individuals who said Obamacare would create jobs, not destroy them, are now the same ones who will say the Administration can “fix” the employer mandate, if only given another year to do so. Conservatives should not be fooled, appeased, or assuaged. Instead, today’s developments should provide every incentive for the American people to redouble their efforts to repeal, defund, and dismantle ALL of this bureaucratic, unworkable law.

The idea that selectively enforcing one provision of the law could “solve” all the problems inherent in Obamacare is absurd on its face. In fact, the Administration’s position raises more questions than it answers:

If the employer mandate will prove so devastating to businesses that it can’t be enforced in 2014—following three years of implementation work—why should it be enforced at all?

Will delaying implementation of the employer mandate encourage more firms to drop coverage entirely and dump their workers on to Exchanges, raising the cost of taxpayer-funded subsidies by trillions?

What about individuals who can’t afford to buy health insurance, yet will be forced to do so under Obamacare? Will they get an exemption from enforcement as well?

It is hard to understate the impact of today’s devastating admission from the Administration that, after three years, it still cannot implement Obamacare without strangling businesses in red tape and destroying American jobs. That said, it is still not too late for Congress to do the right thing, and refuse to fund what the Administration has now—finally—admitted is a job-killing train wreck.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/02/obamacare-impact-another-insurer-leaves-california-market/

The Los Angeles Times reports this morning on another disturbing Obamacare-related development in California:

"The nation’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group Inc., is leaving California’s individual health insurance market, the second major company to exit in advance of major changes under [Obamacare]."

Due to UnitedHealth’s decision, thousands of individuals will be forced to find a new health insurance option. However, those options keep dwindling; as the article notes, today’s development comes just a few weeks after Aetna announced it was also pulling out of the California market, leaving nearly 50,000 California residents searching for new health coverage.

Even advocates of Obamacare could not hide their dismay about today’s development. As the Times article notes:

"The departure of another big-name insurer raised concerns about the effect of reduced competition on California consumers. 'I don’t think this is a good result for consumers,' said California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones. 'It means less choice, less competition and even more consolidation of the individual market with three big carriers.'”

However, as The Wall Street Journal reported last month, these two California announcements could represent merely the leading edge of bad news for policyholders: “Insurance-industry experts say similar moves by other carriers in other states may emerge in coming months, as companies with limited market share decide to avoid the uncertainty tied to [Obamacare’s] changes.”

Recall that in 2008, then-Senator Obama promised that “for those who have insurance now, nothing will change under the Obama plan—except that you will pay less.” Recall too that the Obama Administration intends to use California as “proof that [Obamacare] is working.” Obamacare is working, all right—but not exactly as promised. A month’s worth of stories about skyrocketing premiums and thousands losing their health insurance demonstrates how Obamacare’s supposed “success story” is shaping up to be a significant failure.

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/in-we-trust

How hard is it to lose $30,000 in government funding? Invoke God's name and find out! Louisiana Sheriff Julian Whittington had done so for 10 years as part of his local Young Marine's initiative. After a decade of voluntary prayers, the only complaint he's received is from the U.S. Justice Department -- which unfortunately happened to be funding the project.

Not anymore. The DOJ pulled its annual grant for uniforms and supplies when the Bossier Sheriff refused to remove "God" from the Young Marine's oath. After a random audit of the program, a Justice attorney fired off an email to Whittington objecting to the group's religious references. "They wanted a letter from me stating that I would no longer have voluntary prayer and I would also have to remove 'God' from the Young Marine's oath," the Sheriff fumed. "I flat said, 'It's not going to happen. Enough is enough. This is the United States of America -- and the idea that there mere mention of God or voluntary prayer is prohibited is ridiculous."

He's right. DOJ may have federal funds, but they're allocated by a Congress that prays before every session! If the Justice Department has a problem with the word "God," then it had better start printing its own currency, because "In God We Trust" is on every bill. (A fact the DOJ didn't seem to mind when it accepted its $26 billion budget). To say that a successful program for at-risk kids needs to deny God to qualify for government funds is nothing but ideological extortion. It's the same tactic the Obama administration has used in the contraception-abortion mandate, the IRS tax exemption scandal, and other federal grant applications. Ignore your beliefs -- or else.

Can Bossier's program survive without DOJ's help? Absolutely. Sheriff Whittington says donations are pouring in from outside the parish. It's the administration's double standard that outrages people. The government is cutting off a character development program because of a voluntary prayer -- while at the same time sending billions of dollars to a Planned Parenthood organization that defrauds Medicaid, covers up statutory rape, botches abortions, accepts racist donations, encourages sex trafficking, falsifies medical facts, and endangers women's safety.

Unfortunately, this is just part of the broader effort by the Left to stamp out religious freedom and, more specifically, Christianity. Congressman John Fleming (R-La.) is just one of the incensed Louisianans. "[The Obama administration] is willing to throw the youth overboard and remove the funding just in the name of making this an atheist, agnostic, secular organization." More than 1,000 kids have graduated from the Bossier program, which is not "inherently religious" as the DOJ claims. Even if it were, the DOJ would be just as justified in funding the outreach as it would be in subsidizing any number of faith-based social services. If the government has money for taxpayer-funded dance lessons, pickle promotions, kazoos, and bathtub toys, surely it has plenty left over to help troubled kids.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323936404578581730721532390.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Uh-oh, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, best known for likening American servicemen to Nazis, is looking to limit your First Amendment rights, if not ours. "Everyone, regardless of the mode of expression, has a constitutionally protected right to free speech," he writes. So far so good. "But when it comes to freedom of the press, I believe we must define a journalist and the constitutional and statutory protections those journalists should receive."

That goes against America's entire constitutional tradition. In Lovell v. Griffin (1938), Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court: "The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our own history abundantly attest. The press in its connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion."

In Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), Justice Byron White reiterated the point. The court was asked to hold that the First Amendment precluded the government from requiring a reporter to testify before a grand jury about information he had gathered from confidential sources. By a 5-4 vote, the justices said no. If such a privilege were established, White wrote, "sooner or later, it would be necessary to define those categories of newsmen who qualified for the privilege, a questionable procedure in light of the traditional doctrine that liberty of the press is the right of the lonely pamphleteer who uses carbon paper or a mimeograph just as much as of the large metropolitan publisher who utilizes the latest photocomposition methods."

Durbin now wants to establish such a privilege by statute, so his call for limiting freedom of the press is ostensibly designed to expand it. Obviously a generalized grant of immunity from the obligation to testify would be unworkable, so it is necessary for Durbin to define the special class of "journalists" who would receive it:

"A journalist gathers information for a media outlet that disseminates the information through a broadly defined "medium"--including newspaper, nonfiction book, wire service, magazine, news website, television, radio or motion picture--for public use. This broad definition covers every form of legitimate journalism."

Oh dear, there's Todd Akin's favorite word! We guess Durbin would regard this column as "legitimate journalism," although we're not exactly sure why. Is it because we write for a "newspaper," or by that term does Durbin mean the physical object composed of paper and ink? If it's the latter, well, at least WSJ.com is a "news website."

Justice White was right four decades ago, even if his references to pamphleteers, carbon paper, mimeographs and photocomposition now seem quaint. A law granting special privileges to the press effectively gives the government the power to license the press by deciding who qualifies.

Durbin acknowledges this problem but doesn't really grapple with its implications. For instance, he doesn't spell out whether the protection would belong to individual journalists or only to news organizations. If the latter, then he is in a funny position for a leftist Democrat: He is claiming that a constitutional right belongs only to corporations, not individuals.

Further, a government that grants privileges also has the power to take them away. A shield law would make those designated as "legitimate journalists" beholden to powerful politicians--especially when, as today, most journalists are ideologically sympathetic to the party in power. The Durbin shield proposal looks less like real protection than a protection racket.

[Deleted]

Jul 3, 2013 6:06:25 GMT -5 Tails82 said:

But has a position of authority stretching back to Washington and a significant role to play.

Which is irrelevant. The president does not rely on the old presidents for his authority.

[Tails82]

He gets his authority from the constitution he swears to uphold and the consent of the governed.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/pages/static/my_father_s_speech

Happy 4th

[Deleted]

Still irrelevant.

We could, in fact, dissolve the USA, re-adopt the constitution, and manage to end up exactly as we are now if the votes fell the right way.
_{(only exception, I think, is the clause that allows citizens not naturally born in the country to become president if they're citizens at the time of constitutional adoption; not generally an issue, but re-adopting the constitution would make it relevant again)}

The pope, on the other hand, loses all authority if the papal succession is interrupted even once at any point, as his authority comes from God, given to St. Peter, and passed down from there.
Without said divine right, there is no force behind the pope's words, and indeed, anything the pope attempts to say contradictory to established religious law is heresy in the most extreme.

[Tails82]

You're completely ignoring how bishops retain the connection, and that we would never be entirely cut off from God with the influence of the Holy Spirit wherever people are gathered in Jesus' name...basically making an argument with no grounding, as is usually the case.

[Deleted]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_nomine_Domini

Do you even know your own religion?
Only the cardinals have had anything to do with the election of a pope since 1059. >_>

[Tails82]

I dunno what your point is.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/07/03/regime_postpones_obamacare_employer_mandate_until_after_the_2014_elections

So it was just two days ago, two days ago, right here on this very program, that somebody asked me, "Why in the world are they still selling Obamacare, Rush? It's the law of the land. Why are there ads on TV? Why are we getting stories about how the California health exchange is gonna be run by Democrats to sell Obamacare? Why is there still a campaign for this?"

And I, El Rushbo, said, "Because they remember how health care resulted in a shellacking defeat in the midterms in 2010. And they do not want that repeated in the midterms of 2014. They want to win the House in 2014, the Democrats do. They realize what an albatross Obamacare is. They don't want a repeat of 2010."...All it took was two days, and yesterday the regime announces that they are delaying the implementation of the employer mandate for Obamacare until after the 2014 election. They announce it on a day that they hope -- you know, leading into the Fourth of July long weekend -- that low-information voters will never hear about it, and nobody else will hear about it.

The media is all caught up in the brilliant politics of it. The media thinks it is a brilliant political move. I have a lot of questions about this, but one basic question. I thought, listening to the Democrats, listening to Nancy Pelosi, listening to President Obama, that this was the answer to every health care problem in America. I'll never forget Pelosi on the day the House passed the bill, and maybe it might have been the day that Obama signed it. She was at a microphone and she was barely able to contain herself she was so happy. She kept saying, "Affordable health care for all Americans."

I was watching that, by the way, "Does this women really not know what she just did?" You know, it's a never-ending debate about Pelosi. Is she really the idiot she appears to be, or is that just an act? And I still don't know. The odds are she is, but she's also a liberal, which means she's a schemer, so it opens up possibilities. But really, folks, I thought Obamacare was wonderful. I thought it was gonna answer all the problems that everybody has in health care. I thought it was the solution to every problem. I thought it was good. I thought it was needed. I thought it was going to lower premiums by $2,500.

I thought it was going to make health care finally affordable for everybody, whenever they wanted it, whatever they needed, that it was finally gonna happen, and that some 30 million poor, lost soul Americans who didn't have coverage were going to automatically be covered. And that, if you like your policy and your doctor and all, you get to keep it. I thought it was magic. But did you notice almost immediately after Obama signed it into law, various industries and individual companies began to be excused from it. The regime immediately signed waivers for favored donors and companies exempting them from it. That kind of puzzled me because I thought it was miraculous what had happened here.

The health care system was in tatters, it was in disarray, and Barack Obama and the Democrat Party finally solved it. It was one of the greatest days in American history, to listen to the Democrat Party. And yet there were all these waivers. And now we're going to delay the implementation, not of the individual mandate, we're going to delay the implementation of the employer mandate. I thought this was good. I thought this was the way everybody was gonna get covered. The employer was gonna have to do it. And, if he didn't, then hello everybody going to the exchange, which is now what's gonna happen, because the individual mandate stays. It's just the employer mandate that will not be implemented now until after the 2014 midterm elections.

I have been right and on the cutting edge about much in my career. This, Mr. Snerdley, I've gotta put up there in the top five, in 25 years. There are raging arguments even now. "Does the president have the authority to do this? Is it in the bill that the president can do this?" Some bloggers say it is. Other bloggers say, no, the bill does not permit this. Let me ask you a question. If Obamacare can be delayed -- and that's what this is. I mean, employer mandate, if the president decides, "You know what, this thing might actually hurt my party next election, so I'm gonna delay the damage."

See, what I can't quite reconcile is, Obama and the Democrats sold this as a utopia program. They sold this as a panacea. They sold this as a magic bullet solution. They sold this as something every American wants and the world wants, and it's apparently not that. It's apparently so bad that to actually have it placed into operation, implemented, would cause the president and his party a lot of harm at the ballot box. Imagine that.

I thought this was going to solidify a Democrat majority because so many Americans wanted this, and it was such a wonderful program, it was such a wonderful piece of legislation. It answered every problem. It addressed every need. It lowered costs. It expanded availability. It brought health coverage and insurance to the uninsured. It was going to bring the deficit down. It was gonna bring the national debt down. Why not implement this thing, this is a magic piece of legislation. Yet for some reason, though, we just can't implement it before an election?

Now, if the president can decide, "We got a law here but, you know what, implementing it and enforcing it might not help me," so if he can just delay Obamacare, what else could be delayed that he doesn't like? Maybe all these new Border Patrol agents in the Hoeven-Corker amendment. Maybe they can be delayed, too, after the law has been signed into law. It can be enforced, delayed, or ignored on the whim of the presidency. What is the reason we go through the legislative process if, when it's all over, the president can pick and choose what he's going to allow and what he isn't going to allow, what he's going to permit and what he isn't gonna permit, what he's gonna implement and what he isn't gonna implement. Why even go through the legislative process?

You know, we thought Egypt was a country in trouble. Obama just canceled the game. He didn't want Obamacare to play out, so he canceled it, for now...I mean, folks, this is the stuff of banana republics. Laws have no meaning. You remember when the president said the Congress was in recess when they weren't so he could appoint some people who otherwise couldn't make it? Remember when he rolled the bondholders of General Motors when he took over the car companies? The bondholders are due money; they're first in line to get paid. He called 'em "greedy." He told 'em to get the hell out, to eat it for the country.

Remember when he refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act? The regime just decided, "You know what? We don't like this bill, and we're not gonna defend it in federal court." Remember when he unilaterally granted amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens. Just snapped his fingers, just did it...laws come and go at the pleasure of a corrupt regime. The IRS serves as the president's goon squad. His cabinet secretaries buy off businesses and industries one by one. We don't yet know what the NSA is doing at his behest and I don't really know what degree of cooperation the Federal Reserve has with Obama. One thing we do know the Fed is doing is bailing out banks left and right.

The Fed dollars are bailing out and propping up rich people all over the place to the detriment of middle-class people. The dollar is becoming more and more worthless. The ability for a family in the middle class to accrue wealth is becoming harder and harder and harder. Sequester? Sequester was an excuse to punish the same people who already got roughed up by the TSA and the IRS. What kind of country do we have now?

At least the people of Egypt had the good sense to turn out in the streets and express displeasure with the way they were treated. At least they turned up in the streets and demanded redress from a fraudulent, lying campaign. But because the employer mandate would potentially harm the Democrats' prospects in the elections of 2014, we're gonna delay it. A program that was magical. A program that answered every question and every problem. A program that brought health care to people that didn't have it, millions of them!

Besides kicking the Obamacare negatives past the midterm elections, there's something else going on here, folks. The individual mandate survives. So while your employer, the place you work will not be mandated to provide you health insurance, you're still gonna be required to have it. Your employer, by the way, can use this year to cancel. If your employer wants to, your employer can say, "Sayonara." They can get out of this now. That's right.

Businesses can now kick everybody out of their plans and not pay a penalty, which will then force all of you to the Obama exchanges, which is what Obama wants ultimately anyway because the exchanges are the government. So this is a twofer for Obama. He's not gonna run the risk of having the implementation of this bill be harmful to the Democrats before the election, and it actually speeds up his ultimate dream -- that being the government being sole provider, single payer, single source, of everybody for health care.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323899704578583493972896364.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

These columns fought the Affordable Care Act from start to passage, and we'd now like to apologize to our readers. It turns out we weren't nearly critical enough. The law's implementation is turning into a fiasco for the ages, and this week's version is the lawless White House decision to delay the law's insurance mandate for businesses, though not for individuals.

The employer mandate is central to ObamaCare's claim of providing universal coverage...But all of a sudden on Tuesday evening Mark Mazur—you know him as the deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy—published a blog post canceling the insurance reporting rules and tax enforcement until 2015...White House fixer Valerie Jarrett tried to contain the fallout with a separate blog post promising that ObamaCare is otherwise "staying the course." That's true only if she's referring to the carelessness and improvisation that have defined the law so far.

Which brings us to the dubious legality of this delay. The Affordable Care Act's Section 1513 states in black-letter law that "(d) Effective Date.—The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013." It does not say the Administration can impose the mandate whenever it feels it is politically convenient.

This selective enforcement of laws has become an Administration habit. From immigration (the Dream Act by fiat) to easing welfare reform's work requirements to selective waivers for No Child Left Behind, the Obama Administration routinely suspends enforcement of or unilaterally rewrites via regulation the laws it dislikes. Now it is doing it again on health care, without any consultation from, much less the approval of, Congress.

ObamaCare has become a rolling "train wreck," in Senator Max Baucus's memorable phrase, and it gets worse the more of it the public sees. The employer mandate is terrible policy, as the law's critics said before it passed. Now the Administration is all but admitting it can't implement it properly, and the task for opponents is to press the concession and begin to delay the rest of the law and dismantle it piece by piece.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/07/03/interview_james_o_keefe_the_special_forces_of_the_conservative_movement

Interview: James O'Keefe, the Special Forces of the Conservative Movement

RUSH: I need to ask you, do you ever feel like -- because your work is well-known, particularly among this audience, with ACORN, Planned Parenthood, NPR, Eric Holder's ballot offered to a stranger, the son of Congressman Jim Moran resigning after encouraging double voting, that was all you. But have you ever encountered people on our side who've let you down, who've said, "You know, James, you're putting too much pressure on us." Have you had any people on our side ask you to tone it down?

O'KEEFE: You know, Rush, one of the things you've said that really resonated with me is you said that our adversaries circle the wagons and our allies circle the firing squad. I have come to know this over the last few years in a sort of baptism by fire. People don't know this, when we did the pimp and prostitute videos on ACORN, we had spent our own money to do it, Hannah Giles and I did, and we went to Washington like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, trying to show members of the oversight committee. There's a chapter in this book, Breakthrough, where even Republicans threatened to arrest us if we didn't give them the footage exclusively. And there are so many more stories in this book about trying to speak truth to power and trying to overcome obstacles, not just from the people you would think, from the government, from the media, from the federal judiciary, and even sometimes, yes, from allies.

RUSH: At any time in any of your -- I don't want to call them stunts. What they really are, in their own way they're works of art. Have you ever felt personally threatened, in danger, during any of these?

O'KEEFE: Well, yeah, I mean, to say I was in danger was an understatement. The book starts out with me in federal jail. We had a federal judge delete my videotapes and then charge me with a crime I didn't commit. I was confined to my state where I live, New Jersey, for three years, three and a half years. The government would not let me travel without permission from a US attorney, a federal judge, and a probation officer, for a misdemeanor crime which I would argue I didn't even commit. And I was audited once a month. I had to submit cash inflows and outflows to federal agents. When I would release an investigation, they'd show up at my parents' house and ask my father, "What's your son doing? What's he doing next?" We have faced the fire. And I know that they are politicizing the First Amendment. I see the Department of Justice protecting the guy who bugged McConnell and calling him a journalist, and it is this politicizing of the First Amendment which threatens us. Not just me, but everyone, all Americans, because if we lose this, if we lose the First Amendment, it's over. And we have been on the front lines, and that's what my story is about. It's about surviving them, and overcoming their obstacles and continuing to make a difference, despite everything they've thrown at us.

RUSH: We're talking with James O'Keefe and his new book out last week called Breakthrough. You might want to tell people about the very first mock investigation that you did at college. It's revealing, but, you know, everybody's interested in how people get started, what it is that interests them. You obviously have an aptitude for this, you've had an inclination towards it, but what was the first mock investigation that you engaged in?

O'KEEFE: Well, Rush, you had said when you first mentioned me after the ACORN videos, you pointed to Saul Alinsky, something in his Rules for Radicals, and it was make your adversaries live up to their own book of rules, bring out their absurdity. So in college at Rutgers University, I'm 29 years old, when I was a junior at Rutgers in 2005 on St. Patrick's day, I walked into my dining hall and I brought a box of Lucky Charms, the breakfast cereal, and I said, "This box of Lucky Charms is racist against Irish people because there's a little leprechaun, a little green-cladded gnome. I myself am an Irish-American, we're not all short, we have our differences of height." Rutgers University took my complaint seriously and said that they would remove Lucky Charms because it was in violation of their campus speech code. So we demonstrated the absurdity of their own argument by using their arguments against them.

RUSH: I love this. You're a guy after my own heart. You do what 60 Minutes used to do. You just do it in a little bit more creative way. You do it from a different point of view, obviously. Has anybody in the so-called regular, mainstream media ever praised you, ever welcomed you, ever given you an "attaboy" here or there?

O'KEEFE: After Congressman Moran's son resigned (his field director was telling us how to vote multiple times in other people's names) you started to see a begrudging respect because of our results. But let me just say that I have actually sued a journalist for defamation and gotten settlements, which is not an easy thing to do if you're a public figure. You have to prove actual malice. I have actually gotten money from journalists for defaming me and then use that money to fund more investigations. It's really incredible. We've gotten front page retractions at the Washington Post. We've had hundreds of corrections printed on our stories. And nobody in the mainstream media seems to view me as an ally, and my message is "I'm on the same page as you guys." We're trying to be government accountability people. There's a storied tradition of this kind of work going back to Mike Wallace...Slate is not necessarily one of the most friendly of publications to our mission -- had this to say. Quote, "Project Veritas had more of an impact on the 2012 election than any other journalist," unquote. And for example, our voter fraud exposes prompted six states to change their voter ID laws. It prompted resignations in the Organizing for America campaign. It prompted offices to shut down because they were telling us to vote twice and forge ballots. And it's the results. We got no media coverage. No one in the mainstream media wanted to talk about this.

But now we're getting results. Laws are changing. Just two weeks ago the Lifeline program, known as Obama phones, they fired all the workers we caught on tape telling us to sell the phones and get drugs and handbags, and they retrained all the workers. So we're getting real tangible results. And my vision is that if I just film -- we call it cinema verite, because we show a time slice of reality. If I'm just filming 1%, or .1% of all the people out there with government -- imagine if I was filming 50% of them?

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323899704578583671862397166.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

A half-year has passed since the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Noel Canning that President Obama's appointments to the NLRB were unconstitutional, and thus that the board lacks a legal quorum. In May, the Third Circuit affirmed this ruling. Yet the NLRB — determined to keep churning out a union agenda — has openly defied both appeals courts by continuing to issue rulings and complaints.

Regional directors in April filed two such unfair-labor-practice complaints against Cablevision. The company requested that Mr. Solomon halt the proceedings, given the NLRB's invalid status. It is Mr. Solomon's refusal, dated May 28, that provides the fullest expression of the NLRB's insolence.

The acting general counsel begins his letter by explaining that the legitimacy of the board is really neither here nor there. Why? Because Mr. Solomon was himself "appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate"—and therefore, apparently, is now sole and unchecked arbiter of all national labor policy.

This is astonishing on many levels, the least of which is that it is untrue. Mr. Solomon is the acting general counsel precisely because the Senate has refused to confirm him since he was first nominated in June 2011. Nor will it, ever, given his Boeing escapades.

Then there is the National Labor Relations Act, which created the NLRB. The law clearly says that the general counsel acts "on behalf of the Board"—a board that is today void, illegitimate, null, illegal. Mr. Solomon admits the "behalf" problem in his letter, though he says he's certain Congress nonetheless meant for him to be "independent" of the board. He says.

The most revealing part of Mr. Solomon's letter is the section cynically outlining why the NLRB continues to operate at a feverish pace. Mr. Solomon notes that this isn't the first time the board has operated without a quorum.

The NLRB issued 550 decisions with just two board members before the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in New Process Steel that the NLRB must have a three-person board quorum to operate. Mr. Solomon brags that of these 550, only about 100 were "impacted" by the Supreme Court's ruling—which, he writes, proves that the NLRB is justified in continuing to operate even at times when its "authority" has been challenged.

Mr. Solomon is in fact celebrating that of the 550 outfits harassed by an illegal, two-member board, only about 100 later decided they had the money, time and wherewithal to spend years relitigating in front of the labor goon squad. The NLRB is counting on the same outcome in Cablevision and other recent actions.

The board will push through as many rulings and complaints against companies as it can before the Supreme Court rules on its legitimacy. And it will trust that the firms it has attacked and drained will be too weary to then try for reversals. This is why the Obama administration waited so long to petition the Supreme Court to reverse Noel Canning. The longer this process takes, the more damage the NLRB can inflict on behalf of its union taskmasters...Mr. Solomon's wisdom is the Obama philosophy of raw power, in all its twisted glory.

[Deleted]

What I've been saying the whole time: The pope has absolutely no special authority to do anything, even within the rules of your religion.

It's the authority of one individual passed down, not the authority of anyone in a certain position within the church, and no matter the method for passing down this authority it has been failed entirely and lost several times over.

[Tails82]

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324853704578585961242121902.html?mod=hp_opinion

It's nerve-racking to drive toward the North Korean border with Park Sang Hak. Called "Fireball" by his admirers, the North Korean-born Mr. Park is designated "Enemy Zero" by the Pyongyang regime, which two years ago sent an agent into South Korea to assassinate him with a poison-tipped pen. On this summer morning, he promises to do again what so infuriates the Kim dictatorship—launch large balloons into North Korea carrying leaflets, computer-memory sticks and sweets for the oppressed people of the hermit kingdom.

In return, Pyongyang promises to "physically eliminate the kind of human scum that commits such treason." Adds the North Korean military: "The U.S. and the present puppet authorities of South Korea should not forget even a moment that the Rimjin Pavilion"—Mr. Park's favorite launch site near the Demilitarized Zone separating the two countries—"is within the range of direct sighting strike" of the Korean People's Army.

Yet once we arrive at the balloon-launch site, it becomes clear that Mr. Park has a different antagonist to contend with: South Korea, which has deployed a few hundred police to stop his airborne humanitarian mission. The police let him speak to assembled local media, but when Mr. Park tries to retrieve his balloons from a pickup truck, three rows of plainclothes officers block the way. Mr. Park tries to push through, but the police push back. When he tries to drive the truck slowly through the cordon to a different launch site, a large scuffle breaks out.

Shoving matches pit uniformed and plainclothes police against Mr. Park and fellow activists—most of whom, like him, are native North Koreans who defected to the South sometime in the past 15 years. The most recent defectors wear handkerchiefs to cover their faces, because their identification in photos could mean imprisonment or execution for family members left behind. The grim, chaotic scene ends when Mr. Park is shoved into a police car and driven to the Paju Police Station.

He is released later that day, but not without a reinforced sense that something is rotten in one of the world's most prosperous democracies. "Launching balloons is legal activism that I can do as a free citizen," he tells me (through an interpreter) when we meet again two days later. But his arrest shows that "the threatening and blackmailing by the North Korean regime work well in the international community." And especially in Seoul, he argues, where successive South Korean governments have played down the catastrophic human-rights abuses across the border.

To be born in North Korea is generally a life sentence in the world's cruelest totalitarian state. There is no freedom of speech or worship. North Koreans can't travel without official permission, and border guards have shoot-to-kill orders for anyone trying to flee. More than 200,000 languish in kwalliso, political prisons akin to Stalin's gulag, where more than one million have died. Almost no one owns a car, only about 10% of apartments have refrigerators, and some 10% of the population died of starvation in the mid-1990s. The average 7-year-old is 8 inches shorter and 22 pounds lighter than peers in South Korea.

Mr. Park is one of roughly 25,000 North Koreans to escape and get to the South, and his balloon launches aim to break the information monopoly held by the Kim family. In addition to praising the South's liberal democracy, the leaflets reveal unflattering truths about Pyongyang's rulers, such as Kim Il Sung's craving for mistresses during his reign from 1948-94. The digital memory sticks inform North Koreans about the world, including "people power" movements and life inside South Korea as captured by news articles, movies and (especially) soap operas.

The idea, says Mr. Park, is that even in North Korea "the truth can set you free"—but only if you have access to it. "We don't want the South Korean government or the U.S. government to start a war," he says. "What we're waiting for is to change the [Pyongyang] regime by the hands of North Koreans who are educated with the truth. . . . That's the only way we can give freedom to the 24 million people in North Korea."

This strategy of pursuing regime change from within was explicitly rejected by South Korean leaders during the "Sunshine Policy" years of 1998-2008. Seoul believed that Kim Il Sung's successor, his son Kim Jong Il, would lose interest in nuclear weapons and loosen his grip at home if he saw that no outside forces were working to oust his regime. So South Korean presidents feted him at summits, gave him economic benefits, and ignored human rights.

"Sunshine" didn't stop North Korea's nuclear drive, and South Korean voters have since rejected it twice at the polls. But five years of conservative leadership in Seoul haven't made life easier for Mr. Park, who can't recall whether his latest arrest is number seven or eight.

"South Koreans like saying that we are all in the same family, same ethnic group, we share the culture—but they're just saying that, not really feeling it or believing it," he says. "Many South Korean people think that when the Koreas are unified, they will have to take all the economic burden for developing North Korea, which is deprived and underdeveloped, so will have to pay more taxes for that."

Mr. Park has little sympathy for this dollars-and-cents concern, even as he acknowledges South Korea's efforts to resettle 25,000 defectors, including him and his family. "The GDP of South Korea is $23,000 per person," he notes. "After reunification, after the North Korean regime collapses, the North Korean people will come and see this affluence and they're going to ask you, 'What did you do when we were suffering back in North Korea?' What kind of answer should we give to them?"

The problem is visible, says Mr. Park, in how South Korean journalists report on North Korea's new dictator. "They mention Kim Jong Un even more than North Korean media," he says, sounding incredulous and adding that reporters in the South speak of Pyongyang as if it were a normal government, not a totalitarian tyranny. "They call Kim Jong Un by his formal names. . . . It's like calling Hitler by his full rank and title, to pay respect."

Park Sang Hak was born in 1968 into the elite of North Korean society. His father was a senior official in the Workers' Party with responsibility for smuggling computer technology into North Korea from Japan and elsewhere. The work earned Mr. Park's father riches—large amounts of U.S. currency, an Omega watch from "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, even a Mercedes-Benz—and eventually a promotion into the intelligence directorate responsible for sending spies into South Korea. But he decided to defect in 1999, while stationed in Tokyo, telling his family that with North Koreans starving to death, to aid the Kim regime was a crime against the people.

The younger Mr. Park didn't want to leave, since at age 31 he was a rising bureaucrat on the make. "I knew that within a few years I was going to be a member of the Party, which is really prestigious. I didn't even serve in the military—which is allowed only for elites—but I still got the membership." He owned a car, an imported Toyota. "I blamed my father for abandoning his faith in communism and becoming a capitalist," he recalls.

But over a two-month period, as he listened to a taped message sent secretly by his father, young Mr. Park began to see things differently. "I felt for the first time that I wasn't working for people but rather reigning over people," he says. "I felt like a criminal. I felt guilty for spending a lot of money and having a luxurious life based on the efforts and miserable lives of ordinary citizens."

On Aug. 9, 1999, he, his mother and two siblings defected across the Yalu River into China, having pleased the border guards with 10 times the usual bribe.

Once in South Korea, Mr. Park didn't immediately take up the anti-Pyongyang cause, working instead at Seoul National University. His spur to activism came in 2003, when he learned that as a result of his family's defection, the regime had tortured his uncles to death. His cousins had become street beggars, and to this day he doesn't know if they are alive. "After I learned of that," he says, "I had to stand up and do something."

Still, he has some gripes with the U.S., especially the Bush administration's 2008 decision to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. But Mr. Park doesn't fault Americans for thinking of North Korea more as a nuclear threat than a human-rights violator. For that he blames South Korea: "If your house is on fire, and you don't care much about it and run away, you can't expect other people to extinguish it for you."

Mr. Park notes that South Korea's president visited China this week without publicly pressing Beijing to stop repatriating defectors to North Korea, where they face imprisonment or worse. In Washington, meanwhile, North Korea remains off the terror-sponsor list, and U.S. officials want to resume negotiations with the Kim regime. "They're going to deceive you again and again and again," Mr. Park warns.

At least he offers some consolation as our conversation ends: Most of his balloon launches take place in secret—without advance notice or the glare of cameras—so the South Korean authorities let them proceed. Thus 30 to 40 times a year, when wind conditions are favorable and donors provide sufficient funds, Mr. Park launches 200,000 leaflets northward toward the hermit kingdom. Each one is considered a threat by Pyongyang. No regime so fragile can last forever.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324853704578587610461933172.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

When Rasmussen Reports asked some of its polling subjects to conduct an odd exercise in racial stereotyping, the results were counterintuitive, or at least counterstereotypical:

"Thirty-seven percent (37%) of American Adults think most black Americans are racist, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 15% consider most white Americans racist, while 18% say the same of most Hispanic Americans."

It's not surprising that whites would be more apt to impute racism to blacks than to whites. Thus the partisan and ideological breakdowns are about what one would expect, given that most conservatives, and especially most Republicans, are white.

But the results for blacks are a big surprise. Blacks are more likely (by 7 percentage points) to think most blacks are racist than to think most whites are. Moreover, they are 11 points likelier than liberals (regardless of race) to think most blacks are racist, and 9 points likelier than Democrats. And blacks are 3 points less likely than liberals to think most whites are racist.

All of which suggests that the people likeliest to believe most whites are racist and most blacks are not are those who are both liberal and white. Which reinforces a point we've made often in this column: that a lot of what drives the futile debate over race in America is white liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites.

...

The Texas abortion kerfuffle, which we wrote about Wednesday, is getting even weirder. It seems that some of the antiabortion protesters started singing "Amazing Grace," whereupon the the pro-abortion side taunted them with chants of "Hail Satan!" Twitchy.com has a Twitter roundup.

Reeve goes on:

"And yet that wasn't the worst of it. Twitchy, The Daily Caller, The Blaze, and others picked up a photo showing a little girl holding a sign that says, "If I wanted the government in my womb, I would f*** a senator!" How horrible! "Pro-aborts exploit kids to advocate for killing 'unwanted' ones," Twitchy's headline blared. The image appears to have gone viral after it was tweeted by Ethan Gehrke.

"However, it's a fake. Or at least, it's not from the Texas demonstrations. The photo was posted on a message board in December 2007. The anti-abortion crowd will have to stick with its five Satanists."

That latter paragraph now has a strikethrough tag and is followed by this update: "I read the date wrong. The photo is real! My apologies. The pro-choice activists appear to have let a kid hold that sign after all, which, gross [sic]."

James Fallows must be very proud of his influence on younger Atlanticans.

Not enough lives or jobs have been lost to satisfy Obama:

hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-07-06-US-Pentagon-Furloughs/id-5cb9d1e25dbc447b80917f231d87a87f

A day without pay, the first of 11 through September, comes next week for more than 650,000 people who hold civilian jobs with the Defense Department. Officials worry that the Pentagon will be hit even harder by layoffs in 2014 if automatic budget cuts continue as planned.

Roughly 85 percent of the department's nearly 900,000 civilians around the world will be furloughed one day each week over the next three months, according to the latest statistics provided by the Pentagon. But while defense officials were able to shift money around to limit the furloughs this year, thousands of civilian, military and contract jobs could be on the chopping block next year.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is expected to provide senators with more details early next week on how the next wave of across-the-board budget cuts will affect the department, said Pentagon press secretary George Little. But while defense officials have not yet released details on the impact of the cuts, Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's chief of staff, has warned that as many as 100,000 more active-duty, National Guard and Reserve soldiers could lose their jobs if Congress allows billions of dollars in automatic budget cuts to continue next year.

"There's going to be perhaps some degradation of mission across the department, and because of reduced work schedules for 650,000 employees," Little said.

Imagine if a business ever said "we're not paying you today because we disagree with you ideologically."

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323899704578587613929308942.html

BP Seeks Its Inner Exxon

The oil giant tries to shed its reputation as a serial capitulator.

BP, after the Gulf spill, was beset by a legal and political firestorm. The company faced a financial threat that could have led to bankruptcy or dismemberment. Faustian is not quite the word for the deal BP announced on March 3, 2012, with the so-called plaintiffs steering committee.

It agreed to compensate Gulf-area businesses and individuals for economic losses without proof those losses were related to the spill. Worse, whether any losses occurred would be determined by a casual process that virtually invited plaintiffs to game their financial statements.

"The craziest thing," wrote one lawyer touting his services to clients, "is that you can be compensated for losses that are UNRELATED to the spill."

Unexpectedly but perhaps not surprisingly, law firms themselves turned out to be among the biggest claimants. In a recent round of payouts totalling $100 million, $33 million went to six law firms that claimed they suffered economic losses due to the spill, says BP spokesman Geoff Morrell.

On Monday, before a U.S. appeals court, BP will argue that the claims procedure it agreed to is being unfairly and perhaps corruptly administered by a court-appointed lawyer and his staff. In a different case before the same New Orleans judge who upheld the claims process, BP is also settling in for a long fight over whether the spill amounted to gross negligence.

The orneriness represents a change in the company's attitude. Once BP said it didn't want the Deepwater Horizon accident to become another Exxon Valdez, litigation over which dragged on for 20 years. Now some inside BP are starting to look at Exxon as an inspiration.

When an Exxon tanker ran aground in Alaska in 1989, the company did not deny responsibility. It pled guilty to four federal crimes, paying $125 million in fines. It settled a $22 million damages claim by native communities.

Though Exxon stipulated that damage occurred, when thousands of plaintiffs lined up, Exxon reasonably concluded that only litigation could determine how much injury occurred and who suffered it.

Plaintiffs also sought huge punitive damages in excess of any actual harm suffered. Exxon fought them all the way to the Supreme Court, which reduced a $5 billion jury award to $500 million.

BP money has been used by Gulf localities for reasons having nothing to do with the spill: to repair hurricane damage to marshes, to build a convention center, to benefit local burghers who suffered no harm.

Alabama's attorney general personally barnstormed his state with the court-appointed claims administrator, Louisiana lawyer Pat Juneau. Together, they urged Alabamans to get in on a "hell of a deal."

In a Grisham-like plot twist, one attorney now has been bounced as claims adjudicator amid allegations he received contingency payments from lawyers whose claims he approved. Another bigwig trial attorney, who once hosted President Obama for a fundraiser at his home, was forced to withdraw from the plaintiffs steering committee amid charges he signed up local Vietnamese residents as plaintiffs without their knowledge.

Many politicians and activists seem to think businesses should pre-emptively surrender their own interests in clashes with the "public interest." But there is no heavenly determined public interest. There are only various parties whose claims should never be credited without examination. The rule of law is not an inconvenience but a necessity, unless we want pillage to become the rule in our society. Next time a company finds itself in BP's position—as difficult as that position was—it might do better to wrap itself in the flag and head straight to court.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324328204578572592476276824.html

In defending against an $18 billion judgment levied by Ecuadorean courts, oil giant Chevron has played more offense than defense. It has sued the plaintiffs' U.S. and Ecuadorean attorneys, and several of the plaintiffs' expert witnesses. Last month, Chevron even filed counterclaims alleging fraud and misconduct by Patton Boggs, a well-respected U.S. law firm involved in the case.

The problem for Chevron is that U.S. courts take a generous view toward foreign judgments and will generally enforce them as long as there is no evidence of serious unfairness or fraud in the foreign court proceeding. For this reason, if Chevron had adopted a standard defense strategy attempting to block enforcement of the judgment, it probably would have been forced to settle for a substantial amount.

Instead the company went on the offensive. First, it initiated an international arbitration against Ecuador at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague under the U.S.-Ecuador bilateral investment treaty. In that proceeding, Chevron alleged, among other things, that Ecuador had failed to provide a fair trial proceeding. The arbitration also enabled Chevron to invoke a federal law that allowed it to demand documents and to depose witnesses to support its case in the arbitration.

The company uncovered evidence in this discovery process that it believes shows that the plaintiffs' attorneys were involved in ghostwriting key portions of the Ecuadorean court's expert report finding Chevron liable. Chevron then launched a civil racketeering lawsuit in federal court against the plaintiffs' chief U.S. lawyer, Steven Donziger, his Ecuadorean counsel, and their expert consultants, Stratus. The racketeering lawsuit enabled Chevron to seek more evidence to support its allegations of fraud in the underlying Ecuadorean court judgment.

Over the past year, the company's aggressive strategy has begun to pay off. A judge involved in the Ecuador judgment filed a declaration supporting Chevron's allegations of fraud. The plaintiffs' expert consultants, Stratus, also settled Chevron's lawsuit against it by filing declarations supporting some of Chevron's allegations.

It's nice to see that oil companies are fighting back against corrupt money-grabbers.

[Tails82]

It's the authority of one individual passed down, not the authority of anyone in a certain position within the church

The pope is the bishop of Rome. He is chosen by other bishops and it is bishops who conduct Holy Orders when priests are instated.

www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P2A.HTM

"The power which they exercise personally in the name of Christ, is proper, ordinary, and immediate, although its exercise is ultimately controlled by the supreme authority of the Church." But the bishops should not be thought of as vicars of the Pope. His ordinary and immediate authority over the whole Church does not annul, but on the contrary confirms and defends that of the bishops. Their authority must be exercised in communion with the whole Church under the guidance of the Pope.

The Good Shepherd ought to be the model and "form" of the bishop's pastoral office. Conscious of his own weaknesses, "the bishop . . . can have compassion for those who are ignorant and erring. He should not refuse to listen to his subjects whose welfare he promotes as of his very own children.... the faithful ... should be closely attached to the bishop as the Church is to Jesus Christ, and as Jesus Christ is to the Father":

Let all follow the bishop, as Jesus Christ follows his Father, and the college of presbyters as the apostles; respect the deacons as you do God's law. Let no one do anything concerning the Church in separation from the bishop.

I don't know how to make this any more clear.

Does that make the pope's position unnecessary? Of course not. It is needed for church unity.

www.newadvent.org/cathen/12260a.htm#II

The first witness is St. Clement, a disciple of the Apostles, who, after Linus and Anacletus, succeeded St. Peter as the fourth in the list of popes. In his "Epistle to the Corinthians", written in 95 or 96, he bids them receive back the bishops whom a turbulent faction among them had expelled. "If any man", he says, "should be disobedient unto the words spoken by God through us, let them understand that they will entangle themselves in no slight transgression and danger" (Ep. 59). Moreover, he bids them "render obedience unto the things written by us through the Holy Spirit". The tone of authority which inspires the latter appears so clearly that Lightfoot did not hesitate to speak of it as "the first step towards papal domination" (Clement 1:70). Thus, at the very commencement of church history, before the last survivor of the Apostles had passed away, we find a Bishop of Rome, himself a disciple of St. Peter, intervening in the affairs of another Church and claiming to settle the matter by a decision spoken under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Such a fact admits of one explanation alone. It is that in the days when the Apostolic teaching was yet fresh in men's minds the universal Church recognized in the Bishop of Rome the office of supreme head.

...

Equally noteworthy is the action of Emperor Aurelian in 270. A synod of bishops had condemned Paul of Samosata, Patriarch of Alexandria, on a charge of heresy, and had elected Domnus bishop in his place. Paul refused to withdraw, and appeal was made to the civil power. The emperor decreed that he who was acknowledged by the bishops of Italy and the Bishop of Rome, must be recognized as rightful occupant of the see. The incident proves that even the pagans themselves knew well that communion with the Roman See was the essential mark of all Christian Churches. That the imperial Government was well aware of the position of the pope among Christians derives additional confirmation from the saying of St. Cyprian that Decius would have sooner heard of the proclamation of a rival emperor than of the election of a new pope to fill the place of the martyred Fabian (Ep. 55:9).

www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/pope/succession_1.shtml

Though it is their cardinals, gathered in the Sistine Chapel, who choose the new pope, Catholics believe that these men are simply conduits who are doing the Holy Spirit's bidding. This is what distinguishes the papal election from any other poll. The Holy Spirit plays His part and thereby ensures in theory that any pope wanting to decide his own succession by filling the College of Cardinals with men of like mind will be thwarted.

For you to argue illegitimacy is to say the Holy Spirit, at some point, said "screw you guys I'm out of here" and left forever. Or in the case of false prophets, apparently left for a while until it struck some random guy outside the church. Every heresy necessarily had to break with Rome, as this is recognized as the official church. A pretty obvious indication of where authority lies...

Do you think the Holy Spirit left the church when the first pope died? The seat was temporarily vacant, after all.