Conservatrolling Topic

[kode54]

[Deleted]

You're arguing against a point I never made.
The Pope is the leader of your church, whatever; no one really cares who leads a church. You can do this without direct divine right, yeah? People are building churches all over the place and not getting excommunicated.

My point was, and still is, that is ALL there is to the Pope. He has no divine right handed down from God to Peter to the next pope and so on. Even if that chain were there, it was broken.
The pope is a leader of an especially prominent church, but certainly does not have the power to make his word religious law as was granted to Peter.

[Tails82]

I don't see the reason to believe that.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324399404578583650562822608.html

Washington, D.C. has an 8.5% unemployment rate, and it has come up with an ingenious plan to keep it high: The city council voted 8-5 late last month to require a $12.50 an hour "living wage" for certain big retailers, well above the current national minimum of $7.25.

The wage floor applies to stores with 75,000 square feet of space and $1 billion in parent-company revenues, notably Target, Home Depot and especially Wal-Mart, which has announced plans to open six new stores in the district with its first three under construction. Each store is expected to bring about 300 jobs and $1 million in tax revenue for the city, but unions detest the non-union retailer.

Which is why the proposed law exempts companies operating under collective-bargaining agreements. That's right, supermarket chains like Safeway and Giant get a pass because they have union workforces. So paying a non-living wage is fine as long as it also finances union dues.

[Deleted]

Show me the part where God said "and let there be a pope" rather than "and let Peter do whatever he wants".
Until then, you need to accept that any power the pope has relies on the past popes, not vague assurances that "the holy spirit" had anything to do with anything. (it doesn't)

[Tails82]

Why would power rest on past popes?

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/08/morning-bell-obamacares-dirty-dozen-implementation-failures/

Last week, the Obama Administration attempted to spin its announcement of a one-year delay in Obamacare’s employer mandate as an effort to implement the law “in a careful, thoughtful manner.” Don’t be fooled. Even Democrats have admitted the law has turned into a massive “train wreck,” with delays, glitches, and problems aplenty. Here are a dozen more Obamacare implementation failures.

1. The CLASS Act: ABANDONED, THEN REPEALED

One Democrat famously called this new long-term care entitlement “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of”—and so it proved. In the fall of 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) admitted CLASS could not be implemented in a fiscally sound manner—and Congress eventually repealed the program outright.

2. Exchanges: MISSED DEADLINES

Most states resisted Obamacare’s call to create insurance exchanges, choosing to let Washington create a federally run exchange instead. However, a Government Accountability Office report released last month noted that “critical” activities to create a federal exchange have not been completed, and the missed deadlines “suggest a potential for challenges going forward.”

3. HHS mandate: DELAYED; UNDER LEGAL CHALLENGE

Last year, the Administration announced a partial delay for Obamacare’s anti-conscience mandate. However, many employers have filed legal actions against the mandate, which forces them to fund products they find morally objectionable or pay massive fines.

4. Small business plan choice: DELAYED

The Administration announced in April that workers will not be able to choose plans from different health insurers in the small business exchanges next year—a delay that liberal blogger Joe Klein called “a really bad sign” of “Obamacare incompetence.”

5. Child-only plans: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

A drafting error in Obamacare has actually led to less access to care for children with pre-existing conditions. A 2011 report found that in 17 states, insurers are no longer selling child-only health insurance plans, because they fear that individuals will apply for coverage only after being diagnosed with a costly illness.

6. Basic health plan: DELAYED

This government-run plan for states, created as part of Obamacare, has also been delayed, prompting one Democrat to criticize the Administration for failing to “live up” to the law and implement it as written.

7. High-risk pools: UNDERPERFORMING; FUNDING LOW

This program for individuals with pre-existing conditions faced higher costs and lower enrollment than advertised. Though it was originally projected to cover up to 700,000 individuals, only about 110,000 have enrolled—yet the Administration had to halt new enrollment and take other radical measures to prevent the $5 billion program from running out of money.

8. Early retiree reinsurance: BROKE

The $5 billion in funding for this program was intended to last until 2014—but the program’s money ran out in 2011, two years ahead of schedule.

9. Waivers: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

After the law passed, HHS discovered that some of its new mandates would raise costs so much that employers would drop coverage rather than face skyrocketing premiums. Instead, the Administration announced a series of temporary waivers—and more than half the recipients of those waivers were members of union health insurance plans.

10. Co-ops: DEFUNDED

Congress blocked additional funding to this Obamacare program in January, and with good reason: In one case, a new health insurance co-op was called “fatally flawed” by Vermont’s state insurance commissioner.

11. “Employee free choice”: REPEALED

This provision, which would have allowed certain workers to use contributions from their employers to buy exchange health plans, was repealed in April 2011, as businesses considered it too complex and unworkable.

12. Medicaid expansion: REJECTED BY MANY STATES

Last year, the Supreme Court made Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion optional for states, ruling that Obamacare as written engaged in “economic dragooning” that puts “a gun to the head of states.” Many states are resisting Obamacare’s call to expand Medicaid, knowing that expansion will saddle them with additional, unsustainable costs.

As these examples demonstrate, it’s not just the employer mandate that’s flawed—it’s the entire law. Recognizing these myriad, massive failures, Congress should hold the line and refuse to spend a single dime on Obamacare implementation.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324436104578580081572814300.html

On Jan. 1, manufacturers of medical devices in the U.S. were hit with a new 2.3% tax on revenue, one of the many sources of money tapped to pay for ObamaCare. This tax will likely cut into the profits of large medical-device manufacturers, a cost that will almost certainly be passed on to health-care consumers. But its effect on U.S. medical-device startups—the small companies that fuel innovation—may prove devastating.

Coincident with the 2.3% tax, venture capital investment in medical devices has all but ceased. Why? Ask yourself two questions: Who would want to invest in a highly-regulated, government-controlled industry that faces a unique tax? What startup medical device company can reach the magical break-even point with a tax on its revenue?

When combined with the ever-increasing time it takes to get approval from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Food and Drug Administration, this levy is bound to destroy startups and stunt medical-device innovation in the U.S. and thus the quality of health care world-wide.

At present, response times by the Patent Office and FDA can be measured in portions of a decade. One of our recent patent applications, for a vibrating pad to treat the sleep loss associated with restless legs syndrome, took the Patent Office three years, three months and 17 days to reach an initial negative decision. For the same device, the FDA took four years, two months and 28 days to reach its initial negative decision which, months later, was reversed. Most medical-device startups and their investors can't—or won't—wait that long, especially now that a 2.3% revenue tax has to be weighed.

Unless the federal government changes the 2.3% revenue tax, and until the Patent Office and the FDA improve their turnaround time for regulatory decisions, medical-device startups in the U.S. are all but doomed. For the sake of medical innovation and the future of health care, our lawmakers should repeal this damaging tax immediately.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/06/the-obamacare-big-city-bailout/

The Obamacare Big City Bailout

Bloomberg reports this week on the latest Obamacare trend sweeping across the country: Cities and states may soon attempt to unload unsustainable health costs on the federal government by dumping employees and retirees onto exchanges.

Both Chicago and Detroit have explored using the exchanges to reduce massive budget shortfalls, and it could set an example for others. Bloomberg quotes one expert from the Rockefeller Institute of Government: “We can expect other cities to pick up on this.… I expect [employee dumping] to mushroom.”

The incentives for cities—or even states—to dump their workers onto exchanges are significant. Bloomberg notes that reducing retiree health costs could save Detroit approximately $150 million per year—at a time when the city faces a $386 million budget deficit and $17 billion in long-term debt.

Of course, these budgetary maneuvers aren’t really “savings”—they merely represent a shift of unsustainable costs from cities and states onto the backs of federal taxpayers. If more individuals than expected—particularly retirees, who are likely to be older and sicker than the population as a whole—require federal exchange subsidies, the cost of Obamacare could rise by trillions. And if cities and even states set an example by dumping their health care obligations on the federal government, private-sector employers could well follow suit.

The spokesman for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel called the city’s retiree health system “fiscally unsustainable,” but merely shifting that responsibility to Washington may be about as effective as moving deck chairs on a budgetary Titanic.

Meanwhile, like other Americans losing their coverage due to Obamacare, retirees themselves appear none too keen on getting dumped onto the exchanges. Bloomberg quotes one retired Detroit police officer expressing his outrage:

"Imagine if they said tomorrow your Social Security, your Medicare is going away and you’re going on Obamacare...How would you feel?"

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324507404578591671926459776.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The White House seems to regard laws as mere suggestions, including the laws it helped to write. On the heels of last week's one-year suspension of the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate to offer insurance to workers, the Administration is now waiving a new batch of its own ObamaCare prescriptions.

These disclosures arrived inside a 606-page catch-all final rule that the Health and Human Services Department published on July 5—a classic Friday news dump, with extra credit for the holiday weekend. HHS now says it will no longer attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies and instead will rely on self-reporting, with minimal efforts to verify if the information consumers provide is accurate.

Remember "liar loans," the low- or no-documentation mortgages that took borrowers at their word without checking pay stubs or W-2s? ObamaCare is now on the same honor system, with taxpayers in tow.

People are supposed to receive subsidies only if their employer does not provide federally approved health benefits. Since HHS now won't require business to report those benefits or enforce the standards until 2015, it says it can't ask ObamaCare's "exchange" bureaucracies to certify who qualifies either.

HHS calls this "a slight technical correction" though it is much more than that. The exchanges will not only start dispensing benefits "based on an applicant's attestation" about his employment insurance status. HHS is also handing the exchanges "temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation of projected annual household income without further verification."

In other words, anyone can receive subsidies tied to income without judging the income they declare against the income data the Internal Revenue Service collects. This change has nothing to do with the employer mandate, even tangentially. HHS is disowning eligibility quality control because pre-clearance is "not feasible" as a result of "operational barriers" and "a large amount of systems development on both the state and federal side, which cannot occur in time for October 1, 2013."

You've got to love that passive voice. It's true that coordinating and managing vast amounts of information from hundreds of millions of Americans and corporations, and monitoring compliance with more than 10,000 pages of fine-print Federal Register regulations so far, is hard to do. Yet that is the system Democrats installed when they passed the law, which is not supposed to be optional due to administrative incompetence.

HHS promises to develop "a more robust verification process," some day, but the result starting in October may be millions of people getting subsidies who don't legally qualify. This would mean huge increases in ObamaCare spending. Some of these folks could be fraudsters, much as 21% to 25% of Earned Income Tax Credits flow to people who aren't eligible, according to the Treasury inspector general. The same error rate for ObamaCare would amount to as much as $250 billion in improper payments in its first decade.

Liberals are also now claiming that the employer mandate and these eligibility rules were never important parts of ObamaCare. This is revisionist history, not least because the mandate and eligibility limits helped reduce the cost as measured by the Congressional Budget Office.

The revisionism is also false because every provision of ObamaCare is supposed to "solve" a problem created by some other provision of the bill. Kick out one of the struts like the business mandate and the whole apparatus becomes even more unstable. In the case of the lawless decision to shelve any income or employer insurance scrutiny, HHS's logistical challenges are real. But our bet is that the Administration is also using them as a pretense in a deliberate bid to make it much easier to join the exchanges.

That's because the health planners are terrified that enough healthy, low-cost people won't sign up and therefore the Affordable Care Act's strict regulations on underwriting and risk-pooling will blow up insurance markets. As more and more of ObamaCare tumbles, the Administration is resorting to anything that can salvage the goal of permanently expanding the U.S. entitlement state.

All of this fits with ObamaCare's entire bloody-minded history. Democrats were determined to make their rendezvous with the liberal destiny of government-run health care, so they imposed this debacle on the country on a partisan vote and despite public opposition. Now that they are discovering how difficult it is to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy, they are rewriting the law as they go and telling Americans they have no choice but to live with the consequences.

[Deleted]

God never appointed a successor or requested there to be one; Peter did that of his own accord.
For example, if Peter hadn't decided to pass on his authority, there would no longer be any authority to pass down, much the same as the succession being interrupted.

[Tails82]

But he could and by accounts did.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323823004578591503509555268.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Like King James II, the president decides not to enforce laws he doesn't like. That's an abuse of power.

Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.

This matter—the limits of executive power—has deep historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism, English monarchs asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary statutes they disliked. King James II's use of the prerogative was a key grievance that lead to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that "the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal."

To make sure that American presidents could not resurrect a similar prerogative, the Framers of the Constitution made the faithful enforcement of the law a constitutional duty...With the exception of Richard Nixon, whose refusals to spend money appropriated by Congress were struck down by the courts, no prior president has claimed the power to negate a law that is concededly constitutional.

In 1998, the Supreme Court struck down a congressional grant of line-item veto authority to the president to cancel spending items in appropriations. The reason? The only constitutional power the president has to suspend or repeal statutes is to veto a bill or propose new legislation. Writing for the court in Clinton v. City of New York, Justice John Paul Stevens noted: "There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes."

The employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act contains no provision allowing the president to suspend, delay or repeal it. Section 1513(d) states in no uncertain terms that "The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013." Imagine the outcry if Mitt Romney had been elected president and simply refused to enforce the whole of ObamaCare.

Republican opponents of ObamaCare might say that the suspension of the employer mandate is such good policy that there's no need to worry about constitutionality. But if the president can dispense with laws, and parts of laws, when he disagrees with them, the implications for constitutional government are dire.

Democrats too may acquiesce in Mr. Obama's action, as they have his other aggressive assertions of executive power. Yet what will they say when a Republican president decides that the tax rate on capital gains is a drag on economic growth and instructs the IRS not to enforce it?

And what of immigration reform? Why bother debating the details of a compromise if future presidents will feel free to disregard those parts of the statute that they don't like?

The courts cannot be counted on to intervene in cases like this. As the Supreme Court recently held in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the same-sex marriage case involving California's Proposition 8, private citizens do not have standing in court to challenge the executive's refusal to enforce laws, unless they have a personal stake in the matter. If a president declines to enforce tax laws, immigration laws, or restrictions on spending—to name a few plausible examples—it is very likely that no one will have standing to sue.

Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects. As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress "would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice."

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/07/08/dismal_jobs_report_as_obama_kills_full_time_jobs_and_hurts_the_opportunity_for_young_people_to_have_careers

Now, the release of the June jobs report happened Friday, and it was just like all these other jobs reports. It's dismal. The Labor Department reported that the economy gained 195,000 jobs in June, which beat expectations, which means our expectations are horribly low. We need, just to replace, to go back to 2008 unemployment levels, we need to be creating 600,000 jobs a month...We're nowhere near that, and we're still going the wrong direction.

"The Department also reported that the economy gained 70,000 more jobs in April and May than it originally estimated. The report, however, also provides clear evidence that the the nation is splitting into two; only 47% of Americans have a full-time job and those who don't are finding it increasingly out of reach. Of the 144 million Americans employed last month..." Folks, I'm gonna tell you something. We've got a population -- I know there's kids in this number, children -- we have a population of over 300 million people, and not even half of them are working. I'm sorry. This country cannot stay a superpower, cannot stay great, the economy cannot continue to grow with those numbers. And then it gets worse from there.

"Of the 144 million Americans employed last month, only 116 million were working full-time. Friday's report showed that 58.7% of the civilian adult population of 245 million was working last month. Only 47% of Americans," this is all Americans, not the labor force, "only 47% of Americans had a full-time job." Part-time jobs, which is the majority of the jobs created in that 195,000, the majority of jobs created are part-time jobs, and that's Obamacare. The combination of Obamacare and the economy are almost inseparable.

"The market's positive reaction to Friday's report is another sign of how far our economic expectations have fallen. If today the same proportion of Americans worked as just a decade ago, there would be almost 9 million more people working." You know, I spend a lot of time on this every time the jobs numbers come out, the labor force participation rate, in addition to the unemployment number that's expressed as the percentage. The fact of the matter is that we have lost nine million jobs. Forget people for a second. There are nine million fewer jobs to have in this country...That is how bad the Obama economy has been. Just in the last 12 months, two million Americans have left the labor force. Well, now, in light of that, 195,000 jobs created, big whoop. Two million Americans left the labor force. That means two million jobs ceased to exist. So the unemployment number of whatever it reported, seven point whatever it was percent, it's meaningless, because the universe is shrinking. And then you have with a majority of the population not even holding a full-time job, is it any wonder our economy isn't growing?

In addition to the second largest US employer being a temp agency, there are 101 million Americans receiving food aid from the federal government.

That is a number larger than the number of private sector employees. Now, this is not a new picture to you and me. We've been on top of this and we've seen it coming. We've seen it develop the past five years. But this is a damn tragedy! I'm sorry, this is not a foundation for any growth. This is not a foundation for goodness. This is absolute tragedy. This is embarrassing. The second largest employer is a temp agency!

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/08/egypt-fruits-of-the-obama-administrations-neglect/

For a leader, neglect almost always turns out for the worse. Problems fester. Opponents are emboldened, and supporters demoralized. Aimlessness begets powerlessness, as changing positions confuse and bewilder. Then, after all is said and done, the very thing you most earnestly wanted to avoid comes to pass anyway, only now it’s too late for you to do anything about it.

That is the sad predicament President Obama now faces in Egypt. He has never figured out what to do. He is like an eager amateur who rushes in with easy answers, only to find they don’t work. He then pulls back in a fog of passivity, pretending his newfound aloofness was his intent all along.

Look at his record in Egypt. At one point, Obama backed former President Hosni Mubarak. Then he abandoned him. Next, under the democratic banner of “letting the Egyptian people decide,” he stood on the sidelines as the Muslim Brotherhood took power and began to run the country into the ground. Again unsure of what to do, he took what he thought was the line of least resistance—supporting the Brotherhood and its leader, President Mohamed Morsi.

Only that didn’t work either. Now Morsi is gone, and all the President can muster in response is that he is “deeply concerned” by the Egyptian military’s decision to oust Morsi. Once again Obama got it wrong, and his policy is repudiated.

Foreign policy is hard. An American President cannot dictate events in Egypt. But that’s no excuse for wandering all over the place in confusion. The United States had tremendous influence with the army at the beginning of the Egyptian revolution. Obama squandered it by backing Morsi and his Brotherhood allies.

Now the demonstrators accuse the U.S. of being Morsi’s lackey. Protesters, disappointed by Obama’s uncritical support for Morsi, carried signs denouncing President Obama; one banner visible the day the military deposed Morsi, for example, read “Obama Stop Supporting MB [Muslim Brotherhood] Fascist Regime.”

That’s quite an “achievement.” The only “friends” America seems to have left are Morsi supporters in the anti-Western Brotherhood, who despise American values, oppose U.S. policies, and now blame Obama for backing the army “coup” against Morsi. Thus, the U.S. ends up on the side of the very Islamist group that spawned decades of Islamist enemies of America. And it does so in such a way that its natural allies, the secular democrats, no longer trust us.

There are two reasons why Obama has bungled Egypt. The first is he sincerely believes that too much American influence is a bad thing. Believing deeply that American power is a problem, he seems to think remaining aloof will prove that America is not an inveterate enemy of political Islam.

Only that’s not the problem in Egypt. It’s not American power that is causing Egyptians to doubt the U.S. It is wavering and support for the wrong side. In particular for the demonstrators, the Administration’s embrace of Morsi is seen as a betrayal of our nation’s dedication to democracy and freedom.

The other reason? Obama is confused about what constitutes democracy. Even though he himself said democracy is “more than elections,” that is not the way he’s acted. He watched as the election process chose the worst of the political lot in Egypt, all the while claiming that the U.S. should not “interfere” with the democratic rights of the people. He talked a good game, but his passivity only legitimized the claims that the Brotherhood is a “true” democratic force in Egypt (which they decidedly are not).

Whatever happens, nobody in Egypt is likely to trust Obama’s word again. His tendency is to support whoever ends up in power, but in the meantime, none of the factions knows which way he will jump.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324260204578584060534891582.html?mod=WSJ_hppMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

As more than 50 million Twinkies start making their way to stores next week, the first order of business for the 83-year-old brand's new owner is to let customers know a classic is back.

But behind the return of the familiar cream-filled sponge cake is a leaner operation, free of the union contracts and the $1.3 billion in debt that saddled the brand's previous owners. With that clean slate, the new owner and chief executive, C. Dean Metropoulos, plans to launch an ambitious growth plan and avoid the problems that led to two Chapter 11 bankruptcies, the last of which ended in liquidation.

Some workers who are returning to the company are being paid significantly less than they were before the bankruptcy.

The previous distribution system involved roughly 6,000 drivers—all with union wages and pension benefits—delivering products to stores and placing them on shelves. The old Hostess distribution was governed by complicated work rules that required drivers to deliver bread and cakes on separate trucks, adding costs. Those delivery routes also reached only 50,000 of the country's roughly 150,000 convenience stores, and left some pockets around the country entirely without Twinkies.

Now Mr. Metropoulos is using third-party drivers to deliver products to retailers' warehouses, which he said will enable big expansion. He expects to reach a total of about 110,000 convenience stores by year-end—and to start reaching dollar stores, club stores, drug stores and vending machines, where its products previously were absent.

Mr. Metropoulos's workforce isn't unionized and he is moving to automate and improve the capacity of the plants, while eliminating products that sold poorly or were only sold regionally, such as jelly doughnuts and Strawberry CupCakes.

The old Hostess had approximately 19,000 employees, many of whom worked on brands such as Wonder Bread that Mr. Metropoulos's group didn't buy. The new Hostess is planning to have about 1,800 workers when it is fully staffed in the next couple of months.

The 67-year-old Mr. Metropoulos has been involved in 78 consumer acquisitions in the last 25 years, including Pabst Brewing Co. in 2011. A spokeswoman said his deals' average return on investment exceeds 44%.

The old company also was weighed down by debt, preventing it from investing in its 11 plants, all the while rivals operated more automated, efficient bakeries.

The owners purchased four of those plants and are investing $100 million to upgrade them. They plan to spend another $75 million to $80 million to open a fifth plant next year.

The debt and hefty pension obligations that the old Hostess faced also prevented it from investing in product innovation or marketing. Consumers seeking healthier products abandoned Twinkies, while those who still wanted indulgent treats grew bored of the same old assortment.

With lower overhead, Mr. Metropoulos said he can now afford to spend money on research and development.

He's already invested in making some of the existing products richer tasting. For example, the company reformulated the CupCakes with dark chocolate rather than milk. Those and other subtle product changes have led to a 9% increase in ingredient costs that Mr. Metropoulos said will be offset by production efficiencies.

Mr. Metropoulos said he expects to quickly achieve sales of $1 billion, equal to sales the products had prior to liquidation, and that he expects the business to be profitable in the first year of operation.

In coming months, he said, Hostess will also start developing healthier products. Mr. Metropoulos said they could include whole grains, come in the form of lower-calorie snack packs, be gluten-free or contain stevia, a natural sugar substitute.

"Those are the categories we're exploring," he said.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323368704578593562819939112.html

Can Environmentalists Think?

Think of the Keystone XL pipeline as an IQ test for greens.

As environmental disasters go, the explosion Saturday of a runaway train that destroyed much of the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, about 20 miles from the Maine border, will probably go down the memory hole.

It lacks the correct moral and contains an inconvenient truth.

Not that the disaster lacks the usual ingredients of such a moral. The derailed 72-car train belonged to a subsidiary of Illinois-based multinational Rail World, whose self-declared aim is to "promote rail industry privatization." The train was carrying North Dakota shale oil (likely extracted by fracking) to the massive Irving Oil refinery in the port city of Saint John, to be shipped to the global market. At least five people were killed in the blast (a number that's likely to rise) and 1,000 people were forced to evacuate. Quebec's environment minister reports that some 100,000 liters (26,000 gallons) of crude have spilled into the Chaudière River, meaning it could reach Quebec City and the St. Lawrence River before too long.

Environmentalists should be howling. But this brings us to the inconvenient truth.

The reason oil is moved on trains from places like North Dakota and Alberta is because there aren't enough pipelines to carry it. The provincial governments of Alberta and New Brunswick are talking about building a pipeline to cover the 3,000-odd mile distance. But last month President Obama put the future of the Keystone XL pipeline again in doubt, telling a Georgetown University audience "our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution."

Did the explosion at Lac-Mégantic not significantly exacerbate the problem of pollution, carbon or otherwise?

Like water, business has a way of tracing a course of least resistance. Pipelines are a hyper-regulated industry but rail transport isn't, so that's how we now move oil. As the Wall Street Journal's Tom Fowler reported in March, in 2008 the U.S. rail system moved 9,500 carloads of oil. In 2012, the figure surged to 233,811. During the same period, the total number of spills went from eight to 69. In March, a derailed train spilled 714 barrels of oil in western Minnesota.

Predictable, you would think. And ameliorable: Pipelines account for about half as much spillage as railways on a gallon-per-mile basis. Pipelines also tend not to go straight through exposed population centers like Lac-Mégantic. Nobody suggests that pipelines are perfectly reliable or safe, but what is? To think is to weigh alternatives. The habit of too many environmentalists is to evade them.

Perhaps this explains why the environmental movement has excelled ideologically and failed politically. As in fashion, green is a nice color that rarely wears well. So the whole world (minus your correspondent) agrees that climate change is an urgent threat to life as we know it, yet every U.N. megasummit to save the planet ends on a whimpering note. So all Americans are convinced that the threat of climate change is real, but President Obama had to use executive fiat to impose regulations on the coal industry that Congress would have rejected out of hand.

Perhaps this is also the reason climate science is so prone to scientific embarrassment. In 2001, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insisted that "global average surface temperatures [will rise] at rates very likely without precedent during the last 10,000 years," and that they would rise sharply and continuously.

Yet in the 15 years since 1998, surface air temperatures have held flat, a fact now grudgingly conceded by the climate-science establishment, despite more than 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide having been pumped into the atmosphere over the same period. "Nature is far more imaginative than we are," Stamatios Krimigis, the eminent Johns Hopkins physicist, said last month when readings from the Voyager spacecraft failed to match expectations for what it would find at the far edge of the solar system. That kind of humility in the face of data is tough for today's environmentalists, who have staked so much on their own models, predictions and certitudes.

The first application for a Keystone XL pipeline permit was filed with the U.S. State Department in 2008. Since then, the amount of oil being shipped on rails has risen 24-fold. Environmentalists enraged by this column should look at the photo of Lac-Mégantic that goes with it, and think it over.

[Deleted]

He who?
Certainly not God, or there would have been a bible quotation following.
Couldn't have been Peter either, or there would be no point to your assertion, as we all know that line of succession was broken later anyway.

[Tails82]

www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/mexico-surpasses-u-s-world-fattest-nation-report-article-1.1393801

Mexico surpasses U.S. as world’s fattest nation

In a report released last month, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) found Mexico has a 32.8% adult obesity rate, surpassing the U.S. at 31.8%.

About 70% of Mexico's population is either overweight or obese, and one in six suffers from diabetes, which kills around 70,000 people a year -- roughly as many as the country's notorious gang violence, according to a Global Post report.

"The same people who are malnourished are the ones who are becoming obese," echoed Abelardo Avila, a physician with Mexico's National Nutrition Institute. "In the poor classes we have obese parents and malnourished children. The worst thing is the children are becoming programmed for obesity. It's a very serious epidemic," he told the Global Post.

Avila blamed the country's anti-poverty programs in part for the crisis, saying money given to rural families by the government is often spent on cheap fried food and sodas. Foods like tacos and tamales, once viewed as treats, are now a daily indulgence for many.

So after years or America-bashing, it will now be racist to say Mexicans are lazy.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324853704578587643665526084.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Government researchers continue to show that federal student loans are hazardous to both students and taxpayers. But Senate liberals don't seem to care, as long as the money keeps flowing to their constituents in the nonprofit academic world.

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated taxpayer losses on student loans at $95 billion over the next decade. Meanwhile, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York have been tracking the harm to young borrowers. Student-loan debt used to be a rough indicator of economic progress, because it meant that the borrower was attaining higher levels of education, long associated with higher incomes and lower unemployment.

But in recent years an historic surge in student-loan debt is changing education for many borrowers from a winning investment into a staggering burden. Such debt has nearly tripled since 2004 and now hovers around $1 trillion, with defaults rising on student loans and other types of debt held by these young borrowers.

Whereas credit scores used to be similar for young people with or without student-loan debt, New York Fed economists find a divergence after 2008. "By 2012, the average score for twenty-five-year-old nonborrowers is 15 points above that for student borrowers, and the average score for thirty-year-old nonborrowers is 24 points above that for student borrowers," they note in a recent report.

Fed researchers are now struggling to understand the impact on markets such as housing and autos given the "lowered expectations of future earnings and more limited access to credit" for those who made large leveraged bets on education. Many of them must now delay starting families and buying their first homes.

Liberals apologize for the price hikes imposed by their friends in the faculty lounge by pretending that universities are starved for revenue. Rep. Frank Pallone (D., N.J.) claimed on MSNBC on Saturday that "the federal government is not making the investment in higher education." Perhaps he's forgotten that annual Pell grant spending of $34 billion has roughly doubled in the Obama era, or that Uncle Sugar now originates more than $100 billion in annual loans.

According to data from the government's National Center for Education Statistics, the nonprofit crowd on campus has shown a remarkable ability to collect cash from its various funding sources, even during and after the financial crisis. Both public and private nonprofit institutions grew revenue per student faster than inflation in the period from the 2005-2006 academic year through 2010-2011. And their spending also increased faster than inflation. How many organizations in the real world could do that?

As ever, increasing government education funding to students is pocketed by universities in the form of tuition increases. The never-ending federal effort to "make college affordable" simply provides the resources to sustain higher prices.

Oh academia~

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating

The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's notoriously tough "gaokao" exams, each year winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities.

Last year, the city received a slap on the wrist from the province's Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were "harshly criticised" for allowing cheats to prosper.

So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules.

When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county.

The invigilators wasted no time in using metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers.

Outside the school, meanwhile, a squad of officials patrolled the area to catch people transmitting answers to the examinees. At least two groups were caught trying to communicate with students from a hotel opposite the school gates.

For the students, and for their assembled parents waiting outside the school gates to pick them up afterwards, the new rules were an infringement too far.

As soon as the exams finished, a mob swarmed into the school in protest.

"I picked up my son at midday [from his exam]. He started crying. I asked him what was up and he said a teacher had frisked his body and taken his mobile phone from his underwear. I was furious and I asked him if he could identify the teacher. I said we should go back and find him," one of the protesting fathers, named as Mr Yin, said to the police later.

By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped in a set of school offices, as groups of students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."

According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage.

Teachers trapped in the school took to the internet to call for help. "We are trapped in the exam hall," wrote Kang Yanhong, one of the invigilators, on a Chinese messaging service. "Students are smashing things and trying to break in," she said.

Another of the external invigilators, named Li Yong, was punched in the nose by an angry father. Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset.

"I hoped my son would do well in the exams. This supervisor affected his performance, so I was angry," the man, named Zhao, explained to the police later.

Hundreds of police eventually cordoned off the school and the local government conceded that "exam supervision had been too strict and some students did not take it well".

Yeah it was pretty unfair of them to think the cheaters shouldn't get ahead.

[Tails82]

Holder and his people are out race agitating.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/10/zimmerman-trial-the-holder-justice-departments-latest-abuse-of-power/

Judicial Watch has released documents showing the latest abuse of power by the Department of Justice (DOJ): helping “organize and manage rallies and protests against George Zimmerman.”

Whatever one may think about the guilt or innocence of Zimmerman in his ongoing trial, we should all agree that the chief law enforcement agency of the federal government should not be involved in stage-managing public protests. Yet according to the documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Community Relations Service at Eric Holder’s DOJ “deployed to Sanford, FL, to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen.”

The Community Relations Service provided “support for protest deployment” and “technical assistance” to event organizers for a march and rally on March 31. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Community Relations Service staff even helped organize a meeting between the city of Sanford and the local NAACP that resulted in the temporary resignation of police chief Bill Lee. One of the local pastors whose church was the focal point of protests aptly summarized the bias of Community Relations Service when she was quoted as saying that it was “there for us.” Apparently, it wasn’t “there” for Zimmerman.

If in fact the Community Relations Service was helping train and organize protesters against Zimmerman, not only was the DOJ potentially interfering in a local law enforcement investigation and prosecution, but the service was violating its own mandate. As its website explains, the Community Relations Service is the “peacemaker” for community conflicts. Created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is supposed to assist in “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, incidents, and civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony.” It is not supposed to be raising racial tensions by helping to organize protests.

The Community Relations Service says on its website that it “does not take sides among disputing parties” and provides “impartial conciliation and meditation services.” Apparently, it failed to avoid taking sides or provide “impartial” services in Sanford, Florida.

To some veterans of the DOJ, this is not surprising. Former Civil Rights Division lawyer Christian Adams has pointed out that at least one employee in that division has “a sign expressing racial solidarity with Trayvon Martin” on her office door.

In all likelihood, lawyers in the Civil Rights Division are already looking at whether they can still pursue Zimmerman with a civil rights violation even if a local jury finds him innocent of murder. The bias shown by the Community Relations Service and its interference in local affairs should disqualify DOJ from pursuing such charges.

One thing certainly should happen: Congress needs to hold an oversight hearing regarding the Community Relations Service’s potentially unethical involvement in the Zimmerman case. It should force DOJ to provide all of its internal documents and emails related to its activities in Sanford, and Grande Lum, the current director of the Community Relations Service, should explain why it violated its own rules to take sides in a local dispute and foment racial protests—the exact opposite of the kind of actions it is supposed to take.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/07/10/obama_regime_organized_trayvon_protests

"Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the DOJ on April 24, 2012. According to the documents JW received, a little-known DOJ unit called the Community Relations Service deployed to Sanford, FL, to organize and manage rallies against Zimmerman." Now, folks, this is the United States government. This is not some fleabag, left-wing community agitator. Well, actually it is now. That's what this means. The United States government has been converted by Obama and Holder into a community organizing agitator bunch. The Department of Justice, I mean, they're supposed to be totally blind there. They're not supposed to have any bias whatsoever.

This is a fundamental disintegration, and it's just one of many that are happening to this country under this administration. Judicial Watch was given the documents by the DOJ that prove the DOJ was in Florida organizing anti-Zimmerman rallies. You know the only reason this trial's taking place? The only reason this trial's taking place is because the race hustler industry flew down there the minute this case happened when Zimmerman wasn't charged.

Now, the original law enforcement bunch that first was exposed to the evidence in this case didn't charge Zimmerman. There was nothing to see here. And then Al Sharpton and the race hustlers got in business and flew down there, and Eric Holder flew down there and thanked Reverend Al, as he called him, for his community outreach and service, and this regime saw an opportunity to turn something into a profoundly racial case for the express purpose of ripping the country apart. I don't know how else to describe it.

This is an official DOJ document. This is not something Judicial Watch wrote. The Community Relations Service spent $674 after being deployed on the ground in Sanford, Florida, to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies.

March 25 through 28, the Community Relations Service "spent $1,142.84 'in Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.'"

March 30 through April 1, 2012, Community Relations Service "spent $892.55 in Sanford, FL 'to provide support for protest deployment in Florida.'"

March 30 through April 1, 2012, Community Relations Service "spent an additional $751.60 in Sanford, FL 'to provide technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31.'" Forget the dollar amounts here. This is just expenses. The DOJ deployed people to gin up rallies, to financially support them, to promote them, demonstrations, rallies, protests, the DOJ. This was not even a federal case.

April 3rd through the 12th, Community Relations Service "spent $1,307.40 in Sanford, FL 'to provide technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.'" These people went down there and they organized the protest. And then they gave support to the people that showed up to protest and rally. But the DOJ lit the fuse. The DOJ went down there and made sure that there were protests, is what this means. The DOJ went down there and stirred the pot. The Obama administration sent Eric Holder down there to stir up the people of Sanford, Florida, and to get 'em all worked up and to get 'em protesting and rallying.

April 11th and 12th of 2012, the Department of Justice "spent $552.35 in Sanford, FL 'to provide technical assistance for the preparation of possible marches and rallies,' related to this case. And again, this is expenses for employees to travel, eat, and sleep. They went down there to stir this up.

"Judicial Watch says the documents it obtained reveal that CRS is not engaging in its stated mission of conducting 'impartial mediation practices and conflict resolution,' but instead engaged on the side of the anti-Zimmerman protesters." Didn't just engage. It revved 'em up. Didn't just engage. They went down there and started all of this!

"On April 15, 2012, during the height of the protests, the Orlando Sentinel reported, 'They [the CRS] helped set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police Chief Bill Lee according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.' The paper quoted the Rev. Valarie Houston, pastor of Allen Chapel AME Church, a focal point for protestors, as saying 'They were there for us,' after a March 20 meeting with CRS agents." So they also went down and had a police chief fired. This is the chief that wouldn't charge Zimmerman.

So the DOJ went down there, and this according to the Orlando Sentinel, set up a meeting between the NAALCP and local protesters that led to the temporary resignation of the police chief. Look, you know as well as I do, this just throws the Constitution out the window. This is really serious stuff here. It's not just that it's partisan, this administration's DOJ participated -- well, they didn't participate -- well, they did, but they did more than that. They actually orchestrated racial strife. They sponsored it. They organized it, propped it up, paid for it, encouraged it.

Zimmerman, like our innocent filmmaker friend, is another political prisoner. Held captive only because the administration wants some white person to hate this month.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323368704578596140112431854.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Big Government Implodes

ObamaCare's failures are not the only sign of a great public crack-up.

July 3 was the quiet afternoon that a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy announced in a blog post that the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate would be delayed one year. Something about the "complexity of the requirements." The Fourth's fireworks couldn't hold a candle to the sound of the U.S. government finally hitting the wall.

Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law's theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.

Laughably, Barack Obama tried this week to align himself with the new age in a speech calling yet again for "smarter" government. It requires whatever lies on the far side of chutzpah to say this after passing a 1930s-style law that is both incomprehensible and simply won't work. ObamaCare is turning into pure gravity. Nothing moves.

If the ObamaCare meltdown were a one-off, the system could dismiss it as a legislative misfire and move on, as always. But ObamaCare's problems are not unique. Important parts of the federal government are breaking down almost simultaneously.

The National Security Agency has conservative philosophers upset that its surveillance program is ushering in Big Brother. What's more concretely frightening is that a dweeb like Edward Snowden could download the content of the NSA's computers onto a thumb drive and walk out of the world's "most secretive" agency. Here's the short answer: The NSA has 40,000 employees. (Some say it's as high as 55,000, but it's a secret.)

Echoing that, when the IRS's audits of conservative groups emerged, the agency managers' defense was that the IRS is too big for anyone to know what its agents are doing. Thus both the NSA and IRS are too big to avoid endangering the public.

It is hard to imagine a more apolitical federal function than the nation's weather satellites. The ones we have—to predict hurricanes and such—are about to wear out and need to be replaced. Can't do it. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Pentagon have been trying to replace the old weather satellites, since 1994. The Government Accountability Office says "we are looking at potentially a 17-month gap" in this crucial weather data. NOAA has good scientists whose bad luck is they work for a collapsing constellation of bureaucracies.

To call the U.S. federal government a black hole is a disservice to black holes, which have a neutral majesty. Excepting the military's fighting units, the federal government has become a giant slug, like Jabba the Hutt, inert but dangerous. Like Jabba, the government increasingly survives by issuing authoritarian decrees from this or that agency...Thomas Jefferson, who must be rolling in his grave, said the way to ensure good government was to divide it among the many. Some states and cities are indeed reworking their functions in efficient, innovative ways. But Washington is oblivious to life beyond the Beltway.

www.nationalreview.com/corner/353079/dc-may-force-wal-mart-pay-1250-hour-minimum-wage-katrina-trinko

Wal-Mart is currently building three new stores in D.C., and is slated to eventually build another three. Together, the six stores would create 1,800 jobs. But the D.C. City Council is considering today a measure that would effectively only impact Wal-Mart (technically, the criteria is it would apply to businesses whose stores were 75,000 square feet or larger and whose parent companies were based in D.C., and who do not have unionized employees). The bill would force Wal-Mart to pay its D.C. employees a minimum wage of $12.50 an hour — a whopping $4.25 more an hour than D.C.’s current minimum wage.

In a Washington Post op-ed today, Wal-Mart fought back, writing that if the city council passed the legislation today, “Wal-Mart will not pursue stores at Skyland, Capitol Gateway or New York Avenue if the LRAA is passed. What’s more, passage would also jeopardize the three stores already under construction, as we would thoroughly review the financial and legal implications of the bill on those projects.”

It will be interesting to see whether the D.C. council think it’s worth jeopardizing 1,800 jobs in order to force Wal-Mart to pay its employees more than other businesses in the city.

[Deleted]

So, what, conceding that the Pope isn't special, or just frustrated that the only argument supporting scripture here is from the atheist? >_>

[Tails82]

I believe I've said what I've said and that you refuse to listen or address any of my points.

[Deleted]

You made a point I didn't address several times over?

[Tails82]

As I've said, dunno a reason to think the pope has no authority when he clearly does, I know you wouldn't think he's special regarding beliefs and atheism and all that but there isn't grounds to think he can't be head of the church.

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/more-life-in-the-house

The Air Force brass maybe experts at flying planes, but they need to go back to basic training when it comes to fulfilling their oath to defend the Constitution. They should pay particular attention to the First Amendment, which guarantees the free exercise of religion. TSgt. Layne Wilson, a 27-year service member of the Utah Air National Guard, is finding out that reporting a violation of the law is enough to ruin a career if that report should be deemed politically incorrect. Last December, Wilson was reprimanded after writing a letter to West Point expressing opposition to a same-sex ceremony held in the West Point chapel.

His letter reported a clear violation of DOMA, which was the law of the land at the time and remained so until the Supreme Court's decision two weeks ago. "This is wrong on so many levels," wrote TSgt. Wilson. "If they wanted to get married in a hotel that is one thing. Our base chapels are a place of worship and this is a mockery to God and our military core values. I have proudly served 27 years and this is a slap in the face to us who have put our lives on the line for this country. I hope sir that you will take appropriate action so this does not happen again."

Instead of responding to his valid concerns, the commandant filed a complaint with TSgt. Wilson's superiors. He then received a reprimand letter and was told that his six-year contract would be canceled. The Air Force instead gave him a one year extension and let him know that his views on homosexuality were incompatible with military service. Lt. Col. Kevin Tobias said in a memo, "I'm not comfortable reenlisting him with his strong feelings about this matter." Unfortunately, these threats are becoming all too common in the all-volunteer armed forces. On May 2nd, an Air Force spokesperson told Fox News that "Air Force members are free to express their personal religious beliefs as long as it does not make others uncomfortable." The chilling effect of this "uncomfortable" standard is undeniable. Sharing one's faith not only invites discrimination but is also potentially career ending...Thankfully, we are encouraged that Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are growing increasingly frustrated and are lining up to support U.S. Rep. John Fleming's (R-La.) amendment to the Defense Authorization bill which will help end the wave of anti-Christian attacks by protecting the right of service members to not only hold religious beliefs but to act on them and freely practice those beliefs.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/07/11/zimmerman_prosecution_devolves_into_a_show_trial

Zimmerman Prosecution Devolves into a Show Trial

You know, my instincts told me the fix was in on this thing from the very first moment Obama and Eric Holder got involved in it. But this is outrageous, what this judge allowed today. Folks, it's all up to the jury now, and it really depends on what they do because in the Zimmerman trial, I mean, every fear that we've had about this appears to be manifesting itself.

Prosecutors in the George Zimmerman murder trial want to ask jurors to consider lesser charges of third-degree murder and manslaughter because they know that they haven't made their case on first degree murder. So they went and they said, "We want to let the jury decide," 'cause the alternative was acquittal or first-degree murder. And the prosecution today said, "No, no, no, no, manslaughter and maybe second-degree murder -- third-degree murder." I think it was a second-degree murder charge, not first-degree. And then, to compound this -- are you ready for this? -- it looks like the judge is going to permit the jury to consider a charge of child abuse because Trayvon Martin was 17 years old when this happened.

The attorney for Zimmerman stood up and was beside himself. He said (paraphrasing), "They're pulling this out of their hat. This has been buried deep. We didn't know this was coming. We need some time to prepare for this." The judge didn't seem too sympathetic at all. The judge seemed more than willing for virtually anything that will convict this guy of something to happen. Now, I had a little time here, not a whole lot when this started to shake out. As best I could determine, given the time constraints I had, I'm open to being shown wrong about this, but as I checked the statute on this child abuse business, I think, in order for Zimmerman to be convicted of this in something other than a banana republic court, he would have to have known that Trayvon Martin was 17 years old.

Never mind that Zimmerman's lawyers can't defend against either of these new charges 'cause they've rested. They rested their case, so this stuff comes out after they've rested. They have to ask the judge for special dispensation here.

Zimmerman's attorney has been on TV all morning, strongly objected to the prosecution's proposal that third-degree murder be included in the instructions. The defense attorney's name is Don West. He called the proposal "outrageous" given that it is premised on the idea that Zimmerman committed child abuse since Martin was underage when he was fatally shot. He said, "Oh my God. Just when I thought it couldn’t get more bizarre." West questioned how Zimmerman could be charged with child abuse while Martin was on top of Zimmerman "pummeling him."...I just think it's outrageous. And this is what happens in show trials. The only important thing in a show trial is pleasing the people in power and giving the unwashed masses a lesson. Show trials have nothing to do with dispensing justice. They're all about dispensing social justice, which is usually the polar opposite of real justice.

We're in a show trial. This isn't about justice, folks. Eric Holder goes down there and ratchets up public opinion with Reverend Al. The president says, "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon," thereby injecting race into a story that may not have been about race at all. Probably was not about race. We certainly do not have white on black crime here. We have made up white Hispanic so-called crime on black here. The only reason this trial is taking place is because the media is invested in a guilty verdict, and the race hustler industry, including the attorney general, flew down there the minute this case happened, when Zimmerman wasn't charged. Remember the original police chief wouldn't charge. They didn't have enough evidence to charge. There was nothing to charge here.

The race hustler industry got involved and brought public pressure on the law enforcement officials down there, and even on the state attorney. In order to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful federal government, they charged Zimmerman. The original law enforcement bunch first exposed to the evidence didn't charge Zimmerman. There was nothing to see. And then the Reverend Sharpton and the other race hustlers got in business and flew down there, Eric Holder flew down there, thanked Reverend Al, as he called him, for his community outreach and service.

The regime saw an opportunity to turn something into a profoundly racial case for the express purpose of ripping the country apart...I really don't know how else to describe it.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/11/flush-with-federal-cash-obamacare-supporters-spending-money-onporta-potties/

Even among the law’s supporters, Obamacare is in the toilet. Quite literally.

As The Washington Post reports, states implementing Obamacare’s exchanges are considering all kinds of methods to promote Obamacare. Reporter Sarah Kliff spoke with Michael Marchand, the head of Washington State’s exchange:

"Marchand has been thinking up all sorts of ways to make sure young people hear about the new health program. Perhaps in music-heavy Washington state, it’s no surprise that his thoughts have gravitated toward outreach at concerts and music festivals.

“'We’ve talked about everything we could use, even whether we could do some branding on porta-potties,' he said. 'I want to sponsor charging stations, too. Talk about a captive audience. They’re standing there, charging their iPhones.'”

Kliff reports on other states’ plans to “educate” their citizens about Obamacare, all using federal dollars provided through exchange grants. For instance, “Oregon may reel in hipsters with branded coffee cups for their lattes.” And Connecticut’s exchange “plans to head to the beach this summer” to promote Obamacare:

"Officials will hand out sunscreen customized with a 'get covered' slogan and hire an airplane to fly over beaches with a banner that advertises the new agency.

At a time when our nation’s debt is approaching $17 trillion, using taxpayer funds to buy latte cups, sunscreen, and portable toilets represents a massive amount of waste. It’s yet another reason why Congress should act to defund Obamacare and refuse to spend a single dime on such frivolous expenditures.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578599783139351080.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The Obama administration claims it wants to ensure that the rank political abuse perpetrated by the Internal Revenue Service is never repeated. Ask Donald McGahn how that's going.

Mr. McGahn is a Republican appointee to the Federal Election Commission, an agency with every bit as much potential for partisan meddling as the IRS. Due to leave the agency soon, Mr. McGahn's parting gift is a campaign to rein in an out-of-control FEC bureaucracy. But the left is fighting that oversight and is determined to keep power in the hands of unaccountable staff.

The FEC was created in the wake of Watergate, in part to remove primary power over political actors from the Justice Department. It sports an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners, so that neither side can easily impose a partisan agenda. This means a lot of deadlocks, a situation that infuriates the left, which prefers a fire-and-brimstone regulator.

It also frustrates the FEC's staff, which has responded by going around the commissioners. The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), for instance, makes it clear that staff may not commence investigations until a bipartisan majority (four members) of the commission votes that there is a "reason to believe" a violation has occurred. In theory, this provision should guard against IRS-like witch hunts.

Except that over the years staff have come to ignore the law, and routinely initiate their own inquiries—often on little more than accusations they find on blogs or Facebook . For a sense of how these investigations can go off the rails, consider that Lois Lerner—before serving as the center of today's IRS scandal—was the senior enforcement officer at the FEC. A Christian Coalition lawyer has testified that during a (sanctioned) FEC investigation in the 1990s—in addition to generating endless subpoenas, depositions and document requests, Ms. Lerner's staff demanded to know what Coalition members discussed at their prayer meetings and what churches they belonged to. Once staff gets rolling, there is little to stop them.

More troubling to some FEC commissioners has been the staff's unsanctioned and growing ties to the Obama Justice Department. In September 2011, Tony Herman was named FEC general counsel. Mr. Herman in early 2012 brought in Dan Petalas, a Justice prosecutor, as head of the agency's enforcement section. FECA is clear that a bipartisan majority of commissioners must vote to report unlawful conduct to law enforcement. Yet FEC staff have increasingly been sending agency content to Justice without informing the commission.

These ties are disturbing, since the Obama campaign pioneered the tactic of demanding that Justice pursue criminal investigations of its political opponents as a means of intimidation. The FEC's info-funneling to Obama Justice raises the obvious question of whether Obama Justice wasn't in turn influencing FEC reports. (It also raises another question: If Justice had this kind of pipeline to the FEC, did it have one to the IRS?)

Mr. McGahn hasn't forced this issue, because he's intent on getting all his colleagues to stand up for institutional responsibility. He's made clear he's not trying to end the relationship with the DOJ, or to stop investigations. As he told me this week, the only question is who will make the decisions: "The presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed commissioners who answer to the public, or an unaccountable staff?"

The left wants the latter, since it provides more latitude to use the FEC to their political ends. This has worked to their benefit at agencies like the (currently illegitimate) National Labor Relations Board, where (Acting) General Counsel Lafe Solomon is single-handedly running U.S. labor policy, much to their liking.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323899704578587303796843468.html

Once Again, the Fed Shies Away From the Exit Door

Its policies aren't working, but many believe that unwinding now is too costly. Just like in the 1970s.

The Fed has justified its policies as a means of helping the economy recover. Yet economic growth has come in at less than half what the Fed predicted with all its unprecedented interventions during the past four years, and growth remains under 2% so far this year. Some at the Fed blame other factors for this terribly weak recovery—the latest excuse being cuts in state and local government purchases. But those cuts are the result, not the cause of the weak economy as tax revenues have slowed.

A growing number of economists, former central bankers and senior government officials—including Martin Feldstein, Paul Volcker, Allan Meltzer, Raghu Rajan, David Malpass and Peter Fisher—have now concluded that the Fed's policies are not working. Critics want the Fed to return to a more rules-based monetary policy.

Meanwhile, the global monetary system is starting to fracture. Central bankers around the world, especially in emerging markets such as Brazil, India and South Africa, have experienced adverse spillovers of Fed policy on their currencies and economies. To prevent sharp fluctuations in the value of their currencies and volatile inflows and outflows of capital, they have had to deviate from good policy...Other governments and central banks have imposed capital controls to limit the inflow of capital and the appreciation of their currencies. But capital controls interfere with firms' investment decisions and cause instability as people try to circumvent them—which leads policy makers to seek even more controls to prevent the circumventions. Alarmed by these developments, the Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of central bankers, called last month for an investigation of these spillovers and international monetary policy coordination.

With so many voices rising in objection, some might assume that it will be just a short time until the Fed changes course. Unfortunately, this assumption is unwarranted based on the experience of the late 1960s and 1970s.

In 1968, Milton Friedman explained the folly of the view that permanently lower unemployment could be achieved through easier monetary policy. At first, his view was adopted by a small minority. By the mid-1970s, there was consensus that easy money was not achieving its economic growth or employment goals.

Then the argument shifted to "yes, we agree that the policy is not working, but it is too costly to end." The economy was performing adequately; shutting the money spigot would just make things worse. Yet unemployment and inflation only increased.

It was not until Paul Volcker became chairman of the Federal Reserve in August 1979 that the Fed's excessively easy monetary policy came to an end. Mr. Volcker's resolve was buttressed by new economic models based on rational expectations and price rigidities which showed that the costs of ending easy money were far less than what the pessimists said. These models also predicted that a change in Fed policy would eventually help bring about lower unemployment—which is what the change in Fed policy did help to bring about in the 1980s and '90s.

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As I've said, dunno a reason to think the pope has no authority when he clearly does, I know you wouldn't think he's special regarding beliefs and atheism and all that but there isn't grounds to think he can't be head of the church.

That's you ignoring my arguments, Tails. >_>

1. The authority of "loosing and binding in heaven and earth" was granted by God to a person, not a position.
2. The position exists only because of the people who pass down their authority.
3. If they can't pass down their authority, the authority is lost.

"But wait, the pope is elected," you say, "it doesn't matter if the pope doesn't pass it down directly!"

4. If the pope is elected, such an election must be done rightfully, or the authority is lost.

"Well that's easy, the priests always have a connection to the holy spirit!" you say.

5. See 1 and 2.
6. The priests in general don't even matter; the pope himself ruled, with the full weight of his position, that only the cardinals can elect a pope.

Like I said earlier, the Pope can lead his church all he wants.
But if the current pope were to issue a bull to change scripture, well... there's nothing backing him, even within his own religion.