Conservatrolling Topic

[Tails82]

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323829104578623422748612116.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Bill Nojay: Lessons From a Front-Row Seat for Detroit's Dysfunction

Running the city's transportation department was like being in the boiler room of the Titanic.

Since Detroit declared bankruptcy on July 18, the city's crippling problems with corruption, unfunded benefits and pension liabilities have gotten the bulk of airtime. But equally at fault for its fiscal demise are the city's management structure and union and civil-service rules that hamstring efforts to make municipal services more efficient. I would know: I had a front-row seat for this dysfunction.

Last year, I served as chief operating officer of the Detroit Department of Transportation. I was hired as a contractor for the position, and in my eight months on the job I got a vivid sense of the city's dysfunction. Almost every day, a problem would arise, a solution would be found—but implementing the fix would prove impossible.

We began staff meetings each morning by learning which vendors had cut us off for lack of payment, including suppliers of essential items like motor oil or brake pads. Bus engines that the transportation department had sent out to be overhauled were sidelined for months when vendors refused to ship them back because the city hadn't paid for the repair. There were days when 20% of our scheduled runs did not go out because of a lack of road-ready buses.

The obvious solution for a cash-tight operation is to triage vendor payments to ensure that absolutely essential items are always there. But in Detroit, no one inside the transportation department could direct payments to the most important vendors. A bureaucrat working miles away in City Hall, not responsible to the transportation department (and, frankly, not responsible to anyone we could identify), decided who got paid and who didn't. That meant vendors supplying noncritical items were often paid even as public buses were sidelined.

A major expense for Detroit is the cost of lawsuits filed against the city for various alleged injuries on municipal property. At the transportation department, there were hundreds of claims arising from bus accidents alone. How many of those claims were fraudulent? How many were settled (with the cost of settlement and legal fees posted against DDOT's budget) at unnecessarily high cost?

It was impossible to know, since the city's law department handled all litigation and settled cases without consulting the DDOT staff. It was the law department's policy to settle virtually all claims—which meant that the transportation department became easy prey for personal-injury lawyers bringing cases with little or no merit, costing the city millions.

In the DDOT we tried to hire our own lawyers to fight these claims. But we were blocked by city charter provisions prohibiting any city department from hiring outside counsel without the approval of the Detroit City Council. When we inquired with the mayor's office we were told that the union representing the law department—in Detroit, even the lawyers are unionized—would block any such approval.

Disability and workers' comp claims were routinely paid with no investigation into their validity. More than 80% of the transportation department's 1,400 employees were certified for family medical-leave absences—meaning they could call in for a day off without prior notice, often leaving buses without drivers or mechanics. Management's only recourse to get the work done was to pay the remaining employees overtime, at time-and-a-half rates. DDOT's overtime costs were running over $20 million a year.

Then there was the obstructionism of the City Council. While I was at the DDOT, roughly 10% of bus-fare collection boxes were broken. In another city, getting a contract to buy spare parts to repair these boxes would be routine. The City Council publicly expressed outrage that we didn't fix the fare boxes, since the city was losing an estimated $5 million a year in uncollected fares.

But the reason we couldn't fix the fare boxes was that the contract for the necessary spare parts had been sitting, untouched, in the City Council's offices for nine months. Due to past corruption, virtually every contract had to be approved by the council, resulting in months-long delays. Micromanagement by the council was endemic; I once sat for five hours waiting to discuss a minor transportation matter while City Council members debated whether to authorize the demolition of individual vacant and vandalized houses, one by one. There are over 40,000 vacant houses in Detroit.

Union and civil-service rules made it virtually impossible to fire anyone. A six-step disciplinary process provided job protection to anyone with a pulse, regardless of poor performance or bad behavior. Even the time-honored management technique of moving someone up or sideways where he would do less harm didn't work in Detroit: Job descriptions and qualification requirements were so strict it was impossible for management to rearrange the organization chart. I was a manager with virtually no authority over personnel.

When the federal government got involved, it only made things worse. A federal lawsuit charging that the DDOT did not fully comply with the law in accommodating disabled riders had dragged on for years because of idealistic but painfully naïve Justice Department attorneys seeking regulatory perfection. I felt like a guy in the boiler room of the Titanic, desperately bailing to keep the ship afloat for a few more hours while the DOJ attorneys complained from their first-class cabin that their champagne wasn't properly chilled.

Detroit's other municipal departments had similar challenges. I would often compare notes with managers trying to run the city's street lights, recreation programs, police departments and smaller offices. All of us faced similar gridlock.

The last thing Detroit needs is a bailout. What it needs is to sweep away a city charter that protects only bureaucrats, civil-service rules that straightjacket municipal departments, and obsolete union contracts. A bailout would just keep the dysfunction in place. Time to start over.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/29/how-the-obamacare-honor-system-will-encourage-fraud/

Earlier this month, the Obama Administration—in a 600-plus page regulation—announced that for 2014, Obamacare insurance subsidies will essentially operate on the “honor system.” This will create incentives for fraud, as some applicants may report an income that is actually lower than their true income in order to qualify for the taxpayer-funded subsidy.

And as you know, only those dirty blacks commit fraud so any measures to stop it would be racist.

It’s this loophole that will encourage fraud—because individuals can gain more in benefits than they will have to repay, by understating their income. Take an example of an honest family of four—two adults, both aged 40, and two children—with income of $90,000 (just under 400 percent FPL). According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s subsidy calculator, this family would receive a subsidy of $2,997 to help them pay for insurance. That insurance would carry with it maximum out-of-pocket expenses of $12,700, meaning that the family’s health care costs could not exceed $12,700 for the year.

Compare that scenario to what happens if the same family were to be dishonest and report income of only $35,000—or just above 138 percent FPL—on their application. According to the Kaiser calculator, the family would receive a subsidy of $10,175 to pay for insurance. That’s $7,178 in taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies over the $2,997 they should have received if they were honest.

In many of these cases, individuals will receive more in benefits than they will have to repay the federal government. Therefore, as long as they will qualify for some subsidy, dishonest individuals have incentive to fudge their income so they receive the maximum subsidy—in order to maximize the benefits they receive...These warped incentives, combined with massive bureaucracy where the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, are simply more reasons why Congress should refuse to spend a single dime funding Obamacare.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323829104578624562008231682.html

The EPA's Game of Secret Science

The agency pursues rules that will cost billions but refuses to reveal its research. Maybe a subpoena will be needed.

(because they don't have any research)

To cite a few examples of where the EPA would like to take the country, the agency is moving forward with strict new limits on ozone that by its own estimates will cost taxpayers $90 billion per year, which would make the regulation the most costly in history. Other examples include a Mercury and Air Toxics Standard for power plants (previously known as "Utility MACT") that the EPA estimates could cost up to $10 billion a year. Yet more than 99% of the EPA's health-based justifications for the rule are derived from scientific research that the EPA won't reveal. Taxpayers are supposed to take on faith that EPA policy is backed by good science.

For two years, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, of which I am the chairman, has sought to make this information available to the public. But the EPA has obstructed the committee's request at every step. To date, the committee has sent six letters to the EPA and other top administration officials seeking the data's release.

In September 2011, the EPA's then-Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy committed to provide these data sets to the committee. But the data still remain out of sight. Ms. McCarthy was recently confirmed by the Senate as administrator of the EPA. Now that she leads the agency, Ms. McCarthy has no excuse not to make these taxpayer-funded studies public.

The federal government has no business justifying regulations with secret information. This principle has been supported by two of the president's own science and technology advisers, John Holdren and Deborah Swackhamer. "The data on which regulatory decisions and other decisions are based should be made available to the committee and should be made public," said Dr. Holdren in testimony before the committee last year. Executive-branch rules dating to the Clinton administration require that federally funded research data be made publicly available, especially if it is used for regulatory purposes.

The data in question have not been subjected to scrutiny and analysis by independent scientists. And the EPA does not subject its cost-benefit claims to peer review. This means we have no way of evaluating the quality of the science being used to justify the agency's claims.

The National Academy of Sciences declared in 2004 that the data the EPA is using is of "little use for decision-making." Similarly, President Obama's Office of Management and Budget recently acknowledged that "significant uncertainty remains" about the EPA's claims based on its data sets, saying that the claims "may be misleading" and should be treated with caution.

Yet the EPA presses on: The same data are used to justify the agency's claims about the health benefits of recent proposals to limit emissions for refineries and vehicles. The agency is also poised to use the data to justify its expensive new ozone standards—the EPA's Regulatory Impact Analysis estimated that lowering the ozone standard to 60-70 parts per billion would cost up to $90 billion per year in compliance costs. The regulation could force large areas of the country into non-attainment, a designation that would drastically limit economic growth. Inevitably, the costs would be borne by working families and would include higher gasoline and electricity prices.

The administration's reliance on secret science doesn't stop there. President Obama's ambitious and costly new climate agenda is backed by a finding from a federal interagency working group regarding the "social cost of carbon." How that "social cost" was determined remains unclear. This new justification for economy-wide regulations was developed without public comment or peer review.

The U.S. saw dramatic improvements in air quality well before the Obama administration came to Washington, yet the White House has upped the ante, launching an aggressive anti-fossil-fuel, regulatory assault on affordable energy—while refusing to reveal the scientific basis for the campaign.

Well that's our big transparent administration: transparent lying, covering up and stonewalling. Transparent scandals and waste.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/29/budget-cuts-force-navy-to-neglect-southcom/

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert admitted recently that the Navy currently has no ships in SOUTHCOM due to budget constraints...Swift, a vessel of the 4th Fleet, was the only Navy vessel conducting counter-drug missions in SOUTHCOM. Since its return on May 23, there have been no Navy surface assets in SOUTHCOM, marking the first time in decades that no Navy surface ships were performing patrols in SOUTHCOM.

Citing the current state of the Pentagon’s budget and the drastic magnitude of cuts being contemplated by the U.S. armed services, SOUTHCOM has no solid schedule for surface assets conducting detection and monitoring operations.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23475583

Authorities in New Zealand have told a South African chef he is too fat to be allowed to live in the country.

Immigration officials said Albert Buitenhuis, who weighs 130kg (286 pounds), did not have "an acceptable standard of health".

He now faces expulsion despite shedding 30kg since he moved to the city of Christchurch six years ago.

New Zealand has one of the highest obesity rates in the developed world, with nearly 30% of people overweight.

The couple has appealed to New Zealand's immigration minister, citing the chef's recent weight loss.

An immigration spokesman said Mr Buitenhuis's application had been rejected because his obesity put him at "significant risk" of complications including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

"It is important that all migrants have an acceptable standard of health to minimise costs and demands on New Zealand's health services," he said.

Any time the government gets involved in health care...

[Tails82]

The only circumstances in which he would prescribe the contraceptive pill would be if a woman wanted space between pregnancies, or had at least four children.

Which is nonsensical as supporting abortion under certain arbitrary terms.

[nihilistic anti-religious piece]

Would one kill? That's a tricky one. We have the commandments. We have the soldier's ear. But we also have Abraham's test and various battles. We didn't stop the concentration camps by sending Hitler flowers. The slaves were not freed through a polite letter.

...

What's wrong with free speech? Lights do not belong under bushel baskets. Are we to watch as others fall off the cliff, or act? "Faith wihout works is dead."

[pope stuff]

Priests take celibacy vows so yeah

Tell me this, then: if the Pope cannot countermand God, using God's own explicitly granted authority to loose and bind in heaven and earth, what exactly is that authority good for?

What good would be served by going against God? You are saying the only way he has authority is to reject God, when God is where his authority comes from. He is meant to act on His behalf and discern the correct course of action.

I will repeat this because it doesn't seem to be registering: NO ONE is claiming what you are arguing. But I suspect we will loop around again.

Pardon the brief sophistry, but even if the pope could bend God so that his will be done and not the other way around...how is there a contradiction? The two would be tied together anyway, God goes along with it. Course in reality it would be the other way around: God sets the terms, God judges, man resists but cannot counter what was written in his heart.

"Genetic fallacy"

I'm not saying you're wrong because you're you. I'm asking for an alternative and find it quite lacking.

How does someone challenge authority if they have no authority themselves? Argument may be dismissed on account of standing.

"Loaded question"

I'm glad you picked up I have a bias. Many questions do. This doesn't really mean much else.

"Ad hominem"

There has to be some authority. After this lengthened discussion against the pope, poor zetta is being asked on what authority she acts. Poor zetta cannot take this and dodges the question.

In case you didn't notice, I've been using your religion to argue against your religion

No, you've been using misperceptions and arguing against something which Catholicism is not. I'm glad you recently picked up what religion I support, a little behind the curve but that's all right. Something clicked or something finally was listened to, so there's a plus. Now it'll just take some homework to figure out what I really believe.

Even your God is relativistic. See: Jesus

Jesus who rejected the temptations to abandon values for power while in the desert. Jesus who gave us the Lord's Prayer, "thy will be done" not "the current pope's will be done." Jesus who prayed in the garden, and followed the will of the Father to the end.

why bother with Jesus?

Why bother with humanity? Jesus came to reveal things to us, not him.

The answer you're trying to avoid is, of course, that the necessity of Jesus means God is not omniscient and does not actually know "what is best for us"

Umm

"Of course" I wouldn't reach that conclusion, nor has it crossed my mind seeing as it's inaccurate and based on an inaccurate premise. This is what they call projection. It's talking into a mirror without taking one word of mine into account.

You have set up what I'm to believe in, what my argument is going to be, what my conclusion should be. Why, what's the point of this discussion if you already know everything! How about writing the rest of my responses for me? I don't think you'd notice much of a difference, seeing the amount of things you haven't noticed so far.

God's own view of things is relative.

Relative to what? What else is there? Who else created? Who else made order, law? Where else can one go? Where else can one look? What in the world...

-Oh hey, it's over.

On we go~

[Deleted]

So now you're going to claim the Pope has no real authority to change the rules, pretending you didn't earlier insinuate that's why the bible as-written isn't completely binding?

Jun 6, 2013 12:01:14 GMT -5 @zetta said:

I argue that your bible is its own worst enemy. (although yeah, it does contradict itself pretty often)
Many people, including yourself not too long ago, pull the "but Jesus never said that" card when confronted with the wackiness of the Old Testament.

In the Book of Leviticus, God tells Moses the penalty for adultery is death, and to teach others what He tells him.
In the Book of Matthew, Jesus says not to ignore the Law of God or the word of the Prophets.
By the transitive property, Jesus affirms the penalty for adultery is death; God and Moses say X, Jesus agrees with God and Moses, therefore Jesus might as well have said X himself.

Thusly, even if you want to say "but Jesus never said that", it doesn't matter. If it's in the bible, Jesus supports it, and no amount of finagling will get around that fact.

Any time you disregard any part of God's word in the Bible, you're going directly against the will of God; no matter what the Pope or the collective church has to say about it.

Don't support the death penalty for murderers? Against the will of God.
Don't support the death penalty for working on a Sunday? Against the will of God.
Don't support the mass murder that accompanied every "holy" war? Against the will of God.

[Jordan Ω]

Jul 30, 2013 14:09:10 GMT -5 @zetta said:

So now you're going to claim the Pope has no real authority to change the rules, pretending you didn't earlier insinuate that's why the bible as-written isn't completely binding?

Jun 6, 2013 12:01:14 GMT -5 @zetta said:

I argue that your bible is its own worst enemy. (although yeah, it does contradict itself pretty often)
Many people, including yourself not too long ago, pull the "but Jesus never said that" card when confronted with the wackiness of the Old Testament.

In the Book of Leviticus, God tells Moses the penalty for adultery is death, and to teach others what He tells him.
In the Book of Matthew, Jesus says not to ignore the Law of God or the word of the Prophets.
By the transitive property, Jesus affirms the penalty for adultery is death; God and Moses say X, Jesus agrees with God and Moses, therefore Jesus might as well have said X himself.

Thusly, even if you want to say "but Jesus never said that", it doesn't matter. If it's in the bible, Jesus supports it, and no amount of finagling will get around that fact.

Any time you disregard any part of God's word in the Bible, you're going directly against the will of God; no matter what the Pope or the collective church has to say about it.

Don't support the death penalty for murderers? Against the will of God.
Don't support the death penalty for working on a Sunday? Against the will of God.
Don't support the mass murder that accompanied every "holy" war? Against the will of God.

Nothing to do with the pope here, but I'm pretty sure you meant Saturday, not Sunday, if we're going with the Old Testament. And that was in very specific instances: The defendant has to be warned by 2 people that this is wrong, and he has to say 'I know and that's why I'm doing it.' Same thing with murder, technically. It's actually really hard to put someone to death in the Jewish society. There's some gemara that says (One specific Rabbi holds) that if a court kills more than one person in 70 years, it's considered a 'murderous court' and should be checked out for corruption. Something like that.

[Tails82]

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/the-money-faces-of-obamacare

House Republicans are calling this Stop Government Abuse Week -- and they'll be the first to tell you that there's no greater abuse than the President's health care law! With their summer recess just three days away, House leaders are trying to build as many speed bumps as possible on America's road to ObamaCare. Among the slate of proposals, conservatives in both chambers are trying to rally members around the idea of blocking any budget bill that funds the health care law. The hope is that Congress could delay the law by refusing to fund it.

President Obama helped boost their cause early this month when he ignored the law and postponed the employer mandate -- a sign that the law is still entirely unworkable. While the White House tries to smooth things over, Congressman Tom Price (R-Ga.) is hoping to sink the law's other pillar: the individual mandate. Together with 100 cosponsors, Rep. Price takes aim at a group with an even lower approval rating than Congress -- tax collectors! His Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act takes the teeth out of the department responsible for enforcing the law. Citing the IRS's growing scandals, Price says, "No American should be required to answer to the IRS, an agency that [by targeting conservatives] just forfeited its claim to a reputation of impartiality." A vote on his bill is scheduled for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, on the Senate side, Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are continuing their campaign to strip away the policy's funding. "If the administration will not enforce the law as written," they write, "then the American people should not be forced to fund it." This afternoon they went down to the Senate floor to drive this message home. Based on the polling, the American people certainly don't want to fund it.

Yesterday, [Howard] Dean heaped his own criticism on IPAB in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, describing it as "essentially a health-care rationing body," and joining the calls for its repeal. Dean, who now lobbies in the health care industry, was blunt. "What ends up happening in these schemes... is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients... Most importantly, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic."

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578630522319113676.html?mod=hp_opinion

How ObamaCare Hurts Patients

The 340B program was meant to help about 90 hospitals buy drugs to treat the poor. Now 1,675 hospitals qualify.

President Obama promised to mend the failings in the American health-care system, and yet for cancer treatment, ObamaCare is taking a rotten feature of the old system and making it worse.

The Affordable Care Act expands a program called 340B, which siphons money from drug makers and insurers to subsidize certain hospitals. The program has been expanded as a way to offset some of the cuts that the law imposes on hospitals. One significant side effect: 340B is increasing the cost of cancer care—and harming its quality.

When the program began in 1992, its aim was to support hospitals that cared for many uninsured, indigent patients. Over the years, the program was radically broadened, gradually morphing into a government cash cow that hospitals of every description have learned to exploit.

Under 340B, eligible hospitals are allowed to buy drugs from drug companies at forced discounts of 25% to 50%. The hospitals can then bill government and private insurers for the full cost of the drugs, pocketing the spread. The arrangement gives 340B-qualified hospitals a big incentive to search for patients and prescribe lots of drugs. The costlier the drugs, the bigger the spread. So expensive cancer drugs are especially appealing.

The original legislation creating 340B envisioned that only about 90 hospitals that care for a "disproportionate share" of indigent patients would qualify. But remember, this is a well-intentioned government program handing out money, with the usual result: By 2011, 1,675 hospitals, or a third of all hospitals in the country, were 340B-qualified.

Now ObamaCare is encouraging even wider 340B abuses. The new health-care law expands 340B to cover cancer centers, new categories of hospitals and rural health centers. Since one of the ways that hospitals qualify for 340B turns on how many Medicaid patients they serve, ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion will also increase the number of 340B-eligible entities.

To goose the windfall, eligible hospitals are buying private oncology practices so they can book more of the expensive cancer drug purchases at the discount rates...If these trends continue, the majority of cancer care will soon be delivered by hospitals. When the practice of oncology shifts to outpatient hospital clinics, the care is often less comfortable and convenient for cancer patients—and more costly.

Because the overhead for a hospital is higher than for a doctor's office, a patient treated in a hospital clinic incurs $6,500 more in costs than the same person treated in a private medical office, according to data from the Community Oncology Alliance. Patients who get chemotherapy at a hospital also face an additional $650 in co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses. The price for infusing the drugs alone rises by 55%, according to an analysis of Medicare data. These inflated prices for cancer treatment inevitably drive up the cost of health insurance.

The definition of a "covered patient" for 340B purposes is so murky under other guidance that hospitals are able to buy and bill discounted drugs for patients when the hospital merely serves as a conduit and doesn't give direct patient care.

To combat this sort of gaming, drug makers are tightening how they distribute cancer drugs, to make improper diversion more difficult. This drug-company strategy may stem some of the most rampant abuses, but it adds to the cost and complexity of the pharmaceutical supply chain. It's another way that 340B increases costs.

The 340B program doesn't print free money. The cost of the discounts are foisted onto patients and insurers, who are forced to pay higher prices that drug makers establish to offset the cost of the forced discounts.

One of the rationales behind the Affordable Care Act was that the law would end the gimmicks that distort incentives and drive up costs. In the case of the 340B program and its effect on cancer treatment, the law has only further distorted an already expensive gimmick.

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/30/manning-verdict-in-wikileaks-case-sends-message-to-lawbreakers/

Manning Verdict in WikiLeaks Case Sends Message to Lawbreakers

The military court found Manning guilty of nearly all the charges and specifications against him, but not guilty of arguably the most serious charge, aiding the enemy. All of this was in relation to Manning’s admitted release of thousands of classified documents to Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks website.

Manning’s theft of a huge number of documents make him the most egregious spy in U.S. history, if one were to go by volume alone. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen are probably worse, as their actions resulted in known deaths of agents, and Edward Snowden may turn out to have done more damage, but Manning takes the cake for sheer number of documents.

After admitting he took the documents, Manning claimed he did it to save lives and actually did not think he would harm anyone. He also asserted that he screened what he gave away to ensure no one would be in danger. There is no way Manning could have possibly read and evaluated all the documents he stole and gave to WikiLeaks. The numbers are just too staggering.

Manning should not be seen as a hero or even a whistleblower. He violated the law and misused classified information. Regardless of his intent, this is indisputable.

This verdict should act as a warning to anyone who thinks that he or she alone is the ultimate judge of right and wrong. Particularly for the military, this is a seminal event. It confirms a major component of good order and discipline. The military cannot function properly if every service member thinks he can disobey rules, regulations, and orders with no expectation of adverse consequences.

People like Manning never belonged in the military in the first place.

[Chromeo]

Because he's LGBTQ, or because he actually cares about justice and integrity?

[Tails82]

Because a man who thinks he's a woman should be getting help

[kode54]

Yes, help meaning we should help turn him into something resembling a woman, not try to convince him he's got a screw loose.

[Tails82]

If your friend wanted to mutilate himself, you'd help him? If he wanted to rob a bank, you'd help him?

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/31/thank-you-george-mitchell-for-fracking/

Thank You, George Mitchell, for Fracking

George P. Mitchell passed away on Friday, July 26, leaving behind a legacy as the man who unlocked America’s vast oil and natural gas shale resources.

Born into a poor family, Mitchell wasn’t handed success. Having emigrated from Greece, his parents, Savvas and Katina, stressed the importance of hard work and an education. Mitchell paid his way through Texas A&M and served in the Army Corps of Engineers before starting an oil drilling business with his brother in Texas. Never would Savvas and Katina have believed their son George would turn the company into one of Texas’s best or that his hard work and risks would make him a billionaire philanthropist.

But no one expected Mitchell to reshape the energy outlook of a nation.

By the 1980s, people in the oil and gas industry knew that opportunities to drill were quickly decreasing. They also knew that there was still oil and gas trapped in pockets of shale rock. For almost 20 years, Mitchell led a team to find an economical way to access these resources. For almost 20 years, people told him that he was wasting his time and money. But Mitchell and his team eventually discovered a way to combine hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology, which could open up hundreds of years’ worth of domestic oil and gas and create thousands of jobs.

Natural gas import facilities built in the mid-2000s are now petitioning the Department of Energy for permits to export natural gas. Companies around the world are seeking to expand in America because of inexpensive energy prices. Penna Flame, a small metal hardening company in western Pennsylvania, can afford to hire a robotics technician because their electric bills have decreased by more than half.

Overseas, Poland and Lithuania have been able to challenge a Russian stranglehold on energy prices, and England has just discovered what may be the world’s biggest pool of shale natural gas, which many not long ago would have discounted as useless.

In a message announcing his passing, the family said Mitchell had “a love for his fellow man” and was motivated by “giving back to the community that made his success possible and lending a hand to the less fortunate struggling to reach their potential.” Mitchell and his team found a way to take something useless and make it available for a thousand different uses and thousands more jobs. His success has become success for many others who have had a second chance to work hard and earn a decent living in otherwise cloudy economic times.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/07/31/quick_hits_page

Liberal State of Hawaii Wants to Deport Their Homeless

RUSH: UK Daily Mail story. Hawaii has set aside $100,000 to offer all 17,000 homeless people there one-way airfare back to the mainland. Wherever their home states are. Whatever their home state is, if they know, if they remember. "Hawaii is hoping to take the burden off its welfare system by saying aloha to its 17,000 homeless residents. The state will offer one-way tickets home to any eligible homeless person to anywhere in the continental United States. Hawaii has allotted $100,000 for a three year trial run of the so-called 'return-to-home' program, which could also even offer participants beds on cruise ships bound for their homes."

That's how badly Hawaii wants to be rid of them. I thought, you know, the homeless, every Christmas we're told to be very, very understanding and compassionate of the homeless because, you know, Mary and Joseph were homeless, and the next savior could come from the homeless, we've gotta be really compassionate and understanding. Now, Hawaii is full-fledged Democrat and leftist, Democrat and worse. And they're tired of 'em. (interruption) No, if you're homeless and you want a vacation in Hawaii, don't go there, 'cause they're gonna kick you out. They're gonna give you money to get back home. (interruption) Oh, okay. So get a one-way ticket to Hawaii, and then go on the homeless rolls for a while until they find you and then they'll kick you out and get a free vacation, and a free trip back home.

Now, imagine this. Let's say that they actually implement this. Can you imagine airline flights leaving Hawaii? They've got all these vacationers, which would include a bunch of liberals, I mean, liberals go to Hawaii. Got all these liberal whiners and do-gooders having a cow over all of these mean and evil Republicans and the new laws being enacted and so forth, anti-homeless and so forth, and it's been the Democrats, "We must help these people." It's the Democrats that have had Dumpster diving videos, you know, how to eat healthfully from a Dumpster. And it's been the Democrats who've been telling the Republicans and everybody else that it's the Republicans that are cold-hearted and mean-spirited and don't care about the homeless and don't have any compassion for 'em, and now Hawaii stands up and is basically saying, "We will pay to get rid of you. All you have to do is show up and we'll put you on a one-way flight outta here."

Now, imagine you're on the flight, you're a liberal vacationer, time to go home and some guy's trying to get on the airplane with his shopping cart and put it in the overhead compartment. And the flight attendant says, "No, you can't bring the shopping cart on board. It won't fit. And, no, you can't check the shopping cart." The homeless might refuse to go if they can't take their home with 'em. And wait 'til the cruise ships, wait 'til the cruise lines get a load of this. (laughing) Seriously, folks. A hundred thousand dollars to just get rid of 'em.

Hawaii has no more compassion. They don't have any more money. They don't have any ability to take care of them. They just want them gone. What if other states started doing the same type of thing?

blog.heritage.org/2013/07/31/the-truth-about-breadwinner-moms/

In May, the Pew Forum published a new study on “Breadwinner Moms.”...The prevailing narrative in the mainstream media covering the study’s release was that women are finally breaking through gender stereotypes.

However, the headlines hide the ugly truth in the Pew Forum’s research. Kay Hymowitz, Manhattan Institute senior fellow, clarified that moms out-earning their husbands are the minority. Two-thirds of breadwinning mothers are single mothers—with a median household income of $23,000 a year.

Already, 27.1 percent of children are raised by single parents. The unwed birthrate continues to rise as the marriage rate for women continues to decline, threatening the economic and social well-being of both women and children.

The economic consequences of an increase in unwed childbearing extend well beyond the individual women and children left unprotected by the benefits of marriage. Of the roughly $450 billion in federal welfare spending on low-income families with children in 2011 alone, nearly three-quarters went to single-parent households.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324136204578640021541122916.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Unions and other left-wing groups this week urged a walkout by workers at fast-food restaurants to call attention to their demand for a "living wage"--i.e., a 107% rise in the federally mandated minimum wage, to $15 from $7.25. In a Puffington Host post, Caroline Fairchild wrote that a "researcher" at the University of Kansas had found that "McDonald's can afford to pay its workers a living wage without sacrificing any of its low menu prices":

"Doubling the salaries and benefits of all McDonald's employees--from workers earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour to CEO Donald Thompson, whose 2012 compensation totaled $8.75 million--would cause the price of a Big Mac to increase just 68 cents, from $3.99 to $4.67, Arnobio Morelix told HuffPost. In addition, every item on the Dollar Menu would go up by 17 cents."

It turns out it was an exaggeration to describe Morelix as a "researcher"; he is in fact an undergraduate. The reference in the story has been corrected to "student," and a correction has been appended.

But there are other problems here. Morelix's "study" has a back-of-the-envelope quality to it. He looks at the company's 2012 annual report and observes that its labor costs amounted to 17% of its total revenue. Therefore, he concludes, the consequence of doubling wages would be a 17% price rise--17 cents on a Dollar Menu item, times 4 for the $4 Big Mac.

lol Democrat stats

There's a let-them-eat-cake quality about Fairchild's dismissive reference to a 17% increase in prices. Sixty-eight cents may not amount to much, and the hypothetical increase in the cost of a single meal, even adding fries and Coke, would break hardly anybody's bank.

But people have to eat several times a day, every day. "Working- and middle-class families make up the bulk of McDonalds customers," as blogger Tom Maguire notes. A 17% increase in one's food budget would be much harder for them to bear than for a comfortably salaried professional journalist or for someone who is independently wealthy and thus can afford to write gratis for the Puffington Host (which, as the Associated Press noted last year, won a ruling from a federal judge that it needn't pay bloggers a cent, never mind a living wage).

But as Maguire points out, that isn't even the biggest problem here. He duplicates Morelix's work by reading the McDonald's annual report for himself, and here is what he finds:

"McDonalds reports a net revenue from both the stores it operates and its franchise fees. The McDonalds franchisors are separate businesses which pay a fee to McDonalds Corp and are responsible for their own payroll, as is discussed in the annual report (p. 13).

"So Morelix has not included the payroll figure for the franchisees in this calculation. Is that a big problem? Huge, actually."

So the study is junk, and Fairchild's story about it is the journalistic equivalent of a sugar high...It's reasonable to surmise that Fairchild, Lapidos and McGregor all were attracted to this "study" because it reinforced ideological views they already had.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/07/31/random_act_of_journalism_cbs_reports_truth_about_obama_economy

The gross domestic product number is out. And, by the way, I don't know what this is. There's a new way of measuring the GDP. The Obama administration is measuring it in an entirely different way, which is showing growth. The standard measure of gross domestic product is showing flat. But this new measure, which the media is applauding and loving, is showing a growth rate of 1.7%, and it's being hailed. The stock market earlier today was having a pretty good day. I haven't checked lately. But earlier today, the stock market was having a pretty good day and they were chalking it up to massive economic growth of 1.7%.

So I'm asking myself, is this another new norm? So having nine million jobs cease to exist, all of these people out of work, is the new norm, part-time work is the new norm, and an economic growth rate of 1.7% is something that we are happy about and that we applaud? At this stage of the Reagan second term -- in fact, earlier than this stage, this economy, under the policies of Ronaldus Magnus, the GDP was around I think 5.3, it got up to 6%, with something like 500,000 jobs a month being created, after two recessions in the early eighties. Now we're at 1.7%, we just simply erased nine million jobs from the job market, just gone. And we're celebrating?

Here's what Jill Schlesinger said at CBS.

SCHLESINGER: It's pretty bad. When you look at the average growth rate in post-World War II era, it's close to three to three and a half percent. Now, the last three-quarters we've seen sub-2% growth. That's a slow growth recovery. Now, 2% for the last couple years, okay, now 1%? This is not a good sign for the economy.

RUSH: I don't know if this gal's gonna have a job tomorrow, 'cause this is before the actual number was released, 1.7, and when it was thought to be 1%, she's being honest here. This is dismal. This is pathetic, and as far as the trend line concern, it's horrible. Now, I don't know how many of you care. It doesn't relate to anything, but just to let you know, the ChiCom economy GDP is at 7.5%. The second quarter economic growth rate, the ChiComs, 7.5%. That's not gonna matter to anybody here, but it is fascinating that a communist economy is outgrowing ours. I mean, it's not even close. Seven and a half percent for the ChiComs and, by the way, this 1.7 is not legit. It's because of a new formula that they're using to measure it that amplifies it. So Charlie Rose said, 'cause he didn't like what he just heard here, you're not supposed to talk about bad economy in the same sentence with Obama. So Charlie Rose said, "But the emphasis on the economy is on jobs and how to create jobs. When can we expect that to happen?"

SCHLESINGER: I really to want emphasize, the president is going and talking at this Amazon warehouse. What kinds of jobs are these? These are not high quality jobs. These are 11 or 12 dollar an hour jobs. This is very consistent with what economists are calling a part-time economy. People are losing full-time jobs with lots of benefits and then they're working part time, they're cobbling together two or three jobs together, and they're calling that a career, and they're making way less than they used to. We still have a jobs crisis in this country. Eleven point eight million people are out of work, many more are seeking full-time positions and can't get them.

RUSH: Whoa. What happened here? How did that report get past their editors? Did you hear that? That was real journalism there. We just had some real journalism. "I really want to emphasize, the president's going to this Amazon warehouse. These are not high quality jobs." And she's right. They're part-time, 11- to 12-dollar -- this woman is singing from my songbook. These are not career jobs. And people are having to work two and three, and they're losing their benefits. This does not in any way constitute economic growth, not in any way whatsoever. But I can't believe that I just heard this on CBS. People are losing full-time jobs with lots of benefits. They're making way less than they used to. We still have a jobs crisis in this country. Charlie Rose said, "Well, gee, Jill, is there any good news out there from the markets?"

SCHLESINGER: Corporate profits were up very big in the first quarter, up about 9.7%. The stock market is up 150% from the all-time low. Here's your big but. Fifty-three percent of Americans have no holdings in the US stock market.

RUSH: All right. So under Obama, you know what's happening? The income gap is widening under Obama at a faster clip than it happened in Bush, Clinton years. The income gap, the rich are getting richer faster, and the poor are getting poorer faster under Obama. And the guy who used Occupy Wall Street to demonize Mitt Romney has produced a stock market bubble that most Americans are missing out on.

Now, the stock market is up 150% from the all-time low and that's because Ben Bernanke is digitizing new money into it. And the reason 53% of Americans have no holdings in the stock market is they don't have any money to put there, because mainstream, real Americans, people that make the country work, are not investing in Wall Street. Bernanke is. The Federal Reserve is...And they have decided to pump up Wall Street, to have all this growth, to make it look like the economy is growing overall...this stock market is a bubble, folks. When I say it isn't real, what I mean is it's not the result of normal, every day market flow and commerce. It's the result of stimulus. In this case, the stimulus is from the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is pumping $85 billion a month, and a large part of that is going to buy stock, securities.

Here's what the Commerce Department is doing.

They have "made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product," going back five years. "At the same time, the government also went back and revised data for the past five years, to reflect more complete as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Agriculture." They have made changes to how they're calculating the gross domestic product, or economic growth, and what they're doing now is they're going back five years...Why do you think they decided to go back the last five years to revise data? To rewrite the horrible 4-1/2 years of Obama. There's no question. I don't know if it's fraudulent, but they're cooking the books -- and after cooking the books, after making it look as good as they can, it's 1.7% economic growth. They're applauding this, how great it is.

(Obama impression), "Hey, there was unemployment before I got here and there were all kinds of bad things. There were troubles long before I got here." It's exactly right. All this stuff happened before he came along and it's only gotten worse, because all those people that were here before him really made it bad, and so he's been trying hard but he just can't fix it. It's everybody else's fault. It's almost five years in, and Barack Obama is still blaming predecessors -- and I don't know if you heard, but he got a huge round of applause when he blamed his predecessors.

[Tails82]

www.frc.org/washingtonupdate/weighing-the-probes-and-cons

The President's perpetual eyesore, the Justice Department, is in more hot water now that the House Judiciary Committee has released its report on DOJ's criminal probes of journalists like Fox's James Rosen. Not surprisingly, the House's opinion of DOJ chief Eric Holder hasn't improved much since he was held in contempt of Congress last year.

Nothing about his public scolding seemed to make a dent in Holder's unethical ways, according to Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who explained again why the Attorney General is unfit to lead DOJ. "The Committee finds that Mr. Holder's sworn testimony in the Rosen matter was deceptive and misleading," Goodlatte announced.

Rosen, as you may remember, found himself in the administration's crosshairs when he reported on the CIA's warnings about the possibility of more North Korea nuclear tests. Outraged by the stories, the DOJ tagged him as a "co-conspirator" in a security leak and combed through Rosen's telephone records and State Department logs. Under oath, Holder denied any and all knowledge of the DOJ's activities -- which, of course, was untrue. NBC later broke the story that the country's chief law enforcer not only knew about the shocking crackdown on Rosen but authorized it. Members of the Judiciary Committee launched a probe and concluded that Holder lied to Congress about the DOJ's unlawful snooping of Rosen. "No amount of lawmaking can restore credibility and professionalism to the Justice Department in the wake of these revelations. The only way to achieve this goal is through an improvement in the quality of leadership at the Justice Department."

Once again, the pattern of lawlessness that seems to define this administration is rearing its ugly head, and House members continue to shake their heads. As Goodlatte said, "I find the lack of leadership at the Department of Justice extremely alarming." So do we all.

...

Turns out, the IRS scandals aren't as "phony" as the President wants us to believe. Two days after he brushed off the discrimination against conservatives as another "distraction," a series of emails is suggesting anything but. Sources at the National Review stunned everyone Wednesday morning with the revelation that the IRS may not have been the only federal agency in on the scheme to target right-wing groups. In emails obtained by NRO, it seems the plot seeped into the Federal Election Commission (FEC), where the IRS's tax exempt office appears to have conspired against conservative organizations on at least two occasions.

In one instance, a lawyer for the FEC, whose job is to police campaign finance law, tried to force an investigation into a conservative group by using tax information that the IRS illegally provided. "When we spoke last month," the FEC attorney writes to the IRS's Lois Lerner, "you had told us that the American Future Fund had not received an exemption from the IRS." Soon after, the attorney recommended that the FEC prosecute the group for violations of campaign finance law. "The timing of the correspondence," NRO writes, "...suggests that the lawyer sought information from the IRS in order to influence an upcoming vote by the six FEC commissioners [who decide whether or not to investigate]." The FEC also asked the IRS for the private tax information of another conservative organization, which it provided -- illegally.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) is outraged by the revelations and has asked the IRS to provide all of its communications with the FEC from 2008-2012. "The American public is entitled to know whether the IRS is inappropriately sharing their confidential tax information with other agencies," they write in a letter to acting IRS Chief Danny Werfel. In the meantime, this kind of documented collusion is sure to boost Rep. Tom Price's (R-Ga.) chances with the "Keep the IRS off Your Health Care Act."

His bill, which is scheduled for a floor vote tomorrow, would strip the IRS of its authority to enforce ObamaCare. As of today, the measure had 141 cosponsors -- a sign of members' growing frustration with an agency so ideologically motivated that it won't even cooperate with Congress's investigation. So far, Rep. Camp says the IRS has provided the House with "less than three percent" of the documents it's requested. And of the documents it has received, most pages are completely redacted!

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323681904578642180886421040.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Congressional investigators this week released emails suggesting that staff at the Federal Election Commission have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS's infamous Lois Lerner. This means more than just an expansion of the probe to the FEC. It's a new link to the Obama team.

In May this column noted that the targeting of conservatives started in 2008, when liberals began a coordinated campaign of siccing the federal government on political opponents. The Obama campaign helped pioneer this tactic.

In late summer of 2008, Obama lawyer Bob Bauer took issue with ads run against his boss by a 501(c)(4) conservative outfit called American Issues Project. Mr. Bauer filed a complaint with the FEC, called on the criminal division of the Justice Department to prosecute AIP, and demanded to see documents the group had filed with the IRS.

Thanks to Congress's newly released emails, we now know that FEC attorneys went to Ms. Lerner to pry out information about AIP—the organization the Obama campaign wanted targeted. An email from Feb. 3, 2009, shows an FEC attorney asking Ms. Lerner "whether the IRS had issued an exemption letter" to AIP, and requesting that she share "any information" on the group. Nine minutes after Ms. Lerner received this FEC email, she directed IRS attorneys to fulfill the request...we now know FEC staff engaged in a multiyear effort to deliver to the Obama campaign its win against AIP. This past week, FEC Vice Chairman Don McGahn, joined by his two fellow Republican commissioners, wrote an extraordinary statement recounting the staff's behavior in the case.

The Obama team's complaint broadly claimed AIP was masquerading as a nonprofit, when it should have registered as a highly regulated political action committee. It was a ludicrous claim (see below), yet the FEC staff issued a report in April 2009 recommending the commission go after AIP, not long after its attorneys had been in touch with Ms. Lerner.

When the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC made most of the Obama complaint irrelevant, the staff withdrew its first report, then took 18 months to come up with a second rationale for why the commission should pursue AIP. All this time, FEC staff—Mr. McGahn recounts—were conducting an unauthorized investigation into AIP. The staff was also improperly withholding the results of its research from AIP.

And so the FEC staff's third report presented a novel theory. The staff argued that AIP ought to be judged on what it spent per "calendar year." By shortening the timeline, and looking only at AIP's spending in 2008—an election year—the staff argued AIP had violated campaign law.

The Republican commissioners were appalled, noting that FEC staff had always taken a multiyear view of expenditures, including when it came to cases against liberal groups, like the League of Conservation Voters or the Moveon.org Voter Fund. The FEC staff also sought to impose this new standard after the fact, with no notice to election players and no input from the commissioners.

Vice Chairman McGahn's statement is scathing. "Here," he writes, FEC staff "could be seen as manipulating the timeline to reach the conclusion that AIP is a political committee. . . . Such after-the-fact determinations create the appearance of impropriety, whether or not such impropriety exists."

blog.heritage.org/2013/08/02/is-congress-too-good-for-obamacare/

Is Congress Too Good for Obamacare?

For the past few months, members of Congress and their staffs have been discussing behind closed doors the worrying proposition that they will be forced off their popular health insurance program and onto the federal insurance exchanges set up under Obamacare.

Those concerns reached a fevered pitch this week as President Obama, while making a rare visit to Capitol Hill, assured lawmakers that they and their staffs wouldn’t be foisted onto the same health exchange as millions of Americans. Then late last night, news broke that Obama had “solved” the problem, although no details were available.

Obama and many in Congress are hoping that the Office of Personnel Management can somehow find a way to legally continue paying for members’ health benefits after they lose their current Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) coverage and instead have to get coverage through the new exchanges.

But not so fast, say two Heritage Foundation health scholars and a former general counsel of the OPM. The three health benefit experts scoured Obamacare’s rules, along with other relevant statutes, and found nothing in the law that gives OPM the authority to pay the government’ contributions to any health plan that is outside of the FEHBP.

In other words, members of Congress and their staff will lose the health insurance they like—breaking a big promise from Obama—unless Congress passes another law to preserve its own current coverage. That’s something they have so far been unwilling to do for their constituents, millions of whom are also facing the prospect of losing their current coverage.

Why should the people’s representatives get special treatment? Maybe they should have read the health law more carefully before they voted for it. Regardless, it would be a disservice to millions of hard-working Americans and their families for the Administration or Congress to jam through special favors rather than repeal an unpopular, unworkable, and unaffordable law.

blog.heritage.org/2013/08/01/nyc-soda-ban-shot-down-again-bad-day-for-the-food-police/

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other self-appointed nutrition czars are probably very upset. The New York Supreme Court Appellate Division, First Department, unanimously upheld a lower court’s decision that the New York City soda ban is unconstitutional.

Besides grossly infringing on individual liberty, the soda ban also picks winners and losers in the food and beverage industry. For example, winners include alcoholic beverages, because they aren’t subject to the ban. However, losers include sweetened juices that are subject to the ban.

The ban also doesn’t apply to all businesses. For example, restaurants would be subject to the ban, but grocery stores would be exempt.

Mayor Bloomberg wanted to get his soda ban in place even if that meant going around the New York city council. This is exactly what he did, despite at least 14 council members requesting that there be a vote. The New York City Board of Health moved forward with the ban on its own. The court held that, in so doing, the board was acting outside of its lawfully delegated authority.

In New York City, the city council has the legislative power. The Board of Health, an administrative body, disregarded the city council’s power and in effect took its own legislative action. The court found that the board was not just making public health decisions but also making its own public policy decisions, weighing public health against other interests...Mayor Bloomberg and the Board of Health seek to use their power to change consumer behavior. This assumes that citizens are ignorant and must be protected from themselves.

This is often referred to as a “nanny state mentality,” but in many respects even that description is too kind. These actions are being made not necessarily out of concern for those who aren’t taking the “correct” actions but out of the perceived harms to those who have to bear the health care costs of these undesired actions.

washingtonexaminer.com/exography-many-disability-recipients-admit-they-could-work/article/2533626

Recipients of federal disability checks often admit that they are capable of working but cannot or will not find a job, that those closest to them tell them they should be working, and that working to get off the disability rolls is not among their goals.

More baffling, most have never received significant medical treatment and not seen a doctor about their condition in the last year, even though medical problems are the official reason they don't work. Those who acknowledge they're on disability because they can't find a job say they make little effort to find one, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of federal survey results...the analysis also revealed more practical barriers to weaning recipients off the disability rolls: The jobs they'd be candidates for often don't provide health insurance, which is essential for those with medical problems, and they'd rather receive the federal benefit. Many also say they don't have transportation to work.

Among the most notable results of the survey:

* Returning to work is not a goal for 71 percent of the SSDI recipients, 60 percent of the SSI recipients.

* 75 percent of the SSDI recipients don't see themselves returning to work within five years, 65 percent of the SSI recipients don't.

* 72 percent of the small number of SSDI recipients who started a job while on disability got cash under the table, as did 70 percent of the small number of SSI recipients who started a job while on disability.

* 24 percent of the SSDI recipients lack even GEDs, as do 43 percent of the SSI recipients.

[Tails82]

blog.heritage.org/2013/08/02/not-so-fast-congress-is-still-in-an-obamacare-trap/

News broke late last evening about the debate playing out over Obamacare and whether members of Congress and their staffs will get special treatment.

"Lawmakers and staff can breathe easy — their health care tab is not going to soar next year. The Office of Personnel Management, under heavy pressure from Capitol Hill, will issue a ruling that says the government can continue to make a contribution to the health care premiums of members of Congress and their aides, according to several Hill sources. A White House official confirmed the deal and said the proposed regulations will be issued next week."

Yet a detailed analysis of this issue by Heritage Foundation experts found that the Office of Personnel Management does not have the legal authority to do what the Obama Administration promised Congress last night.

Furthermore, it is mighty curious that word of the Obama Administration “solving” Congress’ problem was suddenly leaked to a couple reporters at 9 p.m. — just hours before the release of Heritage’s report (embargoed copies of which had been given to the media).

If the Administration really thinks it has a legal way under Obamacare for the federal government to continuing paying for the health care of members of Congress and their staff, why didn’t they issue the regulations at any point over the last three years?

It’s not like the Administration just found out about this particular Obamacare issue. Indeed, only 10 days after the President signed Obamacare into law, attorneys with the Congressional Research Service issued a 13-page memo to Congress detailing the numerous problems with this one provision.

Yet here it is, now 60 days before the start of enrollment in the exchanges, and the Administration is promising to issue regulations in another week or so.

The Administration’s strategy appears to be one of deliberately flouting the law, in the belief that it can get away with it because Congress will be the beneficiary and the American public won’t catch on to what they are doing.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/02/they_re_just_better_than_you_president_lavishes_taxpayer_funded_obamacare_subsidy_on_the_house_senate_and_their_staffers

They're Just Better Than You: President Lavishes Taxpayer-Funded Obamacare Subsidy on the House, Senate and Their Staffers

There was real panic among members of the staffs of senators and congressmen over having to give up their current health care plan and move in to Obamacare...And the story three to four weeks ago was a real heart tug, folks, I mean it was three handkerchiefs. The tears, I mean, the paper was wet when it came out of the printer about how these poor people couldn't afford it, and something was gonna have to be done. Something was gonna have to be done because members of the ruling class were not gonna be able to afford health insurance if they had to do what we had to do. Never mind that many Americans aren't gonna be able to afford it, that's fine, that's okay, but members of Congress, it's just not fair that they shouldn't afford it or their staffs.

So the solution is that congressional employees are going to qualify for subsidies so that they can afford Obamacare. Essentially, Obama ordered the Office of Personnel Management to give Congress and its staffers a taxpayer subsidy for their premiums. Now, the salary for congressman, $174,000 a year. The average staffer's salary is over 70,000, and many of them earn almost as much as congressmen. So just one day, folks, after Obama promised the Senate Democrats in a closed-door session that he would give them an Obamacare carve-out, the Office of Personnel Management is saying that it's gonna provide taxpayer subsidies to Congress and their staff so that they can afford the Obamacare premiums...Now, if a Republican president had given Congress a way around his signature legislation, it would be the biggest story since soldiers put panties on the heads of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and made 'em do a pyramid. Now, you want to know what the subsidy is? Currently the subsidies to congressmen and their staffs is 75% of their total health care cost. As a result of the deal, the subsidy will continue as is.

I mean, it fit right in with this model that's been created, the ruling class versus the country class, and the ruling class, to hell if they're gonna be bound in the same constraints we are. The hell if they're gonna live the same way we do. They're better than we are. They're above us. They're elitists. They're a cut above...Let you complain about something and you're called greedy. Let you complain about your taxes, or a proposed tax increase, and they call you greedy and selfish...They're getting a subsidy that nobody else gets, essentially...It's congressional welfare.

Democrats talk about corporate welfare and how unfair it is, tax breaks for Big Oil. The thing about this, however, that resonates with me is the idea that people in Washington ought not be subject to these laws that they write. They ought not have to play by the same rules that they write for us. Equality and fairness don't apply to them. When they were faced with the reality of the law they wrote, they said, "The hell with that. We're not doing that. Who do they think we are?" And they started demanding a carve-out, special treatment, and they got it. That's what the story is about, Obama said, "I'll fix it, I'll make sure that there's a 75% subsidy." That's the story.

So congressional staff could get up to $11,000 a year to defray the costs of their health care premiums, folks. But not via the exchange. This is not the standard subsidy that other Americans are gonna get. This is just a transfer of money from the Office of Personnel Management to members of Congress or their staff. The congressional subsidy is not like the usual Obamacare subsidy. That's really all you need to know on this. They're not gonna have to apply for a subsidy, like you are. They're not gonna have to go in and qualify. They're not gonna have to fill out forms. They're not gonna have to prove income or any of that.

The money is gonna go to them straight from the Office of Personnel Management, and these premiums are big -- from $5,000 to $11,000 a year. It is outright special treatment that you can't get, and the unions are asking for the same thing.

www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/77-percent-say-individual-mandate-should-be-delayed-or-repealed_742449.html

77 Percent Say Individual Mandate Should be Delayed or Repealed

The extensive survey of 2,076 registered voters found that 28 percent say the individual mandate that Americans purchase health insurance coverage should be delayed, while 49 percent say the mandate should be repealed entirely. Among those who favor delay or repeal of the mandate are 91 percent of Republicans, 77 percent of independents, and 65 percent of Democrats.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/02/obama_shuts_down_embassies_as_cia_works_hard_to_cover_up_the_true_story_of_benghazi

What the heck is going on here? Have you seen it? "US to Temporarily Shut Down Embassies Around the World Sunday Amid Security Concerns." I was gonna say, have they shut down YouTube or something? Did that guy get outta jail that made the YouTube video? Did he make another one?...Somebody must have made another video that has enraged the Arab street because we're shutting down our embassies. CNN, a random act of journalism, Jake Tapper breaking big news. The CIA involved in an unprecedented attempt to keep Benghazi secrets secret, to keep facts -- there were 12 or 15 CIA people on the ground at Benghazi. It turns out it may have been about gun running to Syria...Now, remember, President Obama said that Benghazi is a "phony scandal." It's something the Republicans just made up. It's just something the Republicans made up to try to criticize him and to go after the Democrats, but it's a phony scandal. Meanwhile, CNN's Jake Tapper has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA in the wake of the terror attack in Benghazi.

Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed in the assault by armed militants last September 11th in eastern Libya. Sources are now telling CNN that dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night. Dozens. The agency has gone to great lengths to make sure that whatever it was doing remains a secret. Here is Drew Griffin from CNN...

GRIFFIN: CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls "an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out." Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency’s missions in Libya have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency’s working. The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress. It’s being described as "pure intimidation," with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career.

RUSH: What's the big deal? Why bother? It's just a phony scandal. The president said so, and so did Jay Carney. It's just a phony scandal. These polygraphs, monthly polygraph exams? Intimidation? They're probably phony polygraphs, probably phony lie-detector tests. Incredible.

I want to stick with the Benghazi thing because early on, one of the rumors out there was that what was actually going on, one of the reasons Obama was so secretive about this was that the ambassador's real reason for being there was to spearhead a gunrunning operation to Syrian rebels. And people who had heard that and then mentioned it were called kooks. The usual names were thrown at them, conspiracy kooks or tinfoil hat people or what have you, but it's come back up again. Here's Trey Gowdy last night on Greta on the Fox News Channel. She said, "I'd love to interview these survivors," the phony survivors, 'cause it's a phony scandal. She said, "I'd love to interview the survivors, but the administration is doing everything it can to hide them. They're dispersing them around the country. And of course, you know, the CNN report shows that even CIA operatives who were there are getting intimidated from above," monthly lie detector tests...

GOWDY: Including changing names, creating aliases. So you stop and think what things are most calculated to get at the truth: Talk to people with firsthand knowledge. What creates the appearance or perhaps the reality of a cover-up? Not letting us talk to people who have the most amount of information, dispersing them throughout the country, and changing their names.

RUSH: It's almost like the witness protection program for people who were involved in this phony scandal, Benghazi. Fox News Channel, America's Newsroom this morning, Rick Folbaum interviewing Darrell Issa, said, "You've heard these reports about CIA employees being intimidated, trying to get them to keep quiet about what they knew about the Benghazi attack. Have your phony investigators been able to uncover anything phony on that front?"

ISSA: We are aware that there's a pattern of saying you must coordinate with their bosses before talking to Congress. Of course that's not consistent with the law, and it leads to a general belief that you shouldn't talk to Congress, and that happens to be instruction. It's illegal under the statutes.

RUSH: There's no such thing as illegal for Barack Obama. Under the statutes? That's not consistent with the law? You know, our buddy Daniel Henninger -- I didn't get to this yesterday. Things were just popping all over the place. Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece singing my song, things that we've discussed on this program for years. He was crossing the T's and dotting the I's. And basically what he was saying was that this administration doesn't care about the law, and Obama's out there admitting it. Obama's telling everybody, all you gotta do is listen to him, this week in speeches, last week in speeches, when he's out there talking about jobs, he's saying things like, "and if Congress won't do it, I'm just gonna have to take care of it myself." I'm paraphrasing, but those are the kinds of things he's saying. "If Congress won't cooperate, I'll just do it myself." And people are applauding this, by the way.

This is a robust violation of the separation of powers. The Constitution was written and the branches of government had various checks and balances on each other so this kind of thing would not evolve. But in order for it to work, you have to have law-abiding people. You have to have people willing to obey the Constitution, willing to follow the law. Obama doesn't care. He is the law. And this, to me, ought to be readily apparent to anybody, particularly members of Congress. I like Darrell Issa, don't misunderstand anything here. I join a lot of you in getting a little frustrated when I hear members of Congress say, "Well, that's not consistent with the law." Of course it's not consistent. That's the problem.

The law does not constrain Barack Obama. The law is something to be avoided, overrun, gotten around. And it has happened. One of the things that Henninger did in his piece yesterday, Wall Street Journal, is chronicle instances of it. It's like anything else, if there's no push-back on it be -- I mean, we've got laws against murder, but if nobody attempts to apprehend the murderer, then what good's the law, right? You have to have enforcement. Illegal immigration. What good are the laws if you're not gonna enforce them? Well, we have constitutional laws, statutory law, that this administration just doesn't like and is not going to be bound by it, and this Benghazi phony scandal is one instance of it.

Democrats are scared to death what Benghazi could mean to their party, because they remember Iran-Contra, they remember what they were able to do with that, and if the Benghazi cover-up reveals a CIA role in a weapons program that wasn't authorized by Congress -- and that's where everybody's looking now -- then the Republicans might want to remind their friends across the aisle how they've looked at Iran-Contra all these years. They wanted Reagan, and they were gonna use anything to get Reagan, and the Iran-Contra was their last best chance. They wanted to impeach Reagan. And now we've got a situation where Obama is directly involved in a phony story about a video being responsible for a protest that got out of hand. There's a lot of smoke here. We know there's a fire. Will we find out?

www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/02/Black-Teen-Unemployment-rate-is-416

Friday's jobs report was disappointing, but it also contained a truly heartbreaking statistic. Black teen unemployment is a shocking 41.6%. In July last year, the unemployment was considerably lower, at 36%. That almost half of black teens who want to work can't find jobs is a stain on Obama's economic policies.

In recent months, President Obama and national Democrats have increased calls to raise the minimum wage or impose "living wages" on certain companies in urban areas. Minimum wage jobs, however, are often "first jobs," providing that critical first rung on the jobs' ladder. Indeed, more than two-thirds of minimum wage employees receive a raise within the first year on the job.

You can't get a raise, however, without first having a job. Our economic policies are abandoning a generation and threatening to create a permanent underclass. It is shameful.

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Detroit's emergency manager on hope for chance

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More about the most recent lawlessness, where the political class rewrites the law to do whatever it wants.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324110404578625553817281048.html

A key claim made by advocates for regulating the U.S. broadband industry is that the U.S. is falling behind Europe in Internet speeds and prices. But this assertion—and by implication, the case for regulation—has been hobbled by recent developments that prove that U.S. broadband is a major success. The truth is that while America's broadband network has improved dramatically, Europe's has fallen far behind in quality and cost.

The facts are startling. The Internet company Akamai, which produces international speed rankings, has the U.S. currently at No. 9, up from No. 22 in 2009—faster than in France, Germany and Britain. A recent report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation notes that the U.S. has the second-lowest entry-level broadband prices (behind Israel) in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, despite ranking No. 27 among OECD countries in population density, a key driver of cost.

The White House recently reported that U.S. broadband companies have invested $250 billion in Internet upgrades since the recession began in 2008. Two of the largest broadband providers—AT&T and Verizon—invested more in the U.S. in 2011 than the top five oil and gas companies, and nearly four times more than the Big Three auto companies combined.

Compare this with Europe, where in most countries Internet service providers lease aging wires from incumbent, often state-sanctioned telephone companies. This may have created instant infrastructure for Europe, but because the ISPs do not own the underlying infrastructure, they have no incentive to invest in it. The incumbent phone companies, in turn, are often directly or indirectly subsidized heavily by taxpayers.

The results of these two competing models are now apparent. In the U.S., 85% of households have access to wired broadband networks capable of speeds of 100 megabits per second. By contrast, just half of Europeans get service that meets or exceeds 30 Mbps.

Why the disparity? Because the U.S. is one of two nations on the planet—the other is South Korea—that has three different and fully deployed broadband technologies: telephone (both newer fiber and DSL), cable modems and mobile LTE. These technologies compete to deliver broadband connections to nearly every American (plus satellite for some). Nearly 90% of Americans can choose from two wired providers and from four wireless broadband providers. Mobile 4G LTE, which can deliver downloads of 20 Mbps or more, reaches 94% of Americans, but only about a quarter of Europeans.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324635904578643663020328162.html

Exploiting Obama's Foreign Policy Retreat

'We are extremely disappointed," the White House press secretary said after Moscow granted asylum to fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden. A nice understatement. Washington is now looking at the greatest counterintelligence failure since the Rosenbergs betrayed nuclear know-how to Stalin some 60 years ago. Now the Russians have Mr. Snowden's hard disks to unearth more U.S. secrets than could be stolen by a battalion of spies.

President Vladimir Putin has it in his hands to endlessly embarrass the U.S. by releasing choice bits and pieces from the Snowden trove, or to threaten to do so to keep Washington on its best behavior. After this slap, "extremely disappointed" is the diplomatic equivalent of pouting—unbecoming to a great power.

The Russian leader has been checking off the weak spots since Mr. Obama's 2009 inauguration—in disbelief at first, no doubt, then with growing brashness. It started with the Cairo speech in June of that year, where Mr. Obama made nice to the Islamic Middle East, Iran included. A few months later came the White House cave-in on a Europe-based antimissile system the Russians had vehemently opposed. This was part of the celebrated "reset"—but Moscow got to pocket something for nothing, a no-no in great-power politics.

The Kremlin has also noticed how Mr. Obama has basically scotched the military option against Iran's nuclear-arms program. So has the Khamenei regime in Tehran, which keeps enticing Washington with talks resembling a minuet: bow, circle, return to the starting point. In Libya, the U.S. was "leading from behind," in Syria, not at all. Cutting the defense budget has been the order of the day, with or without the sequester.

So if you're Vladimir Putin, why not probe more deeply?

Consider the gauntlets flung down by Russia earlier this year. One is the delivery of sophisticated Yakhont antiship missiles to the Assad regime in Syria. Hard to detect and even harder to destroy, these missiles would pose a serious threat to U.S. naval forces if the weapons were ever deployed to the eastern Mediterranean. Israel regarded the danger sufficient to level a storage site in Syria's port city of Latakia on July 5.

Also in the spring, the Russians dispatched about a dozen warships to the eastern Mediterranean, according to press reports. This was a classic, 19th-century show of force to show resolve and to deter. If the U.S. actually did move against Assad, it would have to put serious sea power in the area. And risk a naval clash with Russia just to topple a bad guy? Anyway, the Sixth Fleet that used to patrol the Mediterranean went long ago, except for a single command ship.

The Kremlin's message: We shall protect our Syrian asset, the Assad regime. And the Russians have plenty of battle-hardened company: Hezbollah on the ground, Iran nearby. While Secretary of State John Kerry is investing in a sideshow—the Israeli-Palestinian peace—Moscow and Tehran are securing a foothold on the Mediterranean. Preventing Russia from reinserting itself in the Middle East has been a top American priority since the 1970s.

Mr. Obama's America seems to be withdrawing from the great-power table in favor of "nation-building at home," as the president keeps repeating. In his May speech at National Defense University, Mr. Obama vowed to end the war on terror and to curtail drone strikes, America's best weapon in an age of "asymmetric warfare." He means it. Last week, Mr. Kerry promised to end drone attacks in Pakistan "very, very soon."

Terror International will not junk its suicide vests in return. The world is being treated to a first in the history of great-power politics. Traditionally, the might of nations was hemmed in by others in an endless game of pressure and counter-pressure. Now, the reigning superpower is proposing to neutralize itself—no foes needed. The nation that invented containment in the Cold War is now playing with self-containment.

So don't blame Mr. Putin for what ambitious powers always do, which is to probe their rivals' positions on the periphery—as Beijing is doing in the war of nerves over some tiny islands in the South China Sea. America is turning into a huge medium-power, like an XXL France—a nation that still shows some great-power reflexes as in nearby Libya and Mali, but cannot take care of global business. When the Europeans ran out of ammunition in Libya, the U.S. stepped in. But if America shrugs off global responsibility, nobody else will shoulder it.

Mr. Obama's central problem is philosophical. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the state system. The president apparently believes that the U.S. can safely retract because giants no longer roam the earth. Alas, the chickens of indifference always come home to roost as birds of prey. In the 1930s, the coldblooded opportunists were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In our time, it is second-rate powers like Russia and Iran, and non-nations like Hezbollah, that are taking on the United States, and they do so because they can.

Their calculus should give pause to Mr. Obama, who is routinely compared to Jimmy Carter. But Mr. Carter learned a lot faster. In May 1977, he had pronounced America "free of that inordinate fear of communism." After the Soviet lunge into Afghanistan in December 1979, he noted wistfully: "This action . . . has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office."

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blog.heritage.org/2013/08/05/900000-reasons-obamacare-is-bad-moving-americans-from-work-to-welfare/

A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research by professors from Columbia University, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago argues that, as a result of Obamacare, between half a million and 900,000 Americans may leave the workforce and receive welfare. The bill grants free or heavily subsidized public health insurance to hundreds of thousands of working Americans who are not currently eligible.

This growth in the welfare state would represent just another step the Administration has taken toward encouraging dependence. As Heritage experts Robert Rector and Katherine Bradley note, “Government should encourage constructive behaviors leading to self-reliance and prosperity rather than rewarding counterproductive behaviors leading to costly dependence and poverty.”

Under the Obama Administration, welfare spending has hit an all-time high, costing taxpayers nearly $1 trillion annually. Nearly one-third of the U.S. population currently receives some type of welfare assistance from the federal government.

Last July, the Administration illegally declared that states could receive an exemption from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families work requirements, gutting the successful 1996 welfare reform. A provision in the 2009 stimulus package that temporarily waived work requirements for able-bodied food stamp recipients still stands.

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In his recent economic speeches in Illinois, Missouri, Florida and Tennessee, the president again made a pitch for government spending for transportation and "putting people back to work rebuilding America's infrastructure." Create the infrastructure, in other words, and the jobs will come.

History says it doesn't work like that. Henry Ford and dozens of other auto makers put a car in almost every garage decades before the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956. The success of the car created a demand for roads. The government didn't build highways, and then Ford decided to create the Model T. Instead, the highways came as a byproduct of the entrepreneurial genius of Ford and others.

Moreover, the makers of autos, tires and headlights began building roads privately long before any state or the federal government got involved. The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway for cars, pieced together from new and existing roads in 1913, was conceived and partly built by entrepreneurs—Henry Joy of Packard Motor Car Co., Frank Seiberling of Goodyear and Carl Fisher, a maker of headlights and founder of the Indy 500.

Railroads are another example of the infrastructure-follows-entrepreneurship rule. Before the 1860s, almost all railroads were privately financed and built. One exception was in Michigan, where the state tried to build two railroads but lost money doing so, and thus happily sold both to private owners in 1846. When the federal government decided to do infrastructure in the 1860s, and build the transcontinental railroads (or "intercontinental railroad," as Mr. Obama called it in 2011), the laying of track followed the huge and successful private investments in railroads.

In fact, when the government built the transcontinentals, they were politically corrupt and often—especially in the case of the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific—went broke. One cause of the failure: Track was laid ahead of settlements. Mr. Obama wants to do something similar with high-speed rail. The Great Northern Railroad, privately built by Canadian immigrant James J. Hill, was the only transcontinental to be consistently profitable. It was also the only transcontinental to receive no federal aid. In railroads, then, infrastructure not only followed the major capital investment, it was done better privately than by government.

Airplanes became a major industry and started carrying passengers by the early 1920s. Juan Trippe, the head of Pan American World Airways, began flying passengers overseas by the mid-1930s. During that period, nearly all airports were privately funded, beginning with the Huffman Prairie Flying Field, created by the Wright Brothers in Dayton, Ohio, in 1910. St. Louis and Tucson had privately built airports by 1919. Public airports did not appear in large numbers until military airfields were converted after World War II.

No matter where you look, similar stories come up. America's 19th-century canal-building mania is now largely forgotten, but it is the granddaddy of misguided infrastructure-spending tales...Most state-supported canals lost money, and Pennsylvania in 1857 and Ohio in 1861 finally sold their canal systems to private owners.

In Ohio, when the canals were privatized, one newspaper editor wrote: "Everyone who observes must have learned that private enterprise will execute a work with profit, when a government would sink dollars by the thousand."

In all of these examples, building infrastructure was never the engine of growth, but rather a lagging indicator of growth that had already occurred in the private sector. And when the infrastructure was built, it was often best done privately, at least until the market grew so large as to demand a wider public role, as with the need for an interstate-highway system in the mid 1950s.

There is a lesson here for President Obama: Government "investment" in infrastructure is often wasteful and tends to support decaying or stagnant technologies. Let the entrepreneurs decide what infrastructure the country needs, and most of the time they will build it themselves.

blog.heritage.org/2013/08/05/two-years-after-downgrade-u-s-credit-rating-hasnt-recovered-and-debt-is-worse/

Two Years After Downgrade, U.S. Credit Rating Hasn’t Recovered—and Debt Is Worse

A lesser credit rating eventually means investors would require a higher interest rate to purchase U.S. government debt. A higher borrowing cost for the U.S. government would drive spending even higher and exacerbate our already deeply troubling deficit and debt situation. The Budget Control Act’s approach—to offset any increase in the debt ceiling with spending reductions of equal size—was a workable compromise at the time and contained a slight chance of arriving at entitlement reforms through a so-called supercommittee.

The supercommittee was a 12-member panel evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans with the charge of identifying $1.2 trillion in spending reductions—or else sequestration would kick in. Though the Budget Control Act allows spending and debt to continue to grow indefinitely, it at least forced some semblance of fiscal discipline.

But the Budget Control Act did nowhere near enough, and the supercommittee failed miserably. The act reduces only one-third of the U.S. federal budget: discretionary spending, which includes defense and non-defense programs. The spending reductions are poorly targeted and were set up in such a way as to assure constant conflict in Congress. They threaten the nation’s defense capabilities the most.

Meanwhile, the key drivers of out-of-control spending and growing debt continue expanding rapidly: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security already consume 45 percent of the budget and are growing fast. Obamacare accelerates the entitlement spending explosion. The Budget Control Act leaves these programs nearly untouched, keeping the U.S. on a fiscal crisis course.

When Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating in 2011, the ratings agency clearly stated that the deficit-reduction measure Congress and the President agreed to fell far short of correcting the U.S. fiscal course. Moody’s, another big-three ratings agency (Fitch Group is the third), warned recently that further fiscal consolidation was necessary to avoid deficits growing too big again in the future, which could hurt the U.S. rating.

Today marks the second anniversary of the U.S. credit downgrade by S&P of a rating the U.S. had held for 70 years, and our nation’s spending and debt problem has only gotten worse. The U.S. hit its statutory debt ceiling in May with a debt that’s bigger than the entire U.S. GDP at $16.7 trillion. Treasury is borrowing from accounts that are not subject to the debt limit to continue spending that exceeds revenues, but that headroom will likely run out sometime this fall.

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In May, Barack Obama told an audience at the National Defense University that the core of al Qaeda was "on the path to defeat." The "future of terrorism," Mr. Obama predicted, would involve "more localized threats," on the order of "the types of attacks we faced before 9/11," such as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing or the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut. "Dealt with smartly and proportionately," he added, "these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11." He ended by calling for repeal of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force—Congress's declaration of war on al Qaeda.

Yes, the president's May speech contained all the required caveats about the abiding terrorist threat and the continued need for vigilance. But the gist of the address was clear, as was its purpose: to declare the war on terror won—or won well-enough—and go home. Facts and analysis were arranged to suit the policy goal. But the facts and analysis were wrong.

Specifically: Mr. Obama believed that killing Osama bin Laden was a strategic victory. In fact, it was mainly a symbolic one (further undercut by his use of it as a political prop). He thought that ending the war in Iraq would help refocus U.S. efforts on Afghanistan. In fact, it showcased America's lack of staying power and gave the Taliban additional motivation to hold out during the president's halfhearted Afghan surge. He thought that substituting the Bush administration's approach to detainees with an approach heavy on drones would earn America renewed goodwill on the Arab street. In fact, there was no goodwill to renew in the first place, and the U.S. is more unpopular in Pakistan and Egypt today than it was six years ago.

He believed that staying out—completely out—of the war in Syria would contain the war to Syria and spare American lives and efforts. In fact, the war has generated a brand new branch of al Qaeda in the Nusra Front, helped regenerate the once-moribund Iraqi branch, and attracted jihadist recruits from Europe who may one day return to put their acquired skills into practice.

Finally, Mr. Obama believed that defeating "core al Qaeda"—the group around Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and Afghanistan—effectively meant defeating al Qaeda, even if a few of its lesser offshoots in Africa or the Arabian Peninsula survived. In fact, al Qaeda was designed not as an organization with subordinate branches, but as a model with multiple franchises—as Burger King not General Motors.

In his speech, Mr. Obama insisted that "not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States." Yet if al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, or the Arabian Peninsula, or the Maghreb, or some as-yet unknown al Qaeda affiliate succeeds in bombing a U.S. embassy, taking down an airliner, or engineering a second 9/11, will it matter that the plot was hatched in Yemen or Somalia instead of Pakistan or Afghanistan?

Which brings us to the shortest distance in Washington: the one that runs between an Obama speech and the media's memory of it. The speech at the National Defense University was billed as a major presidential address. A lengthy article in the New York Times, written days later, reported it was a "window into the presidential mind," the result of "an exercise lasting months," a matter not just of Mr. Obama's policy, but of his very legacy.

Yet here we are, not three months later, faced with a threat that makes a comprehensive and vivid mockery of everything the president said. If there's a silver lining here, it's that the administration can put an end to the end of the war on terror without much fear of embarrassment. Better to do so now than in the wake of an attack.

blog.heritage.org/2013/08/05/morning-bell-learning-from-detroits-mistakes/

Detroit is the poster child for economic decline. The city’s policies and politics over the past half-century should serve as a “do not” guide for policymakers across the country.

There’s a great deal lawmakers in Washington can learn. The first is understanding that Detroit’s demise was the result of big-government, liberal policies promoted by self-interested politicians and coercive public employee unions.

In the wake of America’s manufacturing decline, Detroit enacted policies that drove out businesses and residents. Rather than reduce the size of government as its population shrank, the city instead sought higher levels of government spending. City leaders acquiesced to unions by increasing employee benefits and ceding control and flexibility over employees.

To pay for it, Detroit continually increased taxes and engaged in prolific borrowing when the tax increases did not close the gap. And yet, despite the growth in government taxes and debt, Detroit’s citizens experienced ever-declining city services, the most troublesome result of which has arguably been the steep rise in crime.

As significant as Detroit’s debt is, the federal government is in far worse shape. In fact, as the chart above shows, the federal government’s debt and unfunded obligations are more than eight times that of bankrupt Detroit.

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The Internal Revenue Service's scandalous targeting of tea party and conservative groups refuses to die, as one by one the administration's explanations prove untrue.

We were told that the White House, like the rest of the country, learned about the program on May 10 through a planted question asked of then IRS official Lois Lerner at an American Bar Association conference. Turns out the White House knew earlier. We were told the targeting was the work of a few rogue IRS employees in Cincinnati. Then those employees insisted that they were being managed from Washington.

We were told that no political appointees were involved, but now we know the scandal goes at least to the office of Obama appointee and IRS Chief Counsel William Wilkins. We were told that liberal groups were targeted, too. But then the IRS's inspector general, whose report exposed the harassment, clarified that only conservative groups were targeted.

Now the administration line is that the scandal is nonetheless "phony." That assertion is part of a Democratic counteroffensive contending that the tea party and conservative groups applying for "charitable" tax status never should have sought such IRS approval.

This attack is wrong on the law, and cynical as politics. As these IRS apologists well know, liberal groups, such as Moveon.org, have long had the same tax status as that requested by the tea party and conservative groups—and that status is not of a "charity."...conservative groups targeted by the IRS did not seek tax status as charities. They were applying for designation as nonprofits operating under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, for "the promotion of social welfare." Contributions to 501(c)(4) organizations are not tax deductible, so there is no "tax break" for their donors. Nor do the groups themselves get a "tax advantage." Mr. Toobin argues that these groups should be reclassified under Section 527 of the tax code. More on that below, but 527 organizations also pay nothing in taxes. So there is no "tax advantage" to operating as a 501(c)(4).

So why was the IRS involved at all, and why does it matter? The answer is that the IRS scandal is part of a long-term assault on First Amendment rights. Thanks to "campaign finance reform," citizen groups must navigate a maze of government paperwork and apply to the IRS for a tax license to speak on politics. People literally need a lawyer to figure it out, and not just any lawyer, but one from the highly compensated and mostly Washington, D.C.-based bar practicing "political law."

Social-welfare groups under Section 501(c)(4) must disclose the campaign activity they undertake, but they do not have to publicly disclose information about their donors and members to either the IRS or the Federal Election Commission. This is the result of 70 years of Supreme Court decisions protecting the privacy right of Americans to associate in groups without disclosing their affiliations to the government.

Democrats want the IRS to require the conservative groups to register as political committees under Section 527. This would increase their regulatory burden by requiring them to file quarterly or monthly reports detailing their receipts and expenditures. It would also force them to reveal personal information about their supporters and members, enabling government retaliation and laying the groundwork for unofficial harassment of those supporters. Such harassment has become a routine tactic of the political left, especially since it was successfully used to target financial supporters of California's Proposition 8—which banned same-sex marriage in the state—to get them fired from jobs, for instance.

What kind of democracy claims that political participation is not in the interest of "social welfare?"

Rep. Becerra argues that 501(c)(4) status should be reserved for "something good, not groups that are in business to do politics." That's a remarkable statement from a man who has spent the past 22 years in elective office. Yet this is also the logic of the campaign finance "reform" movement that has wielded so much political influence over the last 40 years. Its drumbeat is that participating in public affairs is bad.

Americans should participate in the political life of the nation. That is what the First Amendment was intended to protect. Shame on those who discourage self-government.

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The IRS targeting scandal is best understood as part of a larger effort to limit the political speech of conservatives and business groups. That became clearer last week regarding the Federal Election Commission, and now evidence is spreading to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Senior Republicans on the House Oversight Committee recently wrote to new SEC Chairman Mary Jo White to report on disturbing events that occurred under her predecessor, and to request agency documents. As at the IRS, there's an emerging pattern at the SEC of senior officials rolling over career staff to politicize the work of a powerful federal agency.

Reps. Darrell Issa, Jim Jordan and Patrick McHenry say that documents they already have "indicate that the SEC has been under immense pressure from elected officials and special interest groups as part of a government-wide effort to stifle political speech." They further note that the pressure has largely succeeded in "moving the Commission closer to using its authority to regulate public securities markets as a backdoor way to limit the political speech of the same types of groups targeted by the IRS."

One way to discourage groups critical of the government is for the IRS to sit on their applications for tax-exempt status while applying the normal review process to groups friendly to the White House.

Another way is to have the SEC discourage public companies from supporting independent organizations, while applying no such regulation to labor unions. Corporations tend to support groups on both the left and the right, whereas unions are more reliably liberal. If businesses are limited in the public debate, it's a big win for Democrats.

Last year politicians like then-Rep. Barney Frank and liberal tax-exempt groups like Public Citizen were encouraging the SEC to demand more disclosure from public companies about the organizations they support. Staff for Mr. Frank specifically told the SEC that, "There is particular interest in what the authority is for disclosure of 501(c)(4) contributions (political contributions)." Mr. Frank's staff also noted that the interest was coming from the House Democratic leadership.

Democratic SEC commissioners Luis Aguilar and Elisse Walter continued to advocate new rules on political activity. By the end of last year they had persuaded Ms. Schapiro to include the issue on the SEC's regulatory agenda. Ms. White, the current chairman, can go a long way toward restoring the reputation of the SEC as a serious and apolitical regulator by deep-sixing this political assault masquerading as transparency.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324653004578650240266112264.html

So Aetna is pulling out of ObamaCare in Connecticut. As corporate identity crises go, this is like L.L. Bean quitting Maine or Apple leaving California—for the moon.

The iconic Connecticut-based company—founded as a fire insurer in Hartford in 1819—has been embroiled in a dispute with regulators over the premiums it wanted to charge next year on the state's subsidized insurance exchange, known as Access Health CT. Those rates must be approved by the state, which demanded arbitrarily lower ones in return for permission to sell its products.

Aetna is the second of five insurers that wanted to participate in the Connecticut exchange to drop out under regulatory pressure on prices. The remaining three may discover that under Connecticut's ObamaCare rules they don't want customers either.

blog.heritage.org/2013/08/06/wind-power-only-when-the-wind-blows-and-the-subsidies-flow/

The wind industry is experiencing slow growth through the first half of the year and blaming uncertainty over a massive subsidy as a reason why. Alex Guillen of Politico reported last week that the United States added only 1.6 megawatts of wind power in the first half of 2013, which is far less than the 13 gigawatts installed last year and significantly smaller than the 3 gigawatts of new power installed over the first half of 2012.

The fact that the wind production experiences significant declines when the subsidy expires is not a good reason to extend it; in fact, it’s a good reason to permanently remove it.

Congress first passed the wind production tax credit (PTC) in 1992 but allowed it to expire several times. The PTC expired in 2000, 2002, and 2004, and annual wind installation decreased by 93 percent, 73 percent, and 77 percent, respectively. Wind energy advocates call this a boom-and-bust cycle created by unstable policy, but it is more likely a case of the wind PTC’s oversupplying a market and artificially propping up a large portion of wind production.

Until the training wheels are taken off...the industry will not have the strongest incentive to innovate and lower costs to become economically viable and instead will concentrate efforts on lobbying for handouts.

Even Patrick Jenevein, CEO of the clean energy firm Tang Energy Group, affirmed in The Wall Street Journal the problems with his own industry’s dependence on subsidies:

"Government subsidies to new wind farms have only made the industry less focused on reducing costs. In turn, the industry produces a product that isn’t as efficient or cheap as it might be if we focused less on working the political system and more on research and development."

blog.heritage.org/2013/08/06/senate-majority-leader-were-through-making-defense-a-priority/

Senator Harry Reid (D–NV) made it quite clear that he no longer views defense as a priority: “We are not going to be gamed by having the military programs funded at a much higher level than Head Start program, or the National Institute of Health. We’re not going to do that. We’re through.”

As Heritage’s James J. Carafano explains in the Washington Examiner, the Senate Majority Leader blundered when he compared defense funding to failed social initiatives. “More importantly, he should understand that defense is more than a social program.”

Heritage education expert Lindsey Burke explained that according to the Obama Administration’s own report, “Head Start also had little to no effect on the other socio-emotional, health, or parenting outcomes of children participating in the program.” Yet Head Start, which has cost taxpayers over $100 billion since its inception in 1994, with no significant results to show for it, is now being placed on par with the security of our nation.

Reid is one of many in the 113th Congress who seem to have forgotten the government’s constitutional duty to protect and defend its citizens. The idea that defense is just another program the government funds is a sure path to threatening national security. The defense sector provides real security in the air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace and supports the protection of economic interests for American citizens.

www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/06/bezos_buys_wapo_media_world_rocked

Rush Limbaugh on the demise of everyone who predicted his demise

[Tails82]

blog.heritage.org/2013/08/07/government-watchdog-to-investigate-planned-parenthood-funding/

Government Watchdog to Investigate Planned Parenthood Funding

The announcement comes as Planned Parenthood, which received more than half a billion in tax dollars in one year alone, faces numerous accusations of fraud and claims of unsafe conditions at some of its abortion clinics.

Despite the organization’s prominence—performing roughly one of every four abortions in America—Planned Parenthood has ridden the waves of taxpayer funding to millions of dollars in annual surpluses. Planned Parenthood received over $542 million in taxpayer dollars during 2011 alone, all the while performing a record 333,964 abortions. In that year, like many before it, Planned Parenthood saw a very comfortable income, reporting excess revenues exceeding $87 million and net assets of more than $1.2 billion.

The announcement of the GAO’s investigation comes just a few weeks after Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast agreed to pay over $4 million to settle claims of Medicaid fraud. State audits of family planning programs have indicated similar abuse and fraudulent practices by Planned Parenthood affiliates to the tune of over $8 million across 12 states. The lucrative abortion provider is also currently embroiled in at least four whistleblower lawsuits claiming that Planned Parenthood overbilled Medicaid programs.

While claiming to support the interests of women, Planned Parenthood has also shown an apparent willingness to abet the sex trafficking of minor girls and allegedly turned a blind eye to unsafe and unsanitary conditions in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and elsewhere.

Just last week, former nurses at a Planned Parenthood in Delaware testified before state legislators, claiming the clinic that performed dangerous “after hours” abortions also failed to inform hundreds of women who tested positive for infections.

Even outside the walls of its clinics, Planned Parenthood’s legislative interests increasingly diverge from the views of most Americans. The organization has repeatedly opposed legal protections for infants born after botched abortions and opposes restrictions on late-term abortions, even though a majority of women support such policies.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324653004578651952240608788.html

How Al Qaeda Made Its Comeback

The U.S. regarded the terrorist group's affiliates as local problems—instead of fighting their potent Islamist ideology.

What should be questioned is why, more than a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda is still deemed to have high enough capability to force the U.S. to close its embassies and consulates. This seems to be at odds with America's military and counterterrorism successes, and with the declarations of U.S. officials, including President Obama, that al Qaeda has been nearly destroyed.

The disconnect lies in our failure to appreciate that while al Qaeda central has been badly weakened by U.S. counterterrorism efforts, the group was never close to being extinguished. It adapted. It gave greater power to semi-independent affiliates, such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, and to more loosely connected groups, like Boko Haram in Nigeria.

The West made the mistake of failing to effectively tackle these affiliates and their propaganda, dismissing them as local problems irrelevant to the war against al Qaeda. While groups like AQAP and Boko Haram initially did focus their violence locally, terrorists who endorse Osama bin Laden's jihadist message inevitably move on to the global war against the West. That's a key lesson that I and my colleagues in law-enforcement and intelligence learned by tracking al Qaeda in the 1990s.

Bin Laden himself started out by focusing on a local issue: U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, his homeland. Initially the FBI and others in the intelligence community had to battle higher-ups eager to ignore him. He was "just a Saudi financier," we were told.

Because the connection between al Qaeda and its affiliates was neglected by the West, these terror groups have thrived. So despite all the successes in the war on terror, al Qaeda has maintained a steady stream of new recruits, replacing the members that have been killed or captured by the U.S.

Al Qaeda has also been greatly helped by the Internet and social media, which enables recruitment to take place in chat rooms rather than just in underground guesthouses. The narratives used by al Qaeda and its affiliates all follow the same pattern: Recruiters prey on local grievances, young men's lack of purpose, and their feelings of anger, humiliation, and resentment. The recruiters combine this with distorted religious edicts, along with conspiratorial messages that blame the U.S. and the West for their problems. With these seemingly clear explanations for their problems, recruits feel empowered and embrace the jihadist mission.

The al Qaeda ideology—blaming the West for the Muslim world's problems, rejecting anyone who doesn't follow al Qaeda's specific beliefs and claiming that terrorism is the only way to deal with opponents—was previously found mainly in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. Now it has spread, from West Africa to Southeast Asia. Combating the group's ideology in an effective manner has been the weak link in the West's counterterrorism strategy.

To top it all off, al Qaeda's ranks have also been bolstered in recent weeks by brazen, large-scale prison breaks linked to the group in Iraq, Libya and Pakistan. Reports estimate that as many as 500 inmates escaped in Iraq, 1,000 in Libya and 248 in Pakistan.

The U.S. and others governments have been right in recent days to declare a high terror alert and to close embassies. But it shouldn't have come to this. Until the U.S. starts combating the narratives that allow al Qaeda and its affiliates to continually recruit and retain members, these types of shutdowns and panics will become more routine.

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

There's a story that just ran on what it is that constituted the reason for this massive shutdown of our embassies. And apparently the regime, this Eli Lake and another writer have the story at The Daily Beast, and the only way they could get this is if the regime leaked it. I mean, who else knows this? Who else knows what happened? I mean, sure you've got people -- the NSA and CIA -- but that's the regime. And basically Ayman al-Zawahiri is now apparently much more active than even bin Laden was. He was bin Laden's number two. Apparently, these terrorists had a conference call of like 20 of them, 20, 22 terrorists, conference call around a virtual conference table, like a board of directors of a corporation. They planned all this murder and mayhem and terrorism, and we overheard the call. And we've leaked that.

So now Zawahiri and his other fellow members of the Board of Terrorists Inc. now know not to use that form of communication again because it's been compromised. Why in the world leak this? I'll tell you why leak it. They leak it so as to make Obama look big and competent and tough and make this administration look like nobody's gonna get anything past them. These are really tough guys, the Obama administration, and they really take terrorism seriously...So they announce the closing of the embassies, and then, while Obama's telling us he's got Al-Qaeda on the run, we leak the actual details of that call, which gives up, tells these terrorists, Zawahiri and the others, not to use whatever form of communication they were using because it's been compromised. So now they're gonna go do something else that we can't follow. Why in the world would you do this? Why would you leak this?

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323477604578654001297158918.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

"The odds of people dying in a terrorist attack obviously are still a lot lower than in a car accident, unfortunately," President Obama told NBC's Jay Leno last night.

Wait, "unfortunately"? Does the president really wish more Americans were killed in terrorist attacks? Indeed, orders of magnitude more, since nationwide traffic fatalities typically run between 30,000 and 50,000 a year?

Of course not. Obviously when he deployed that adverb he was thinking of the unfortunate souls killed in car accidents, not the victims of terrorism. He simply misspoke--just as Todd Akin did last year when he used the unfortunate phrase "legitimate rape." But for some reason, the World's Greatest Orator and the most powerful man in the world is held to lower standards of verbal exactitude than a lowly congressman from Missouri.

Perhaps most vexing was Obama's reply to a Leno question about Russia's grant of asylum to fugitive national-security contractor Edward Snowden:

"I was disappointed because even though we don't have an extradition treaty with them, traditionally we have tried to respect if there's a law-breaker or an alleged law-breaker in their country, we evaluate it and we try to work with them. They didn't do that with us. And in some ways it's reflective of some underlying challenges that we've had with Russia lately. A lot of what's been going on hasn't been major breaks in the relationship, and they still help us on supplying our troops in Afghanistan; they're still helping us on counterterrorism work; they were helpful after the Boston bombing in that investigation. And so there's still a lot of business that we can do with them.

"But there have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality."

Contrast that with what he said in his last presidential debate:

"Governor Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that al Qaeda is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al Qaeda; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years.

"But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s."

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

Last night, while everybody's worried about a miniseries on Hillary that hasn't happened, Obama showed up for, what, the sixth time on The Tonight Show.

Last night, to show you how the country is changing in a very serious way, last night was the first time since this massive upgraded terror warning was put into effect on Sunday, this was the first time the president of the United States spoke to the American people about this. We closed 21 embassies in the Middle East on Sunday for a full week. The president of the United States of America, the world's lone superpower, the president, by reputation, by tradition, the leader of the free world -- that's somewhat dubious now, but traditionally that's how our presidents have been referred to and thought of. The president of the United States went to a late-night comedy show for his first-ever statement about this increased terror threat. A late-night comedy show.

It's a diminishing thing that happened last night. The presidency was diminished last night, the country, talk about being respected or loved by people around the world. This was a very small thing that happened last night. Made the country look small, made the presidency look small. No, I don't think JFK went on Jack Paar to talk about the Cuban missile crisis.

Do you remember this? This was July 24th, 2007. You probably don't remember this. This was during the presidential debate, during the '08 campaign season. And this was a Democrat candidate debate. This was leading up to the Democrat primaries, the eight candidates vying to be the Democrat nominee. There were really just two of them by this time. It was Hillary and Barry Soetoro -- uh, Barack Obama. And it was on CNN. I've got the New York Times account of this.

Anderson Cooper said, "Let's go to another YouTube viewer." They allowed viewers to send in YouTube video questions. And one of the YouTube video questions was, "In 1982, Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since. In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?"

And then Anderson Cooper said, "By the way, that YouTube guy, he's in our audience tonight." And the crowd went, "Yay, right on YouTube!" Senator Obama was asked to answer the question, and he said, "I would," be willing to meet separately without precondition during the first year of my administration in Washington or anywhere else with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea. "I would," said Obama. "And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them -- which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration -- is ridiculous."

So Obama said (paraphrasing), "Hell, yes, I'll talk to 'em, I'll talk to 'em any time, anywhere, no preconditions. Iran, anybody." And yet it was Obama last night who canceled an upcoming summit meeting with Vladimir Putin because Putin and the Russians did something regarding the Olympics in 2014 and homosexuality that Obama didn't like.

By the way, Obama embarrassed himself last night. The Olympics that are going to be in Russia are the winter Olympics, and Obama was talking about all the great athletes on the balance beams and in the swimming pool and he forget that it was the winter Olympics, or maybe he never even knew and probably didn't care.

These kind of hypocritical contradictions with Obama are frequent and often, and we'll tell you about 'em in this instance because he's the one that went to a comedy show to talk about this. He's the one that announced about terror threats on a comedy show, for the first time ever addressing the people of this country about recent events.

Meanwhile, Russia can practically fight us on the ground in Iraq. They can practically build a nuclear bomb for Iran. They can demand that we give up our missile defense for ourselves and our allies, and they can support murderous thugs like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, but don't let 'em diss the gays, then we're really gonna get mad at 'em.

So this appearance last night -- by the way, Obama also, folks, he had a number of faux pas. He didn't just get the Olympics thing wrong. He told Leno that he wants to deepen the ports on the Gulf Coast, like in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida. Except they don't have any ports on the Gulf Coast there, because they aren't on the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast is Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. And Obama told Leno he wants to deepen the ports on the Gulf Coast, like Charleston, South Carolina -- that's the Atlantic Ocean -- Savannah, Georgia -- that's the Atlantic Ocean -- Jacksonville, Florida -- that's the Atlantic Ocean.

...So, anyway, it was an unserious statement, unserious appearance. It made a mockery of what are serious world events.