Year: 2016

Judge blocks illegal Obama overtime rule

5:39 pm

The law is such an inconvenient thing: A federal judge today blocked an Obama administration rule that tried to unilaterally extend overtime to millions of workers, without any legal basis.

U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in Sherman, Texas, agreed with 21 states and a coalition of business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that the rule is unlawful and granted their motion for a nationwide injunction. It was to take effect Dec. 1. The rule would have doubled to $47,500 the maximum salary a worker can earn and still be eligible for mandatory overtime pay.

The states and business groups claimed in lawsuits filed in September that were later consolidated that the drastic increase in the salary threshold was arbitrary. Mazzant, who was appointed by President Obama, held that the rule runs counter to the federal law that governs who is eligible for overtime. The law does not allow the Labor Department to determine eligibility based only on salary levels, Mazzant said.

This behavior by the Obama administration is pretty par for the course. What do they care what the law says? They are wise and educated Ivy-League liberals who know better. They have the right to impose their will on everyone else, without any restrictions.

0 comments

The worst fake news stories in the past few decades

11:34 am

And these faked stories are all from the mainstream leftwing press, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Washington Post, New Republic, and MSNBC.

The NBC corporation is an especially bad player here. Worse, their behavior has been specifically aimed at fueling a race war. In one case, they claimed that the Tea Party movement was made up of white racists and thus dangerous to blacks, and to prove it they showed an image of the rifle slung over the back of a Tea Party protester. The trouble was that they specifically framed the image to hide the fact that the protester was black. Then NBC deliberately edited the recording of George Zimmerman’s conversation with 911 to make him sound racist. It was a lie, as were all these stories.

What makes NBC the worst is that they have made no effort to fix the problem. They not only haven’t punished or fired anyone, they keep doing it again and again.

For this network or any of these mainstream leftist outlets to now complain about “fake news” is the height of absurdity. What they are really doing is trying to discredit alternative news sources that have actually been reporting the news better than them. They don’t like the competition, both financially and politically.

2 comments

Massachusetts college bans American flag

9:41 am

Madness: Hampshire College in Massachusetts has decided to ban the flying of all flags, including the United States flag, in order to avoid offending anyone.

Their problems began when they lowered their American flags to half mast to protest the election results. Then they let someone remove a flag and burn it. Faced with a storm of criticism they have decided to punt, which I think will do them even more harm. I would not be surprised it alumni donations dry up, as well as student applications.

22 comments

Democrats look in all the wrong places to explain their losses

9:35 am

The Democratic Party is attempting to analyze the recent election to try to find out what has been causing their significant losses in order to prevent further election defeats and bring about a recovery.

Not surprisingly, they are blaming everything and everybody but their own policies.

Party insiders are reluctant to blame the popular Obama but cite plenty of reasons for the decline. These include a muddled economic message; an overemphasis on emerging demographic groups such as minorities and millennial at the expense of white voters; a perception the party is elitist and aligned with Wall Street; a reluctance to embrace the progressive populism of Senator Bernie Sanders, the former presidential hopeful; and failure to field strong candidates in key states.

There is an emerging consensus, they add, that the party has been too focused on winning national races and has not invested enough in local campaigns, along with a grudging admission that Republicans have done a better job of competing on the ground. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted text above shows how completely divorced from reality this Democratic Party continues to be. Most of the country rejects socialism, and it was the Democratic Party’s increasing tilt towards socialism that is hurting it badly and caused it lose control of almost all the state legislatures nationwide.. Do they recognize this? Absolutely not. Instead they want to become more socialist.

Moreover, most of the other reasons they cite for their losses either blame outside forces (such as Republican efforts to require an ID to vote) or poor messaging. It is never anything they did, such as impose Obamacare and run the government badly.

Moreover, that the Democrats continue to increase their dominance in the big urban areas should not be used by them as a sign that their policies are right. The big urban areas are also generally places with the worst quality of life, the most crime, the worst poverty, and biggest government deficits. Even if the citizens in those places can’t see how badly they are being ruled by Democrats, the rest of the country does. Moreover, it will be impossible for the Democratic Party to recover significantly as long as it relies solely on the voters in these concentrated urban areas. To get the rest of the country to consider them worth voting for again they are going to have to face their own policy failures and change direction. Sadly, I see no evidence that they are going to do this.

8 comments

An update on the Bigelow inflatable module on ISS

9:12 am

NASA has released an update on the privately built inflatable BEAM module that is presently attached to ISS and is under-going two years of testing.

NASA and Bigelow Aerospace are pleased to report that, overall, BEAM is operating as expected and continues to produce valuable data. Structural engineers at NASA JSC confirmed that BEAM deployment loads upon the space station were very small, and continue to analyze the module’s structural data for comparison with ground tests and models. Researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, have found no evidence of large debris impacts in the DIDS data to date—good news for any spacecraft. And radiation researchers at JSC have found that the dosage due to Galactic Cosmic Rays in BEAM is similar to other space station modules, and continue to analyze local “trapped” radiation particles, particularly from the South Atlantic Anomaly, to help determine additional shielding requirements for long-duration exploration missions.

None of this is a surprise. It seems to me that this testing program is a bit overdone, since NASA never did anything like this in orbit for its own modules. What I think is really happening is that the two-year test of Bigelow’s module was required politically within NASA because there were too many people there opposed to using a privately-built module. I also suspect that NASA got further pressure from the contractors, such as Boeing, who had previously owned this business, and did not want the competition from Bigelow. Thus, despite the fact that Bigelow has already launched two test modules of its own and proved the viability of its designs, it was forced by NASA to do an additional test under NASA’s supervision in order to squelch this opposition.

2 comments

Russia postpones Proton launch again

9:03 am

Originally scheduled for October, International Launch Services (ILS), the Russian company that manages its commercial launches, has once again postponed the next Proton rocket launch.

“The new launch date is December 2016,” the website says. The reasons for the postponement have not yet been announced.

As reported earlier, Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos had rescheduled the launch from October 10 to November 23. It was initially scheduled for late June, then postponed to August 29 and then to October 10.

More significantly, there have been no Proton launches since a June 9 launch were the second stage of the rocket inexplicably shut down prematurely. The Russians have been conducting an investigation, but have released absolutely no information about what they have found

2 comments

Atlas 5 launches NOAA weather satellite

10:53 pm

Successfully completing its second launch in 8 days, ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket put a new NOAA weather satellite in orbit on Saturday.

NOAA is giving this new satellite a big PR push, claiming it will revolutionize weather monitoring and forecasting. While the satellite might be state of the art, it is also was very expensive, costing $1 billion. I strongly suspect that the same thing could have been built far cheaper, and quicker, if left to the private sector.

1 comment

UAE sheikh okays next phase in Mars mission

10:48 pm

The competition heats up: The Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has approved the start of construction of the prototypes for the UAE’s Mars Mission, dubbed Hope.

Sheikh Mohammed gave the greenlight to start manufacturing the probe’s prototypes, the Arab world’s first Mars probe. The project places the UAE with the nine countries that aim to explore Mars. His Highness said: “UAE ambitions is to explore the outer space. We are investing in our national cadres to lead this project and contribute in expanding our knowledge about Mars. Hope Probe is a qualitative leap for UAE’s scientific efforts, it the first contribution for the Arab world in this regard”.

Sheikh Mohammed’s remarks came while visiting the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) to open the second phase of the UAE satellite manufacturing and assembly complex, a multitasking facility capable of handling several space projects at a time.

It will be very interesting to see how this top-down mission proceeds, as it is being pushed heavily by the sheikh in a country with almost no experience in building such things.

12 comments

Obamacare Medicaid expansion to overwhelm state budgets

11:34 am

Finding out what’s in it: The 24 states that have accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion are about to have their budgets overwhelmed by the much larger numbers of enrollments in that program than was expected.

Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion makes working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities eligible for a welfare program that was costly and ineffective long before Obamacare. The 24 states with a year or more of data available expected no more than 5.5 million would ever sign up, but their expansion enrollment is already 11.5 million – more than double its projected all-time maximum.

Alaska, Indiana, Louisiana, and Montana have not yet released a year of enrollment data, but have all reported Obamacare expansion enrollment higher than their expected maximums, FGA vice president of research Jonathan Ingram and FGA senior research fellow Nicholas Horton noted. “Medicaid expansion already makes welfare for able-bodied adults a higher priority than services for the nearly 600,000 seniors, children with developmental disabilities, individuals with brain injuries, and other vulnerable individuals currently languishing on waiting lists for needed Medicaid services,” Ingram and Horton wrote. “Mounting overruns will soon exacerbate pressure on policymakers to shift even more money away from the truly needy and towards ObamaCare’s able-bodied adults.”

Obamacare expansion benefits are 100 percent federally funded through the end of the calendar year, which has shielded states from billions of dollars in cost overruns since expansion took effect in January 2014. That will soon change. If Obamacare remains in place, states will be on the hook for five percent of their rapidly rising Medicaid expansion costs starting in January. And if President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress fulfill campaign promises to repeal Obamacare, federal funding for Medicaid expansion could be cut off in a matter of months.

On this issue, at least, there is precedent for congressional Republicans sticking to their word. Last January, President Obama vetoed an Obamacare repeal bill that would have ended Medicaid expansion.

Even if Obamacare is not repealed, these states still face serious budget problems because the cost of this program is, like everything else in Obamacare, far higher than predicted. If Obamacare is repealed, then these states face bankruptcy.

17 comments
1 … 17 18 19 20 21 … 171