Working for the Democratic Party: Two separate IRS offices last year targeted the GOP’s Hawaii leader for audits and investigation.
Pushback: Fifty-four Colorado sheriffs as well as a host of other organizations have filed suit against their state’s new very restrictive gun laws.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Heh: In his weekly radio address, President Barack Obama reassured the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.
Great Britain’s first official astronaut has been picked for a five month mission on ISS in 2015.
Astronaut Michael Foale was born in Britain, but he flew on Mir as an American. Britain meanwhile had banned spending any government money on space exploration in the 1960s, and hadn’t changed that policy until about two years ago. If the reaction to Canadian Chris Hatfield’s ISS mission is any guide, this mission will liven things up a bit for space exploration in the old country.
Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!
From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.
“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.
All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.
It ain’t just the IRS: A judge in New York this week dismissed a case against a cop who broke into a home with no warrant and killed an unarmed man inside.
Video below the fold. Watch it. It is blatantly clear that the cops had no right to enter the house and entered it illegally.
The article describes how the IRS focused on harassing small organizations that could not defend themselves while leaving untouched the big organizations with the punch to fight back, the typical behavior of a bully. More important, the IRS did not simply focus on harassing all small organizations, only those whose political philosophies differed from that of the President and the Democratic Party.
In other words, as I like to say, they were working for the Democratic Party, using the tax code to harass and destroy its opponents. Truly corrupt, tyrannical, and vile.
Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke
Scientists have released the first topo map of Titan.
Whereas Earth’s tallest mountain towers nearly 9 kilometers above sea level, Titan’s topographic variations are mild: Its highest point is just half a kilometer above the mean and its lowest just 1.7 kilometers below.
Overall the detail here is not very great. None of the instruments on Cassini can see anything smaller than a half kilometer, about 1,500 feet, so the data doesn’t really show us the rough details. Moreover, the best data is spotty, as it has been accumulated by about a hundred Cassini fly-bys, rather than systematically by an orbiting spacecraft.
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS targeted the conservative Catholic League for investigation because its leader had dared to criticize a rival liberal religious organization.
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS refused to grant tax exemption to a Christian conservative organization because they “criticized President Obama … and she said we did it when he was a candidate.”
A group of tea party organizations is preparing to sue the IRS for its harassment of conservatives. Key quote:
“We could lose everything. Today, it’s me and my organization, but tomorrow it could be you.”
An evening pause: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
Watch how a politician gets his underlings to do his dirty work, while keeping his own hands clean. From the 1964 film, Becket. Click through to part 15 to see that dirty work being done.
Did multiple federal agencies target True the Vote, an organization that has successfully identified numerous examples of voter fraud?
True the Vote spokesman Logan Churchwell sent Watchdog.org a timeline of the encounters, which include two unscheduled audits by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, six visits or phone calls by the Federal Bureau of Investigation looking for domestic terrorists, five rounds of questioning by the IRS over True the Vote’s application and one round over King Street Patriot’s application, both of which were filed in July 2010, and neither of which has been approved yet.
That’s not to mention the IRS audit (they actually got money back) or the audit by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and another by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The only non-federal agency mentioned above is the last.
Did Treasury inappropriately target conservatively-owned car dealerships for shutdown in the GM bailout?
This pattern was noted by conservative websites at the time, but now the question seems even more pertinent, considering the IRS scandal.
Sarah Hall Ingram, the woman who ran the IRS office which harassed conservative organizations and now runs the IRS Obamacare office, received more than $100K in bonuses for her work, three of which were large enough that they requred Presidential approval.
Her bonuses for 2010, 2011, and 2012, the years in which the harassment policy was established and put into effect, were all higher than $25K, a bonus which cannot issued without the President’s okay.
The impact of a 100 pound meteorite on the Moon in March produced the brightest flash ever recorded.
Anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion–no telescope required. For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a 4th magnitude star.
Ron Suggs, an analyst at the Marshall Space Flight Center, was the first to notice the impact in a digital video recorded by one of the monitoring program’s 14-inch telescopes. “It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” he recalls.
The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide hit the Moon traveling 56,000 mph. The resulting explosion1 packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT.
It will be really interesting to see the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images of the impact site, which can’t be taken until the spacecraft passes over the site and can photograph it.
The Mars rover Opportunity has now traveled farther than any other American rover, including the Apollo 17 rover on the Moon.
The team operating NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity received confirmation in a transmission from Mars today that the rover drove 263 feet (80 meters) on Thursday, bringing Opportunity’s total odometry since landing on Mars in January 2004 to 22.220 statute miles (35.760 kilometers). … The international record for driving distance on another world is still held by the Soviet Union’s remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 23 miles (37 kilometers) on the surface of Earth’s moon in 1973.
We have to once again remind ourselves that the roving part of Opportunity’s mission was originally only supposed to last 90 days, not 9 years.
O goody: The woman who had been in charge of the IRS office when it targeted conservatives beginning in 2010 now heads the IRS office that will enforce Obamacare.
Her name is Sarah Hall Ingram. Remember it, you will hear that name again. Meanwhile, the man who announced his resignation from the IRS today, Joseph Grant, had been her deputy until 2012. He only took over her office after that date, which means most of the scandal occurred during her tenure.
Tonight I will be appearing once again on Coast to Coast with George Noory, from 10 to 11 pm (Pacific), to talk about the end of the Kepler space mission as well as what the space telescope accomplished and will yet still accomplish. We should also touch upon some other space topics as well.
Working for the Democratic Party: Did the IRS audit the conservative Leadership Institute in 2011 as part of its effort to target conservatives for harassment?
Socialism does it again! Venezuela has run out of toilet paper.
Why is it that socialist- and communist-ruled nations always have shortages of toilet paper? The Soviet bloc was famous for its lack of toilet paper. Now Venezuela has joined the party!
The law is such an inconvenient thing: A second appeals court has ruled that Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional.
Earth under fire from the Sun!
The Sun’s sunspot production might be down, but we are still in the solar maximum, weak as it is, and this last week the Sun has been producing the strongest flares in years. The sunspot producing these flares is now rotating into a position where any further flares will be aimed at the Earth. Should be interesting.
What could go wrong? In order to enforce Obamacare, the federal government, led by the IRS, is creating the largest federal database ever of the personal tax, income, and health records of American citizens.
Known as the Federal Data Services Hub, the project is taking the IRS’s own records (for income and employment status) and centralizing them with information from Social Security (identity), Homeland Security (citizenship), Justice (criminal history), HHS (enrollment in entitlement programs and certain medical claims data) and state governments (residency).
The data hub will be used as the verification system for ObamaCare’s complex subsidy formula. All insurers, self-insured businesses and government health programs must submit reports to the IRS about the individuals they cover, which the IRS will cross-check against tax returns.
Working for the Democratic Party: Two pro-life groups were told by the IRS that they had to change their position on abortion in order to get their tax exemption request approved.
In one case, the IRS specifically told them they had to guarantee in writing that their organization would not protest against Planned Parenthood.
In other news: The U.S. Departments of Justice and Education today demanded that every college and university in the United States establish strict speech codes that would violate the First Amendment and decades of legal precedent.
“They simply did what their bosses ordered.”
Remember this story when the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress try to pin the IRS scandal on a handful of low level IRS employees.
The IRS is deeply political — and very Democratic.
The analysis explains how President Obama doesn’t have to give an order to get what he wants. Instead, the partisan nature of the people who gravitate to these government jobs gives the Democrats an advantage, naturally.
In other words, you want freedom you don’t give power to the government, for it will eventually abuse that power, no matter what.
