An eight grade high school student, suspended from school for wearing an NRA t-shirt, now faces the possibility of a year in jail.
My heart bleeds: A Democratic Congressman thinks it “is simply not fair” to make his staffers subject to Obamacare like everyone else.
The problem it seems is that
Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting. The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.
Well, ain’t that just too damn bad. As I say, my heart bleeds.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: It appears that Homeland Security and Customs both train their officers to believe that pilots have “no right to refuse a search” of their planes.
To put it another way, these agencies think that they don’t need a warrant to search the private property of pilots.
Coming soon to a blue state near you! Detroit announces that it will default on its debt today.
The City currently faces approximately $17 billion in total liabilities. Detroit is insolvent and cannot meet its financial obligations without a significant restructuring.
It is important to note that Detroit has been run exclusively by Democrats for about a half century. Thus, this bankruptcy is an entirely partisan event, supported by voters who blindly insisted on one-party rule, and never questioned the incompetence or corruption of that Democratic Party.
And please, don’t argue with me by mentioning examples where Republicans screwed up. They have their own lock on stupidity, corruption, and failure. The point here, however, is to recognize that the failure in Detroit, as well as all of the recent other cities that have gone bankrupt, is because of decades of liberal Democratic rule, where money got funneled to unionized city employees at the expense of the taxpayers, with no regard to cost or affordability.
And if you doubt me, read this history of Detroit’s last fifty years.
Why doctors are bailing out of health insurance.
And yes, Obamacare is a major reason, though not the entire reason. It is instead the worst symptom of an on-going philosophical failure that goes back decades.
Stonewalling: Not one tea party group has yet been contacted by the FBI, one month after the IRS scandal began.
Worse, the head of the FBI can’t even name the FBI person in charge of the investigation.
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan lit into Mueller for his lack of knowledge during a House judiciary committee hearing. “This is the most important issue in front of the country in the last six weeks, and you don’t know who the lead investigator is?” Jordan asked, sounding shocked.
“At this juncture, no I do not,” Mueller responded.
“Do you know if you’ve talked to any of the victims?” Jordan went on. “Have you talked to any of the groups that were targeted by their government? Have you met with any of the tea party groups since May 14, 2013?”
“I don’t know what the status of the interviews are by the team that’s on it,” Mueller said.
Reached for comment Thursday afternoon, the FBI’s Washington, D.C. press office transferred TheDC to a long-ringing phone line and eventually hung up.
I have embedded the video of this hearing testimony below the fold. Watch and you will know that the claims of “outrage” by Obama and Holder are utter crap.
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The law is such an inconvenient thing: An audit has revealed that in 2010 and 2011 more than 1,000 IRS employees misused government charge cards.
The key quote from the article is this conclusion from the audit:
The inspector general’s bottom line conclusion in this area was that the IRS is more tolerant of its own employees who misuse government charge cards than it is of American taxpayers who fail to pay their taxes in a timely manner.
“Of particular concern is the fact that the IRS ask taxpayers to voluntarily pay taxes owed in a timely manner and yet was more tolerant when its employees became delinquent and defaulted on outstanding payments, violated the terms of the Citibank contract, abused a Government-provided resource (travel funding), and compromised the integrity of the IRS.”
Finding out what’s in it: Under Obamacare it looks like health insurance will be unaffordable for most low wage workers.
I guess that’s why Obama and the Democrats officially named Obamacare the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”. Like most badly written government laws, it is achieving exactly the opposite of its intentions.
The world upside down: The Obama administration demands the right to snoop on American private communications, but it specifically forbids any spying in mosques.
Which might explain why this administration completely failed to catch the Boston marathon bombers, despite plenty of evidence that they were a threat.
No matter. They’ve got us covered. If anyone decides to criticize Obama they will be right on the case!
We’re here to help you: A researcher of fuel cells, manhandled and arrested because he used the wrong mailing labels in selling and shipping sodium to fund his research, was then prosecuted by the EPA because he wasn’t home to maintain his sodium supplies.
On May 27, 2004, federal agents in two black SUVs, waving assault rifles, forced Krister’s car off the road. Manhandling him as if he were a terrorist, they arrested, interrogated, and jailed him. For what? Putting the wrong shipping label—with the correct instructions, mind you—on a box of raw sodium that he sold on eBay.
A jury saw that it was an honest mistake and found Krister “not guilty.” But while Krister was on trial, sodium from his experiments sat in steel drums at an industrial warehouse. The Environmental Protection Agency learned of the additional sodium, determined that Krister had “abandoned” it, and charged him with a federal crime.
Although Krister’s expert witness testified that the sodium was stored properly, a jury found Krister guilty. He served 13 months in federal prison and eight more in a halfway house.
So, what did he do that was morally wrong? Nothing. Not that this matters to our lovely federal government. He did not obey their rules to the letter, even when they themselves made it impossible for him to do so. Thus, he must be destroyed.
The new freedom: The Secret Service raided a man’s home expressly and solely because he was a frequent critic of President Obama.
The man wasn’t violent, had never threatened Obama in any way (something the Secret Service admitted). His only crime was that he expressed his first amendment rights to criticize the president. For that, his house was searched and he was threatened.
O goody: Republican Lindsey Graham said today that he’d be willing to censor our mail if he thought it would help catch terrorists.
“In World War II, the mentality of the public was that our whole way of life was at risk, we’re all in. We censored the mail. When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter was written back from the battlefield to home, they looked at what was in the letter to make sure they were not tipping off the enemy,” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don’t think it is.”
This guy hasn’t a clue. The example he gives does not apply, as a military officer is under a different set of rules than ordinary citizens. If we do as he suggests, we will lower ourselves to the level of the thugs and dictators and bullies we supposedly oppose.
Then again, I’m not sure we haven’t done this already.
The whistleblower who leaked the NSA surveillance program to the press has gone public and is talking. Key quote:
Q: Does your family know you are planning this?
A: “No. My family does not know what is happening … My primary fear is that they will come after my family, my friends, my partner. Anyone I have a relationship with …
I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. I am not going to be able to communicate with them. They [the authorities] will act aggressively against anyone who has known me. That keeps me up at night.” [emphasis mine]
It tells us how far the United States has fallen if this man fears our government so much he thinks that government will go after his family.
Read the whole interview. It is quite horrifying, especially now that we know there are federal agents willing to use their power to target specific people solely because of their politics.
The National Security Agency can secretly access user data provided by as many as fifty American companies, ranging from credit rating agencies to internet service providers.
The furor this week over this NSA snoop scandal is fascinating to me. The snooping really isn’t news, as it has been known for years that the NSA delves into these kinds of records in its effort to identify terrorist activity.
So, why the sudden furor and outrage? Up until a few weeks ago, most Americans assumed the federal government restricted this kind of snooping to foreign sources and to specifically hunting for terrorists. Now, however, after the IRS scandal, the public realizes that this government, under Obama at least, is quite willing to abuse its power for partisan political reasons. Under Obama, the IRS was used to target innocent Americans, merely because they disagreed with Obama. The public now realizes that it is also likely that this administration will abuse its access to the private information gathered by NSA, and that sends chills up people’s spines.
Thus, the furor. This kind of snooping is suddenly perceived as a real threat to Americans.
An evening pause: As this is June 6, the anniversary of D-Day in World War II, let’s watch John Wayne show us how Americans once did it. From the 1962 film, The Longest Day.
The KGB comes to America: A senator asks Attorney General Holder if the Obama administration has spied on Congress with its access to Verizon phone records and Holder refuses to answer.
Video below the fold.
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Despite the failure of any climate model to predict the climate, the Obama administration is increasing the cost and strictness of regulation because of what it sees as the “social cost of carbon dioxide.”
[E]ssentially, the government is now incorporating newer climate models that capture the future damage from sea-level rise more explicitly. Those models also project that agriculture will suffer more heavily in a hotter world. So, in its central estimate, the federal government now assumes a ton of carbon-dioxide emitted in 2013 does roughly $36 in damage, rather than its previous estimate of $22, with the value rising each year.
Meanwhile, new data also suggests increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might actually be beneficial, not damaging.
Shouldn’t the EPA and the Obama administration get their heads out of the sand?
Two IRS employees in Cincinnati have told congressional investigators that officials in Washington directed and established the policy of harassing conservative groups that began in 2010.
I especially like this quote:
Hofacre said she was outraged last month when IRS higher-ups, including Lois Lerner, then the head of the IRS tax-exempt division, blamed the problem on employees in Cincinnati. “I was furious,” Ms. Hofacre told interviewers. “It looked like Lois Lerner was putting it on us.”
Yup, that is exactly what Lerner was doing — looking for a fall guy.
Two more IRS agents have been put on leave.
Both are charged with accepting free food and other items inappropriately. One is also implicated in the IRS harassment scandal and is the deputy to Sarah Hall Ingram, who now runs the IRS Obamacare office and was in charge of the enforcement division when it was implementing the harassment policy.
