Tag: freedom

The long range medical study of 100,000 children from birth to adulthood that Congress mandated fourteen years ago and has already spent a billion dollars without even getting started has just been delayed again after an outside review has raised new questions.

9:14 am

Pigs in medicine: The long range medical study of 100,000 children from birth to adulthood that Congress mandated fourteen years ago and that has already spent a billion dollars without even getting started has just been delayed again after an outside review has raised new questions.

I’ve reported on this project before. The idea is laudable but the implementation has been nothing but pure pork. Fourteen years and a billion dollars merely to design the study? Hey, if you believe this has anything to do with medical research I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you real cheap!

0 comments

The lawyer for True The Vote — one of the groups targeted by the IRS and other federal agencies for harassment — has just issued a very blunt letter to the Department of Justice that puts them and the IRS very much in the hot seat.

6:11 pm

The IRS time bomb ticks some more: The lawyer for True The Vote — one of the groups targeted by the IRS and other federal agencies for harassment — has just issued a very blunt letter to the Department of Justice that puts them and the IRS very much in the hot seat.

Read it all. The legalities here are not in favor of the Obama administration and the IRS. They are very exposed. The last few paragraphs of MItchell’s letter illustrate this quite starkly:

In addition to seeking responses to the questions in this letter, we also seek your consent to immediately allow a computer forensics expert selected by TTV to examine the computer(s) that is or are purportedly the source of Ms. Lerner’s “lost” emails, including cloning the hard drives, and to attempt to restore what was supposedly “lost,” and to seek to restore any and all “lost” evidence pertinent to this litigation.

We also seek access to all computers, both official and personal, used by any and all of the Defendants from and after July 1, 2010, in order to ensure preservation of the documents of all Defendants in this action.

We wish to resolve our concerns amicably but, absent your consent, we will file such motions as deemed necessary and appropriate asking the Court to require that you respond to the questions contained in this letter, and to permit such forensic examination described herein and for such other relief as may be appropriate for this egregious breach of legal authority and professional ethics.

Due to the time-sensitive and urgent nature of this request, please respond by noon on Wednesday, June 18, 2014.

These demands are entirely legal and routine in lawsuits with circumstances such as this. Even the most partisan Democratic judges in the courts are going to find it very difficult to protect the IRS and the Obama administration here.

As was said over and over and over again during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, it wasn’t the crime so much as the coverup that destroyed Richard Nixon. It looks like the same thing might be happening to Barack Obama.

7 comments

The ticking IRS IT department time bomb.

9:34 am

The ticking IRS IT department time bomb.

It’s one thing to get a political hack to lie under oath or to take a fall to keep himself viable in that world, it’s quite another to get the non political people who have no real skin in the game to be willing to perjure themselves before congress in an attempt to claim incompetence.

These guys simply aren’t going to take the fall for a bunch of political hacks.

The clock is ticking, as soon as the IT guys are under oath the IRS scandal is going to explode and that blast is going to take a lot of people with them.

The only way this bomb will go off, however, is if the Republicans in Congress light the fuse. They have to push the issue, forcing these lower level IT people to testify. Sadly, these Republicans too often act like they are afraid of their own shadow, thus letting the worst acts of corruption slip without so much as a peep.

Hopefully the results of the November election will give these guys some backbone.

7 comments

Getting the Russian Soyuz capsule prepped to take two tourists around the Moon.

8:59 am

More capitalism: Getting the Russian Soyuz capsule prepped to take two tourists around the Moon.

The key detail in this story is not so much that they are beginning to figure out the engineering upgrades necessary to fling a Soyuz capsule around the Moon but that Space Adventures has apparantly finally gotten two passengers who have put down deposits for the lunar flight. For years they have said they had one ticket holder, suspected to be James Cameron, but without a second passenger the flight could not go forward. It now appears that they have gotten a deposit from that second person.

Posted on the road in New Mexico.

0 comments

What Cantor’s loss and Graham’s win mean.

12:08 pm

What Cantor’s loss and Graham’s win mean.

I think Trende’s analysis here is the best I’ve seen of this ongoing primary election cycle. These three paragraphs especially pinpoint why things are happening as they are:

We are in a deeply anti-Washington environment, both throughout the country and in the Republican Party in particular. In this environment, representatives who pay insufficient attention to what is going on in their districts are in grave danger of losing. There are two components to this explanation.

First, analysts need to understand that the Republican base is furious with the Republican establishment, especially over the Bush years. From the point of view of conservatives I’ve spoken with, the early- to mid-2000s look like this: Voters gave Republicans control of Congress and the presidency for the longest stretch since the 1920s.

And what do Republicans have to show for it? Temporary tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, a new Cabinet department, increased federal spending, TARP, and repeated attempts at immigration reform. Basically, despite a historic opportunity to shrink government, almost everything that the GOP establishment achieved during that time moved the needle leftward on domestic policy. Probably the only unambiguous win for conservatives were the Roberts and Alito appointments to the Supreme Court; the former is viewed with suspicion today while the latter only came about after the base revolted against Harriet Miers.

His second component notes that the politicians who understand this environment win, while those who do not lose. Read the whole thing. It will help clarify not only what has happened but what will happen in the coming months.

16 comments

A petition signed by 87,000 people wants George Will fired by the Washington Post because he wrote a column saying things they don’t like.

9:46 am

Fascists: A petition signed by 87,000 people wants George Will fired by the Washington Post because he wrote a column saying things they don’t like.

The petition drive was put together by a group called UltraViolet led by Nita Chaudhary.

Who is UltraViolet co-founder Nita Chaudhary? In 2004, she was the Democratic National Committee’s first director of online. And she is the former campaign director at MoveOn.Org. … Chaudhary is also the wife of Jesse Lee, the White House’s director of progressive media and online response.

The author then asks this blunt but totally valid question:

And so I ask a genuinely scary question: does the broader progressive movement, which includes the White House media team, believe in free speech? By that I mean the actual kind of free speech, not the increasingly common progressive view where you profess fealty to the First Amendment as an anachronistic legal technicality solely so you can deflect criticism when someone calls out your totalitarian impulses. Real free speech means a culture of free speech, where we all confront opinions that bother us, in the understanding that regularly challenging our assumptions makes us a more thoughtful, cohesive, and, yes, tolerant people.

I think we can safely conclude that Chaudhary and Lee don’t believe in the meaningful kind of free speech.

And Lee is part of the team that runs the White House media operations. What does that tell us about the Democratic Party and the left?

9 comments

Why Japan (and Germany) really lost World War II.

10:23 pm

Why Japan (and Germany) really lost World War II.

The article also illustrates with facts why Russia would have lost to the U.S. as well if we had fought them then, before they got the bomb.

Read it. The facts are quite astonishing. Moreover, I have read a number of histories of World War II from the perspective of the Japanese and the Germans, and in both cases their experience matches the facts laid out by this article: The depth of the U.S. manufacturing capability — created by freedom and property rights and small government — was beyond anything the Axis powers could match. As the war continued it overwhelmed them.

24 comments

Oklahoma today joined Indiana and South Carolina in rejecting the Common Core education standards that have been imposed by the federal government.

9:32 am

Oklahoma today joined Indiana and South Carolina in pulling out of the Common Core education standards that have been imposed by the federal government.

All told, seventeen states are pushing back against the federal standards, with four states, Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia, refusing to participate at all.

2 comments
1 … 583 584 585 586 587 … 683