With friends like this, who needs enemies? Republican John Boehner, Speaker of the House, agrees to consider any gun control bill passed by the Senate.
Why do they need them? Homeland Security has purchased almost 3000 armored vehicles and has had them retrofitted for use on the American streets.
Another chance at killing Obamacare in the Supreme Court?
We are doomed, but not because of the sequester, but because of how meaningless it is compared to the scale of the debt.
The censoring of Google maps, by Google and governments.
This is a complex issue, described in great detail by the article. Very much worth reading.
Pushback: The boycott by gun and ammo manufacturers of anti-gun states has now grown to over 100.
The Obama administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity — cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting.
A 2011 Government Accountability Office report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester.
Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It’s firemen first. That’s the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget, and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office, stacked with nepotistic incompetents, remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the firetruck — the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts.
After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall.
The only reason sequestration will cause a shut down of government services will because Barack Obama and his administration choose to do so. Keep that in mind if you discover that lines at the airport have suddenly grow to hours.
A wonderful montage of people refusing to answer questions at Border Patrol checkpoints.
I’ve embedded the montage below the fold. I especially like the one near the end, where the man driving the motor home expressly tells the officer that he is not exiting his vehicle and that they are not getting inside without a warrant. The officer eventually has to back down because that is exactly right: without a warrant they have no right to search his vehicle.
The best however is the last.
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Who woulda thunk it? A new GAO report says that Obamacare will increase the federal government’s long term debt by $6.2 trillion.
The worse part of this is that these government predictions of debt are always wrong, but in the wrong direction. If this is the prediction, the actual increase in debt caused by Obamacare is likely to be far higher.
Note also that this is no surprise to the Republicans who opposed this bill. It also proves just how much Obama was either incompetent or simply lying when he said this:
“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future,” Obama told a joint-session of Congress in September 2009. “I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.”
Incompetence: Even as Democratic lawmakers scream for more gun control laws, the enforcement of the current laws by the Obama administration has declined by 40 percent.
The Syracuse study found the number of federal weapons prosecutions fell from about 11,000 in 2004 to about 6,000 under the Obama administration in 2011 — and ticked up to 7,770 in 2012. The GOP letter also cited data from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), which found in 2010, of 6 million Americans who applied to buy a gun, less than 2 percent — or 76,000 — were denied. Of those, the ATF referred 4,732 cases for prosecution. Of them, just 44 were prosecuted, and only 13 were punished for lying or buying a gun illegally.
Gee, if these idiots really care about “the children,” maybe the first thing they should do is handle the responsibilities they’ve already given themselves?
We’re here to help you: Homeland Security seizes a man’s boat because they made an error on his custom’s paperwork.
That he eventually got it back is completely beside the point.
The question is worth asking, based on the described series of attacks. Too bad it is considered racist to ask it.
