Tag: government

Only two weeks before Obamacare goes into effect, the law’s health exchanges can’t figure out what people will have to pay for coverage.

10:32 am

Not finding out what’s in it: Only two weeks before Obamacare goes into effect, the law’s health exchanges can’t figure out what people will have to pay for coverage.

It appears the software for determining premiums doesn’t work. But don’t worry, the Democrats voted to fund this turkey today!

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The Republican battle plan for defunding Obamacare while keeping the government operating.

10:12 am

The Republican battle plan for defunding Obamacare while keeping the government operating.

What makes me skeptical is their fear of having the government shut down, a fear that somehow does not worry the Democrats. While Obama and the Democrats are quite willing to shut everything down to save Obamacare, the Republicans don’t seem to have the same courage. Under these circumstances, they will likely lose the battle.

And why is it that everyone assumes the Republicans will be blamed for the shutdown when they seem to be the ones most interested in avoiding it?

Update: The House has now voted to defund Obamacare but fund the goverment.

Note that the Democrats in the House have once again voted in support of Obamacare, a law that is very clearly destroying the health insurance business.

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Another leak from the IPCC shows that politicians in Belgium, Hungary, Germany, and the United States attempted to pressure the scientists writing the report to cover up the lack in global temperature rise since 1998.

7:11 pm

Another leak from the IPCC shows that politicians in Belgium, Hungary, Germany, and the United States attempted to pressure the scientists writing the report to cover up the lack in global temperature rise since 1998.

[L]eaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years. Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change. Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat – and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve. The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter.

Two points: First, for this article to refer to any legitimate scientist who questions the theory of human-caused global warming to be called a “denier” offends me beyond words, as regular readers of this website know.

Second, this leak proves once again the foolishness of allowing politicians to get involved in the scientific process. They should be kept as far away as possible, at all times.

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Home Depot joins Walgreens in dumping tens of thousands of employees from their employer heath insurance plan, because of Obamacare.

12:43 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Home Depot joins Walgreens in dumping tens of thousands of employees from their employer heath insurance plan, because of Obamacare. Key quote:

The accelerating shift of workers to Obama’s taxpayer-funded network will likely drive up costs to taxpayers, disadvantage companies that try to pay for their employees’ health-care and make more voters dependent on health-care decisions made by Democratic officials and legislators. The switch is also making a mockery of Obama’s promise that Americans would be able to keep their pre-Obamacare insurance if they prefer. “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,” he said in June 2009. [emphasis mine]

Obama’s statement in 2009 was an obvious lie and an insult to everyone’s intelligence. Unfortunately, it appears he estimated the intelligence of too many Americans quite rightly.

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The House vote to fund the government but not Obamacare will force vulnerable Senate Democrats to either endorse the unpopular law again or shut it down.

9:57 am

The House vote to fund the government but not Obamacare will force vulnerable Senate Democrats to either endorse the unpopular law again or shut it down.

Exactly. Force these Democrats to once again endorse this turkey of a law, just as it is about to go into effect. Even if the Republicans eventually back down, they will have successfully put these senators on record, only a year before the next election.

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IRS officials specifically targeted conservatives for harassment because they thought that was what President Obama wanted.

9:00 am

Working for the Democratic Party: IRS officials specifically targeted conservatives for harassment because they thought that was what President Obama wanted, according to an interim House report.

In the report, the investigators do not find evidence that IRS employees received orders from politicians to target the tea party, and agency officials deny overt bias or political motives. But the report says the IRS was at least taking cues from political leaders and designed special policies to review tea party applications, including dispatching some of them to Washington to be vetted by headquarters. “As prominent politicians publicly urged the IRS to take action on tax-exempt groups engaged in legal campaign intervention activities, the IRS treated tea party applications differently,” the staff report concludes. “Applications filed by tea party groups were identified and grouped due to media attention surrounding the existence of the tea party in general.”

It was about this time that both Obama and Democrats in Congress were demanding the IRS go after conservative organizations.

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New documents show that more than 80% of the organizations targeted by the IRS in 2011 for harassment were conservative.

10:22 pm

Working for the Democratic Party: New documents show that more than 80% of the organizations targeted by the IRS in 2011 for harassment were conservative.

A handful of liberal organizations were definitely targeted for close inspection, but it appears to me that these were merely picked to give the IRS some cover while it mainly focused at harassing as many conservatives organizations as possible.

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Another look at the leaked IPCC draft report.

10:11 pm

Another look at the leaked IPCC draft report. Key quote:

To those of us who have been following the climate debate for decades, the next few years will be electrifying. There is a high probability we will witness the crackup of one of the most influential scientific paradigms of the 20th century, and the implications for policy and global politics could be staggering.

The article also takes a close look at the contradiction between the data and the IPCC models and says this:

[W]hat is commonly called the “mainstream” view of climate science is contained in the spread of results from computer models. What is commonly dismissed as the “skeptical” or “denier” view coincides with the real-world observations. Now you know how to interpret those terms when you hear them.

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India space officials have decided to completely replace the second stage of the GSLV rocket that leaked during the rocket’s scrubbed launch last month.

8:36 am

India’s space agency has decided to completely replace the second stage of the GSLV rocket that leaked during the rocket’s scrubbed launch last month.

“Although the exact reasons for the leakage in the second stage of the engine, which prevented the launch on August 19, are being probed by the team headed by K Narayanan, it has been decided that a new liquid second stage (GS-2) will be assembled to replace the leaked stage,” said the official. He added that the process of assembling has begun, and that besides the GS-2, all the four liquid strap-on stages are being replaced with new ones.

That leak must have been quite significant for them to make this decision.

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The Obama administration has decided to actually follow the law and not give its Democratic union buddies a waiver on Obamacare.

3:58 pm

Finding out what’s in it: The Obama administration has decided to actually follow the law and not give its Democratic union buddies a waiver on Obamacare.

It shows us how far we have fallen that we are surprised that the Obama administration is going to follow the law, as written and passed by Congress, rather than arbitrarily rewrite that law illegally into order to help its political allies. Nowadays we are increasingly expecting this administration to treat the law as a plaything that it can ignore willy-nilly, without any opposition from anyone.

This story also illustrates the danger of blindly supporting the actions of one political party. Union leaders have for decades allied themselves with the Democratic Party, without ever really questioning the wisdom of anything those Democrats were doing. Obamacare was only one example of this foolishness. Now they are going to suffer badly for their blind partisanship.

It would have been much smarter for those unions to have done what conservatives and tea party advocates demanded back in 2009 and 2010: Read the damn law before you pass it!

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The increasing harassment of their members by Homeland Security has caused the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) to begin a political campaign against the agency.

11:54 am

Gotta have your KGB: The increasing harassment of their members by Homeland Security has caused the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) to begin a political campaign against the agency.

The link above takes you what looks like a fundraising letter sent about by the AOPA to its membership. The significance is that they are centering their campaign around the harassment by Homeland Security, which suggests that this harassment has become a very big issue within this community.

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Before the Minnesota Obamacare health exchange has even officially opened there has been a security breach of the private health records of more than 2,400 individuals.

9:27 am

That didn’t take long: Before the Minnesota Obamacare health exchange has even officially opened there has been a security breach of the private health records of more than 2,400 individuals.

Stay tuned for more screw-ups and the misuse of private health records for political purposes. The Obamacare health exchanges are inherently insecure.

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Fifteen so-called journalists have made their political preferences official by joining the Obama administration.

9:23 am

Working for the Democratic Party: Fifteen so-called journalists have made their political preferences official by joining the Obama administration.

That almost all of these media types have ended up working for a Democratic administration illustrates the one-sided culture in the mainstream media. If you aren’t for the Democratic Party, you won’t survive as a journalist at these news outlets. In fact, it is likely that you won’t even get a job there.

More here. This second article is absolutely worth reading because it dissects the leftwing and partisan culture of the mainstream press by looking at the employment history of these mainstream media journalists as well their history of bad and biased reporting.

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Indiana University is laying off 50 maintenance workers to avoid Obamacare costs.

4:34 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Indiana University is laying off 50 maintenance workers to avoid Obamacare costs.

The employees will now work for an independent company, which I am sure will either make sure its total staffing is under 50 or those employees work less than 30 hours per week in order to also avoid Obamacare.

The numbers here aren’t gigantic, but the story is notable in that these employees and the university that had employed them almost certainly supported Obamacare and Obama blindly this last five years. The sad thing is I doubt they will finally face reality and link their troubles with his policies.

And then there’s this: Trader Joe’s to drop health insurance for part-time workers because of Obamacare.

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The two Colorado Democrats who were key instigators of that state’s new gun control laws were both decisively voted out of office yesterday in recall elections.

10:26 am

Pushback: The two Colorado Democrats who were key instigators of that state’s new gun control laws were both decisively voted out of office yesterday in recall elections.

The election, which came five months after the United States Senate defeated several gun restrictions, handed another loss to gun-control supporters. It also gave moderate lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.

The recall elections ousted two Democratic state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, and replaced them with Republicans. Both defeats were painful for Democrats – Mr. Morse’s because he had been Senate president, and Ms. Giron’s because she represented a heavily Democratic, working-class slice of southern Colorado.

The article says almost nothing about Angela Giron’s defeat, which I find intriguing. She was not expected to lose, considering her district was so Democratic, but her margin of defeat was actually larger than Morse’s. See also this article for a very good election analysis which suggests that any effort by Democrats to impose oppressive gun control laws is going to backfire for them very badly.

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