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?
More reporters admit to being threatened by the White House.
What is shameful about this is how willing these reporters — some of whom are quite powerful — to tolerate this abusive, intolerant, and even oppressive behavior from this White House. Imagine if an official in the Bush White House had done the same? Would these same reporters have simply shrugged their shoulders and made believe it didn’t matter? Not on your life.
In other words, these mainstream reporters are nothing more than boot-licking lackeys for Obama and the Democratic Party. They will tolerate any abuse in order to support their liberal policies and to remain their friends.
We are doomed, but not because of the sequester, but because of how meaningless it is compared to the scale of the debt.
Pushback: A major manufacturer of gun magazines says it will leave Colorado if the state legislature passes a law banning high capacity magazines.
This same stupid law, pushed by the Democrats, would also outlaw the most popular form of shotgun used by hunters. I wonder what those citizens might say about it.
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.
Pigs fly! An environmental report by the Obama administration has admitted that the Keystone oil pipeline would do little environmental damage.
Finding out what’s in it: The Obama administration today released more than 700 pages of new regulations to implement parts of Obamacare.
Won’t it be nice to have to deal with the equivalent of the Motor Vehicle Administration whenever you have to see your doctor in the future?
To me, the most irritating thing about this might not be the law itself, but having to hear people who voted for Obama complain about it. And they will complain. Everyone will. I guarantee it.
Gasp! The Democratically controlled Senate is about to mark up its first budget in four years!
It appears that sequestration and the expiration at the end of this month of the most recent continuing resolution is finally forcing the Democrats to act responsibly and actually do their job. If (and that’s a very big word) the Republicans stand firm in the House, they might be able to force the Democrats in the Senate to write a reasonable budget. For one thing, if a real budget is passed instead of the continuing resolutions we’ve been stuck with for the past four years — because of the Senate’s refusal to pass a budget — we might finally be able to stop paying for Obama’s so-called onetime 2009 stimulus bill, year after year after year.
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.
Another liberal reporter describes getting obscene and threatening emails from the White House.
Whose side are they on? A bill in Congress would strip the Constitutional rights from any Americans being prosecuted by an American Indian tribe under Indian law.
According to the Congressional Research Service, the language in this Senate bill, if enacted, means that “the Constitution will not apply” to Americans tried by Indian tribes for alleged acts of domestic violence. These Americans, according to the CRS, will not have recourse to the Bill of Rights.
In truth, Congress does not have the right to pass any law that voids the rights outlined in the Constitution. But this law will force citizens to go to court to fight for those rights.
More details about the law, which has already passed the Senate, here. It appears that the Republicans are once again folding like a house of cards on this battle.
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.
» Read more
Transparency! Bob Woodward said today that a senior White House official threatened him for his critical reporting of Obama concerning sequestration.
A more detailed report can be found here, with this quote:
The Obama aide, Woodward told Politico, “yelled at me for about a half hour” as well. “I’ve tangled with lots of these people,” Woodward said. “But suppose there’s a young reporter who’s only had a couple of years – or 10 years’ – experience and the White House is sending him an email saying, ‘You’re going to regret this.’ You know, tremble, tremble, tremble. I don’t think it’s the way to operate.”
Update: The White Office has backed down, making public an email written by that senior official to Woodward, apologizing for the above-mentioned threats.
Update #2: Meanwhile, partisan Democrat Lanny Davis has said that he too has been threatened by a senior White House official for writing columns that are critical of Obama.
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.
Pushback: Beretta has threatened to leave Maryland over the state’s proposed new gun bans.
Note that this was not said by a conservative, but by a very liberal commentator with whom I generally disagree. He should know, however, as he was fired by a leftwing “big media institution” for not toeing the line.
Pushback: Public pressure is now being applied to gun manufacturers who are trying to weasel out of the boycott against gun-banning states.
In other words, Armalite is trying to play both ends against the middle. They want to say they are on-board with the boycott (sort of) to placate gun owners, but they aren’t; they’re still going to continue selling to individual police officers… just not to the departments. Armalite will sell to every individual officer in the department that wants an AR-15, but they won’t sell to the department’s official purchasing agent. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
Owens suggests spending your money with other companies and I agree. We are reaching the moment where you are either for freedom or against it. And if you act against it you are not my friend and will get none of my support.
Does this make you feel safer? “All you need to know to get on a plane these days is the color of your house.”
I realize that this is actually an example of the TSA trying to be helpful to a U.S. citizen, but it also illustrates the complete uselessness of all TSA airport security.
Pushback: The number of gun companies who have decided to stop selling to anti-second amendment state governments has grown to 44.
None of the companies listed include any of the big gun or ammo manufacturers, but give it time. The government is sometimes their biggest customer, so to sacrifice that income requires a level of commitment they might not yet be ready to make. Nonetheless, I expect it is only a matter of time before some of the heavy players join this effort, if only to apply pressure to state governments. And when a few do, all will feel pressure to join in.
We are doomed: A new poll finds that the public opposes cuts to virtually all types of spending.
We can make believe we can keep spending as we have, but reality always wins.
Finding out what’s in it: Because of the cost of Obamacare, employers are dropping healthcare coverage for spouses.
By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional.
Chicken Little report: The head of the Transportation Department today threatened long delays if the sequestration cuts take place March 1.
Either he is lying or he has decided to make the most harmful cuts to hurt the public the most. Sequestration will lower the budget of the FAA by 8.2 percent, which will cut that agency’s budget from $18.7 to $17.2 billion, which is still more than the FAA got in 2009, by $300 million. I don’t remember long delays and limited airport operations at that time, do you? See here for my sources.
There is no reason to shut down operations or cause significant travel delays, unless LaHood wants to cause pain so that the money flow keeps pouring in.
Update: One more comment. It took me all of five minutes of research to come up with the past budgets of the FAA to give the sequestration cuts some context. I think it disgraceful that the reporter for this story couldn’t do the same.
Doesn’t this make you feel safer? The TSA detained a wheelchair-bound three-year-old girl, took away her stuffed doll, and refused to allow the parents to videotape the child’s pat down. Videotape at the link.
It is necessary for more people to challenge these thugs. (I don’t care that the agents in the video tried to be polite to the mother, they were still acting like brainless thugs.)
The anti-choice left’s disarming of the American woman.
As I said, the fascists are out, and they appear no longer timid about telling us who they are and how they want to control our lives.
