Does this make you feel safer? A Virginia police officer shot a family’s pet dog as he arrived to tell a family that their son had been murdered.
Your grass is too long? In Columbia County, Georgia that means a law enforcement official can enter your home without permission, bang on your bedroom door, wake you up, and yell at you about it.
A woman got the shock of her life when she woke up to find a stranger in her bedroom, yelling at her to wake up because her grass was too long. Erica Masters was asleep when Columbia County Code Compliance Officer Jimmy Vowell entered her Martinez, Georgia, home without permission to serve a violation notice for her overgrown lawn. After knocking on the woman’s door a few times, Vowell let himself and made his way into her bedroom, which was captured on surveillance video.
Click on the link to watch the video. What’s worse is that the county says it needs to investigate this more. I’d say it’s pretty cut and dried, especially as they have it on tape. Any law enforcement official who thinks he has the right to do such a thing should fired.
Don’t you feel safer? Florida police shoot and kill the wrong man after knocking on the wrong door.
The police did not identify themselves, and began firing when the man opened his door holding a gun.
A review by the IPCC of its earlier reports has admitted that the manner in which the reports were produced had serious problems and fundamental biases.
The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22). In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.
The IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18). Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18). In other words: authors are selected from a “club” of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.
The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists — a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers — was plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking. “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the IAC auditors wrote. The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25). [emphasis mine]
The sad part is that almost none of these problems have been addressed by the IPCC in producing its next report, due out sometime in 2013 or 2014.
George Orwell would be proud! The Obama administration has been caught reading the emails and personal files of a group of scientists who were critics of the FDA.
The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration has backed off and is giving Florida access to a database of noncitizens so the state can check for illegal voters.
What sadly surprises me about this is that the Obama administration obeyed the judge’s ruling. Based on this administration’s past behavior, I would have expected them to defy it.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The EPA is attempting to enforce a regulation requiring ships to use low-sulfur fuel, despite the fact that the regulation has not yet been voted on by the Senate.
The treaty amendment at issue is a 2010 agreement under the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, or MARPOL. The United States has signed onto MARPOL, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accepted the 2010 amendment. Domestic enforcement of the amendment is not permitted without ratification by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate.
And the Senate has not voted on this yet.
Racists! Against the advice of almost every farm organization the USDA is proceeding with regulations that will require farmers to individually tag every chicken and cow.
Fidelis Hegngi, a senior staff veterinarian at USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, also has his doubts. “To really truly have something like tagging work on poultry you would need to have something absolute because birds move a lot, if you don’t have something absolute, it’s not going to work. … I don’t think the technology is there yet to really implement the bird ID to be fully, fully functional,” Mr. Hegngi said. Government officials have not said whether they would check animals for identification at traffic stops.
Ms. Bergener has a simple solution to the poultry police: “I’m going to do selective passive resistance,” she said. “I’m not tagging.” …
According to the letter to OMB, the USDA’s disconnect with farmers does not stop at rules for poultry. The USDA estimates a rancher’s cost to identify cattle at 18 cents a head, but the letter cites a study from North Dakota State University that places the actual cost of cow citizenship at $20 a head.
Nowhere is it explained why the USDA is demanding such stringent ID requirements of farmers, other than to make their lives difficult and to increase the petty power of the Washington bureaucracy.
In other words, for the Obama administration it all can be summarized like this: “Voter ID bad! Chicken ID good!”
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration has decided to waive the work requirements under the 1996 welfare reform law, even though the law does not give the executive branch that right.
At least 80 House Republicans have signed a letter demanding that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) block any further funding of Obamacare.
This story illustrates two things. First, the House Republican leadership has been timid about using its power to block the implementation of Obamacare, even though the public clearly wants it blocked. Second, that about a third of the House Republican membership has already signed the letter, with more signatures expected, suggests that the bulk of the Republican Party is not as timid as their leadership. Moreover, I expect the November election to significantly strengthen this fiscally conservative trend.
Thus, it will not surprise me if we see some very radical budget cuts in the next Congress.
Racists! Five Democrats joined 239 Republicans as the House today voted to repeal Obamacare 244-185.
Repeal it! With each new estimate, the cost of Obamacare has risen. See the chart below the fold.
Obama’s initial cost estimate was $900 billion for ten years. The most recent CBO estimate is $2.6 trillion. And we all know that even this number is a lie.
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The day of reckoning looms: Another California city, San Bernardino, has decided to declare bankruptcy.
Orwell would be proud: India is in the process of biometrically identifying every one of it 1.2 billion citizens.
This is good: The number of Democrats in the House willing to join the Republicans to vote for repeal of Obamacare appears to be growing.
A campaign by scientists in England to reform that country’s libel laws.
Repeal the damn thing! A survey of doctors nationwide has found that 83% have considered abandoning the practice of medicine due to Obamacare.
The National Park Service is proposing the removal of several historic bridges in Yosemite because they interfere with water flow, according to environmentalists.
Look, why don’t they simply admit it: They really want don’t want any humans to visit these parks, and simply outlaw them all? That way, the job of the National Park Service will be so much easier: They — and their environmentalist buddies — will finally have the park to themselves to play in without being bothered by all those disgusting American citizens.
The House Appropriations Committee has approved a $1.4 billion cut in the budget of EPA, also including 31 additional riders limiting the agency’s regulatory powers.
That would make the 2013 EPA budget equivalent to its budget in the early 2000s, numbers that would hardly be crippling.
This is freedom? A Phoenix man has been jailed for holding private Bible study sessions in his own home.
Salman is the owner of Mighty Mike’s Burgers — and he is also an ordained pastor. He and his wife have been hosting Bible studies on their 4.6 acre property since 2005. The gatherings were originally attended by as many as 15 people.
Wow! As many as fifteen people! The mind boggles. Just imagine the traffic problems these mobs must have caused, especially as they gathered on a plot of land as small as 4.6 acres!
I say “Please!” and I say it loudly. Picking Ryan for number two would reverse Ronald Reagan’s biggest mistake, picking moderate George Bush Sr. as his VP. The result of that bad choice was 12 years of Bush rule in the late 1980s and in the 2000s, during which there was little effort to rein in the power or size of government. In fact, the Bushes did a lot to increase government’s power and size.
Picking Ryan as VP would place a competent fiscal conservative into the limelight and make such a person a leading contender for the Presidency in future years. It would also help demonstrate again that the 2010 election was a trend, not a fluke.
Is the U.S. government reading your emails without a warrant? The answer appear to be “Maybe.”
And the stance of the Obama administration?
The Justice Department and the Obama administration had a chance to settle the issue in April 2011, during a Senate hearing on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Instead, officials with both the Commerce and Justice departments failed to provide any clarity. Instead, a Justice Department official argued against extending Fourth Amendment protections — specifically strict warrant requirements — to email, saying that doing so would hinder investigations. “Congress should consider carefully the adverse impact on criminal as well as national security investigations if a probable-cause warrant were the only means to obtain such stored communications,” James Baker, associate deputy attorney general, testified at the hearing.
This behavior is not only immoral it is constitutionally illegal. It should stop.
Job growth amounted to a disappointing 80,000, below analyst expectations of 90-100K, while the jobless rate remained the same at 8.2%:
Read the whole article. There’s a lot more, all of its depressing and trending downward.
While no President should be blamed entirely for the unemployment numbers, the policies of any President do have a direct influence on those numbers, and should bear some responsibility, especially in this era where we have ceded so much power to the federal government. Consider this graph (below the fold), which shows the “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” The steep upward swing, beginning in 2008, sadly corresponds too closely with the beginnings of the Obama administration. And it is with this administration that we have seen the worst deficits, the most regulation, and the biggest increase in the power of government in our lifetimes. It is thus no surprise the economy has crumbled.
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Obamacare marches on: “There’s already 13,000 pages of regulations, and they’re not even done yet.”
How well does your Congressman uphold his oath to uphold the Constitution? The new Freedom Index will tell you!
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. [emphasis mine]
A warning, and prediction, for November.
Last week I received an email from the local Tucson tea party, asking if I would be willing to attend a demonstration today in response to last week’s Supreme Court decision on Obamacare. To quote the email,
We would like to stage two simultaneous protests against the train wreck they call ObamaCare, at two separate locations Monday July 2nd, 4:00pm-5:45pm. 75 people at both locations are needed to make the necessary impact. They say the Tea Party is dead. What say ye? We need your commitment.
Today those protests took place at two different prominent street corners in the Tucson area. At each location there were about fifty people lining the sidewalk and holding signs and American flags out to passing motorists. My wife Diane and I went to one of those protests. Here are my impressions:
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