The surest sign that the Democrats will lose the recall vote there today: “Mainstream media escapes from Wisconsin.”
What could go wrong? The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has asked the Utah state legislature for permission to scan the license plates of all cars driving on Interstate 15.
Worse, they are already scanning plates in Texas and California, and plan to add Arizona to the list.
I especially like this quote from a Utah legislator in response to the request. “I’ll be quite frank with you. A lot of us in Utah don’t trust the federal government.” Do tell.
Repeal it! More colleges have announced plans to drop their student healthplans due costs imposed by Obamacare.
Lenoir-Rhyne University of Hickory, N.C., the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., and Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa—all private liberal-arts colleges—have told students they are dropping school-sponsored limited-benefit insurance plans starting in the fall. The three colleges said students’ premiums would have gone up roughly tenfold, and they said they could no longer justify making students sign up if they didn’t have their own insurance. [emphasis mine]
And if they don’t drop their healthplan?
The State University of New York at Plattsburgh said its 2011-2012 premium was $440 for a plan that covered up to $10,000 for each injury or sickness. Officials said the premium for the coming year would be $1,300 to $1,600 for a plan that meets the new requirements. The school will continue to require students to carry insurance, either through the school or not.
How’s that hope and change working out for you, students?
Not good: The man tapped to head Romney’s transition team should he win the election favors implementing Obamacare on the state level.
The Romney campaign responded to say that Romney intents to repeal Obamacare fully once in office. Still, to pick this man to head his transition team is worrisome.
Bipartisan corruption: A bank run by an Obama fund-raiser has gotten an Republican-led House committee to exempt that bank from provisions of the Dodd-Frank act, saving the bank $300 million.
Any law that allows legislators to grant individual waivers isn’t a law at all but a form of extortion: Pay up or you won’t get your exemption. Dodd-Frank, as well as much of all the legislation passed by Congress in the past decade, should be repealed so that everyone gets the exemption.
Florida has decided to continue to purge its election rolls of illegal and ineligible voters, in defiance of the Obama administration’s demand that it stop.
The state is enforcing the law, as written on the books. Yet Eric Holder’s Justice Department somehow thinks that this is illegal. Maybe someone should teach Holder and his attorneys how to read.
In related news, Holder’s Justice Department is suing a Las Vegas casino because the casino followed the law in verifying that all its employees were legal residents of the United States.
Theft by government: A county government in California, rather than buy private property through eminent domain, is using zoning regulations to force owners out so the county doesn’t have to pay any compensation.
A government study has found that the more educated in science and math an American is, the more likely they will be skeptical of the dangers of global warming.
The results of the survey are especially remarkable as it was plainly not intended to show any such thing: Rather, the researchers and trick-cyclists who carried it out were doing so from the position that the “scientific consensus” (carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous) is a settled fact, and the priority is now to find some way of getting US voters to believe in the need for urgent, immediate and massive action to reduce CO2 emissions.
Having discovered that educating the public will defeat these activists in their goals, the researchers than suggest, like Paul Krugman, that maybe the U.S. government should stop trying to educate people and focus on fake propaganda instead.
What does this tell us? A black former Democrat Congressman who also gave the seconding speech for Obama’s nomination in 2008 has decided to switch parties and become a Republican.
Finding out what’s in it: A college has been forced to double the healthcare fees it charges its students, and lays the blame solely on Obamacare.
Corruption in Big Science: A U.S. senator is demanding the NIH explain how it could give a $2 million grant to a researcher previously punished for not reporting financial conflicts of interest who is also under investigation by the Department of Justice.
The wolves guarding the chicken house: The top GSA official involved in the extravagant Las Vegas conference has been reinstated.
A conservative blogger was arrested today in Maryland — for blogging.
The blogger was arrested merely because he had written critical posts about leftwing activist and convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin. Kimberlin claimed the blogger’s posts caused others to harass him.
If this stands, it makes everyone who writes anything responsible for the misbehavior of others.
Modern intellectualism: At a Harvard conference, a scientist has proposed that the government should require people to exercise in order to control their weight.
At a “Harvard Thinks Big” confab earlier this year, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman offered his own bright idea for tackling the nation’s obesity epidemic. Merely medicating it won’t do, he said, and education is well-meaning but ineffective. His answer? “Coercion. … We should start telling corporations what to do.” But not just corporations. He also advocated – “to hearty applause,” the Harvard Gazette noted – “requiring people to exercise.” [emphasis mine]
I emphasis the applause to illustrate that this tyrannical attitude is not unusual in academic circles. The modern elite community is very arrogant, and believes it has the right to tell everyone else what to do.
Yesterday my wife Diane and I took my 94-year-old mother on a sightseeing trip to see the Casa Grande ruins southeast of Phoenix, “the largest known structure left of the Ancestral People of the Sonoran Desert.”
This four story high structure was built around 1350 AD from bricks made of concrete-like caliche mud, with the floors and roofs supported by beams of pine, fir, and juniper brought from as far away as fifty miles. (The rooflike structure above the ruins was built by the National Park Service in order to protect it from rain.)
Though impressive, I must admit I’ve seen far more impressive American Indian ruins elsewhere. Casa Grande, which means “Great House” in Spanish, suffered as a tourist attraction from two faults:
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Banned by the Forest Service from using heavy equipment to repair their water supply, Tombstone residents are planning an event in June where thousands will gather to do the work manually with shovels.
According to the Tombstone Shovel Brigade’s website, the group was established for several reasons, including to bring public awareness to the issues facing the city regarding repairs to its historic water system and the “limited cooperation” the city has received from the Forest Service.
“Another goal of the Tombstone Shovel Brigade is to get a lot of work done using hand tools and horses. A few workers can only make so much progress but a couple of thousand people with picks, shovels, ropes and chains can accomplish a lot and will send a loud message to the National Forest Service and the federal government,” states the website.
What could go wrong? China, Russia, Brazil, India and other UN members have proposed giving the UN more control over the governance and operation of the internet.
Fortunately, it appears that members of Congress from both parties seem hostile to this idea.
The first notes in the longest and slowest piece of music in history, designed to go on for 639 years, will be played on a German church organ this Wednesday.
But is it really music?
Tip of the iceberg: The head of the National Weather Service stepped down on Friday in response to an inspector general’s report that accused the agency of giving $43 million in unjustified bonuses and contract extensions.
NOAA officials could not, for example, provide written explanation for why they paid $303,000 in awards on a $10 million contract to upgrade personnel and equipment for a satellite operations control center, the report says. An $80 million contract for the National Weather Service’s river, flood and drought forecasting specified that the contract had to be evaluated annually. But the board assigned to evaluate the contract never met, the report says, nor had a chairperson been assigned. Even so, auditors found that the contract was renewed five times to the tune of $40 million.
Of the nine contractors, NOAA gave eight high ratings, which allowed contractors to reap the “substantial award fees,” the report says. As a result, auditors concluded that NOAA’s pay system “provided little incentive for contractors to excel in executing their contracts.”
As I said earlier this week, this kind of story isn’t the exception but the rule. For years now our culture has condemned anyone who dared raise questions about any of the funding for science, to the point where the funding of science could no longer be questioned at all.
The result: vast sums of money have either been wasted or handed out as payoffs.
It is time we question everything, to the penny. The federal government can no longer afford to spend its money so sloppily, and the world of science community will be better off anyway if they are forced to justify their projects more rigorously.
“This is the most despicable violation of religious liberty that this nation has ever seen.”
Brought to you by Obamacare and the White House.
A graveyard of ships — in the desert.
This environmental disaster in the Soviet Union was caused more by that failed country’s centralized state-run command society than the technological society they were trying to create. Though technology in any kind of society can certainly do harm to the environment, when all decisions are controlled by a single entity — in this case the communist Soviet government — it is practically impossible to adapt and adjust when things start going wrong.
In a free democracy, however, you have many safety valves. No project is ever so big that it effects everything, and if things start to go wrong the chaos of freedom will allow people to choose differently, correcting the problem more quickly.
New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on Friday suggested on HBO that scientists should get together and lie to the public about a threat of alien invasion in order to create a crisis that will force the public to agree to big government projects.
To quote him:
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How nice of them: The TSA has decided to no longer require the elderly to remove their jackets, belts, and shoes when going through airport security.
My emotional response to the TSA about this are two words not appropriate in mixed company, the first starting with “F” and the second with “Y”. My more rational response is to call for the end of this damn agency so the U.S. can get back to being the home of free and land of the brave.
You can’t make this stuff up: The Democrat mayor of a New Jersey town and his son have been arrested for hacking into the website run by an organization trying to get him recalled from office.
The campaign of political terrorism by the left.
In this post you will hear that audio clip. You will also read about a months-long campaign of harassment carried out by at least three individuals: Ron Brynaert, Neal Rauhauser, and Brett Kimberlin — much of it directed at critics of Brett Kimberlin. This harassment includes repeated references to critics’ family members, workplace complaints, publication of personal information such as home addresses and pictures of residences, bogus allegations of criminal activity, whisper campaigns, frivolous legal actions, and frivolous State Bar complaints.
And finally, you will hear a comparison of one of those men’s voices to that of the man who made the call that sent police to my home. And you’ll read a declaration from a forensic audio expert comparing those two voices.
The phone call falsely claimed that the blogger had shot his wife, causing a swat team to descend on the blogger’s home with their guns raised. As he noted, “When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun.”
That these leftwing thugs are from the left is only relevant in that too many members of the left excuse this kind of behavior. Bad behavior is bad behavior, no matter what one’s political beliefs. These individuals should be shunned by the left, and prosecuted if they commit illegal acts that threaten the lives of their opponents.
“Cronies ‘R’ us,” an illustrative example of why conservatives don’t trust the Republican Party.
As this story points out, the problem in Washington is not merely the fact that the Democrats like to spend other people’s money like water (which they do). It is also because too many established members of the Republican party have been all too willing to join them in this spendthrift behavior.
It is for this reason the tea party movement exists, and why so many established Republicans, like Richard Lugar in Indiana, are getting kicked out of office. The movement isn’t partisan, it is merely focused on making whatever progress it can. Kick out Democrats wherever possible, and do the same for those Republicans who like to be me-too Democrats.
Destroying polio: only three nations left to go.
It is revealing that the only three nations where polio still survives — Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan — happen to be poor, corrupt, and heavily dominated or influenced by Islam. Moreover, the article notes that India just celebrated its first full year free from polio, even though it had been thought that the country would be a difficult challenge given its high population density and what the article calls “poor hygiene.” We shouldn’t be surprised, however. Since India abandoned socialism in the early 1990s and embraced capitalism and freedom, the country has thrived. And with increased wealth comes better education and better living conditions, both of which will aid in getting the population to cooperate in this effort.
Going on a trip? Check out the National Speed Trap Exchange.
