We’re here to help you! The Obama Administration is banning the only over-the-counter asthma inhaler because of environmental concerns.
A California couple has been hit with fines for holding a Bible study session in their home.
Long lost Arkansas moon rock found among Governor Bill Clinton archives.
Freedom of speech alert: A high school suspended a student earlier this week for merely saying “I’m a Christian. I think being a homosexual is wrong.”
We’re here to help you! The Philadelphia City Council wants to regulate the placement and color of residential satellite dishes.
On Thursday, Clarke is expected to offer final amendments to a bill requiring satellite companies to try to install dishes somewhere other than the front of a building. Roofs, rear or side yards, and backs of buildings all are acceptable, the bill says. The measure would also require some customers to paint their dishes to match the front of their buildings.
The House unexpectedly defeated a spending bill today.
The bill would have funded the government at an annual rate of $1.043 trillion, in line with a bipartisan agreement reached in August. Many conservatives want to stick with the lower figure of $1.019 trillion that the House approved in April. The measure failed by a vote of 195 to 230, with 48 of the chamber’s most conservative Republicans joining Democrats in opposition. The vote demonstrated the continued reluctance of Tea Party conservatives to compromise on spending issues, even as the public grows weary of repeated confrontation on Capitol Hill. [emphasis mine]
I have highlighted the last line of the quote above to illustrate an example of Reuters inserting its own political agenda into a story, based not on facts but on fantasy and leftwing wishful thinking. Not only is there no indication that the public is “weary of repeated confrontation,” polls and recent special elections suggest that the public is instead quite weary of politicians unwilling to cut the federal budget. It is for this reason these conservative Republicans feel so emboldened. They know the political winds are at their backs.
With the Kyoto climate treaty expiring in 2012 and with almost no chance of a new treaty being agreed to this December at the next climate meeting in Durban, South Africa, Australia and Norway have proposed extending Kyoto until 2015.
The Australia-Norway submission calls for a new timetable to finalize an international treaty that would extend the Kyoto Protocol until 2015. Kyoto, which requires nearly 40 developed nations to cut greenhouse emissions by at least 5.2 percent less than 1990 levels by 2020 during the years 2008-12, is scheduled to expire in 2012. . . . The 2015 timetable is intended to “scale-up” international efforts on climate change to attain a global goal of limiting temperature rises below 2 degrees Celsius, the Australia-Norway proposal said.
What this tells me is that the chances of a new treaty are getting slimmer and slimmer. And I think that is good news, as we really have no idea what the climate is really doing, therefore making it very premature to write any treaty that limits human freedom. For all we know, the sun might be going quiet, which in turn could lead to global cooling.
But then, we don’t really know yet, do we? And without knowing a new climate treaty might do more harm than good.
Repeal this turkey! A new survey now shows that thirty percent of employers will drop their health coverage under Obamacare.
Have doubts about the survey? Note that Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is quoted in the above article as finding it creditable.
Starting in December, all GM cars with OnStar will record all data for police and insurance, unless the owner opts out.
General Motors and the government: what a team!
Police ticket citizen for directing traffic at intersection where traffic light failed.
Gerrish said Ehrlich cleared up the mess in 10 minutes. After 15 minutes, South Pasadena police say they finally received a call about their newest traffic officer, KCBS reported. Police responded to the scene and told Ehrlich to stop and issued him a ticket, but never stepped in to direct traffic themselves.
If this doesn’t illustrate the present madness of modern government, I don’t know what does. The proper answer by the police when they arrived should have been “Thank you, sir. We will take over now.” Instead, they do the exact opposite, punishing him while refusing to solve the problem.
Now for some good reporting: A Senate committee today approved an NIH budget that trimmed the health agency’s budget by $190 million.
This report actually gives us an accurate description of the proposed budget, which offers a 2012 budget of $30.5 billion compared to the $30.7 that NIH got in 2011. For further context, note that the 2012 budget is still more than the agency got in 2009 ($30.2 billion), and more than a billion above what it got in 2008 ($29.2 billion). Anyone who cries poverty at this budget cut immediately discredits themselves.
How freedom dies: The Indiana Supreme Court has reaffirmed its earlier ruling saying that citizens have no right to resist a police officer making an illegal entry to their home.
Another ObamaCare glitch could result in some businesses being exempt from fines for not providing their workers with health insurance.
In reading the article I found its attempt to explain this situation to be quite incomprehensible. In fact, I wonder if anyone really understands this law, which helps explain why it has squelched the economy and should be repealed.
One of the judges who ruled in the Kelo property case has apologized to the owner.
Worth a look: The U.S. spy satellite Big Bird, the KH-9 Hexagon, will be on public display for the first time tomorrow, for only one day, in the parking lot of the Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.
More troubles for Democrats: A new poll says that Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein is in trouble in California.
This is a reason to pass a bill or a law? “If you love me, you’ve got to help me pass this bill!”
The story behind the Italian prosecution of six scientists and one government official over their failure to make an earthquake prediction.
As is usual in these kinds of stories, things are more complicated than they appear at first glance.
Well ain’t that a shame: Washington political staffers fear pay cuts, layoffs, and loss of perks. Some precious quotes:
“Salaries are essentially frozen and in some cases going down,” said one former senior House Democratic aide, who recently left the Hill. “That makes it very hard for some people to stay on the Hill and just promotes a culture of underappreciation.”
and
Many chiefs of staff have started with small office perks: water jugs, sodas and orange juice. One Republican lawmaker told POLITICO that aides now take up a collection because the office can’t afford coffee.
What prigs. The rest of the country is experiencing the highest unemployment and lowest income in decades, and they’re unhappy they don’t have a water cooler or coffee machine.
A September 11 memorial in New Jersey says nothing about what happened on September 11.
The stone reads, “Dedicated September 11, 2011/10 year anniversary,” followed by the names of the current township mayor, committee members and administrator. The marker does not mention the terrorists’ nearly 3,000 victims, the attacks that cost their lives or the origins of the steel. “I mean, how freaking narcissistic can you be?” [retired Police Officer Dennis] Ryan said Tuesday.
At just after midnight tonight AP named the Republican, Bob Turner, the winner of the special Congressional election in Brooklyn/Queens. At that time Turner was winning 53% to 47%, with 73% of the precinct reporting.
In looking at the results as well as the district map itself, I find myself more than astonished. The Republican Bob Turner got seventy percent of the Brooklyn vote (as of 12:05 am).
» Read more
How the Palestinian Authority trains children to hate:
Classroom incitement has been thoroughly documented as has hate-teach and hate-preach on PA TV and radio, where Jews and Israelis are represented as demonic figures; and the need to wipe Israel off the map is a frequent theme in the eulogies of suicide bombers, martyrs whose deaths in terror attacks intending mass murder endear them to Allah. The goal seems to be to create a seething, raging population of young people far more interested in wiping Israel off the earth’s face than in achieving peaceful coexistence.
And they do not wait until the children start school. Palestinian Authority and Hamas preschool television and radio programming could be called Terrorism for Tots; and such programming continues well into high school. A Hamas weekly program starred a Palestinian version of Mickey Mouse, Farfur, who tells children to pray until there is “world leadership under Islamic leadership” and in the meantime to oppose the “oppressive invading Zionist occupation.” Farfar is ultimately beaten to death by an enraged Israeli “settler,” and is replaced by an intrepid young bee who buzzes the same message to the preschool viewers. Similar messages are encouraged in the classroom with supplementary material and teacher-guided self-expression that encourage martyrdom and glorify terrorism and terrorists.
Read the whole thing. As the author notes, “Can a government so filled with hate and bigotry that they crucify their own children on the cross of jihad and Jew-hatred realistically be expected to develop a nation that will work toward peace?”
The Senate has approved a flat budget for the Department of Energy.
On Wednesday the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $4.843 billion for DOE’s Office of Science in 2012. That’s the same level as this year, and a slight bump over the $4.8 billion approved in July on a largely partisan vote by the House of Representatives covering the entire department. Although the funding is a far cry from the $5.416 billion that the Obama Administration had requested in February for the next fiscal year, which begins on 1 October, officials at the Office of Science’s 10 national labs say they’re not complaining. “Even staying flat when a lot of other programs are getting cut is relatively good news,” says Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. In budgets, “flat is the new good,” quips Eric Isaacs, director of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. [emphasis mine]
That a government official is now happy that the budget is flat is a good sign that we might finally be making some cultural progress in terms of bringing the federal budget under some control. In the past the very thought of no increase would have sent these people into spasms of outrage. Now they realize how pointless such a tantrum would be, and might actually do their budget negotiations harm.
Doesn’t this make you feel safer? TSA is now digging into personal medical records to deny Canadians entrance to the United States.
Madness: The EPA is using taxpayer money to encourage environmentalist groups to sue the EPA.
The Obama administration has discovered that the cost to build the program-formerly-called-Constellation, required by Congress, is going to be far more than they can stomach.
White House budget officials increasingly are concerned that some of NASA’s manned-exploration plans may be unaffordable, especially as the space agency weighs options that would raise the cost by billions of dollars by speeding up the development of rockets and spacecraft, according to people familiar with the issue.
The cost concerns are coming to a head, these people said, as the White House Office of Management and Budget ratchets up questions about NASA’s proposed program in light of the current emphasis on deficit reduction.
None of this surprises me.
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Awakening the only British launched science satellite, dead for decades.
A just released National Research Council report on space junk, Limiting Future Collision Risk to Spacecraft: an assessment of NASA’s meteoroid and orbital debris programs, describes in great and worthwhile detail the increasing problem of orbital debris as well as the technical and budgetary problems that exist for removing it. It is especially worth reading for the stories, such as when a Colorado hiker heard a high-pitched sound and then found a still warm thirty-inch diameter sphere in a foot deep crater. The object turned out to be a titanium tank from a Russian upper stage rocket, launched two months earlier.
What I want to focus on here, however, is one issue the report discusses that, as far as I can tell, has generally been missed. Worse, this issue — somewhat ridiculous when you think about a little — will make removing most of the space junk in Earth orbit far more complicated than ever imagined by engineers.
Simply put, under already agreed-to international treaties, no nation can salvage or collect any debris placed in orbit by another nation. To do so will violate international law, and almost certainly cause an international incident. To quote the report:
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Why no one should want to live in California: A new proposed law there would require workers’ compensation benefits, rest and meal breaks and paid vacation time for babysitters.
Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.
