Tag: oppression

California orders churches to fund abortions

8:34 am

Fascists: In a sudden change to its health insurance regulations, leftwing California is now requiring churches to fund abortions.

California’s Department of Managed Health Care has ordered all insurance plans in the state to immediately begin covering elective abortion. Not Plan B. Not contraceptives. Elective surgical dismemberment abortion. At the insistence of the American Civil Liberties Union, the DMHC concluded that a 40-year-old state law requiring health plans to cover “basic health services” had been misinterpreted all these decades. Every plan in the state was immediately ordered, effective August 22, to cover elective abortion. California had not even applied this test to its own state employee health plans (which covered only “medically necessary” abortions). But this novel reading was nevertheless quietly imposed on every plan in the state by fiat.

… Several other California churches have received similar notices from their insurers, and others will follow. While California (like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS) exempts churches from its contraceptive mandate, there is no exception to this bureaucratic abortion mandate. This leaves California churches in the illogical and impossible position of being free to exclude contraceptives from their health plan for reasons of religious conscience but required to provide their employees with abortion coverage.

This is clear proof that the left’s long claim that it is the champion of freedom and religious liberty is quite hollow, and if any speech or religion happens to believe something different than the left, the left is going to aggressively move to deny it its freedom.

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A citizen pulls over a cop and issues him a warning

2:20 pm

Watch the video below the fold. The citizen saw a cop on patrol in an unmarked car, which is illegal in Washington, and flagged him down to tell him that he was in violation of the law.

Seim then went through all the normal steps of a traffic stop: taking the officer’s name and asking to see his license. Then after a lengthy discussion about the law, Seim let him off with a warning. He urged the officer to speak with his bosses about their illegal patrol cars.

» Read more

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Send your sermons to Houston

9:05 am

This is good: Mike Huckabee on Saturday suggested that every pastor in America send their sermons to the mayor of Houston.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said pastors from across the United States should send “thousands and thousands” of Bibles and sermons to the Houston mayor who demanded pastors turn over their sermons to the government due to their objection to an LGBT discrimination city ordinance.”I hope she gets thousands and thousands of sermons and Bibles,” Huckabee said on his Fox News show Saturday, referring to Mayor Annise D. Parker.”It ought to make you mad that the mayor thinks she can turn in her pastors. And so I got an idea,” Huckabee explained. “If she wants a sermon, here is my suggestion. I would like to ask every pastor in America, not only the ones in Houston, to send her your sermons and go ahead. Obviously she could use a few. And everybody watching the show ought to send her a Bible.”

As always, the best answer to bad speech is more speech!

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Things are going to get worse

11:23 pm

Link here. Key quote:

Readers will recall my prediction that fake strategies like those used by the administration go through 3 phases: 1) the denial of the problem; 2) over-confident half measures; 3) blind panic. President Obama is officially at number 3 and has canceled fundraisers in New Jersey and Connecticut “to convene his Cabinet at the White House instead, as U.S. officials grappled with the widening Ebola crisis.”

The panic phase comes very fast because it is actually the moment when a leader realizes he’s running out of the most precious resource a manager can have, which is time. And the administration, for the past six years, has been all about wasting time; about kicking the can down the road. They thought it was clever, a big joke they could play on their Republican successor. But most of the president’s opponents on the world stage, familiar with the idea that strategy is largely the story of time, saw it for the amateur mistake that it was. They saw the president for what he was and took him to the cleaners.

Read it all. It will chill you to the bones. Even if the Democrats get creamed in November’s election the country will still be led by a man and an elite leftist community astonishingly disconnected with reality.

You doubt this? Then please explain the clipboard man to me.

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Obama quarantines American soldiers in Africa but not Africans

10:09 am

Incompetence: Even as the Obama administration refuses to consider any real travel restrictions for African citizens of ebola-ravaged countries, it has ordered military officials to quarantine American troops in Africa for up to 21 days if they suspect they might have ebola.

According to CNN, “Commanders also will be given the authority to isolate their entire unit in the region for the final 10 days of a deployment if necessary. All troops will be monitored for 21 days after returning from the mission.”

Currently, citizens of Ebola outbreak countries are required to self-report their possible exposure. The “honor system” of self-reporting was violated by Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who was the first to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S., when he did not voluntarily disclose that he’d carried a pregnant woman in the throes of Ebola.

The restrictions for American troops actually does make sense. The lack of restrictions for Africans, however, is the height of blindness.

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Democrats oppose an ebola travel ban

10:07 pm

Incompetence: Congressional Democrats have expressed strong opposition to any travel bans from ebola infected countries.

Remember, these are the same people who conceived, wrote, and passed Obamacare, without really reading it or even considering the concerns expressed by many people about the law (all of which have turned out to be true). Thus, it is not surprising they don’t have the brains now to recognize that a quarantine is exactly the right approach to handle ebola at this time, We have a very infectious disease that hasn’t yet broken out into the general populace which we can still keep confined to a small area, where we can more effectively fight it. A quarantine, enforced by a travel ban, will accomplish this.

But these Democrats care! So what they don’t have the ability to think? Let’s vote for them again!

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Houston mayor says she will reduce scoop of pastor subpoenas

8:18 pm

How nice of her: The lesbian Democratic mayor of Houston has backtracked and promised to narrow the scope of the subpoenas her government issued to several pastors, demanding access to their sermons, speeches, and communications with church members.

She is still a fascist, as she is still going to go forward. She also has not yet specified exactly how she plans to narrow the scope of her demands, since as far as I can tell, none of her demands are constitutional or even reasonable.

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40 to 63% increases in heath insurance premiums in Minnesota

5:45 pm

Finding out what’s in it: The health insurance premiums for one major Minnesota health insurance company are expected to increase by 40 to 63 percent in 2015.

The insurer started informing brokers Tuesday about rates for individuals if they renew coverage with the company for next year, said Heidi Michaels, an agent with the Dyste Williams agency in Minneapolis. In the half dozen consumer scenarios she’s looked at, Michaels said she’s consistently seeing premium jumps in the neighborhood of 40 percent to 60 percent. Her analysis, however, did not take into account significant discounts that consumers could see by way of federal tax credits, depending on their income. “They’re going to get substantial rate increases,” Michaels said in an interview Wednesday. “I haven’t seen one below 40 percent.”

Letters with these rate increases will go out the end of October, just before election day. (The company has pulled out of the government exchange, which means they don’t have to keep their rates secret until after the election, as required by the Obama administration, the most transparent in history!)

However, these rate increases indicate strongly how high the rate increases will be across the board. They are going to be ungodly high, possibly so high no one will be able to afford them.

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“We’re not gonna move.”

11:20 am

Watch the video below the fold as a string of university officials from Southern Oregon University harass several students whose only action is standing on the sidewalk and handing out Constitutions.

It made me very proud to watch these college students defy authority to defend their very clear constitutional rights. The school wanted them to move to the very small restricted “Free Speech Zone”. The students refused, noting that the Constitution and Bill of Rights essentially designates the entire U.S. a free speech zone. The students also refused to give their names to one official, noting that they were uncomfortable doing that. Since the official had no authority to take their names, the official had to back down.

In the end, the school did nothing to them, and they remained on the sidewalk, handing Constitutions out of fellow Americans. Kudos to them all! We need more Americans willing to stand up like this and not be cowed.
» Read more

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The silent Obamacare protest of doctors

10:11 am

Faced with Obamacare’s high costs and deadening bureaucracy, doctors are finding ways to opt out.

Physicians across the country are responding to this evolution — most recently in response to the Affordable Care Act — by shielding their practices from government interference. This comes in many forms: Rejecting new Medicare and Medicaid patients, transitioning to third-party-free practices and ditching small private practices for employed positions with ever-larger hospital-owned networks.

Incompetence is incompetence, and if you are so stupid as to write an unworkable law that conservatives rightly predicted would do exactly the opposite of what you want — raise costs instead of lowering them, shrink health coverage instead of widening it, corrupt health care instead of improving it — than no one should be surprised if you exhibit incompetence in other areas as well. For example, the incompetence demonstrated by President Obama and the Democratic Party by imposing Obamacare on us is now being illustrated again in how Obama is handling the arrival of ebola on American shores: badly, foolishly, and with nothing but failure as a result.

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Houston demands that pastors hand in their sermons on homosexuality or be held in contempt of court.

3:36 pm

Fascists: The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding that pastors hand in any sermons on the subjects of homosexuality, gender identity or the city’s first openly gay mayor Annise Parker or be held in contempt of court.

Among those slapped with a subpoena is Steve Riggle, the senior pastor of Grace Community Church. He was ordered to produce all speeches and sermons related to Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality and gender identity. The mega-church pastor was also ordered to hand over “all communications with members of your congregation” regarding the non-discrimination law. “This is an attempt to chill pastors from speaking to the cultural issues of the day,” Riggle told me. “The mayor would like to silence our voice. She’s a bully.”

The only reason the city government and the mayor are demanding these sermons is to silence their opponents. Their actions are blatant violations of the first amendment and the freedom of speech, and are an effort to oppress any opposition to their own personal political agendas.

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1 in 4 Americans can no longer afford to see their doctor

2:30 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Because of the high cost and high deductibles of Obamacare-mandated health insurance plans, 25% of Americans now believe they can no longer afford healthcare.

That any of these Americans are even considering voting Democratic in any future election is shameful. They conceived it, they wrote it, and then they shoved it down our throats, in one of the most partisan maneuvers ever seen in these United States. Until the Democratic party moves to fix the problems caused by this monstrous law — mostly by repealing it — they do not deserve the support of anyone.

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The Obamacare trifecta

10:08 am

A very detailed and accurate description of the disaster that is Obamacare. Key sentence:

Over the next couple of years, I will lose my doctor, I will lose my plan and my healthcare costs will increase.

Read it all, and remember that this disaster is coming to all of us in the coming years. Note also that just because the Obama administration is delaying the release of next year’s ballooning health insurance premiums until just after the election does not require us to be stupid and to make believe these increases aren’t going to happen. They are, because the design of Obamacare rations treatment, imposes unneeded costs on everyone, and stifles the free market (which is the best tool for keeping costs down).

And then there’s this: “Grim milestone: Semi-retired president plays 200th round of golf in office.”

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EPA tells court it has lost text messages

3:21 pm

The most transparent administration ever: The EPA has admitted that text messages demanded in a lawsuit, which the agency is required by law to retain, have been lost.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told a federal court that it may have lost the text messages at the center of a lawsuit by a libertarian think tank.The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sued the EPA last year in federal court to compel the release of text messages to and from Administrator Gina McCarthy and her predecessor under the Freedom of Information Act. In the Tuesday filing to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Justice Department lawyers representing the EPA said the agency will soon file a notice that it may have misplaced records that it was legally required to retain.

It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration has decided to follow the same playbook with all its many scandals: stonewall and coverup, legally or illegally.

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Obamacare forces 13 states to cancel insurance plans

10:50 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Thirteen states plus the District of Columbia are expected to force the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of health care policies just before the November elections because they are not in compliance with ObamaCare.

In coming weeks, 13 states and the District of Columbia plan to cancel such policies, which generally fall out of compliance with the Affordable Care Act because they don’t offer the level of coverage the law requires. Virginia will be hardest hit, with 250,000 policies expected to be canceled. And because federal law requires a 60-day notice of any plan changes, voters will be notified no later than November 1, right before the Nov. 4 midterms.Many of those forced out of their current plans and into ObamaCare may not be able to keep their doctors. They also could face higher deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, making ObamaCare an election issue on the eve of voting.

But we all know none of this is possible because Obama promised us multiple times that “If you like your plan you get to keep your plan. Period.” And everything Obama and every Democrat says is always true!

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IRS begins an audit of an anti-Obamacare filmmaker

9:28 am

Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS has begun an audit of an anti-Obamacare filmmaker, even as it proceeds with audits of other consevatives.

Logan Clements, producer of “Sick and Sicker: ObamaCare Canadian Style,” announced via press release Tuesday that he is being audited for the first time ever. The news comes one month after the conservative Breitbart News announced that it, too, was being audited and that the action was probably politically motivated. Mr. Clements‘ movie makes the case that Obamacare will eventually lead to socialized medicine like Canada.

Remember, Obama claimed there wasn’t a “smidgeon of corruption” surrounding the IRS. And of course, we all believe everything this Democratic politician says!

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SWAT teams kill another innocent citizen in raid

9:21 am

Another late night raid of a citizen’s home, based on the lies of a drug user, has resulted in the death of that innocent citizen.

The police entered the home without knocking or identifying themselves. Their warrant apparently required them to knock first. The home had been burglered two nights earlier by the drug user, so the homeowner’s were understandably on edge.

This is nothing more than murder. It is also unconstitutional. Every police SWAT team in the nation should be dismantled now. We managed for 200 years without them, and can do so again.

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The next wave of Obamacare insurance cancellations begin arriving

4:20 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Walmart is dropping health insurance for its part time workers because of Obamacare.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

This is only a sampling of what is beginning to happen throughout private industry. If companies aren’t cutting hours to less than 30 for many employees so they don’t have to provide Obamacare, they are cutting their total staff to less than 50 to exempt themselves from the law. And they are doing it not because they want to but because they have to. If they don’t, the cost of Obamacare will bankrupt them.

Of course, it is also bankrupting the individuals who now have to find their own insurance and quickly find they can’t afford health insurance as offered by Obamacare.

But remember, the Democrats and Obama care! So what they are idiots and wrote a law that does nothing but harm. We must vote for them anyway because they care!

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The deep ocean is not where global warming has gone

5:26 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new NASA study finds that the deep oceans have not warmed since 2005, striking dead one of the favorite theories of global warming advocates to explain the 18 year stall in global warming.

In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s oceans — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.

Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.

“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”

The bottom line: no one really knows what is going on, climate scientists still do not have a good handle on how the climate works, the science is not “settled”, and anyone who says it is is a liar.

 

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Reality bites liberal Texas judge

10:09 pm

The Texas judge who visited the infected apartment of America’s first ebola victim without protection has now had a complaint filed against him for endangering his own 9-year-old daughter.

The concerned citizen reached out to Breitbart Texas in a phone interview and provided information about his complaint to [Child Protective Services]. He told Brietbart Texas he wanted to remain anonymous because he is a business owner and is concerned about retaliation. He said he felt Jenkins’ conduct was inappropriate and unnecessarily exposed his child to potential danger. “I am doing this because I am concerned about the child,” the complainant said, “and I am concerned for the children in her school who might become exposed if the virus were to spread.”

Read the article at the link. The risks to the judge’s family and their acquaintances are real. Moreover, there is evidence that the judge has spent considerable time in contact with infected locations and individuals, without protection.

But he cares! That absolves him of any guilt should his actions causes others to die!

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The stall in global warming is now more than half the satellite record

7:21 pm

The uncertainty of science: There has now been no global warming for 18 years, a time period that is more than half the entire satellite temperature record.

The Great Pause is the longest continuous period without any warming in the global instrumental temperature record since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for a little over half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. …

The length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed.

If you click on the link you will see quotes from one global warming scientist who, rather than honestly deal with the conflict between theory and data, instead uses name-calling as an argument. He unfortunately is the rule, not the exception.

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Some reasons to panic, part 2

11:13 pm

Left wing fantasies meet the real world: Apropos my previous post about the refusal of the modern intellectual liberal elite to face reality, on Thursday a liberal Democrat Texas judge and two assistants entered the Ebola-infected apartment of America’s first Ebola patient without any protection.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins shocked the local press corps Thursday night when he and two female workers entered the apartment where America’s first Ebola patient was staying. He entered without any visible protection from possible exposure to the deadly virus. Judge Jenkins entered the apartment to speak with the occupants who are now being held inside their home under a protection order requiring their compliance. He and two unknown women entered and were not visibly wearing gloves or any kind of mask or other form of protection from the virus.

This idiot and his assistants are now wandering around Dallas, shaking hands at political rallies and possibly spreading the disease far and wide. But it is all okay because he cares for these poor infected blacks and wants to help them. And if you die because of his actions it will only be because you are a raaaaaacist!

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Some reasons to panic

7:45 pm

And those reasons have less to do with actual problems and more to do with the incompetence of our culture’s intellectual leadership.

Over the last few years the divergence between what the government promises and what it delivers, between what it says is happening or will happen and what actually is happening and does happen, between what it determines to be important and what the public wishes to be important—this gap has become abysmal, unavoidable, inescapable. We hear of “lone-wolf” terrorism, of “workplace violence,” that if you like your plan you can keep your plan. We are told that Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration, that al Qaeda is on the run, that the border is secure as it has ever been, that Assad must go, that I didn’t draw a red line, the world drew a red line, that the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups involved not a smidgen of corruption, that the Islamic State is not Islamic. We see the government spend billions on websites that do not function, and the VA consign patients to death by waiting list and then cover it up. We are assured that Putin won’t invade; that the Islamic State is the jayvee team of terrorism; that Bowe Bergdahl served with honor and distinction; that there is a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

While the public remains pro-Israel, our government negotiates with Israel’s enemies. While the public wants to reduce immigration, the preeminent legislative objective of both parties is a bill that would increase it. While the public is uninterested in global warming, while costly regulations could not pass a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, while the scientific consensus behind the green agenda is, at the very least, fraying, the president says that climate change is the greatest threat to the United States. While Americans tell pollsters their economic situation has not improved, and that things are headed in the wrong direction—while even Democratic economists acknowledge the despondent state of the middle class—the president travels to Chicago to celebrate his economic recovery.

These disjunctions and confusions, these missteps, scandals, and miscalculations, have hurt Obama’s approval numbers. They endanger the Democratic Senate majority, contribute to the widespread sense of disorder and decay, shatter trust in government and in public institutions. They have put into stark relief a political class dominated by liberal partisans, captured by ideas and interests removed from those of ordinary Americans. The stories of ineptitude or malfeasance that appear in the daily newspaper are more than examples of high ideals executed poorly. They are examples of the pursuit of ideas—of equality and diversity and progress and centralization and environmentalism and globalization—to absurd and self-destructive limits. [emphasis mine]

Read the whole essay, as I couldn’t have said it better. The incompetence of our intellectual partisan liberal elite, more consumed with pie-in-the-sky leftwing agendas than the real world around them, has become downright frightening. The sooner the general public rejects them, wholly and completely, illustrated by a landslide election, the sooner our society can get back to the business of dealing with the increasingly deadly problems of the real world.

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The day fascism rushed through the door in Wisconsin

9:28 am

And I call it fascism because that is what it is, the misuse of government force by members of one political party, the Democrats, to harass and destroy the lives of citizens who happen to disagree with them about policy.

“Houses were surrounded and lit up,” O’Keefe said. “Children and spouses were home in multiple cases, and made to suffer through two-and-a-half-hour raiding parties going through all paper files and seizing computers and phones. Children in multiple cases were told they could not inform their schools why they were late.”

After investigators stormed into their homes and rooted through their possessions, the conservative targets and their families suffered the additional insult of the gag order, O’Keefe said. “So a traumatic event is imposed on entire families, and they are told to suck it up, don’t talk to your friends, relatives, ministers, colleagues,” O’Keefe said. “Don’t explain the deputies’ cars, the boxes they took from your house. Don’t allow your children to tell the truth.”

Once again, the only reason these SWAT team searches were done was because the citizens under attack happened to oppose the politics of the propsecutor who ordered them. And if he could have arrested these citizens without trial, I firmly believe he would have.

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Homeland Security settles lawsuit of reporter whose home they illegally searched

7:06 pm

In a lawsuit settlement Homeland Security has agreed to pay $50,000 and promise to return everything they seized — including confidential files and paperwork that identified Homeland Security whistleblowers –during an illegal raid of a reporter’s home.

Audrey Hudson, an award-winning journalist most recently at the Washington Times, told The Daily Signal she was awoken by her barking dog around 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, 2013, to discover armed government agents had descended on her property under the cover of darkness. The agents had a search warrant for her husband’s firearms. As they scoured the home, Hudson was read her Miranda rights.

While inside Hudson’s house, a U.S. Coast Guard agent confiscated documents that contained “confidential notes, draft articles, and other newsgathering materials” that Hudson never intended for anyone else to see. The documents included the identities of whistleblowers at the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security.

The settlement requires the government to return all documents, destroy all notes made from these papers, and promise it did not copy anything. Does anyone believe this?

Posted from Sedona, Arizona, where Diane and I will be for the next week.

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More IRS hard drives wiped to conceal evidence

10:42 am

Looks like a pattern to me: In a different legal case separate from its harassment of conservatives, the IRS has been accused of wiping more hard drives and destroying more evidence.

In its latest court filing, NetJets claims the IRS has been concealing evidence. Its lawyers say the computers of three key IRS employees were wiped clean, including the computer of “an excise-tax policy manager and a key decision maker regarding the application of the section 4261 ticket tax to whole and fractional aircraft-management companies.”

While the harassment of conservatives was a poltical act apparently instigated by the White House, this case has more to do with IRS managers interpreting the tax code, possibly improperly, so as to squeeze as much money from an American company as possible. That it is also possible that they were also willing to destroy evidence suggests a rampant corrupt culture that needs a major house-cleaning.

We can hope the next Congress will force this house-cleaning after the November election.

Posted on the road passig through Phoenix.

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More health insurance cancellations due to Obamacare

4:24 pm

Finding out what’s in it: A new report says that 50,000 people in seven states will have their health insurance plans cancelled in the next month.

This of course is only a small sampling. The disastrous ramifications of Obamacare have only just started.

I wonder if Obama has found out about this. Usually he has to read a newspaper to find out what happens in his administration, and this story is just breaking now.

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