Oy. A new study has found strong evidence that compact fluorescent bulbs can harm the skin.
From the man whose job it was to police the $700 billion TARP bailout:
The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true.
The regulatory culture of the banking industry that this book describes possibiy explains why Jon Corzine has not yet been prosecuted. Regulators and prosecutors are afraid to proceed out of fear of hurting their careers.
Worse, Barofsky describes a banking regulatory system that is still in place, and is therefore ripe for another collapse. No wonder the tea party movement was born out of outrage over TARP and the bank bailout, and is still growing.
If you own that art, it’s not yours. The IRS owns it instead.
The object under discussion is “Canyon,” a masterwork of 20th-century art created by Robert Rauschenberg that Mrs. Sonnabend’s children inherited when she died in 2007. Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero.
But the Internal Revenue Service takes a different view. It has appraised “Canyon” at $65 million and is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes.
“You didn’t build that: Readings from the Book of Barack.”
1 In the beginning Govt created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the economy was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the ATMs, and the Spirit of Govt was hovering over the land.
3 And Govt said, “Let there be spending,” and there was spending. 4 Govt saw that the spending was good, and that it separated the light from the darkness. 5 Govt called the spending Investments, and this he did in the first day.
6 Then Govt said, “Let there be roads and bridges across the waters, and let dams divide the waters from the waters.” 7 Thus Govt made the infrastructure and the patronage jobs for eternity under the firmament from the Potomac which was above the firmament; and it was so. 8 And Govt called the firmament Washington. This Govt did on the second day.
9 Then Govt said, “Let the regulations and the guidlines under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the Bureaus appear”; and it was so. 10 And Govt called the Bureaus demigovts, and the gathering together of them He called AFSCME. And Govt saw that it was good.
Read the whole thing.
Leftwing tolerance: The IRS and Labor Department have started investigations into the finances of a Romney campaign contributor who was also one of the first listed on Obama’s enemies list.
I don’t appreciate it when the right attacks George Soros for supporting the leftwing causes he believes in, and I certainly oppose it when the left does the same. Here, however, it appears the Obama administration is using the force of the law to attack a private citizen, merely because he supports Obama’s opponent in the election. Such behavior is immoral, wrong, and hostile to everything our free country is supposed to stand for.
A Texas woman did not want a smart meter installed in her home, and when the power company employee would not take no for an answer she stopped him — by showing him her legal gun.
She placed herself between the installer and her old meter but, “He just kept pushing me away.” That’s when she showed him her handgun. “He saw it, and went back the other way.”
The response of the power company is also interesting.
“We are deeply troubled by anyone who would pull a gun on another person performing their job,” reads a statement from the company. “CenterPoint will be taking additional steps – including court actions – because what happened is dangerous, illegal and unwarranted.”
First, the employee was on this woman’s property. Second, it appears the employee pushed the woman. Since when is it illegal to protect both your property and your person from assault?
The TSA protester who stripped naked when TSA agents demanded he submit to a more detailed body search has won his case in court.
The money quote from the article:
“I was aware of the irony of removing my clothes to protect my privacy,”
This illustrates better than anything the absurdity of the security arrangements of the TSA. What good is this fake security if it destroys our freedom?
We’ve only just begun: The lawsuits fighting the Obama administration requirement that religious organizations fund contraceptives against their religious beliefs has now risen to more than 20 separate cases and nearly 60 individual plaintiffs.
Does this make you feel safer? The TSA allowed 25 illegal aliens to attend a flight school owned by an illegal alien. Six of these illegals even got a pilot’s license!
But don’t worry. The TSA is making sure that old women, little girls, and wheelchair-bound little boys don’t have guns hidden in their crotches.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: Despite a court order one year ago requiring them to “promptly” hold public hearings on the use of x-ray scanners, the TSA still refuses to comply.
And I agree with Ham: Everyone should opt out of being scanned by these porn machines, and make the TSA feel them up each time. If enough people do that, they will be forced to abandon these x-ray scanners, which don’t work, have health risks, and are fundamental invasion of our constitutional right against unreasonable search.
In a related story, watch the video below the fold, in which an American citizen successfully refuses to answer any questions at two Border Patrol checkpoints, because in truth, he has the right not to answer those questions. And not only does he not answer the questions, he refuses to participate in a vehicle search, and is eventually allowed to go on his way.
» Read more
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.
Land of the free? Because of a single complaint a retirement home has forbidden its residents from praying in common areas.
The complaining resident, Wanda Hughes told DePetro that she wrote a letter to the property management group because she finds the Rosary to be “an in your face ritual.” In the letter she threatens to bring the issue to the ACLU if it is not addressed.
What I find disgusting is that this person, Wanda Hughes, somehow thinks that just because she doesn’t like prayer she has the right to shut it down. The rights of others mean nothing to her.
What is also disgusting is the cowardice of Brook Village Retirement Home in North Providence, which immediately bowed to her wishes while grinding its fist into the faces of everyone else.
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.
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.
» Read more
Orwell would be proud: India is in the process of biometrically identifying every one of it 1.2 billion citizens.
The modern Democratic Party: The Democratic candidate for Secretary of State of Missouri claims that no Jews were killed on 9/11, while also suggesting that Jews were involved in the attack itself.
“Why [was] 9/11 was a official holiday for all Jewish people who worked in the the WTC?” Alam said in a discussion titled, “Was 9/11 a conspiracy??”
Asked earlier this week about this statement, Alam reaffirmed his position. “My question was, ‘What’s the reason not a single Jew was killed on that day,’” Alam said, according to the Washington Free Beacon. “Was there a single Jew killed on that day?”
Gee, I wonder what he would say to these people?
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.
