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?
The soft bigotry of the left: Landlady rejects renting an apartment to a man because he was a veteran who served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.
Not only is this intolerant and close-minded, it is also illegal.
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.
McCarthyism of the left: Blackballing Nat Hentoff.
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.
In his first two years in office, Democrats gave Mr. Obama everything he wanted, save for cap and trade and union card-check, which would have done even more harm to job creation. They passed stimulus, ObamaCare, multiple housing bailouts, Dodd-Frank and more.
Even after Republicans took the House, they gave Mr. Obama the payroll tax holiday he demanded first for 2011 and again for 2012. Far from some new fiscal “austerity,” overall federal spending hasn’t declined. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has delivered monetary stimulus after stimulus—QE I, QE II, Operation Twist, and 42 months of near-zero interest rates with the promise of 30 months more.
Mr. Obama has had the freest run of policy of any President since LBJ. So maybe the problem is the policies.
Maybe Milton Friedman was right that “temporary, targeted” tax cuts don’t change the incentives to invest or hire because people aren’t stupid. Maybe each $1 of new federal spending doesn’t produce a “multiplier” of 1.5 times that in added output. Maybe the historic burst of regulation of the last three years has harmed business confidence and job creation. And maybe the uncertainty that comes from helter-skelter fiscal and monetary policy has dampened the animal spirits needed for a durable expansion.
As I said yesterday, though no president or Congress is entirely to blame for the state of the economy, they both can do great harm if they make decisions that interfere with the freedom of the market. And sadly, having the government interfere with the freedom of the market has been Obama’s mantra since the day he took office.
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.
The scientist suing JPL because he thinks he was fired due to his religious beliefs wants $1.36 million, according to court papers filed early last month.
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.
The Muslim Brotherhood candidate in Egypt: “[Christians] need to know that conquest is coming, and Egypt will be Islamic, and that they must pay jizya [tribute] or emigrate.”
So, how’s that Arab Spring doing for ya, Obama?
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.
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.
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.
The rise of leftist eco-terrorism.
A group calling itself the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front has claimed responsibility for the non-fatal shooting of a nuclear-engineering executive on 7 May in Genoa, Italy. The same group sent a letter bomb to a Swiss pro-nuclear lobby group in 2011; attempted to bomb IBM’s nanotechnology laboratory in Switzerland in 2010; and has ties with a group responsible for at least four bomb attacks on nanotechnology facilities in Mexico. Security authorities say that such eco-anarchist groups are forging stronger links.
In other words, they can’t persuade with cogent rational arguments, so the answer is violence and terrorism. Nor is this surprising, considering that these violent groups are definitely leftist and therefore believe in a top-down command economy. The idea of letting people decide for themselves what’s best is beyond their ken.
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.
Leftwing civility? Another right wing blogger has had the police arrive at his house because of a false report of a shooting.
The intention of the false report is to cause a SWAT team to descend on the house, guns blazing. In this case this fortunately did not happen.
We don’t know yet who made the false report, but the MO is identical to the previous events that appeared to have been instigated because the conservative blogger had written about leftwing activist Brett Kimberlin’s criminal past.
“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:
» Read more
“So how’s that old Arab Spring going?”
Not so good, based on the candidates running for president in Egypt.
Then there is this key paragraph which sums up the West’s entire response to the totalitarian Islamic threat since 9/11:
One of the basic defects of the Bush administration’s designation of a “war on terror” was that it emphasized symptoms (bombs and bombers) over causes (the underlying ideology). In the war of ideas, the West has chosen not to compete, under the erroneous assumption that the ever more refined delivery systems for its sensual distractions [the internet] are a Big Idea in and of themselves. They’re not.
We aren’t fighting an emotion (“terror”), we are fighting violent Islamic radicals who believe that God has given them the right to kill anyone who disagrees with them.
Leftwing civility: “We’re going to put a bullet in your head. We know where you and your family live.”
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.
