It’s good work if you can get it: Occupy Wall Street protesters stay at $700-a-night hotel.
Some historical context in discussing the federal debt.
When Bill Clinton was president, the national debt rose by an annual average of $193 billion; when the profligate George W. Bush was in the White House, the yearly debt increases averaged $612 billion. On Obama’s watch, by contrast, the federal debt has been skyrocketing by more than $1.5 trillion per year. It took 40 presidents and nearly two centuries, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan , for the US government to accumulate $1.5 trillion in indebtedness. The 44th president – aided and abetted by Congress – enlarges the federal debt by that amount every 12 months.
A victory for freedom: Canada is about to repeal its oppressive hate speech law.
Government in action! Regulators in the European Union have forbidden bottled water companies from advertising that their product — water — prevents dehydration.
Repeal it! Obamacare is forcing the American medical device industry out of business.
The 2010 law imposed a crippling 10-year, $20 billion tax on revenues — not on profits — earned by companies that make medical devices, such as catheters, artery-clearing stents, scalpels and pacemakers. The tax is prompting American companies to shed jobs, move factories overseas and reconsider niche-market research projects, said Paulson, whose district include medical device companies.
Under the radar: The Obama administration is pushing to limit gun use on pubic lands.
Gun owners who have historically been able to use public lands for target practice would be barred from potentially millions of acres under new rules drafted by the Interior Department, the first major move by the Obama administration to impose limits on firearms.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers “premium assistance”—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law’s cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If consumers face the law’s full cost, support for repeal will grow.)
The law encourages states to create health-insurance exchanges, but it permits Washington to create them if states decline. So far, only 17 states have passed legislation to create an exchange.
This is where the glitch comes in: ObamaCare authorizes premium assistance in state-run exchanges (Section 1311) but not federal ones (Section 1321). In other words, states that refuse to create an exchange can block much of ObamaCare’s spending and practically force Congress to reopen the law for revisions.
The Obama administration’s solution? Ignore the law as written.
I have a better idea: Repeal the damn thing!
Is Newt Gingrich America’s Churchill?
As the author himself says, “The thought startles.” However, it is quite a fascinating read, founded strongly in history.
We’re here to help you: A government inspector arrives during a meal and forces private citizens on private property to destroy the home-grown food.
Susan [the inspector] deemed our food unfit for consumption and demanded that we call off the event because:
1. Some of the prepared food packages did not have labels on them. (The code actually allows for this if it is to be consumed within 72 hours.)
2. Some of the meat was not USDA certified. (Did I mention that this was a farm to fork meal?)
3. Some of the food that was prepared in advance was not up to temperature at the time of inspection. (It was being prepared to be brought to proper temperature for serving when the inspection occurred.)
4. Even the vegetables prepared in advance had to be thrown out because they were cut and were then considered a “bio-hazard”.
5. We did not have receipts for our food. (Reminder! This food came from farms not from the supermarket! I have talked with several chefs who have said that in all their years cooking they have never been asked for receipts.)
I don’t actually agree with most of the ideas of the organic farm-to-fork movement. However, I find it beyond disgusting that our government thinks it has the right tell us what we can eat.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to Obamacare during this term, with an expected decision to occur prior to next year’s elections.
No matter how the court rules, the timing here is not good for Obama and the Democrat Party. If the court kills the law, it will illustrate how misguided it was. If they uphold it, it will only fire up the voter base that wants it repealed to vote against the party that passed and still supports the law. And that voter base has consistently been made up of large majorities of the population, based on every poll taken since the law was first proposed.
Peace and love: It appears the Occupy Portland protesters are preparing to confront the police with homemade weapons and reinforcements.
People in the camp are expecting 100-300 re-enforcements from various locations. There may even be as many as 150 anarchists who will arrive soon. There is information that people may be in the in trees during a police action and that there are people who are attempting to obtain a large number of gas masks. There is a hole being dug in one of the parks and wood is being used to reinforce the area around it. There are reports that nails have been hammered into wood for weapons and that generally there are people in the camps preparing for a confrontation with police. . . People were seen carrying pallets into the camp shortly after 1:00 a.m. this morning. The destination of the pallets is a structure with graffiti in the northwest part of Chapman Park, also known as “The 420 Hotel”. The people there are very suspicious of any passers by, we are not sure at this point what exactly they are doing. We have been told it looks like they were making shields.
We’re here to help you! Various environmental regulations or actions of the Obama administration have eliminated more than 2.6 million jobs.
Repeal the damn thing! Gallup reports that since Obamacare became law more than 4.5 million Americans have lost their employer sponsored health insurance.
Repeal the damn thing: The manufacturer of artificial hips and knees will cut its workforce by five percent next year in the face of new fees required by Obamacare.
The Supercommittee to the rescue!
They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.
These four stories, all in today’s news, all suggest that the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement is strongly intolerant, filled with angry hatred, and prone to violence. Sadly, they appear to a small subset of a much larger sampling of similar stories.
In Oakland Occupy protesters have withdrawn a resolution to remain peaceful.
A small number of the protesters have openly called for the use of violence as a tactic to get their message out.
In Berkley, dozens of Occupy protesters were arrested yesterday. The cause:
The university reported earlier that an administrator had told the protesters they could stay around the clock for a week, but only if they didn’t pitch tents or use stoves or other items that would suggest people were sleeping there. The protesters voted not to comply with the demand and to go ahead with setting up a tent site they dubbed “Occupy Cal” to protest financial policies they blame for causing deep cuts in higher education spending.
In New York, a man was arrested for assaulting a paramedic and breaking his leg Wednesday night.
And finally, there is this eight minute video, where a Occupy Portland protester curses and threatens a news crew repeatedly until the police finally arrive to escort him away.
An evening pause: In honor of the fall of the Berlin Wall on this day in 1989, I post below Part 2 of a documentary on the history of the Wall’s construction and the many escape attempts by East Germans. Though the documentary does a poor job of explaining why East Germans desperately made attempt after attempt to flee to the west (a wish to escape from oppression and go somewhere where they could freely live their lives), it does include some incredible film footage showing the various escape attempts. Part 1 outlines the Wall’s initial construction, during which many people could easily break through.
Part 2, embedded below, describes the first deaths, when the communist East German government gave its guards orders to “shoot to kill.” Part 3 is even more fascinating, showing the effort by West Germans to dig tunnels under the 150 foot death strip in order to get friends and relatives out. Parts 4 and 5 show later attempts, when the Wall had become more impregnable, including one escape using an arrow (!) and another using two ultralight airplanes. Part 6 shows the Wall’s fall in 1989.
For twenty-eight years a government decided it had the right to imprison its citizens because they longed for freedom. In the end, all that government really achieved was to prove that freedom is better, and that good intentions — based on intellectual ideology and imposed on people by force — lead nowhere but hell.
A gallery of Occupy Wall Street hatred.
I think this collection of stories from the various “Occupy Whatever” protests gives a good flavor of what this protest movement stands for. And unlike the tea party protests, it appears that it is the violent extremists that form the movement’s heart.
And then there’s this, recorded yesterday in New York. Note: Language warning.
The day of reckoning looms: We’re still not cutting.
In the spring fight to avert a government shutdown, Republicans promised $100 billion in real cuts but then compromised for $38.5 billion in future savings. In reality, the Congressional Budget Office found the deal still resulted in an increase of more than $170 billion in federal spending from 2010 to 2011. The “largest spending cut in history” ended up being a spending increase.
And this:
But the [super]committee isn’t really trying to cut spending. It seeks only to spend the country into bankruptcy a little slower. Rather than letting the country rack up $23.4 trillion of debt by 2021, the supercommittee hopes to keep it to $21.3 trillion. It’s the difference between speeding off a cliff at 91 miles per hour versus 100 miles per hour.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team has released a wide angle side view image of the Apollo 15 landing site, showing the lunar module and the areas around Hadley Rille and the Apennine Mountain range that the astronauts explored using their lunar jeep. Below is a cropped close-up, showing the landing site near the top of the image with Hadley Rille near the bottom. Below the fold is a second image showing a wider view that includes the Apennine mountain slope that the astronauts drove their rover up.
We’re here to help you: A federal agency has ruled that thousands of lakefront homes in Missouri must be removed, despite being built legally and having been in place for decades.
The tolerance of Islam: Iranian officials have been pressuring a jailed pastor to return to Islam rather than be executed for converting to Christianity.
Communism fails again: For the first time in a half-century, a new law will allow Cubans to buy and sell real estate.
Most curious: General Electric, whose CEO is a strong Obama backer, gets no flack from the NLRB for building an aircraft factory in a right-to-work state.
When it came to Boeing, however, which is not a strong Obama backer, the NLRB has done everything it can to interfere.
The TSA and the federal government ignored the real cancer risks associated with using the new airport X-ray scanners.
And I say, whatever you do, refuse to submit to these scanners. If everyone refuses, they will eventually have to get rid of them.
What could possibly go wrong? A National Research Council panel today proposed creating a massive data research network using the private health records of patients.
As a pilot project, the report recommends sequencing the whole genomes of 1 million Americans and combining the data with medical histories to look for genetic links to disease. That may sound expensive—even if sequencing costs drop to $1000 per genome, it would cost $1 billion—but $1000 is in the range of what a routine MRI scan costs, Desmond-Hellmann pointed out. Another pilot project would use metabolomic profiles of patients’ blood to help predict which patients with insulin resistance will go on to develop type II diabetes.
Creating the network over the next decade or two shouldn’t require new funding, the report says. “This is not the Human Genome Project,” said Sawyers. “It’s taking advantage of things happening anyway and bringing them together and doing it at the point of care.” NIH needs to redirect resources and push for more long-term studies that combine research with health care, the report says. Building the network might also require a revision of patient privacy rules and an “evolution” in the public’s attitudes about allowing researchers to use their medical data. [emphasis mine]
The last sentence, highlighted by me, was also the last sentence in the article, added almost as a minor aside. Yet, it is probably the most important aspect of this story, since the right of each of us to control our personal health records is directly threatened by this proposal.
The tolerance of Islam: One day after a French satirical weekly published an issue poking fun of Islam and naming Mohammed its “editor-in-chief”, its offices were firebombed and its website hacked with these words:
You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. Be God’s curse upon you!
