Tag: oppression

Healthcare Reform Law Requires New IRS Army Of 1,054

6:44 pm

Repeal the damn bill! The IRS announced today that it will require over a thousand new agents and $359 million more money to implement Obamacare in 2012. Key quote:

The detailed IRS budget documents spell out exactly what most of the new workforce will be doing. For example, some 81 will be tasked just to handle the tax reporting of 25,000 tanning salons. They face a new 10 percent excise tax on indoor tanning services. Another 76 will be assigned to make sure businesses engaged in making and imported drugs pay their new fee which is expected to deliver $2.8 billion to the Treasury in 2012 and 2013. The new healthcare corps will also require new facilities and computers.

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Austrian Court fines speaker for describing Islam accurately

2:18 pm

Bad news for freedom: An Austrian court today convicted Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff for speaking out against Islam. Key quote:

It seems the case turned on the judge’s reasoning that her statement that Islam’s prophet Mohammed was a “pedophile” was defamatory since his child bride Aisha (age six at the time of marriage and nine at the time it was consummated) remained his wife when she turned 18.

More details at Gates of Vienna.

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Cutting the Full $100 Billion

11:01 pm

Keep this momentum going! The House Republican leadership was forced this week to increase its proposed budget cuts to $100 billion because of tea party movement pressure, both in the House and back at home. Key quote from this New York Times report:

The reversal was the most concrete demonstration yet that the wave of fiscal conservatives who catapulted Republicans into the House majority is reshaping the political and policy calculations being made by the party leadership.

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Are Health-Care Waivers Unconstitutional?

11:19 am

Are the more than 700 waivers to Obamacare that the Obama administration has handed out unconstitutional? The final paragraph sums it up well:

Waivers can be used for good purposes. But since the time of Matthew Paris [around 1251], they have been recognized as a power above the law — a power used by government to co-opt powerful constituencies by freeing them from the law. Like old English kings, the current administration is claiming such a power to decide that some people do not have to follow the law. This is dangerous, above the law, and unauthorized by the Constitution.

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The bigotry among social psychologists

9:54 pm

The bigotry among social psychologists. Key quote:

Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) told the audience [at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference] that he had been corresponding with a couple of non-liberal graduate students in social psychology whose experiences reminded him of closeted gay students in the 1980s. He quoted — anonymously — from their e-mails describing how they hid their feelings when colleagues made political small talk and jokes predicated on the assumption that everyone was a liberal.

“I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

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Bernanke headlines a day of grim warnings about the nation’s fiscal standing

12:24 pm

Fed chairman Bernanke issued a grim warning yesterday about the federal government’s overwhelming debt. Key quote:

The national debt is currently about 60 percent of the economy, or Gross Domestic Product, [Bernanke] said, adding that it is projected to reach 90 percent of GDP by 2020 and 150 percent of GDP by 2030. But Bernanke’s citation of $9.5 trillion in national debt didn’t include the $4.6 trillion owed by the government to trust funds for things such as Social Security and Medicare, which have paid out cash to the Treasury in exchange for promisory notes. The full national debt – when both forms of debt are included – is already just under 100 percent of GDP, which is currently around $14.6 trillion.

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Judge holds Interior Department in contempt over offshore oil drilling moratorium

11:57 pm

A Louisiana judge has held the Interior Department in contempt over its offshore oil drilling moratorium. Key quote:

After [the judge] overturned the government’s moratorium in June, the agency issued a second nearly identical suspension. “Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government’s contempt of this court’s preliminary injunction order.”

The Obama administration might not realize it — as well as many politicians from both parties in DC — we are a nation of laws, not men. It thumb your nose at the law it will eventually come back to bite you. Especially if the citizenry becomes outraged at your arrogance.

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Remembering Boris Yeltsin

1:15 am

A monument to Boris Yeltsin was unveiled today in his hometown on the 80th anniversary of his birth.

In this week of memorials to American space tragedies, this event in Russia brings to mind the far more important and significant events, affecting millions of people worldwide, that unfolded in the Soviet Union during the late 1980s and mid-1990s. The communist superpower was collapsing, and there was the real possibility that that collapse could lead to worldwide war and violence.

Yeltsin, far more than any other man, helped shepherd the former Soviet Union out of that chaos, and he did it as a civilized man, with relatively little bloodshed. As he shouted defiantly as he stood on a tank in front of the Russian parliament building on the day of the August coup, “Terror and dictatorship . . . must not be allowed to bring eternal night!”

Unlike many former communist leaders, Yeltsin had the openness of mind to recognize that the state-run centralized command society that he had grown up in and had helped run for years simply did not work. “We have oppressed the human spirit,” he noted sadly during a press conference shortly after the coup. More importantly, he also had the courage to take action on this realization, and force the painful changes that were necessary to save his country.

Yeltsin was no saint, and the Russian transition from dictatorship to freedom was far from perfect. No one even knows if that transition is going to hold, today, twenty years later. Nonetheless, the world should remember Yeltsin for his success, and honor that memory.

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finding out what’s politically correct

12:50 pm

Want to know what the academic elite think is or is not politically correct? Make two different Freedom of Information Act requests at the same university for two scientists who just happen to be on opposite sides of the global warming debate and see how the university responds.

Not surprisingly, the university was glad to do whatever it could to hurt the global warming skeptic, while stonewalling any requests for information about the global warming advocate.

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Florida Judge Rules Against Health Law.

3:38 pm

Big news! A Florida judge today has ruled the entire Obamacare law is unconstitutional. Key quote:

In his ruling, Judge Roger Vinson, a Republican appointee, said that the law’s requirement to carry insurance or pay a fee “is outside Congress’ Commerce Clause power, and it cannot be otherwise authorized by an assertion of power under the Necessary and Proper Clause. It is not constitutional.” The ruling also said that the entire law “must be declared void,” because the mandate to carry insurance is “not severable” from the rest of the law. [emphasis mine]

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