EPA funnels cash to Democrats
Working for the Democratic Party: A new report finds that the EPA has been directly funneling government funds to Democratic activists in the environmental movement.
Tag: oppression
Obamacare continues force premiums to skyrocket.
Finding out what’s in it. Premiums continue to rise, and numerous insurance policies continue to be cancelled, all because of Obamacare.
Writing in Forbes, Manhattan Institute health-policy analyst and NRO contributor Avik Roy discovered that in 3,137 of America’s 3,144 counties, Obamacare has hiked 2014 individual-market premiums by an average of 49 percent. Women saw rates increase in 82 percent of U.S. counties, while they rose in 91 percent of counties for men. Although some have benefited from Obamacare’s subsidies, Roy writes, “Those who face higher premiums, higher taxes, or both, appear to outnumber those whom the law has made better off. That alone isn’t a test of the law’s virtue — but it is a measure of the law’s failed promise.”
The article also describes the cancellation of insurance policies in numerous states, despite Obama’s oft-repeated promise that “if you like your plan you can keep your plan. Period.”
The Feds steal cars
Theft by government: Homeland Security agents confiscate forty vehicles because they think they violate the Clean Air Act.
The story has this very interesting tidbit: According to the owner of one vehicle “had spent considerable money ensuring her vehicle would pass inspection laws and that it was in compliance with emission rules.” Nonetheless, the feds showed up at her door and took the vehicle.
Sudanese Christian woman arrives in U.S.
Some good news: The Sudanese Christian woman who had been threatened with execution because she would not renounce her religion has finally escaped Sudan, arriving in the United States on Thursday.
Go to the link for some joy. Despite the efforts of some in this country to destroy its fundamental freedoms, it still remains the world’s haven for the huddled masses yearning to breath free.
Mom arrested for teaching her son independence and self-reliance
Insanity: A mother has been arrested because she let her 7-year-old son walk alone about ten blocks to a neighborhood park.
The boy had a cell phone which he had just used to check in with his mother.
When I was seven I wandered all over my neighborhood in Brooklyn. In fact, when I was 4 to 6 my parents would rent a bungalow in a resort in the Catskills each summer. There, I would wander the countryside every day completely on my own. The resort, called a bungalow colony, was not fancy and did not really have any organized activities for the kids. We were free to explore, and would go miles in all directions into the nearby farm fields and woods. Interestingly, we knew our limits and always stayed within them.
But that was then, when this culture was free and believed in freedom and teaching independence and self-reliance to its young. Now, such ideas are considered evil and must be squelched.
The Clintons demand that unauthorized bios should not “be allowed”
Fascists: Faced with the publication this year of three unauthorized biographies, the Clintons are demanding that such works “should neither be allowed or enabled.”
The Clintons’ prepared statement is very clear:
Their behavior should neither be allowed nor enabled, and legitimate media outlets who know with every fiber of their being that this is complete crap should know not to get down in the gutter with them and spread their lies. But if anyone isn’t sure, let’s strap all three to a polygraph machine on live TV and let the needle tell the truth. [emphasis mine]
As Ed Morrissey notes bluntly at the link, “Their behavior should not ‘be allowed’? What authority exists to bar these authors and their publishers (one of which is Regnery, like Hot Air a subsidiary of Salem Communications) from engaging in political speech? A better question: What authority do the Clintons propose to stop political speech?” [emphasis in original]
CIA admits it hacked the Senate’s computers
These people should be fired, then imprisoned: The CIA today admitted that illegally hacked into the Senate’s computer system.
Oh wait, I have a better idea! Let’s put them in charge of our healthcare and patrolling the borders and our tax system and space exploration and climate research and any number of other important issues of the day in which we need honesty, ethics, reliability, and competence!
A Democrat speaks, and lies spew out
We never tried to impeach Bush, says Democratic lawmaker who co-sponsored Bush impeachment bill.
What really depresses me about this story is not that the Democrat lied so blatantly but that she did so because she knew that her supporters are so wedded to her and her party that they will accept what she says without question. She knows she can get away with it.
In related news: “Want to see what liberals are really like? Then read our uncensored hate mail from the last three weeks.”
Mangement failures in Obamacare
Finding out what’s not in it: A new GAO report cites epic management incompetence in the Obama administration that caused the disastrous Obamacare website failure.
Among the issues, investigators found that the administration kept changing the contractors’ marching orders for the HealthCare.gov website, creating widespread confusion and adding tens of millions of dollars in costs. Changes were ordered seemingly willy-nilly, including 40 times when government officials did not have the initial authority to incur additional costs.
As a result, the government has spent $840 million on Healthcare.gov and its supporting systems, according to the report.
As I’ve said repeatedly, when you ask the equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles to run one-sixth of the U.S. economy, you are guaranteeing this kind of failure. Worse, it is not as if this hasn’t happened before. We have had plenty of experience with failed and bungled government operations in the past four decades. Why do we then demand that we entrust more of our lives to their control?
As Albert Einstein wisely noted, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Burn the witch!
The left’s fascist war on anyone that dares disagree with them.
In this case the war was against Roger Pielke, a well known and respected scientist with many peer-reviewed papers with thousands of citations by others in the climate field.
New emails reveal Lois Lerner’s hatred of conservatives
Working for the Democratic Party: In newly revealed emails, Lois Lerner refers to Obama’s conservative opponents as “–holes” and “terRorists”.
In that Nov. 9, 2012 email, Lerner further suggests that conservatives will ruin the country: “So we don’t need to worry about alien teRrorists (sic). It’s our own crazies that will take us down,” she wrote.
The evidence also shows that Lerner used her private email account to conduct official IRS business, while also clearly favoring liberal organizations.
I wonder what we would find if those lost emails could turn up?
Jews attacked in Germany
The evil returns: In Germany a synagogue is firebombed and a rabbi gets death threats merely because they are Jewish.
As one commenter at the website above explained when another commenter asked for an explanation of anti-semitism, “An example of anti-Semitism is where people in the middle east are shooting at each other and an uninvolved Jewish man in Wuppertal gets death threats because of it.”
Reading the comments and the amount of childish hate that exudes from too many of them will certainly depress you.
Black bigots in California
Black leaders in Fresno, California want to stop the hiring of a teacher merely because his skin color happens to be white.
On Monday morning, a small band of activists showed up in front of the sparkling new school at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Church Avenue. The local press was also there. “We’re just saying what the community wants,” said Rev. Karen Crozier, one of the activists. “We didn’t fight for a white male or female teacher to educate our babies.” Crozier, who appears to be a professor at Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary, also suggested that a white person cannot teach minority children in this instance because of racism.
Sometimes the bigotry and blindness of people just leaves me speechless.
In related news, the organizer of a “gay” job fair is outraged that non-gays keep showing up there looking for jobs.
Congress restores most VA bonuses
After the House voted 421-0 in June to eliminate all bonuses at the Veterans Administration in response to the scandals there, a compromise bill with the Senate has restored most of those bonuses.
The compromise bill announced Monday by the chairmen of the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committees says VA bonuses will be capped at $360 million annually for the next ten years. But that cap is just 10 percent below the $400 million in bonuses the VA has distributed in recent fiscal years, and will allow up to $3.6 billion in bonuses to be awarded over the next decade.
“In each of fiscal years 2015 through 2024, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs shall ensure that the aggregate amount of awards and bonuses paid by the Secretary in a fiscal year… does not exceed $360,000,000,” the bill says. A description of the bill adds that members expect the VA to implement this cap in a way that does not “disproportionately impact lower-wage employees,” although the legislation itself does not include any restriction on how to award the money.
More evidence that our elected officials don’t represent us, but the employees of the government instead.
Another DC gun ban ruled unconstitutional
Victory for freedom: On Saturday a federal judge ruled that the DC ban on carrying handguns outside your home was unconstitutional and must no longer be enforced.
Expect the crime rate in DC to finally begin declining.
Update: DC’s police chief today announced that they will no longer arrest anyone who has the legal right to carry a gun, concealed or otherwise, in DC or in any other state. This means they now recognize the gun laws of the rest of the country.
“This was lawless behavior, and reckless as well.”
Guess who was both lawless and reckless. I can promise you it wasn’t George Bush.
The loss of skepticism in science
In April I taped a half hour television interview with George Noory for his subscription-based video show, Beyond Belief. Below is a clip from that interview, where I describe the terrible state of climate research, and how politics is destroying the very heart of what science stands for. Too many people are no longer open-minded. Rather than relay on the data they push their theories instead.
Robert Zimmerman discusses the truth about climate change with George Noory!
SLS needs more money!
Surprise, surprise! A GAO report finds that SLS is over budget and that NASA will need an additional $400 million to complete its first orbital launch in 2017.
NASA isn’t meeting its own requirements for matching cost and schedule resources with the congressional requirement to launch the first SLS in December 2017. NASA usually uses a calculation it calls the “joint cost and schedule confidence level” to decide the odds a program will come in on time and on budget. “NASA policy usually requires a 70 percent confidence level for a program to proceed with final design and fabrication,” the GAO report says, and the SLS is not at that level. The report adds that government programs that can’t match requirements to resources “are at increased risk of cost and schedule growth.”
In other words, the GAO says SLS is at risk of costing more than the current estimate of $12 billion to reach the first launch or taking longer to get there. Similar cost and schedule problems – although of a larger magnitude – led President Obama to cancel SLS’s predecessor rocket system called Constellation shortly after taking office. [emphasis mine]
I want to underline the current $12 billion estimate for the program’s cost to achieve one unmanned launch. That is four times what it is costing NASA to get SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada to build their three spaceships, all scheduled for first manned launch before 2017. SLS not only can’t get off the ground before 2017, it can’t even get built for $12 billion.
If this isn’t the definition of a wasteful, boondoggle designed merely as pork, I don’t know what is. And what I do know is that there is no way SLS is going to ever get the United States back into space. It should be shut down, now.
Islamic terrorism and bigotry for all to see.
The article also shows, with pictures, the violent nature of the Muslim demonstrations against Israel in France, and the intolerant treatment of Christians by ISIS in Mosul, Iraq.
More destroyed evidence at the IRS
Working for the Democratic Party: The IRS now reports that as many as 20 individuals under investigation for the agency’s harassment of Obama’s political opponents have had computer crashes, losing their emails.
IRS Deputy Associate Chief Counsel Thomas Kane said in transcribed congressional testimony that more IRS officials experienced computer crashes, bringing the total number of crash victims to “less than 20,” and also said that the agency does not know if the lost emails are still backed up somewhere.
The new round of computer crash victims includes David Fish, who routinely corresponded with Lois Lerner, as well as Lerner subordinate Andy Megosh, Lerner’s technical adviser Justin Lowe, and Cincinnati-based agent Kimberly Kitchens.
But hey, Lois Lerner says she did nothing wrong!