A Democrat reveals his dislike for democracy: New York Senator Charles Schumer proposes disenfranchising tea party voters in order to weaken their impact at the polls.
He also suggested that the IRS harassment of conservatives, and conservatives only, is a good thing.
Finding out what’s not in it: Enrollees in Obamacare in California are discovering few doctors or hospitals willing to accept their plans.
Worse, they are finding that the lists of doctors and hospitals that supposedly accept Obamacare is wrong.
For his part, Peter Lee, Covered California’s executive director, acknowledged that consumers may be getting misinformation from the state agency or insurer about whether their providers are participating. But, he said, the exchange is prepared to help those consumers get new plans that more suitably meet their needs. “If our directory or the directory of the health plan is wrong and a consumer wants to change plans, we’ll work with them to make sure they can do so,” Lee said in a news call this week. [emphasis mine]
Pushback: The conservative target of a fake investigation by a Wisconsin Democratic prosecutor — having won in court — is now threatening to sue if the prosecutor doesn’t shut the investigation down immediately.
Eric O’Keefe, who has been identified in media reports as a target of a secret “John Doe” investigation in Wisconsin, today demanded that state prosecutors end their action against him or face a federal civil rights action. O’Keefe is director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, which was also targeted for alleged unlawful “coordination” with Governor Scott Walker’s campaign for fiscal reforms. “This investigation is political payback by elected prosecutors against conservative activists for their political successes in Wisconsin,” stated O’Keefe. “They are violating the constitutional rights of private citizens and must be held accountable.”
In a letter to the prosecutors, O’Keefe’s lawyer, Washington attorney David B. Rivkin, states that the probe has no basis in Wisconsin law and violates Mr. O’Keefe’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association. The prosecutors’ legal reasoning, the letter states, “is unsupportable as a matter of law and crystal clear evidence of bad faith.”
“I am confident that any federal court that reviews the facts will see your investigation for what it is, put a stop to it, and hold you publicly accountable,” the letter states.
I have missed the story in which a judge had quashed the prosecutors’ subpoenas, which is good news. That the Wisconsin Club for Growth is going on the offensive now is even better news.
The totalitarians of New York.
It is why I left back in 1998. Amazingly, it is getting far worse with the passing years. See for example this story.
The IRS harassment of conservatives continues.
The massive abuse of government power by the Obama administration against their conservative opponents nationwide makes anything done in New Jersey by Chris Christie’s underlings seem petty and inconsequential.
Banning guns by proxy: Gun manufacturers flee California over its microstamping law.
Smith & Wesson announced it will stop selling its handguns in California rather than manufacture them to comply with the new microstamping law. The other publicly traded firearms manufacturer in the U.S., Sturm, Ruger, also said this month that it will stop new sales to California. The announcement late Wednesday came a week after the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, filed suit against California for requiring that all new semi-automatic pistols that are not already on the state’s approved gun roster have the microstamping technology.
Microstamping is a patented process that, in theory, would have a unique code on the tip of a gun’s firing pin that would engrave that information on the casing when fired.
In other words, while the California legislature might want to make believe the technology is practical, the people who have to build and sell the guns know otherwise and can’t do it. So, this law essentially becomes a backdoor ban on guns and the second amendment. If you make it illegal to manufacture and sell guns, it doesn’t matter whether you have a right to own one.
Note also the basic dishonesty of the legislators who passed this law. They knew it was impractical, and did it not to put microstamping on ammo, but to make it impossible to sell guns. Or to put it more bluntly, they lied about what they were doing.
Finding out what’s in it: The credit rating agency Moody’s has downgraded its outlook for health insurancers from stable to negative because of Obamacare.
In other words, the agency now expects many of these companies to go bankrupt because of the costs and regulations imposed on them by the healthcare law.
Aren’t we all glad Obama and the Democratic Party forced this law on us?
You might have noticed a plethora of stories in the last couple of days, reporting claims by NASA and NOAA that 2013 was one of the hottest years ever on record.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday released its global temperature figures for 2013. The average world temperature was 58.12 degrees (14.52 Celsius) tying with 2003 for the fourth warmest since 1880. NASA, which calculates records in a different manner, said Tuesday that 2013 was the seventh warmest on record, with an average temperature of 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius).
How can this be, if there has been a pause in global warming for the past 17 years, as has been admitted by the UN’s IPCC and climate scientists everywhere?
The answer, in my opinion: outright fraud.
» Read more
A U.S. Geological Survey science team has determined that the grizzly bear population has recovered enough that the bear can be taken off the endangered species list.
A report delivered in November by the US Geological Survey’s Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team describes a resilient and healthy bear population that has adapted to the loss of pine nuts by eating more elk and bison, keeping fat stores at levels that allow the bears to survive and reproduce. For Christopher Servheen, a biologist who oversees grizzly-bear recovery efforts at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Montana, that is not surprising. “Bears are flexible,” he says. “It’s easier to say what they don’t eat than what they do eat.”
Not surprisingly, environmental activists don’t like this decision. They claim that, wait for it, global warming threatens the bear enough that it should not be delisted.
» Read more
The most pessimistic view: Six likely events that will follow an economic crash.
I have doubts about some of the predicted events, but I have no doubt about the precarious state of the United States’ financial situation, as described here. Nothing good can come from this. Nothing.
Repeal the damn law: A woman spends six weeks trying to cancel an Obamacare insurance policy.
Ms Hill was told by an ObamaCare operator that she needed to call her insurance company, who passed her back to the Federal Exchange. Ms Hill claims the terminate button on Obamacare’s website did not work, and that she spent ‘several hours a day’ on hold with the Health Insurance Marketplace. Finally, Ms Hill drove to her insurance company’s headquarters in Kansas City, 100 miles from her home, and they were able to help her cancel her ‘Obamacare’ plan.
Remember, Obamacare essentially asks the equivalent of the DMV to handle the complex task of running the nation’s health insurance industry. And we all know how efficient the DMV is!
“The potential for abuse is staggering.”
The words Obamacare and IRS should immediately come to mind.
