Tag: policy

Supreme Court upholds voter ID again

9:31 am

The Supreme Court today turned down a challenge to Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, essentially allowing it to become fully effective.

This is not the first time the court has upheld voter ID. Moreover, the decision today is another political victory for Scott Walker, who pushed the legislation through, and a defeat for Democrats and the left, which for some reason fear a system that will make sure voter fraud is difficult if not impossible.

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Further SLS delays loom

9:32 pm

A report by NASA’s inspector general finds that the planned first launch of the SLS rocket in November 2018 is threatened with delay because the ground facilities at Kennedy might not be ready.

In a report released Wednesday, NASA’s Office of Inspector General warned that Ground Systems Development and Operations, or GSDO, may be hard-pressed to have Kennedy Space Center’s launch facilities ready on time. Ground systems are a critical piece of the SLS-Orion infrastructure. All three elements are tightly integrated, with ground systems requiring significant input from the rocket and capsule designs. “GSDO cannot finalize and complete its requirements without substantial input for the other two programs,” said Jim Morrison, the assistant inspector general for audits. “And NASA is still finalizing the requirements for those programs.”

Gee, I guess SLS isn’t getting enough money, as its budget is only about $3 billion per year (about six times what the commercial space program gets per year, a program that has already created two freighter systems for ISS and is now creating two manned ferry systems for ISS). Why don’t we give them more, so that even more won’t be done with the money we spend?

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Arkansas agrees to let Stanley children go home, but only for awhile

10:01 am

The Arkansas government has agreed to return to their parents the children it had kidnapped, but only provisionally.

Four of the seven Arkansas Christian homeschool children who were removed from their parents home in January will finally be returned to live full time on a 60-day trial basis after the family reached a mediated agreement with the Arkansas Department of Human Services on Tuesday. The children’s mother, Michelle Stanley, told The Christian Post on Wednesday that the agreement will also allow for the three older children to return home on the weekends and to stay at home during their spring break, which is next week.

Isn’t this nice of them? The parents have been accused of no crime, there is absolutely no evidence of abuse, but the state has decided it can take the kids anyway and than determine if the parents can ever see them again. Doesn’t that make you feel really safe?

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Ohio wedding photographer threatened with legal action over beliefs

9:55 am

Here we go again: A Christian wedding photography now faces legal action because she declined photographing a same-sex marriage.

Although the [same-sex] couple filed the complaint, Ohio is one of 13 states that does not allow same-sex marriages, and Bexley is also a municipality that does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. Additionally, the Bexley Chamber of Commerce does not prohibit its members from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

The Bexley Chamber of Commerce issued a statement through Facebook on Monday condemning Schmackers’ refusal of service. The post continued by stating that board members have decided that the chamber’s policy must be changed so that this type of “discrimination” does not happen again.

Damn right. These evil Christians have got to be squelched and destroyed. They have no right to their religion. In fact, maybe we should round them up and put them in camps! That will show them that we believe in tolerance and freedom!

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Obamacare is crushing small business with its cost and complexity

9:15 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare is costing small businesses thousands of dollars to fulfill its complex regulations that they didn’t have to spend beforehand.

The Affordable Care Act, which as of next Jan. 1 applies to all companies with 50 or more workers, requires owners to track staffers’ hours, absences and how much they spend on health insurance. Many small businesses don’t have the human resources departments or computer systems that large companies have, making it harder to handle the paperwork. On average, complying with the law costs small businesses more than $15,000 a year, according to a survey released a year ago by the National Small Business Association. “It’s a horrible hassle,” says Mete, managing partner of the Miami-based company.

And how are these small businesses paying for this? Either they have to raise prices, so that you the customer pay, or they

cut back on workers’ bonuses and raises. “[The employees] understand it didn’t emanate from us,” Patton says. “They’re just disappointed that $25,000 could have gone into a bonus pool.”

Obviously, it is Bush’s fault that this is happening! Who would dream of blaming the Democrats and Obama, even though they wrote this law and were the only ones who voted for it? If Bush hadn’t been President, they would never have done it! In fact, I am sure it is Reagan’s fault also!

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Airline passengers subdue man screaming “Jihad!” on airplane

10:07 am

A United Airlines flight had to turn back when passengers on board were forced to subdue an unruly passenger who was yelling “Jihad!” as he charged the cockpit.

This is another example of why the TSA is a complete waste of money while doing terrible harm to our culture’s concept of freedom. No matter what the TSA does, it can never prevent bad guys from getting on a plane. In the end, it will always be the job of the passengers and crew to resist a terrorist. We should just give that responsibility back to them, as free Americans, and get rid of the TSA. It might increase the risk, but I promise you, if every flight had armed Americans aboard, randomly placed, terrorists would go elsewhere to try to do their dirty work.

Most Americans think my opinion here is crazy, but it is the way our country did things for its first two centuries, and things were actually no more dangerous but we all had much greater freedom.

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Wait times at the VA remain months long, not 4 days as claimed

11:42 am

The federal government marches on! The wait times to get medical appointments at the VA continue to be months long, not 4 days as the claimed by agency officials in congressional hearings.

Records show on January 15, more than 1,600 veterans who were new patients were waiting 60 to 90 days for appointments. Another 400 veterans have waited up to six months, and 64 veterans had been waiting six months to a year for their appointments. The documents provided to CNN show the lengthy wait times are still happening, within the last several months, and sources say the backlog is happening even now.

And yet last month, the VA’s acting director for the Western region overseeing the Los Angeles VA told Congress that veterans who are new patients there only have to wait a few days for appointments. “The average wait time for a new patient right now is about four days,” Dr. Skye McDougall, the acting director of the Desert Pacific Healthcare Network, Veterans Health Administration, testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

Who ya gonna believe, the actual facts or what an important government official claims? Obviously, the official is right and any skepticism by anyone makes them a denier who should just shut up. It makes people uncomfortable!

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Another American expresses his anger

5:07 pm

The rage builds: “So I’d like to ask the Fed, is it that you just hate the working class here in America and thus like to torment them or are you truly that stuck up your own asses that you just cannot see the light?”

Read it all. I don’t agree with his perspective entirely, but I do agree that the elite of this country are increasingly ignoring the wishes of the general public, for their own gain and to the detriment of everyone else. If they don’t stop this behavior soon, they are going to find this rage coming back to bite them, and that bite is going to hurt everyone very badly.

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Russia abandons super-rocket designed to compete with SLS

9:39 am

The competition heats up: Russia has decided to abandon an expensive attempt to build an SLS-like super-rocket and will instead focus on incremental development of its smaller but less costly Angara rocket.

Facing significant budgetary pressures, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, has indefinitely postponed its ambitious effort to develop a super-heavy rocket to rival NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System, SLS. Instead, Russia will focus on radical upgrades of its brand-new but smaller Angara-5 rocket which had its inaugural flight in Dec. 2014, the agency’s Scientific and Technical Council, NTS, decided on Thursday, Mar. 12.

For Russia’s space industry, it appears that these budgetary pressures have been a blessing in disguise. Rather than waste billions on an inefficient rocket for which there is no commercial demand — as NASA is doing with SLS (under orders from a wasteful Congress) — they will instead work on further upgrades of Angara, much like SpaceX has done with its Falcon family of rockets. This will cost far less, is very efficient, and provides them a better chance to compete for commercial launches that can help pay for it all. And best of all, it offers them the least costly path to future interplanetary missions, which means they might actually be able to make those missions happen. To quote the article again:

By switching upper stages of the existing Angara from kerosene to the more potent hydrogen fuel, engineers might be able to boost the rocket’s payload from current 25 tons to 35 tons for missions to the low Earth orbit. According to Roscosmos, Angara-A5V could be used for piloted missions to the vicinity of the Moon and to its surface.

In a sense, the race is now on between Angara-A5V and Falcon Heavy. It shall be quite exciting to watch this competition unfold between big government and private enterprise over the next few decades.

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Family flees home due to death threats

8:57 am

Modern American freedom: The parents of one of the Oklahoma fraternity students caught on video making a racist chant have fled their home due to death threats.

As vile as the racist chanting was, it was not threatening anyone with death. Moreover, we have something called the first amendment, which protects all speech, even the vile kind. Threatening the parents of someone who says something you don’t like is hardly standing up for righteous principles.

In related news, Christians at George Washington University in the District of Columbia face punishment because they refuse to participate in gay sensitivity training sessions.

A conservative student group at The George Washington University faces punishment, including the loss of its funding, for refusing to engage in LGBT sensitivity training on campus. The students are now being condemned and attacked on campus by those who claim they’re committing an “act of violence” for standing up for their members’ individual rights and Judeo-Christian values. The Young America’s Foundation chapter at the Washington, D.C.-based academic institute has refused to participate in LGBT sensitivity training recently made as a requirement.

Amanda Robbins, vice president of GW YAF, told The Christian Post that their objection to the training “stems not only from many of our members’ Judeo-Christian values, but also from our organization’s commitment to defending the individual rights of every student on campus. We firmly believe that there should be no such preconditions for any student organization to be able to operate freely on campus,” said Robbins.

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Feel the middle-class rage

11:43 am

While this story is about the testimony of a mother before the Arkansas State Board of Education, objecting to Common Core standards and demanding that they be changed or abandoned, I think its most important take-away is watching the intelligent and thoughtful anger she expresses.

I have included the video of her testimony below the fold. Anyone who thinks the tea party movement is dead needs to watch this video to find out how wrong they are. This woman speaking as a representative of over a thousand parents and teachers, all of whom object to Common Core, the federally-imposed education standards. She also reveals the increasing level of rage and anger that is percolating in the general public over the incompetent and destructive dictates that are being imposed on them by bureaucrats in Washington.

The Republican leadership in the House and Senate might think they were elected to keep the government open, but this woman’s testimony tells me that the mid-term elections were a demand by the public for the Republicans to shut it down.

And they better do it soon, because the rage is continuing to build. If our elected officials don’t respond to it soon the very system of democracy on which our society was built — founded on the principle that government is the servant to the people — is going to become very seriously threatened.

» Read more

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New CBO report reveals that Obamacare will add more than a trillion to debt

9:12 am

Finding out what’s in it: A new CBO report has revealed that Obamacare will add $1.35 trillion to the federal government’s debt over the next decade.

Anyone want to bet me against me when I say that I have no doubt that this is an understatement? Also, the link above makes sure to include this juicy quote from President Obama, made in 2009 while he was selling Obamacare:

First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.

It seems that whenever Obama uses the word “period” to emphasize his position, he is signalling to everyone that either he hasn’t the faintest idea what he is talking about, or he is a bald-faced liar. Personally, I think it is both.

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Supreme Court throws out Obamacare contraceptive mandate again

9:01 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Supreme Court has thrown out a lower court ruling that had favored the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate under Obamacare.

What this ruling essentially does is announce to the courts, and the nation, that its decision in the Hobby Lobby case — where it was ruled that the mandate was unconstitutional and that the administration could not force Hobby Lobby to buy contraceptives for its employees — applies nationwide to all companies.

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Americans demand mandatory food labels for DNA

1:48 pm

We are doomed: A new survey has found that more than 80 percent of Americans support the idea of requiring labels on any foods that contain DNA.

If the government does impose mandatory labeling on foods containing DNA, perhaps the label might look something like this: “WARNING: This product contains deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The Surgeon General has determined that DNA is linked to a variety of diseases in both animals and humans. In some configurations, it is a risk factor for cancer and heart disease. Pregnant women are at very high risk of passing on DNA to their children.”

I truly fear for the future, not so much because so many people haven’t the slightest idea what DNA is, but because so many people are so eager to force food labeling (or any other regulation you can think of) on others at the slightest whim.

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The only Republican Presidential contender to be honest in Iowa

10:01 am

During an event in Iowa, only one Republican Presidential candidate had the courage to oppose ethanol subsidies.

[Ted] Cruz reiterated his opposition to the Renewable Fuels Standard, a popular policy in Iowa that presents a thorny problem for many Republicans who campaign against crony capitalism but want to win the GOP presidential nomination.

“I recognize that this is a gathering of a lot of folks where the answer you’d like me to give is ‘I’m for the RFS, darnit;’ that’d be the easy thing to do,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, people are pretty fed up, I think, with politicians who run around and tell one group one thing, tell another group another thing, and then they go to Washington and they don’t do anything that they said they would do. And I think that’s a big part of the reason we have the problems we have in Washington, is there have been career politicians in both parties that aren’t listening to the American people and aren’t doing what they said they would do.”

All the other candidates, including Scott Walker, pandered to the audience by saying they supported, in some manner, a continuation of the subsidies. Thus, it might be that Ted Cruz might actually be the only candidate with whom we can actually trust what he says.

And then, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton explained private enterprise to everyone at a campaign event for a Democratic candidate for Massachusetts governor, “Don’t let anybody tell you it’s corporations and businesses create jobs,” Clinton said.

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Most Republicans fold to Boehner

11:00 am

It appears there will not be a battle in the Republican Party to replace John Boehner.

Instead, the Republicans in the House appear eager to accept their place as brown-nosing boot-lickers to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. Moreover, the leadership that likes licking these boots is getting aggressive about it:

Heightening the party’s intramural angst were new political ads by the American Action Network, run by Boehner’s allies. They began running Tuesday in the districts of about 50 House Republicans who defied him on Homeland Security last week. The $400,000 campaign includes phone calls, a few TV ads, and ads on popular conservative talk radio shows. They urged constituents to call their representatives, not vote them out of office.

For years I’ve argued against splitting off a third party, because I know it will only fracture the right’s strengths and give more power to the left. At this point, however, I see no point supporting this Republican Party. It appears they have no interest in fighting for conservative values, and merely wish to act as a go-between between the left and the right, with their sole goal being to placate the right as they facilitate left wing policies.

If we are to be led by leftists, let’s let them lead, do their worst, and show the world exactly who they are. At least then there will be no doubt to future generations who destroyed this country.

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Obama threatens veto of House bill to limit EPA use of unpublished data

9:57 am

Here we go again: The House is about to vote on a Republican bill to require EPA to use only publicly available data.

The bills, introduced by a mostly Republican cast of sponsors in both the House and the Senate, would require that EPA use only publicly available, reproducible data in writing regulations and seek to remake the membership and procedures of the agency’s science advisory panels. Supporters, including industry groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argue that the legislation would improve the transparency and soundness of how EPA uses science, making regulations less costly and more effective.

Opponents, however, are calling the bills wolves in sheep’s clothing. “I cannot support legislation that makes it easier for industry to implement their destructive playbook, because risking the health of the American people is not a game that I’m willing to play,” said Representative Paul Tonko (D–NY) at a 25 February committee meeting on the bills.

The White House has issued statements saying Obama will veto the bill. How hard to do you think John Boehner and Mitch McConnell will fight for this legislation?

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Obamacare causes insurance company to lose money

10:10 am

Finding out what’s in it: For the first time in 15 years, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina will lose money in 2015 due to Obamacare.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the state’s largest health insurer, said Friday that it posted its first financial loss in 15 years as a result of insuring high numbers of older and sicker people under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Chapel Hill organization signed up 257,704 people under the federal health care law, which requires insurers to provide coverage regardless of a customer’s health condition. New enrollees last year swelled Blue Cross’s covered membership to 3.91 million people, and boosted revenue by 25 percent to an all-time high of $8 billion.

But steep medical claims – for hip and knee replacements, heart procedures, specialty drugs and other costs – drove up medical claims from $5 billion in 2013 to $6.4 billion in 2014. Blue Cross also paid $156 million in ACA-related fees, a new cost for the company.

Federal subsidies under Obamacare are supposed to cover these loses, but then we must ask where is the bankrupt federal government going to get this money? In the end, someone is going to go bankrupt and we will all be worse off.

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Investigators say 32,000 Lerner IRS emails have been recovered

10:12 pm

Transparency! The Treasury investigators told a House committee on Thursday that they have been able to recover 32,000 emails by IRS official Lois Lerner that IRS officials had sworn were lost forever.

[Timothy Camus, a Treasury deputy inspector general for tax administration,] said it took investigators two weeks to locate the computer tapes that contained Lerner’s emails. He said it took technicians about four months to find Lerner’s emails on the tapes. Several Oversight Committee members questioned how hard the IRS tried to produce the emails, given how quickly independent investigators found them.

In other words, IRS officials lied to Congress when they said these emails were unrecoverable and couldn’t be found.

Unfortunately, the investigators have not yet gone through these emails in detail, and were not yet prepared to reveal what was in them. For that show we will have to wait a bit longer.

Update: During his testimony Camus also said that they are considering a criminal investigation into whether there was a real cover-up.

The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed. Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.

“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.

Camus also said that when his investigation went to the software people to try to get the tapes, they discovered that IRS officials had never talked to them, demonstrating clearly that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was lying when he said the agency had searched high and low for the tapes and discovered them lost.

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Russians confirm plan to leave ISS in 2024

8:59 am

The competition heats up: Russian space managers have confirmed that they have endorsed a plan to leave ISS in 2024, when they will assemble their own space station using new modules as well as a significant number of the modules attached to ISS.

On February 24, 2015, the Scientific and Technical Council, NTS, at Roskosmos, the main planning body at the agency led by a newly appointed chairman and the former head of the agency Yuri Koptev, formally endorsed the Russian participation in the ISS program until 2024. It would be followed by the separation of Russia’s newest modules from the ISS to form the new national space station. As previously reported on this site, the initial configuration of the station would include the Multi-purpose Module, MLM, the Node Module, UM, and the Science and Power Module, NEM. Notably, the original Russian ISS component — the Zvezda Service Module, SM — was not included in the plan, thus ensuring that its propulsion capabilities would be available for deorbiting of the outpost at the end of its operational life.

Whether ISS will be functional with just the Russian Zvezda module is not clear. NASA engineers now have about a decade to figure this out and to fix it.

In general the break up of the partnership running ISS will be good for space exploration. The competition between nations will spur development and innovation. It will also free each nation from the shackles of the partnership. The Russians in particular have wanted to utilize ISS for more daring and longer expeditions to research interplanetary travel, and were stymied by NASA’s bureaucracy. Once they start doing this sort of thing on their own station NASA will feel obliged to follow.

Obviously, competition between nations carries risk. As long as there is some agreed to framework for claiming territory on other planets (something that the U.N. treaty does not allow), the nations will be able to compete peacefully. Without that framework, however, will leave room for disagreement and conflict.

It is thus essential that the space-faring nations sit down and work out this framework, and do it as soon as possible before each nation has vested interests in space that are already in conflict with each other. Above all, this new framework has got to abandon the U.N. space treaty with its rules that forbid the claiming and controlling of territory by nations in space. Those rules were never realistic, and literally guarantee that nations will eventually end up at war with each other as they fight to determine who owns what in space.

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Obamacare taxes hit the poorest the hardest

11:20 am

Finding out what’s in it: An H&R report has found that more than half of the poorest Obamacare enrollees face a tax liability of around $500 at tax time.

The report also found that the Obamacare penalty for not having insurance is now averaging about $172. This number however will go up in future years as the full penalty is phased in.

But isn’t Obamacare the “Affordable Care Act”, as Obama and the Democrats named it? It can’t cost us more. They said so! They promised!

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Watching politics eat away at climate science

9:29 am

Two stories today today illustrate how the field of climate science is being destroyed by politics.

In the first, a leading climate skeptic chortles over the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri, the man who has headed the IPCC since 2002, who has stepped down because of allegations of sexual harassment by an employee at the institute he heads in New Delhi. In the second, Willie Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist who has published numerous peer-reviewed papers raising questions about global warming science, is attacked for not fully disclosing the sources of his income.

In both cases, the two sides in the global warming debate are using these allegations as ammunition to attack the believability of each side’s stance on the scientific question of global warming. And in both cases, the stories raise literally no questions about the science itself that each man advocated.

I admit that I have attacked Pachauri numerous times in the past, but each time it was because he demonstrated outright ignorance of the field of climate science or had been caught making significant scientific errors. His resignation here however has nothing to do with the science published in IPCC reports, and should not be used as fodder to criticize the theory of human-caused global warming.

Similarly, none of the articles in the mainstream science press about the allegations against Soon have raised a single question about his actual results. All they have done is attack him for not revealing all of his funding sources. His research itself still appears valid. That the largest science journals, Science and Nature, have published articles attacking Soon, with the Smithsonian now piling on as well, without presenting any evidence that he had falsified any of his work, illustrates how corrupt this field has become. The science for these major science journals no longer matters. All that matters is destroying someone who was apparently successful in bursting the balloon on some global warming science.

Until everyone stops playing this game and focuses instead on the data itself and what that data is really telling us, we will get no closer to truly understanding the climate of the Earth. And tragically, I see far too little effort in the climate field to do this.

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Florist rejects attorney general’s deal to settle lawsuit over same-sex weddings

9:57 pm

The Washington florist whose entire assets a judge has ruled can be confiscated because she refuses to participate in a same-sex wedding because of her Christian religion has rejected outright a settlement offered to her by the state’s attorney general.

Ms. Stutzman [the florist] rejected Friday a settlement agreement offered by Mr. Ferguson [the attorney general] that would have required her to pay $2,001 in damages and legal fees after a judge ruled last week that she violated state law by declining to provide services for a same-sex wedding. “My primary goal has always been to bring about an end to the Defendants’ unlawful conduct and to make clear that I will not tolerate discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” Mr. Ferguson said in a statement.

The agreement also would require Ms. Stutzman to agree “not to discriminate in the future,” which means she must provide custom floral arrangements for same-sex weddings or stop doing weddings altogether, said Peter LaVallee, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office.

In rejecting the offer, Stutzman was very blunt about her reasons.

“Your offer reveals that you don’t really understand me or what this conflict is all about,” Ms. Stutzman said in a letter to Mr. Ferguson. “It’s about freedom, not money. I certainly don’t relish the idea of losing my business, my home, and everything else that your lawsuit threatens to take from my family, but my freedom to honor God in doing what I do best is more important.

“…I pray that you reconsider your position. … I kindly served Rob [the gay plaintiff] for nearly a decade and would gladly continue to do so. I truly want the best for my friend. I’ve also employed and served many members of the LGBT community, and I will continue to do so regardless of what happens with this case.”

She concluded, “You chose to attack my faith and pursue this not simply as a matter of law, but to threaten my very means of working, eating, and having a home. If you are serious about clarifying the law, then I urge you to drop your claims against my home, business, and other assets and pursue the legal claims through the appeal process.”

The mildness of the attorney general’s offer suggests to me that he is feeling some political heat. He looks like a tyrant and a bad guy who is trying to destroy this woman expressly because of her religious beliefs. He thus wants this case to end with a victory, but to end as quickly as possible.

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Another problem with the Obamacare online system forces further delays and problems

9:25 am

The glitches keep coming! Because almost a million taxpayers were provided incorrect information by the Obamacare online system the Obama administration has announced that there will be delays in sending them their tax refunds, with many being forced to resubmit their tax returns.

The truth is that these kinds of screw-ups should be and will be routine in any system as complex and Rube Goldberg-like as Obamacare is.

Bur just keep reminding yourself: The Democrats continue to support this law in every way, refusing to consider any change under any condition.

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Another Obamacare law delay

9:52 pm

The law is for little people: The Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it will delay for five months enforcing a part of Obamacare pertaining to small businesses.

It seems that under Obamacare businesses are no longer allowed to offer employees spending accounts which can be used cover a portion of the cost of buying individual health plans. (Another example of not being allowed to keep your plan, even if you like it. Period.) If they continue to offer these accounts they could get fined $100 per day per employee. If they don’t, their employees might find themselves without health insurance.

So, the Obama administration is not going to enforce another Obamacare provision for five more months, even though this law was Obama’s gift to the nation and was so perfect it wasn’t necessary to discuss its passage with anyone outside the Democratic Party. In fact, it was so perfect the Democrats themselves didn’t need to read the law before they voted for it!

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Democrats discover that Obamacare fines are costly

10:23 am

Finding out what’s in it: Congressional Democrats are pleading with the Obama administration to create an illegal waiver of the Obamacare tax penalities for people who fail to obtain health insurance by this past weekend’s deadline.

Idiots. They have voted numerous times in lockstep for Obamacare, resisting all efforts to repeal or even amend it. Yet when the law they supported and forced upon us is finally about to take effect they suddenly discover they don’t like it?

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Europe’s last ATV leaves ISS

9:44 am

Europe’s last ATV cargo freighter for ISS left the station and burned up over the Pacific Ocean this past weekend.

Because of a technical problem on the ATV, a camera designed to record what happened inside the freighter as it burned up during re-entry was removed prior to undocking so that it could be used instead during a later re-entry.

Meanwhile, instead of supplying ISS with cargo, Europe has decided to meet its contribution to ISS by building the service module for NASA’s Orion/SLS program, which has no plans to ever go to ISS. Note, however, that Europe has also not committed to building more than two service modules, so how Orion/SLS will go beyond Earth orbit after these two modules have been launched remains a mystery.

If you are scratching your head at all this, you are not alone. To me, this one decision alone illustrates quite neatly the utter stupidity of big government-run programs.

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