Tag: policy

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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