Go to the link and take a look. A picture is worth a thousand words. And in this case it is several pictures.
Does this make you feel safer? Homeland Security has lost track of more than one million foreigners after they have entered the country.
The government does track arrivals, but is years overdue in setting up a system to track departures — a goal set in a 1996 immigration law and reaffirmed in 2004, but which has eluded Republican and Democratic administrations. “DHS has not yet fulfilled the 2004 statutory requirement to implement a biometric exit capability, but has planning efforts under way to report to Congress in time for the fiscal year 2016 budget cycle on the costs and benefits of such a capability at airports and seaports,” GAO investigators wrote.
Homeland Security, like the TSA, is a fraud. Neither is capable of protecting us. Both are very skillful however at abusing innocent American citizens. Both should be eliminated. The country was actually safer — and freer — before they existed.
Does this make you feel safer? A new GAO report has found that TSA misconduct has risen by 26% in the past three years.
More evidence that Obamacare is turning the U.S. workforce into a part-time workforce.
The graphs are damning. The consequence of this shift is that the U.S. will increasingly be unable to compete in the global market. In addition, incomes and prosperity will shrink.
Working for the Democratic Party: Emails between IRS official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office show them twice colluding to illegally influence the FEC to prosecute conservative groups.
The timing of the correspondence between Lerner and the FEC suggests the FEC attorney sought information from the IRS in order to influence an upcoming vote by the six FEC commissioners. The FEC received a complaint in March 2008 from the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party alleging that the American Future Fund had violated campaign-finance law by engaging in political advocacy without registering as a political-action committee. The American Future Fund responded to that complaint in June 2008, telling the commission that it had applied for tax exemption in March of that year and was a “501(c)(4) social-welfare organization that was organized to provide Americans with a conservative and free-market viewpoint and mechanism to communicate and advocate on the issues that most interest and concern them.” According to the e-mail correspondence, a month after receiving the American Future Fund’s response, the FEC general counsel’s office — which is prohibited under law from conducting an investigation into an organization before the FEC’s six commissioners have voted to do so — contacted Lerner to investigate the agency’s tax-exempt status. [emphasis mine]
Simply put, the law states that when the FEC receives a complaint, the commission must then decide whether to initiate an investigation. Until it does so, however, it is a crime for the FEC’s general counsel to do any investigation. It is also a crime for the IRS to provide them any confidential tax information. Yet, the FEC’s general counsel did do an investigation on at least two conservative groups prior to a vote and Lois Lerner at the IRS provided them what they wanted, all illegally.
It appears that for justice to be served and for trust to be restored to these bureaucracies a lot of people need to be fired. Unfortunately, I do not expect that to happen. The Democrats clearly want to take advantage of this corrupt bureaucracy to wield power and destroy their enemies, and the Republicans are too wimpy to fight back. The result: The corruption and abuse of power will continue to happen, and it will happen with increasing aggressiveness against conservatives.
Working for the Democratic Party: New evidence now suggests that the IRS harassed conservative organizations routinely, whether or not they already had tax exempt status.
The war on women: The sad fate of Democrat women.
It’s always a little galling (not to mention hilarious) for those of us on the right to reflect that the Democratic Party — the party of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and family-destroying social programs — the party of Detroit, New Orleans, Newark, and Baltimore — the party that facilitates a black abortion rate that would bring a smile to the face of Planned Parenthood’s genocidally racist founder — has somehow managed to sell itself to African Americans as the friend of black people!
But it’s beginning to be equally galling (and equally comic) to reflect that the Democrats have also contrived to present themselves as the party of women.
This is the party whose most powerful senator left his probable mistress to drown after a car accident; the party whose most popular living president is a serial philanderer and accused rapist; the party whose most prominent woman rose to that prominence by virtue of her stand-by-your-man loyalty to a louse; and now the party of Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer, two men who have humiliated their wives with truly creepy behavior and yet seek to continue their political careers regardless.
We all make mistakes and it’s not that the GOP hasn’t got its share of sexual shenanigans, but the Republican establishment doesn’t routinely make excuses for its recidivist miscreants or make icons of their victimized spouses. The Dems…? They seem to think their political agenda somehow excuses their personal behavior. I joked on the Ricochet podcast last week that the party’s new slogan should be, ”Women — We Treat You Like Dirt, But At Least You Can Kill Your Unborn Children!”
But don’t worry. The Democrats are there to protect women from Romney’s “binders full of women.”
Update: And then there’s this.
Finding out what’s in it: The cost of complying with Obamacare is forcing insurance companies to abandon many state markets.
In February 2010, a month before passage of the law, Obama explained at a bipartisan health care summit at the Blair House, “What we’ve said is that if you join one of these exchanges, you will have choice and you will have competition. You will have a menu of private insurance options that you’ll be able to purchase.”
Increasing the number of insurance options for individuals was one of the key ways in which Obama claimed the law would be able to drive down insurance costs. But with less than 70 days before the exchanges are set to open, large insurers are pulling out of states as a result of the health care law, resulting in less choice for consumers, not more.
This is exactly what happened in New York in 1992 when the state legislature passed a law with many of the same components as Obamacare. Insurance companies fled the state, and premiums went up.
If only all bills were this lacking in details: Congress fiercely divided over completely blank bill that says and does nothing.
A blank piece of legislation that says nothing, does nothing, and contains no text whatsoever has been the source of heated debate in Washington this week, and has sharply divided Congress along partisan lines, Beltway sources confirmed Thursday. Known as S.0000, the bill, which doesn’t have sponsors, co-sponsors, or an author, has reportedly drawn starkly contrasting opinions from legislators in both the Senate and House of Representatives, and has paved the way for a major legislative battle in coming months.
Read the whole thing. It accurately captures the reality of present day Washington, with the Democrats pounding the table for this bill and the Republicans pounding the table against it.
According to two industry sources, the federal government has demanded that major internet companies provide it the stored passwords of their customers.
“I’ve certainly seen them ask for passwords,” said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We push back.” A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies “really heavily scrutinize” these requests, the person said. “There’s a lot of ‘over my dead body.'”
So far at least, it appears that the companies are doing the right thing and telling the government to go to hell.
The witch hunt continues: The Detroit City Council unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday calling for the further prosecution of George Zimmerman.
It not like these leaders in Detroit don’t have their own problems that they should be dealing with, eh?
As I said yesterday, they are thugs, jack-booted thugs. If they could arrange a kangaroo court to guarantee the conviction of those they dislike or disagree with, they would. And in fact, that is what they are trying to do right now.
The death of freedom: Ten things you could do in 1975 that you can’t do now.
Read the comments as well. I especially liked this: “It used to be that laws and regulations were put in place to prevent people from doing bad things to other people. Now laws and regulations are put in place to prevent good people from enjoying the fruits of their labor!”
Surprise, surprise! The defense industry has found that the cuts from sequestration have been far less painful than their lobbying had claimed.
Contractors seem pleasantly surprised that the automatic spending cuts are not hurting nearly as much as the industry’s lobbying arm warned they would in the months leading up to the sequester that took effect in March. [For example,] Lockheed Martin had predicted that sequestration would wipe out $825 million in revenue this year, but it no longer expects such a big hit. In fact, the company said, profit will be higher than initially projected. [emphasis mine]
The article specifically mentions the doomsday lobbying effort of the Aerospace Industries Association, As I noted back in December 2012, that lobbying was a lie. There is so much fat in the government that sequestration could have been three times bigger and it wouldn’t have done these contractors any serious harm. The inconsequential nature of those cuts now is illustrating the reality of this truth.
Finding out what’s in it: According to a new poll, only 11% of doctors believe that the Obamacare health exchanges will be open for business on October 1, as mandated by the law.
I found this tidbit from the article, however, far more disturbing, as it describes a detail of the Obamacare exchanges that will surely cause doctors incredible financial pain, and will likely cause them to demand all payments up front:
Jackson said that doctors who don’t have an understanding of those coverage terms could be in for a nasty surprise once the new plans go into effect. That’s because under the rules of the exchange, a patient can go up to three months without paying premiums and still not get their coverage formally dropped by an insurers—but the insurer isn’t obligated to pay claims incurred during the second and third month if that person isn’t paying their premiums for that time, Jackson said. Those rules could mean that doctors end up eating the cost of the care they have already provided, or have their receivables stay unpaid for longer stretches of time. [emphasis mine]
In other words, the law is tilted to allow patients to stiff both their doctors and their insurance companies. How precious.
An Arizona nursing student was suspended from school and called a bigot because she requested one of her classes be taught in English.
The student, Terri Bennett, 50, initially complained in April to school officials because she said the Spanish-dominated discussions in her class room were preventing her from learning, Townhall reported. The college nursing program director, David Kutzler, then allegedly called her “a bigot” and an expletive, and suspended her.
She has sued. The article also notes that the Arizona constitution requires schools to use English.
A close look at Angela Corey, the Florida prosecutor who brought charges against George Zimmerman.
And it doesn’t look good. She appears to be corrupt, vindictive, and power-hungry, all the things you do not want in a prosecutor.
A review and analysis of China’s space program.
The review’s one fault is that it ignores the military aspects of China’s effort. Nonetheless, its conclusions on China’s reasons for building this program illustrate once again why I repeatedly say, “The competition is heating up.”
More climate fraud: The routine lowering of past climate data to make today’s temperatures seem hotter.
Almost all past temperatures have been adjusted downward, compared with the temperatures that were actually recorded at the time. During the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, when many record high temperatures were recorded, the readings have been adjusted downward by, generally speaking, one to one and a half degrees. These adjustments stop abruptly in the late 1990s. The effect of the adjustments is to make the past look cooler in relation to the present.
This kind of manipulation of data, changing the historical record after the fact, is done ALL THE TIME by the climate alarmists who crank out all of the data that are reported on in the newspapers. And the adjustments are always the same: they make the past cooler, so that the present will look warmer, in order to support their power-grabbing climate hysteria agenda. Whenever you hear on the radio that a temperature reading is the “warmest ever” in a particular place, you can reasonably assume that the “warmest ever” title was conferred by falsely reporting temperature readings from past decades.
And as Hinderaker properly concludes, “This is, in my view, the biggest scandal in the history of science. I can’t think of any competitor that could even come close.”
From one of my readers: The Plundering of NASA: an Expose, How pork barrel politics harm American spaceflight leadership. You can buy the ebook edition here, and the print edition here.
I just finished reading it. Boozer’s introduction and opening two chapters provide one of the best detailed summaries explaining clearly why the United States today cannot launch its own astronauts into space, and why we are threatened with the possibility that we won’t be able to do it for years to come. And while his perspective is mostly from an engineering perspective, he also gives some of the political background behind this situation.
His later chapters are not as effectively written, but the opening is still worth it.
I will give a hint about his thesis: it involves comparing the Space Launch System (SLS) with private commercial space. And SLS does not fare well.
The uncertainty of science: Pro-global warming climate scientists, called to testify to Congress by Barbara Boxer (D-California), admitted yesterday that the global temperature has not risen for the past 10 to 15 years.
William Wilkins, the IRS chief counsel, now implicated in the IRS scandal to harass conservatives, is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire IRS.
Noonan’s review and analysis of yesterday’s testimony in the House is right on the money. The IRS scandal now points directly to the White House. Or as she notes,
It’s almost as if—my words—the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.
And this was done deliberately, by Wilkins, Obama’s political appointee, using the IRS for political purposes.
Moreover, the testimony yesterday also proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed the harassment was merely the actions of some rogue agents in Cincinnati. The obvious question then is this: Who was Lois Lerner trying to protect by these lies? The obvious answer: her bosses, in the White House.
Business as usual: Under pressure from her fellow legislators, a Maryland congresswoman has withdrawn her proposal to close the Marshall Space Flight Center.
As I wrote yesterday, this is government, and our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities. Gotta protect that pork!
This also illustrates quite nicely why NASA can’t build anything cheaply, which means it can’t build anything at all. The agency is saddled with too much expensive fat which it is not allowed to trim.
What a half-century of Democratic Party rule gets you: Detroit today filed for bankruptcy, the largest city in U.S. history to do so.
Though I personally dislike Democratic Party policies and think they accelerated this disaster, the real problem was a willingness of voters to accept the idea of one-party rule. Not once during those fifty-one years of continuous and disastrous Democratic Party rule did Detroit voters even once consider the idea of firing these guys to give someone else a shot at running the city.
A summary of the IRS scandal testimony today before the House Oversight Committee.
With video. The key point is that the harassment of conservatives was managed and controlled in Washington, D.C., by high IRS officials including Lois Lerner and White House appointees.
The new brownshirts: The New Black Panther Party is offering a $10,000 bounty for the capture and kidnapping of George Zimmerman.
Watch the video at the link. (I was especially struck by the uniforms, which strongly reminded me of Nazi uniforms in the 1930s.) They are holding themselves above the law, with the right to kidnap and imprison anyone they happen to dislike or disagree with.
Update: A commenter has noted that this is not a new story. The Panthers offered this bounty back in March 2012, before Zimmerman was charged. I should note however that this really doesn’t change anything, as these thugs were still making themselves judge, jury, and executioners, and above the law.
The IRS scandal moves up the chain of command: Testimony today revealed that the harassment of conservatives was managed by a White House appointee in the IRS chief counsel’s office.
It appears that one of the four individuals whose tax records were illegally accessed for political reasons was Delaware senatorial Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell.
Investigators for Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, an influential Republican who serves on the Finance and Judiciary committees, have uncovered one key issue: a backdoor system in which state officials can access Americans’ private tax records in the name of investigating with little oversight or accountability. [emphasis mine]
Now isn’t that reassuring?
The law is such an inconvenient thing: A third federal court has ruled that Obama’s fake recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Broad violated the Constitution.
The worst part of this violation by Obama and his cohorts is that, even after these rulings, the illegally appointed board has continued to issue regulations, ignoring the decisions of all the courts.
Congresswoman Mary Edwards (D-Maryland) is proposing a merger of two NASA centers to save money.
The amendment would establish a Center Realignment and Closure Commission that would be given six months to evaluate “[c]onsolidating all rocket development and test activities of the Marshall Space Flight Center and Stennis Space Center in one location” and recommend a location promising the greatest cost savings. The commission would also be asked to look at “[r]elocating all operations of the Marshall Space Flight Center to both the Stennis Space Center and Johnson Space Center.”
Now this is interesting. The Marshall Space Flight Center has been looking for a reason to exist for decades, since the end of the Apollo program. Any smart private company would have shut it down long ago to save money.
But then, this is government. The article, hostile to the idea of eliminating any government facility, describes quite succinctly why NASA can’t build anything cheaply and why nothing in government ever shrinks. Our legislators don’t represent us, they represent the small number of employees at these specific government facilities.
