Another great moment in local government.
The article also includes some links a entire collection of great moments, all sadly hilarious.
Finding out what’s in it: A mother with multiple sclerosis has lost her health insurance because of Obamacare.
She will likely face an IRS audit now as well, since she has gone public with her story. Can’t have these little people speaking bad of our great leader.
We’re here to help you: The Federal Trade Commission goes after piano teachers.
[T]he MTNA has existed since 1876 solely to advance the cause of music study and support music teachers. The 501(c)(3) has about 22,000 members, nearly 90% of them piano teachers, including many women who earn a modest living giving lessons in their homes. The group promotes music study and competitions and helps train teachers. Not exactly U.S. Steel.
The association’s sin, according to the feds, rested in its code of ethics. The code lays out ideals for members to follow—a commitment to students, colleagues, society. Tucked into this worthy document was a provision calling on teachers to respect their colleagues’ studios, and not actively recruit students from other teachers.
Such evil. Thank god we have Washington bureaucrats around to stamp it out!
Scott Walker’s epic battle to beat the unions in Wisconsin.
When they and Democratic legislators failed to prevent passage of Act 10 [the law that defanged the unions], they tried to defeat — with a scurrilous smear campaign that backfired — an elected state Supreme Court justice. They hoped that changing the court’s composition would get Walker’s reforms overturned. When this failed, they tried to capture the state Senate by recalling six Republican senators. When this failed, they tried to recall Walker. On the night that failed — he won with a larger margin than he had received when elected 19 months earlier — he resisted the temptation to proclaim, “This is what democracy looks like!”
Read it. It describes the way our country can defeat the fascists.
Another state tells Obama that they have to follow the law, even if it is a horrible one like Obamacare.
Working for the Democratic Party: A cancer patient who went on Fox to talk about how Obamacare has made him lose his health insurance is now being audited by the IRS.
Another way to describe this despicable behavior by the Obama Administration and the IRS is that they are fascist, jack-booted thugs. But that would be uncivil of me, even if it is entirely accurate.
Update: The insurance broker who saw the Fox news report and then helped the cancer patient keep his insurance is now also being audited.
Gun confiscation begins in New York.
Not only does this violate the second amendment, it also violates the fifth amendment, which states that no private property shall “be taken … without just compensation.”
I am so glad I moved out of that fascist state back in 1997.
Working for the Democratic Party: The Obama administration yesterday proposed outlawing political speech by any non-profits.
The IRS would enforce these new rules, which would make official the harassment of conservatives that the IRS did during the run-up to the 2012 election. Though they claim these rules would apply to all political groups, you and I know that they will likely use these rules selectively to squelch the speech of the administration’s opponents.
If you have any doubt, consider the selective manner in which the National Park Service enforces its laws. The leftist Occupy movement was allowed to do whatever it liked during its protests, despite being in clear violation of the law, but veterans were blocked from visiting open-air national monuments during the government shutdown in October.
This decision by the Obama administration also reveals Obama’s total support for that IRS harassment of conservatives. He liked it, and now wants to make it official. Moreover, the failure of his so-called investigation into the IRS scandal to contact any of the groups harassed, even after six months, tells us again that President Obama actually supported the harassment and is acting to stonewall the investigation.
The Supreme Court has decided to rule on the Obamacare contraceptive mandate.
Remember, Obamacare does not have what lawyers call a severability clause. If they rule any part of the law unconstitutional, without this clause they are required to rule the entire law unconstitutional.
Of course, these rules existed when we followed rules. Nowadays, who knows?
The uncertainty of climate science: This year’s hurricane season, predicted to be above average, was the weakest in decades.
This failure also continues a pattern seen in recent years, where the number of actual hurricanes ends up far below their prediction, but the number of named hurricanes still ends up about right (see the charts on the prediction link above). I noted this in 2012, and now it has happened again. As I said then,
I wonder if their naming process was fudged to get them the numbers they wanted. While it might be possible to do that with the naming process of tropical storms, it is far more difficult to fudge the number of actual hurricanes. My skeptical nature and the recent willingness in the climate field to fiddle with data probably makes me more suspicious than I should be.
Thus to me, these seasonal hurricane predictions are becoming increasingly suspect.
The day of reckoning looms: Another wave of mortgage loan defaults is about to hit.
The loans are a problem now because an increasing number are hitting their 10-year anniversary, at which point borrowers usually must start paying down the principal on the loans as well as the interest they had been paying all along. More than $221 billion of these loans at the largest banks will hit this mark over the next four years, about 40 percent of the home equity lines of credit now outstanding.
For a typical consumer, that shift can translate to their monthly payment more than tripling, a particular burden for the subprime borrowers that often took out these loans. And payments will rise further when the Federal Reserve starts to hike rates, because the loans usually carry floating interest rates.
Read the whole article. The possibilities, especially for some large banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America, are not good.
Five disastrous predictions that the Republicans got right about Obamacare.
Before Obamacare was passed, when Democrats were telling the public that it would make health care cheaper, better, and would cure cancer right after it makes your bed in the morning and cuts your grass, Republicans were pointing out the very flaws that the American people are bitterly complaining about today.
Sadly, the worst is yet to come, all of which have also been predicted by conservatives. And the most important prediction of all has been that there will no way to repair the damage created by this law by minor fixes. It must be repealed.
Update: Here’s another prediction that is going to hit 80 to 100 million people just before next year’s midterms. I wonder if it will cause any of those diehard low information Democratic voters to finally consider changing their votes.
A man in Ohio is arrested for the crime of having an empty hidden compartment in his car.
Read the story and weep for the death of freedom and individual rights.
The Washington Times and the journalist whose confidential files were taken illegally during a house search on an unrelated matter are suing Homeland Security.
The suit is also demanding that they be allowed depose the Homeland Security agent “who attended the raid and was involved in collecting the reporter’s materials to determine how widely information from the newspaper’s documents was distributed within the government.” That agent appeared to be on a fishing expedition to get these files, containing the names of several Homeland whistle-blowers, and then pass that information along to higher-ups in the agency.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: The Obama administration has delayed next year’s enrollment deadline under Obamacare.
Some of the buzz about this delay is that it pushes it to after the elections. This isn’t significant, and might even be worse for the Democrats, as everyone will still find out about the higher premiums just before the election. What is significant is how nonchalant this administration is about rewriting legislation without going through Congress. I thought Obamacare was the “law of the land” and that the Republicans were terrorists, racists, and bomb-throwers for suggesting changes during the government shutdown debate in October. Yet, Obama and the Democrats see nothing wrong with his administration rewriting laws at his whim, without getting the law changed by Congress.
In other words, the Republicans were not only right about the disaster that is Obamacare, they have been trying to fix it the correct and legal way.
The essay here is focused on what makes Obamacare politically different — and quite deadly for its supporters.
Working for the Democratic Party: In undercover tapes, the communications director of Enroll America, an organization that helps sign people up for Obamacare, is seen agreeing to help get confidential personal data of enrollees so that it can be used for political purposes.
From the beginning I have always thought the most vile aspect of Obamacare was how it made your private and personal medical records available to hordes of government workers in multiple government agencies, a situation that is very vulnerable to corruption and abuse. Not surprisingly, it hasn’t taken long for Project Veritas to uncover such political corruption.
Finding out what’s in it: It ain’t your doctor!
As Americans have begun shopping for health plans on the insurance exchanges, they are discovering that insurers are restricting their choice of doctors and hospitals in order to keep costs low, and that many of the plans exclude top-rated hospitals. The Obama administration made it a priority to keep down the cost of insurance on the exchanges, the online marketplaces that are central to the Affordable Care Act. But one way that insurers have been able to offer lower rates is by creating networks that are far smaller than what most Americans are accustomed to.
In other words, because of Obamacare, you will either have to pay for your doctor up front and without any help from insurance, or you won’t be able to keep your doctor at all. So much for that promise.
The day of reckoning looms: The federal budget deficit for October was “only” $91 billion.
The AP article makes a big deal about how much lower this deficit is compared to past Octobers, but at this level, we would still have an annual deficit over $1 trillion. Even it ends up as half that, the numbers are still terrible.
The budget deal that ended the government shutdown ends on January 15. Be prepared for another shutdown. I expect some Republicans are going to once again tie that shutdown to repealing Obamacare.
Thugs: A father is arrested merely because he wants to pick up his kids from school and walk home with them.
Watch the video below the fold. It ends with the police officer physically hitting the person with the camera.
I can think of no sane reason why a school would not release this man’s children to him. What difference does it make whether he leaves on foot or in a car?
» Read more
Good enough for government work: The Pentagon has for years routinely been doctoring its budget numbers, and has no idea where billions of its money is going.
In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.
The Obamacare website apparently has security flaws so significant that experts are afraid to describe them.
Kennedy, a former U.S. Marine Corps cyber-intelligence analyst, presented a 17-page report describing the problems to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. It does not go into specifics in some areas, he said, because that could provide criminals with a blueprint for launching attacks. … “There is a lot of stuff that we are not publicly disclosing because of the criticality of the findings,” Kennedy said. “We don’t want to hurt people.” When asked to describe the severity of the threat that they posed to the public, he said it was a “critical risk.”
Does this make you feel safer? The Homeland Security employee who runs a website that calls for the the mass murder of whites has still not been fired.
Kimathi, using the online nom de guerre “the Irritated Genie,” called for “ethnic cleansing” of “black-skinned Uncle Tom race traitors” on his website, which envisioned a massive race war on the horizon. “In order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites—more than our Christian hearts can possibly count,” he wrote.
In other postings, he warned that whites and their enablers like President Obama are trying to “homosexualize” black men in order to make them weaker, and suggested that a woman’s primary role in life should be to “keep a strong Black man happy.” He also seemed to hold anti-Semitic views, claiming in a Facebook post that his website was under attack from a conspiracy of “zionist smallhats, the Uncle Tom koons,” and, naturally, “the haters.”
Working for the Democratic Party: Newly released emails provide more evidence that IRS official Lois Lerner was lying when she said the IRS scandal was confined to the low-level employees in Cincinnati.
An IRS official blasted Lois Lerner for her attempt to blame the agency’s targeting scandal on low-level employees in Cincinnati, according to newly released emails. “Cincinnati wasn’t publicly ‘thrown under the bus’ (but) instead was hit by a convoy of Mack trucks,” wrote Cindy Thomas, former director of the IRS exempt organizations office in Cincinnati, in a May 10, 2013 email to Lerner obtained by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Thomas wrote the email on the very day that the IRS targeting scandal broke when Lerner, a senior agency official based in Washington, D.C., admitted that her exempt organizations division engaged in improper targeting of conservative groups.
The truth was that the low-level employees in Cincinnati were getting their orders to harass conservatives from high up the chain in Washington.
Working for the Democratic Party: The Census Bureau apparently faked the unemployment numbers prior to the 2012 election to make it appear more people were employed.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it. Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy. And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
An excellent article on what is probably one of the worst photo-ops ever attempted by a political campaign. My one disagreement is how the article focuses on how silly Dukakis looked in the helmet. This wasn’t what made the photo-op a disaster. What really made it fail was how absurd it was for him to think that riding in a tank would make people forget his deep and longstanding opposition to the military. Watch the Reagan campaign’s response ad, which used the tank ride to point this out. This is what made the photo-op a failure.
An Obamacare supporter begins to see the light.
None of the surprising disasters he describes should have been a surprise to him, but for the fact that he likely considered any criticism in 2010 of Obama or Obamacare by his conservative friends pure racism and not worth listening to. Thus, he never heard them tell him that these disasters were exactly what was going to happen.
Will he change his voting allegiances come November? I doubt it. Too many of the liberal voters I have met in my life are downright bigoted when it comes to politics. To them, Democrats are “the good people who protect the weak and poor” while Republicans are “the evil racists who want to starve little children.” With this simplistic view of the world, they are generally unable to consider the possibility that they have this wrong.
The House, with 39 Democrats voting yes, today passed its “You can keep your plan If you like it” bill.
Where is the damn Republican Obamacare repeal bill? After the 2010 elections they introduced and voted on one. Why not re-introduce it now?
So, when does Ted Cruz get his apology?
Cruz, recognizing that Obamacare is a disaster, tried to stop it. The Democrats, in love with Obamacare and oblivious to its impending problems, fought back and forced the government shutdown rather than agree to any of Cruz’s proposals. At the same time, Cruz was called all kinds of names by people on both the left and the right. (Consider John McCain, who was vicious in his attacks on Cruz but now is calling for a full repeal of Obamacare.)
Cruz was right however. Obamacare is a disaster. It must be repealed. And the Democrats must be forced to agree or pay the penalty at the ballot box.
Good news! Obama announces he will veto any bill that changes Obamacare, including the “Keep your plan” offers from both parties in Congress.
For once I agree whole-heartedly with Obama. The bills in Congress now are foolish, and only serve to make Obamacare more permanent and even more flawed. Let us have a full repeal, and let him veto that. At least then the next election will be on this issue, clearly.
And in related news, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) states that he is going to introduce repeal legislation.
