Leftwing tolerance: A Moveon.org petition calls for the arrest of the House Republican leadership.
At the moment the petition has over 21,000 signers. Isn’t it gratifying how tolerant the left is to the idea of dissent, when that dissent happens to disagree with them?
Working for the Democratic Party: A House hearings yesterday, the partisan tactics of the director of the National Park Service were clearly illustrated by comparing what this government official did during the Occupy Wall Street protests versus his actions during the government shutdown. Watch:
The man should be fired. But he won’t be. Obama’s outrage over such activities is pure theater. He actually likes what Jarvis did, as it wholly supports the agenda of the Democratic Party.
Obamacare might well be imploding.
In other words, the elites in Washington might have signed a corrupt budget deal, but meanwhile the cause of the shutdown, Obamacare, continues to show itself to be an abject failure, justifying the efforts of the more honest Republicans to try to stop it.
The Democrats endorsed this law again during the budget standoff. Had they be willing to even consider minor changes the shutdown could have been averted. Instead, they stood firm as a party, supporting this unworkable law, as it stands.
The Senate budget deal that the House will vote on today includes some really nice pork.
The bill includes extra funds to fix flooded roads in Colorado, a $3 million appropriation for a civil liberties oversight board and a one-time payment to the widow of Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who died over the summer. It also includes a more than $2 billion increase in funding for construction on the lower Ohio River in Illinois and Kentucky. Current law authorizes $775 million in spending for related projects, and the bill increases it to $2.918 billion.
The last appears to be a kickback to Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) to get him to buy into this crap.
The bill also has this crap:
The legislation broadly re-opens the government through Jan. 15, and extends the ability of the government to borrow money through Feb. 7. It does so by allowing President Obama to waive the debt ceiling, a move that can be overridden by a resolution of disapproval by Congress that Obama could still veto. [emphasis mine]
In other words, Congress is now ceding this budgetary responsibility and power to the President, who will then rule by decree.
Update: The bill passed both houses of Congress and has now been signed by the President. Note that the only opposition came from Republicans, but even here the opposition was a minority. The Democrats strongly endorsed this bill, and for good reason. It gives them (and the Republicans who supported it) lots of pork and greater power for Obama. Americans meanwhile are screwed. The day of reckoning still looms.
A Democratic Congresswoman speaks her mind: “Let’s don’t confuse nobody with the facts.”
But don’t worry: I guarantee she will be re-elected forever. She is a black representative, in a black district. What matter that she appears to be as stupid as a brick, she’s black!
When your only criteria for voting for someone is their race, then you are the bigot. And sadly, this description appears to apply to too many blacks voters today.
The director of the National Park Service now claims that the barricades around memorials in DC were put there to protect them from terrorists during the shutdown.
What kind of fools do they take us for? This is downright insulting.
An Obama supporter finds out what’s in it: “I wanted the Affordable Health Care Act. The problem is, is it’s not affordable.”
I would laugh except that I am crying. Moreover, the article is from a San Francisco media outlet, which is as surprised as this Obama supporter at the cost of Obamacare. Too bad these liberals all considered conservatives and tea party people terrorists, murderers, and hate-filled killers of small children and therefore not worth listening to back in 2009. Had they listened, they would have found out about the unworkable nature of this law then, instead of now, and the law would never have been passed.
They should maybe consider this reality and recognize that this is why there are Republicans putting up a fight now to delay or defund the law.
Well hallelujah and amen! No budget deal: The Democrats continue to refuse to give in at all, and the Republicans have shown some spine and refused to cave.
This deadlock has been a team effort, from both sides. To say it is entirely the fault of one party or the other is to reveal your partisanship.
Nonetheless, legislation requires negotiation, and the only ones refusing to negotiate at all have been the Democrats. In the real world outside of government, such pig-headedness always results in no deal at all.
Right now it looks like 17% of the government will remain shut for quite awhile. And with the debt ceiling kicking in, the federal government will find its hands tied even more. The American people are about to find out that life will go on quite successfully without their big daddy to boss them around.
Tennessee and North Carolina have agreed to reopen Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Like other states, they will pay the operating costs of the National Park Service, then get reimbursed when the government shutdown ends.
I wish they weren’t paying anything. They could have made sure the parks were open and available to all using state resources, and let the National Park Service throw a temper tantrum when it discovered it couldn’t control the parks.
The government shutdown has put flight testing of Dream Chaser on hold.
It appears that the decision to do these flight tests at Dryden is the problem. As a NASA facility, it has been shut down. If the flight tests had instead been arranged at a private facility, Dream Chaser could still be flying.
Finding out what’s in it: A company that employes a large number of temporary workers is now going to have to drop health insurance for all of its employees, because of Obamacare.
Aside from its full-time staff, the company also manages about 400 temporary workers, and is hoping to add another 200 in the next year. Those employees can buy into a separate health insurance program North Georgia Staffing signed up with. Under new ObamaCare rules, many of those “temps” will count toward the Underkoffler’s full-time staff. Larry Underkoffler calculates their full-time employee count will instantly surge from 18 to around 200. They will go from boutique operation to “major employer” overnight.
And that means, under the health care law, they’d have to provide insurance coverage to all, or pay a $2,000-per-worker fine. In the Underkofflers’ case, the fine might be the more affordable option. “We would have to provide the same program for all the employees — including the temps — to everyone employed by us. And we just couldn’t do that,” Larry Underkoffler told Fox News. They argue that providing insurance to all the employees would bankrupt the company. Instead, they’ll eat the cost of the fine, and dump the employees they can’t cover into Georgia’s federally run health insurance exchange.
“It looks like we will have to just pay the penalties,” Debbie Underkoffler told Fox News. Those penalties could add up to $400,000 in just the first year. That comes right off their bottom line. Still, it’s a fraction of what providing health care could cost them. That tab could top $2 million per year. What’s more, because ObamaCare does not allow separate plans for the full-time employees and the temporary workers they manage, their full-timers will lose their current benefits.
The cost of the fines themselves is so high that I expect that they will soon begin destroying business left and right. Get prepared for the arrival of a large underground black market, working illegally under the radar to avoid the unbearable financial burdens of Obamacare.
Meanwhile, the CEO of Aetna insurance moans the complete failure of the Obamacare website to function.
Asked if he would have delayed the launch of the exchange given its earlier problems, Bertolini said, “I would have, if I’d been in their seat.”
But don’t worry, the Democrats have your back! Having Obamacare the law of the land now is so important to them that they are willing to shut down the government, for as long as necessary.
Shutdown fascism: A Catholic priest at a military base has been prohibited from even volunteering to run Mass and was told that if he violated that order he would be arrested.
Even more amazing, “Protestant services continue to take place. Only Catholic services have been shutdown.”
A lawsuit has been filed.
