Cover up: President Obama today invoked executive privilege in order to withhold documents demanded by a House committee investigating the “Fast and Furious” gun scandal.
In related news, the union that represents Border Patrol agents called today for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder.
The Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), created by Obamacare, announced its first round of grants today, part of a funding program of fifty “pilot projects” totaling $30 million.
It didn’t take much research for me to conclude that, while some of this work might be useful, most of it sounds like bureaucratic claptrap. For example, consider the description Nature gives for these three grants:
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NBC has been caught again, for the third time this year, of selectively editing news footage to create a false scenario.
In all three cases the false scenario aided Democratic leftwing politics.
I mention this story only to emphasis how completely unreliable NBC is as a source of news information. Sadly, none of the other media networks are much better.
A Virginia dog that died two years ago received a voter registration form in the mail last week, asking it to register to vote.
The organization that sent out the form is called “the non-profit Voter Participation Center,” which is working to get “groups like young people, minorities, and unmarried women” to vote. Which suggests strongly that this center is a leftwing political activist group working to win future elections for Democrats, by any means necessary. A close look at their website confirms this, as they have many ties to liberal organizations and think tanks. More here.
This is further evidence that when Democrats scream about “the suppress the vote” efforts of Republicans, they are really worried about is the possibility that voter fraud will be eliminated, preventing them garnering fake votes.
Global warming: Second thoughts by an environmentalist.
For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN’s climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.
He then very clearly outlines what we do and do not know about the Earth’s climate, and pinpoints the important uncertainties that presently exist.
The FAA and NASA have worked out their differences concerning their regulation of private commercial space.
Essentially, NASA has finally conceded with this agreement that it has no control over a private space launch that is not flying to a NASA facility. That the FAA continues to have as much regulatory control is bad enough, but getting NASA out of the loop will at least ease the bureaucratic burden for private companies.
How nice of them: The TSA has tentatively approved a plan to allow private companies to screen passengers in Orlando.
It’s all crap. In a free society there is no such agency as the TSA, and according to the Constitution, no one is screened by anyone without due cause.
A real estate industry group today announced that there was a nine percent jump in foreclosures during the month of May.
RealtyTrac reported that 205,990 U.S. properties received filings last month, including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions, marking the first monthly increase since January. Bank repossessions climbed steeply, up 7% to 54,844, after hitting a four-year low in April.
The report also noted that foreclosures made up 26% of U.S. home sales in first quarter and that more than 30% of mortgage borrowers were still underwater.
As someone who just moved to Tucson and spent more than six months searching for and finally purchasing a home, I can add a bit of personal experience to these dry statistics. And my perspective is sadly not encouraging.
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Scott Walker has won the recall election in Wisconsin by a large margin, 53-46 percent, more than predicted and exceeding his vote total in his 2010 election victory.
Good news: Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Virginia) has backed down and modified the language he had inserted in the NASA budget bill that would have limited the number of commercial space companies NASA could subsidize.
From Clark Lindsey:
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) , who is Chairman on the Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations committee, put language into the recent House budget for NASA that requiree NASA to down-select immediately to one primary contractor in the commercial crew program. This would obviously eliminate competition on price and rule out redundancy in case one system is grounded. He has now relented and is willing to allow for “2.5 (two full and one partial) CCiCAP awards”.
As I wrote earlier, the success of Dragon is putting strong political pressure on Congress to support the independent commercial space companies over the NASA-built and very expensive Space Launch System (SLS) that Congress had mandated. Expect to see more elected officials back down in the coming year, with the eventually elimination of SLS from the budget.
We’ve only just begun: “So come and get me if you must, Mr. President. I will not bow to your wicked regulation.”
James Dobson is not to be taken lightly. Under the Obamacare HHS contraceptive mandate, his organization, Focus on the Family, would not qualify for any exemption and would be required to pay for contraceptives and abortion drugs. And if Dobson’s organization defies the federal government here, expect very loud fireworks, as Focus is very large with a very large following.
Tone deaf: The union representing maintenance crews at Belmont is threatening to go on strike on Friday, just prior to the Belmont Stakes where the horse “I’ll Have Another” has a chance to win the Triple Crown.
With more than 100,000 fans expecting to attend the race as well as millions more watching on television, a strike will do wonders in sealing the union’s image in the public’s eye.
