Filed under: Domestic Policy, Freedom, Humor, Literature, News of the Weird, Terrorism | Tags: Ghosts and Goblins, Protection from Witches, Trick or Treat
Happy Halloween 2014
Witches can only come out at midnight and they must be gone by the time the first morning star appears.
Witches are very curious, and they stop to count everything. You can protect yourself from witches by placing a broom or a bowl of salt outside your door. The witch will stop to count the straws in the broom or the grains of salt in the bowl. Before she can finish counting them, the morning star will appear, and then she will have to leave. You can also sleep with a sieve over your face. The witch will try to count all the holes in the sieve, but she will be unable to.
Witches do not like the color blue because it is the color of the heavens. If you wear a blue bead or a blue bracelet, a witch cannot get you. If you paint your windowsill blue, a witch cannot come into your room.
If you carry a penny in your pocket or wear a new dime in each shoe, witches can’t harm you.
Witches have fun on Halloween.
(From The Hodgepodge Book)
Filed under: Africa, Domestic Policy, Freedom, Health Care, Movies, Music, Regulation, The United States | Tags: Boredom is a Choice, Three Weeks of Opportunity, Twenty-One Day Quarantine
Had I been to West Africa treating Ebola patients, I would surely understand the reason that I might be quarantined. I can’t imagine many things worse than having to live with the knowledge that I had caused someone else’s illness or death.
So, faced with being quarantined for 21 days, what could you do about it? Can I assume a laptop, a phone and a TV, a bed, a shower and a bathroom? I could knit a sweater, take a couple of online courses, call friends to chat, watch movies, build a model, read the books I have been wanting to have time to read. I could write a diary of my quarantine, real or imaginary. Most of us complain about not having enough time for the things we want to do, and ordinary life intrudes.
A phone, a laptop and a credit card will get you exactly the materials you need, and the gift of free time gives you the time for study or contemplation. Is that really all bad? Boredom is a choice, not a given.
On the other hand, when members of the military are quarantined on their return, are they quarantined together, when one exposed person could expose the whole group or separately? Has anybody thought that one through?
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Freedom, Health Care, History, Law, Politics, Progressivism, Regulation, The United States | Tags: Big Government Grows, The Example of ObamaCare, The Rule of Law
If you understand thoroughly the proposition that the Federal Government has no money of its own, you are on the way to economic enlightenment. It’s true, and failing to understand that simple fact leads to all sorts of economic confusion. The government gets its money—all its money — from the taxpayers.
I mention this because we are inclined to forget it when politicians are promising nice things around election time. You will have to pay for those “nice things.” That was what Democrats wanted you to ignore when they started promising health care for all, and health care for the needy. They weren’t offering health care, but only government control of health insurance, and through the 20,000 pages of regulations for the entire medical establishment, control of the doctors and nurses and technicians and hospitals and medical equipment and services and anyone connected to the medical establishment that I forgot to mention. It was not about health, but about control.
The Democrats in Congress believed that medical care cost too much. They claimed that if they just told everybody what to do and how to do it, things would get cheaper. [Well, not really. What they really wanted was single-payer health care like the care that has been financially ruining Britain for years, but they didn’t think Americans would go for it right off the bat.] If you take out all the carefully constructed language, and just flatly describe the project, it doesn’t sound so appealing at all, and with good reason.
The Affordable Care Act was supposed to make health care more affordable, but a study of insurance policies before and after ObamaCare shows that average premiums have skyrocketed — for some groups as much as 78%.
Average insurance premiums in the sought-after 23-year-old demographic rose most dramatically, with men in that age group seeing an average 78.2 percent price increase before factoring in government subsidies, and women having their premiums rise 44.9 percent, according to a report by HealthPocket scheduled for release Wednesday….
The premium increases for 30-year-olds were almost as high as for 23-year-olds — 73.4 percent for men and 35.1 percent for women — said the study, titled “Without Subsidies Women & Men, Old & Young Average Higher Monthly Premiums with Obamacare.”
Between higher healthcare premiums, lower quality health care, higher food costs, ever more taxes — there goes the standard of living. How are people supposed to save for retirement, for their kids education, for their own home?
Democrats favor big government, not because they are particularly enamored of bigness as such, but because they keep ‘improving’ everything with more laws and regulations, which requires more workers, and more agencies and first thing you know, government has just grown bigger and bigger. I touched on this with a quotation from Rob Stein, founder of the Democracy Alliance — who candidly explained the importance of being in control of government to the Democrats, and I’ll repeat it here, because it’s important.
The reason it is so important to control government is because government is the source of enormous power,” Stein continued. “One president in this country, when he or she takes office, appoints…5,000 people to run a bureaucracy, nonmilitary nonpostal service of 2 million people, who hire 10 million outside outsource contractors–a workforce of 12 million people–that spends $3 trillion a year. That number is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four countries on the face of the earth.
So the reason we’re doing what we’re doing…and the way we get progressive change, is to control government,” Stein said. “That’s what this is about.
Ah, but there’s the rub. Philip K. Howard explains:
Modern government is designed to be a kind of legal machine.But it is badly designed. Indeed, it may be one of the worst machines ever invented. Its core flaw is that it aspires to make choices without human judgement at the moment of action. …
Grinding public decision through a legal apparatus is not the handiwork of a demented management theorist. It’s a philosophical mandate. Government decisions, we believe, must comply with what is known as the “Rule of Law.” This hallowed concept is universally regarded as the foundation of a free society.
The Rule of Law aims at making sure government uses its powers properly, in an orderly fashion, and not by the whim of some official. By drawing boundaries of prohibited conduct, law limits the scope of state power and assures citizens of a protected zone of their freedoms.
“Automatic law,” Howard says, “causes public failure. A system of detailed dictates is supposed to make government work better. Instead it causes failure.” And when things don’t work, the response of government is to make another law or add some more regulations.
The goal of preventing action by the whim of some official leads to an inability to make decisions, even truly necessary ones. Agencies have formal budgets, and the goal becomes to spend enough to use up all budgeted funds, for that makes it possible to get an increase for the next fiscal year, rather than being cut back. There is no goal of cutting expenditures.
Now and then there is a push for cutting back. President Obama proudly proclaimed eliminating the law that classified spilled milk in the farmyard as an oil spill. (EPA regulated milk as it does petroleum because of butter fat content. Ditto vegetable oil) But it didn’t go much beyond that. Philip Howard proposes a 15 year limit attached to all legislation. At the end of 15 years, a law would have to be revisited, and either renewed for another 15 years, or dumped. Makes sense to me. Congress always means well, but never ends up discarding useless laws. Anyone have a better suggestion?
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Election 2008, Election 2010, Election 2012, Election 2014, Foreign Policy, Law, Politics, Regulation, Taxes, The United States | Tags: Election Day Is Special, Vote Fraud Is Real, Why Do They Cheat?
A video has emerged from Illinois (why am I not surprised?) that a “calibration error” that just happens to cause voting machines to switch votes from Republican to Democrat. You punch the box to vote for the Republican candidate, and it registers that you voted for the Democrat candidate. The video purportedly shows voting machines in the Moline, Illinois public library registering votes for the Democrat candidate when the Republican is the intended choice.
That makes it nice and simple, doesn’t it? Doesn’t even have to be somebody there miscounting ballots, or hiding some — just program it into the voting machine, just enough to win the election, but not enough that anybody would immediately call FRAUD!
Same thing is happening in Maryland. “Calibration Errors” that cannot be replicated. People with fat fingers, or long nails perhaps? I get suspicious of anything that involves changing the vocabulary from a simple and straightforward “vote fraud” to a broad generalization like “calibration error.” I have never read anywhere of a ‘calibration error’ changing a Democrat vote to a Republican vote, but perhaps that’s just a coincidence?
We’ve had a lot of vote fraud here in Washington State, and the people have not forgotten. Governor Christine Gregoire was not elected until they recounted the votes enough times to find just enough to give her a small margin of victory. She had lost in the first count, and in the second, but by the third count they found some votes in a box in the back room or left in somebody’s car — something like that.
The pro-amnesty Hispanic-activist organization the National Council of La Raza has been promoting a Washington Post article explaining in which states “undocumented” people can vote without having to present photo ID. Most states request some form of ID but don’t require it. Another 20 states don’t require identification. The Washington Post has a handy graph outlining the requirements.
Democrats scoff that vote fraud is merely a figment of Republican imagination, but serious survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study produced estimates of 1,408.000 non-citizens voting in 2008, and 484,000 voting in the off-year election in 2010. That’s enough to decide an election.
Here in Washington State, we have switched to Mail In Ballots, which are much more conducive to vote fraud than plain old voting at your local school or retirement home with a hand marked ballot. Those people saw to it that you showed ID, signed in, and there were election judges there. Now we just do it any old-time prior to the election, fill them out at home, and hope they get counted. I liked the formal trip to the polls, greeting poll workers that I hadn’t seen since the last election — it was inconvenient, but a small price to pay for executing my civic duty. It felt good.
Do you remember in 2012, there was a thing about military ballots. Republicans were trying to make sure that soldiers got their ballots and that their votes were recorded. Then there was something in the news about the plane going down in Afghanistan, and too late to get more ballots or something, but there was never any report of the crash, or about survivors, or a death toll. Curious.
Discover the Networks has a section intended to refute, with hard evidence, the foregoing assertions of the Left. The section consists of excerpts from hundreds of news stories reporting on fraud and improprieties in the voter-registration process as well as at the ballot box. Do take the time to visit and see for yourself the extent of the fraud that Democrats claim does not exist. If you are really curious, enter the “Secretary of State Project” in the search function there. Now supposedly discontinued, there could have been no other purpose for the project than to elect Democrats to control the State office that oversees elections.
Obama came from the Chicago political machine. It’s the only kind of politics he knows.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Health Care, Military, Politics, Science/Technology | Tags: A Public Relations Crisis?, Federal Government Agencies, Tell Us Up-Front!
What is a quarantine, and what is not, and what is inhumane treatment that requires a lawsuit to escape?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructs health workers returning from West Africa to monitor their health for 21 days and that “during the time that you are monitoring your health, you can continue your normal activities.” Only after a health worker’s temperature reaches 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit does the CDC advise that he or she go to a doctor, “limit your contact with other people” and “avoid public transportation.”
A lot of people were shocked to hear that when Ebola-infected doctor Craig Spencer returned to New York City from Guinea, after serving there with Doctors Without Borders, he went for a three-mile run, stopped at a coffee stand, ate at a meatball restaurant, rode on three New York subway lines, met friends at a bowling alley and used an Uber sedan to return home — none of his actions violated CDC directions. and he apparently felt fine.
The president has consistently treated Ebola as a crisis of public relations, that can be fixed with a new manager or a more fortuitous choice of words. Instead of telling us up-front what we know for sure and what we don’t know for sure, the CDC has consistently attempted to pacify rather than take firm precautions.
Obama promised Americans that his administration was taking the necessary precautions so that someone with Ebola didn’t get on a plane, which Thomas Eric Duncan did just four days later, and due to much confusion about CDC protocols managed to infect two nurses before he died of Ebola.
Kaci Hickox returned from West Africa after tending Ebola patients there, and immediately began complaining when she was quarantined. Inhumane treatment! she shrieked, and threatened to sue. When she was sent home to Maine with a promise that she would carefully self-monitor and remain at home, immediately decided that self-quarantine was unnecessary and went out.
Ebola is not easily cured, and has something like a 70% death rate. One would think that staying home for 3 weeks would be easy if you knew that you were preventing your fellows from catching a fatal disease from you. File under lack of character.
Australia has simply shut its borders to citizens of the countries of Ebola Central. That followed decisions by the U.S. military to quarantine soldiers returning from an Ebola response mission (including one General). The U.N. and the afflicted countries say all this is unnecessary and might stop people agreeing to volunteer just when they desperately need thousands of volunteers. Dr. Frieden, head of CDC called for isolation of “people at the highest risk for Ebola infection” but said most returning medical workers would require monitoring without isolation. Frieden said:
At CDC, we base our decisions on science and experience … And as the science and experience changes, we adopt and adapt our guidelines and recommendations.
File this under “I’m a doctor, don’t doubt me.”
The hospital where Thomas Eric Duncan died and two nurses were infected, was unprepared, had not trained for the possibilities, nor studied the protocols. The media keeps talking about the “mass panic” — which has not yet appeared, and ignoring the anger — which has appeared. Ebola has appeared in Africa for many years. We gave extra funds to the CDC, the office in HHS of the Ebola Czar, other agencies so they could study up and determine how best to address the disease. All the agencies were grateful for the extra cash and quickly spent most of it on frivolous grants and more fun stuff.
Research shows that certain strains of Ebola can remain on surfaces up to 50 days. It typically lives on a dry surface for a matter of hours, but in moist conditions like mucus, it is extended, according to the UK’s Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL).
The State Department had quietly made plans to bring Ebola-infected doctors and medical aides to the U.S. for treatment, according to an internal document which argued that as the only way to get other countries to send medical teams would be to promise the U.S. as the world’s medical backstop. The Obama administration if furiously backpedaling, claiming they are not going to do it.
Since the administration will not be truthful about Enterovirus D-68 deaths, the connection to unaccompanied minors, nor just where the illegal children have been sent and what schools they are attending, they seem not to be aware that the lack of clarity about one health threat harms public attitudes about another health threat.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Energy, Junk Science, Politics, Science/Technology, The United States | Tags: Less Energy - Higher Costs, Replacing Coal-Fired Plants, Where Are Needed Pipelines?
After 6o years of operation, Salem Harbor coal-fired power plant shut down permanently in June. Candidate Barack Obama said that under his plan for “cap and trade,” electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.
He didn’t manage to get “cap and trade” through Congress, so he went through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to get his way. The wishes of the representatives of the American people have never counted with this president, and this winter New England residents will pay the price. In 2013, residents of the northeast spent as much during the winter as they did in the whole of 2012.
There was a nuclear plant in Vermont, Vermont Yankee, that has been retired. Basic economics: less supply to meet demand — higher rates. The environmental loonies feel the demand to shut down any possibility of a CO² – emitting coal-fired plant is so urgent that they can’t manage to replace the electricity it produced. And nasty nuclear — banished. They want more electricity from natural gas, but haven’t moved ahead to build pipeline capacity, which would take all sorts of permissions and environmental impact surveys.
National Grid, Massachusetts’ biggest utility will seek a 37% rate increase for the six months beginning November 1st. In New Hampshire, the public Utilities Commission has already granted an average 47% rate increase to Liberty Utilities. In New Hampshire, Public Service of New Hampshire reports that their rates will remain pretty much the same. They are the largest utility in the state and have a large scale clean coal-fired power plant. Last year they saved their customers over $100 million, and may be able to repeat that feat this winter — which may be even colder than last year.
Last year’s brutal winter meant that natural gas inventories are starting at 10.7% less than last year and 11.4% less than the five-year average. The green illusion that “renewable energy” can replace the kind of energy they do not like continues, but they are wrong. Wind energy cannot become a major supplier of energy because it requires too much land. To keep up with world energy demand, you would have to add 4 times the current wind capacity— each year.
The John Kerrys and Barack Obamas believe in renewable energy because — that’s what good Democrats believe. The EPA ‘lost’ the science they say their work depends on several years ago. Nobody reads the science or studies up, Republicans are knuckle-dragging deniers and have no interest in saving the planet, and what more do you need to know?
Cold with higher energy cost is deadly. In the UK alone over 35,000 excess winter deaths have been recorded since 1998. Cold affects mostly the poor or elderly, and is associated with flu, respiratory and circulatory disease. Many have to choose between heat and eating. Governments in Europe have stopped the subsidies for renewables. Germany is building 24 coal plants and reinstating nuclear power. 600,000 Germans had their power turned off because they could not afford to pay their bills. NASA keeps forecasting warmth, but according to their own data, US winters have been cooling for 25 years.
Remember that next time you see the loonies out protesting coal and fossil fuels, fracking and pipelines. The probabilities are bleak, and will expose major errors once again in government climate and energy policy.
Filed under: Blogging, Domestic Policy, Environment | Tags: Broken Cable, Broken Water Main, No Internet Access
We have been without internet access all day. Water-main break a few blocks away where they are widening and redoing a major street. Just got access back. They must have cut a buried cable.
Big windstorm Saturday night, major branches down and enough fir cones to set up a Christmas store. Drumming and crashing on the roof all night.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Election 2008, Election 2010, Election 2012, Election 2014, Law, Politics, The United States | Tags: Are Clean Elections Possible?, How Much is Too Much?, Many Ways of Vote Fraud
I got a little curious today, about the prospects for vote fraud in the upcoming election, so I did what we all do when we’re curious, I went to Google for a cursory search. What I found was fascinating. The websites I consider reliably Left, reliably said— nothing to see here, move right along. No such thing, proclaimed large numbers. Republican claims of vote fraud are untrue. Real but rare, they insist. Oh come on. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Chicago? In two elections, Barack Obama fortuitously managed to get court-sealed divorce records of his opponent opened just before the election. My next door neighbors for many years were from Illinois, and they had some remarkable stories. We had some real vote fraud here in Washington State. Military ballots gone missing. Documented. The arguments will continue — there’s a great deal at stake, and Democrats will continue to insist it is all figments of the Republican imagination.
The Washington Post asked a few days ago “Could non-citizens decide the November election?” They went to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) for answers.
How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.
Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
Estimated Voter Turnout by Non-Citizens 2008 2010 Self reported and/or verified 38 (11.3%) 13 (3.5%) Self reported and verified 5 (1.5%) N.A. Adjusted estimate 21 (6.4%) 8 (2.2%)
The study did not indicate any advantage coming from Photo ID, because illegals were able to vote anyway. The researchers say that perhaps the United States should move to legalize some electoral participation by non-citizens as many other countries do—though they offer no justification for so doing. Election rules in Kansas and Arizona are set to bar thousands of people in coming weeks from casting ballots in state primaries even as the federal government allows some of them to vote in congressional races. The comments in the article are about what would be expected:
“There is a very real problem with aliens being registered to vote,” said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who said about a dozen states are likely to pass such measures in coming years.
Democrats have countered that there are few examples of fraud at the polls and that such steps suppress the vote of such groups as minorities and women.
So there you go. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, India, Science/Technology | Tags: Reducing Wages, Silicon Valley, Suspicions Verified
About those Silicon Valley claims that they just can’t find enough talented STEM workers in this country:
Although there is a surplus of American high-tech workers, high-tech companies continue to clamor for more guest-worker visas to lower the wages of their workers. Companies like Microsoft have lobbied for massive increases in foreign workers even while laying off 18,000 American workers.
Electronics for Living is a billion-dollar manufacturer of computer peripherals with sales of $727 million last year. They apparently have an operation and employees in Bangalore, India. The company decided to install a new computer system and imported eight workers from India to do this work. The first arrived in September 2013, and the last left in December of that year.
The workers continued to be paid at their Indian wages plus an apparently tiny bonus, in rupees, or 74 Indian rupees an hour. In American dollars, their total pay was $1.21 an hour. Oops! Temporary or not the were completely covered by both federal and California minimum wage law, the latter calls for at least $8.00 an hour and time-and-a-half for overtime. At least one of the workers was forced to work 122 house in a week, but details for the others are not available.
They were busted, but while both workers and corporation were egregiously violating the Immigration and Naturalization Act. they got off with a minor slap on the wrist. The Dept. of Labor figured the difference between $1.21 and the state’s minimum of $8.00 an hour plus the missing overtime payments came to about $20,000. Labor did double that figure, and each worker got about $5,000 or $40,000 all together. And they added in a $3,500 administrative fee to the total. Electronics for Living said “We unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local U.S. standards.”
When India-based Infosys was called into court for multiple violations of the INA, they were smacked with a $34 million fine. The two cases are separate, but if you look upon whines from Silicon Valley about their inability to find satisfactory STEM graduates in this country with a bit of a jaundiced eye, you cannot be blamed.
Importing foreign workers pushes the wages for available jobs downward. Massive increases in guest-worker visas will cut off opportunity for American workers to enter the middle class through technology jobs.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Economy, Energy, Health Care, Immigration, Law, Middle East, National Security, Politics, Regulation, Russia, Taxes, Terrorism | Tags: Never Admit Error, Nothing Works, Pure Partisan Politics
October 2014. Americans are worried. The world is heating up and our government seems utterly clueless at best, and quite unable to understand just why Americans are so worried.
Much of what the Obama administration and the Center for Disease Control initially told us about the Ebola crisis was false. The virus did infect Americans here at home. The CDC protocols did not protect the nurses. Nobody else would arrive with Ebola because we now have Ebola screening at five airports, which means taking temperatures and asking travelers where they have been, which we are told is useless. The president says travel bans would do more damage, but does not explain how, and claims that people might go “underground” but does not explain what “underground” might be if there is no air travel. Seems to be spin.
The terrorists of the Islamic State could have been contained if only we had left some peacekeepers in Iraq in 2011 when it was mostly quiet, to help train up the Iraqi Army. Politics, not strategic logic, explained that reckless action. Confronted with the Islamic State, we try to understand why they are so angry. Obviously, it must be our fault. We are racist, Islamophobic, religious bigots, Zionists, insensitive or perhaps just socially unjust.
We have had six years of piling on debt, piling on regulations, growing deficits, raising fees and penalties, slashing defense just as Russia is trying to reconstitute the old Soviet Union, and China is trying to claim the entire South China Sea as their private territory. We are newly told today that North Korea has finally figured out how to miniaturize a nuclear weapon to fit on a missile.
Trusted federal agencies have turned out to be crooked fiefdoms right out of “Yes Minister,” the British comedy about eternal bureaucracy. No one can trust the IRS any more, whether you are audited will depend on your political activity. The Department of Veterans Affairs has imposed callous wait times on veterans needing treatment, and in some cases our veterans have died while waiting for help. The Justice Department has played politics, incited race riots, accused any state of calling for voters to show photo ID of voter-suppression, and covered up any administration indiscretions. The EPA in a lawless grab for power may be dooming New England residents to freeze in the coming winter.
The Democrats have tried every treasured progressive idea and we are still left with a jobless economy, more people on food stamps than ever before in history, more poverty, and more billions invested in “renewable” energy only to find that the wind is incurably intermittent, solar energy is incurably diffuse, and ethanol does more damage than plain old gasoline. The pursuit of biofuels may do more damage to the military than the enormous budget cuts that are slashing military readiness just when the world heats up.
Republicans have a bulging quiver of time-tested remedies for what is wrong with the economy, but while Republicans in the House have passed more than 200 bills, Harry Reid has twisted himself into contortions to avoid allowing any of them to reach the president’s desk. He has passed only 59, the lowest number since the 60s, yet Democrats claim the absence of legislation is due to Republican intransigence. Uh huh.
But Obama will still be president for two more years, even if Republicans do take over the Senate. With a big enough majority they can override a veto. With control of the Senate, they can defund bad policies.
With all the problems facing us right now, President Obama’s number one interest remains politics, which trumps all else. Democrat candidates running for office want Mr. Obama to stay away from their campaigns, he is poison at the polls. Yet he cannot keep himself from hints of what he will do “after the election.” Amnesty for illegal aliens, 100,000 Haitians admitted to the country and given work permits. More illegals from Honduras and other Central American countries who will become Democrat voters in gratitude for citizenship.
It’s the things that don’t seem to be on his list that are worrying. Eliminating the threat of ISIS, securing the border, a travel ban on Ebola Central, eliminating wasteful spending, there’s Enterovirus D-68 which has killed more kids in this country than Ebola. We have a government that cannot talk straight, that covers up anything that does not reflect positively on itself, or grow the Democratic Party.
We have had partisan administrations before, but never one that put the welfare of its own political party ahead of the welfare of the nation and its people.
Filed under: Blogging, Law, Liberalism, National Security, Progressivism, Regulation, Statism, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: Democrats Attack Free Speech, They Hate the 1st Amendment, Totalitarian Socialists
Friday night news dump. As the media went home for the weekend, the Democrats sneaked in a last minute proposal that the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) be allowed to heavily regulate political content on the internet. They have in mind sites like YouTube, blogs, and the Drudge Report. Why? You can go to YouTube and watch campaign commercials, and even worse, find things that President Obama and other politicians said in the past, and demonstrate their constant overweening hypocrisy. There’s no telling what awful things you will find on blogs, and the Drudge Report is simply an aggregator of news from — the media.
The problem, of course, is the First Amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of speech, most especially political speech. We cannot be a free people without free political speech. First thing you know, they will put you in jail for criticizing the president, or shut your business down, or subject you to an IRS audit.
Obama FEC Commissioner Ann M. Ravel announced that the FED was preparing new regulations to give itself control over videos, Internet-based political campaigns and other content on the web. She insisted that “A reexamination of the commission’s approach to the internet and other emerging technologies is long overdue.”
Well, not exactly. The First Amendment was made permanent back in December of 1791, and has served us very well indeed, although the totalitarian sector of the Democratic Party keeps trying to get rid of it.
Democrats really don’t like criticism or being disagreed with. They have trouble defending their ideas, because they just say things, and have never, never done their homework. Rather than studying up on a policy and its inevitable consequences, they just want to pass it into law, and think that if there are problems, they’ll just add some regulations or make more laws. Evidence for that statement? I give you ObamaCare.
The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. For many, it is also a vision of themselves — a very flattering vision of people trying to save the planet, rescue the exploited, create “social justice” and otherwise be on the side of the angels. This is an exalted vision that few are ready to give up, or to risk on a roll of the dice, which is what submitting it to the test of factual evidence amounts to. Maybe that is why there are so many fact-free arguments on the left, whether on gun control, minimum wages, or innumerable other issues — and why they react so visceraly to those who challenge their vision. ………………………………………….Tom Sowell 1/22/2014
FEC Chairman Lee E. Goodman, a Republican, said that if regulation extends that far, then anybody who writes a political blog, runs a politically active news site or even chat room could be regulated. “I have been warning that my Democratic colleagues were moving to regulate media generally and the Internet specifically for almost a year now,” Goodman told FoxNews.com. “And today’s statement from Vice Chair Ravel confirms my warnings.”
FEC Vice Chair Ravel said:
Since its inception, this effort to protect individual bloggers and online commentators has been stretched to cover slickly-produced ads aired solely on the Internet but paid for by the same organizations and the same large contributors as the actual ads aired on TV,” she said. Ravel vowed to “bring together” people from “across the spectrum” next year to look at the issue.
This set off alarm bells, as it should.
“The FEC’s approach to free speech on the Internet should be hands-off,” Goodman said, urging the public to go to the FEC website to comment on the issue.
Filed under: Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economy, Election 2014, Foreign Policy, Freedom, Health Care, Immigration, The United States | Tags: No Real Principles At All, Power and Control, The Totalitarian Impulse
The Democracy Alliance is not just another nonprofit liberal organization, but was meant to be a funding clearinghouse for progressive groups. They solicit contributions from left-wing billionaires and multi-millionaires who are accepted as “partners.”The organization serves as a pass-through that funnels their money to favored organizations. It is a highly secretive group that avoids any public scrutiny.
Powerline brought this quotation from the founder of the Democracy Alliance to our attention. In The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado by Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer, Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein explains candidly the politics of the Left:
The reason it is so important to control government is because government is the source of enormous power,” Stein continued. “One president in this country, when he or she takes office, appoints…5,000 people to run a bureaucracy, nonmilitary nonpostal service of 2 million people, who hire 10 million outside outsource contractors–a workforce of 12 million people–that spends $3 trillion a year. That number is larger than the gross domestic product of all but four countries on the face of the earth.
So the reason we’re doing what we’re doing…and the way we get progressive change, is to control government,” Stein said. “That’s what this is about.
Did you see anything in that statement about protecting the country, improving the economy or reducing government interference in the lives of the people or helping the downtrodden? Of course not. It is all about power. They want power to enrich themselves and their friends. They want to remake the world to fit their own personal preferences — they’re just not sure what their goals are, but they will be good. It’s the power that counts. As has often been said: inside every liberal is a totalitarian trying to get out.
That’s why Liberals are so terrified of the Tea Party. Those radical extremists want to reduce the power of government, to reduce its control over the lives of the people, to cut regulation and allow businessmen and corporations to run wild. They even want to reduce taxes. They want government to leave them alone. No wonder the left wants those groups listed as dangerous right-wing extremists. With their guns and their Bibles, who knows what damage they might do?
The reason Mr. Stein is so candid, is because he regards it as the natural role of government. He assumes that the goal of the Republicans is the same as his, they are just more devious about it, trying to deprive Democrats of power for their own ends.
They have no particular principles to guide them. They’ll figure those out when they get the government under complete control. That’s why they want to get rid of the Constitution, or at least reform it so it is more to their liking. They have no interest in free market capitalism, they are opposed to corporations and business in general which at a very minimum needs more regulation.
All that power, and so much sheer incompetence.
American Elephants 