Several Cities Looking at Banning People From Living in Their Cars

That some people HAVE to live in their cars shows the failure of big government in America generally and particularly under the Obama administration.  A large part of America's great wealth is sucked up by government and spent on vast bureaucracies

In one of the most liberal states in the country and one of the richest counties there, many of their poor population are facing troubles. Palo Alto, one of the richest areas in California, which is part of Silicon Valley, is looking at punishing the homeless who are forced to live in their cars.

An ordinance passed by Palo Alto last year would punish people who are cited for living in a vehicle with as much as a $1,000 fine or 6 months in jail. Right now the city has delayed the enforcement of this ordinance because of a challenge to a similar ban in Los Angeles.

Right now the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering a challenge to a very similar law they currently have in Los Angeles. A decision is expected within a few months and this could then affect laws in nearby San Jose and Santa Clara. There are at least 70 cities across America with these types of laws, targeting those who live in their cars.

It seems that all the rich people in Palo Alto became scared of the people who were living in their cars and washing in the local community center. They began to call in the authorities to rid them of this ‘nuisance’.

How is it that anyone can tell people where they can live? And what good does it do to put anyone in jail for doing what might be absolutely necessary for their survival? And let’s talk about another silly idea, fining people who are homeless. If they had the money to pay a fine, wouldn’t you think they would probably use it to pay rent in a home or apartment?

This just doesn’t seem like the most effective way to help those impoverished citizens.

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Brainwashed black lady

"I've Been Rejected by 96 Doctors So Far"

So writes Danielle Kimberly in Ebony, as she discovers for herself what conservatives meant when we repeatedly warned that obtaining health coverage is not the same thing as securing healthcare:

    “I’m sorry, we are no longer accepting that kind of insurance. I apologize for the confusion; Dr. [insert name] is only willing to see existing patients at this time.” As a proud new beneficiary of the Affordable Health Care Act, I’d like to report that I am doctorless. Ninety-six. Ninety-six is the number of soul crushing rejections that greeted me as I attempted to find one. It’s the number of physicians whose secretaries feigned empathy while rehearsing the “I’m so sorry” line before curtly hanging up. You see, when the rush of the formerly uninsured came knocking, doctors in my New Jersey town began closing their doors and promptly telling insurance companies that they had no room for new patients. My shiny, never used Horizon health card is as effective as a dollar bill during the Great Depression. In fact, an expert tells CNN, “I think of (Obamacare) as giving everyone an ATM card in a town where there are no ATM machines.”

If you assumed the author of this piece surely learned a valuable political lesson from her experience, you'd be mistaken. She goes on to gush about how "grateful" she is for the "tremendous strides" President Obama has made on healthcare, praising the government's "valiant attempts" to address this problem, and implicitly placing most of the blame for her plight on greedy doctors (I wonder where she got that idea).

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The New Inquisition

Victor Davis Hanson

What if you believed that the planet might not have warmed up the last two decades, even though carbon emissions reached all-time highs?

Or, if the earth did heat up, you thought that it was not caused by human activity?

Or, if global warming were the fault of mankind, you trusted that the slight increases would not make all that much difference?

The Los Angeles Times would not print your letter to the editor to that effect.

The CEO of Apple Inc. might advise that you should "get out of this stock."

Or maybe if you were a skeptical climatologist, you would cease all research and concede that man-caused global warming needed no further scientific cross-examination -- as columnist Bill McKibben recently advocated.

If you were a drought-stricken California farmer and worried about diversions of irrigation water to support fish populations, you would be told by the president of the United States that the real problem is not a failure to build reservoirs and canals, but is due entirely to global warming, which is a "fact" and "settled science."

What if you supported equality for all Americans regardless of their sexual preference, but -- like presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and about half the country today -- opposed making gay marriage legal?

If you were the CEO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, you would be forced to resign your position.

If you owned a fast-food franchise like Chick-fil-A, boycotts of your business would ensue.

If you were a star of "Duck Dynasty," your show would be threatened with suspension or cancellation.

What if you thought that foreign nationals who broke the law to enter and reside in the U.S. were aliens residing here illegally?

Three or four years ago, you would have been advised to use only the politically correct term "illegal immigrant" -- even though not all arrivals crossed the border to live permanently in the U.S. The more legally precise noun "alien" was no longer allowable.

Then, about a year ago, you would have been further advised that the adjective "illegal" was suddenly also no longer acceptable.

Yet all the while, entering and residing inside the U.S. without legal permission stayed a federal crime -- just as it is in every other nation in the world.

What if you thought that supporters of both the Israelis and Palestinians would wish to air their positions on college campuses?

If you were the Israeli ambassador, you would be shouted down at University of California, Irvine.

If you were a Jewish student organization asking to ensure free speech at the University of Michigan, you would probably be cursed at with racial epithets, as happened recently.

If you were a faculty member organizing a scholarly trip to Israel, you would be harassed at Vassar College.

What if you were a professor at Oberlin College or the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wished to teach literature that sometimes dealt with class, race, gender and sex?

If the ensuing class discussions did not meet left-wing dogma, you might soon be asked by student groups to offer "trigger warnings" on your syllabus -- as if your class were a toxic cigarette or pesticide in need of warning labels.

We are in a new Inquisition. Self-appointed censors try to stamp out any idea or word that they don't wish to be aired -- in the pursuit of a new race, class, gender and environment orthodoxy.

Hounding out people with different views is seen by the Left as a necessary means to achieve its supposedly noble goals -- just like the Spanish Inquisitioners who claimed God was on their side as they went after religiously "incorrect" Jews, Muslims and heretics.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been part of the problem, not part of the solution. Its appointees used the once-impartial IRS against conservatives. They monitored Associated Press reporters. They denied that the NSA was eavesdropping on average citizens. They arbitrarily chose not to enforce laws they didn't like.

The president bragged of using "a pen and phone" to circumvent the legislative branch, and urged his supporters to "punish our enemies." The attorney general calls Americans who have different views from his own on matters of affirmative action "cowards."

All of that them/us rhetoric has given a top-down green light to radical thought police to harass anyone who is open-minded about man-caused global warming, or believes that gay marriage needs more debate, or that supporting Israel is a legitimate cause, or that breaking federal immigration law is still a crime and therefore "illegal."

Our civil liberties will not be lost to crude fascists in jackboots. More likely, the death of free speech will be the work of the new medieval Torquemadas who claim they destroyed freedom of expression for the sake of "equality" and "fairness" and "saving the planet."

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Harry Reid – Corruptocrat

Money causes corruption in politics the way guns cause crime and cake causes obesity. Money isn’t corrupt, it’s just money; politicians taking money in exchange for favors is corrupt. Rewarding donors for their support is corrupt: See Solyndra for an example.

But Democrats, the political party that raised and spent a billion dollars in the last two presidential elections, want people to think that two brothers, Charles and David Koch, are attempting to buy Congress. Sadly, with the media on their side and their voters’ serial incuriosity on matters of truth, many believe it.

No one has been more vocal of late on the “evils of the un-American Koch brothers” than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But before Reid was beating a path from his office to the Senate floor to attack private citizens, he was busy enriching himself through some now legendary corruption that took him from a man of somewhat modest means to a multi-millionaire – all while being a “public servant.”

That’s a neat trick for an “honest” man.

Most of Reid’s shadiness has been ignored by the media and Democrats. But his hypocrisy hasn’t slowed his denunciations against others; it seems only to have emboldened him.

Remember the Jack Abramoff scandal? Nearly every Republican was “bought and paid for” by the corrupt lobbyist, according to Democrats and the media. Starting Jan. 1, 2006, I was press secretary for Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont. Burns, one of the few senators who wasn’t rich, was knee-deep in the Abramoff scandal since Abramoff represented Indian tribes and Burns was chairman of a committee that oversaw Indian relations.

But buried in the faux outrage was the fact that as Harry Reid accused Republicans of selling their souls for money from “Abramoff and his associates,” he forgot to mention his own pockets were filled by those same people. Reid, in doublespeak worthy of Orwell, always added “and his associates” when discussing money that went to Republicans but mentioned only Abramoff himself when talking about whether Abramoff money went to Democrats.

Why? Because the “associates” contributed to both Republicans and Democrats, but Abramoff himself gave only to Republicans. He is, after all, a Republican. If Reid included money from the associates that went to Republicans, it built the totals they had received. But if he discussed only Abramoff’s personal giving, he could say Democrats received none of that. So, miraculously, once this new unit of measure was applied, Reid and his fellow Democrats had clean hands. Reid still did Abramoff’s bidding, but not at his behest, or so they’d like you to believe.

In other words, Republican senators who got a couple thousand dollars from Abramoff personally were said by Reid to be bought and paid for, but the $68,000 Reid got from Abramoff’s co-workers and clients had no influence on him at all. That’s some creative math there.

In the case of my old boss, this lie worked. Burns was defeated, then after the election was cleared of any wrongdoing. Harry Reid, who did the same things Burns was accused of, was elevated from minority leader to majority leader when Democrats took the Senate in the 2006 election thanks in large part to that different unit of measure he applied to others but not himself.

This has always been the Reid Way – the rules don’t apply to him.

On his official Senate website he has a page “The Facts About The Koch Brothers.” Using our tax dollars on his government website, Reid’s first “point” is that David Koch “called social security ‘The Ultimate Pyramid Scheme’ and promised to abolish and replace it.” This was from a 1980 campaign. 1980! By the way, he wanted to “abolish and replace it,” so no one was talking about leaving seniors out to dry.

If we’re going to hop into the Wayback Machine, we need not go back that far to find something on which a politician seems to have had a change of heart. In 1994, a U.S. Senator wrote the following:

 * Our doors should remain open, but only wide enough to admit those to whom we can realistically offer opportunity and security. To leave the door unguarded is to create an environment in which no one can live securely and peacefully. And so I am sponsoring a bill in the Senate to reduce immigration – legal and illegal.

 * Most politicians agree that illegal immigration should end. My legislation would double border patrols and accelerate the deportation process for criminals and illegal entrants.

 * Opponents of immigration reform cry racism or point toward our historic role as a nation of immigrants. Charges of racial bias are unfounded.

That senator was Harry Reid writing in the Los Angeles Times. He’s allowed to “evolve” on an issue, but David Koch is to be held to account, at taxpayer expense, for opinions he held 34 years ago.

Harry Reid illustrates that when you control the unit of measure, you are held to zero standards yourself.

The cherry on top of Reid’s anti-American attacks on two brothers who’ve created more jobs and employ more people than Reid’s entire caucus is that he’s gotten donations from Koch lobbyists. Whether Reid then funneled that money to family members is unknown – it was 2003. But given his penchant for slipping his granddaughter $31,000 in campaign cash for junk jewelry, anything is possible.

Harry Reid will go down as one of, if not the, most corrupt people ever to serve in Congress. He became a millionaire while a “public servant,” tainted other senators for doing exactly what he was doing and used tax dollars to attack private citizens. Harry Reid should not be in the Senate; he should be prison, and he should die there. But he won’t ever go, he’s protected. Rather than face charges for his corruption, Reid will remain the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, be they in the majority or minority. Justice will have to wait, but it eventually comes for all of us.

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