I think the image below is meant to be derogatory but there are a lot of fine people in America who think along similar lines



There is nothing irrational about distrusting the government

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Google whistleblower reveals tech giant DOES blacklist right-wing news sites and says the company called police when he leaked the evidence, leaving him 'fearing for his life'

A Google engineer has spoken on the record to say the web giant does blacklist certain news sites and has an 'editorial agenda'.

Whistleblower Zachary Vorhies spoke to Project Veritas after claiming the company called police in San Francisco to perform a 'wellness check' on him when he originally leaked files on their activity.

Senior software engineer Vorhies, who worked for the company for eight years, says he added a 'dead man's switch' which would activate the files in case he was 'killed or assassinated'.

Among the hundreds of documents leaked by Vorhies to Project Veritas is a document called 'news black list site for Google Now' which he claims shows a list of the web pages Google restricts.

It includes a number of conservative leaning websites such as The National Enquirer, Media Matters and Infowars.

Vorhies says the company's actions are 'hypocritical at the least and it's perjury at the worst' after CEO Sundar Pichai testified to Congress to say they do not promote left-leaning, Democratic news over that of more Conservative outlets or merely outlets it does not rate.

The insider said he spoke out amid fears the 'entire election system was going to be compromised forever by this company that told the American public that it was not going to do any evil'.

Vorhies told Project Veritas: 'This particular black list is showing which news sites aren't going to show up underneath the search bar when people are searching on their Android phone.

'And what they are doing is that they are saying "ok, well, you know, Newsbusters, the Gateway Pundit, National Enquirer, Media Matters, Infowars, they're not going to appear on their search results".

'And they are telling people that they don't have any blacklists, they don't have any political ideology, they don't have any political bias but it's really clear that they do.

'If Google wants to have political bias and if they wanna say they have political bias that is their right as a company.

'But for them to go under oath and say that theses blacklists don't exist, well employees like me are able to just search through the internal search engine of the company and see that they do, it is hypocritical at the least and it's perjury at the worst.

'If people don't fall in line with their editorial agenda then their news articles get deboosted and deranked. 'And people do fall in line with their editorial agenda then it gets boosted to the top.'

Another file appears to show ranking classifier to 'define channel quality'.

In his interview Vorhies adds: 'When they see the documents themselves they are going to be shocked and they are going to terrified. They are going to be like how can Google so blatantly lie to the American public and lie to Congress when there is a pile of evidence showing that what they are saying is untrue.'

Images shared with Project Veritas show Vorhies walking towards officers with his hands in the air after he says Google found out he leaked the files.

He told the site: '[The police] started banging on my door. 'They called in the FBI, they called in the SWAT team. And they called in a bomb squad. '[T]his is a large way in which [Google tries to] intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company.'

Vorhies claims he was targeted on Twitter by an undercover employee who outed him as the leaker as well as being sent a 'threatening' letter 'containing several demands'.

He added: 'Attorneys told me this is the first step in having your life ruined. They are going to come after you. 'Google is not who they say they are.'

SOURCE 

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Have Republicans Learned These Crucial Lessons from Obamacare?

“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, period,” President Obama promised during the Obamacare sales pitch to America almost 10 years ago. But as the American people know all too well by now, the gulf between Obamacare's marketing and reality is vast.

There was “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” but that didn’t work out either. The Washington Post's fact-checkers rated that one the Lie of the Year in 2013. The fallacy behind that falsehood was that Obamacare specified exactly what health care plans would have to cover to satisfy the Obamacare individual and employer mandates.

Millions of Americans lost their health plan when the insurance companies had to cancel them because they were not in compliance with the Obamacare mandates. That problem should have been foreseeable.

Then there was the Obamacare promise that Obamacare would reduce health insurance costs by $2,500 per family per year. In reality, because of all the new regulations, the cost of health insurance soared once Obamacare was fully phased in. This is particularly true for the terribly over-regulated individual health insurance plans that the American people had to buy on their own. The American people had no choice but to buy plans with enormous deductibles of thousands of dollars a year. This made health insurance worthless for most Americans, whose average health costs per year became less than their deductibles.

Finally, there was the Obama promise that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.  But the real problem under Obamacare was whether your doctor would want to keep you, under the cost burden Obamacare regulations imposed on doctors. So many Americans lost their doctors when their health insurance was cancelled, or their doctors retired because of the cost of Obamacare regulations.

Now these problems of unintended consequences are threatening Americans' health insurance again. The federal government is considering new legislation involving costly federal regulations to address the issue of “surprise medical billing.” Surprise billing results when insured Americans suffering a medical emergency are taken to a hospital out of their insurers’ network. The trouble is that when they recover, they have a financial crisis on their hands.

Because the hospital was out of their insurance company’s network, the insurer often refuses to pay for the bill. So, the patient then gets the whole bill, which is beyond what most Americans – most of which cannot afford an out-of-pocket $400 expense – can pay without help from their health insurance. President Trump wants to address this issue. But the Senate Committee on Health Insurance, called the HELP Committee, is not offering effective help. "We're from the government, and we're here (not to) help..."

The Committee is considering the Lower Health Costs Act. This would impose price controls on doctors and hospitals, requiring them to accept the average cost that Medicare pays for the health care services received.

As the long history of price controls shows, when the price is held below costs, demand increases. But bureaucrats’ price floors always reduce supply, resulting in shortages of the service. In this case, it will be emergency health care that gets cut. That would not be good for the American people.

The problem of surprise medical billing can be and has been successfully addressed without price controls with the market incentives of arbitration. New York of all places has treated the issue this way.

Under arbitration, both parties submit an offer to an independent arbiter, and then the arbitrator picks the one that seems most reasonable. Each side has an incentive to put their best foot forward, so they both try to compromise to the extent they can.

Even the hard-nosed New York regulators report that since this process was adopted, they have rarely seen complaints. They notated that, by and large, the problem seems to have been resolved with no hardship imposed on anyone.

Competition, not more of the Obamacare status quo, is the solution to America’s healthcare problems. If liberals in New York can recognize that, so too should Republicans in Congress.

Fellow conservatives: rather than help the left dance one step closer to socialized medicine, let’s move the limited government ball down the field on this issue.

SOURCE 

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The Left Eats Its Own: NYT Editor Demoted After Tweets Attacking 'The Squad' and Justice Democrats

The New York Times has demoted its former deputy editor, Jonathan Weisman, after he pointed out a distinction between city and rural voters and after he called out a liberal group for mustering a primary challenge to a black Democratic congresswoman. He also sent angry emails to author and Times contributor Roxane Gay demanding "an enormous apology" for her attacks against him. Perhaps he thought his Jewish heritage protected him from accusations of racism from the left. If so, he was dead wrong. Gay denounced him for having the "audacity and entitlement of white men."

"Jonathan Weisman met with [Times executive editor Dean Baquet] today and apologized for his recent serious lapses in judgment," the newspaper announced in a statement. "As a consequence of his actions, he has been demoted and will no longer be overseeing the team that covers Congress or be active on social media. We don't typically discuss personnel matters but we're doing so in this instance with Jonathan's knowledge."

Weisman, who wrote a book rightly condemning the alt-right and wrongly condemning the Trump administration for supporting anti-Semitism, drew the ire of the left by accusing various Congressmen of not truly representing their districts.

First, he responded to Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid, who attempted to shoot down former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). In explaining her loss to Josh Hawley, McCaskill said, "Free stuff from the government does not play well in the Midwest."

Attempting to defeat McCaskill's argument, Shahid argued that Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) are from the Midwest, and that "Medicare and Social Security are both technically 'free stuff' and they play very well."

To this, Weisman replied, "Saying [Rashida Tlaib] (D-Detroit) and [Ilhan Omar] (D-Minneapolis) are from the Midwest is like saying [Rep. Lloyd Doggett] (D-Austin) is from Texas or [Rep. John Lewis] (D-Atlanta) is from the Deep South. C'mon."

Weisman was clearly trying to make a political point about the differences between representing a liberal urban area and representing a typically conservative rural area. In areas like the Midwest, the Deep South, and Texas, rural areas carry a state's electoral votes — and often other state-wide elections. Tlaib, Omar, Doggett, and Lewis could be said to represent islands of blue in seas of red.

But Weisman's good point does not come across, partly because the left has demonized any attacks on "The Squad" as racist, but also partly because Weisman chose Lewis — beloved as a Civil Rights hero — as an example. He later deleted that tweet "because I realize I did not adequately make my point."

Weisman's other unforgivable sin involved calling out Justice Democrats, a far-left group seeking to primary sitting members of Congress for being insufficiently progressive. "Justice Democrats has backed another primary challenger, this one seeking to unseat an African-American Democrat, Joyce Beatty, who represents Columbus," the Times deputy editor tweeted.

Morgan Harper, the candidate Justice Democrats endorsed in order to challenge Beatty, responded with a brief tweet: "I am also black, [Jonathan Weisman]." Weisman replied that the Justice Democrats endorsement "included a photo."

Justice Democrats compared Weisman's tweets to Trump's "go back" tweets, which it characterized as racist. "We must fundamentally change the idea that people of color can't exemplify the region — or the nation — in which we live," the group added, interpreting Weisman's deleted tweet as racist, rather than a discussion of political representation.

Roxane Gay interpreted Weisman's answer to Harper as a suggestion that Harper is not really black. The author suggested he was utterly unqualified for his job.

"Any time you think you’re unqualified for a job remember that this guy, telling a black woman she isn’t black because he looked at a picture and can’t see, has one of the most prestigious jobs in America. Shoot your shot," Gay tweeted.

In response, Weisman emailed Gay, her assistant, and her publisher, demanding "an enormous apology." Gay shared screenshots of the emails, tweeting that "the audacity and entitlement of white men is f**king incredible."

Weisman claimed Gay "misconstrued my rather innocuous tweet, willfully or mistakenly, accused me of racism, and incompetence, seemed to want me fired."

Racism and incompetence are serious charges, and conservatives feel a somewhat justified schadenfreude when they see a liberal accused of racism in the same way so many liberals baselessly accuse conservatives of the same charge.

"This is amazing. Weisman wrote an entire ridiculous book smearing the GOP as a bunch of Nazis, but is demoted for offending Ilhan Omar's fans," David Harsanyi, senior editor at The Federalist, tweeted.

Indeed, it seems Weisman may be experiencing some comeuppance for claiming that Trump — whose administration has heavily favored Israel and who himself is very proud of his Jewish daughter and son-in-law — harbors anti-Semitism.

Conservatives may enjoy double schadenfreude as The New York Times is struggling with accusations of racism — for reporting verbatim Trump's words condemning racism. Sadly, the Times seems to be immediately caving to the left, with no regard for the real meaning behind things denounced as racist.

SOURCE 

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The Left Responds to new immigration rules

As we reported yesterday, the Trump administration issued new rules defining what a public charge is under our immigration laws. As we also noted, this is not a new concept.

It has been part of U.S. immigration law since the 1880s and was revived during the Clinton years. The problem is that it was never seriously enforced. (By the way, the new rule also benefits immigrants who are proficient in English.)

Predictably, the left’s reaction to these reasonable rules is over the top.

For example, The Washington Post warns that the Trump administration is ramping up its “war on legal immigration,” while The Nation declares that the “war on immigrants just got a whole lot worse.” Numerous progressive politicians and special-interest groups are vowing to sue to overturn the rule.

What the left is describing as a “war on immigrants” is actually cover for the left’s war on the American taxpayer. We taxpayers are a very diverse group of people. Taxpayers include immigrants, as well as people of all races, religions, and backgrounds.

The progressive reaction is also very telling because it exposes yet again how the left goes out of its way to promote the interests of noncitizens over the interests of American citizens.

We are told over and over that immigrants pay taxes and are a boon to society. Well, to the extent that they are productive members of society and do pay taxes, that’s true. And that is why most conservatives are strong proponents of legal immigration.

But that assumes we have an immigration system that is making commonsense decisions about who gets in. That has not been happening.

We know that because Reuters tells us that “some experts say [the new rule] could cut legal immigration in half,” which means that half of legal immigrants meet the definition of “public charges."

According to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), "63 percent of households headed by non-citizens use at least one welfare program, including an astonishing 80 percent of non-citizen households with children."

CIS research also found, "The average household headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) costs taxpayers $6,234 in federal welfare benefits.”

Thankfully we have an administration that is fighting for the taxpayer. Voters who are uneasy with Trump’s style or his tweets will get a rude awakening if the left takes power and there is nothing standing in between them and their wallets.

SOURCE 

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