Obamacare: A death panel for the rule of law

Barack Obama is in a box: He repeatedly promised “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” but his socialized medicine monstrosity has cost millions of people their coverage. It’s also become painfully clear Obama knew this was going to happen as early as March 2010 — yet kept regurgitating his false promise.

Obamacare also has a bigger problem: As written, the law’s key mechanism for issuing subsidies to state exchanges is legally enforceable in only one third of the country — meaning the only way to pay for its nationwide dependency expansion is new deficit spending. This would clearly violate another oft-repeated Obama promise: That his law would not “add one dime” to the federal deficit (well, beyond the $6.2 trillion identified in this 2013 GAO report).

What’s an administration to do, right?

That’s easy: Change the law.  “As we implement this law, we have and will continue to make changes as needed,” senior administration official Valerie Jarrett wrote this summer.

And so Obama has shredded the Constitution in favor of the “Easy Button,” arbitrarily remaking entire sections of the health care law that deal with its employer mandate, its deductible and co-payment limits, its coverage requirements and — more disturbingly — its power to subsidize health insurance in more than thirty states.

Consider this: Obamacare itself contains 906 pages and approximately 380,000 words. But the regulations promulgated in support of the law total 10,535 pages and approximately 11,588,500 words.

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) hit the nail on the head earlier this year in responding to this systematic obliteration of our nation’s constitutionally prescribed separation of powers.  “The president doesn’t get to write legislation, and its illegal and unconstitutional for him to try and change legislation by himself,” Paul told Fox News.

He’s right. Yet sadly this sort of crass usurpation is nothing new for Obama – whose contempt for the rule of law is unprecedented in American history. For example, after multiple Congresses (including a Democratically controlled Congress) refused to enact his proposed energy tax Obama went over their heads.

“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” he said in his 2013 State of the Union address. “I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take.”

Last month he made good on that threat — forming a new Democratic-controlled environmental panel designed to “skirt legislative oversight” and “push a federal agenda on states” as part of a “sweeping overhaul” of American environmental policy, according to one report.

After Congress refused to pass Obama’s DREAM Act in 2011 Obama unilaterally imposed the measure himself — effectively granting legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants.

Without Congressional approval Obama’s administration pledged last month to indefinitely extend America’s failed military intervention in Afghanistan — one of several foreign lands where Central Intelligence Agency operators have conducted extralegal killings (the evidence of which has been kept hidden from taxpayers).

Just as egregiously, Obama’s Internal Revenue Service unfairly discriminated against his political opponents in the years leading up to his reelection — illegally targeting them for “added scrutiny” and then covering up the scandal until after the election.

Last month Obama applauded Sen. Harry Reid’s decision to undo two centuries of democratic tradition in the U.S. Senate — part of a crass effort to further radicalize the federal government by eliminating a critical check on executive overreach (one Obama previously embraced as a member of the U.S. Senate).

And in perhaps the most dangerous example of them all, Obama has empowered his National Security Agency to intercept, store and access billions of phone records, emails, text messages, website histories and online interactions of American citizens in direct contravention of their constitutional protections against warrantless search and seizure.

In each of these actions Obama’s modus operandi is clear: Centralized power, by any means necessary.

America was built on the rule of law — indispensable liberties articulated by the Magna Carta and Anglo-Saxon common law and expanded upon during the American Revolution, the U.S. Civil War and the civil rights movement. Obama’s arrogant disregard for the rule of law is destroying this shared heritage. It is breaking the bonds of civil society — fueling the very distrust and contempt for government Obama professes to abhor.

This alien ideology — which will take generations to erase from our national identity – is the true legacy of the Obama regime. And Obamacare represents its shining “achievement.”

SOURCE

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The moral superiority of capitalism

The American Right has yet to fully make the moral case for capitalism.  Too many conservative writers and politicians focus on its practical aspects, but details of order and efficiency do not sway the hearts of voters, compassion does.  Not surprisingly, the party most hostile to our founding economic principles has won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, in large part, by claiming the moral high ground for wealth redistribution and more centralized power.

Columnist Leonard Pitts recently excoriated Rush Limbaugh for calling out the Pope in the wake of his pronouncements condemning the free market.  Pitts cites the Apostle Paul who writes in 2 Corinthians 8:13-15 that it is wrong for some to live lives of ease while others struggle.  Limbaugh and others, according to Pitts, “are fine with faith as long as it speaks in platitudinous generalities… but scream bloody murder when it imposes specific demands on their personal conscience — or wallet.”

A complete theological rebuttal to Pitts’ twaddle would require space not permitted here.  Certainly God does require His followers to care for the needy.  Rush Limbaugh annually hosts a Leukemia and Lymphoma Cure-a-thon on his radio show and he proudly supports the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, which offers scholarships to the children of fallen heroes.  The dreaded robber barons of the 19th Century gave millions to establish hospitals, universities and charitable foundations.

Still, the point is not that conservatives and capitalists do good things.  The point is that capitalism makes such giving possible.  Furthermore, the moral case for capitalism lies in the fact that it makes life better for everyone every day.  The wonders of capitalism are why people from all over the world flock to our shores by the millions.

The Reagan years, known as the decade of greed, saw average incomes for all Americans increase, according to the Census Bureau, more than 15 percent.  Unemployment was reduced considerably during the Reagan era from Carter Administration levels of more than 10 percent, and, according to surveys, charitable contributions reached an all-time high of over $120 billion.  These are the fruits of a system that should be hailed and not demeaned.

One could remind us that the Pope was merely assailing the excesses of the free market.  Pitts, in fact, began his column by stating that “I like capitalism.”  But the American left has been reining in the supposed extremes of capitalism for much of the last 100 years, and with no real successor to Reagan in over a generation, one has to wonder how many excesses could be left!

Neither Pitts nor the Pope mention that charity has no meaning if not freely given.  What they seem to advocate is wealth redistribution, the results of which, as history has shown, have been mostly disastrous.  Visit most any Democrat-controlled inner city. Statists invest faith in their own bloated vision of the benevolence of the state.  They show little faith in a free people.  Capitalism flourishes on the highest ideals of the average person.  Capitalism thrives on achievements of which the achiever never thought him or herself capable!  Socialism can’t say that.  Now tell us which system best speaks to the innate goodness and potential of the human spirit.

Unfortunately, the face of American capitalism far too often resembles Mr. Potter of It’s a Wonderful Life fame, as opposed to a true hero in the Atlas Shrugged mold.  The business world often has only itself to blame.  And conservatives and Republicans who should be hailing capitalism tend to adopt a defensive posture or promote it solely on pragmatic grounds.

Finally, the Pope above all should hail the moral superiority of a free system that allows the most humble to worship the God of his conscience and not the idol of the omnipotent state.  Statists will cite the Bible for their own purposes but they mask their own messianic worldview.  No doubt, this is not about competing economic theories, this is a moral war.  Let’s not be afraid to call it that.

SOURCE

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Obama Agenda Promotes Unfairness

by STAR PARKER

The things that increase the likelihood of improving one's life are the very things the President and his liberal friends fight

When presidents give speeches, the affair is choreographed like a Broadway production. The message is not just the words of the speech, but where it is given and who happens to be the chosen audience.

So it was not by accident that President Barack Obama chose a theater in a poor black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where the average income is barely half the national average, to speak this week about economic opportunity and fairness.

What exactly was the President trying to achieve by sharing with a low-income black audience that "today's CEO now makes 273 times more" than the average worker?

Did he want to inspire hope that one day they can earn money like this? I don't think so. The point was to create despair and convey that America is not fair.

Even though the president doesn't deny there are many American success stories (he knows -- he raises lots of money from them), he implies that somehow they are the exceptions to the rule. His core message is that average Americans are not getting ahead, and the reason is that America is not fair.

I can't find a word in the President's remarks that would do anything but reinforce the sense of helplessness, meaninglessness, and disenfranchisement that already exists in generous doses in low-income neighborhoods.

Is this leadership?  Is this the message those trying to get their lives together really need to hear?

Maybe they do need to hear it if it is true. But it's not. There are indeed unhealthy trends in America today that undermine opportunity and the chances of many to get ahead.

But they are not the things the president talked about. In fact, the trends that are reducing opportunity are the things that President Obama and his liberal friends love to promote. And the things that increase the likelihood of improving one's life are the very things the President and his liberal friends fight.

There is today reams of data, piles of studies that show that more economically free nations grow faster and create more wealth.

What is economic freedom? It means citizens can run their lives and do their business with minimal government interference. It means keeping taxes, government spending and regulation low. It means more-powerful citizens and less-powerful politicians.
In 2000, the United States was number 2 in the world as measured by the Economic Freedom of the World Index. By 2011 it dropped to number 19.

This dramatic drop in economic freedom in America helps explain today's sluggish economy and slow job creation.

But liberals, like our president, insist that government is the solution rather than the problem. We need more of it, according to them, not less. Then when jobs disappear, they say it's not fair.

What about individual realities?

According to Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution, "Kids in single-parent families are about five times more likely to be poor as children in married-couple families. Yet the share of children in single-parent homes families has been rising for decades."

And liberal government policies have been contributing for decades to marriage breakdown.

Now Obamacare gives Americans a new reason not to get married.
Kaiser Health News reports that two low-income earners -- say one earning $30,000 and one earning $40,000 -- would each qualify for health insurance subsidies. But if they married, their combined $70,000 would disqualify them.

The president told his black audience in Southeast Washington, D.C., that "we need to set aside the belief that government cannot do anything about reducing inequality."

You're right, Mr. President, it can.  Government can start protecting rather than violating our freedoms.

And our leaders can start promoting policies consistent with, rather than in violation of, traditional biblical values like marriage and personal responsibility, so that our citizens will be in good shape to take advantage of their freedom, if we can ever get it back from our government.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Leftist hate is alive and well in Australia too

Andrew Bolt reports (The ABC is Australia's public broadcaster  -- predictably Leftist)

Three examples from the past week shocked me.

Example 1. The ABC's main TV news bulletin in Brisbane last Thursday showed the exterior and street number of the home of Bill Mellor, a decorated former army brigadier, and gave out his suburb.

Mellor's wife was in tears and police rushed in to secure the house.

The reason? As the ABC report pointed out, Mellor was co-ordinating the Queensland Government's war against criminal bikie gangs linked to murder, rape, drug trafficking and extortion.

Why on earth did the ABC show bikies the home of the man overseeing the fight against them that has led to nearly 400 arrests? How could his home be relevant to its report?

There may be an innocent explanation involving extreme stupidity, but Queensland Premier Campbell Newman and others, me included, also suspect bias.

We already know the ABC last month published stolen intelligence on our spying in Indonesia, damaging our national interest without exposing any sin that needed correcting. It seemed the ABC's Leftist culture made it only too keen to rock the Abbott Government. Only too ready to undermine national security.

In the Mellor case, the ABC, an eager critic of Newman's conservative Government, may have been similarly seduced into forgetting its duty even to people with whom it has no political sympathy.

Once, the ABC had little problem with Labor premier Anna Bligh having her husband made a department head or one of her wedding guests made Queensland's top public servant.

But now it's all over Mellor's new job, after Labor shamelessly claimed Premier Newman was "appointing his mates".

"We don't need the military running this state," Labor added.

All piffle, of course. Newman's "mate" was a man he'd served under at Duntroon 31 years ago. Mellor has since commanded the Australian force in Somalia, helped plan our intervention in East Timor and recently served as Queensland's flood recovery co-ordinator.

Nor is he in charge of police work. He heads a team of directors-general and senior officers to ensure government agencies work together against bikie gangs.

In any case, why show where he lives and put him in danger?

Should I now show where ABC managing director Mark Scott lives to illustrate this latest example of an ABC out of control?

Example 2. Last week, Melbourne University's Professor Thomas Reuter wrote in the Jakarta Post to accuse Australia of startling crimes against Indonesia.

Reuter told his Indonesian readers the latest spy allegations were part of our "consistent unneighbourly behaviour" which he claimed included "attempts to assassinate (former president) Sukarno".

He even claimed Australian soldiers were "involved in massacres" of Indonesians during their struggle for independence from the Dutch.

Not mentioned in Reuter's list of our alleged sins was our strong support for Indonesian independence, our yearly aid of $500 million or our $1 billion donation in tsunami relief.

What the hell was Reuter up to? Surely he realised the danger of preaching such anti-Australian poison days after mobs besieged our Jakarta embassy?

Still, someone of the Left may think the more trouble for the Abbott Government, the better.

But most scandalous was that Reuter's stories of Australians massacring Indonesians or trying to kill their president seem figments of imagination - of Reuter's or that of his undeclared sources. Indeed, Reuter has since withdrawn his massacre claim, at least, admitting it "cannot be verified".

So what will Melbourne University - whose vice-chancellor organised the farcical 2020 ideas summit for his friend Kevin Rudd - do about a professor who makes such baseless and dangerous claims?

Example 3. Labor's Joy Burch is Education Minister in the ACT, in charge of children's schooling.

Well, look away, children, because last week your minister fired off tweets attacking federal Education Minister Chris Pyne when she read - and retweeted - one by an abusive Leftist calling Pyne a "c---".

Burch later claimed this was an accident caused by her "poor social media skills", and, true, she soon deleted the tweet.

Yet for more than a day, she failed to apologise to Pyne.

Whatever the truth, the Left's abuse of the Abbott Government is already worse than anything complained of under Julia Gillard.

Tony Abbott has been called a "liar" by the Opposition Leader and pictured hanging from a noose on a poster at a same-sex marriage rally.

Someone operating in the Geelong Trades Hall set up a Facebook page urging Abbott's assassination, and The Age promoted "F--- Abbott" T-shirts sold by an Age columnist.

The hatred now has a dangerously violent tone, and I ask again - what does the Left want?

Bodies in the street?

 SOURCE

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Truth Slips Away in Public Debate

Suzanne Fields

The political liar has never been regarded as a mythological creature, but lying has recently grown to mythic proportions. The most prominent offender, of course, is a certain president who puts deception to work to achieve his goals, most prominently about his health care scheme.

Jon Stewart, the liberal comedian who usually defends whatever President Obama says and does, rolls out a series of video clips showing the president in numberless versions, one after the other, of repeating his statement that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it. "So, yes," the comic concedes, "the president was somewhat dishonest about the promise of his health care program." Only somewhat?

Ordinarily, quoting a comedian to make a political point is a fool's errand, but useful this time because television comedy shows are where the young and foolish get their "news." Lying can be stretched out on a yardstick, quantified and compared for laughs. According to some surveys, almost a third of Americans under the age of 40, many of whom must sign up for Obamacare to subsidize the older generations, say they get their news from pop TV like the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and Internet sites of suspect reputation.

Frank Gaffney, chairman of the Center for Security Policy, extends his analysis of the president's meretricious statements about what's actually in the Iranian agreement to halt the race to the Islamic bomb. "How do we tell the president is lying?" he asks. "His lips are moving."

A lie, goes the folk wisdom, can travel around the world before the truth gets its boots on. The congressional Democrats, whose leader told them they could find out what was in Obamacare after they passed the legislation, were still trying to tie their shoelaces when they voted for it. The Iranians cheer the lifting of sanctions and say out loud that, under the agreement, they can continue to enrich uranium, and the president says no they can't, that's not in the agreement. Who do we believe?

Lies can be merely wishes, saying what you hope is true, and if President Obama gets the benefit of the doubt he doesn't deserve, his early pledges about keeping the insurance we like may have been wishful thinking, but once the evidence was in and he continued to say it, the "misspeaking" became the willful lie.

The fact checkers at The Washington Post, which grants the president many mulligans, use symbols of Pinocchio to denote lying. This time they gave him the maximum, four Pinocchios.

It's hardly stop-press news that politicians lie, but when lies go viral on the Internet, it's difficult for the truth to survive. Just as the comedy "news" shows are not after truth, the Internet blurs fact and fiction because the gatekeepers, the crusty old city editors who wouldn't let a reporter or columnist get by with fudging facts, are mostly all dead. The new breed insists that "going viral" trumps verification, volume trumps veracity. Incentives work against truth telling in the high tech culture.

"If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you're the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it's proved false, you still get those views," Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for the Huffington Post, told The New York Times, conceding that it had posted phony stories. "That's a problem."

The specific stories Huffington posted were fairly harmless. Once, a child's letter to Santa on Twitter with a detailed link to Amazon.com, was actually written by a grown-up comedian. A fight on an airliner that was reported as fact was actually pure fiction. But when truth is continually sacrificed -- whether carelessly or cravenly -- on sites that purport to offer serious news, trustworthiness is sacrificed, and the reader is confused as well as deceived. This is true when presidents do it, too.

The searchers who found the hard-to-spot Pinocchio lizard say the critters, though camouflaged, weren't hard to find "if you knew where to look." The lizard, in fact, was one up on truth in public life.

 SOURCE

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How Autoworkers Became More Equal Than Others

The Treasury Department has sold the last of its stock in General Motors Co. Even though taxpayers lost $15 billion on the auto bailout (including losses at Chrysler Group LLC and Ally Financial Inc., which offers financing for GM vehicles), the Barack Obama administration put out a statement taking credit for its handling of tax dollars and the Detroit automakers’ success.

Yet the administration shouldn’t be so quick to toot its own horn. The government didn’t need to lose any money on the auto bailout. Had the United Auto Workers not gotten special treatment, taxpayers would have come out ahead.

The administration gave the UAW billions more than bankruptcy law calls for. Typically, bankruptcy reduces union compensation packages to competitive rates. However, GM’s existing union members made few concessions on pay. As the UAW put it, the contract meant “no loss in your base hourly pay, no reduction in your health care, and no reduction in pensions.”

This virtually never happens during bankruptcies at unionized companies, as many unionized airline pilots can attest. As a result, GM still has higher labor costs than every foreign transplant automaker -- almost $60 an hour.

Bankruptcy law further stipulates that all unsecured creditors should recover their debts at the same rate. This, too, didn’t happen. Instead GM’s bondholders recovered less than 30 cents on the dollar; the UAW recovered most of the money owed its retiree health trusts. At Chrysler the UAW recovered a greater proportion of its (unsecured) debt than even secured creditors did.

GM also backstopped the pensions of union workers at Delphi Automotive Plc, its bankrupt parts supplier. New GM had no legal obligation to do this. Nonetheless the company spent $1 billion of bailout funds to preserve their benefits.

These generous subsidies account for more than the entire net cost of the GM and Chrysler bailouts. The excess funds and equity given to the union cost the Treasury $30 billion -- twice what taxpayers lost. Had the administration bailed out the automakers but treated the UAW impartially, taxpayers wouldn’t have lost anything. Instead, the union collected more than the entire U.S. foreign aid budget.

That the union received such a sum is extraordinary. Nonunion workers who were equally worthy of sympathy got far harsher treatment. Delphi’s salaried nonunion employees also had their pensions terminated. Unlike the UAW, they got nothing.

The union’s windfall makes little economic sense. It had no leverage in 2009, and it needed the bailout to survive. A strike would have liquidated the company and eliminated UAW members’ jobs. Like Sheriff Bart in “Blazing Saddles,” the union could only point a gun to its head and threaten to shoot. It had to accept any terms the administration offered.

Further, the government gained nothing from giving the UAW most-favored-special-interest status. Whatever the economic benefits of keeping the automakers afloat, inflating union compensation doesn’t help the economy. Nor did these subsidies reduce welfare costs -- things such as unemployment insurance, Medicaid or food stamps. Only workers who lose their jobs or have very low earnings are eligible for those benefits, not those whose contracts get downgraded but remain well in the middle class. This $30 billion handout provided virtually no public good.

Until recently the administration has ducked responsibility for this largesse, claiming the automakers negotiated these expensive union contracts and the White House simply signed on. To hear the officials tell it, the administration “deferred to General Motors in terms of their business judgment.”

An Inspector General report released last summer shows otherwise. The IG found that GM understood the administration’s auto task force called the shots in the bailout. During negotiations between GM and the UAW, the task force “gave the UAW additional leverage” that enabled it to extract these concessions. The task force made GM restructuring and signing a new union contract within 40 days a condition for future bailout funds. They also informed the UAW of these facts.

As the IG dryly put it: “The UAW understood that GM could not walk away from negotiations and had to reach agreement with it.” Unsurprisingly, the union used this leverage to hold out for as much money as possible.

The UAW rejected GM’s proposals for two days, knowing the company couldn’t walk away, and refused to even discuss modifying its expensive pensions. On the third day, the UAW’s president called the auto task force. The IG reports that President Obama’s auto team “actively negotiated and made the final deal,” which GM subsequently accepted -- a deal that cost taxpayers billions more than necessary to keep the automakers running.

The administration could have avoided losing money in the Detroit bailout. It only had to treat unions impartially. Instead, it gave $30 billion to a politically powerful union. With GM and Chrysler’s recovery, this handout has attracted little attention. But the administration can hardly boast of demanding “responsibility and results.”

 SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Exterminate!  Exterminate! Cry the Daleks of the Left

And their target is Megyn Kelly



Ever wonder why some seemingly meaningless things end up being a big deal in the media while other important ones never get mentioned?

Whether it be the Obama selfie at the Mandela memorial—which revealed the juvenile child residing behind the stern teleprompter lecturer—or Fox News’ Megyn Kelly’s statement that Santa Claus is white.

The Obama situation is obviously too good to pass up given the funny set of pictures, made all the better by Michelle’s obvious anger at his behavior.  In a world where memes and pictures drive messaging on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, Obama’s reaching for the Danish was guaranteed to go viral once it hit the web.

The Megyn Kelly faux controversy over her declaration that Santa is white is something else altogether. Quoting directly from an article by Ben Shapiro on the blog TruthRevolt.com covering the declaration of victory over Fox News by George Soros-funded Media Matters, Shapiro writes about Kelly,

“Media Matters admits that it has been having difficulty targeting Kelly, with new Vice President Angelo Carusone explaining, ‘We deal with reality. She’s not as vitriolic. On the other hand, she is in some ways more pernicious because her credibility has not been completely and totally eroded … so she has the potential to legitimize and validate smears and lies in ways that some of the more disreputable figures on Fox can no longer do, which just presents a new challenge.’”

That is why every left wing publication from Politico to Mother Jones has jumped on the faux Santa is White controversy with the collective intent to sully Ms. Kelly’s reputation and paint her in some way as a racist based upon that remark.

Let’s be clear, while St. Nicholas was a Greek living in Asia Minor in the 4th Century, the guy in the red suit actually originated in Europe and the United States over the past few centuries.  While anyone can choose to depict this character as any race they choose, the character has traditionally been white, and to attack someone for noting this historical fact is just looking for a reason to hate.

However, when you are attempting to diminish a smart, tough, attractive interviewer who challenges guests of all philosophical stripes, in the “ends justify the means” world of the left, creating a controversy and using it to claim racism is perfectly justifiable.

Unfortunately, those who have never even watched Ms. Kelly will assume this false characterization is true, just as those same people believed Tina Fey’s fictional, satirical turn as Sarah Palin was a realistic portrayal even down to thinking the infamous, “I can see Russia from my house” line was actually uttered by Palin.

Right now, Kelly rightfully scares the left far more than a temporarily marginalized Palin with her capacity to build an independent audience of female viewers for FoxNews that reaches well beyond those who tune in to see O’Reilly or Hannity.  And for posing this threat, the left must thoroughly destroy Megyn Kelly—no issue can be too trivial in this pursuit.  So expect to read a lot more about Ms. Kelly in the future, as the misogynists and conjurers of liberal spin will try their best to demonize her using all the powers of fictional depiction at their disposal.

 SOURCE

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Netanyahu did not bow down to the Mandela whitewash

I was shocked when I read that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would not be attending the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa because it was too expensive to travel there. Seriously?

It appears that the real issue was not the expense of the trip but rather the fact that Mr. Mandela had compared the situation of South African blacks under the apartheid system with the situation of Palestinians living in the so-called occupied territories, also praising Yasser Arafat.

In an opinion piece for Al-Jazeerah, Hanna Kawas, Chairperson for the Canada Palestine Association, lamented the loss of Mr. Mandela, praising him as a great friend of the Palestinians. She noted that in 1997 he stated, “But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” while in 1990 he said, “I believe that there are many similarities between our struggle and that of the PLO. We live under a unique form of colonialism in South Africa, as well as in Israel, and a lot flows from that.”

In a clip played by Ted Koppel on ABC, Mr. Mandela also stated that, “We identify with the PLO because, just like ourselves, they are fighting for the right of self determination. . . . Arafat is a comrade in arms.”

And in a 1990 interview with Australian media, he said, “We agree with the United Nations that international disputes should be settled by peaceful means. The belligerent attitude which is adopted by the Israeli government is to us unacceptable,” also explaining that his organization, the ANC, does not consider the PLO a terrorist group.”

He added: “If one has to refer to any of the parties as a terrorist state, one might refer to the Israeli government, because they are the people who are slaughtering defenseless and innocent Arabs in the occupied territories, and we don’t regard that as acceptable.”

 SOURCE

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The third big lie in Obamacare

Jonah Goldberg

"Obamacare was sold on a trinity of lies."

That ornate phrase, more suitable for the Book of Revelations or perhaps the next installment of "Game of Thrones," comes from my National Review colleague Rich Lowry. But I like it. Most people know the first deception in the triumvirate of deceit: "If you like your health insurance you can keep it, period." The second leg in the tripod of deception was "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."

But the third plank in the triad of disinformation hasn't gotten much attention: Obamacare will save you, me and the country a lot of money. This lie took several forms.

First, Obama promised on numerous occasions that the average family of four will save $2,500 a year in premiums. Where did that number come from? Three Harvard economists wrote a memo in 2007 in which they claimed that then-Sen. Obama's health-care plan would reduce national health-care spending by $200 billion. Then, according to the New York Times, the authors "divided [$200 billion] by the country's population, multiplied for a family of four, and rounded down slightly to a number that was easy to grasp: $2,500."

In September, the Obama administration's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used far more rigorous methods to predict that Obamacare would increase national health-care spending by $621 billion. Using Obama's own math, that would mean -- according to Chris Conover, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and Duke University -- each family of four in America will spend an additional $7,450 thanks to Obamacare.

Of course, that methodology is still bogus. But it's probably closer to the truth.

The president and his allies also insisted that all of Obamacare's "free" preventative care would save the country vast amounts of money. As Obama put it in 2012: "As part of the health care reform law that I signed last year, all insurance plans are required to cover preventive care at no cost. That means free check-ups, free mammograms, immunizations and other basic services. We fought for this because it saves lives and it saves money -- for families, for businesses, for government, for everybody."

That's not true either. First of all, you'd think people would understand that there is no such thing as "at no cost." You are paying for "free" mammograms, blood tests and the rest, even if you don't see a line item for them on your bill. And even if you're poor enough that you don't even see a bill, that doesn't mean no one's paying. That's why millions of Americans who've lost their health insurance thanks to Obamacare are discovering that the new plans it offers are either more expensive, have higher deductibles or both.

Also, prevention doesn't necessarily save money. I know that Benjamin Franklin said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. (People always leave out the fact that he owned an insurance company that ran at a profit.) The idea that prevention saves money is one of these things that intuitively sounds like it has to be true. But think about it.

According to the National Cancer Institute, 12.4 percent of American women will get breast cancer at some point in their lives. So for every positive diagnosis there are seven negative diagnoses. Those tests cost a lot of money. Moreover, of the women who do get it, premature screenings won't necessarily catch it. That in no way means that screenings don't make sense. They do, particularly for women in high-risk groups. But testing everybody isn't a great way to save money. As the Congressional Budget Office reported in August, "The evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall."

When presented with these and other facts, Obamacare's defenders note that the rate of increase in health-care costs has slowed in recent years. "I'm not going to walk away from something that has helped the cost of health care grow at its slowest rate in 50 years," Obama said last month.

This spin doesn't work either. The slowing of health-care costs began a decade ago, and even the administration's own actuaries say the recent drop is mostly attributable to the lousy economy. But even that's too generous to Obama. Costs haven't dropped. The rate of increase in spending has slowed. We're still on course to spend a record $2.9 trillion on health care in 2013.

Obamacare may have been sold on a trinity of lies, but it turns out it's also lies all the way down.

SOURCE

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A new IRS outrage

Here's a question: When did it become acceptable for the IRS to be used as a tool to target enemies of the president? Moreover, what article or amendment of the U.S. Constitution authorizes a component of the Executive Branch to be used as a powerful political weapon? The answers to these questions should be obvious to most: “never” and “none,” respectively. But apparently that's not so for Barack Obama.

Fresh from wiping mud off its face for its scandalous behavior in targeting the Left's political enemies, the IRS is proposing new rules that double-down on that egregious behavior. The new rules would restrain the free-speech rights of certain organizations under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code by preventing them from posting officeholder votes and quotes on their websites within two months of an election. These organizations are politically active nonprofits and exist specifically to promote political speech and issue advocacy. (And with the Senate “going nuclear” and allowing Obama to pack the courts – especially the DC Circuit – with leftists, the courts will almost surely uphold these new rules.)

These organizations are not tax exempt, but they have for more than 50 years enjoyed the ability to engage in political activity on behalf of donors who wish to remain anonymous. Now that conservative nonprofits have grown at such a rate that they threaten formerly Democrat strongholds, naturally the Entitled Party wants to quash such activity, either by restricting these groups' rights through unconstitutional rule-making measures or by exposing and harassing conservative donors.

For his part, Obama didn't even pass the first philosophical hurdle – that using the IRS as a political weapon is, well, “wrong.” In a recent interview with Chris “I-felt-this-thrill-going-up-my-leg” Matthews, Obama stated, “You've got an … IRS office … and they've got a list, and suddenly everybody's outraged” – as though being outraged is somehow itself offensive. Well, yes, Mr. President: “Suddenly” – once the despicable act is discovered, that is – everybody is outraged. A better question might be, “Why wouldn't they be?”

As to the original questions concerning the use of the IRS as a political weapon, we would refer readers to the “IRS” acronym itself for answers: Internal Revenue Service – “Internal,” meaning from within the country itself; “Revenue,” meaning federal government income from taxes; and “Service,” meaning an organization that (ostensibly, at least) helps people. Note that none of these terms state or imply an organization that regulates politics or free speech rights. The best solution to this mess is to disengage the IRS from the business of doing political work on behalf of the president and his party. But that solution will never be acceptable to the Left, which knows that it must rely on deceit and unfair tactics to hold power. Sadly, this is simply another thinly veiled attack on Americans' liberty.

 SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The poor should pay more

The top 40 percent of households by before-tax income actually paid 106.2 percent of the nation’s net income taxes in 2010, according to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

At the same time, households in the bottom 40 percent took in an average of $18,950 in what the CBO called “government transfers” in 2010.

Taxpayers in the top 40 percent of households were able to pay more than 100 percent of net federal income taxes in 2010 because Americans in the bottom 40 percent actually paid negative income taxes, according to the CBO study entitled, “The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010.”

“When refundable tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, exceed the other federal tax liabilities of the households in an income group, those households are said to have a negative average tax rate,” said the CBO study.

“In its analysis, CBO measured individual income taxes net of refundable credits,” it said.

In 2010, the CBO determined, American households in the bottom 40 percent paid negative amounts in income-tax dollars and a negative average income-tax rate.

“Much of the progressivity of the federal tax system derives from the individual income tax,” said the report. “In 2010, the lowest quintile’s average rate for the individual income tax was -9.2 percent and the second income quintile’s rate was -2.3 percent.”

“A group can have a negative income tax rate if its refundable tax credits exceed the income tax otherwise owed,” said the CBO report.

The households in the top 20 percent by income paid 92.9 percent of net income tax revenues taken in by the federal government in 2010, said CBO. The households in the fourth quintile paid another 13.3 percent of net income tax revenues. Together, the top 40 percent of households paid 106.2 percent of the federal government’s net income tax revenue.

The third quintile paid another 2.9 percent—bringing the total share of net federal income tax revenues paid by the top 60 percent to 109.1 percent.

That was evened out by the net negative income tax paid by the bottom 40 percent

SOURCE

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The Left Learned Wrong Lessons from Nazism

Dennis Prager

The only way to understand what is happening to America in our time -- and for that matter, in Europe since World War II -- is to understand the left.

And one way to understand the left -- and its enormous appeal to many decent people -- is to understand what it learned from World War II and the Nazi experience. The lessons people draw from history go a long way toward explaining how they view the world and how they behave.

Unfortunately, virtually everything the left learned from the unique evil known as Nazism has been wrong.

The first lesson was that the right is evil, not merely wrong. Because Nazism has been successfully labelled "right-wing," virtually every right-wing position and leader has been either cynically or sincerely characterized by the left as a danger to civilization. That is why the right is so often labelled fascist and compared to Nazis. Vast numbers of people in the West truly believe that if the right prevails, fascism will follow.

Of course, Nazism was not right-wing -- certainly not in American terms. How could it be? Right-wing means less government, not more. Nor was it left-wing, even though "Nazism" was an abbreviation for National Socialism.

Nazism was sui generis. It was radical racism combined with totalitarianism; and racism as a doctrine is neither right nor left.

We have no contemporary movement of any major significance that is Nazi-like. The closest thing we have is Islamist hatred of non-Muslims -- but even that is mostly religion- rather than race-based.

The association of Nazism with right-wing is one reason many Jews loathe the right. In the Jewish psyche, to fight the right is to fight incipient Nazism.

The second lesson the left learned is directly related to the first. If the right is so evil that, if allowed to prevail, Nazism will follow, then surely the left must be beautiful and noble. And that, of course, is how the left sees itself -- as inherently beautiful and noble. After all, how can the opposite of Nazism be anything but noble?

The third erroneous lesson is a deep fear and loathing of nationalism. Since the Nazis committed their crimes in the name of nationalism (race-based nationalism, to be precise), nationalism must be curbed. That explains much of the left's contempt for Americans who wave the flag -- indeed, the left has rendered the term "flag-wavers" a pejorative term.

How else to explain the fact that on American national holidays one finds so many more flags displayed in conservative areas than in liberal ones? The trauma of World War I had already killed nationalism in much of Europe. And World War II did that for the left in America.

The left regards any assertion of American national identity -- not merely flag-waving -- as chauvinism bordering on fascism. When the left charges Americans who fear the dilution of American national identity that could follow citizenship for tens of millions of illegal immigrants with "xenophobia," and "racism," it is not only a cynical attempt to cultivate Latino votes for the Democratic Party. It is also a sincere belief that conservative concerns about American national identity are reminiscent of chauvinist bigotry.

The most obvious example of left-wing opposition to American nationalism is its cultivation of "multiculturalism" as a replacement for American national identity. For the left, American citizens are no longer Americans first and foremost; we are African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic- or Latino-Americans, Native-Americans, etc. The left celebrates what precedes the hyphen far more than the "American" that follows it. As a result, America no longer instills traditional American values and an American identity on either those born here or in its immigrants, which is the reason for the right's concern over illegal immigration, not bigotry and xenophobia.

A fourth lesson the left learned from Nazism has been that no judging of cultures is permissible. Because the Nazis deemed Jews and others as inferior, we are no longer allowed to judge other cultures. In the post-World War II world of the left, all cultures are equal. To say that the contemporary Islamic world, or that black inner city culture, has serious moral problems that these cultures need to address is to be labelled dangerously racist -- again reminiscent, for the left, of the Nazis who declared other groups (inherently) defective. For the left, the only cultures one may judge adversely are white American and religious Jewish and Christian.

Fifth and finally, the left has affirmed pacifism as an ideal. One would think that the most obvious moral and rational lesson to be learned from the Nazi experience is the need to fight evil. After all, if decent nations were not as militarily strong as they were, and were not as prepared as they were to use that might, the Nazis would not have been defeated, and many millions more "non-Aryans" would have been enslaved and murdered. But the left, including, sad to say, Germany, did not draw that lesson. Instead of learning to fight evil, the left has learned that fighting is evil -- and it has taught this to two generations of Americans.

To amend Santayana's famous dictum, it is those who learn the wrong lessons from history who are condemned to repeat it.

SOURCE

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Four Decades Eroding the Foundation of Liberty

The Supreme Court over the past four decades has issued some decisions that not only defied the Constitution, but imposed changes on our society that go so far as to challenge fundamental principles of our civilization.

For example, our Founding Fathers believed all men are endowed by their creator with an inalienable right to life - a principal derived not only from natural law, but also from the commandment thou shall not kill.

In 1973, the court said that the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War to ensure equal protection of the law to all people in the United States, protected the right of a woman to contract with a doctor to kill an unborn child.

Since then, tens of millions of unborn babies have been denied their right to life.

In 1986, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court turned back a challenge to the Georgia law that prohibited same-sex sodomy.

In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger made a telling point. "I join the court's opinion, but I write separately to underscore my view that, in constitutional terms, there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy," said Burger.

"As the court notes, the proscriptions against sodomy have very 'ancient roots,'" he said. "Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards."

"To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching," said Burger.

Seventeen years later, in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court did just that. It reversed Bowers and declared that same-sex sodomy was indeed a right.

This time, Justice Antonin Scalia, in dissent, pointed to the opinion the court had so recently issued in Bowers - and warned that declaring sodomy a right might be only the beginning.

"State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices," said Scalia.

SOURCE

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Why Liberal Ideology Doesn't Work

41% of net new jobs created in November were government jobs. That's not progress, that's alarming. 40% of the population shouldn't be employed by the government unless you live in North Korea.

As a consequence, the unemployment rate dropped, but this is an empty statistic. The government could hire every unemployed person in the U.S. tomorrow, but the government doesn't create wealth, no new added value is made to our nation. In fact the opposite is true, government employees, though clearly many of them are absolutely necessary, have a net negative effect on wealth creation because they have to be paid through the taxes paid from the wealth created by others.

This is precisely why government should remain as limited as possible, because even necessary positions are a drain on the economy and on growth and prosperity.

This is a man that I have had come speak at the Wylie Tea Party before.  I love him because his posts are thoughtful, thought provoking, and accurate. Clearly he does his research.

What he has to say should scare every American to the core.  With the data he provided, let us consider a few simple math facts and consider what they mean:

An astounding 40% of the US population is now employed by the Federal Government

A rather inaccurate 7% are unemployed (and we know this number is closer to 14% because it does not include those who have stopped looking or those who should be employed full time but have only been able to find part time work).

Then we must consider that portion of the US population not working and not considered part of the unemployed.  Retirees represent roughly 13% of the US population according to the US Census reports, and children represent roughly 20%.

If we take all these numbers and add them together, what does this all mean?

It means that 40% of the population are sucking our tax dollars from the system and not creating tax dollars (oh sure they pay taxes on their income, but they are merely putting back a small portion of tax dollars back into the tax pool they sucked it from). These tax suckers are coupled with 7% of the unemployed, and 33% of those not of working age.  This totals to an astounding 80% of the population not working.

That number should scare the living excrement out of you.  The fact is only 20% of the US population are creating any national wealth or contributing to it. That number is insane and most certainly not sustainable, which is one reason why we have an incredible deficit on our hands. We prove every time the Democrats want to increase the debt ceiling that our economy is not sustainable. What I don't understand is just what part of that data Democrats don't understand?  If you are voting with the Democrats then  you are supporting the eventual doom of our country, especially when our policies limit how much of our own resources we sell to other countries.  It is pretty simple math, folks and the big fat negative number continues to grow.

Now imagine if our government focused on creating jobs rather than doling out tax dollars.  Just what sort of wealth might our population create? This is why liberal ideology does not work because it is not sustainable.  This is why our economy is in the condition it is in.

Regardless of whether you appreciate the Tea Party or Constitutional Conservatives, this is why we are right and our way is the only way that will bring our economy back around without putting us further into debt.  Robbing Peter to pay Paul for job creation is a very bad plan and I would challenge every liberal to prove how their plan can possibly work longer-term.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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A stylish Danish blonde upsets a few applecarts





It would probably need a strong man to resist the opportunity of some fun with Helle Thorning-Schmidt.  She may be the Prime Minister of Denmark but she is also one attractive lady.  And as you can see from the photos, Mrs Obama was intensely unamused.  In fact she later swapped places with Mr Obama to separate him from the blonde.  Mr Obama no doubt felt he had a Republican in bed with him that night.

And the British Prime Minister copped a bit of flak too.  It is not known what Samantha Cameron said to him that night but he was chipped in Parliament and came out with the lamest of excuses.  See below.  He professed respect for Neil Kinnock.

Hopefully it was a joke.  Known in his day as the "Welsh Windbag", Neil Kinnock lost the "unloseable" 1992 British general election to the Conservative but soppy John Major, an event that generated immense soul-searching in the British Labour party. I remember at the time saying to a British Labour Party supporter:  "Your lot couldn't even beat John Major!"  The agony on his face was a graphic reply. Some Labour party people still profess respect for Kinnock but there must be very few others who profess any.

The upshot of that agony was the installation of Tony Blair  -- a man who was clever enough to use a lot of conservative talk while doing socialist things.  Mr Obama has clearly learnt from him the usefulness of words entirely unconnected to deeds.

Both Cameron and Obama have been criticised for their disrespectful behaviour at the funeral but when I heard that they were sitting through a 4-hour ceremony, I couldn't condemn them.

DAVID Cameron yesterday tried to defend his decision to pose for a light-hearted ‘selfie’ in the middle of Nelson Mandela’s memorial service – by claiming he was only being polite.

The Prime Minister attempted to laugh off the storm of criticism he provoked after larking around with Barack Obama and Denmark’s prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

He joked he was being ‘polite’ by agreeing to pose for a picture with Miss Thorning-Schmidt, the glamorous daughter-in-law of former Labour leader Neil Kinnock.

SOURCE



One wonders a little how it all went down in Denmark.  I imagine the Danes would be both amused and pleased.  If Denmark ever wants anything of either the USA or the UK, their Prime Minister is obviously in an extremely good position to make the request!  Any phone calls from Helle Thorning-Schmidt would obviously be put through straight to the top!  -- JR

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A heartbreaking story

A woman who just wants to live is being killed by Obamacare

By EDIE LITTLEFIELD SUNDBY

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.

Countless hours searching for non-exchange plans have uncovered nothing that compares well with my existing coverage. But the greatest source of frustration is Covered California, the state's Affordable Care Act health-insurance exchange and, by some reports, one of the best such exchanges in the country. After four weeks of researching plans on the website, talking directly to government exchange counselors, insurance companies and medical providers, my insurance broker and I are as confused as ever. Time is running out and we still don't have a clue how to best proceed.

Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University's Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The second element essential to my fight is a United Healthcare PPO (preferred provider organization) health-insurance policy.

Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.

But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.

You would think it would be simple to find a health-exchange plan that allows me, living in San Diego, to continue to see my primary oncologist at Stanford University and my primary care doctors at the University of California, San Diego. Not so. UCSD has agreed to accept only one Covered California plan—a very restrictive Anthem EPO Plan. EPO stands for exclusive provider organization, which means the plan has a small network of doctors and facilities and no out-of-network coverage (as in a preferred-provider organization plan) except for emergencies. Stanford accepts an Anthem PPO plan but it is not available for purchase in San Diego (only Anthem HMO and EPO plans are available in San Diego).

So if I go with a health-exchange plan, I must choose between Stanford and UCSD. Stanford has kept me alive—but UCSD has provided emergency and local treatment support during wretched periods of this disease, and it is where my primary-care doctors are.

Before the Affordable Care Act, health-insurance policies could not be sold across state lines; now policies sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges may not be offered across county lines.

What happened to the president's promise, "You can keep your health plan"? Or to the promise that "You can keep your doctor"? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician.

For a cancer patient, medical coverage is a matter of life and death. Take away people's ability to control their medical-coverage choices and they may die. I guess that's a highly effective way to control medical costs. Perhaps that's the point.

SOURCE

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Celebrity Hypocrites

John Stossel

I'm annoyed that so many Hollywood celebrities hate the system that made them rich.

Actor/comedian Russell Brand told the BBC he wants "a socialist, egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth."

Director George Lucas got rich not just from movies but also by selling Star Wars merchandise. Yet he says he believes in democracy but "not capitalist democracy."

Actor Martin Sheen says, "That's where the problem lies ... It's corporate America."  ...  And so on.

On my TV show, actor/author Kevin Sorbo pointed out that such sentiments make little sense coming from entertainers. "It's a very entrepreneurial business. You have to work very hard to get lucky, mixed with any kind of talent to get a break in this business. I told Clooney, George, you're worth $100 million -- of course you can afford to be a socialist!"

It's bad enough that celebrities trash the only economic system that makes poor people's lives better.  What's worse is that many are hypocrites.

Celebrities who support big-government politicians routinely take advantage of tax breaks, which reduce the amount they contribute to that government.

It's nice that Obama supporter Bon Jovi has a foundation that builds houses for poor people, but at tax time, the musician labels himself a "farmer." He pays only $100 in state property tax. And his tax dodge gimmick: raising honeybees.

Bruce Springsteen sings about factories closing down but pays little tax on the hundreds of acres of land he owns. His dodge: An organic farmer works his land.

Hollywood's campaign to "save the earth" brings out the most hypocrisy. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio recently announced, "I will fly around the world doing good for the environment." Really? Flying around the world? I'm amazed they're not embarrassed by what they say.

Maybe they don't know how clueless they are because reporters rarely confront them about their hypocrisy. Hollywood reporters want access to celebrities, and posing uncomfortable questions reduces that access.

To fill the gap, Jason Mattera, author of "Hollywood Hypocrites," confronts hypocritical celebrities.

He and his cameraman located Harrison Ford after the actor had himself filmed getting his chest hair waxed. Ford said the pain of ripping out his chest hair should make us think about the pain the earth feels when trees in a rainforest are cut down. Chest hair, rain forest -- get it? But that environmental message came from a celebrity who owns (SET ITAL) seven (END ITAL) airplanes. Ford once even flew his private jet to get a cheeseburger!

"I don't care that he owns seven airplanes," said Mattera, "but do not lecture the rest of us that we're on the precipice of global warming Armageddon while you have a sasquatch-sized carbon footprint." Even though Ford ignored Mattera when confronted by him, at least he was forced to listen to someone questioning his positions.

Some actors wake up to the burden of big government when they try doing something outside acting. Actors usually collect a paycheck. They rarely deal with government regulation; their agent handles the details.

When actor and lifelong Democrat Rob Schneider tried launching a business, he was so offended by California's burdensome regulation that he left the state and changed political parties.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was enthusiastic about free markets when he owned a bricklaying business. But, unfortunately, during his time as California governor, he started to act more like a supporter of big government. Being a politician has that effect on people, especially in California.

Actors Drew Carey and Vince Vaughn are among the few others who've seen the light. On ReasonTV, Carey said, "We don't need a centralized government to tell us what to do all the time."

On a radio show, Vaughn recently said, "I'm very supportive of Ron Paul ... As you get older ... you just get less trust in the government running anything. If you look at the Constitution and the principles of liberty, the real purpose of government is to protect the individual's right."

Hooray for Carey and Vaughn. Maybe they'll convince their colleagues.

SOURCE

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Income Redistribution: Last GM Shares Sold

More than four years after U.S. taxpayers bailed out a flailing General Motors, the government sold its remaining shares in the company this week, leading Barack Obama to announce, “GM has now repaid every taxpayer dollar my administration committed to its rescue, plus billions invested by the previous administration.” There's just one problem: it isn't true. Shocking, we know.

When the Obama administration put taxpayers on the hook for $49.5 billion to prop up the auto giant, the government received in return a 60.8% stake, or 912 million shares, in GM. With the sale of the remaining shares, the government recovered $39 billion of the bailout. For those in the administration who can't apply basic math, that's a $10.5 billion difference – a far cry from Obama's “every taxpayer dollar” repaid claim.

Naturally, the president omitted this small fact in his announcement, instead touting his refusal to let GM fail and bragging that his administration “bet on what was true” and “that bet has paid off.” In no other arena – indeed, in no sane reasoning anywhere – would a 21%, $10.5 billion loss be called a payoff. Indeed, it certainly didn't pay off for the American taxpayer. But then again, none of Obama's policies have, so why would we expect this one to be any different?

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Mandela's motives

If you read conservative blogs, you will be aware by now that the idolatry of Nelson Mandela that you see in the mainstream media is far from universally shared.  The fact is that Mandela was always a Communist and was a very active terrorist in his youth  -- which is why the Boer regime imprisoned him in a high security prison for 27 years.  A relatively mild "alternative" account of Mandela is here.  And even after he became President, he maintained cordial relations with such charmers as Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro.

So how come he managed the transition from white rule to black rule so peacefully?  Why did he not act out the hostility which he expressed for all his life?  Nobody seems to answer that.  They just see the years of his Presidency as the manifestation of a "great soul", which he clearly was not.  A great hater, maybe.

I think the answer is obvious and I am a little bemused that it once again seems to fall to me to identify the elephant in the room.  The answer is that he knew what a tough lot the Boers are and was afraid of them.  After what the Boers did to the British Empire, a rabble of blacks would have been a snack for them.  After all in the Apartheid years the South African police force was quite small relative to population.  The Boers did not need much to suppress back discontent.

And Mandela was right to fear the Boers.  They still held all the levers of power in South Africa  -- police, army, bureaucracy, media etc.  Had they been energized to act in response to extensive violence encouraged by the new black regime, there can be no doubt that the violence would have been decisively crushed and only a semblance of black rule would have continued.

The peaceful Mandela was a coward, not a great soul.  But cowardice was probably wise in the circumstances

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Gun charges against George Zimmerman dropped, media hardest hit

It was reported almost from the very beginning that George Zimmerman’s most recent girlfriend was just as erratic as the previous women in his life, and the Daily Mail now confirms it:

    George Zimmerman’s girlfriend has dropped charges against him just weeks after she claimed he pointed a shotgun at her and smashed her stuff, and now she even wants him back, it has emerged.

    Samantha Scheibe called 911 in November, telling operators Zimmerman was brandishing a weapon during an argument and that she feared for her life. He was charged with a felony aggravated assault charge among other charges.

    He is now asking to have conditions of his bail modified so he can resume contact with Scheibe, who, according to court documents filed by Zimmerman’s attorney, gave a sworn statement that read: ‘I do not want George Zimmerman charged.’

    Zimmerman, 30, had been barred from contacting the 27-year-old blonde after he posted $9,000 bond. He was also forced to give up his guns and wear a GPS monitor.

    According to ABC News, Scheibe says in a new affidavit, dated December 6, ‘When I was being questioned by police I felt very intimidated…I believe that the police misinterpreted me and that I may have misspoken about certain facts in my statement to police.’

    Scheibe went on to say in the statement that Zimmerman ‘never pointed a gun at or toward my face in a threatening manner’ and that ‘I want to be with George.’

Tomorrow, I’ll be expecting a revelation that Zimmerman is actually a Koch Brothers-created cyborg designed to cause Piers Morgan to have a stroke, which Morgan will likely have once he discovers that Zimmerman will soon have his trio of handguns, his Kel-Tec KSG shotgun, and his AR-15 in his posession.

SOURCE

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More Physicians Are Refusing to Accept Any Third Party payment

A small but growing number of physicians are not accepting government insurance, such as Medicare and Medicaid, and are even refusing to accept patients’ private insurance, according to Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS).

Orient says the transition to a business model in which patients agree to pay doctors directly for the health care services they provide started before Obamacare was passed, but that the new law has accelerated the trend, especially among AAPS’ 4,000 or so members.

AAPS is the conservative alternative to the much larger American Medical Association (AMA), which endorsed Obamacare while AAPS opposed it.

“They like the freedom,” Orient, a Tucson-based internist, told CNSNews.com. “They don’t like third parties telling them why they can’t do what’s best for their patients. They’re tired of the constant threats of audits and prosecution, and they don’t like being owed money by government programs and many insurance programs.

“But the biggest complaint I hear is that they are tired of fighting people who don’t have a clue, and don’t even know how to spell the procedure they want to perform,” Orient added. “It just devours time and sometimes puts the patient’s life at risk.”

Some physicians never signed up with managed care insurance plans in the first place because the reimbursement levels didn’t cover their costs, she said.

But now even doctors who “agreed to accept the crumbs, whatever compensation the government or the insurance companies decide to send them,” are having second thoughts as the costs of practicing medicine continues to climb and government regulations become even more onerous.

“I get several calls a week from doctors seeking advice on how to opt out,” Orient told CNSNews.com. “They tell me that they either have to go out of business or go back to the old-fashioned practice of charging for their services.”

At least 100 physicians attend workshops and seminars AAPS sponsors twice a year on the subject. Former AAPS president Dr. Juliette Madrigal-Dersch, who started her cash-only practice in Texas 11 years ago, tells fellow physicians that she has more time and flexibility to spend with patients and is actually better compensated for it, even after offering a discount for “teachers and preachers” and free care for cancer patients.

“I see billionaires and migrant workers, and everybody gets the same care,” she says.

She charges $15 for a CBC (complete blood count), while the tax-subsidized “charity hospital” down the street charges $79. Medicare reimbursement is just $3.50 for the same test.

Madrigal-Dersch says that by not having to deal with third-party payers, she is able to establish “a true doctor-patient relationship,” enabling her to provide better care. For example, she says one of her patients would probably have died waiting for the Veteran’s Administration to approve an MRI for her brain tumor.

In June, the association’s website added a sample document AAPS members can use to opt out of Medicare.

“Once CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] unleashes its dreaded new program of ‘private auditors’ to shake down physicians in the Medicare program, far more physicians will likely opt out – and even more will wish they had,” the AAPS website states. It also includes a state-by-state list of physicians who have already done so.

Doctors who stop accepting insurance typically lose patients and experience a drop in income, Orient said. Some never recover the revenue, but because they don’t have to pay people to process insurance claims, their overhead costs also decrease.  “Before too long, they often find the move very positive financially as well as professionally because they are working less and making more money,” she pointed out.

“I hope that this will spread,” she added. “Obamacare is turning the nation’s health care system into a Third World experience, just like the website. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

SOURCE

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Knockout Game Goes right

In an apparent case of the “Knockout Game” gone wrong, new video shows a man attempting to hit a girl and knock her down, but his plan backfires when the woman hits him back.

The incident, which reportedly happened in a Las Vegas shopping mall, shows the woman retaliate as soon as she is hit by the man. She starts to beat him on the head when another man, who is reported to be her boyfriend, runs back to try to break it up when he realizes that the guy hit her.

“You hit a girl?” the apparent boyfriend asks before springing into defense mode and helping the woman beat the man. People are watching the incident unfold, asking what happened, before the woman and her boyfriend angrily walk away.

The man who had originally hit the woman is seen, at the end of the video, lying on the ground in the fetal position with a bloody nose. Since being posted to World Star Hip Hop yesterday, the video has already garnered over a million views and about 4,300 comments.

SOURCE

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Obama’s class warfare claptrap

On Dec. 4, President Barack Obama in a major speech on economic policy spoke of “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain.”

He thinks it is income inequality that is holding back regular Americans. But for that to even be a problem, many Americans would first need an income.

Yet according to the latest job numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, folks are not even entering the labor force (i.e. looking for work), let alone finding jobs at the rate needed to significantly improve labor market conditions.

That is the real problem with the Obama economy. Not fairness, but simply the lack of opportunity.

Since 2009, the civilian non-institutional population aged 25 to 64 has increased by 4.2 million. The workforce, however, has not grown to match the population increase. Those working or looking for work shrank by 165,000.

For that reason, the so-called unemployment rate for that age category has dropped from 7.4 percent to 5.7 percent, and yet the participation rate in the workforce has dropped from 79.1 percent to 76.9 percent.

Mind you, this excludes those over the age of 65 to eliminate any doubt that declining labor participation is because of Baby Boomers retiring en masse. They are not.

If anything, seniors are working longer.

Labor participation (i.e. working or looking for work) among those 65 years and older has increased from 17.3 percent to 18.6 percent, meaning seniors are actually working longer, a theme certainly borne out by data.

There are 1.7 million more seniors are working today than in 2009, a 27 percent increase. For comparison, those working aged 25 to 64 increased by just 2 million, a 1.75 percent increase.

While the fact that 2 million aged 25 to 64 found jobs may seem like good news, relative to 2009’s 73.2 percent employment population ratio, it should have more like 3 million found jobs.

In simple terms, these means almost 1 million people in their prime earning years are not participating in the economy.

That is an alarming statement on current labor market conditions.

So, with all due respect to Obama’s screed against income inequality, that is not what is wrong with the economy. It is his assault on America’s private job-creation engine, and the failure to recover from the financial crisis.

Between Obamacare, the EPA, and bailing out financial institutions, Obama has done more to destroy middle income jobs while protecting the super wealthy than anyone and now wants to everyone to believe has a solution to the very inequality for which he is responsible.

If Obama truly wants to jumpstart an economy that will create jobs at all, he should immediately rescind those same EPA regulations, Obamacare mandates, and job-killing bailouts that divert resources from productive activities to government bonds.

In short, he should get the government out of the way and out of the class warfare business.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Little Change in Small-Town Life

When the family of seven sitting near the front of Connie's Corner restaurant discreetly held hands and bowed their heads in prayer before their meal, no one in the bustling diner seemed surprised.
At the same moment, 400 miles east at Sotheby's auction house in New York City, "Saying Grace" sold for $46 million. The painting by Norman Rockwell vividly depicts a crowded restaurant (not so unlike Connie's Corner) where a grandmother and her grandson pray at a table as truck drivers watch.

In the 62 years since Rockwell brought a family in prayer to life on canvas, some aspects of how Americans conduct their lives have remained the same - such as a family praying before dinner in this northern panhandle town.

"I love that about Chester and small-town American cities," said Scott Paulsen about the family giving thanks for their food. The 54-year-old WDVE morning radio host in Pittsburgh spent his childhood here, exploring the nearby woods and finding adventure along the train tracks.

Connie's Corner was Allison's Restaurant when Paulsen moved here from Baltimore as a seventh-grader. Connie Hissam was a waitress then; today she owns the restaurant. "What a great American success story," Paulsen said of her rise from employee to employer.

When Paulsen's family moved to Chester for his father's management job in the steel industry, a red-and-white building in the shape of a teapot sat across the street from their new home; attached to a pottery outlet, it was used to sell trinkets and hot dogs to travelers. Today, after the town rallied to save the 1930s roadside relic, it sits proudly on a corner of the Lincoln Highway, a beacon to locals and visitors.

In the beginning, Chester's prosperity depended on the very soil upon which it rested and the river that curved around it; the clay and the water were ideal for making pottery. The town rose and fell with both the pottery and steel industries.

"We do fine here," said Hissam, who has owned the restaurant for nearly 10 years. The Mountaineer Casino Racetrack & Resort and the Homer Laughlin factory are the area's biggest local employers, she said.n her diner, brightly colored Fiestaware dishes and platters made a mile away at the Homer Laughlin factory are filled with eggs and bacon, turkey and stuffing, meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

Homer Laughlin employed more than 3,500 locals in its heyday in 1929, but the decline in American-made pottery already had begun when tariffs were removed from pottery imports in 1910.
This is a slice of America that has ebbed and flourished over the years. Yet, for the most part, the people who live here remain the same; they still go to the same church on Sundays, still walk "up the street" to pick up milk and eggs, and still go hunting with friends and family.

What they don't do is protest for higher wages outside a small business like Connie's Corner; they don't feel entitled to much of anything - other than some peace and quiet to watch a football game or a boxing match - and they find irony in President Obama speaking about economic inequality while standing on one of the wealthiest patches of real estate in the country.

Most of all, they enjoy hard work and being part of a community. Just ask a woman named Irene, who retired from Homer Laughlin after 42 years as a brusher in the decorating department; she returned to the plant less than two years later, she said, because she missed both of those things.

Rockwell's "Saying Grace," played out in real life here, gives an observer the emotional tug of roots and continuity; it makes you feel good about yourself, your community and your relationships, and it provides a texture that is sometimes missing in our daily lives.

Our constant news cycle and the politics of Washington tend to make us believe that we live in a nation filled with self-indulgence and hatred. But most folks don't see it that way. The truth is, we are surrounded by good deeds. They are not exceptional, newsworthy moments, but they are there - and all you have to do is look up from your iPhone to see them.

SOURCE

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The Liberal God Dies Again

The god of liberalism is an idea and ideas are notoriously fragile things. They fall apart once they make the transition from the ivory tower of the mind to the mud and dross of reality. Every writer and artist has had the experience of holding a perfect ideal in his mind only to lose it as he struggles to set it down on canvas or paper. The creative process is that recognition that the ideal cannot be made real.

Liberalism, progressivism and the various names by which the modern left identifies and is identified is the belief that the ideal can and must be made real. That anything short of the ideal is a savage state of repression, tyranny, patriarchy, fascism and the whole litany of crimes against ideal humanity.

The liberal god rises as an idea and dies again. And rises again. No matter how many times the whole thing ends in blood and bankruptcy, the worshipers return to worship the coming of the god again.

"People in every corner of the globe who saw in him a hope for the future and a chance for mankind. We weep for our children and their children and everyone's children: For he was charting their destinies as he was charting ours," Art Buchwald wrote in the International Herald-Tribune after the assassination of JFK.

In Buchwald's crude Stalinist panegyric, JFK was a deity who charted the destinies of the whole world. "He cared about all of us," he writes. No sparrow could fall but that JFK would see it. JFK would help the "Negro", the "working man", "the artist, the writer and the poet",  "teachers and pupils" and even "old people".

But John F. Kennedy the man with flaws and strengths is not present in the North Korean scale orgy of leader worship because it isn't really him that Buchwald is mourning. It isn't Kennedy the man that liberals weep for every year. It is liberalism.

Camelot is liberalism. The death of Kennedy was the death of the idea. Liberalism didn't die, but its best avatar did. The ideal became the real with a magic bullet. The man who was supposed to chart the destiny of the world couldn't save himself from a "single lousy Communist" who killed the hope that he was supposed to represent.

The god of liberalism vests in an avatar like Kennedy or Obama. The avatar is messianic. It is superhuman. Its empathy is unlimited. Its liberal godhood elevates us all by merely being in its presence, hearing it speak or reading one of its speeches. It is the idea made flesh. The secular god.

But the god of the left must die. It is a mad illusion to think that any man can chart the destinies of the world. Buchwald put far too great a burden on JFK. Had a lousy Communist not killed him, then, like Obama, he would have lived to disappoint and infuriate his followers.

The Russians went mad when Stalin died. The North Korean weeping was equally insecure. When you believe that your destiny is charted by a man who is the only hope for your future; what can you do but weep, not for him, but as Buchwald writes, "We weep for the millions of people who are weeping for him."

The ideas of the left always fail because the avatars and muses always fail. The ideas that seem so bright in theory fail when confronted with the actual task of charting human lives and the unpleasant reality that the Negro, the working man, the old people and the students may not want the same things that the idealists want for them.

For a golden moment, the avatar of liberalism makes it seem as if all things are possible, he weaves an enchanting spell of transcendence that promises that paradoxes can be reconciled and that people will set aside their "selfish" needs and interests. They will stop thinking of themselves and start thinking of what they can do for their country. They will become the change they were waiting for.

The progressive ideal is that all men and women will become avatars of the liberal god in the same way that what we think of as Communism was only meant as a temporary system of rule that would give way to the true Communism in which there would be no more need for rulers and secret police because each man would be a true Communist with no need for external pressure and coercion.

Instead of this golden age, the tyranny of the avatar grows, coercion increases, protests spread and the project decays into a totalitarian state or is overthrown. The golden age never arrives. The ideal is slain by the real. And the true believers go into mourning for what might have been.

The tyranny of the ideal is the most brutal of all tyrannies for men and women are not ideal; they are real. Its plans are bound to fail and yet it has such a passionate grip on the minds of its believers that it is bound to rise again and again.

And so this cycle of the liberal god who dies and rises again, dies and rises, keeps repeating. As long as the tyranny of the ideal remains a rallying cry, as long as men and women choose to believe that a better world can be created through central planning, forcible redistribution and mass reeducation then the cycle will continue. No matter how often the liberal god dies, he will rise again.

The secular god of the progressive ideal has become an entity of life, death and rebirth. Its failures only incite its followers to believe that it will come again. It does not matter how many gulags and mass graves lie in its wake. It is a matter of faith. And in a secular world, there is nothing left to believe in except a better world.

Obama is dying now. ObamaCare, his great work, has failed. Like Ra and all the others, he will pass into the darkness and the ideas will reemerge again in a new avatar. Perhaps it will be Elizabeth Warren. Or someone else. And it will not be remembered that health care nationalization does not work. Like Communism, it will only be another experiment that was carried out incorrectly.

Men are flesh and blood. They are born and they die. But ideas appear to transcend them. That is what attracts men to ideas. Even the worst of them carry the taste of immortality on their lips.

"Alone--free--the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal," O'Brien declares in Orwell's 1984.

And so the messiahs come offering transcendence through submission to the Party. But they die and they fail, and the Party, that ugly confused creature with a million mindless heads, a trillion talking points, and no soul, looks around for a new avatar to embody its secular religion.

A man who will call for the submission of the world so that the world may become the Party and the Party may become the world.

"'We are the priests of power, god is power," Orwell tells Winston. This is the liberal priesthood of community organizers and activists, NGO chiefs and talking heads, senate aides and prattling pundits who wait for a god who will justify their power and their cruelty, who will convince them that their immortality within the body of the Party is within reach.

And then he dies and they appoint another avatar to embody the progressive godhood and wait again for their community organizer god to be born anew.

This liberal avatar will care for the Negro, the working man, the artist, the poet and writer, the teacher and the pupil, he will "save us from war", "command" us and "chart the destinies" of the whole world. He will do what he was unable to do in any of his prior reincarnations-- he will make the ideal into the real, he will make the impossible ideas of the left finally work.

SOURCE

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ATF Ruins the Lives of Disabled Teenagers to make themselves look good

If you don't already know by now, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms can't even run a store without royally screwing up. Nearly one year ago, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on an ATF sting gone bad when the bureau tried to catch bad guys by setting up a store. The sting ended in a damaged rent space, $35,000 in stolen goods and with a fully automatic machine gun lost on the city streets.

Now it appears ATF failed during another store front sting and is punishing teenagers they convinced to help them by throwing them in jail. We're talking about ATF agents convincing mentally disabled kids to get giant squid neck tattoos, having them participate in a sting operation, arresting them for participating and then calling it a success. You can't make this up:

Aaron Key wasn't sure he wanted a tattoo on his neck. Especially one of a giant squid smoking a joint.  But the guys running Squid's Smoke Shop in Portland, Ore., convinced him: It would be a perfect way to promote their store.

They would even pay him and a friend $150 apiece if they agreed to turn their bodies into walking billboards. Key, who is mentally disabled, was swayed.

He and his friend, Marquis Glover, liked Squid's. It was their hangout. The 19-year-olds spent many afternoons there playing Xbox and chatting with the owner, "Squid," and the store clerks.

So they took the money and got the ink etched on their necks, tentacles creeping down to their collarbones.

It would be months before the young men learned the whole thing was a setup. The guys running Squid's were actually undercover ATF agents conducting a sting to get guns away from criminals and drugs off the street.

The tattoos had been sponsored by the U.S. government; advertisements for a fake storefront.  The teens found out as they were arrested and booked into jail.

In an effort to cover their behind for this insane and reckless behavior, ATF has tried to pin failed storefront incidents and the abuse of the disabled on the "this was an isolated incident," argument. The Sentinel further reports these kinds of incidents are hardly isolated and are happening all over the country.

More HERE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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