Libertarians and Open Borders:  Immigration Is Not A Right

Why Libertarians Advocate Open Borders, And Why They Are Wrong

Libertarians believe we should have open borders, so that people from other countries can enter the United States freely. They believe it is a human right.

There are some good arguments for open borders. The first and most basic one for libertarians is that as free people, believing that all humans are by right (God-given or by Natural Right) free to use their minds, bodies and talents in freedom, and without coercion from others, no one has the right to STOP anyone from moving wherever they please.

All people are equal, and no one should abuse another's rights. This includes at borders to countries. When a government stops someone from crossing a border, it is violating that person's right to travel freely, and to exist in peace without coercion.

But libertarians also believe in private property. Ask a libertarian if we as individuals have the right to stop strangers from entering our homes uninvited. To a man, we will reply yes. There are long and convoluted arguments over the justice of private property, not worth going into here. It is sufficient when arguing the immigration question with libertarians to get them to agree that private property can be defended by its owners, and outsiders can be justly excluded.

Where libertarians fail in the immigration argument is in not considering the government as having any private property rights. Libertarians willingly give themselves rights in private property, but seem to consider the government as an alien of sorts, imposed upon us by Martians. But, how did the US government get here? It was founded by a compact of the original settlers to the US, and their descendents.

After stealing the land from the Native Americans, the early settlers staked out landholdings and drew up contracts with each other, giving themselves ownership of parcels of land. (For the moment let's ignore land grants by colonizing European governments.) They spread out, and new settlers came over from the old countries, and the White Man spread across the land, pushing out the Indians and carving out more and more owned land. It was these original owners and their children who conspired to create first the local governments, and later the States and then the Federal government.

We know where our government came from and how it came to be. It was the result of agreement among the people alive at the time, and repeated acts of agreement by later generations. For all the spitting and clawing over elections, and even a civil war, in general most Americans are and have been in agreement with the basic outlines of our government. We admire its better attributes, and work within the existing system of constitutional law to change those things we don't like.

Only true anarchists and straight up outlaws disagree. People who oppose the US government by violence in order to impose a different government, are outside of the question I am discussing here. (I'd say the Indians also have a right to be unhappy with the situation!)

In other words, the citizens gave up certain private property rights to the government, in order to gain the advantages they saw of having a central state.

Let me give an example in small, then expand it to national scope. Suppose a dozen families move onto a virgin tract of forest, cut down trees to build homes and make fields for crops. All is well. Everyone knows everyone else, so there isn't much need for a government. Private property rights are ingrained in the early settlers by tradition. But the village grows, strangers move in nearby and soon there are too many people to keep everyone straight. The original settlers decide they need a mayor and a sheriff, maybe a schoolteacher. They agree to pay a stipend for the upkeep of these few officials.

But, who are these officials in power over? So the citizens mark out the outlines of the village and voluntarily agree that the mayor and sheriff have certain limited powers within these bounds. Many early Americans were literate, and they didn't like being pushed around, so they wrote up contracts, outlining exactly what powers they were giving over to their new government. We do not have the situation in the US of alien warlords forcing a government on us. We are the alien warlords.

The original settlers owned ALL THE LAND. They made the streets themselves, cutting through private land, and along the borders between farms. They gave up some for streets, a city hall, a school. Public land, owned by the government, came from private land, and the rights to it were given up voluntarily. There was no force, no violence involved. The only injustice was done to the Indians, who were not asked their opinion. In time this whole process became habit, tradition, and the process of forming new towns almost automatic. As people moved west, they just assumed they would build up governing structures similar to what they knew.

The central government also purchased huge expanses of land from foreign powers (again ignoring the native inhabitants). This was bought with money supplied by citizens, operating under the rules they had agreed to, under the governing system they had entered voluntarily. Nothing changes just because the government bought that land. It is still private land, owned by the government. (Some portions of the Southwest were stolen outright from Mexico, but I don't care because the Mexicans were invaders too. They had no legal right to the land better than our claims.)

The US is so enormous, and its government so complex, that hardly anyone, libertarian, liberal or conservative, understands any more that it is in essence private. It is a government of, by and for the people. You may recall that phrase from somewhere!

Sure, it has grown to ridiculous size, but in essence it remains a government owned by the citizens.

Back to the immigration argument. The government is OWNED by the citizens of the United States. All public land is thus owned by the citizens. We each have a single stick of the bundle of rights all landowners have in their own property. The government merely manages it on our behalf, and since there are so many of us, and so many competing views on how the land should be used, we are forced to use such inefficient methods as voting for representatives who make laws controlling its use.

One of the most basic rights of a property owner is controlling who we let into our house, or walk across our land. You can argue that in an emergency we should allow people to cross our land, or even in extreme circumstances to break into a house, if a life is at stake.

But the basic point stands. A landowner can control who he lets onto his property. The government owns all the public land, and we own the government. We, through laws passed by our elected leaders, can justly prevent non-citizens from entering the USA. It's our land. We own it. We can tell them to stay out, or make non-citizens get out if they get in.

When we were at peace, after the cold war ended, I was a lot more in favor of open borders, or at least fairly easy entry. Now, like it or not, we are at war again, with an enemy even more alien to American values than the communists were. They have lots of money, and they have just as much raw brainpower, man for man, as we do. Too many are rich, smart, and dedicated to the destruction of the US. They are trying to make or buy nuclear weapons. Our private property rights allow us to exclude others from our homes. Our government has the same right.

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Unemployment rate is meaningless

The headlines read that the unemployment rate has dropped to its lowest point since Obama took office. This is a case where a headline can be 100 percent true and completely wrong in its implications.

If the unemployment rate drop from 7.3 percent down to 7 percent is actually meaningful, the Federal Reserve should immediately end its bond-buying program, called “quantitative easing.” One can assume that the economy is rapidly heating up, and we should all be concerned about inflationary risks created by more monetary pumping. When coupled with the net 750,000 new hires reported by the Labor Department over the past three months, the economy must be on fire.

However, the same report that shows the unemployment rate drop is disastrous when comparing data for the past three months.

The Labor Force Participation Rate dropped by 0.2 percentage points in that two-month period, meaning 666,400 fewer people were in the labor force in November than in September, roughly the equivalent of an entire congressional district.

The number of employed people is almost as grim. If you are to believe the unemployment report, only 83,000 more people were employed in November than in September.

The unemployment rate did not drop because of people getting jobs, but instead due to another massive labor drop-out. If this sounds familiar, it is because our nation has seen a staggering drop in the labor participation rate over the past five years.

Since Obama took office, the civilian non-institutionalized population age 16 years and over has grown by approximately 11.8 million people. However, the labor force has only grown by slightly more than 1 million people. Fully 91 percent, or 10.7 million of the increased population that are 16 years old and over are not only not working; they are not even trying to find a job.

This precipitous workforce participation rate decline of 2.7 percent has reached lows not seen since Jimmy Carter was president in 1978.

And it isn’t old people leaving the workforce in droves. Instead it is a startling drop in participation by teenagers and young adults who are failing to launch their lives.

While the unemployment rate for teenagers is virtually identical today as it was in January 2009, at 20.8 percent, the percentage of teenagers actually in the workforce has declined by 4.5 points. This means that while the unemployment rate for teens is virtually the same, the number of teens who are actually employed has declined by 716,000.

Headline writers love to take the easy unemployment rate top line, but almost three quarters of a million fewer teens have jobs today than when Obama took office, with half a million fewer even looking for work.

This is the reality of Obama’s new normal economy: Carter levels of labor participation and teens failing to even try to get a job. Of course, with revelations that the unemployment rate books may have been cooked by the government, it is probably wise to ignore their reported unemployment rate altogether.

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It’s a Very Merry Christmas for Washington’s Parasite Class

Daniel J. Mitchell

Last year, while writing about the sleazy and self-serving behavior at the IRS, I came up with a Theorem that explains day-to-day behavior in Washington.

It might not be as pithy as Mitchell’s Law, and it doesn’t contain an important policy prescription like Mitchell’s Golden Rule, but it could be the motto of the federal government.

Simply stated, government is a racket that benefits the DC political elite by taking money from average people in America

I realize this is an unhappy topic to be discussing during the Christmas season, but the American people need to realize that they are being raped and pillaged by the corrupt insiders that control Washington and live fat and easy lives at our expense.

If you don’t believe me, check out this mapshowing that 10 of the 15 richest counties in America are the ones surrounding our nation’s imperial capital.

Who would have guessed that the wages of sin are so high?

But even though the District of Columbia isn’t on the list, that doesn’t mean the people actually living in the capital are suffering.

Here are some interesting nuggets from a report in the Washington Business Journal.

"D.C. residents are enjoying a personal income boom. The District’s total personal income in 2012 was $47.28 billion, or $74,733 for each of its 632,323 residents, according to the Office of the Chief Financial Officer’s Economic and Revenue Trends report for November. The U.S. average per capita personal income was $43,725."

Why is income so much higher? Well, the lobbyists, politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups, contractors, and other insiders who dominate DC get much higher wages than people elsewhere in the country.

And they get far higher fringe benefits.

 "In terms of pure wages, D.C., on a per capita basis, was 79 percent higher than the national average in 2012 — $36,974 to $20,656. …Employee benefits were 102 percent higher in D.C. than the U.S. average in 2012, $7,514 to $3,710. Proprietor’s income, 137 percent higher — $9,275 to $3,906. …The numbers suggest D.C. residents are living the high life."

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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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Are libertarianism and conservatism totally different?

We occasionally see some rather poorly informed claims to the effect that libertarianism and conservatism are totally different -- e.g. an article by Walter Block here.  I think therefore that a little clarification is required.  The truth can be very simply put:  Libertarianism is ONE ELEMENT in conservative thinking.  More precisely, Libertarians and conservatives share an attachment to individual liberty.

Libertarians are in some ways like Leftists.  Leftists tend to have very simple formulas for what is wrong with the world.  Ask them and they will say:  inequality, poverty and (more amusingly) intolerance.  When you realize that leading Leftists are usually well-off and are totally intolerant of dissent, you can see how uninsightful and oversimplified leftist reasoning is.   And aside from being mostly poor, libertarians are like that too.  They oversimplify enormously:  Get government out of the way and a  new Eden will dawn.

Conservatives, on the other hand see everything as complex.  They see that there can be other influences on human welfare than freedom.  For instance, when a country seems threatened by foreign aggression (as Britain was in WWII) a conservative may see national security as an important consideration that may need balancing against individual liberty  - hence conservative governments may introduce a whole range of "wartime measures" that reduce the liberties of citizens to some extent.  Conservatives try to balance competing principles.

Another revelatory case is immigration.  Since libertarians dislike governments and their restrictions, they usually favour open borders.  If libertarians had their way, most of Mexico would end up in the USA.  But conservatives see other issues as being involved -- such as pressure on welfare programs and other systems,  and the importation of the dumb political ideologies that have kept most of the Americas South of the Rio Grande mired in poverty.  What the immigrants have in their heads is important, not just the fact that they are a person. And conservatives also see it as a matter of property rights. If I have the right to say whom I will have living with me in my own home, surely groups of people (nations) also have the right to say who will live among them?

Libertarians also tend to ignore genetics.  When proposing remedies for poverty,  Leftists will say: "give the poor more money" while libertarians will say "Give the poor no money".  Neither system will usually be practical so conservatives tend to say:  "The poor ye always have with you".  With no ideology to explain everything, conservatives can simply accept reality.  As one of Britain's most prominent Conservatives recently said, some people are equipped mentally to do well and some are not.  Leftists usually cry "racism" when genetics are mentioned so the conservative response is usually implicit rather than explicit these days.  That people are born different underlies a lot of conservative thinking even though it can be risky to say that out loud.

Similarly with homosexual "marriage".  Leftists see it simply  as an equality issue, libertarians see it simply as a liberty issue while conservatives see it as impacting on many other things  -- such as morality and the family and a general devaluation of marriage.

So conservatives try to align their thinking with the complexity of reality while libertarians have a "one size fits all" explanation and solution for all problems.  Conservatives value liberty but don't think it is the answer to everything.  And the  only liberty Leftists value is your liberty to do what they say -- JR.

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Encouraging Lessons from the "Duck Dynasty" Imbroglio

David Limbaugh, below, is inclined to see the Duck Dynasty affair as a turning point.  I think it may be an even bigger turning point than he suspects.  I think it marks the end of kneejerk bans in response to shrieks of "homophobia", "racism"  and the like.  Fox will gladly grab the show if A & E don't back down soon.  They are in a no win situation:  Stick with political correctness or lose one of their top money-spinners.  So it would be amazing if they didn't grovel to the people they have offended.  They now know that "offence" works both ways.  Others are going to see that too.

Something similar has just happened in England.  A checkout chick at a tony department store chain (M&S) refused to put through a bottle of champagne because she is a Muslim.  The buyer had to line up at another checkout.  The firm initially backed the Muslim but got such a barrage of abuse over it that they did a u-turn and said they will no longer use Muslims  in that role.  So after all the accommodation that has been given to Muslims a limit has been  reached.  There is a lot of synchrony between what happens in Britain and what happens in the USA so I supect that we have seen the end everywhere of automatic obedience to political correctness  -- JR

A&E's suspension of Phil Robertson for expressing his politically incorrect, Bible-based opinion on homosexual behavior has turned out to be a blessing in disguise and serves as an object lesson for Christian and other social conservatives, as well as other lovers of liberty.

The politically correct left has built a culture and network of intimidation against all who refuse to accept their views and especially those who are vocal in standing their ground.

Among the encouraging lessons from this brouhaha are that people are waking up to the tyranny of uncompromising leftist groups and realizing that they don't have to cower before them and cave to their bullying demands. We're seeing that courageous individuals, secure in their beliefs, can make a difference and by speaking out motivate like-minded people to stand up and fight back.

Conservatives are recognizing that they don't have to sit back and continue to be victims of the left's domestic economic sanctions, that sometimes it's necessary to fight fire with fire by reciprocating with economic sanctions or support of their own.

The Cracker Barrel restaurant chain learned this lesson the hard way. It announced it would stop selling certain "Duck Dynasty" merchandise because of Robertson's statements. The backlash from its customers via social media was immediate and so overwhelming that it issued an apology and reversed its decision, which teaches us another lesson. While the conventional wisdom is that the left owns social media, the reality is that people, including millions of conservatives and Christians, own social media and can use it to combat the left's tyranny and otherwise engage in the culture war.

A similar phenomenon occurred in reverse when customers of Chick-fil-A flocked to its restaurants throughout America to support the chain when CEO Dan Cathy came under attack for saying he supports traditional marriage. The mayors of Chicago and Boston lambasted the company, and D.C.'s mayor said it was peddling "hate chicken."

People who want to mind their own business are finally grasping that certain militant leftists, especially gay activists, won't let them. They don't want to live and let live; they don't just want equal rights and respect. They want to stamp out opposing viewpoints and suppress the liberties of those who disagree.

Robertson and Cathy are not the first to be demonized. Some who worked on the Prop 8 ballot initiative in California were told they would be vilified as anti-gay and would never work again. That's right: If you express your support for traditional marriage, the militant gay movement slanders you as "anti-gay." They can't win in the marketplace of ideas, so they have to take out their opponents -- assaulting their character and reputation and destroying their credibility and courage to fight back.

These bullies are threatening lawsuits against churches that refuse to perform same-sex weddings. They are forcing the normalization of the homosexual lifestyle into our public schools via Common Core. They have sued a baker for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. They sued to compel a Christian photographer to take pictures at a same-sex ceremony.

People are also witnessing the militant gay lobby engage in calculated deception in its quest to impose its views and suppress the opposition. This deception is primarily found in the deliberate distortion of terms, such as "anti-gay," "hate," "discrimination," "bigot," "homophobe," "bullying" and "intolerance."

To oppose same-sex marriage or even to subscribe to the Biblical declaration that homosexual behavior is sinful is in no way anti-gay or hateful. Most people who oppose same-sex marriage have good will toward homosexuals but don't want society to be forced to alter the thousands-year-old understanding of marriage. They want to preserve their constitutional freedoms of expression and religion to believe and state their opinions even if they offend certain people.

On the other hand, an abundance of hatred flows from many militant activists toward those who disagree with them, and especially those who actively oppose them.

Phil Robertson voiced his opinion about homosexual behavior. In doing so, he and others like him neither discriminate nor advocate discrimination against homosexuals in any way.

Those who oppose these practices are not bigots; they do not seek to mistreat homosexuals. Even those who believe the behavior is sinful are not being hypocritical if they admit their own sinful behavior, as well. They aren't advocating that society impose punitive sanctions against homosexuals. Nor are they homophobes, meaning they fear homosexuals. That's outright absurd -- period. But this has not prevented the term from insinuating itself into the common cultural vernacular.

Bullying and intolerance? Here again the accusers are projecting. They have demonstrated they will not countenance opposing viewpoints and will seek to bully, intimidate and suppress the liberty of those who wish to express them.

All in all, freedom lovers should be invigorated with these developments. They are waking a sleeping giant: those Americans who did in fact want to live and let live but who are now realizing that sitting out the culture wars they didn't start is not an option.

SOURCE

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The Biggest Lie Of All.... "Doing something" about Income Inequality

In the last few days Barack Obama has attempted to change the subject of public discourse from healthcare to income inequality,  which he has dubbed “the defining challenge of our time.”  Now he tells us!

Since POTUS hasn’t paid much attention to this problem for the first five plus years of his administration, even with African-American unemployment through the roof and the middle class disappearing from American economic life,  and with Rand Paul (of all people) the only one to come up with a concrete suggestion of how to elevate people out of poverty, as he has recently with Detroit, this should come as some surprise.

But it doesn’t.  The fight for “income inequality” is and has been for a long time the defining lie of modern liberalism.

This is not to say that income inequality does not exist.  Of course, it does.  But what liberalism does is pretend to do something about it, to whine and complain about it, in order to ensure the support of the poor, the semi-poor and minority groups, while doing nothing that changes the substance of their inequality in any permanent way.  Indeed, it often exacerbates it.

Consciously or unconsciously, these liberals may actually want the lower classes to remain the lower classes.  After all, if they bettered themselves, they might leave the Democratic fold.  That wouldn’t do.  So the system goes on.

Meanwhile, for all their pious progressive talk, George Soros gets to keep his palazzo in Katonah (among many others),  Jeff Katzenberg his beach shack in Malibu, and Obama the beach shack that some say awaits him on Oahu.  And we all know about Al Gore’s many eco-friendly homes.  (Oops, I think that one’s now Tipper’s house.)

So, on the surface, all this income inequality chatter is nothing more than hypocrisy, that “homage that vice pays to virtue,” as La Rochefoucauld put it.  But it’s really worse.  It’s cynical and mean because all these so-called liberal solutions to poverty, solutions that have been tried hundreds of times since the Great Society, and probably before, to no avail,  suck the energy from the room, befuddle the media and the body politic and make it impossible for other methods to be tried, as with the Rand Paul idea referenced above.

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Kwanzaa: The Holiday Brought To You By the FBI

Ann Coulter

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga -- aka Dr. Maulana Karenga -- founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. He was also a dupe of the FBI.

In what was ultimately a foolish gambit, during the madness of the '60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better.

By that criterion, Karenga's United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American '60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the '60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution (although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers). Those were the precepts of Karenga's United Slaves.

United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented "African" names.

In one barbarous outburst, Karenga's United Slaves shot to death two Black Panthers on the UCLA campus: Al "Bunchy" Carter and John Huggins. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as a black studies professor at California State University at Long Beach.

Kwanzaa emerged not from Africa, but from the FBI's COINTELPRO. It is a holiday celebrated exclusively by idiot white liberals. Black people celebrate Christmas. (Merry Christmas, fellow Christians!)

More HERE

For the best Christmas address ever, go here.  Such is the incredible rightness of what he says, Ronald Reagan still brings tears to my eyes.  I hope he does that for you too.  How much America has lost since his passing!

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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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Christmas!

A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL WHO COME BY HERE!

And if you are going to church, I hope the sermon is a good one.  The sermons can get pretty boring in some of the old-line churches these days.  With a bit of luck the minister might even talk about Redemption, which is what Christmas is all about.  But talking about Redemption involves talking about SIN!  So I doubt that you will hear much about Redemption in a lot of churches.

I am not so far planning to attend a service this year but we will see.  I went to a rather good Christmas carol service at Wynnum Presbyterian church on Sunday.

I am not posting on all my blogs today.  Just this one plus  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS.  I may not post at all tomorrow but again we will see.  It is hard to keep a good blogger down.

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A liberal case for drastic shrinkage of the Federal government

Let the States spend most of the money

The great divide in American politics is between Blue and Red ways of thinking. Blue America looks to European successes for inspiration. Sweden, Denmark, France and Germany offer examples of ways to manage society for the betterment of the many rather than just the few wealthy and elites.

Red America looks backwards, to a past America when men were men and women women, pioneers rough and independent, building wilderness homes with only the aid of a few trusted neighbors and family.

Whichever is right or wrong, these two visions of society can never reconcile. In a democracy we divide into opposing parties, each trying to impose our vision, our will, on our 'enemies'. I believe there is a way out. Not perfect, but better than the cat-fighting we have now.

 It is clear that Blue, liberal America is rich America. Red America is poor. Of the top ten richest states, eight are Blue, only two Red. Of the bottom ten, only one is Blue. What do you conclude from that?

But, in spite of Blue State success at home, liberal ideas never really succeed at the national level. There are always enough Republicans running around, elected from poor Red States, to prevent or delay or derail correct implementation of liberal ideas on a national scale. Look at the disaster that all attempts at national health care have led to. Bill Clinton nearly destroyed his presidency on health care, and President Obama...

People have advanced crazy ideas for resolving this split personality we have in the US. Some suggest divorce, splitting the country into two, and others mass reeducation camps for the unwilling. Some people are just nuts.

Blue America already pays the bulk of the taxes collected at the federal level. Any attempt to remake all of America to match the Blue vision would require Blue State citizens to shoulder an ever greater part of the burden. Taxes come from where the money is, and the rich corporations and rich people are in the Blue States. (There are exceptions, like Texas.)

This already pisses liberals off to no end. Perhaps that is just, perhaps not, but it is true. Liberals are getting tired of having to fight conservative resistance to get anything at all accomplished. They are getting tired of paying and paying for programs that support mainly people who at least claim they don't want the programs in the first place, but seem willing enough to take the money.

I have a suggestion:  No one can stop you from enacting liberal programs in Blue States. In my own home state, Illinois, Republicans can sometimes get it together to elect a governor, but have not controlled the legislature in a generation. (Hint. The legislature makes the laws.)

This is basically true in all Blue States. New York may elect a Mayor Giuliani, but liberals control the state. Liberals can enact any sort of program they want in Blue states. But here's the rub. Blue States are broke because too much of their money goes to Washington. And Republicans are essentially equal in strength there. The loot gets split, and Red State politicians make sure they get their share.

It does NOT have to be this way! Look at California. It is seriously in the red (sorry, bad pun). This year they are looking at spending 16 billion more than they take in, hurting everyone from teachers to retirees. That is one big hunk of deficit change, added on top of their existing debt.

Or, is it? How much money LEFT California in taxes paid to the federal government? $313,998,874,000. Three Hundred Thirteen Billion and change. Excuse me? California has a piddly little budget deficit of sixteen billion, and they are sending three hundred plus billions off to Washington, to be spent by Republicans? 16 billion is almost a rounding error compared to that.

All Blue States look the same. All send billions and billions to Washington, while local programs starve.

Blue States should stop sending so much of their money to Washington and they should keep it at home, where people appreciate liberal programs! Conservatives have been naming Washington as their enemy for at least three generations. They have it backwards. The true victims of Washington politics are liberals and liberal states. DC is a vampire sucking your blood, and sending it to people who DO NOT WANT IT!

That money flooding into Red States doesn't really help the average citizen there much anyway. It goes to big business and corporate farms (there is a deliberate policy of Washington to eliminate small farmers in favor of big company farms, going back at least to the early 1970s). A few dimes trickle down to the true poor, in food stamps and the like. Projects of national worth, interstate highways, military bases would continue to be funded regardless. But other spending should be cut to the bone.

If there are natural, economic reasons for businesses to locate in Red States, they will. If not, not. We should not be paying big corporate farmers to produce. Republicans like to talk about the free market. If the farms are more economical big, they will get big under a free market, without the feds punishing small farmers. If business is more efficient in Red States, it will move there, without incentives from DC.

Liberals have despised the words 'States Rights'. They should embrace them. America will never test liberal policies in action as long as conservatives are fighting them nationally.

Conservatives want to be left alone to go to hell in their own way. And why should liberals WANT to impose policies on people who repeatedly reject them? Shouldn't we let people go their own way, test other values and ways of life? If the Red States fail disastrously, they will learn. Their best and brightest will move to Blue States, strengthening them.

A New Progressive Party

America needs a new progressive movement. States Rights Progressives! Step back from national civil war. Surprise the Right with political judo, and turn their own moves against them. Embrace their slogans, States Rights, Free Enterprise, Low Taxes. Liberals should take their ball and go play at home, with their friends. The kids down the block don't play nice.

And what is the end result of the current politics? Poverty in Blue States! What city is the poorest in the entire country? Detroit. Bluest of Blue. Nary a Republican in sight. What happened to the vast wealth created in the Motor City? Where did it all go?

Blue States have plenty of problems at home. Why go looking for problems where you are not welcome?

SOURCE

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Duck Dynasty: I Wish Gays Would Stop Being So Gay About Speech That Offends

The inimitable Doug Giles has his say

Let me see if I have this right. According to the Thought Police, Duck Dynasty’s patriarch Phil Robertson is a bigot because he said what the majority of the planet believes namely, that men prefer a woman’s yoo-hoo instead of a man’s Chattahoochee canal?

I know that’s not exactly what he said during the GQ interview where he dared to tell everyone what he or she and A&E already clearly knew he thought. I merely cleaned that sentence up for the children. And by children, I mean the rabid gay adults who freak out when they read the words “vagina” and “anus” in the same sentence.

Hey, reflexively irate, rage blinded, LGBT community: do you really have to have banned from humanity every word and person that hurts your fragile feelings? Are we really expected to fly a foot off your vocabulary taste wing and never deviate one angstrom? Good Lord, man. Grow a pair. No one wants to live in your catty world of “gay-approved-speech-only.” What will the Muslims do?

The cool thing is that not everyone in the homosexual community has bought into the kneecapping of the naysayers of their penchants. One lesbian of prominent note is the feminist professor and columnist Camille Paglia who said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show this past week during the Duck ruckus the following:

“I speak with authority here because I was openly gay before the 'Stonewall Rebellion,' when it cost you something to be so," she said. "And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech. In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as they have the right to support homosexuality -- as I one-hundred-percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right to religious freedom there … to express yourself in a magazine in an interview -– this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. It's the whole legacy of the free speech 1960's that have been lost by my own party."

OMG, eh? Can Camille say that? Does she get a pass because of her sexual proclivities? Is her college and publisher doomed to get a nasty pastel background, caps lock on, extra exclamation points email demanding she be banned from writing and teaching her politically incorrect heresy of … of … uh … um … free thought and free speech?

As far as I’m concerned, Miss Camille slammed GLAAD and their ilk more than old daddy Phil did by comparing you cats to Hitler and Stalin. Cowabunga. Run home and tell mommy, whiners. By the way, Ms. Paglia, if you’re reading this right now I’d like to tell you, and I’m not ashamed of it, that I love you and appreciate your stand for liberty and uncommon common sense.

Another reasoned voice from the homosexual community is Brandon Ambrosino who said in his Time column last week,

"I’m undecided on whether or not I think Phil actually is homophobic, although I certainly think his statement was offensive, and not only to the LGBT community. But I also think that if I were to spend a day calling ducks with Phil, I’d probably end up liking him — even in spite of his position on gay men. It’s quite possible to throw one’s political support behind traditional, heterosexual marriage, and yet not be bigoted. I’m reminded of something Bill Maher said during the height of the Paula Deen controversy: “Do we always have to make people go away?” I think the question applies in this situation too."

Then Brandon put this query to the gay community …

"Why is our go-to political strategy for beating our opponents to silence them? Why do we dismiss, rather than engage them? One of the biggest pop-culture icons of today just took center stage to “educate” us about sexuality. I see this as an opportunity to further the discussion, to challenge his limited understanding of human desire, to engage with him and his rather sizable audience — most of whom, by the way, probably share his views— and to rise above the endless sea of tweet-hate to help move our LGBT conversations to where they need to go. G.K. Chesterton said that bigotry is “an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.” If he is right — and he usually is — then I wonder if the Duck Dynasty fiasco says more about our bigotry than Phil’s."

As the Duck Dynasty storm was raging last Thursday, I went to my gym in Miami to work out my old crippled ass and while there I asked a buddy of mine who is definitely not a “Bible-thumper” what he thought of the Duck dust-up. Without missing a beat he made it clear that he wasn’t a Christian, doesn’t care about what others do with their naughty bits and that he thinks the radical gay activists should shut their quiche-hole and that Phil has every right and reason to speak his mind.

Taking the experiment further, I quizzed a cute twenty-something waitress at an establishment I frequent when I write my columns on Friday afternoons what she thought about the GQ/DD/LGBT/GLAAD war and without a hiccup she said, “What? It’s now weird that men like vagina more than a man’s anus? That’s crap! No pun intended.”

Interestingly, the place where I’m writing is right next to a massive horse track which reminds me of Mark Twain’s famous quote that, “it’s the difference of opinion that makes horse races.” Frankly, I love It’s the difference of opinion. That’s why I dug, as a Christian, the late Christopher Hitchens who brutalized my beliefs and made me a better man for it.

Look, I prefer a nation where argument and differences and the freedom to vent them in the most passionate manner rules the roost. Without that kind of freedom we have an Iran and I hear that Iran sucks for both Christians and homosexuals.

So, my modest proposal is this: let everyone who believes whatever it is say it and live it out for all to see and let we the people decide for ourselves who we’re going to follow. Amen.

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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Christmas tomorrow

Not sure how much I will be posting for the next few days  but even on Christmas day I usually put something up.  I am looking forward to a big traditional family Christmas dinner with about 20 adults and six kiddies

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De-Federalize welfare -- hand it all over to the States

Americans need government for some things but no American needs TWO governments for anything

The welfare state is a nightmare.  Programs such as Medicaid are fiscal catastrophes. The food stamp program is riddled with waste. The EITC is easily defrauded, even sending checks to prisoners. And housing subsidies are a recipe for the worst forms of social engineering.  The entire system should be tossed in the trash.

Why not take all income-redistribution programs, put them into a single block grant, and then transfer the money - and responsibility - to state governments?  Here's my argument for decentralization and federalism.

 In an ideal world, the block grant would gradually diminish so that states would be responsible for both the collection and disbursement of all monies related to welfare. But that's a secondary issue. The main benefit of this federalist approach is that you stop the Washington-driven expansion of the welfare state and you trigger the creation of 50 separate experiments on how best to provide a safety net. Some states might choose a basic income. Others might retain something very similar to the current system. Others might try a workfare-based approach, while some could dream up new ideas that wouldn't stand a chance in a one-size-fits-all system run out of Washington, DC. And as states adopted different systems, they could learn from each other about what works and what doesn't work. And since it's easier to influence decisions that are closer to home, taxpayers at the state level almost certainly would have more ability to impact what happens with their money.

Last but not least, I'm just a policy wonk, but I think the federalism strategy also has political appeal. As just noted, it worked with welfare reform. And I suspect a lot of non-libertarians and non-conservatives will intuitively understand that you'll get better results if you allow diversity and experimentation at the state level.

P.S. There would be some bad news if we decentralized the welfare state. It could mean an end to the Moocher Hall of Fame.

P.P.S. Replacing the welfare state with a (hopefully shrinking) block grant only addresses the problem of "means-tested" programs. If you also want to solve the problem of old-age entitlements, that requires Medicare reform and Social Security reform.

SOURCE

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The antisemitic Left is back again

From Karl Marx on, the Left has been antisemitic.  They had to can it for a while after their socialist friend in Germany went too far for the kindly people of America to tolerate, but they could not suppress it forever. Hate is what Leftists do

Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake eviction notices from the university's housing office. A pro-Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass expulsions of Palestinians.

At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel's good offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders.
And the Left's doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses.

At New York's 92nd Street Y, Commentary editor John Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to explain why the ASA's just-announced boycott of Israel was an obscene act of bigotry.

Many commentators have rightly pointed out that the ASA and the NAISA are fringe groups. They represent doctorate holders who chose to devote their careers to disciplines predicated not on scholarship, but on political activism cloaked in academic regalia whose goal is to discredit American power. The ASA has only 5,000 members, and only 1,200 of them voted on the Israel- boycott resolution. The NAISA has even fewer members.

It would be wrong, however, to use the paltry number of these fringe groups' members as means to dismiss the phenomenon that they represent. They are very much in line with the general drift of the Left.

Rejecting Israel's right to exist has become part of the Left's dogma. It is a part of the catechism. Holding a negative view of the Jewish state is a condition for membership in the ideological camp. It is an article of faith, not fact.

Consider the background of the president of the ASA. Curtis Marez is an associate professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. His area of expertise is Chicano Film and Media Studies.

He doesn't know anything about Israel. He just knows that he's a Leftist. And today, Leftists demonize Israel. Their actions have nothing to do with anything Israel does or has ever done. They have nothing to do with human rights. Hating Israel, slandering Israel and supporting the destruction of Israel are just things that good Leftists do.

And Marez was not out of step with his fellow Leftists who rule the roost at UCSD. This past March the student council passed a resolution calling for the university to divest from companies that do business with Israel.  Why? Because hating Israel is what Leftists do.

The Left's crusade against the Jewish state began in earnest in late 2000. The Palestinians' decision to reject statehood and renew their terror war against Israel ushered in the move by anti-Israel forces on the Left to take over the movement. And as they have risen, they have managed to silence and discredit previously fully accredited members of the ideological Left for the heresy of supporting Israel.

This week, Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz retired after 50 years on the law faculty. His exit, the same week as the ASA and the NAISA announced their boycotts of Israeli universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro-Israel Left that Dershowitz represented.

For years, Dershowitz has been a non-entity in leftist circles. His place at the table was usurped by anti-Israel Jews like Peter Beinart. And now Beinart is finding himself increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max Blumenthal.

The average voter is not in a position to change the positions of his party or the dogma of his ideological camp. He can take it or leave it. With rejection of Israel now firmly entrenched in the Left's dogma, and with the Left firmly in control of the Democratic Party under President Barack Obama's leadership, for those who care about Israel, the Republican Party is a more natural fit. So, too, the ideological Right is far more congenial to the Jewish state than the Left.

While the most sensible place for supporters of Israel to be today is on the political Right, it is also true that it is neither smart nor responsible to abandon the Left completely. Jews should be able to feel comfortable as Jews, and as supporters of Israel everywhere. Ideological camps that castigate Jews for their pride in the accomplishments of the Jewish state, and for their support and concern for its survival and prosperity, are camps in desperate need of fixing.

But we should not fool ourselves. Challenging the likes of Marez, or the Swarthmore students, or Max Blumenthal or Peter Beinart to a reasoned debate is an exercise in futility. They do not care about human rights. They do not care that Israel is the only human rights-respecting democracy in the Middle East. They do not care about the pathological nature of Palestinian society. They do not care about the Jewish people's indigenous rights and international legal rights to sovereignty not only over Tel Aviv and Haifa, but over Hebron and Ramallah.

Being hypocrites doesn't bother them either.  You can talk until you're blue in the face about the civilian victims of the Syrian civil war, or the gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia and the absence of religious freedom throughout the Muslim world. But they don't care. They aren't trying to make the world a better place.

Facts cannot compete with their faith. Reason has no place in their closed intellectual universe. To accept reason and facts would be an act of heresy.

While the ASA and its comrades are on the fringes of academia, they are not fringe voices on the Left. The Left has embraced the cause of Israel's destruction.

SOURCE

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Abandoning Our Liberties And Livelihoods: Lessons From The Obamacare Debacle

Doctors are the losers from socialized medicine too

You've got to hand it to President Obama's partisans among the pundits: they won't be deterred, no matter how bad the President's policies prove to be.

Even as Mr. Obama himself continuously alters and delays implementation of his own healthcare agenda (all without congressional participation), his faithful followers in the media insist that "the law is more resilient than you think" and "Obamacare death spiral worries are overblown."

Meanwhile the rest of us across the country find ourselves on the run from our government, hoping and praying that we don't need serious medical care anytime soon or that our insurance plans and jobs don't both get "cancelled." Even the New York Times had to admit in a news story this weekend that, because it raises taxes and drives up the cost of every facet of healthcare, the Obamacare agenda is hammering middle class Americans who "aren't poor enough" to qualify for the president's healthcare subsidies.

What can we learn from this debacle? In the interest of not repeating the same mistakes, consider this:

We should all stop believing in the magical promises of politicians: President Obama promised that his legislation would produce better quality health care for more people, and that it would cost less money. But how could that have ever been a realistic promise? Goods and services have to be paid for somehow. The President's rhetoric was the economic equivalent of alchemy - the mythical chemical process of turning fecal matter in to gold.

Arguably, the American people were duped by this. Not once, but twice did we vote to make the man with specious claims our President. And along with Barack Obama's magical promises about health care are his and congressional members' agendas for reducing the cost of higher education, even as student loan debt among college graduates is at an all time high.

The modern-day liberal political agenda promises a government program to meet every human being's needs at every stage of life. Americans need to sober-up and realize that there is no government program that can substitute for hard work, frugality, stewardship and productivity. And the more we vote for our government to meet our needs, the more we are subject to the whims of politicians and bureaucrats.

We should all begin to understand the basic economic dynamics of our professions and industries: It is sad to realize how many highly-trained and well educated professionals don't understand basic cash flow issues at their place of employment. Ask them "how do you get paid?" and you're likely to hear "through automatic deposit" or "I get a check every 2 weeks."

The insurance industry thought the Obamacare agenda was great at first - if the federal government uses its power to mandate that people buy your product (insurance) what could possibly go wrong? - but now finds itself a servant to the federal government, and reliant on the government's ability to operate websites and process subsidy applications properly. In short, the insurance industry is now, by law, an extension of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the presidential administration.

And then there are the medical doctors among us. There was a day when the American Medical Association officially opposed Medicare, the federal healthcare program for retirees and the disabled, because physicians feared "too much government meddling" in their practices. But soon after the program launched, the AMA fell in love with Medicare because it created continuous revenue streams in to doctor's offices.

But after two and a half decades or so of financial bliss, things began to change. Back in the 90's the federal government began telling physicians, in essence, "we don't care what your `billing rate' is for any particular service - we'll pay you what we think your service is worth." As a result many physicians try to limit the number of Medicare patients they see today, because dealing with Medicare is financially a "loser."

Having still not learned their lesson, the AMA then began an "on again - off again" flirtation with President Barack Obama. In 2009 the group tacitly opposed Obamacare; then in 2010 they said they were "open to it;" and in 2012 - in the final few weeks of the presidential re-election cycle - they officially opposed it again. Without any clear understanding of the economic dynamics of their profession, today physicians are losing their jobs in some regions of the country and having their wages cut in others, because the Obamacare law drives up the operational costs of hospitals and clinics, making physicians' salaries unmanageable.

Have Americans sobered-up and are we willing to assume responsibility for our own needs? Or are we still looking for a savior in the White House and in Congress, and willing to believe more empty promises? The 2014 elections should help answer these questions.

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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Researchers say our genes shape our political views

I have been pointing out evidence to that effect for years  -- since the '80s -- but it is good to see that the evidence keeps coming -- JR

Biology may not be destiny but it does shape who we vote for. A new study has found that our political attitudes are hard-wired into our DNA, with 56 per cent of each belief influenced by our genes.

Individual experiences, upbringing and other social influences explain the remaining variation in our left or right-wing orientation, according to the study.

'We've tended to think of political attitudes and behaviors as being rooted in the environment,' study co-author Dr. Kevin Smith, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told HuffPost Science.

'What our study shows along with a number of other studies is that they seem to be at least partially rooted in our biology.

'I know people get bent out of shape about this. The environment is important, it's just not everything. 'You can talk about biology and you can talk about the environment. Who we are is a combination of both.'

For the study, published in this month's Political Psychology journal, researchers surveyed 682 pairs of middle-aged twins, all recruited from a large database called the Minnesota Twin Registry.

Half of the twins were identical (monozygotic), sharing all of the same genes. The other half were fraternal, sharing about 50 percent of their genes.

The twins were asked about their attitudes to a range of political issues including gay marriage and egalitarianism.

The research found the identical twins' political views were consistently more similar than those of the fraternal twins, with further statistical analysis revealing the differences were due to genetic influences.

The study also revealed about half (48 percent) of the difference in extreme authoritarian beliefs is inherited, while 50 percent of egalitarian views are encoded in our genes.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln co-author Dr. John Hibbing said the research could offer insights into how to ease political tensions.

'Some observers have the idea that if people just talk about politics long enough, everybody will come to agreement,' he told HuffPost Science.

'Our research, as well as that of others in the field, indicates that political differences run deep, are biological, and affect the way the world is perceived and processed.

'It is pleasant to believe our political foes are merely uninformed but often times (not always) they are well-informed but just have different predispositions.'

SOURCE

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A&E Fires Phil

“Duck Dynasty” star and patriarch Phil Robertson came face to face with the political correctness police at A&E again this week when he dared to go “off script” during a GQ interview.

Last May, the network requested that the #1 show in cable TV history eliminate its references to God and guns, but Phil said no: “God and guns are part of our everyday lives [and] to remove either of them from the show is unacceptable. If we can't pray to God on the show, then we will not do the show.”

Responding to a question about sin in the current edition of GQ, Phil replied in his colloquial manner, “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there.” He then paraphrased 1 Corinthians: “Don't be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers – they won't inherit the kingdom of God. Don't deceive yourself. It's not right.”

The reaction from the two most infamous proponents of gender confusion and homosexual normalization was swift and predictable. The so-called “Human Rights” Campaign  protested, “Phil Robertson's remarks are not consistent with the values of our faith communities or the scientific findings of leading medical organizations. We also know that Americans of faith follow the Golden Rule – treating others with the respect and dignity you'd wish to be treated with. As a role model on a show that attracts millions of viewers, Phil Robertson has a responsibility to set a positive example for young Americans.”

Well, we think Phil did set a positive example for young Americans!

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (contact) complained, “Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil's lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe. He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans … who support [them].” They accused Robertson of “vile and extreme stereotypes” and “hateful anti-gay comments.”

As for “the majority of Louisianans,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal clarified, “Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the state of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints – except those they disagree with. I don't agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.”

When it comes to opposing the homosexual agenda, Christians are now routinely condemned for speaking their beliefs. But the tyranny of political correctness is anathema to America itself, and enslaving all of us to a particular code of thought deemed acceptable to leftists is no different from any other kind of slavery.

If you'd like to let A&E know what you think, send an email to feedbackaetv@aenetworks.com. (Keep it clean.)

Memo to A&E: Civil Rights Act of 1964: DISCRIMINATION BECAUSE…RELIGION…, SEC. 703. (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer – (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;

More HERE

We also read:: "But the vicious backlash from Robertson's supporters has unnerved executives at A+E Networks, who have been on the receiving end of death threats. And the company has hired extra security for its Manhattan headquarters. No further announcements are expected over the holidays but the Robertsons and A+E remain in talks."

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The Snowden Chronicles and Another NSA Smackdown

A series of chain reactions that began in May with the release of highly classified information by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden continued this week. Snowden's leaks have revealed the sheer ubiquity and volume of information gathered and stored by the government, and this latest backlash arrives in the form of a stunning collective setback for the intelligence community, notably, the National Security Agency (NSA). Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, issued a preliminary injunction barring the agency's bulk collection of phone records, specifically, the so-called “metadata” associated with an individual phone call.

Metadata includes such information as the phone number called, the time the call was made, the duration of the call and, potentially, the location from which the call was made. Judge Leon ruled that the NSA's metadata collection violates the Fourth Amendment's proscription on unreasonable searches. However, the judge hedged his decision somewhat by staying his injunction order, pending an almost certain government appeal on the case.

By way of background, Congress first authorized bulk collection of phone records through the Patriot Act, which it passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Although special “FISA” courts were later established in 2006 to provide judicial oversight and authorization for intelligence collection operations, the enormity of the data collected renders this oversight largely moot: A single “authorization” to collect data can render millions upon millions of metadata records.

The controlling law up to this point has been the Supreme Court's 1979 opinion in Smith v. Maryland, in which the court ruled that collection of metadata regarding a phone call did not violate the Fourth Amendment's bar to unreasonable searches. Accordingly, critics complain that Judge Leon failed to follow the Supreme Court by not recognizing that metadata falls outside the Fourth Amendment's “unreasonable search” prohibition, as annunciated in that decision, and that the judge is employing judicial activism in his ruling. One critic – a former assistant U.S. attorney – even went so far as to call the judge's ruling “comically lawless.”

However, Judge Leon's central point – roughly paraphrased – is that the methods, conditions and assumptions that rendered Smith are apples-and-oranges apart from today's “privacy-expectation” landscape, and that the Smith court – which decided a case involving a single phone record on a single individual – could not possibly have foreseen the ways in which aggregate metadata is currently being used to violate all of America's “reasonable expectation of privacy,” and thus Smith is largely useless in determining the constitutionality of a governmental action fundamentally different from the one in that landmark case.

Additionally, where Smith gave the government authority to access metadata only in a limited manner (“limited data on outgoing calls”) on one individual in a single case, the government has extended that authority over the years – especially after the Patriot Act – so that it has no limits, has a duration of at least several years and extends to every person in the U.S. Information gathered from billions of cross-referenced data files is of a fundamentally different quality and character from data gathered from a single-line “pen register,” as in Smith.

Moreover, the NSA and other intelligence agencies have even further extrapolated the authority granted in Smith by dragooning every major phone company into involuntary service. To quote Judge Leon, “It's one thing to say that people expect phone companies to occasionally provide information to law enforcement; it is quite another to suggest that our citizens expect all phone companies to operate what is effectively a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the Government.” Indeed, in Judge Leon's mind – and ours, for that matter – there is only one word for this constitutional overreach: unsatisfactory.

Finally, we note that the most tangible result of Snowden's intelligence leak has been this: The leak, along with the government's subsequent damage-control reaction, has resulted in the tacit acknowledgement that metadata is almost certainly being collected on every phone in America. Thus the government has inadvertently conferred standing upon every U.S. citizen to levy a constitutional suit against it. Accordingly, expect a lot more of these types of suits in the future, independent of Judge Leon's controversial decision.

SOURCE

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George Zimmerman and his girlfriend pick up their guns from Seminole County Sheriff

George Zimmerman picked up his guns yesterday. It really is a non-story on the one hand, and yet there is this:

"Zimmerman, 30, whose arsenal was confiscated in November following a domestic dispute with his girlfriend, picked up his four firearms, including a shotgun and an assault rifle from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in Sanford, Fla., this week.

He was eligible to retrieve the weapons since Dec. 11 when assault charges against him were dismissed.

Zimmerman, perhaps Florida’s most notorious gun owner, picked up the weapons on Tuesday and Wednesday and returned to the sheriff’s office  on Thursday with girlfriend Samantha Scheibe, 27, because she also had to retrieve a handgun police seized during the same incident in November.

Returned to Zimmerman were an Interarms .380-caliber handgun, a Glock 19 handgun, a Kel-Tec 12-gauge shotgun and an AR-15 assault rifle.

Scheibe picked up her Taurus 9mm handgun."

I’m particularly amused by their description one rifle, one shotgun, and two pistols as an “arsenal,” and want to point out that we are only now discovering that gun number five, the Taurus 9mm, belonged to Scheibe, not Zimmerman.

The media enjoyed protraying her as the poor, defenseless victim, and it was only after she dropped the charges and they came to pick up their respective firearms as a couple that we find out that she was armed as well.

Stay classy, mainstream media!

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 new and dangerous attempt by the IRS to prevent free speech

An email from illegal immigration critics Numbers USA:

IRS would make us take down grade cards and faxes! Please help us STOP them.

We are especially proud of our grade cards that, for the past 17 years, have tracked most actions in Congress that impact overall immigration numbers. Our grade cards are widely sourced and often used by activists to paint a clear picture of how a Member of Congress has acted on immigration.

But if the Internal Revenue Service has its way, we'll be forced to shut down our grade cards and many of the other features on our website in the months leading up to federal elections.

The IRS has proposed a new rule for non-profit organizations that is supposedly meant to respond to a recent political scandal. But instead of focusing on the rather narrow types of organizations and activities reflective of the scandal, its rule appears ready to punish all 501(c)4 non-profit organization and would cripple organizations whose primary mission is to educate the public on various issues in Congress.

The rule would prohibit the simple mention of a candidate's name within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary - even if the mention has nothing to do with the election! If your Member of Congress introduces a great immigration bill or a terrible amnesty bill within 30 days of his/her primary, under the proposed rule, we wouldn't be able to tell you about it.

The IRS thinks it's shutting down inappropriate electioneering by certain 501(c)(4) groups, but in reality, it's granting elected officials immunity from public accountability. Non-profits like NumbersUSA, the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association, the League of Conservation Voters, and even the pro-amnesty National Council of La Raza would all be silenced, and we're all speaking out against it.

We've joined a small coalition of groups that have launched the website ProtectC4FreeSpeech.com. This site provides additional background on the rule, links to relevant news stories, and a way to submit public comments to the rule.

Under federal law, the IRS needs to read and respond to every unique comment made to a proposed rule, so our goal is to send them more than 1 million comments!

Email from Numbers USA

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Paglia: Duck Dynasty uproar ‘utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist’



The suspension of Phil Robertson from A&E’s Duck Dynasty is outrageous in a nation that values freedom, according to social critic and openly gay, dissident feminist Camille Paglia.

“I speak with authority here, because I was openly gay before the ‘Stonewall rebellion,’ when it cost you something to be so. And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech,” Paglia, a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, said on Laura Ingraham’s radio show Thursday.

“In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as well as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I one hundred percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right of religious freedom there,” she added.

Robertson has been suspended from Duck Dynasty due to comments he made to GQ that have been deemed “anti-gay.” According to Paglia, the culture has become too politically correct.

“To express yourself in a magazine in an interview — this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades,” Paglia said. “This is the whole legacy of free speech 1960’s that have been lost by my own party.”

Paglia went on to point out that while she is an atheist she respects religion and has been frustrated by the intolerance of gay activists.

“I think that this intolerance by gay activists toward the full spectrum of human beliefs is a sign of immaturity, juvenility,” Paglia said. “This is not the mark of a true intellectual life. This is why there is no cultural life now in the U.S. Why nothing is of interest coming from the major media in terms of cultural criticism. Why the graduates of the Ivy League with their A, A, A+ grades are complete cultural illiterates, etc. is because they are not being educated in any way to give respect to opposing view points.”

“There is a dialogue going on human civilization, for heaven sakes. It’s not just this monologue coming from fanatics who have displaced the religious beliefs of their parents into a political movement,” she added. “And that is what happened to feminism, and that is what happened to gay activism, a fanaticism.”

 SOURCE

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Judge: Obama Administration Assisted in Criminal Conspiracy to Smuggle Illegal-Alien Children into U.S.

In a court order, Federal District Judge Andrew Hanen accused the Department of Homeland Security of helping to smuggle an illegal-alien girl into the U.S. to live with her mother. Judge Hanen said this was the fourth recent case in which the Border Patrol apprehended a “coyote” smuggling a child, then delivered the child to illegal-alien parents. In each case, taxpayers covered the expense.

In the case, Patricia Elizabeth Salmeron Santos, an illegal alien, paid a coyote to smuggle her 10-year old daughter from El Salvador to Virginia, where she resided. When Border Patrol Agents apprehended the smuggler and the girl, they prosecuted the smuggler but brought the child to the mother, who they knew was an illegal alien.

Judge Hanen wrote, "Salmeron Santos admitted that she started this conspiracy by hiring alien smugglers to transfer her child from El Salvador to Virginia. She agreed to pay $8500 for these human traffickers to smugger her daughter. The criminal conspiracy instigated by Salmeron Santos was temporarily interrupted when Nava-Martinez was arrested. Despite this setback, the goal of the conspiracy was successfully completed thanks to the United States Government. This Court is quite concerned with the apparent policy of the Department of Homeland Security completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States.”

Judge Hanen continued, "The DHS could reunite the parent and child by apprehending the parent who has committed not one, but at least two different crimes. It would be more efficient for the Government to arrest the individuals who are not only in the country illegally, but while in the country illegally are also fostering illegal conspiracies. It would also be much cheaper to apprehend those co-conspirators and reunite them at the child's location. Yet it neither prosecutes nor deports the wrongdoer."

“The DHS, instead of enforcing our border security laws, actually assisted the criminal conspiracy in achieving its illegal goals,” Judge Hanen wrote. “It completed the mission of the conspiracy initiated by Salmeron Santos. In summary, instead of enforcing the laws of the United States, the government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it. A private citizen would, and should, be prosecuted for this conduct…The DHS is rewarding criminal conduct…More troubling, the DHS is encouraging parents to seriously jeopardize the safety of their children.”

“In the last year, this Court has seen instances where aliens being smuggled were assaulted, raped, kidnapped and or killed. Time and again this Court has been told by representatives of the Government and the defense that cartels control the entire smuggling process. These entities are not known for their concern for human life....The Government is not only allowing them to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so,” the order states.

The Washington Times reports that border crossings by “unaccompanied alien children” are a growing problem. Between 2010 and 2012, apprehensions of these children increased 81 percent. That suggests that more illegal-alien parents are risking the lives of their children to bring them into the U.S., perhaps to qualify for the Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or in anticipation of a congressional amnesty.

Since Homeland Security officials told Judge Hanen that the drug cartels control smuggling operations, he said the department’s actions are helping the criminal entitles they are trying to disrupt. “The big economic losers in this scenario are the citizens of the United States who, by virtue of this DHS policy, are helping fund these evil ventures with their tax dollars,” the judge wrote.

Judge Hanen’s order also addressed the plight of Border Patrol Agents under the Administration's prosecutorial discretion policy. “These men and women, with no small risk to their own safety, do their best to enforce our laws and protect the citizens of the United States,” Judge Hanen wrote.” It seems shameful that some policymaker in their agency institutes a course of inaction that negated their efforts. It has to be frustrating to those that are actually doing the work of protecting Americans when those efforts are thwarted by a policy that supports lawbreakers …To put this in another context, the DHS policy is as logical as taking illegal drugs or weapons that it has seized from smugglers and delivering them to the criminals who initially solicited their illegal importation/exportation. Legally, this situation is no different.”

 SOURCE

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Some thoughts in this Holy season

By Rich Kozlovich

Here is the correct response to questions about evolution and creation:

“I wish to state categorically that I believe in the Theory of Evolution because that theory presents clear and incontrovertible scientific evidence there must be an Intelligent Designer!” Wow! I’m willing to bet that’s a shocker for many – on either side of the aisle - so let’s explore this?

For years I’ve been saying; “everything is the basics”. What does that mean? It means that in order to understand anything we must explore the foundational thinking of what it is we’re trying to understand. If the foundation is flawed, then the entire structure of thinking that it’s built on is a false premise, and will collapse under scrutiny from its own weight; that is if we wish to really see the truth. And that is the crux of the matter isn’t it?

Believing takes on many forms. For some it has to do with a higher power. For others it can take on the worship of oneself, for others it can take on the worship of some philosophy or other; but humanity has the desire to look to some higher explanation for existence, and human existence in particular. But one thing seems clear; ‘believing’ is inherent to our genetic code. Otherwise how can anyone explain why so many have believed so much over so long a time of human history, and in so many different cultures? Of course, the problem for the unbelievers among my readers with this explanation is that they would then have to explain how that genetic code was designed in that manner - or designed at all for that matter - if there is no higher power.

I do find it fascinating how some can believe that Intelligent Design is “a pig that won’t fly”! The design is so complicated that it defies explanation as to how infinitely small mutations over millions of years could bring us (and all else in the universe) to what now exists. Whether one disagrees or agrees with evolution, I question how anyone can say that there is no designer. Some feel that an intelligent designer used evolution. Some feel evolution is a mistake constantly making more mistakes and changing everything all the time all by accident. I wonder how anyone can explain how this can happen by accident and develop successful organisms since "geneticists estimate that 99 out of 100 mutations are harmful, and about 20 out of the 99 are lethal."

Then there are those who state there is so much “statistical data that they were at last able to confirm what they had suspected all along: Mutations were not 99 percent harmful to the DNA and the organism; they were 100 percent harmful! It was discovered that in EVERY instance, mutations caused some kind of damage—always! Out of it all, the researchers learned that DNA coding in the genes simply will not tolerate much change. More than just the slightest amount will ruin the code and the organism will be greatly weakened.”

According the Theory of Evolution life started when electricity, in some form such as lightening, charged some molecules existing in a chemical rich ocean soup and thus became cellular life. There is absolutely no evidence that this ever occurred, and there is no evidence that it can occur since no one has been able to duplicate this mythical event in a lab - ever. They have been able to get molecules to group together, but it isn’t life, especially since no one has ever been able to generate more than four of the twenty amino acids needed for life. These “cells” are all lacking in all the things that make life possible,including a DNA molecule which can’t form without a preexisting protein. Protein molecules are amazingly complex, and are absolutely necessary for life.

Furthermore, in order for a cell to function it takes 2000 protein enzymes. If life started in the ocean in some chemical rich soup, through some accidental electrical discharge; how did that cell, or group of cells, survive long enough to replicate themselves?

Evolutionally thought would require millions of years of mutations before the next step to propagation would come into being. If that’s so - how did they replicate? If we are to believe what proponents of evolutionary theory claim, then we have to recognize that these mythical cells would have died within seconds, minutes or days; but they would have ceased to exist long before they could have reproduced.

Much 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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A libertarian case for immigration control

(Most libertarians advocate open borders)

I know a nice libertarian-socialist fellow named Mophery Rurbt. He has a household, let us imagine, consisting of three wives (well, he is a Mormon, and the Supreme Court has legalized polygamy), and four children.

One day at his door he finds a small Bangladeshi child, looking hungry, and saying he is come all the way across the world from Bangladesh, and has no place to stay. Mophery's family all consult together, and decide they can take him in. The little Bangladeshi child is overjoyed and becomes part of the Rurbt household.

One thing he does after joining that household is Facebook message all his friends back in Bangladesh, and tell them about this generous American who will take people in. Well, they Facebook message their friends, and so on, and about a week later...

Mophery wakes up in the morning to find Bangladeshis on his lawn. And beyond his lawn. In fact, as far as the eye can see (and this is pretty far, since Mophery lives on a tall hill) darn Bangladeshis struggling to advance towards his home. He learns that every single one of them expects him to take them in.

He locks his door, and shouts out the window that he will call the police if the horde tries to force its way in.

All, but now his fellow libertarian socialists hate him. "You're telling these people where they can go at the point of a gun."

The problem is that they don't see private property as legitimate, and thus don't see Mophery's efforts to stop his home from being overwhelmed and destroyed as a useful dwelling as legitimate. But Mophery has had a sudden awakening, and realizes that his household, to be a functioning unit, has to be able to control who may or may not join. If those who are not invited to join try to force their way in anyhow, the initial quote aggression" is on their part, not on his household's.

Nation-states, too, are functioning social units. If they are to remain functioning social units, they have to be able to regulate the influx of new members. It takes an ideology to occlude this rather obvious point, and make it look as though a group declining to invite someone in is somehow threatening them "at gunpoint."

SOURCE

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How to Get Real and Affordable Health Insurance Without Obamacare

What if we told you there are ways you can buy real health insurance, and more importantly, more affordable health insurance, than you can get from either the federal government's or your state government's health insurance "marketplaces"?

By now, you are likely very well informed about how President Obama's lies andmultiple broken promises have produced an even more broken system for buying individual health insurance coverage. Coverage that has become bothmore costly and of lower quality than what you may have had before because of all the useless bloat that has been added to it by President Obama and his bureaucrats who have put their politics ahead of people.

Sean Parnell, who helped us with the development of our "Obamacare: Should You Pay the Premium or the Tax?" tool, has been working on how to get effective and affordable health insurance coverage without dealing with Obamacare. At all. And best of all, in describing how to opt out of Obamacare, he explains you can get the kind of unbloated coverage that might make the most sense for you:

1. "Join a health care sharing ministry. These are voluntary, charitable membership organizations that agree to share medical bills among the membership. They function similar to insurance, and are probably the best alternative to conventional health insurance. There are four of them, at least that I know of. Three are open only to practicing Christians (Samaritan Ministries, Christian Healthcare Ministries, and Christian Care Ministry***) while a fourth, Liberty HealthShare, is open to anyone who agrees with their ethical commitment to religious liberty. They operate entirely outside of Obamacare’s regulations, and typically offer benefits for about half the cost of similar health insurance. Members are also exempt from having to pay the tax for being uninsured.

2. Buy a short-term health insurance policy. These policies usually last between 1 and 11 months (6 months seem to be standard) and are not regulated under Obamacare, and therefore don’t offer the same high level of benefits that can drive up costs. Deductibles are available that are higher than what is allowed with Obamacare-compliant health insurance, leading to further savings. They can typically be renewed at the end of the policy, although it is a new policy that won’t cover any conditions that occurred under the previous short-term policy. Another limitation is that they often can’t be renewed over and over again, it looks like 3 years of coverage is about the maximum. But they are much less expensive than conventional health insurance, and can be a good option for covering major medical expenses.

3. Buy alternative insurance products like fixed-benefit, critical illness, or accident insurance. These policies pay cash in the event you are diagnosed with cancer, spend a night in the hospital, or need some other medical treatment. They cost a fraction of what health insurance costs under Obamacare, and by giving you cash directly you aren’t locked in to any particular provider network. Another thing to do is to max out your medical and uninsured/underinsured driver coverage amounts under your auto insurance policy, which can pay medical bills if you are hurt in a car accident.

***UPDATE #2: I listed four health care sharing ministries above, including Christian Care Ministry. What I forgot to mention is that they operate under the name Medi-Share, which many of you may be more familiar with."

He also goes on to describe how to get lower cost health care (not just lower cost health care insurance), so you can get more bang for the bucks you do spend on health care, at least as compared to what someone who signs up for an Obamacare policy will get.

The short-term policies are more like traditional health insurance coverage, which makes them ideal for only paying for the kind of unbloated coverage you need. A good portion of your premiums for an Obamacare policy is actually going to pay for out-of-pocket health care expenses that President Obama's political supporters would like to not have to pay for themselves, which is one reason why their premiums are so much higher than what typical premiums were before the law's implementation.

One downside to the short-term policies is that they don't automatically cover pre-existing conditions, so if you develop a condition that requires extended treatment during the term of one of these policies, you may not be able to renew that coverage. A good way to get around that limitation though is to time the coverage period of your short-term policies during the year so that they go through December, where you could have the option to then get Affordable Care Act coverage during its next enrollment period if you do develop a condition that requires extended treatment. You could then drop the expensive Obamacare policy after you no longer need it in favor of the less costly short term policies again, as would be your right as an honest tax-paying American citizen.

If that describes your situation, when you do "opt-in" to Obamacare, it will be to your advantage to select a "Gold" or "Platinum" level plan, where instead of a high deductible that can require you to pay thousands of dollars out of your own pocket before you even get any meaningful benefit for having health insurance coverage, as is the case for both "Bronze" and "Silver"-level plans under the terms of the Affordable Care Act. We have previously found that people with expensive chronic or short-term, but costly health conditions will almost always pay less for their health care by selecting an Obamacare plan with minimal deductibles.

In fact, we could tell if Obamacare has developed an adverse selection problem simply by looking at the percentage of each kind of "metal" plan that its enrollees have selected, which is perhaps a very big reason why the Obama administration has refused to provide that information to date.

The fixed-benefit and accident insurance coverage would be beneficial as gap filling coverage, which is a means of covering thecost gap if you choose a policy that has a high deductible.

Of course, these kinds of policies would also make sense for people who can only afford Bronze or Silver-level health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, but the difference is that those people will also be paying higher premiums, and are therefore less likely to have the money to pay for the kind of insurance that might actually reduce their out-of-pocket costs for health care.

SOURCE

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The CoveredCA.com Collapse: How Many California Democrats Does It Take With It?

Peter Lee is going to need a copy of The Happiest Life, and very soon, because his 2014 looks like it will be miserable, though not as miserable as he will have made the start of the new year for hundreds of thousands of Californians whom Lee has failed.

Lee is the number one guy at what may prove to be the biggest failure of many big failures in the state Obamacare exchanges. He is the executive director of CoveredCA.com, Obamacare's poster-child for state exchanges which is slowly but surely being exposed as an enormous and costly flop. A year ago, Lee was the Sacramento Business Journal's "executive to watch" in 2013. Now he's hiding from the press and his agency is hunkered down amid a growing storm of bad news, broken promises, and unmet goals.

Exchanges in Oregon, Minnesota and Maryland are getting most of the bad press --with Jim Geraghty noting today that Maryland is getting close to folding its tent and giving up-- but for sheer size of failure given ambitions-not-met and budget-spent, Lee's CoveredCA.com has got to be number one.

When enrollment opened, CoveredCA.com came up with a magic number of 487,000 subsidy-eligible enrollees by 4/1/14 as a bare minimum success number. That could only have been a very low bar arbitrarily set to guarantee "success" given that the national goal is 7 million enrollees. Even that low bar is proving too high, though, and sooner or later the real reporters are going to start digging into this epic failure and the man atop it.

The "progress" towards that minimum number of 487,000 subsidized enrollees cannot be known since the exchange's refusal to publish timely updates on enrollment data is pronounced. But we do know that the wizards at CoveredCA.com have sent out 114,000 error-filled notices to potential enrollees.

This latest snafu comes weeks after the Los Angeles Times reported that "California's health exchange has given insurance agents the names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who went online to check out coverage but didn't ask to be contacted."

Lee's supporters keep hoping the woefully unqualified nice guy somehow manages to turn things around, but this is the easiest part of the process. When small businesses get their coverage cancelled next year and are then thrown on to CoveredCA.com, the California nightmare will hit stage two,three and beyond --right in the middle of Jerry Brown's re-election campaign, and those of every other state wide official and all of the state's Assembly, half of its State Senate, and more than a few wobbly Democratic Congressional incumbents.

California's insurance commissioner Dave Jones estimated last month that more than a million Californians had had their health insurance cancelled because of Obamacare. Hard to imagine many Democrat votes from among those folks and their family members.

Nor is CoveredCA.com helping to fill the gap that the Obama-Reid-Pelosi troika created and which Jerry Brown and Peter Lee manage. In October and November, 777,000 applications were begun on the website, according to CoveredCA.com, but less than 110,000 people actually "enrolled." (And who knows how many will make a payment, even if today's bungled letter-to-enrollees melt down is corrected quickly.) It is a long way from 110,000 to the bare minimum of success at 487,000, and time has all but run-out, which explains the panicky Tweet that issued from CoveredCA,com today urging people to pay attention to the lateness of the hour.

SOURCE

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Director of Minnesota's Troubled Obamacare Exchange Resigns Following Tropical Vacation

Guy Benson

A follow-up to a story we mentioned yesterday. Like her failed Obamacare colleague in Maryland, Minnesota's embattled exchange director has stepped down. April Todd-Malmlov decided it would be a good idea to take a lengthy holiday in Costa Rica as the state's new healthcare system -- for which she was responsible -- was still failing many Minnesotans. Until recently, Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton defended Todd-Malmlov's "right" to take this sunny two-week getaway, but public outrage hasn't subsided. She's out:

"MNsure executive director April Todd-Malmlov left her $136,000-a-year post during a closed-door meeting with the program’s executive committee...Todd-Malmlov’s abrupt departure comes as thousands of Minnesotans scramble to enroll in the state’s online insurance marketplace by Jan. 1. The implementation of Minnesota’s program has gone more smoothly than in other states, but it still has been marked by countless technical glitches, delays and frustrated consumers...The outrage over Todd-Malmlov intensified following revelations that she and state Medicaid director James Golden took a nearly two-week tropical vacation late last month, even as the program was swamped with problems. According to Star Tribune records, the two live together and have worked closely on the implementation of the new exchange. Todd-Malmlov did not respond to repeated requests for comment."

These two incompetent lovebirds flitted off to paradise, leaving behind thousands of ordinary people to grapple with the consequences of their failures. That's what being a public servant is all about, dontcha know? The governor's stance, incidentally, has shifted from asserting Todd-Malmlov's "right" to a wildly ill-timed and undeserved vacation, to declaring the whole situation "unacceptable." Smooth work, gov. Here's a nifty companion piece to Todd-Malmlov's departure:

"Minnesota’s health-care exchange is asking about 1,000 applicants to reapply so they can receive insurance premium subsidies. MNsure had issues computing those subsidies earlier; the problem only applies to those who applied for insurance but didn’t enroll and don’t have a family member on a government health program such as Medicaid. The exchange is calling this group to inform them that they must reapply. Meanwhile, the exchange’s website, which recently eliminated a security vulnerability, was down Monday for people applying for new coverage."

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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