Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Enjoy--going offline for a bit

Enjoy. I expect to be off line for a few days with my job transition and doctors’ appointments. ~Bob

Who is to blame for the Government Shutdown?
Either side could have avoided it by giving in to the other, thus are equally to blame (or credit?). When the media or pundits blame one side or the other, they are idiots or partisan hacks. In fact, the GOP backed off defund to a one-year delay, so who won’t compromise? But the media is reporting that Obama won’t negotiate with Republicans, who refuse to compromise! GOP will have to give in on including Congress in Obamacare, though. Senate Democrats will never agree to being treated like everyone else. And it’s a pretty good bet the government “workers” will get back wages for not working during the “shutdown.” ~Bob.)

Stephen Colbert blames Obama for gov’t shutdown in ‘Breaking Bad’ spoof

AP Republicans "stubbornly demanded" but Obama, Reid "adamantly refused"

I wish I knew which party the media reflexively supported like a lover but damnit, they're so cautious with their language I JUST CAN'T TELL

Destroying Household Jobs. By Thomas Sowell
Excerpt: Despite evidence from around the world that minimum wage laws can price low-skilled workers out of jobs, the U.S. Department of Labor is planning to extend minimum wage coverage to domestic workers, such as maids or those who drop in from time to time to do a few household chores for the sick and the elderly. This coverage is scheduled to begin in January 2015 — that is, after the 2014 elections and nearly two years before the 2016 elections. Politicians show a lot of cleverness in protecting their own interests, even if they show very little wisdom as far as serving the public interest.

A New Approach to SSDI Reform: More people with disabilities would return to work if they faced better incentives. By Jagadeesh Gokhale
Excerpt: One explanation for this inaction is the availability of an easy short-term fix: temporarily transferring funds from SSDI’s larger companion trust fund, the Social Security Old Age and Survivor Insurance (OASI) program. According to the Trustees, the OASI Trust Fund will not be exhausted until 2034. Were a temporary transfer made from the OASI to the SSDI trust fund, the combined (OASDI) trust funds would not be exhausted until 2033.

The Psychological Problems of Using Health Care Exchanges: Behavioral economics uncovers a few hurdles that consumers will face in picking an insurance plan. By Danielle Kurtzleben
Excerpt: But some principles of behavioral economics suggest that even if the exchanges have a flawless rollout, consumers could have a bumpy road to choosing their insurance.
In part, that's because the new bevy of choices could overwhelm consumers, forcing them into bad insurance choices – or even no insurance at all, says one expert.

How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers
Excerpt: Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn't apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It's time to stop the public giveaways to America's richest sports league -- and to the feudal lords who own its teams, says Gregg Easterbrook, a contributing editor at The Atlantic. In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, who styles himself as a budget-slashing conservative crusader, took $4million from taxpayers' pockets and handed the money to the Washington Redskins for the team to upgrade a workout facility. The Redskins' owner, Dan Snyder, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at $1billion. (I am opposed to using tax dollars to support any form of entertainment: sports, the arts, public radio and TV. ~Bob.)

Egyptian Terrorist Sympathizer To Receive Human Rights Award?
Excerpt: The Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, also known as “the Nobel Prize for human rights,” might be awarded to Mona Seif, a young Egyptian activist who is known for supporting terrorism against Israel. Seif, a biology graduate student researching breast cancer mutations, became a prominent activist documenting the 2011 Egyptian uprising from Tahrir Square. …Her nomination sparked a backlash from pro-Israeli organizations. Human Rights Watch, who chose Seif and the other three finalists, also received harsh criticism. 

Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca Unleashes New Virus w/65% Fatality Rate. By Daniel Greenfield
Excerpt: It’s almost like God is not terribly fond of the Haj. SARS has an 8 percent fatality rate. This new Mecca virus has a 65 percent fatality rate.

Welfare State is Over, Dutch King Announces. By Daniel Greenfield
Excerpt: In other newsrepublics just don’t work. Holland’s new king Willem-Alexander today declared the end of the welfare state in a nationally-televised annual address. The king, who is at 46 the youngest monarch in Europe, said a new ‘participation society’ would take its place, in which people must save and invest to create their own social safety net with less help from the national government.

Excerpt: A leaked State Department email indicates that officials were worried about the safety of House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa after Democrats revealed his plans for a secret trip to Libya this week. Issa, a Republican from California, has safely returned from his fact-finding trip to the country as his committee continues to investigate the terrorist attacks that killed America’s ambassador and three others in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. CBS News reported Thursday on an email that quoted a Libyan national sharing “his concern and his opinion that Representative Issa should not come to Libya for his own safety.” (Loose lips cheaper than a drone strike? Who are the anarchists and terrorists? –Barb)

Daniel Henninger: Let ObamaCare Collapse. Congress can't kill the entitlement state. Only the American people can.
Excerpt: The public's dislike of ObamaCare isn't growing with every new poll for reasons of philosophical attachment to notions of liberty and choice. Fear of ObamaCare is growing because a cascade of news suggests that ObamaCare is an impending catastrophe.

Excerpt: There is a reason why every fiat currency in the history of the world has eventually failed. At some point, those issuing fiat currencies always find themselves giving in to the temptation to wildly print more money. Sometimes, the motivation for doing this is good. When an economy is really struggling, those that have been entrusted with the management of that economy can easily fall for the lie that things would be better if people just had “more money”. (Like the author says, quantitative easing isn't complicated. Only the name is. Because the name is pure obfuscation. It aims to throw dust in your eyes for a while. I explained it to my wife today, for about the 10th time (I think she finally is getting it). She said, "I don't get it. Didn't the government always print money?" I said "Well, the Fed (which is sometimes mistaken for the government because it works hand in hand with it) always did print money. But traditionally, it would mostly print money just to keep up with the 2% inflation target which it set for itself (which it was never tasked with doing) and to replenished damaged old banknotes. The banks would send their worn out bills to the Fed and the Fed would send back newly-printed ones--or newly minted coins as the case may be. But NOW the Fed is printing vastly more than the amount corresponding to the inflation and the wear and tear on the banknotes. When such unbridled printing was tried in the Weimar Republic, it eventually collapsed the Deutschmark. There is no reason now to suspect that QE, despite the fancy name, won't have the same effect. Because it is exactly the same thing." --Don Hank)

New Report Undercuts Global Warming Alarmists. By Michael Barone 
Excerpt: But the subject here is not Millerism, but another kind of religious faith: the faith of the global warming alarmists. And while it's not likely to have the impact of the Millerites' Great Disappointment, we could be seeing the beginning of something similar on Sept. 27, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues its fifth assessment report in Stockholm.

Global warming believers feel the heat. By James Delingpole
Excerpt: At the heart of the problem lie the computer models which, for 25 years, have formed the basis for the IPCC’s scaremongering: they predicted runaway global warming, when the real rise in temperatures has been much more modest. So modest, indeed, that it has fallen outside the lowest parameters of the IPCC’s prediction range. The computer models, in short, are bunk.

Energy Game Changer. By Harry R. Jackson, Jr.
Excerpt: Far from being on the brink of a true energy shortage, two relatively new discoveries open up the possibility that affordable, abundant energy lies in our foreseeable future. Crystalline natural gas (known to scientists as methane hydrate) can be found in tremendous quantities underneath the ocean. In layman’s terms, methane hydrate is ice that can be burned for fuel.

Cruz Control Should Be Standard on GOP Models. By Ann Coulter
Excerpt: If I could briefly interrupt the Republican firing squad aiming at Ted Cruz, let's talk about something we all agree on. And by "we all," I mean a majority of the American people, the Teamsters, many Democrats and every single last Republican. Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster.

Peas in a Pod: Farrakhan Sups with Rouhani: Made for each other. By Rick Moran
Excerpt: Say you're the brand new leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran and you visit the US for the first time. Just who do you want coming to dinner? If you're President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, one name you simply can't leave off the guest list is Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Liberalism and Mass Shootings. By J. R. Dunn
Excerpt: According to John Lott, Jr. every last mass killing since the 1950s has occurred in a "gun-free zone." The Navy Yard massacre is only the latest. In an early example of using the military to pioneer obnoxious social doctrines, Bill Clintonsigned a bill in March 1993 rendering military bases "gun free."

Obama Has Dismantled America. By Pamela Geller
Excerpt: Kenya has been a beacon for democracy in Africa. But Africa has come under the boot of Islam under a post-American U.S. president who is aiding and abetting the global jihad. Obama aided Islamic supremacists in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria.

The Racially-Motivated Mass-Shooting the Media Doesn't Want to Talk About. By John Nolte
Excerpt: According to the Grand Jury indictments, a black man named Lakim Faust entered a Walmart in June with more than a hundred rounds of ammunition, and targeted white people based on their race: Police said Faust’s first victim on June 21 was an insurance adjustor in the parking lot of a law firm. He then crossed a five-lane highway and shot three more people in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, investigators said.

Obama-linked Islamists Downplay Coptic Suffering on Social Media. By John Rossomando
Excerpt: Dalia Moghaed, credited with helping President Obama draft his June 2009 Cairo speech about American relations with the Islamic world, recently downplayed attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians on a Facebook page.

UK: Yes, forgiveness is a virtue, Archbishop, but the West's failure to help persecuted Christians is a sin. By Cristina Odone
Excerpt: The [British government's] guiding principle is to treat everyone as "equal" – well, everyone who is not Christian, that is. In their rush to erase all distinctions between races, religions and sexual preferences, these bigwigs fail to distinguish between good and evil. That does not comfort the majority of Muslims, who'd never hurt a Christian; instead, it makes them feel contemptuous of a civilisation that no longer knows what's wrong.

Christians are being thrown to the lions again. By Peter Stanford
Excerpt: Archbishop Justin Welby’s choice of the word “martyrs” to describe the 81 Pakistani Christians killed when their church in Peshawar was targeted by suicide bombers has raised eyebrows. It is the sort of language avoided nowadays in the secular, sceptical West, with its taken-for-granted religious freedoms, in case it makes people feel uncomfortable. Yet in terms of Christian history the Archbishop of Canterbury’s description is surely accurate.

Recruit Hurst, J. E. - Platoon 2095. By Andy Weddington
Excerpt: Recruit Hurst was a pickup, a training recycle, from First Recruit Training Battalion. My memory is he was recycled simply because he needed a little more time than the average recruit - he did not have an attitude problem.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/1417397c2c841b59 Excerpt: The other night Senator Ted Cruz, Republican Senator from Texas stood up and spoke against the funding of Obamacare for 21 plus hours. He cited the already proven inefficiencies in the program, the massive $13 trillion dollars added to the deficit and the ever increasing government oppression in our personal lives. Both Senator Paul and Senator Rubio were in the Senate chambers cheering him on and assisting when Cruz needed a sip of water. How dumb these guys are. They are fighting with principle against a tide of superficiality and ignorance.

Phony fatwa? Group claims Iranian anti-nuke edict cited by Obama a hoax
Excerpt: President Obama could be hanging his hopes for productive nuclear negotiations with Iran on a hoax, according to one Middle East-focused think tank.
On Friday, Obama cited a “fatwa,” or religious edict, from Iran’s all-powerful Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, banning the pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Interfaith outreach in Egypt: Muslims shoot at Bishop's car, Bishop escapes unharmed

India: 99% of Muslim girls oppose Muslim religious body's attempt to lower legal marriage age for Muslim girls
Excerpt: Few things are more abundantly attested in Islamic law than the permissibility of child marriage. Islamic tradition records that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was six when Muhammad wedded her and nine when he consummated the marriage:

Yemen gunmen kill suspected homosexual, police say
Now don’t go all Islamophobic on me. As the progressives say, all cultures are equally valid. ~Bob

Fact Check: Obama's ObamaCare claims
Excerpt: As the Obama administration scrambles to roll out the health care exchanges for their Tuesday debut, it’s worth a look back on the conflicting claims the White House has made on how the exchanges help, who they benefit and what they promise.

ACORN Crooks on the March for Obamacare. By Matthew Vadum
Excerpt: A corrupt union ringleader who orchestrated massive campaigns involving identity fraud in furtherance of voter fraud and who covered up a million-dollar embezzlement involving pension funds will soon have unfettered access to confidential information on thousands of people seeking health insurance.

Why Terrorists Kill. By Daniel Greenfield
Excerpt: But there’s nothing senseless about the violence that took place. Terrorists kill because it’s what they do. Plumbers unclog toilets. Computer companies sell you software. Terrorist organizations kill people.

Are Guns the Problem? By Walter Williams 
Excerpt: What about gun availability? Catalogs and magazines from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s were full of gun advertisements directed to children and parents. For example, “What Every Parent Should Know When a Boy or Girl Wants a Gun” was published by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The 1902 Sears mail-order catalog had 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped. For most of our history, a person could simply walk into a hardware store, virtually anywhere in our country, and buy a gun. Few states bothered to have even age restrictions on buying guns.

Time for Conservatives to Make a Decision: Dump the GOP
Excerpt: After the 2008 Iowa caucus, I made what some would describe as wild predictions. Some were right, some were close, others were off and others still await the future. At that time, I thought that Hillary Clinton would be the next President. The meteoric ascendancy of Barack Obama caught me and the rest of the nation by surprise. 

Mom Protects Home with Gun Twice in Four Months
Excerpt: It is very likely every mother's worst nightmare. To wake up in the middle of the night, having heard a noise just outside the safety of the walls of your home and knowing that you are likely all of the protection you and your children have. A call to the police may work, but how long might it take for them to respond? Five minutes, ten? Even less may be just too long. That is the nightmare that Toledo, Ohio mom, Betty Collins has had to live through not once… but twice in the last four months.

The News in Zingers. By Argus Hamilton
Excerpt: California park rangers found three hundred tons of pot growing in a forest guarded by bears. Now it all makes sense. Bears sleep three months a year, all you ever see them doing is rummaging through the trash looking for food, and their leader's name is Smokey.

Good Column: Geezer zombies, coming to a reality near you. By John Kass
Excerpt: Establishment pols continue bickering over crumbs while refusing to do much about those fiscally ravenous and unsustainable entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security and Obamacare. And the young are encouraged to believe that those of both parties who spend and spend are compassionate — and therefore kind and cool. Unfortunately for them, the unsustainable federal spending is neither kind nor cool. They voted for Obama, so tough for them. ~Bob.)

100 Unintended Consequences of Obamacare: Companies, workers, retirees, students, and spouses all suffer from the law’s inflexible mandates. By Andrew Johnson
Excerpt: Yet from major corporations to local mom-and-pop shops, from entire states to tiny school districts, a wide range of companies and institutions have seen Obamacare’s negative impact on their workers, budgets, and production. Here are 100 examples of how Obamacare is falling short of what was promised.

Illinois plans to spend $35 million promoting ObamaCare
Well, it’s not like IL is broke, right? ~Bob

Beware ObamaCare. By Sen. John Barrasso, MD
Excerpt: Four facts about the new health care system that should raise concerns. (Dr. Barrasso is an orthopaedic surgeon. ~Bob)

Mental health leading cause of military hospital stays
In my day, the Gunny took you behind the barracks and got your head straight…Bob

EPA's 'secret agent' con man pleads guilty -- then pleads the Fifth
Excerpt: A high-ranking federal Environmental Protection Agency official who admitted to cheating the government out of nearly $1 million by pretending to be a secret agent, smugly refused to answer questions from lawmakers Tuesday, invoking the Fifth Amendment – even though he’s already pleaded guilty.

Excerpt: Those heartless GOP Tea Party types can either put funding for Obamacare back into the spending bill, or the blood of members of Congress wounded attempting to open their own doors is on their hands:

Older, from the left: Time For House Democrats To Find New Leadership. By Howie Klein 
Excerpt: All the House Democratic leaders, from conservatives like Steny Hoyer, Steve Israel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Joe Crowley to "liberals" like Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn and Xavier Becerra, are working to round up votes inside the caucus to back Obama's plan to bomb Syria. (Conservatives? ~Bob)

What Iran Is Asking Us to Believe. By Victor Davis Hanson
Excerpt: To believe in the current Iranian, post-Syrian peace initiative, we would have to believe that the Iranian theocracy concedes, in a stunning Qaddafi-like turn-around, that its decade-long effort to obtain nuclear weapons was a terrible strategic mistake that earned it only ostracism and crippling sanctions that have no chance of being ended by a resolute West.

So, President Stompy Foot is closing a WWII memorial even though it is outside and unmanned anyway. Isn’t he awesome?

Merck to Fire 8,500 in Strategy Overhaul That Shifts R&D
Excerpt: Merck & Co. (MRK), the second-biggest U.S. drugmaker by sales, will fire 8,500 workers and revamp its research and development after seeing new medicines delayed by U.S. regulators. The positions eliminated add to 7,500 cuts already announced, the Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based company said in a statement today. That amounts to 20 percent of Merck’s total workforce

Video: MSNBC Anchor Tries to Enroll in Obamacare On Air, Fails, Gives Up

California telecom to relocate N. American HQ to Dallas
Excerpt: Emeryville, Calif.-based Ciao Telecom, a global telecommunications provider, plans to relocate its North American headquarters to Dallas-Fort Worth.

Despite charm offensive, fatal car chase haunts Saudi religious police
Excerpt: The head of the Saudi religious police, Sheikh Abdullatif Al Sheikh, admitted on Sunday that a recent car-chase pursuit which involved members of his force had killed a young Saudi and injured another, in an interview with Al Arabiya TV.

Iraq terror deaths reach 1,000
Excerpt: The number of deaths from terror reached 1,000 in September in Iraq, a number that rivals the worst of the Iraq War and a sign that violence is getting out of control. (Heck of a job ending the Iraq War, Barry. ~Bob)

Fresh DOJ loss in ‘Fast and Furious’ docs fight
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/fast-and-furious-doj-documents-97604.html
Excerpt: A federal judge has rejected Attorney General Eric Holder’s attempt to keep the courts from wading into the “Fast and Furious” documents dispute that led to him being held in contempt by the House last year. (DOJ using the Syrian strategy: Delay, Delay. ~Bob)

Black Biker Gang Behind Suv Attack In Nyc: Police make arrest after assault caught on tape. By Colin Flaherty
Saw on TV, but no mention of race. ~Bob

Why Climate Science is Fallible. By Dr. David Deming
Excerpt: But the common understanding of science is largely an ignorant misconception. Although most science is based on observation and reason, there is no such thing as an agreed upon scientific method. It doesn’t exist.

Will the White House Chefs be Sent Home?

Excerpt: The government shutdown that starts today results in temporary pink slips to “nonessential” government workers, begging the obvious question: Are the White House chefs essential?

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