Saturday, July 27, 2013



THIS WEEK’S NEWS
A push to defund ObamaCare using the threat of a government shutdown is gaining momentum among House and Senate conservatives. On Thursday, a group of 12 senators sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) stating that none would support a measure to fund the government if it includes resources for the healthcare law. And on the House side, 66 Republicans have backed an effort by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) to discourage GOP leadership from bringing any bill to the floor that includes ObamaCare money.

Voters think ObamaCare is going to hurt their wallet and over half want the law repealed, according to a new Fox News national poll. By a large 47-11 percent margin, voters expect the 2010 health care law will cost them rather than save them money in the coming year.
A new CBS News poll finds more Americans than ever want the Affordable Care Act repealed.

But here’s a warning:  “a lot of thoughtful conservatives are looking (to the day Obamacare) is scheduled to go fully into effect. On that day the government will begin subsidizing health insurance for millions of Americans. (A family of four with income as high as $88,000 will be eligible for subsidies.) When people begin receiving that entitlement, the dynamics of the Obamacare debate will change. At that point, the Republican mantra of total repeal will become obsolete. The administration will mount a huge public relations campaign to highlight individuals who have received government assistance to help them afford, say, chemotherapy, or dialysis, or some other life-saving treatment. Will Republicans advocate cutting off the funds that help pay for such care?...(Will Obamacare) collapse of its own weight? The administration's insurance against that is the billions of dollars that will start flowing out of Washington Jan. 1. Once that happens, Republicans will likely stop talking about Obamacare's collapse and will instead start searching for ways to limit the harm done to millions of Americans.”

Would you trust thousands of low-level Federal bureaucrats and contractors with one-touch access to your private financial and medical information? Under Obamacare you won’t have any choice.  http://rare.us/story/move-over-nsa-here-comes-the-obamacare-big-brother-database/#sthash.6eweXyA4.dpuf

As the reality of Obamacare emerges, a disastrous calamity imposed on the American people, even the most compliant members of the Obama fan club are beginning to panic. Three union presidents have sent Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi a scathing letter decrying Obamacare, showing just how out-of-control this law has become. This astonishing reversal has been underreported so far, except by the ever-vigilant Tom Gara in the Wall Street Journal. The fact is that the crater of Obamacare is getting deeper, with sharper edges. The unions are first-tier political allies  "The goal for the White House over the next 15 months is to make sure the 2014 elections will not just be a referendum on Obamacare."

Obamacare Call Center hires part time workers so they don’t have to offer healthcare benefits

As President Obama campaigns to increase the minimum wage, his own interns aren’t getting paid a cent to work a minimum of 45 hours a week.

The US national debt stacked in dollar bills would stretch from earth to moon five times

Some 61 percent of Americans polled say the nation is headed off on the wrong track compared to 29 percent who say it's headed in the right direction;

RINO alert:  “President Obama teams with McCain to cut deals.”

“The Democratic Party is battling scandals from New York to San Diego and from city hall to Capitol Hill, as the party finds itself on the defensive over embarrassing lapses ranging from sexual misconduct to multiple scandals ensnaring the Obama administration.”
President Obama talked earlier this year of a Democratic takeover of the House, but instead his party is now in danger of losing the Senate. The latest blow to their hopes of keeping the upper chamber came from former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D),who opted out of a race to replace retiring Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) Schweitzer’s decision deflated the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s annual retreat on Martha’s Vineyard, where many senators heard the news. “People were very upset,” said a Democratic donor who was there.

As part of a pilot scheme to help reduce illegal immigration in Britain, vans with billboards emblazoned with the slogan “Go home or face arrest” will be driven around London boroughs.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is ripping libertarians — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — for challenging government surveillance programs and failing to understand the dangers of terrorism. “This strain of libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought…”
Rand Paul to Chris Christie: “You need to talk to more real Americans.”

Political correctness on steroids:  A Christian chaplain in the military is being officially censored and anti-Christian activists are demanding he be punished.  He’s accused of quoting Dwight Eisenhower:  “..there are no atheists in the foxholes."
A nursing student attending Pima Community College in Arizona was suspended from class and subjected to accusations of bigotry when she asked that the course she paid for be conducted in English.
The U.S. Department of Education has officially opened an investigation into allegations that an Arizona high school’s “Redneck Day” amounted to a federal civil rights violation. The point was to dress like – and spoof – “Duck Dynasty,” an A&E reality TV show which follows a wealthy, eccentric Louisiana family. “…one kid bedecked himself in Confederate flag regalia, which offended some students.”
HUD's New 'Fair Housing' Rule Establishes Diversity Data for Every Neighborhood in U.S.

Last week Janet Napolitano just about tripled her old salary as Homeland Security Secretary now that she’s confirmed to be the next president of the University of California. While the Board of Regents assured they’re in the business of education, they thought it made good business sense to pay her $575,000 a year. In addition, she gets a free house, an $8,000 car allowance and $142,000 for relocation expenses.
What sequester?  The Defense Department just awarded a $31,200 contract (frame included) to Portraits, Inc. for an official portrait of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.  Can’t they just snap his picture?

NY food stamp recipients are shipping welfare-funded groceries to relatives in Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Haiti
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Shelby Steele:  The Decline of the Civil Rights Establishment  6/21

Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman…The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch. The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason for being.

The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean—the supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child? Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.

And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment's mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.

One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today's civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today's civil-rights leadership.

Another good read:
Statism is turning America into Detroit – Ayn Rand´s Starnesville come to life. The Observer, naturally, quotes a native complaining that ‘capitalism has failed us,’ but capitalism is the one thing the place desperately needs. Detroit has been under Leftist administrations for half a century. It has spent too much and borrowed too much, driving away business and becoming a tool of the government unions. Of Detroit’s $11 billion debt, $9 billion is accounted for by public sector salaries and pensions…..Under the mountain of accumulated obligations, the money going into, say, the emergency services is not providing services but pensions. Result? It takes the police an hour to respond to a 911 call and two thirds of ambulances can’t be driven. This is a failure, not of the private sector, but of the state. And, even now, the state is fighting to look after its clients: a court struck down the bankruptcy application on grounds that ‘will lessen the pension benefits of public employees’. Which brings us to the scariest thing of all. Detroit could all too easily be a forerunner for the rest of the United States……As Mark Steyn puts it in the National Review:  Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan “immigration reform” actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of “community organizers” and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized…..Oh dear. No wonder the president would rather talk about Trayvon Martin.”
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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Illinois Review, a conservative blog, recently unearthed Illinois Senate records showing that then-state Senator Obama voted for and even co-sponsored a 2004 bill that expanded the protection of the state's 1961 stand-your-ground law to include immunity from civil liability for people who use deadly force to defend themselves or their property. The bill wasn't controversial in the liberal legislature, passing the Senate without dissent and the state House with only two nays before then-Governor Rod Blagojevich, also a Democrat, signed it.”
                         -The Wall Street Journal

"We wonder if Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder is familiar with the case of Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville, a black woman who received a 20-year prison sentence in May 2012 for firing warning shots against her allegedly abusive husband. The judge rejected a defense under Florida's stand-your-ground law. Alexander told police it was to escape a brutal beating by her husband, against whom she'd already taken out a protective order. For defending herself, she went to jail -- as some still wish for George Zimmerman. But by standing her ground with a firearm, she may have saved her life, just like Zimmerman."
                      -Investor's Business Daily

"The moral-religious outlook of an older America ... restrained some of the wilder impulses of the human species. It was acknowledged fairly regularly that actions produced consequences; that as a man sowed, so he reaped -- due to which reality it was useful to think carefully about the crop one was planting, all the while watching the weather. ... Appraisals of this character fell out of favor as politics assumed a larger and larger role in life. What politician was going to go around with dour face and wagging finger, warning happy constituents of reckonings to come? The ancient moral law fell into disuse. History as a predictor of outcomes turned into televised entertainment. And so ... Detroit. Maybe Chicago. Maybe Los Angeles. Maybe a Medicare system yoked to unrealistic promises made for the sake of political returns, the future shoved further into the future, the can kicked as far down the road as possible. A moral overhaul for a nation suffering from the neglect of sound moral teaching is, you might say, a bit overdue."
                     -William Murchison
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LEFTIST WATCH
In the People’s Republic of Seattle, Mayor McGinn says he won’t support a Whole Foods development unless the company raises the wages of its workers. Whole Foods pays nonmanagement workers on average $16 an hour in Seattle, plus health benefits.  Whole Foods has been picked as one of Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work” for 16 years in a row. McGinn’s action raises questions. Such as: What standards do businesses now need to meet to locate in Seattle? Do they have to run their payrolls past the mayor?

“You can take the community organizer out of the South Side, but you can’t take the community organizer out of the community organizer. Today, America heard threats from the increasingly predictable President Alinsky. “The position of the middle class will erode further,” Mr. Obama said. “Inequality will continue to increase, money’s power will distort our politics even more. Social tensions will rise, as various groups fight to hold on to what they have, start blaming somebody else for why their position isn’t improving. That’s not the America we know.” This is standard-fare Das Kapital by Karl Marx.”
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GLOBALONEY
Remember when scientists and other truth-seekers used to get all riled up about the way the Catholic Church treated Galileo? The outcry was not over the fact that Galileo was a "peer-reviewed" researcher, and therefore beyond question. Quite the contrary: the argument was that, from the point of view of the quest for truth, no one, including the representatives of official orthodoxy and authority, ought to be regarded as beyond question. In the Michael Mann lawsuit against Mark Steyn and National Review, it is the "award-winning researcher" who is joining the fight for Church orthodoxy, while the defendants are the persecuted Galileos.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/mann_vs_steyn_heresy_shall_be_crushed.html#ixzz2aACxDCRm
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SECOND AMENDMENT
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D – Calif.) cited her oath to “protect and defend” the U.S. Constitution as the reason Congress should enact harsher gun control measures.

Only nine years ago, in the Illinois state senate, President Obama co-sponsored a bill that strengthened his state’s 1961 Stand Your Ground law.

South Carolina's Nikki Haley test-fires machine guns and brags 'I did it in heels'
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ARTICLES
Ann Coulter:  Only black people are expected to never speak against their community. Might we spend five minutes admiring the courage of blacks who step forward and tell the truth to cops, juries and reporters in the middle of our periodic racial Armageddons? …….."I know George, he's my friend."   That was Elouise Dilligard, George Zimmerman's final defense witness. Clear as a bell, this black woman spoke warmly about "my neighbor George" and went on to describe his nose being disfigured and bloody right after the shooting.  You won't see her on CNN, though. In fact, you'll never hear a peep about any of these courageous black people, unless you obsessively research every "race" case of the last 30 years, as I did for my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. (All these black heroes appear in my book.) Whites never need to be brave this way. There's absolutely no pressure on white people to root for their race. In fact, there's often pressure to root against their race. Instead of being asked to weep over President Obama's ever having been looked at suspiciously (probably by Jesse Jackson), could we reflect on the fortitude of ordinary black citizens who resist "racial solidarity" and speak the truth?

Knocking Zimmerman for his supposed "overzealousness" ignores the fact that he was doing a job he had volunteered to do: supporting law enforcement by serving as a neighborhood watch captain. His community had experienced a rash of property crime that prompted his neighbors' "decision last September to start a neighborhood-watch organization, which was initiated by Zimmerman himself. The burglary of Olivia Bertalan's home was just one of at least eight reported over the previous 14 months-several of which, neighbors said, involved young black men…..As to the "series of reactions" it "set in train," at whose door may most of those reactions be laid?....  The pictures of Zimmerman's injuries bear out his account of the ordeal he was undergoing and indicate that (Martin) was in the process of killing (Zimmerman).  Martin had completely subdued Zimmerman, but not satisfied with his thuggish triumph, he jumped on his hapless victim and subjected his head to blunt-force trauma with deadly weapons: to wit, his fists and the hard concrete sidewalk. Zimmerman endured nearly a minute of this before he acted. His shot was not "punitive," but preventive…He was being murdered -- and he stopped it…..These refined gentlemen in their comfortable offices need to cease their unwarranted criticism of an innocent man who has already been through too much - and who is sure to go through more. They're simply echoing the calumny of lead prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda, who in his closing statement declared that Zimmerman "[has] got a gun, he has the equalizer, he's gonna take care of it, he's a wannabe cop." Wrong. George Zimmerman was an ordinary citizen trying to perform a service to a community with a crime problem.

If Obama Had A City, It Would Look like Detroit.  Consider the following regarding the city of Detroit: 40% of its street lamps don’t work. 210 of its 317 public parks have been closed…It takes an hour for police to respond to a 911 call. Only a third of its ambulances are drivable. One-third of the city has been abandoned. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate Evidently 50 years of governance by compassionate Obama community organizer types have driven out the business class and now there is no one left to rail against.
News item:  “Unions ask Obama for Detroit bailout”

“As I’ve written elsewhere the present crisis is one of information. Society is increasingly unable to solve its pressing problems not for lack of a solution or resources, but primarily from an unshakable determination not to face politically inconvenient facts. Take for example, Chicago’s new crime-fighting strategy. “Chicago police are going to hand deliver letters to people suspected of committing or being victims of gun crimes in an effort to stem violence in the city, according to a new report. ” This is a triumph of PR over policy, fiction over reality and madness over sanity.”

How is the U.S. like Sweden? In its low murder rate. That is, if you include in the statistics only non-blacks in the U.S. legally.  In round numbers, there are about 250 million non-blacks in the U.S. legally. So their murder rate is about 1.0 per 100,000, or the same as Sweden´s. A murder rate of 1.0 is in the same league as the Europeans who like to call us gun-crazy cowboys. But it´s not the "cowboys" who are doing the killing. (In fact, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming have murder rates significantly lower than the U.S. average.)
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WISE WORDS
"It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
                    -Noel Coward

"The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles."
                    -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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LATE NITE
Leno:  The Obama administration has admitted that under Obamacare, you might not be able to keep your doctor. At first the president guaranteed you'd be able to keep your doctor, and now they're saying you "might" be able to. Today Obama changed his slogan from "Yes we can" to "Perhaps we could try. Can’t promise anything."…… According to a new study, lying gets easier over time. People get better at lying the more they do it. See, that's why you have to have term limits…….Detroit has become the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy. What happened was Detroit's population dropped something like 70 percent, but the government got bigger. The tax base got smaller, but the government got bigger. Thank God that kind of thing could never happen in Washington.

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