Weston, FLA: A New Model of Gummint Employment?

Interesting.

Weston, Fla., an affluent suburb 25 miles northwest of Miami, has one of the most unusual charters of any city: it specifically discourages the city from hiring employees.

.... the city has used contractors to fulfill virtually every city function. Today, the city of 65,000 has a budget of $121 million -- and just nine of its own employees. ...

The city has about 285 full-time equivalent employees who are "dedicated staff" provided by contractors. They work in city facilities and are treated like city employees, but on paper, they are actually employees of private companies that get paid by the city.

The result is a situation that many city managers and mayors may envy. City leaders don't have to deal with labor disputes or union negotiations; they aren't struck with ballooning pension obligations; and they aren't dealing with painful and politically unpopular layoffs.

Many of the contracts are for a particular level of service, as opposed to a particular number of employees. When the amount of work facing the building department slowed during the recession, for example, the city didn’t have to continue to pay idle workers. "That’s the vendor’s issue of what he does with the staff," says Daniel Stermer, who served as Weston city commissioner from 2002 to 2010 . "We’re not paying for it unless somebody’s using it."

Whatever you do, don't tell Scott Walker about this.

HT: FreedomLine

The CJ's New Clothes

In the final analysis, Roberts managed to make a mockery of SCOTUS.  Ironic, since his objective (reportedly) was to preserve the 'image' of that institution.

What he really did was to escalate the cynicism of those, myself among them, who believe that the Ruling Class bunch is devoid of integrity and will engage in any necessary amount of lies, fraud, and chicanery to preserve itself at the expense of the Country Class.

Roberts joins Humpty Dumpty--who was, after all, a cartoon--in re-writing the dictionary in the Grand Tradition of Dred Scott, Wickard, and Roe.

Congratulations, CJ.  We do not think you are clothed in robes or anything else.

*Flush* Go the Dollars

Another one bites the dust.

Abound Solar, the panel maker, plans to file for bankruptcy and liquidate next week, putting 125 people out of work and leaving American taxpayers with up to a $60 million tab, the Denver Post reported Friday.

Oh, well.  

ObozoTax

And that's the way it is.

HT: Gateway

On the Other Hand, Tapscott

While we discuss whether a tax is a penalty, Tapscott discusses long game.

....I’ve  concluded that what Roberts has done is fundamentally shift the constitutional debate away from the liberal assumption since the Woodrow Wilson era that an Imperial Presidency and supine Congress can pretty much do as they please so long as it’s covered by at least one of those fig leaves known as the General Welfare, Necessary and Proper or Commerce clauses of the Constitution. The new assumption is, thanks to Roberts, that at least two of those clauses in fact cannot simply be dragooned into the service of whatever a passing majority in Congress wants to do....

...the holding that Obamacare passes constitutional muster if it is understood as a tax may be an even more significant victory for conservatives. To understand why, which of these two words sounds more positive? “Benefit” or “tax”? [Ha.  The Left will simply lie, as did Obozo.  You REALLY think otherwise, Mark?]

...Roberts has forced the entitlement state to drop its pretense that government entitlements are intrinsically beneficial and concede the brutal reality that they are in fact the application of force to take from some to give to others. As a practical matter, taxes cannot represent an unlimited power. That’s a genuinely new deal for welfare state advocates. and one that is not likely to adduce to their future success.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Roberts forces what is a profound assault on the nation’s constitutional framework hiding behind the false flag of humanitarianism out of the courts and tosses it into the political arena where the general sense of the community can resolve the outstanding issue.

True dat.  November will be Waterloo for a lot of Democrats.  Buh-bye, Tammy.....

Sen. Ron Johnson's Coming Trial

OK, so Roberts' Rule of Disorder is operative.  A penalty is a tax.  (Does that mean a tax is a penalty?)

RoJo will be calling for a repeal-vote in the Senate, following the successful repeal-vote in the House on July 11th.

And Mitch McConnell, every bit the slippy-slimy-Senator, will once again attack Senator Johnson for his position.  Oh, you won't hear it from McConnell's lips--it will be done through "aides" and "sources."

Hang tough, RoJo.  As Mencken once observed, "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

We've hoisted the TEA Party flag........

In Racine, the S*&^ Gets Deeper

Holy smoke....

Today, Recount observers in Racine discovered that ballot bags for 9 of the 36 city of Racine wards were sealed on election night, reopened, and then closed (but not sealed) again.

o   Once a bag is reopened, the seal will show evidence of tampering (and did)

o   The bags were shown to be reopened when delivered to the city clerk

o   Upon delivery to the Racine County Clerk, the County Clerk rejected the ballot bags and sent them back to the city clerk because they were not sealed.

o   When the city clerk received the returned ballot bags, the city clerk’s office double bagged the original ballot bag, then sealed the double bag.

o   The questionable bags were then accepted by the County Clerk....

Just coincidence, of course:  the tampered bags came from wards which broke HEAVILY for Lehman.

That's not all.

This is just another in a series of problems of voting in the city of Racine including:

o   Missing signatures

o   Missed Voter #’s

o   Different Voter #’s

o   Names not matching on poll lists

o   Potentially invalid addresses...

SEIU/Voces may have finally overplayed their hairy hands.

HT:  Wiggy

O, What a Tangled Web....

In the case of Roberts, it appears to have been self-deception (writ very large, indeed.)

...John Roberts has ruled that the penalty is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act, but IS a tax for constitutional purposes. (As a side note, even the lower courts or judges that semi-accepted the "tax" argument had it exactly the opposite: that it was a tax for AIA purposes but NOT for constitutional purposes....)

...Here, Congress is taxing the inactivity itself. This is unprecedented, and illogical. It means that any time Congress wants to force you to, yes, buy broccoli, it can impose a tax on your refusal to do so, and thus escape the limits on Commerce-Clause powers.

....and "conservatives" such as Krauthammer and Erickson give Roberts a BJ because he didn't buy the "commerce clause" bunkum spewed by the Administration.

Did we ever mention the Ruling Class?

And If They Lose in the Courts.....??

The usual path for the Left is this:  first, we attempt to legislate X, Y, or Z result.  If we can't legislate it, then we sue for (or against) it.

Generally, the courts like Leftism, so hey!  That works.

Of course, that's until the Left LOSES in Court.  Then they have a bunch of pre-packaged other excuses.

...When Democrats lose, however, they tend to place the blame a little higher. The Supreme Court is rigged. The election was stolen by Diebold voting machines. After John Kerry lost in 2004, Democrats snickered about an electoral map showing the “real America” being composed of the West Coast and Northeast. The rest of the map — the red states Bush carried — was dubbed “Jesusland.” The inference being that the real problem was with the American people. All of which is why, facing the prospect of losing the Obamacare case, the left’s first instinct hasn’t been to blame a bad law. Or bad lawyering. Or even just bad luck. No, to the liberal mind there are no bad outcomes; only broken systems.  --J Last quoted at AOSHQ

Of course, SCOTUS takes fire, no matter the truth:

In their effort to preemptively attack the credibility of the Supreme Court in general and Chief Justice Roberts in particular, liberals have started spreading a stupid and easily refutable lie. 

It started with that James Fallows character who claimed the Supreme Court was about to perpetrate a coup. He claimed that Justices Roberts and Alito in particular, “actively second-guess and re-do existing law.” Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's chief law analyst who completely shit the bed predicting that no lower court would even pretend that the Obamacare lawsuits had merit, also oozed this lie, claiming that the Roberts Court has been "eager" to overturn legislatures. This lie was ultimately repeated by Politico's dim and shallow Roger Simon and now it is ubiquitous and unchallenged among liberals. 

Yes, in about 48 hours liberals managed to cook up this claim and now they're all scurrying around repeating it like a bunch of lemmings. There's just one problem: it is completely untrue.

It is NOT co-incidence that Pilate quipped "What is truth?", folks.

Lefties: Against It Then, For It Now (the Mandate)

There's lots of noise about the Heritage Foundation's "pro-mandate" boner.

Not so much noise about the Lefties (like H R Clinton).

When federal judge Roger Vinson ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional in early 2011, law professor Karl Manheim took to the airwaves and declared it “radical decision” that represents “a resurrection of the old states’ rights, Southern right argument.”

Got that? You’re probably for Jim Crow, or even slavery if you’re against the individual mandate.

Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacist!!

But that's now.  Look back a few years and find what the Perfessor/Innerlekshul wrote in '04:

Americans do have a constitutional right to live in the United States. Accordingly, neither federal nor state governments can require you to purchase health insurance as a “condition” for residency. The Supreme Court has drawn a distinction between requirements that are flat-out imposed by government and those imposed as a condition for discretionary benefits.

Sure.

HT:  Carney

Idiots Combine With Morons: "Cellulosic" Ethanol

You can figure out who are the idiots, and who are the morons.  (Hint:  they all share one employer:  the US Government.)

Scores of companies have received federal loans and grants from President Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” to manufacture an experimental fuel called cellulosic ethanol, which has not been successfully produced in the U.S. and might not even work.

The fuel, which is supposed to come from wood chips, was first pushed and funded by the George W. Bush administration.

Here's where the other half comes into play:

Despite the fact that no company has been able to produce the fuel, Congress previously passed a law imposing mandates on oil companies to mix the non-existent cellulosic fuel into gasoline.

Some companies have even been fined by the Environmental Protection Agency for failing to use the non-existent fuel.

And you wonder why companies "outsource"?

Logic Flaws 101: Harsanyi

Harsanyi claims to be intellectually superior.

Outsourcing has been successfully lowering costs, creating better jobs and spreading wealth since ... well, since the Persians hired Greek mercenaries to do their pillaging. So why are we always knocking it?

What that historical reference tells you is this:  the Persians couldn't handle it themselves.  (And war is not a good comparo to economics, but that's another "innerlekshl" mental deficiency.)

"Outsourcers" do what they do because of cost-differentials.  The US Congress and the several States have managed, over 100 years or so, to create so many regulatory and tax burdens on domestic economic activity that very few firms can operate profitably here.

Instead of remedying the tax-and-reg problem OR establishing offsetting tariffs, policymakers simply ignore the problem, thus exporting US wealth to 3rd-world countries.

International socialism.  Harsanyi loves it.  And he calls himself "conservative."

Holder: Racist/Partisan Hack

Another reverse of the Racist/Partisan-Hack General:

The Department of Justice tried to prevent Florida and its Governor, Rick Scott, from removing non-citizens from its voter rolls, asking for a restraining order and arguing that removing non-citizens would be a violation of the National Voter Registration Act. Today, a U.S. District Judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton denied the Department of Justice's request, according to the Miami Herald. Florida will now be able to rightfully remove non-citizens from its voter rolls.

Contempt of Congress?  Hell, no.

Contempt of Country.

What the Hell's Going On HERE? "Home Loans" and "Foreign Banks"??

This graf ought to engender a reaction from all three of you faithful readers:

The U.S. Federal Home Loan Banks’ unsecured lending to foreign institutions skyrocketed last year as the European sovereign debt crisis intensified, raising concerns about their risk management, an auditor’s report said today.

U. S. Home Loan Banks.

Lending to foreign institutions.

WTF?

Ryan, Sensenbrenner, Duffy, Petri: MIA

Maybe the above-named are too busy to sign the letter, eh?

...there is a concerted effort to overturn the earmark ban in the House and reinstate some form of this onerous practice.

Fifty-seven House members signed a letter demanding that earmarks be PERMANENTLY banned.

Ryan, Sensenbrenner, Duffy, and Petri did NOT sign the letter.  Neither did any Democrat.

"Comity" and "bi-partisanship" in action again!!

Even MORE Bi-Partisan Destruction!

"Comity" is achieved when screwing future generations of Americans.  Just as Tommy Thompson screwed State taxpayers (bond-payers) with his highway and education largesse, so this Congress:

...In 2007, the Pelosi-Congress reduced interest rates on government-subsidized Stafford loans from 6.8% to 3.4%.  Like every stimulus measure during that era, it was supposed to be temporary.  Now there is a bipartisan deal to ostensibly make it permanent (they say it’s only for 1 year, but we’ve seen that rodeo before).  They only care about the $6 billion annual cost to the government, but fail to focus on the more fundamental problem – the fact that government subsidies will continue to fuel the education bubble, engendering a further need for larger subsidies.  Hence, the circuitous cycle of government intervention and inflation will continue unabated....

Instead of debating how to pay for more subsidized loans, Republicans should articulate the case for phasing out this unlimited subsidization of higher education.  Since the Department of Education was created, the cost of college tuition has increased over 439% adjusted for inflation!  The rate of increase is almost exactly commensurate with the rate of growth of DOE subsidization...

It's all just "co-incidence" resulting from "comity" in the Parliament of Whores.

Bi-Partisan Destruction of the USA

We mentioned (below) that Congress is bi-partisan when they've been strategically purchased.  Often that's to the detriment of the country as a whole.

More of the same:

House and Senate Republican leaders, collectively the Stupid Party, are yet again set to expand government, government spending, and engage in Keynesian economic policies they’ve criticized Barack Obama for...

Republicans and Democrats have agreed to a massive increase in federal gluttony with a highway bill. The Republicans decided to drop demands for approving the Keystone XL pipeline and demands that the EPA stop its ridiculous regulations on coal plants that will harm our energy future. In exchange, Democrats will not fund bike paths and highway landscaping.

Yah, that's so funny it makes you puke.

Tommy Thompson ran up the debt of the State of Wisconsin by spending zillions on highways and redundant UW-system buildings while not increasing taxes.  Big Labor loved him; so did Big Contracting and Big Education.  It got him re-elected, right? 

Same with the Stupid Party today.  Spend, re-elect, spend, re-elect.

Principles are fo' suckas.

"Genius Foreign Students"?? Nope. Scrooge Employers

Gotta love Matloff.

He's pinned the tail on the donkey (cheap-ass US universities and Scrooge employers) again. 

Where are all the native-born STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) students?  Being displaced by H1-B imported folks. 

...there is a new patent study that the proponents of expanded H-1B and green card programs are splashing so much all over the press that I need to comment. 

In 2011, 76% of patents awarded to the top 10 patent-producing American universities had at least one foreign-born inventor, according to the report.  [quoting the WSJ]

Now Matloff, a stats prof, disembowels the author(s):

1.  Since there are large numbers of foreign nationals at U.S. universities, it is natural that a large number of them have their names on patents produced by those schools.  It does not mean that the foreigners are more innovative than the American students and post docs

 2.  The phrase "at least one foreign-born inventor" is quite slippery. If just one foreigner is listed, together with say 7 Americans, the study counts this patent at "foreign."

Just to do a rough probability analysis:  Say every patent lists 5 names, and that 30% of the university research population is foreign. If the nationalities of the 5 inventors were independent random variables, the probability of having at least 1 foreign inventor among the 5 would be 83%, huge compared to the 30%--exactly the kind of misleading statistic the PR people who wrote the study want to present.

"Elegant" liars, not your common Congressman liars.  Liars, nonetheless.

You say, "So what?"  Matloff thought about that, too:

...the reason there are so many foreign students in these grad programs is basically H-1B:  H-1B draws in the foreign students, hoping for a job after graduation; the influx suppresses wages, causing America's best and brightest to avoid STEM careers.  An influential National Science Foundation position paper predicted this 20 years ago, and it proved quite prophetic.

My own recent research found that the former foreign students, now working in industry, are actually LESS likely to produce a patent than are Americans of the same age, education etc., in the fields of computer science and electrical engineering.

So, the less innovative are displacing the more innovative, a net loss.

We have over 20 years' proof that H1-B does not further the national interest.  However, it DOES further the interests of University research programs and cheap-ass US employers (but I repeat myself).

Yet Congress continues the program in a genuine bi-partisan fashion every year, proving that they can be bi-partisan when the same interests purchase both sides of the aisle.

Nice.

Find Matloff's work here.

The Regime's Results

We all knew it--but there it is in numbers and stuff.

HT:  ColdFury

Orrin Hatch's Admission

Gee.  After 30 years of blind stupidity, he catches on!  Is that what he's telling us?

Hatch told the Associated Press in an interview Tuesday night that he was ready to tackle the nation's debt problems and focus on Social Security and Medicare.

"This is my last term," Hatch said. "I'm ready to bite the bullet."

Great, Orrin.  Really great.

The Racine Follies: Elections

Well, well.

Thousands of voters who registered at the polls on recall election day in the City of Racine may not have signed the supplemental poll list as required by law, the MacIver News Service has learned.

That would be 2,000 or more.

The "didn't sign" list means, potentially, that 50 people simply ran between all the polling stations, filled out forms, and voted.  With no signature, there will not be a signature comparison.

We're waiting for the howling from the media.  The Waukesha County Clerk lost her job WITHOUT having done anything wrong (stupid, but not wrong.)

The Racine City Clerk?  Incompetent is a kind word; this could be huge vote-fraud.  And on HER WATCH.

The WI Retirement Fund Question--Again

The local newspaper trumpets a Pew study which declares that (for all intents and purposes) the Wisconsin Retirement fund is just fine and dandy.  Evidently Gov. Walker signed on to the same thesis.

Yah, well--except that statement is made based on 'standards' which are surreal.

....public pension systems use a kind of accounting — smoke and mirrors by a number of economists’ estimates — that in part stipulates that benefit promises are to be discounted at an assumed return on pension assets.

There are some pretty lofty assumptions out there. Illinois’ public teachers’ pension, for instance, uses a return rate of 8.5 percent. There haven’t been a lot of 8.5 percent returns in these pension plans, significantly funded, or underfunded by riskier stock and hedge fund investments.

In fact, public pensions are only beginning to rebound from the investment bloodletting of the Great Recession.

Even the apparent best-funded plan in the country, which has stood by a more reasonable 7.2 percent rate of return, has repeatedly missed the mark.

The Wisconsin Retirement System returned 6.8 percent on its core fund during the past decade, and just 3.3 percent during the past five years — both of which are actuarial losses. The crash in 2008 wiped out $23.6 billion from WRS’ assets.

Missing the mark effectively means you’ve got to pump more money (taxpayer money, let's not forget) into the system or achieve higher – sometimes significantly higher – investments over the long haul.

The 'standard' which WRS (and others) use is like T-Ball, while private-sector pension funds use professional baseball hitters' rules.

Holder Loses Again (UNEXPECTEDLY!!!)

Not only an ideologue and radical partisan, but a loser.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a constitutional challenge to a central provision of Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law, clearing the path for similar legislation to take effect in other states...

...All eight justices who ruled on the case voted to allow the mandatory immigration-check requirement to go into effect....

(I should add that this Politoco story was apparently swallowed whole from Justice and re-spewed onto the 'net...)

Egads! Even Brookings Thinks Obozo's Way Out There on Energy

While Brookings is described by the WaPo's columnist as "centrist," you don't have to read too far into the item to figure out that the WaPo is wrong.

That given,....

...To the extent that it’s coherent at all, the federal energy “portfolio” represents a return to industrial policy — governmental selection of economic winners — which was fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s, before it collapsed under the weight of its intellectual and practical contradictions.

As such, current clean-energy programs are no likelier to pay off than President Jimmy Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corp., which blew $9 billion, or President George W. Bush’s $1.2 billion program for hydrogen vehicles.

This isn’t just my opinion or the finding of some right-wing think tank. Rather, all of the above comes from a new paper by three certifiably centrist Brookings Institution scholars, Adele Morris, Pietro S. Nivola and Charles L. Schultze; Schultze was a senior economic adviser to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter.

The researchers pick apart clean-energy subsidies rationale by rationale.

The correct phrase is "rationalization by rationalization"--because there is no actual "ratio" involved in Obozo-think.

HT:  The Warrior

Corragio, Your Grace!!

Milwaukee Abp J. Listecki puts out the word.

Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki voiced objections to a federal policy that requires most employers to offer insurance that provides free contraceptives. 

WITI-TV (Channel 6) in Milwaukee reports that after celebrating Mass at St. Matthew Parish in Oak Creek on Saturday, Listecki said: 

"Catholic agencies are going to be defined how the government wants to define it and not how the church wants to define it. That's totally intolerable. That is not the sense of religious freedom as we know it."

President Barack Obama's federal health care reform law requires most employers, including facilities such as Catholic hospitals but not churches and synagogues, to offer their employees insurance that provides free birth control.

UNEXPECTEDLY, the Milwaukee JS forgot to mention that the policy also requires free sterilization coverage, and that some of that "birth control" is actually abortifacient.

Romney Immigration Plan: Uninformed, at Best

Guys like Ted Kanavas--an IT sort--should be puking when they read this.

Romney wants to "grow our economy by growing legal immigration," according to a campaign fact sheet.  He would raise caps on high-skilled immigrant visas.  He would also streamline the temporary worker visa process; Expedite family reuinfication; Create a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who serve honorably in the military; Balance this with a fairly strong illegal immigration policy including e-verify, better safeguards for people overstaying visas, and completing the border fence...

It has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that the "high-skilled" immigrants are extremely few and far between.  What Romney did (naturally) is fellate the IT contractors who pay inferior wages to not-so-bright IT programmers.  This has an effect:  US citizens are tossed aside after they reach the age of 40 (old, ya know).

Same sorta crap with "research" types--except the effect there is to discourage US citizens from obtaining Ph.D.'s because they'll never, ever, find a job which will pay enough to liquidate their college debt AND provide basic housing, food, etc.

"Family reunification"?  You mean more chain immigration, Mitt?

As to the rest:  not necessarily awful.

The "Free Trader's" Big Problem

Vox nails it here:

The observable fact is that if you scratch a free trader, you reveal the globalist centralist underneath. And since there is no risk to human freedom greater than a single global state, they are working to bring about precisely that which they fear most.

The rest is worth reading, too.

The Larger TEA Party Challenge

Although it begins with electing people who understand that the REAL role of the Feds (and States) is to adhere to their respective Constitutions, the far-larger and more difficult agenda will be to weed the administrative-State garden after about 100 years of neglect.

So yesterday I teed off on Nancy Pelosi’s ridiculous explanation for her 2010 remark about Obamacare that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy.”  She was far from the only liberal who said this, recognizing the inner truth of what it reveals to us about how we are actually governed by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than elected representatives.  Sen. Christopher Dodd said of his equally egregious Dodd-Frank Act; “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.”

Indeed, Dodd-Frank is as unconstitutional as Obamacare, and it is likewise heading for a Supreme Court challenge on grounds that it violates what still remains of the separation of powers. ..

Were it only ObozoCare and Dodd-Frank!  Zillions have been confiscated spent on EPA regs which are tinged with insanity, and zillions more will be spent to replace coal as a fuel in this country.

Should we mention DDT, too?  How about lightbulbs?

The NLRB, Homeland ihre papiere, bitte "Security" granny-grabs, grossly offensive 'Commerce Clause' power-grabs, the attack on Catholics, and the blatant and continual autocratic re-writes of "WE don't obey the steeenkin' laws" by the current (and some past) AG's are all symptomatic of the real problem:  Statism.

That, my friends, will be remedied in one of two ways:  either dropping Agent Orange on the weeds, or the even more difficult:  revolt.

Insanity Defined

The definition:  Nancy Pelosi. 

Not only does she claim to be "a practicing Catholic", which claim is neutered by her perfervid love for unlimited-abortion-financed-by-Catholic-taxpayers, she now sees monsters under the bed, too.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., declared that House Republicans are charging Attorney General Eric Holder with contempt of Congress not as part of an investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, but in order to weaken his ability to prevent voter suppression.

“They’re going after Eric Holder because he is supporting measures to overturn these voter suppression initiatives in the states,” Pelosi told reporters during her press briefing today. “This is no accident, it is no coincidence. It is a plan on the part of Republicans.”  --quoted at Malkin

It's the RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACISM, you see.

The Law Is fo' Suckas!!

The Statist-in-Chief expects all of us to obey the law.  That stricture doesn't apply to him, however.

...Obama isn't joking. He can't wait. Only recently, he circumvented Congress on college loans and mortgages; he directed the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act; through rulemaking, he empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to effectively institute legislation that Democrats could not pass; he involved the United States in military action in Libya (the right kind of warring, apparently) without congressional consent; he installed four recess appointments without a recess; and that's just for starters.

This week he couldn't wait again. Even if you agree substantively with Obama's decision to grant 800,000 young illegal immigrants a reprieve from deportation -- as I do -- having a president undo a perfectly legitimate legislative deadlock by simply ignoring the law is a precedent that should alarm everyone. So should Obama's invocation of executive privilege in the Fast and Furious gunrunning investigation regarding a document that he supposedly knew nothing about....

The important question:  will Romney be willing and able to reverse all of the Obozoid's chicaneries?  Because if he isn't--or doesn't want to--there will be consequences.

That ObozoDebt: A Turd in the Legacy Punchbowl

Obozo will have a legacy, alright.  And the turd will be the ObozoDebt.

Anyone who's checked the latest jobless data knows President Obama's massive stimulus failed to stimulate anything but $5 trillion in new debt. Now it turns out this debt could hamper growth for years to come.

The study, published recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, looked at 26 episodes in advanced economies since the early 1800s where gross public debt levels exceeded 90% of GDP for at least five years.

What they found was alarming: When countries run debt levels that high, average growth rate is significantly below low-debt years — 2.3% on average vs. 3.5%.

Worse, the study also found that once countries run debt up to that level, it can take years, if not decades, to bring it back down. In fact, 20 of those high-debt episodes lasted more than a decade, and the average duration was 23 years.

Combine the two, and what you get is "a massive cumulative output loss," according to the study's authors.

Twenty three years of retarded growth.  Meantime, Obozo will be golfing.

Removing the Varnish

This guy makes only one error.

...As we all realized four years ago, Barack Obama is a political myth. Oh, there is a real man behind the myth, but he has little in common with the demi-god who ran for President.

Obama the Myth is a history changing, once in a generation leader. He is a gifted orator, a Jedi Master of politics and the smartest man to ever occupy the Oval Office. He brings people together, inspires them and guides them to a better tomorrow. He farts Skittles and pees rainbows.

Obama the man is an incompetent bullshit artist with no principles. But his greatest weakness isn’t incompetence, it’s hubris. He REALLY believes he is Obama the Myth.

He is a narcissist who is surrounded by sycophants dedicated to preserving his delusions of grandeur. He smokes his own hopium. He gets high on his own supply.

Now comes the part with the error:

...With Obama’s mediocre skills and lack of morals he could have easily spent a long career in the Senate – just like Joe Biden. But Obama’s an exception to the Peter Principle – he’s risen above his level of incompetence.

He had a lot of help getting there. On his own he never would have made it to the Senate. He had rich and powerful “friends” who hooked him up with David Axelrod, one of the most sought-after political fixers in the country.

It was a symbiotic relationship. They wanted to use him, and he wanted to use them. Every puppet needs his puppet master, but Obama ain’t Gepetto.

Umnnhhhh.....there are only two possible answers to the question "How can someone be so totally anti-American?"  One possibility:  incompetence.

The other:  actual anti-Americanism.

I don't agree that he's incompetent.  So yah--I think he IS anti-American.

All You Need to Know About Gummint

By your answer we shall know ye.

HT:  FreedomLine

Walker's Two Big Upcoming Battles

Walker has two large battles remaining.  You can choose which is first on the plate--either resolving the State employee's over-compensation, or resolving the Wisconsin Retirement System's Fantasyland-accounting problem.

Another Downturn?

Some will ask "Whaddya mean, ANOTHER one?"  Regardless,

...One of my favorite indicators, mentioned here back in March, is the FedEx indicator, and it is flashing bright yellow right now.  The package shipping business is a highly sensitive indicator of aggregate decisions across the economy.  Yesterday the Wall Street Journal updated the FedEx indicator with the headline: “FedEx Signals Economic Woe.”...

Not real surprising for anyone who's paying attention to retail sales numbers. Kohl's same-store numbers are limpid and in a wrong-way trend.

It's Bush's fault, of course.

The UN's Quarterback Sneak on Small Arms

How to stop small-arms sales?  "Customary law."  And--just as important--ignoring the role of governments, particularly those governments which are, frankly, illicit in se, or which choose to ignore the actions of murderous government-allied parties inside their own borders.

...Ultimately, UN CASA’s ISACS initiative is hoped to eventually result in customary international law.  Customary international law is the result of international administrative rule making which acquires the same weight as treaty law over time.  States can be bound by customary international law regardless of whether the states have codified these laws domestically.  Along with general principles of law and treaties, customary law is considered by the International Court of Justice, jurists, the United Nations, and its member states to be among the primary sources of international law.(9)...

There are a couple of problems with this (ignoring the Second Amendment matter pro tem.)

...The first assumption is that proliferation of small arms is a universal threat to humanity, or, alternatively, that greater availability of small arms means more gun deaths in a given society....

Students of history will understand that the most significant numbers of "gun deaths" in 3rd-world (and in some 1st-world) societies result from governmental action, or the utter lack of law enforcement (governmental IN-action).  Hutu/Tutsi wars, anyone?  Muslim/Christian conflicts?  Narco-trafficking?  Hello!!!???

Beyond that,

Clearly, the small arms situation in some places may indeed be out of control, and that this can poses a societal hazard.  But proliferation, i.e. the distribution of arms or expanding private ownership of arms, is not intrinsically a bad thing for everyone everywhere, especially in an ordered society.  Proliferation, in fact, can be a force for good even in a disordered societal situation.

The American experience alone invalidates the global causative relationship between small arms proliferation and human insecurity.   For example, trend data over the past nearly 20 years shows the US has been experiencing a phenomenal decline in gun-related deaths per 100,000 people.  Specifically homicides, suicides, and accidents have decreased 44%, 19%, and 69% respectively.

The second assumption is that there is a plague of international illegal weapons trafficking threatening humanity everywhere.

New research suggests the problem of illicit international trade in arms is not nearly as bad as first hypothesized over 10 years ago.  Humanitarian campaigners’ evidence about the vast size, global scope, and cataclysmic impact of international illicit trafficking simply does not exist.  Granted, it’s hard to quantify such illegal activity.  Nonetheless, the assertion that illicit international small arms trafficking is a major problem for the world has in fact been disproven over 10 years of progressively improved knowledge on the topic by academics and specialist researchers.

The inconvenient truth today for humanitarian campaigners for international small arms controls is that for most countries around the globe, even for most developing or fragile states, a combination of deficient domestic regulation of legal firearms possession with theft, and loss or corrupt sale from official inventories is a more serious problem than illicit trafficking across borders....

It's not likely that the US Senate, no matter its political composition, will sign on to any arms-limitation treaty, although there's no doubt that Obozo will elbow his way to the front of the "sign-here" line before losing office in January.

However, that "customary law" thing may require a courageous and principled stance from US political leadership in the next 10 years.

I'm not taking bets on that.

NBC: National Bunk Carrier

This fellow knows from news, and has given up on the MFM's most rotten (post-Rather) purveyor of bunk.

First, there was the Trayvon Martin boondoggle a few months ago.

Then yesterday, evidence of some creative editing regarding Mitt Romney’s visit to a Wawa in Pennsylvania.

Today, we have Andrea Mitchell’s spectacularly lame followup to “criticism of the Romney clip edit” — which amounted to Ms. Mitchell saying, with a sigh and a frown, “Oh, bother.  Fine.  Here’s what we left out.”...

The Deacon doesn't mention that Nat'l Bunk Corp. is a property of GE, which is headed by an Obozo worshipper--because, after all, GE is very damn good at playing the Corporate Welfare game.

...You deserve what they’re saying about you.  It’s earned.  You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you.   You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more.  You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press...

In a related development, Bruce Murphy, also a damn good reporter, notes that the local (NBC-affiliated) news monopoly seems to have ignored basic elementary statistics while writing up sensational stories about Milwaukee crime (as if  it needs sensationalizing...)

...Yet the Journal Sentinel did this in a story that is filled with logical and evidentiary holes.

If the idea is that Flynn is trying to cook the books, then you would want to go back to 2007, and compare how assaults were coded under his predecessor, chief Nan Haggerty. The newspaper made no attempt to do this....

IOW, was the coding consistent from one cop-administration to the next?  For that matter, was it consistent with practice BEFORE 2007?

I'm perfectly willing to concede ad arguendam that the current practice is biased.  But that doesn't mean that PAST practice was perfectly legitimate.

HT:  Hot Air and Sykes

Perspective

Grim's Hall provides perspective.

Noting that Iceland is 'the most peaceful nation on earth' (perhaps because it's too damn cold to cause trouble up there), he then observes:

Funny; it was just last Christmas we were noticing with worry that Ciudad Juarez, just over the border, had seen more people killed than Afghanistan.

This year, it's Chicago.

To a Cheesehead, it's not news that Chicago is a sewer, of course.

For You Keynsian Fairy-Tale Folks...

So happens that this scenario occurred to me, too.

....These are rather startlingly different ways of addressing the impasse but they actually point to the same problem – and it is bigger than the euro disaster, although that is the clearest and most acute manifestation of it. The economy is now beyond the control of national governments, and therefore outside the remit of democratic politics. It has become truly global, and thus a law unto itself; nation states have gone broke in their attempt to feed its gargantuan appetites for consumption and debt. The remedies for this began in panic and are now ending in delusion: first the banks went bust and were bailed out by governments; then the governments went bust and needed to be bailed out by – whom? International funding agencies which get their cash from – where? From central banks which will have to print gigantic amounts of money to replace all the money that simply disappeared in the bad debt that bankrupted the banks in the first place. And if we all agree to accept the illusion that this newly printed cash has actual value – if we all clap really hard and say that we believe in fairies – then the whole show can get back on the road and we will be rich again....

But unless ALL the Gummints pretend, in unison, NONE of it will stand.

Maybe we should start ignoring laws about "counterfeiting."  Bernanke and SCOAMF certainly ignore 'em.

HT:  CMR

So Which Laws Do WE Get to Ignore?

It's tiresome to repeat--again and again--that the Obozo Administration is doing its very best to demolish the rule of law in this country.

...On issue after issue — gay rights, drug enforcement, Internet gambling, school achievement standards — the administration has chosen to achieve its goals by a method best described as passive-aggressive.

Rather than pushing new laws through a divided Congress to enact his agenda, Obama is relying on federal agencies to ignore, or at least not defend, laws that some of his important supporters — like Hispanic voters and the gay community — don’t like....

Thus sayeth Politico (!!) about our SCOAMF.  And they didn't even mention Fast & Furious.

Socialist and now near-tinpot dictator.  It fits.

Napolitano's Lying About Fast & Furious, Too

Fast and Furious lying spreads from Holder to Napolitano.

...Of these weapons, the majority (approximately 50) were noted to have come from Operation Fast & Furious in Arizona, purchased by Uriel Patino and Jacob Chambers. The ROI was written and signed by Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Jaime Zapata, who was shot dead in an ambush at a fake roadblock in San Luis Potosí, Mexico on 15 February 2011. At the time of the report, Agent Zapata was assigned to the Laredo office.

... The Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Department of Justice have long denied that the case of Jaime Zapata had anything to do with Fast and Furious. The discovery of this ROI by Zapata, “puts the lie to that...

Napolitano lied, people died.

HT:  Owens

Obozo Thinks It's Still All About Him (!)

The po' bastard's still living in 2008--behind the curve by quite a bit.

...Stephen Hayes advanced these facts: Rubio's about to release a book next week and will be all over the media, and Rubio's been working with Congressmen on some sort of a measure to deal with the children of illegals. Further, Obama has actually instructed his party to not deal with Rubio on the matter.

His conclusion is that Obama did this for fear that Rubio could actually put together some kind of a deal, and he couldn't have that.

More and more he looks like the desperate little dwarf behind the curtain of Oz.

Holder Meets Underside of Bus

Looks like Eric Holder's party ("Injustice for Most") is about to end.

...The Washington Post, in a front page article, heaves Eric Holder under the bus. When a Demo is in the White House, WaPo is the White House's PR agency, so I read this as indicating the White House has decided that he's a lost cause....

There are a couple more whistleblowing volunteers.  (HT:  Arms/Law)

Maybe the Milwaukee JS will write a complete report on "Fast and Furious"/Gunrunner.

And maybe not.

Remember George Petak?

Some of you remember that George Petak was successfully recalled after breaking a promise and voting to tax Racine County residents for Bud Selig's playground.  (Yes, Tommy Thompson, now billing himself as 'conservative', led that parade....)

Seems that the 'Most Evil People in the US'--according to the Lefties--don't like that sort of corporate welfare.

...Americans for Prosperity describes its policy aims as "limited government and free markets on the local, state, and federal levels." David Koch and his brother Charles are described by his critics as "lifelong libertarians."...

...From the Minnesota Post's Brian Lambert:

Put down your coffee, it’s spit-take time. David Koch — that David Koch — is putting a political hit out on Minnesota legislators who supported the Vikings stadium..

And a couple of those leggies are Republicans.

Wisconsin Pubbies, to this day, defend Petak and note that when he lost his seat--for his treachery--the (D) folk obtained a majority in the State Senate.

Too bad.  Petak and Thompson shoulda thunk of that, instead of their political wallets.

That "Racine Election Problem" Is Serious

There's more coming on this, folks.

...Lou D’Abbraccio, an election observer working with conservative local groups, said that he observed a voter attempting to register to vote at the John Bryant Community Center using a handwritten receipt dated June 5, 2012, the day of the election. D’Abbraccio tried unsuccessfully several times to challenge the election workers’ acceptance of the handwritten document as proof of residence. Wisconsin state law lists specific types of documents that must be used to prove residence in order to cast a ballot.

Handwritten receipts are not among those documents regarded as acceptable legal proof of residence.

D'Abbraccio is not a gadfly.  He has serious credentials.  You can bet that the "Community Center"'s trash is going to be of interest to the authorities, and that one won't be the only one.

...On Thursday, the MacIver Institute revealed that the Racine County Sheriff’s Department was initiating an investigation into documents found in a dumpster at the Cesar Chavez Community Center (the polling location for Racine wards 11,12, and 15). According to a source that MacIver talked to, the investigation pertains to pre-certified ballots, partially filled out election day registrations, and partisan political literature found in the dumpster.

It gets more interesting.

...election observers reported that an extraordinarily high number of voters were showing up to the polls for same-day registrations, using change of address forms to obtain ballots. That led to legitimate concern that such an individual showing up to vote, might also have been registered at another location. According to another election observer I spoke with, there is no mechanism in place to prevent people from casting multiple ballots at a different polling location where they have previously been registered. One election observer reported seeing the same woman vote three times at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center polling place...

Oh, yes, there's even more!!

...At Festival Hall, one female election observer, Jennifer Neubauer of Illinois, receiving a threat from a thug inside the polling place who was entering and exiting with groups of voters who had been bused to the location to vote. The thug in question was not an election official, and was reportedly issued a $400 citation for threatening to the smash Neubauer’s head into the ground. 

Wisconsin Jobs Now and Voces de la Frontera deployed vans to drive voters to and from the polls, as well. One of these vans had the words “Cash Money” painted on the window, giving rise to the question of whether voters had been paid or offered any sort of compensation for going to the polls.

Did all of that add up to 825 votes?


For the complete list of questionable, illegal, and fraudulent behavior, see Lou's post here.

Public Employee Unions, Big Agriculture: Same Difference

Remember how it works?  AFSCME extorts money from taxpayers, then contributes bunches of dues-money to politicians who cooperate with even more extortion.

No different with Big Ag.

...Maybe if the government wouldn’t intervene in the agriculture sector, inducing sharp increases in the price of commodities, many of the 46 million people on food stamps would be able to afford food.

Then again, why would liberal politicians abrogate their source of political power?  They stand to benefit from subsidizing rich sugar farmers and keeping 15% of the country dependent upon the government for food.  The calculus of socialism dictates that a permanent dependency constituency + special interest money = perennial power.

That "15%" number reminds us of Big Ag's Corn-A-Hole-the-Public con, by the way.  Coincidence?

Is The Election Over Already?

Well....it's quite a ways away, right?  Anything can happen, right?

Right.

But..........

...while most seem to discount the midterms as predictive -- and most seem to almost completely ignore 2010 as if it's an obvious aberration -- in fact, at least over the past three cycles, the midterms have been highly predictive. They've predicted the presidential vote to within 1%.

 

Given that circumstances from 2010 have not improved -- indeed, it seems likely Obama's position has deteriorated -- why would we expect 2012 to break this pattern?

No reason I can think of.

Oh, Yah....Those Foreclosures!

Barry reminds us that the real-estate problem ain't exactly over with.

...Fast forward to the national robo-signer giveaway settlement. With that now behind them, the voluntary foreclosure abatements have come to an end. Thee was an 18 month period where banks had stopped actively processing these properties. That ended earlier this year. As the creaky, wheezy, inadequate machinery of processing defaulted mortgages rumbles back to life, you would expect to see signs of increasing foreclosures and distressed sales begin any day now.

Cue the RealtyTrac report:

Foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 205,990 U.S. properties in May, an increase of 9 percent from April but still down 4 percent from May 2011.

The linked article is worth reading, as Barry is NOT nice to the bankers.

Rand Paul, the Rights Senator

Don't want to go to all the fuss and bother of shooting down your local drone?

Well, Rand Paul has a solution!!!

..."Like other tools used to collect information in law enforcement, in order to use drones a warrant needs to be issued," Paul said Tuesday. "Americans going about their everyday lives should not be treated like criminals or terrorists and have their rights infringed upon by military tactics."

The bill, S. 3287, would require the government to obtain a warrant to use drones with the exception of patroling national borders, when drones are needed to prevent "imminent danger to life" or when there are risks of a terrorist attack.

The bill would also give Americans the ability to sue the government for violating the act. And, it would prohibit evidence collected with warrantless drone surveillance from being used as evidence in court.

It's a start.

Reagan Was More Than an Anti-Communist

The 'Tear Down This Wall' speech contained another real gem.

Reagan was not afraid to point to:

“...the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront. Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches, they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to correct what they view as the tower's one major flaw, treating the glass sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even today when the sun strikes that sphere--that sphere that towers over all Berlin--the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.”

That sign is quite powerful, eh?  

A123, the Metaphor

"Green Car" battery maker A123 Systems issued a "going concern" warning.  That's a VERY serious warning, required by the CPA ethics code when a company is in extremely deep doo-doo.  In effect, it means that it could very well go bankrupt, and soon.

It was one of Obozo's darlings, of course--and the US taxpayer, at the point of a gun, has donated at least $249 million to the company.

A123 is a metaphor for the Obozo Administration, which should also file a "going concern" notice.  It's not likely to last past next January.

The worry?  That the Obozo-ites will take the US into bankruptcy as the administration sinks beneath the waves.

Blind? Nope. MSM!!

Two best-sellers on the NYT list, and aside from the listing there, you've never heard of them from the MFM.

Marji Ross, [....] tells me, “It’s a very exciting day here at Regnery, having both the #1 and the #2 books in the country. Clearly these books have struck a chord with the American people, who are very worried about the future of our country and the direction Barack Obama seems to be taking us. Both David Limbaugh and Ed Klein have done a tremendous amount of work in documenting the failures of this administration and we’re thrilled with the books’ success.

There is a positive here:  it's clear that the loyal-dissent media (Limbaugh, Levin, Malkin, Hannity, etc.) are very potent advertising channels, indeed.  And it's also clear that Conservatives do something other than clean the guns and grip the Bible.

Corporate Welfare, Green Version

I don't care if it's Goldman, JPMorgan, or the GreenWeenies.  It's welfare, simple.  And in this case, probably illegal.

New emails provided to Congress show substantial White House involvement in directing Department of Energy subsidized loans to BrightSource Energy, a company that received a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the government to build the world's largest solar power plant in the Mojave Desert.

... These emails reveal that Jonathan Silver, executive director of the Energy Department's loan guarantee program, was helping draft a letter from John Bryson, chairman of the board of BrightSource Energy, to then-White House Chief of Staff William Daley requesting help in obtaining the loan. These emails were written from Silver's personal account during business hours.

Oh, really??

It would have been improper for a government official to have assisted an applicant for a government loan program using a government computer on government time. But it's impossible to believe that using a nongovernmental account makes the action appropriate. Indeed, it appears to be an effort to conceal an unseemly activity.

Silver's email to Woolard stated, "My comments/changes are interspersed. I've tried to turn this into a memo that we can all support as drafted. I have to be honest and say that its [sic] off-target."

Not only "off-target", fella...

Silver then suggested exactly how the beggar applicant could receive expedited service from the taxpayers  Government.


Nice.

CRG Is Right; Vos Is Wrong

This morning on Weber's show, Citizens for Responsible Government's Chris Kleismet made the argument for keeping Wisconsin's recall provision intact.

And he was right.  The recall provision keeps politicians honest (not a bad thing, that) and it is rarely used.

Weber characterized the Walker recall (and the other 14 in the last year or so) as "abusive."  Kleismet responded that just because a law is abused doesn't mean that you change the law.  It's worth remembering that the Republican rule will eventually come to an end and that another Dolyeite regime could ensue.  Should they face recall if they emplace odious policies?

Damn right they should.

Robin Vos is of the opinion that he and all his colleagues are entitled to their term, once elected.  Vos is wrong.  There's no "entitled" job; either he does what his constituents want, or he gets canned.

Thanks, Mr. Kleismet!  Keep up the good work!!

Rove: Energy Strategerist, Too!!

Yah, ol' Karl's a friggin' polymath...

Renewal of federal tax credits for wind energy can save U.S. jobs and reduce dependence on foreign oil, according to Karl Rove, an adviser to former President George W. Bush.

“We’ve got a growing economy that’s increasing energy consumption and wind energy should be part of the solution,” Rove said today on a panel at a wind conference in Atlanta. Extending the so-called production tax credit “should be a priority.”  --quoted at HotAir

OK, Karl.  Whatever.

US Forest Service: The Nuts Are in Charge

There's a very serious possibility that another "Sagebrush Rebellion" is in the works in Tombstone, AZ.

You can get the story at the link--but here's a telling out-take:

...As a result, Ivory said, Tombstone "is minutes away from going up in smoke" because it is "a wooden town in the middle of the desert in the middle of a drought."

At the center of the debate is the Mexican spotted owl.

"What is more important, owls or the people of Tombstone?" James Upchurch, a Forest Service supervisor who oversees the wilderness, was asked in court earlier this year.

Upchurch responded that there was no easy answer, which left jaws dropping on Tombstone's side of the courtroom.

I wonder what Upchurch's wife and children think of that response, don't you?  After all, if he can wash his hands of the population of Tombstone, why not his family?

Even DiFi (!!!!)

From a Noonan column:

...Most ominously, there are the national-security leaks that are becoming a national scandal—the “avalanche of leaks,” according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, that are somehow and for some reason coming out of the administration. A terrorist “kill list,” reports of U.S. spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen, stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how America got it, and U.S. involvement in the Stuxnet computer virus, used against Iranian nuclear facilities. These leaks, say the California Democrat, put “American lives in jeopardy,” put “our nation’s security in jeopardy.”

This isn’t the usual—this is something different. A special counsel may be appointed.

And where is the president in all this? On his way to Anna Wintour’s house. He’s busy. He’s running for president.

But why? He could be president now if he wanted to be.--quoted at Gateway

It's a long way to November, but the obits are already being written.

"Constitution? What 'Constitution'?"

Seems like the Regime doesn't like all that fuss and bother of the 1st and 5th Amendments.  But also remember:  the REPUBLICAN HOUSE passed this 'law' along with the DEMOCRAT SENATE.

It's a Ruling Class thing, ya' know.

...The federal government had told the judge it concluded that her recent ruling exempted only the named plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the provision

U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest shot back in a new Memorandum Opinion and Order yesterday that said because the possible injury to Americans includes the loss of their rights, her order was intended to protect everyone...

 ...The judge noted that the law doesn’t have a requirement that there be any knowledge that an act is prohibited before a detention. The judge also said the law is vague, and she appeared to be disturbed that the administration lawyers refused to answer her questions.

Titus said the opinion underscores “the arrogance of the current regime, in that they will not answer questions that they ought to answer to a judge because they don’t think they have to.”

The judge explained that the plaintiffs alleged paragraph 1021 is “constitutionally infirm, violating both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the 1st Amendment as well due process rights guaranteed by the 5th Amendment.”

Given the trajectory outlined above, the Feds may well stuff that judge into prison first, before they frog-march the Catholic Bishops...

Human Rights No Longer Include Religious Freedom: Obozo Administration

The continuing madness (and we mean mad-dog, not 'anger') of the Obozo-ites.

The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.

The new human rights reports–purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered–are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath.  --quoted at Fr Z's place

Who needs all that "religion" anyway--when the LightBearer himself is in charge?

The Problem With E.J. Dionne

We've cited Patrick Deneen several times.  Here he takes on E J Dionne's mis-construal of the Catholic Church.  By co-incidence, I heard Dionne yesterday when Hewitt interviewed him.  It was clear to me that Dionne does not grasp Catholicism very well.  Deneen agrees.

...I have grown increasingly distressed by his tendency to define the Church and its activities in terms of American partisan politics. By doing so he diminishes the Church and threatens to make it merely an extension of modern politics and even the State. 

... In one recent column, “The Battle Among the Catholic Bishops,” Dionne divides the Bishops between “moderate and liberals” and “conservatives,” and points to the vast majority of dioceses that did not file suit against the HHS mandate as proof that there is a silent majority of liberal Catholics. He points with particular delight remarks by Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, CA, who “broke the silence on his side” to express reservations about the lawsuits.

Yet, while Bishop Blaire expressed concern about tactics, he stated robust agreement with his fellow bishops who “very strongly support whatever action has to be taken to promote religious liberty.” That is, Bishop Blaire’s concerns are prudential, not categorical. Such differences do not suggest the fundamentally opposed worldviews of “liberals” or “progressives” against “conservatives.” They are properly and appropriately Catholic, in which there are properly and appropriately differences that are prudential in nature...

Here's the guts of it:

 ...By describing discussions within the Church in terms of American partisan labels, he threatens to instruct his readers that there is no difference between internal Church discussions and debates in American politics. Dionne portrays a Church whose internal discussions are simply an extension of contemporary political debates.

The labels themselves are inappropriate, particularly that of “progressive Catholic”—a combination that is fundamentally a contradiction in terms, yet a label that Dionne uses again and again to describe his approach to the Catholic faith. The Progressives were theologically millenarian, even Arian, believing that salvation could be achieved through human effort and especially through the twin avenues of science and politics. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Progressives such as John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and Walter Rauschenbusch were self-described critics of the past and hostile to tradition. John Dewey equated Christianity and democracy, believing that democracy had become the new means of ongoing revelation, and in which the teacher should seek to bring about the kingdom of God—progress advanced in the classroom could accelerate the coming of the millennium on earth

Yah, that's worked out real well...

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “the fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.” Catholicism is an accumulation of tradition, including a magisterium that does not waver from the fundamental truth as divulged in the teachings and life of Jesus. It is a faith that traces itself back through apostolic succession to its point of origin with Jesus' commission to his apostles to go forth and spread the Word. It is a faith that is populated by constant remembrance of the cloud of witnesses, the communion of the saints, who are remembered in every Mass during the Eucharistic prayer. While Catholics look forward to the future with hope, they do not invest their hopes in perfection of the City of Man. If Catholics are anything, they are not “progressives,” and to import the political term for the description of Catholics is to collapse the Church into a political program that cannot be reconciled to the Catholic worldview...

Just ask the Wisconsin "Progressive" Republicans why the Catholics vote(d) Democrat for 60+ years.

...Dionne’s other preferred form of self-description—“Social Justice Catholic”—appears only to endorse the Church’s charitable work on behalf of the poor, with a heavy preference for government’s role in that effort. But is the Church’s efforts on behalf of the dignity of every human life—born or unborn—any less a part of its commitment to social justice? Is not the defense and preservation of the family a central focus of social justice? Should not we understand the Bishop’s opposition to the HHS mandate, and preservation of the Church’s ministry without needless interference by the State, also to be a part of social justice? Dionne seems to define social justice to be activities that conform solely to the platform of the Democratic Party, but, here again, American partisan positions map poorly onto the Church’s rich tradition of Catholic Social Thought. His portrayal of “Social Justice Catholics” as distinct from “conservative Catholics” is a disfigurement of the fullness of Catholic teaching...

Oh, yes--just like the Left-O-Lemmings at Marquette University, and G'town who "think" just like Dionne.

And there's a lot more to Catholicism than "liberal" or "conservative" politics.

Even More Fun With ObozoCare

You didn't seriously expect anything different, did you?

...the Obama Administration has signaled that it may create new regulations in order to protect Obamacare’s online health insurance marketplaces called Health Insurance Exchanges. Despite Obama’s promise that if you like your health plan you can keep it, some small businesses may not be able to keep their self-insured health plans if the Obama Administration has its way....

 ...While subject to many of Obamacare’s new mandates, self-insured plans are not subject to the Essential Health Benefits, risk pooling, risk adjustment, rate review, or medical loss ratio mandates.[4]

This concerns liberal “consumer advocates” like Professor Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee University School of Law.  Jost calls self-insurance a “loophole” in Obamacare.[5]  Jost and other Obamacare ideologues have called on the Obama Administration to use its regulatory powers to close this so-called “loophole.”[6]

Their particular concern is that self-insured plans with low attachment points are a risk to Obamacare’s Exchange marketplaces.  Now HHS, in its RFI is echoing this concern.

For this reason, we expect that the information collected from the RFI will be the basis of a future regulation.  We further expect that such a future regulation may regulate self-insured plans with stop-loss insurance and thereby may attempt to make it difficult or impossible for small businesses to self-insure.

One of the options that Catholic institutions have available is precisely the 'self-insured' route, with plan design that does NOT cover abortifacients, abortions, sterilizations, (etc.)

Can't possibly have that sort of "religious" stuff going on here, can we??

For the Luddite/Krugmanite/Keynesian Bitter Clingers

Estonia.  Yes, there is such a place, and it's doing very well, thanks!

Why?

Because Estonia CUT GUMMINT SPENDING after the crash of '08.

Krugman selected his data and tried to show otherwise.  But the truth emerged.

Don't like Estonia as a model?

Then try Sweden.  They didn't raise taxes; they cut spending instead.  Worked there, too!!

FLA Prosecutor Attempts to Silence........Dershowitz!!!

Egads.

State Attorney Angela Corey, the prosecutor in the George Zimmerman case, recently called the Dean of Harvard Law School to complain about my criticism of some of her actions. She was transferred to the Office of Communications and proceeded to engage in a 40 minute rant, during which she threatened to sue Harvard Law School, to try to get me disciplined by the Bar Association and to file charges against me for libel and slander.--Dershowitz, quoted at The Warrior

In the rest of the essay, Dershowitz rips Ms. Corey to shreds and implies that she should be brought up on perjury charges for submitting a 'half-truth' charging affadavit.

Worth considering.

A Real Loser Sues: The Entitled Politician

This is not a new story, but it reminds you that the 'will of the people' means nothing in the eyes of the Left.  When they can't get what they want through elections, they sue.

...Steve Driehaus, who voted for President Obama’s health care bill when he represented Ohio’s first congressional district, sued the [Susan B Anthony List] after it said his vote supported taxpayer-funded abortions. SBA had considered erecting billboards saying, “Shame on Steve Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion,” although the signs never went up.

Driehaus lost to Congressman Steve Chabot by a sizable margin.

Now get this:

Driehaus argued the proposed-but-never-erected billboards amounted to defamation and sued for loss of livelihood, because SBA’s opposition contributed to his seven-point defeat in 2010.

So.  SBA did not put up the signs.  A Lefty lost an election by SEVEN POINTS, a sizeable margin, after voting for ObozoCare.

Po' widdle Lefty sues because he "lost his job."

THIS is what the courts are for????

Really???