With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. - Herman Melville > Moby Dick
At a "Harvard Thinks Big" confab earlier this year, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman offered his own bright idea for tackling the nation's obesity epidemic. Merely medicating it won't do, he said, and education is well-meaning but ineffective. His answer? "Coercion. … We should start telling corporations what to do." But not just corporations. He also advocated — "to hearty applause," the Harvard Gazette noted — "requiring people to exercise." Lieberman's idea sounds radical. For now. But in fact, he is (pardon the term) only slightly ahead of the curve. Yale's Kelly Brownell has long advocated taxes on Twinkies, soda and other high-sugar snacks. That idea has gained support from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the mayors of Philadelphia and Baltimore, and state lawmakers in numerous states. The New York Times' Mark Bittman likens foods with added sugar to tobacco, and asks, "How do we regulate the consumption of dangerous foods? … We need the government on our side. It must acknowledge the dangers caused by the most unhealthy aspects of our diet and figure out how to help us cope with them." Bittman's colleague, Frank Bruni, agrees. In a column lamenting America's spreading waistline, he concludes that "we need to rethink and remake our environment much more thoroughly."
It is in the nature of government and government agencies to want to regulate and to control. There is no limit to what a government agency will think it has the right and the duty to control. That is why governments are dangerous and why our founding fathers set up a constitution that specifically limited the powers and scope of our government.
But the constitution itself is not enough. What is even more important than having a constitution that limits the powers and scope of government, is having a people that want to be free.
If the people that make up our nation want a government that controls what they can eat and how much they exercise, then constitutional limitations on the powers and scope of government are reduced to nothing but a string of nice sounding words.
We are sliding into an age where eating a chocolate bar will become a revolutionary act.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. George Washington
Sorry folks. You can't blame the demise of the UK on the Royals. You did it yourselves. You voted to have the state give you things for free. Now you are learning that "free stuff" is more often than not, worth exactly what you pay for it.
Socialism sucks. It destroys wealth. It destroys people. It destroys everything but want.
The term is loaded with the implication that something was wrongly taken and that the taker has “given back” to make amends for their aggression against those that they have victimized.
People need to call bullshit on this crap.
These police officers did not take something wrongly. They did not victimize "the community" by taking something from it by force or by fraud. Neither they nor any of us should allow ourselves to manipulated by the cult of victim-hood that promotes that damnable “give-back” crap. It demeans all of us when it is used.
Check out the timeline of this twitter feed for March of 2012. https://twitter.com/#!/workingwa There is every reason to expect Amazon to feature prominently in the months to come.
Now take a look at a what appeared in the Sunday April 1st Edition of the Seattle Times.
Hint to The Seattle Times and labor toadies: Amazon is a retailer, not a charity. They sell stuff to people that are willing to buy. They employee people to make this enterprise work. Everyone wins, except the parasites. People are not forced to work for them. People are not forced to patronize them.
These kinds of attacks on Amazon will likely ramp up this summer.
Hopefully Amazon will have the courage and the will to fight these bastards.
Like Bernard Goldberg, I am not convinced that this election is a slam-dunk for the Republicans. I think that when a large enough portion of the voting population is dependent on the government for their material comforts and wants, our mandate to be "a free people" devolves into pleading to be "a people of free stuff."
We are becoming more and more like the serfs of our feudal past.
Those that seek to use government to "redistribute the wealth" should keep the following in mind:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's. -Exodus 20:17
Theft is no less a sin when you use government to take from your neighbour because he has wealth to take.
You can only give as charity that which is yours to give. You cannot put a gun to someone's head and make him give his money to the poor and call it charity.
We like tax cuts as much as anyone. But the fact is, we're taking money from a pay-as-you-go retirement system that's already running in the red, and replacing that cash with IOUs. We're burdening future generations so we can spend tax cuts now.
When you hear and see the news reports on the payroll tax cut that is working its way through congress, keep in mind what it really cuts. If a Republican had tried to pull this stunt, the MSM, AARP, and all the rest of the assorted welfare state advocacy class would have been up in arms and screaming to the rafters about how it would destroy the Social Security system. Yet, since Obama is a Democrat, they are silent.
Obama's illegal appointments will create havoc with the appointment process. If they are allowed to stand, the President, whoever it happens to be from this day forward, will be able to "declare" congress to be in recess for the purpose of bypassing the constitutional requirements of advise and consent.
The president cannot require Congress to act on his priorities. To the contrary, Congress acts independently of the president as a check and balance to his power.
Obama's view that he may decide when the Senate has gone into recess virtually nullifies the Senate's advice and consent role. Under this rationale, what would stop the president from declaring recesses every weekend so that he can make unilateral appointments?
Precedent is a bitch. If this abomination is not slapped down now, there will be no stopping any future President from using it.
Any-time that the Senate or the House goes quite for short holidays and weekends will become an opportunity for an opportunistic President to make a "Recess Appointment."
So what will voters do about this in November? Will they reward Obama and his enablers in the Democrat Party by returning them to office?
Ultimately it is we the voters that are the last line of defence of the constitution.
In a press release, Sen. Michael B. Enzi, Wyoming Republican, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension (HELP) Committee, stated, “The president has ignored the Senate’s confirmation and vetting process” by appointing Ms. Block and Mr. Griffin.
As Mr. Enzi rightly noted, the president’s submission of the nominations at the last minute made it impossible for the Senate even to begin its vetting process. The process includes a background check to see if the nominees’ taxes are paid, if they are facing any pending civil or criminal investigations and to ensure that they face no conflicts of interest.
For Obama and the Democrats, the constitution is a "flawed document" and means nothing. For them, all politics can be boiled down to "what you can get away with."
Obama and the Democrats think that at this time, they can get away with making "recess appointments" even if the congress is not in recess.
From this point forward, any-time that there are not people on the floor of both the house and senate, yammering away on something, future presidents will be able to declare congress to be in "recess" and appoint their people to office. The day or the hour won't matter. Weekends and holidays will become defacto recesses.
That is, if they are allowed to get away with this.
The appointment of John Cordray is illegal on two counts.
1) Obama declared this "a recess" appointment. Congress was not in recess. Obama is entitled to his own opinions, but he is not entitled to his own facts. He can not make this "a recess appointment" by just declaring it so. Congress has to actually be in recess in order for Obama to lawfully make a recess appointment.
2) The Frank-Dodd act, which created this unnecessary office, specifically requires that the appointee be approved by the senate. It is a weird little oddity in the legislation that is most likely due to sloppy legal work on the part of the legislations drafters. But it is there none the less. The Frank-Dodd act does not allow for recess appointment.
The post office’s problems stem from one hard reality: it is being squeezed on both revenue and costs.
As any computer user knows, the Internet revolution has led to people and businesses sending far less conventional mail.
At the same time, decades of contractual promises made to unionized workers, including no-layoff clauses, are increasing the post office’s costs. Labor represents 80 percent of the agency’s expenses, compared with 53 percent at United Parcel Service and 32 percent at FedEx, its two biggest private competitors. Postal workers also receive more generous health benefits than most other federal employees.
The suggestion that the postal service is losing money to Email is difficult to accept, especially looking at the great heaping gobs of junk mail that are stuffed into my mailbox every day. There is so much crap (Snail-Mail Spam) that is sent to me in the mail that I have at times tossed out mail that was important to keep because it was lost in the great wads of ads and "dear occupant" mail. Is there really anyone out there that is getting "less" mail sent to them they have received in years past?
The US Postal Service is being bled to death by the parasitic Public Sector Unions that have put the service on the brink of bankruptcy. The parasitic Public Sector Unions are negotiating with elected politicians and or government bureaucrats that are beholding to elected politicians for a piece of the the public treasury. These elected politicians are also beholden to the parasitic Public Sector Unions for campaign contributions and for votes. It is base political corruption pure and simple.
The US Postal Service can only be saved by reducing it's Labor cost to something in the range of what its main competitors, UPS and FedEx, have to work with. The only way that will happen is to eliminate the parasitic Public Sector Unions entirely. They must be done away with. They are incompatible with Democracy.
A range of factors, both economic and political, were also at play. The recent rise in raw goods has been fueled in part by the U.S. Fed pumping cash into the markets by purchasing $600 billion in bonds. This program has pushed interest rates extraordinarily low, making borrowing essentially free once adjusted for inflation. Investors have been using the super-cheap money to buy into commodity markets. But the Fed's program is slated to end on June 30.
"Funds were likely to take profits before June when the direct (Fed) bond purchases stop. All were eyeballing each other to see who would take profits first," said a London-based oil trader.
LAS VEGAS -- Some voters in Boulder City complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County's electronic voting machines.
Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked.
Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.
"Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time -- that's wrong."
Watch your vote.
They will take that away from you too if they get half the chance.
Fight.
[Update - 11:27 am]
And in North Carolina, more strange Democrat vote fraud.
In North Carolina, an incident was reported in which a voter tried to vote a straight Republican ticket and instead the voting machine indicated that a straight Democratic ticket was voted.
"Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.
"'They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,' Laughinghouse said. 'That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.'"
With an important, possibly history-making election drawing nigh, the idea of voter fraud is being raised on talk radio and other venues. The fact that the current president learned politics in the rough and tumble atmosphere of Chicago, a place known for ballot manipulation, does not exactly assuage suspicions.
Malfunction my ass.
The Democrats need to understand that if they bugger the elections to the point that nobody believes in them anymore, things will get ugly.
[Update 10:42 pm]
So lets take the above two stories and look at a tie-in.
Now the county voting technicians aren't unique here -- many of Clark County's employees are also represented by the SEIU. But it is worth mentioning, the SEIU is hyperpoliticized and has seen its fair share of corruption. (It certainly seems more questionable than Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer with Republican ties that was at the center of many conspiracy theories on the left during the Bush administration.)
Unions increasingly have a major financial stake in election outcomes, both as a matter of their own election expenditures, and as a function of what they stand to gain if their legislative agenda is enacted. Should they really be responsible for tabulating the votes? That's certainly something voters ought to think long and hard about.
Cray says she is currently compiling data from each of Illinois' jurisdictions to determine which were compliant and which were delinquent. Cray said it's possible the ballots may not be counted because the state was tardy in sending them out.
Illinois was required to have all of its absentee ballots mailed by Sept. 18, the national deadline. Election officials have until Nov. 15 to count the absentee ballots, which must be postmarked by midnight Nov. 1 to be eligible.
Bringing in a clown to testify on the highly charged issue of illegal immigration is the Democrat's way of expressing contempt for those Americans that want our immigration laws enforced.
WASHINGTON – Taking his blowhard comedy act to Congress, Stephen Colbert told lawmakers that a day picking beans alongside illegal immigrants convinced him that farm work is "really, really hard."
"It turns out — and I did not know this — most soil is at ground level," Colbert testified Friday. Also, "It was hotter than I like to be."
Nancy Pelosi thought that bringing in a clown to testify before congress was not only appropriate, "It was great."
Here's one of the big questions, really, one to chew on over the weekend, one that's asked a lot around this town. How could a bunch of people who ran such a brilliant campaign be doing such a lousy job at the politics of governing?
The answer is actually very simple.
Obama and his team have successfully rammed through a number of measures through the congress that would, and will, fundamentally change the nature of our government and our relationship with it.
Obama's plummeting popularity is a consequence of his political success.
Confusing President Obama's popularity with his political success is a mistake. He has been very successful. Obama is very unpopular now because of his political successes.
On the day parts of Arizona's immigration law, SB 1070, went into effect, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is in the news for another reason: there's a price on his head - allegedly offered by a Mexican drug cartel.
This is not the first instance of a Mexican Drug Cartel threatening to kill US Law Enforcement Officers.
A Mexican drug cartel has threatened Nogales police officers, saying they will be targeted for retribution if they conduct off-duty drug busts.
Nogales Police Chief Jeffrey Kirkham told the Nogales International on Friday that the threats stemmed from an incident approximately two weeks ago, when off-duty officers surprised marijuana smugglers while riding horseback in an unincorporated border area east of town.
The officers seized part of the drug load, and the smugglers were able to flee back into Mexico with the other part.
“As a result of that,” Kirkham said, “our officers have received threats from the cartel that they are to look the other way if they are off-duty, or they will be targeted by a sniper or by other means.”
In our nation's history, we have dealt with a similar problem with Mexico.
It resulted in what the history books call "The Punitive Expedition" or "The Poncho Villa Expedition."
In late 1915 - early 1916, Poncho Villa began a campaign of killing Americans living and working in Northern Mexico. It escalated from there to a cross border war into New Mexico.
Poncho Villa's raid into Columbus New Mexico, killing 18 and wounding 8, sparked a military response from the US.
A General Pershing type incursion into Mexico to hunt down Mexican Narco-Terrorist may have to be repeated if the Democrat led US Government is unable or unwilling to secure our borders with Mexico. This would not be a good war, though it may become a necessary one.
The Democrats in Washington D.C. need to recognize the risks they are running by refusing to look at the cross border threats from Mexican gangsters as serious threats to our national security.
So far to date, the most aggressive and forward posture that the Obama Administration has initiated to contain the violence that is spilling across the border from Mexico, is to put up signs in the desert on the American side of the border, warning Americans to stay out of threatened US land. Tactically, Obama has implemented a policy of retreat.
The signs were posted over a month after a Pinal County Sheriff's Deputy was shot by suspected drug traffickers while patrolling the area around the junction of Interstate 8 and Arizona Highway 84. Last week, two bodies belived to those of drug mules were found shot to death in the same area where the deputy was ambushed. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said in an interview Tuscon's KGUN TV that the cartels are in increasing control of parts of Arizona, including Pinal County.
As unpleasant as it may be for Obama and the Democrats that control Washington D.C. to consider, they have to secure the US border with Mexico. If they fail to do so, they will be responsible for having failed to prevent a war that we will end up having to fight on our southern border.
[Fenway's Not Another New England Sports Blog! has more on the topic of the Mexican Narco-insurgency and the illegal immigration issue. Its worth taking a look at.]
With Congress gridlocked on an immigration bill, the Obama administration is considering using a back door to stop deporting many illegal immigrants - what a draft government memo said could be "a non-legislative version of amnesty."
The memo, addressed to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and written by four agency staffers, lists tools it says the administration has to "reduce the threat of removal" for many illegal immigrants who have run afoul of immigration authorities.
On the surface, it is about the politics of illegal immigration.
But there is something happening here that is working below the surface. It is a "Big Picture" thing. It is something that is working on an emotional level in the Modern American Left.
It explains much of the way the modern American Left feels about the problem that we have with illegal immigration.
John Lennon's Imagine is not just a silly pop song. It is their prayer, their hymnal, their anthem. It is a dream that the Modern American Left hopes is our future and the whole worlds future.
(Yoram Hazony's Israel Through European Eyes explains why Israel is hated by much of the European, and by extension, the American Left. The core of his argument is compelling and it has important implications for all of the Western Nations that fought in WWII.)
