Moonbattery » Spreading the Wealth: "Assuming Teller baked the pie, while Penn busied himself watching daytime television between trips to the polls to vote for Democrats, this would summarize our current economic system:"
George F. Will: Four words in the ACA could spell its doom - The Washington Post: "If courts, perhaps ultimately including the Supreme Court, disallow the IRS’s “interpretation” of the law, the ACA will not function as intended in 34 states with 65 percent of the nation’s population. If courts allow the IRS’s demarche, they will validate this:Read More......
By dispensing subsidies through federal exchanges, the IRS will spend tax revenues without congressional authorization. And by enforcing the employer mandate in states that have only federal exchanges, it will collect taxes — remember, Chief Justice John Roberts saved the ACA by declaring that the penalty enforcing the mandate is really just a tax on the act of not purchasing insurance — without congressional authorization.
If the IRS can do neither, it cannot impose penalties on employers who fail to offer ACA-approved insurance to employees.
If the IRS can do both, Congress can disband because it has become peripheral to American governance."
Mike Lee's State of the Union response was amazing | The Daily Caller: "3. FINALLY offered a populist Republican explanation of economic inequalityRead More......
“This inequality crisis presents itself in three principal forms: immobility among the poor, who are being trapped in poverty by big-government programs; insecurity in the middle class, where families are struggling just to get by and can’t seem to get ahead; and cronyist privilege at the top, where political and economic insiders twist the immense power of the federal government to profit at the expense of everyone else.
… [Inequality is] guaranteeing insurance companies taxpayer bailouts if Obamacare cuts into their profits.
Inequality is blocking thousands of middle-class jobs in the energy industry as a favor to partisan donors and radical environmental activists.
… But where does this new inequality come from? From government — every time it takes rights and opportunities away from the American people and gives them instead to politicians, bureaucrats and special interests.”"
Articles: Obama Has Made it Impossible for Israel to Strike Iran: "I called a hardheaded realist, a Harvard trained PhD who has been watching the Middle East professionally for decades, to ask him about Obama's Iran deal. This is what he told me. It's done. Iran will get a bomb. They want a bomb and they will not be denied unless somebody stops them. Obama does not want to stop them. He does not want a friendly regime in Iran. He wants Iran as a counterforce to America and Israel. Obama is not a Muslim, but he is a radical. He sees the U.S. and Israel as imperialistic and oppressive. He doesn't like the U.S. military. He'd cut it to nothing if he could get away with it. We'll have to pull our troops and our aircraft carriers out of the Persian Gulf. We'll lose our ability to protect Middle Eastern oil. The Gulf Arabs will have to cooperate with Iran. So will Europe; they depend on that oil."No, that's not a mis-spelling in the title. Read More......
Instapundit » Blog Archive » JIM GERAGHTY: The State of the Union: The Self-Congratulatory Blowout of the Governing Class. Re…: "JIM GERAGHTY: The State of the Union: The Self-Congratulatory Blowout of the Governing Class.Perfect. Read More......
Related: Kevin Williamson: Great Caesar’s Ghost. “It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.”
UPDATE: From the comments: “A naked emperor addressing a parliament of whores.”
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 6:40 pm"
Mussolini’s Idea of the State and Its American Defenders - Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. - Mises Daily: "If some of the superstitions of fascism have made their way into American life, it could be because both fascism and whatever it is that America has become share a superstition in common — namely, the state itself. The state has been cloaked in all manner of flattering but obfuscating rhetoric. The state looks after the general welfare, provides economic stability, protects us from the bad guys, prevents inequality, and binds us together in a common cause greater than ourselves.Read More......
It’s time we viewed the state for what it really is: a mechanism by which rulers enrich themselves at the expense of the ruled. Everything else is a smokescreen."
Progressive Kristallnacht Coming? — Letters to the Editor - WSJ.com: "Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."Tom Perkins and his KPCB is beyond legendary in the annals of successful Silicon Valley VC firms and the lefties are squealing like stuck pigs from this one. Whoo boy.
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?
Tom Perkins
San Francisco
Mr. Perkins is a founder of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck. --Lazarus Long" --Robert HeinleinRead More......
Love in the Time of Obama | Washington Free Beacon: "“The game is rigged,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) famously told the 2012 Democratic National Convention. What an odd situation in which we find ourselves, where the most influential figures in politics, media, culture, and the academy, the leaders of institutions from the presidency to the Senate to multinational corporations to globally recognized universities, spend most of their time discussing inequalities of income and opportunity, identifying, blaming, and attacking the mysterious and nefarious figures behind whatever the social problem of the day might be. This is the way the clique that runs America justifies the inequalities endemic to “meritocracy,” the way it masks the flaws of a power structure that generates Brown-educated cable hosts and personal chefs who open ballparks with a phone call. This is how a new American aristocracy comes into being, one as entitled and clueless as its predecessors, but without the awareness of itself as a class.I started by quoting the grand finale so you didn't miss it. But its glorious-ness can only be understood after you've RTWT. And this is definitely a RTWT. Here's how it opens:
“It’s going to be fascinating to see where both of them go,” Obama aide Melody Barnes tells Weisberg. I know exactly where both of them will be going. Straight to the top, Melody. Straight to the top."
The first time he saw her from a distance. She was a reporter, observing his workplace from the outside. He was struck by her good looks, her energy. He mentioned her to a friend, who told him she was out of his league. But he persisted. His friend brought him to a party where he found an opportunity to strike up a conversation with her. One thing led to another. He took her to drinks. She mentioned she liked baseball, rooted for the Washington Nationals. They had that in common. So for their next date he took her to play catch. In Nationals Park. When it was closed to the public.And how can I resist adding this from the middle?:
Click may be a good word for the show, but “clique” is a better one for the world described in Vogue. On the first read the Weisberg piece is notable for its status details: the little things, the style of life of bobo liberals that drives conservatives crazy. I am referring here to the meal Weisberg shares with the couple in Kass’s sure-to-be-expensive Logan Circle townhouse: “butterflied roast chicken with tarragon and preserved lemons, faro risotto with wild mushrooms and leeks, and a green salad with buttermilk dressing” served with a Barbaresco made by friends in Italy. I am referring to Kass’s “hand-forged Carter Cutlery knives, which are produced by a Japanese-trained bladesmith in Oregon.” To the Hermès coat, Nili Lotan sweater, 7 for All Mankind jeans, Hunter + Rag & Bone boots, M Missoni dress, and Prada flats that Wagner wears at various moments in the piece. To the names checked by Weisberg to establish the fact that Wagner is with it, au courant, hip, cutting edge: This Town author Mark Leibovich, Ezra Klein, Jonathan Franzen, Frank Ocean, the Tanlines, and New York restaurants Blue Hill, Carbone, Franny’s, and Vinegar Hill House.This is your ruling (idiot) class. And as you can tell, they surely spend all their time thinking of fixing the "inequality problem". That's why it's improved so greatly in all the major cities which have nearly all been run by people just like this for the last 50 years.
I am referring to the cringe-inducing moments of false modesty. Wagner complains, “Every trip to the high-end knife shop in D.C.’s Union Market ‘costs us about $500.’” Weisberg reports, “Friends describe Kass as reserved,” despite the celebrity chef’s multiple television credits. Weisberg writes, “Their ideal Saturday night is dinner with friends—not a red-carpet event,” and then, in the very next sentence, notes, “In October, they attended the News and Documentary Emmys, at which Wagner was nominated, but sneaked in a side door to avoid the cameras.” Wagner describes her horror when she broke a heel on the way to a job interview with George Clooney (she got the job).
by ThirteenthLetterRead More......
Good God, what awful, entitled people. Everything they have, they've gained from being in the same tiny, incestuous circle. Didn't we have a revolution a few centuries back to get away from people like this?
Posted 1/24/2014 7:45:07pm
Instapundit » Blog Archive » JOHN FUND ON PREVENTING VOTER FRAUD: We were reminded just this week of problems associated with …: "JOHN FUND ON PREVENTING VOTER FRAUD:Read More......We were reminded just this week of problems associated with absentee ballots. Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe released an undercover video of a meeting of Battleground Texas, a leftist group working to elect Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor. The video shows the Davis supporters ignoring questions about whether forging a signature on a relative’s absentee ballot was legal. “People do that all the time,” said Lisa Wortham, pretending to cover her ears. Wortham is an attorney and a deputy voter registrar working with the group. A volunteer from the group adds her opinion: “I don’t think that’s legal, I’ll do like Lisa did — I didn’t hear you say that.” Other Battleground Texas workers agree but jokingly cover their ears and also pretend not to hear.Democrats, as matter of electoral strategy, rely on a lot of voter fraud, so it’s best for them to pretend it doesn’t exist, and to loudly scream racism when people point out that it does.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 10:40 am"
Ace of Spades HQ: "Okay I checked the blog rule book and it turns out that speaking in tongues and handling serpents within the comments are not specifically prohibited. So there you go.Read More......
Coincidence: Hollywood's only conservative group is getting close IRS nonprofit scrutiny
Another Coincidence: James O'Keefe Group Being Audited by NY. Again.
Yet Another Coincidence: Dinesh D'Souza Indicted For Election Fraud
Still Another Coincidence: IRS Proposes New 501(c)(4) Rules That Just Happen to Cover Most Tea Party Groups
Judge Strikes Down Wisconsin's 'John Doe' Subpoenas
Secret investigations targeted coincidentally at most prominent conservative groups in WI who can only now legally talk about their harassment. If you want to see what American fascism would look like, well this is it."
Where Have All the Uninsured Gone? - Bloomberg: PBDD HRGuru an hour ago −Read More......
Your observations are spot on. I've been in private practice medicine for 30 years and there were ways of helping people who couldn't pay. The hospitals and county would come up with private/public partnerships (long before we even knew that's what they were!) to take care of people, including writing off charity care. I myself was one of those doctors who supervised a free clinic on the days I was on call. It worked, probably much better than whatever we're going to end up with.
But it doesn't play into the grand glorious scheme of those who support centralized planning. Too many moving parts at a local level, I guess. Also, too much of that good old Christian charity. Can't have people helping people out in their own community, person-to-person without a big government entity ensuring it's "fair".
Heart-Pounding Video Takes You Inside the Cockpit of One of the World’s Fastest Jets | Video | TheBlaze.com: "If you think you’re ready, strap in, keep your arms and feet inside your cubicle, and press play."
"Only a delta would believe someone whose chief skill is teleprompter reading has prestige." --Me
What two classic works have I synthesized this from? Follow the links and do your own research...
Security Expert Hacks Obamacare Website In 4 Minutes; Accesses 70,000 Records | Zero Hedge: "The hits just keep on coming for ObamaCare. It was less than two weeks ago that I highlighted the potential premium rate death spiral that ObamaCare faces due to the fact that only old and sick people are signing up for the program. Now it seems there are further security related concerns plaguing the site, as cyber-security expert David Kennedy recently claimed that “gaining access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees via HealthCare.gov took about 4 minutes.”Read More......
It’s actually hard to be this incompetent if you tried."
TaxProf Blog: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the IRS: "In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: Tallahassee Democrat, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the IRS:Plus ca change... Read More......
This past year, much ado was made about the so-called “IRS-Gate” and concerns that the Obama administration may have used the agency to target Tea Party and other right wing groups. ... [W]hat often is not stated during the Martin Luther King Holiday weekend is that King, early in his leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), was routinely subjected to IRS audits of his individual accounts, SCLC accounts as well as accounts of his lawyers, first starting during the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower and continuing through the Kennedy administration. ..."
Wow: Greta drops a bomb about White House trying “very hard” to get Fox not to report on Benghazi | Young Conservatives: "[M]y friend told me that my colleague Jennifer Griffin, who was aggressively reporting on Benghazi, was wrong and that, as a favor to me, my friend in the Administration was telling me so that I could tell Jennifer so that she did not ruin her career. My friend was telling me to tell Jennifer to stop her reporting. Ruin her career?RTWT. You knew it was happening. You just didn't have proof until now... Read More......
In 20 plus years, I have never received a call to try and shut down a colleague – not that I even could – this was a first."
Obama’s NSA reforms won’t protect Americans’ privacy « Hot Air Headlines: "Even though President Obama assures us “the United States is not spying on ordinary people,” this statement does not jibe with any of his suggested reforms. Plus, we’ve heard these types of assurances before.Thank you Rand. Yeah, Obama has the solution here all right. As long as the problem is to maintain his power to suppress political opponents. Read More......
Obama saying that his new policy will only examine private information “two steps” removed from the target, as opposed to the current policy of three steps, is no comfort at all. The president might as well be saying we’re only going to abuse the Fourth Amendment twice, not three times."
Dr. Ben Carson Says More About MLK Day With 25 Words Than the Huffington Post Says With 800 | Independent Journal Review: "One thing I love about Dr. Ben Carson is that he can say a lot in just a few words. Take a look at what he tweeted this morning:You could take a thimble full of Ben's brain and have more compute power than all the white libs in the world combined. So there, I'm racist against whites!
As we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. let us pay more attention to the content of one’s character than the color of one’s skin.— Dr. Ben Carson (@RealBenCarson) January 20, 2014"
From the Files of Police Squad: No CCWs Allowed?: "I was going to lead yesterday's gun thread with this story, but after I posted my Lone Survivor review, the gun thread became a casualty of honey-do list prioritization.... And how did they know to expect him to have a gun you ask? Why, in a fashion very similar to what happened in the 1930's in Nazi Germany. Only more intrusive and efficient:
You probably know the basics by now: a Florida resident and CCW holder named John Filippidis was traveling down I-95 on the way home from New Jersey, when he was pulled over and his car was rifled through by Maryland law enforcement officers looking for the gun in his safe in Florida."
Maryland State has a network of technical security databases which access the databases of all other states who comply and coordinate with them. For states who do not willfully comply, or those who are not set up to align technically, Maryland mines data from various LEO systems.The addition of the middle of the night raids should be starting soon I suspect. The CCW holders will be first to be disarmed of course... Read More......
Maryland has a rather innocuous sounding name for the intelligence hub which contains this data, it’s called Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center.
The intelligence analysis hub has access to, and contains, Florida’s CCW list (among other identification systems) and mines the state’s database systems for vehicle plate numbers of the holders. These license plate numbers are then stored in a cross referencing database within the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center.
And RTWT of course. Read More......Only 11% of ObamaCare signups previously uninsured? « Hot Air: "After the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, the administration hired Accenture as the new lead contractor. The deal is estimated to be worth $90 million and is now in the hands of the poster boy for global labor arbitrage and offshore tax havens.“In all probability” doesn’t mean “confirmed.” This is conjecture, but conjecture based on numbers. Besides, this is the very thing for which Team Obama attacked Mitt Romney in 2012, is it not?"
Accenture has 80,000 Indian workers, 35,000 in the Philippines and only 40,000 in the United States. Over 40 percent of their worth comes from outsourcing. In all probability, the tech jobs awarded under this contract and paid for with US tax dollars are going abroad.
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