This could be the most expensive bacon ever: Pigs that have a price of $10,000 on their heads.
Problem is, the money is not going to the farmer; it’s being demanded
from the farmer. By the state. Because they’re the wrong breed of pig.
According to a report from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund,
which advocates for policies that allow producers to deliver food
products directly to Americans, the Michigan Department of Natural
Resources alleges that there are 70 “illegal pigs” being raised by
farmer Mark Baker.
Authorities say the animals, each and every one, are a violation of
the state’s invasive species order. The state is demanding a fine of up
to $10,000 per violation, or $700,000 for Baker’s actions in raising for
sale 70 pigs “the state deems the wrong breed.”
It was just over a year ago when Baker sued the state over that
invasive species order. He had raised the pigs for years, yet suddenly
the state told him they were illegal.
The Defense Fund said supporters of food rights from around the
country will gather at the Missaukee County Courthouse in Lake City,
Mich., at 2 p.m. on July 12 for a hearing in the case.
The Defense Fund is providing Baker’s counsel.
“The ISO supposedly was issued so the state could get rid of feral
pigs; but the way DNR is interpreting the order, it could be applied to
any domestically raised hog, threatening the livelihood of small, family
farming operations,” the group explained.
The state agency had announced it would decide whether a pig was allowed or not based on its physical characteristics.
The new rules, with the force of law, took effect April 1, 2012, and Baker has been fighting ever since.
“Because of the ISO, I have not been able to process or sell any pork
in Michigan since April 2012 or sell the live pigs. This threatens the
viability of my farm, my income and the health and well-being of my
family,” Baker said. “This order denies consumers access to the foods of
their choice and violates property rights and the right to make a
living. Farmers and other hog owners in Michigan must either get rid of
their now ‘prohibited’ property or become felons.”
Details of the ongoing battle are online at Bakers Green Acres.
WND previously reported the small pork producers were worried their fight with “Big Pork” in the state would not go well.
They warned the bureaucrats could simply by describing a type of pig outlaw it, costing the farmers their livelihoods.
At the time, Ed Golden, a spokesman for the state agency, said the
state was trying to work with farmers who raised the now-banned animals
to bring them into compliance with the new dictate.
Pete Kennedy of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund called the move a “brazen power grab” by the state.
“The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is using the state
Invasive Species Act to expand its jurisdiction beyond hunting and
fishing to farming operations,” he said.
Kennedy said the DNR has issued its own order to allow agents to
“seize and destroy heritage breeds of pigs that farmers are raising; and
DNR will not compensate farmers whose pigs are destroyed. In the logic
of the department, ‘Indemnification in (Michigan) statute is for
livestock and invasive species are not livestock, and are therefore, not
eligible for indemnification.’”
Kennedy said the Michigan Pork Producers Association “wants all pigs
to be raised in confinement facilities, and the best way to achieve that
is to make it illegal to raise certain swine, especially those offering
alternatives to the white pork raised in confinement.’”
The state has listed a number of characteristics, including
underbelly fur, tail structure, ear structure and skeletal appearance,
that would define an animal as banned.
“Yet these are the very pigs that farmers and ranchers in Michigan
have been raising for decades. The state doesn’t seem to care about
this, and there are indications that this ISO may have been nudged into
position by the conventional pork industry as a tactic to wipe out its
competition of local, specialty ranching conducted by small families and
dedicated farmers who don’t work for the big pork corporations.”
http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/most-expensive-bacon-ever-10000-per-animal/
The $100,000 Obamaphone for Millionaires
The FCC spends billions subsidizing high-end golf and ski developments.
The Obamaphone lady
is moving up in America: She isn’t a rabble-rouser in Cleveland
anymore, but a real-estate developer in Maui, a ski-resort owner in
Breckenridge, and a dedicated golfer in Scottsdale — and, more
important, the telephone companies that serve them. And she isn’t
costing taxpayers a couple hundred bucks a year in subsidies, but more
than $100,000 per household.
That’s the finding of a
new study released by economists Thomas Hazlett of George Mason
University and Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute, who
have turned their attention to the aptly named “high-cost fund”
administered by the Federal Communications Commission and supported by
the 16 percent universal-service tax levied on everybody from landline
users to voice-over-IP customers. The fund has spent some $64 billion on
carrier subsidies since 1998, and while there is some dispute about how
many additional households have phone connections thanks to those
outlays, the highest estimates run around 600,000, meaning a cost of
more than $100,000 per household.
The program was originally developed to help extend basic communications
to poor people in remote rural areas without telephone service. But the
United States ran out of poor people in remote rural areas without
telephone service a good long while ago. The administrators of federal
programs fear nothing so much as looking for a job in the private
sector, so the program found new products to subsidize, such as
broadband internet, and new places to subsidize them: No more dirt farms
in the sticks, but high-end developments — “mansion-lined gated golf
communities” in the words of Dave Herman of the Alliance for
Generational Equity, which sponsored the study.
According to Hazlett, the $4.5 billion-a-year program has connected at most 0.5 percent of U.S. households to telephone service.
Those
recent beneficiaries in Maui and Scottsdale do not include very many
poor people. But the 16 percent tax that supports their subsidies is
paid by a great many poor people, especially young immigrants who spend a
disproportionate share of their income on international long-distance
calls, “a very high tax on low-income people,” Hazlett says.
The
problem is a telecom-subsidy model that relies on a cost-plus model of
pricing, which gives rural telephone companies an incentive to keep
their costs as high as possible. The result is what the result always is
when private-sector rapacity encounters public-sector incompetence.
When critics began circulating those mind-blowing per-line cost
estimates a few years back, the FCC responded with a series of “reforms”
that locked in the worst elements of the program.
Confronted
with evidence that the program was in some cases costing as much as
$23,000 per line every year, the FCC capped subsidies at $3,000 per line
per year — still far in excess of what a mobile-phone plan or
satellite-based internet-and-telephone package would cost. (And those
are just the subsidies — consumers pay out-of-pocket on top of those.)
Spending on the program had been in decline, expected to go down to $4
billion in 2012. So the FCC pulled a classic bureaucratic move: It
decided that “demand” for the subsidies would be set at a minimum of
$4.5 billion a year, and forbade the program’s administers to estimate
its needs at any less than that. As Wallsten put it, the program’s new
budget is a floor, not a ceiling. So while the FCC is phasing in
restrictions on the per-line subsidies, the total outlays under the
program are locked in at their current levels — or higher. Average
payments will be reduced, but total spending will stay the same or rise,
meaning that the FCC will need to find more targets to subsidize.
“You
can call it corporate welfare, sure,” Hazlett says, “But it’s a
small-business plan, basically. The small, rural companies are the ones
that really cash in. There’s more than a thousand of them, and they are
literally developed around the idea of federal subsidies for high-cost
performance. They wouldn’t exist without the subsidies.”
The
authors said they were “stunned” that the Obamaphone lady became such a
national scandal when “wheelbarrows full of dole” were being directed
at grasping telecoms and their affluent customers. If only people knew
where the money is really being wasted.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353104/100000-obamaphone-millionaires-kevin-d-williamso
Commerce Dept. Spent $2.7 Million to Fix
Nonexistent Computer Virus
The Commerce Department destroyed more than $170,000 worth of
working computers, televisions and cameras, all in response to a cyber threat
that “did not exist.”
The Economic Development Administration (EDA), which promotes innovation and
competitiveness within the Commerce Department, feared its IT network was
infected with a widespread virus, and ultimately spent more than $2.7 million
to fix a problem that was nothing more than “common malware.”
According to an inspector general report
released on June 26, the EDA based its decision to destroy its computers
on “inaccurate information.”
In December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first notified
the EDA that it had a “potential” malware infection within one of its IT
systems.
Believing the problem was widespread, the EDA “decided to isolate its IT
systems from the [Herbert
C. Hoover
Building] HCHB network
and destroy IT components to ensure that a potential infection could not
persist,” the report states.
“However, OIG found neither evidence of a widespread malware infection nor
support for EDA’s decision to isolate its IT systems from the HCHB network.”
Worried it was being hacked by foreign governments, the EDA had hired a
cybersecurity contractor to look into the initial threat in January 2012.
Within two weeks, the contractor found no evidence of a malware infection, but
continued an investigation until May.
There was never any indication the network was being hacked, and only six
components were found to have malware infections that “could have been
remediated using typical containment measures.”
The EDA’s Chief Information Officer, however, “concluded that the risk, or
potential risk, of extremely persistent malware and nation-state activity
(which did not exist) was great enough to necessitate the physical destruction
of all of EDA’s IT components,” the IG said.
“EDA’s management agreed with this risk assessment and EDA initially
destroyed more than $170,000 worth of its IT components, including desktops,
printers, TVs, cameras, computer mice, and keyboards,” they said.
Not only did the agency have $170,500 worth of working equipment destroyed,
they paid $4,300 to have it done.
The ordeal ended up costing $2,747,000—which is over half of EDA’s budget
for the year—including more than $1 million for “temporary infrastructure.”
In fact, the EDA wanted to destroy all of its computers and IT equipment,
valued at over $3 million, but ran out of funds to do so.
“By August 1, 2012,” the report states, “EDA had exhausted funds for this
effort and therefore halted the destruction of its remaining IT components.”
“EDA intended to resume this activity once funds were available,” it
said. “However, the destruction of IT components was clearly unnecessary
because only common malware was present on EDA’s IT systems.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/commerce-dept-spent-27-million-fix-nonexistent-computer-virus#sthash.zQ15PO4v.dpuf
Taxpayers Billed $94K to Fly Scientists to Cyber
Workshop in Vietnam
A team of U.S.
scientists will spend more than $94,000 of federal taxpayer money on travel
costs when they attend a cyberinfrastructure workshop in Vietnam later
this year instead of using existing technology to hold the conference online.
Cyberinfrastructure is the all-encompassing term given to databases,
microchips, and the larger Internet universe that allows individuals to share
data across multiple platforms worldwide.
The
one-year $94,432 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its
Division of Advanced CyberInfrastructure was awarded on March 22, 2013.
According
to the grant
abstract, "the NSF funds will support travel for U.S. scientists and
graduate students working with collaborators in the countries of the LMR”
(Lower Mekong Region, which includes Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and
Myanmar, formerly known as Burma) “and/or collaborating with counterparts in
the region, including those from across many NSF divisions."
The
workshop will focus on “forming and enhancing” opportunities for collaboration
between scientists in the U.S. and their counterparts in Southeast Asia,
developing and maintaining cyberinfrastructure in the region, and establishing
rules for research practices there as well.
Principal
investigator James Williams of Indiana
University said in the
grant abstract that the workshop's broader impacts will "include
increasing participation by researchers from countries of the LMR in
international science and engineering projects."
Neither
Williams nor a spokeswoman for the NSF responded to questions posed by
CNSNews.com.
The
work of these scientists will be in addition to a larger, multi-million-dollar initiative by the U.S. State
Department.. The goal of that initiative is to “enhance cooperation in the
areas of environment, health, education, and infrastructure development"
between the United States and countries in the Mekong River
region, including “a web-based ‘Virtual Secretariat’ to enhance coordination
and planning.”
The
Lower Mekong Initiative (LMI) was launched after a July 23, 2009 meeting
between then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Foreign Ministers
of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam in Thailand. Myanmar joined the initiative in
July 2012.
A
July 2011 press release on the State Department website announced
that LMI received $221.25 million in funding in 2011.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/taxpayers-billed-94k-fly-scientists-cyber-workshop-vietnam#sthash.iixwG4Dq.dpuf
This Year's Duke Lacrosse Case
By Ann Coulter
This week, instead of attacking a Hispanic senator, Marco Rubio, I
will defend a Hispanic citizen, George Zimmerman, on trial for the
murder of Trayvon Martin. (Zimmerman would make a better senator.)
It's becoming painfully obvious why no charges were brought against
Zimmerman in this case -- until Al Sharpton got involved. All the
eyewitness accounts, testimony, ballistics and forensics keep backing up
Zimmerman. We should send a big, fat bill for the whole thing to
Sharpton, courtesy of MSNBC.
With the prosecution's witnesses making the defense's case, the
inquisitors' last stand is to claim that, if the races were reversed,
the black guy would have been instantly charged with murder. As
explained in The New York Times:
"Had Mr. Martin shot and killed Mr. Zimmerman under similar
circumstances, black leaders say, the case would have barreled down a
different path: Mr. Martin would have been quickly arrested by the
Sanford Police Department and charged in the killing, without the
benefit of the doubt." (Also, CNN could have dropped the "white" and
referred to Zimmerman exclusively as "Hispanic.")
The people who say this are counting on the rest of us being too polite
to mention that it is nearly impossible to imagine such a case in a
world where half of all murders and a majority of robberies are
committed by blacks. To reverse the races with the same set of facts,
first, we're going to need a gated, mixed-race community, similar to the
Retreat at Twin Lakes, that has recently experienced a rash of
robberies by white guys. The only way to do that is to enter "The
Twilight Zone."
There were at least eight burglaries in the 14 months before Zimmerman's
encounter with Martin. Numerous media accounts admit that "most" of
these were committed by black males. I'm waiting to hear about a single
crime at Twin Lakes that was not committed by a black male.
Just six months before Zimmerman's encounter with Martin, two men had
broken into the home of a neighbor, Olivia Bertalan, while she was alone
with her infant son. She had just enough time to call 911 before
running upstairs and locking herself in a room. The burglars knew she
was home, but proceeded to rob the place anyway, even trying to enter
the locked room where she held her crying child.
Bertalan had seen the burglars just before they broke into her house --
one at the front door and one at the back. They were young black males.
They lived in the Retreat by Twin Lakes.
In another case, a black teenager strode up to Zimmerman's house and, in
broad daylight, stole a bicycle off the front porch. The bike was never
recovered.
Weeks before Zimmerman saw Martin, he witnessed another young black male
peering into the window of a neighbor's house. He called the cops, but
by the time they arrived, the suspect was gone.
A few days later, another house was burglarized. The thieves made off
with jewelry and a new laptop. Roofers working across the street had
seen two black teenagers near the house at the time of the robbery. When
they spotted one of the teens the next day, they called the police.
This time, the roofers followed the suspect so he wouldn't get away. The
cops arrived and found the stolen laptop in his backpack. This was the
same black teenager Zimmerman had seen looking in a neighbor's window.
The only reason it's hard to imagine the Zimmerman case with the races
reversed is that it's hard to imagine a white teenager living in a
mixed-race, middle-class community, mugging a black homeowner. This is
not a problem of society's reactions, but of the facts.
There is, however, at least one case of a black homeowner fatally
shooting a white troublemaker. He was not charged with murder.
In 2006, the ironically named John White was sound asleep at his nice
Long Island home when his teenage son woke him to say there was a mob of
white kids shouting epithets in front of the house. The family was in
no imminent danger. They could have called 911 and remained safely
behind locked doors.
But White grabbed a loaded Beretta and headed out to the end of the
driveway to confront the mob. A scuffle ensued and White ended up
shooting one of the kids in the face, killing him.
White was charged and convicted only of illegal weapons possession --
this was New York, after all -- and involuntary manslaughter. He was
sentenced to 20 months-to-four years in prison, but after serving five
months was pardoned by Gov. David Paterson.
With all due compassion for the kid who was killed, the public was
overwhelmingly on the father's side -- a fact still evident in Internet
postings about the case. The kids were punks menacing a law-abiding
homeowner. Even the prosecutor complained only that Paterson hadn't
called the victim's family first. The local NAACP had campaigned
aggressively on White's behalf. There were no threats to riot in case of
an acquittal.
The centerpiece of White's self-defense argument was his recollection of
his grandfather's stories about the Ku Klux Klan. George Zimmerman's
memory of young black males committing crimes at Twin Lakes is somewhat
more recent.
John White wasn't jumped, knocked to the ground, repeatedly punched, and
his skull knocked against the ground. He wasn't even touched, though he
claimed the white teen was lunging at him. Talk about no reason to
"follow," there was no reason for him to leave the safety of his locked
home. White's son knew the kids by name. They could have waited for the
cops.
So, yes, this case probably would be very different if Zimmerman and
Martin's races were reversed. It is only when the victim is black that
we must have a show trial, a million-dollar reward paid to the victim's
parents and the threat of riots.
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2013/07/10/this-years-duke-lacrosse-case-n1638235/page/full
Supposed Crimes of the Mind
With hate speech, it’s the perceived ideology of the perpetrator that matters most.
When do insensitive words destroy reputations?
It all depends.
Celebrity
chef Paula Deen was dropped by her TV network, her publisher, and many
of her corporate partners after she testified in a legal deposition that
she used the N-word some 30 years ago. The deposition was made in a
lawsuit against Deen and her brother over allegations of sexual and
racial harassment.
Actor
Alec Baldwin recently let loose with a barrage of homophobic crudities.
Unlike Deen, Baldwin spewed his epithets in the present. He tweeted
them publicly, along with threats of physical violence. So far he has
avoided Paula Deen’s ignominious fate.
Does race determine whether a perceived slur is an actual slur?
It depends.
Some
blacks use the N-word in ways supposedly different from those of
ill-intentioned white racists. Testimony revealed that the late Trayvon
Martin had used the N-word in reference to George Zimmerman and had also
referred to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” who was following him.
Some
members of the media have suggested that we should ignore such
inflammatory words and instead focus on whether Zimmerman, who has been
described as a “white Hispanic,” used coded racist language during his
911 call.
Actor Jamie Foxx offers nonstop racialist speech of the sort that a
white counterpart would not dare. At the recent NAACP Image Awards (of
all places), Foxx gushed: “Black people are the most talented people in
the world.” Earlier, on Saturday Night Live, Foxx had joked of his recent role in a Quentin Tarantino movie: “I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?”
Foxx has not suffered the fate of Paula Deen. He certainly has not
incurred the odium accorded comedian Michael Richards, who crudely used
the N-word in 2006 toward two African-American hecklers of his stand-up
routine.
Yet whites at times seem exempt from any fallout over the
slurring of blacks. Democratic Minnesota state representative Ryan
Winkler recently tweeted of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote
to update the Voting Rights Act: “VRA
majority is four accomplices to race discrimination and one Uncle
Thomas.” Winkler’s implication was that four of the jurists were
veritable racists, while Thomas was a sellout. After a meek apology,
nothing much happened to Winkler.
Winkler’s “Uncle Thomas” racial
slur was mild in comparison to the smear of Justice Thomas by MSNBC
talking head and African-American professor Michael Eric Dyson, who made
incendiary on-air comments invoking Hitler and the Holocaust.
Does profanity against women destroy celebrity careers? Apparently not.
TV talk-show host Bill Maher used two vulgar slang terms with reference to Sarah Palin, without any major consequences.
Those
Palin slurs were mild in comparison to late-night television icon David
Letterman’s crude riff that Palin’s then-14-year-old daughter had been
impregnated by baseball star Alex Rodriguez.
In contrast, when
talk-show host Rush Limbaugh demeaned activist Sandra Fluke as a “slut,”
outrage followed. Sponsors were pressured to drop Limbaugh. Some did.
Unlike the targeted Palin, Fluke became a national icon of popular
feminist resistance.
So how do we sort out all these slurs and the contradictory consequences that follow them?
Apparently,
racist, sexist, or homophobic words themselves do not necessarily earn
any rebuke. Nor is the race or gender of the speaker always a clue to
the degree of outrage that follows.
Instead, the perceived
ideology of the perpetrator is what matters most. Maher and Letterman,
being good liberals, could hardly be crude sexists. But when the
conservative Limbaugh uses similar terms, it must be a window into his
dark heart.
It’s
apparently OK for whites or blacks to slur the conservative Clarence
Thomas in racist terms. Saying anything similar of the late liberal
justice Thurgood Marshall would have been blasphemous.
In short, we are dealing not with actual word crimes, but with supposed thought crimes.
The liberal media and popular culture have become our self-appointed
thought police. Politics determines whether hate speech is a reflection
of real hate or just an inadvertent slip, a risqué joke, or an anguished
reaction to years of oppression.
Poor Paula Deen. She may protest accusations of racism by noting that
she supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. But the media
instead fixate on her Southern accent and demeanor, which supposedly
prove her speech was racist in a way that utterances by the left-wing
and cool Jamie Foxx could never be.
We cannot forgive the
conservative Mel Gibson for his despicable, drunken anti-Semitic rant.
But it appears we can pardon the liberal Alec Baldwin for his vicious,
homophobic outburst. The former smears are judged by the thought police
to be typical, but the latter slurs are surely aberrant.
The crime
is not hate speech, but hate thought — a state of mind that apparently
only self-appointed liberal referees can detect.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353130/supposed-crimes-mind-victor-davis-hanson
Late-Night
Shenanigans in the House
The House leadership appears to be pulling a fast one on the American public
and even fellow House members when it comes to the farm bill.
The House
has split up the farm-related programs and food stamps, which is
great news. However, they didn’t make a single reform. That’s not the worst
part, though.
Every five years or so, Congress passes a new farm bill.
The entire purpose of this reauthorization process is for Congress to fix the
law if problems exist. The House appears to be doing away with this process for
many of the most costly farm program provisions. As a result, bad public policy
could be locked in indefinitely.
House leaders have sold this flawed
farm-related bill in part by getting rid of existing "permanent law." So it may
surprise many that the bill would just replace this existing permanent law with
new permanent law that may even be broader in scope.
Further, the House
introduced the text of its farm-only bill last night, and current plans are to
vote on the bill as soon as mid-morning today. They are rushing it through the
process and not giving members a chance to offer amendments, properly review the
bill, or even determine the extent of this potential bait and switch when it
comes to permanent law.
This flawed bill simply brings the same troublesome farm
programs up for a vote that were considered and soundly rejected by the House a
few weeks ago.
Everything that was bloated and egregious in the bill is still
bloated and egregious.
- It still goes out of its way to tax Christmas trees, in an effort to
override the Obama Administration's decision to not tax Christmas trees.
- It still drives up food prices—which hurts low-income Americans
most.
- It still spends more than President Obama even wanted to spend on the
costliest farm program, crop insurance.
- It still hands
out taxpayer money to these surprising recipients.
As
Heritage expert Daren Bakst wrote:
The current agriculture portions of the House bill need to be
reformed. They were flawed when they were combined with the food stamp program,
and they will still be flawed if they are separated from food stamps. These
sections don’t magically get better by being on their own.
Bakst
noted that the House’s insistence on pushing the same old bill to a quick
vote—without allowing amendments—only makes
matters worse:
When a bill makes Obama look fiscally responsible, it’s a financial
fiasco. When the process would trample on open and representative government,
it’s an insult to American citizens.
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/07/11/morning-bell-late-night-farm-bill-shenanigans-in-the-house/?roi=echo3-16220090235-13616789-faf3caca1c8149dbf5b68b54abba7650&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
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