Yup.

Oh Monday. Why?

Right now I have nothing to watch on TV on Sundays, Wednesdays, Thursdays or Saturdays ... can we not coordinate the schedule to suit ME? Tonight I have The Voice, Sleepy Hollow and Blacklist. Yeah.

I finished the Jane Austen book. It was interesting but not earth shattering. I'm auditioning books for my next read. I'll let you know.

Otherwise, just plugging along.

Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster

Current Events - September 30, 2013

I Will Not Comply

Like most members of the Congress that passed it and, undoubtedly, the president of the United States who signed it, I have not read the entirety of the ill-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Yet there is one aspect concerning that legislation of which I am certain: I will not comply.

I will not comply because I am a free citizen of the United States, not a subject of its government.  I consider non-compliance with this monstrosity and the tens of thousands of pages of regulations that are to be enforced by an unelected bureaucracy, and that have left a gigantic carbon footprint on our environment and the United States Constitution, a duty.

Non-compliance is my executive order, and that order reads in part that I do not recognize any government's claim on my action or inaction in the marketplace, nor upon any personal information I am unwilling to divulge.

I will not submit to a cabal who read George Orwell's 1984 not as a terrifying warning, but as an instruction manual.  Nor will I submit to the dictates of those who attempt to trample the right of free speech of others in the halls of government who are warning us about the looming tyranny.  I refer to those sons of liberty who, as Camus wrote, "are not all legitimate or to be admired. Those who applaud it only when it justifies their privileges and shout nothing but censorship when it threatens them are not on our side."

If (when) the IRS or HHS or any other such entity attempts to extort a tax or fee of any kind for not participating in mandated commerce, they will be met with resistance.  I will not pay any such tax or fee.

I live in Massachusetts, where, once upon a time, a spirit of resistance and independence animated much of the citizenry.  But many here have devolved from the shot heard round the world to sheltering in place.  Not I -- nor many of my fellow Bay Staters, who are outnumbered but undaunted.

Refusing to comply with the dictates of an illegitimate law that is selectively enforced, and from which the privileged few are exempted, is not, in the annals of American history, brave or difficult.  Those who refuse to comply are not barefoot in the snows of Valley Forge, crying out in agony at Gettysburg, or rushing the cockpit of Flight 93.  While there will be consequences to civil disobedience in defiance of oppression, any difficulties can be and will be overcome.

We are, however, drawing a line that the forces of repression, socialism, and tyranny must not cross.  Some might even color the line red.  Yet unlike a certain other, this red line is immovable.  I yield nothing on the plane of freedom.  I will not take any small step that is, in actuality, one giant leap backward to the darkness we thought we had vanquished.

Who is with me?

 http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/i_will_not_comply.html#ixzz2gOFGX2eG

ObamaCare: The Latest and Greatest Bastardization of the Constitution

One of the great illusions progressives cling to is the notion that the majority of Americans do not really oppose ObamaCare.  Interspersed among the majority of Americans against ObamaCare is that minority of Americans who advocate a strict single-payer system and therefore don't think the bill goes "far enough."  Once you account for them, it's not really a majority of Americans against the bill -- just a bit of finagled data that conservatives use as political fodder.
Let's first state the obvious.  If you are for single-payer healthcare, you probably support ObamaCare.  President Obama is on record advocating single-payer, and this health care bill is the "foot in the door" to single-payer that Democrats have sought for so long.
In reality, there are three types of people who actually do support ObamaCare: those who support single-payer, those who ignorantly deny that it is an effort to institute single-payer, and those who are oblivious to the implications of single-payer altogether, but stand to benefit from its implementation.  That's it.
But the obvious popular opposition to ObamaCare is a thorn in the progressives' side.  Ever the devotees to democracy, they believe that if they can just somehow convey that the majority of the people really want ObamaCare, it somehow justifies its implementation and overrules those loud voices of dissent.
But ObamaCare is wrong not because the majority of Americans oppose it, and to think otherwise is to miss the point entirely.  It's wrong because of something much more fundamental.
The legislation is a disgusting and tyrannical seizure of liberty from private business and the American individual.  There is no other way to describe it.  It is the coerced extraction of wealth from one to be bestowed upon another.  ObamaCare is, by design, to be financed by private insurance companies, government subsidies, and more generally, the young, the healthy, and the "well-off" so that the old, the unhealthy, and the less well-off can have it so much cheaper, or in some cases, for free. 
Advocates of ObamaCare, of course, have no problem with this.  Take Alex Ruthrauf over at Wonkette, who argues that, sure, facts definitively show that there will be "roughly $621 billion" spent in the next ten years on ObamaCare, but it won't be "you, me, and the two other members of our typical family" paying for it "out of pocket."  Greedy insurance companies will.  Oh, and government subsidies will pay for a bunch, too.  And yeah, yeah, it'll be paid for by people who are young, healthy, and well-off "for now," but you've got to remember that one day they may be on the receiving end of all these great benefits that they are forced to finance today. 
Such a marvelous disconnect from reality might be charmingly naïve, if not for the fact that it represents a mindset that is so disturbingly widespread.  This bears repeating: those greedy insurance companies get their money from American individuals and families, and alas, there is no government subsidy tree sprouting billions in the White House backyard.  Chris Conover at Forbes writes:

[W]e can be pretty certain that insurance companies (especially if they are greedy!) are unlikely to be paying any tab without turning around and passing the cost along to (gasp!) American families.  Similarly, Uncle Sam has nowhere else but American families to keep replenishing the coffers.  In short, American families manifestly WILL be absorbing every single penny of the $621B in added health spending created by ObamaCare and it is intellectually disingenuous (and certainly no contribution to informed debate) to suggest otherwise.

So here are the facts: you and I, and the two other members of your typical family, will be financing a new entitlement -- health care -- for millions of Americans.  We have earned our money, which is our property, and we are being forced to surrender it, contributing to a slush fund which will finance others' welfare. 
This conclusion will raise eyebrows for some.  One might ask, "Well, what's the difference between that and Social Security?" 
Well, nothing.  Social Security's enactment was an affront to our constitutional rights as well.  FDR, being sick of the Supreme Court striking down much of his New Deal legislation, threatened to pack the Court with six judges of his choosing to ensure that his vision was fulfilled.  In fear of FDR's scheme, the Court had an apparent shift in position to uphold Social Security -- the "switch in time that saved nine."
What has always fascinated me is the difference between the majority and dissenting opinions in the rulings on Social Security, particularly Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, which ruled on the unemployment insurance component of the Social Security Act.  In this case, it was the dissenting opinion that broadly invoked the Constitution and the distribution of power, leased upward from the citizen to the state, then to the federal government.  Justice McReynolds writes:

Can it be controverted that the great mass of the business of Government -- that involved in social relations, the internal arrangements of the body politic, the mental and moral culture of men, the development of local resources of wealth, the punishment of crimes in general, the preservation of order, the relief of the needy or otherwise unfortunate members of society -- did in practice remain with the States; that none of these objects of local concern are by the Constitution expressly or impliedly prohibited to the States, and that none of them are by any express language of the Constitution transferred to the United States?  Can it be claimed that any of these functions of local administration and legislation are vested in the Federal Government by any implication?  I have never found anything in the Constitution which is susceptible of such a construction.

On the other hand, what was Justice Cardozo's majority argument for the legality of upholding the unemployment insurance mandate?  Little more than an appeal to the gods of progress.  Seriously.  The majority opinion is essentially a long diatribe about how regulatory taxes don't have to be used for explicit purposes -- that they can also be used for...well, any secondary purpose.  Furthermore, he writes that "it is now settled by decision. The conception of spending power advocated by Hamilton ... has prevailed over that of Madison."  Yes, that would be James Madison, widely known as the "Father of the Constitution," and the man most associated with its composition.  This conclusion was, of course, reached not solely based on interpretation of the Constitution, but based on more recent judicial precedent and government practices.  Cardozo goes on by saying that it is "too late today for the argument to be heard with tolerance that in a crisis so extreme the use of moneys of the nation is a use for any purpose [other] than a promotion of the general welfare."
Sound familiar?  Of course it does. 
There is little we can do about Social Security now, beyond minor reforms.  Most Americans have invested if they've ever held a job, some are vested and collecting their expected returns, still others are collecting well beyond what they ever put in, and all the while politicians continually raid the Social Security piggybank.  It's a staple of American life, however unconstitutional its genesis.
But it is because Social Security was passed, because Medicare was later implemented, because the welfare state has been ever-expanding, that progressives today think there is no harm, and that, indeed, it is their moral duty to facilitate the federal government's maintenance of the poor via wealth redistribution.  They actually believe that taking money from those who have more and giving it to those who have less is the proper role of our federal government.  This has been the role of a great many monarchs and dictators and socialist legislatures throughout history, but one thing is beyond dispute: our founders never dreamed that this would be the role of the American government.  For if the federal government has the right to tax for any purpose, what purpose does any other limitation upon the federal government's power in the Constitution have?
Yet generations of progressives have bastardized the Constitution to suit their own ideological agenda, and as such, many Americans have forgotten the very core principles upon which our nation was founded.
What we are seeing today is a late reaction to a century in which progressives thoroughly corrupted our purest ideals of individualism and liberty and transformed government's role -- without amending the Constitution to allow the government to usurp the power it seized.  This power was stolen from the States by executive intimidation, judicial activism, and a blind devotion to wrongful "precedent."  Is it really possible that Barack Obama and Harry Reid are surprised by the vehement opposition to this latest, and perhaps greatest, government-instituted subversion of our liberty? 
Conservatives and libertarians, like our founders, reject the notion that we are subjects of a centralized government.  We are rising up in resentment, and not simply because we know that we are in the majority.  We are rising up in resentment against a central government which disregards our foundational contract.  We are demanding that health care decisions be left to individuals and the states, because the federal government has absolutely no constitutional right to demand that all Americans adhere to the uniform health care regulations and redistributive measures set by the edicts of an obviously corrupt central government in Washington. 

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/obamacare_the_latest_and_greatest_bastardization_of_the_constitution.html#ixzz2gOFnVbTF

Keeping the Poor Poor (Until They're Not)

Government data indicate that the U.S. remains far from winning the longest war in its history: the war on poverty.

The latest line of argument from defenders of the welfare system is that we are measuring poverty inaccurately; counting welfare as income, they suggest, would show that we are winning the war on poverty.  Proponents of changing the way we classify the data on America's poor would accomplish little more than a subterfuge to distract from glaring flaws with the status quo of government social welfare programs. 

The economic downturn that began in 2007 has officially been over since June of 2009, but the end of the recession did not mark the beginning of meaningful prosperity for many Americans.  With the coming of the debt ceiling and proposed reforms to the government's food stamp program, there is a serious debate unfolding about what the government should do to bring people out of poverty.

Census data for 2012 have just been released showing that poverty levels have remained persistently high at 15 percent.  Nearly 48 million Americans find themselves on the food stamp rolls, and the numbers have been on an upward trajectory.  At the same time, Republicans in Congress are pushing through changes to the food stamp program that would create stronger work requirements, time limits, and stricter eligibility requirements for those receiving other government benefits.  The food stamp program, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), is currently projected to cost $764 billion over the next ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.  The proposed reforms are expected to reduce spending by $39 billion over that time and remove several million people from eligibility for the program.

As the political battle over food stamps was being joined, the New York Times published an opinion piece, by Sheldon H. Danziger of the Russell Sage Foundation, attempting to justify the government's outlays in fighting the war on poverty in light of the recent Census Bureau report.  His thesis was that spending on government programs such as food stamps has been successful in reducing poverty; the problem is that we are not measuring the data properly.  Programs such as food stamps are working, despite the depressing numbers from the Census Bureau, or so the argument goes.

Mr. Danziger took aim at Republican arguments that social welfare programs are both too expensive and ineffective, typified by Congressman Paul Ryan's statement that "[w]e have spent $15 trillion from the federal government fighting poverty" and remain stuck with the highest poverty rates in a generation.  Mr. Danziger countered that if programs such as food stamps and a myriad of others were counted as actual income to recipients, the poverty level would be much lower.  For example, counting food stamps as income would mean that 4 million people were no longer below the poverty level.

Such a new measure of poverty, in fact, will be released by the Census Bureau in October.  It will help show that decades of expensive government programs fighting poverty haven't been a waste (the reasoning goes).  Looked at in this light, programs such as food stamps are responsible for removing millions of people from poverty.

Mr. Danziger is pushing sophistry.  And he was recently joined by the New York Times' Paul Krugman, who made a similar argument about the measure of poverty.  Their purpose is to obscure failures for which the economic data lay responsibility plainly at the feet of the government anti-poverty programs they support.

Imagining welfare to be income does not change the reality of people's poverty.  It is not winning any battle in the war on poverty.  The rate of poverty should rightly be a measure of those people in need of assistance because they have little or no income of their own.  Removing them as the focus of our measure of poverty would mean sweeping the issue under the rug.  Proclaiming that the program has lifted 4 million people from poverty would be deliberately misleading, but for those who have a vested interest in proving the wisdom of the war on poverty, it is a seductive argument.

Measuring poverty in this way does nothing to rebut the policy argument that Mr. Danziger attacks -- namely, that trillions of dollars in federal government spending have done nothing to win the war on poverty.  Economic dependency is hardly something to be celebrated or tolerated.  Most Americans would agree that winning the war on poverty would mean getting people jobs. 

The undercurrent of Mr. Danziger's piece is that government welfare programs shouldn't be touched because they still help people.  So, one might argue, if the money is helping people who are currently poor, why reform the program?  Why seek to strike more people from the food stamp program?

The negative uproar over the reforms to the food stamp program gives insufficient consideration to the negative externalities of welfare spending in general.  The current system of government welfare, of which SNAP is but one piece, distorts incentives to such a degree that it effectively discourages people from joining the workforce.  A recent Cato Institute study found that in 35 states, a recipient of typically available welfare support would be receiving more income than that available through a minimum-wage job or other entry-level positions.  In 13 states, welfare pays more than a $15-per-hour job, and in 11 states, it pays more than the average first-year wage for a teacher.  In 39 states, welfare pays better than the starting salary for a secretary; in 3 states, it pays more than a position as an entry-level computer programmer.

Limited and prudent support for individuals experiencing periods of unemployment makes sense, morally and economically; but the data indicate that there is a point at which that support siphons away the economic incentive for a recipient to find a job and the programs become self-defeating.  In short, this is how you lose a war on poverty.

A new measure of poverty that renames failure as success won't help anyone, though it may fool some.  At bottom, it reflects an attitude that sees more people receiving government aid as a policy victory, not a problem to be remedied.  Those concerned about the plight of people struggling below the poverty line should see the current debate over food stamps as a cause for a rigorous reexamination of the nation's welfare programs as a whole, and seek ways to reform them to serve their intended function of ending poverty.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/keeping_the_poor_poor_until_theyre_not.html#ixzz2gODlHnlO

Reid Stopped Negotiations to Avert Shutdown

If the government shuts down at midnight on Monday, it will largely be the result of a strategy pursued by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Democrats have lined up so squarely behind Reid's strategy that President Obama cancelled planned negotiations with congressional leaders to find a resolution. Not only has Reid refused to even talk with Republicans, he has employed tactics that seemed designed to "run out the clock" ahead of a shutdown.

The Senate will reconvene at 2pm on Monday to consider the latest House-passed Continuing Resolution. This CR, which also delays ObamaCare for one year, was passed in the wee hours Saturday. Yet, the Senate remained away from Washington on Sunday. Had it immediately returned to consider the CR, it would have bought precious time for the chambers to hammer out an agreement to avoid a shutdown.
Convening at 2pm, however, leaves just 10 hours until the government's spending authority expires. Given the slow pace of action in the Senate, it seems almost impossible that Congress can now prevent a partial government shutdown.

“He’s been the rock … and he’s had our whole caucus behind him,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said about Reid. “Because if we negotiate on a short-term [government funding bill], what are [Republicans] going to do on a long-term bill? What are they going to do on the debt ceiling?”

Reid took a similar cavalier approach to the first House CR, which defunded ObamaCare. Passed a little over a week ago, Reid again waited until after the weekend to take action. Had he instead immediately filed the motions necessary to begin Senate action, Congress would have gained an additional few days to negotiate a solution.

Reid's actions suggest he is eager for a government shutdown. The conventional wisdom is that Republicans will be blamed for any shutdown, because the media will blame them for being obstructionists. This happened during the last government shutdown in 1996, although it is unclear how much political damage the GOP suffered since it maintained its Congressional majorities for the next decade.

The media landscape is not what is was in 1996. Reid's insistence on not even speaking with Congressional Republicans, also, begs the question of who is being unreasonable. Reid may want to avoid negotiations on the larger budget and fiscal issues, but that is a necessary feature of representative government.

Harry Reid is the architect of the coming government shutdown. He, and his caucus, will be made to own it.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/30/Reid-Stopped-Spending-Negotiations-to-Avert-Shutdown

US economy boomed during 1995/1996 shutdown

Every major economic indicator in the United States improved during and after the Clinton-era government shutdown that has dominated news analysis columns throughout the Defund Obamacare debate.
Although the spending gaps that occurred from November 1995 to January 1996 are depicted almost unanimously by politicians and the establishment media as disasters for the United States, in fact the so-called shutdowns, during which a portion of government spending was temporarily reduced, did no discernible damage to the American economy, and may have boosted the financial well-being of the American people.

“I mean whatever effect Obamacare might have on the economy is far less than even a few days of government shutdown,” President Obama declared in a speech to supporters Thursday, giving a characteristic point of view that seems to be shared by a majority of Americans, who strongly oppose a government shutdown.

A review of economic performance, however, tells a very different story. The spending gaps of the Clinton presidency occurred from November 14 through November 19, 1995 and from December 16, 1995 to January 6, 1996.

Despite the greatly ballyhooed furloughs of government employees, unemployment stayed even at 5.6 percent during November 1995, the period of the first spending gap, which ended when a deal cut by President Bill Clinton and Republican legislators allowed government to stay funded at 75 percent.
Unemployment actually dropped to 5.5 percent during the second spending gap, which was more complete than the first.

Unemployment continued to plummet in the months following the shutdown, as a hamstrung Clinton allowed the rate of government spending increases to slow and headed toward the eventual budget surpluses that became the highlight of Clinton’s legacy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment dropped half a percentage point within a year of the first shutdown and had dipped below 5 percent by the spring of 1997.

More surprisingly, gross domestic product increased during both quarters covered by the Clinton-era shutdowns. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP began the fourth quarter of 1995 at $7.7 trillion and ended the second quarter of 1996 at $7.9 trillion. By the end of the second quarter 1996 GDP had topped $8 trillion.

Personal consumption expenditures, gross private domestic investment and personal income also increased during and immediately after the shutdown.

The GDP numbers are particularly striking because government spending is given outsized weight in GDP measures, which assume that every dollar in federal spending results in a full dollar’s worth of economic activity. Nevertheless, GDP continued to climb despite the suspension of transfer payments.

With a recent CNBC poll showing 59 percent opposition to the current shutdown threat, few are willing to speak up for the 1995-96 shutdown, though Newt Gingrich, who was House Speaker at the time, did argue over the summer that the dispute helped Republicans and paved the way to balanced budgets.

By focusing only on public policy, however, Gingrich is being too modest. The best argument for the Clinton-era shutdown is found in the private economy. According to Federal Reserve flow of funds data [pdf], personal income also spiked throughout the period of the shutdown, from $5.2 trillion in the fourth quarter of 1995 to $6.3 trillion in the first quarter and $6.4 trillion in the second quarter of 1996.

One economic indicator that did take a dip during the shutdown period was the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index, a “soft” measure that takes account of psychological rather than financial effects. Consumer confidence dipped sharply in December 1995 but rebounded rapidly throughout 1996.



That the Clinton-era shutdown produced no negative effects on our nation’s prosperity is not entirely surprising, according to one economist. Mark Vaughn, a fellow at the Weidenbaum Center at Washington University in St. Louis, notes that economic growth in the mid-1990s was more vigorous than it is today, and that the shutdown, however much it has grown in the popular imagination, was actually brief, totaling only 26 days over a period of three months.

“All the models we have of consumer behavior show that people spend based on their lifetime income, subject to short-term liquidity issues they may have,” Vaughn told The Daily Caller. “If people expect this to be a short shutdown, you’re not going to see much effect.”

Vaughn compares the non-disaster of the mid-90s to this year’s panic over the budget sequester, which also failed to inflict significant damage on the economy. “If you think about it, government does two things,” he says. “It purchases stuff and buys labor. For the labor part, the gap probably won’t last very long, and in the past people ended up getting paid for the time off; even if they don’t you’re most likely only talking about a few days. And as far as purchases, all you have to do is delay the purchase for a few days.”

There are substantial differences between 1995 and 2013 that suggest a spending gap might play out differently this year. The size of the government has vastly expanded; a raft of new federal regulations on business and finance have been passed; the number of Americans on federal public assistance has exploded; measures of private net worth, income and indebtedness are all much worse than they were in the 1990s.
Vaughn notes that the economy as a whole is much weaker in the Obama era than it was in the Clinton era.
“Still,” he told TheDC, “I think the lesson is — don’t bet on a large negative effect of a shutdown.”

 http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/29/u-s-economy-boomed-during-19951996-shutdown/#ixzz2gO6ILSoF

An Obama-Cruz Shutdown

The President is refusing to compromise on anything.

Washington is careening toward a partial government shutdown on Tuesday amid its usual synthetic outrage. As the partisan cries grow in volume, it's worth a few minutes to sort the truth from the nonsense.

The first thing to keep in mind is that this does not mean "anarchy," in Harry Reid's typically subtle formulation, or even a complete government shutdown. Functions deemed "essential" will continue, and it's debatable how many of those really are crucial to daily American life. The military will be paid, Social Security checks will still go out. Many Americans will be inconvenienced, but tens of millions may come to realize how easily they can do without most of the vast federal Leviathan.

A second reality is that both parties are responsible for getting to this point. Americans chose a divided government in 2010 and again in 2012, electing House Republicans as a check on Democrats whose undiluted liberalism alarmed millions of voters when they ran the entire government in 2009-2010. The inability to compromise now is rooted in the wide disagreement about the role of government that now separates the two parties.

We've criticized GOP Senator Ted Cruz for his strategy to make defunding ObamaCare a requirement of funding the rest of government. He and his allies know that Mr. Obama can never agree to that, and even millions of Americans who oppose ObamaCare don't agree with his shutdown ultimatum. It risks political damage for the House and Senate GOP in 2014 even as Mr. Cruz builds his email list for 2016.

Yet it takes two to tangle, and Mr. Obama is as much to blame for the partisan pileup as Mr. Cruz. This is a President who is eager to negotiate with dubiously elected Iranian mullahs but can't abide compromise with duly elected leaders of Congress. He refuses to negotiate at all over an increase in the federal debt limit, claiming this has never happened. Like so much that Mr. Obama says, he knows this is false. His own staff suggested the spending sequester during the 2011 debt debate, and Democratic Congresses have used the debt limit to extract concessions from Republican Presidents.

Mr. Obama also refuses to bend on any part of ObamaCare—except when he unilaterally announces bending in his own political interest. He decided on his own, and contrary to the plain text of the law, to delay for a year the business mandate to provide insurance for employees. He also unilaterally delayed verifying the income of Americans seeking subsidies. He did this to pile more people into the ObamaCare exchanges, lest they fail, and to limit the harm to job creation before 2014.

Yet now he'd rather see the government shut down than accept the ObamaCare compromises that House Republicans have put in their latest government funding bill. He refuses to delay the law for a year though his own actions reveal it is not ready for prime time. And he won't even accept repeal of the medical-device tax that 79 Senators, including 33 Democrats, are on record as supporting. The tax is already hurting innovation and sending jobs overseas.

Mr. Obama's refusal to negotiate suggests that he wants a shutdown—either over the budget or debt limit. His agenda is dying on Capitol Hill, because of Senate Democrats as well as House Republicans. With his approval rating down and independents leaning toward the GOP, he figures his only chance to salvage a second-term domestic legacy is to restore Nancy Pelosi as Speaker in his final two years. His best opening to make that happen is a shutdown or debt-limit crisis that he will try to blame on Republicans. A shutdown is as much his strategy as it is Mr. Cruz's.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303918804579105210933399796.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion

Unions Will Demand Back Pay if Government Shuts Down

If the federal government partially shuts down on Tuesday, federal worker unions are set to protest and demand back pay for government workers. Government unions may even consider lawsuits to get back pay for furloughed federal employees.

If Congress cannot agree to a short-term resolution to fund the government by Monday, parts of the federal government will shut down on Tuesday.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said he believes government employees should get back pay and, since many may be living "paycheck to paycheck," he asserted, “We as a Congress need to be more sensitive to their needs.”

Union officials estimate roughly 800,000 workers will be furloughed as "non-essential" employees in the event of a government shutdown and will demand retroactive pay because the furloughs would "add insult to injury for workers who have been living under a pay freeze for three years."

“We are trying to maintain pressure on this White House that in the event of a government shutdown, that any negotiated settlement includes an agreement that all federal employees — essential and non-essential alike — get paid when the government reopens,” Matt Biggs, legislative director for the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers (IFPTE), told The Hill.

IFPTE is not the only union that will be aggressively demanding back pay.

AFSA, a union that represents the workers of U.S. Foreign Service, reportedly waived signs on Friday urging the government not to shut down. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) "is organizing protests that will begin on Monday outside federal agencies and run through next week" and will lobby for back pay. In addition, members of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) are also planning rallies and demanding back pay; NTEU President Colleen Kelley said back pay would be "absolutely, positively" a priority in the event of a shutdown.

Beth Moten, AFGE's legislative director, said her union was considering legal action to obtain back pay for union workers.

“Our attorneys are looking at that right now. No final decision has been made yet,” Moten said.
According to The Hill, furloughed federal workers received back pay after the government shut down twice in the 1990s, but there are no such guarantees this year.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/30/Unions-Will-Demand-Back-Pay-if-Fed-Gov-t-Partially-Shuts-Down

Welcome to the ‘new anarchy’

Harry Reid says the opposition party are anarchists because they act like an opposition party.

Immediately after Texas Senator Ted Cruz finished his 21-hour mother of all speeches, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid killed the euphoria by responding with some blunt words for the freshman Senator as well as the Tea Party. “I do believe that what we have here with the so-called Tea Party is a new effort to strike government however they can, to hurt government,” Reid said. “Any day that government is hurt is a good day for them. It’s, as I said before, the new anarchy.”

After I dug my nails out of my desk, I thought at length about what Sen. Reid said and his words “the new anarchy” in particular. Firstly, the Greek word anarchy translated literally means “no ruler”.  And typically when I think of anarchists I think of Occupy Wall Street or anyone at Starbucks at 8 in the morning.  Both crowds can be equally unruly.

For several years now the Tea Party has been ridiculously compared to Occupy Wall Street and of course the differences are legion. But the one thing those labeled as anarchists generally want is to be in control of their lives, in varying degrees.

Neither Senator Ted Cruz nor the Tea Party supports any state of lawlessness or political disorder. Their demonstrations, or Cruz’s filibuster, were models of respect for order; rules were followed, at least the written ones. The unspoken law, however, that one is never allowed to buck the establishment or progressive ideology, was very much broken.

Obamacare is wholly against all this country was founded upon. When Reid said, “Any day Government is hurt is a good day for the Tea Party” he forgets this country isn’t about our government. This country is about our people.  It was made by the people, for the people.

In V for Vendetta, one of my favorite graphic novels that just so happens to be about anarchy, author Alan Moore paraphrased Thomas Jefferson, “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” Occupy Wall Street highjacked the Guy Fawkes mask under the guise of being something like anarchists. But if they want to declare Cruz’s speech a faux-filibuster, I’ll happily refer to them as faux-anarchists. True anarchists don’t have signs begging for more government control.

The worst thing about Obamacare is that it’s a central planning scheme under the guise of caring for people and keeping them safe. Yet how safe will it be to wait a year for an MRI to determine if a small abnormality is cancerous? That’s how it works in Canada. Compare that to a friend who was diagnosed with Stage 0 breast cancer and was given an MRI approximately a week later. The American example is the success story because she was able to quickly get the medical care she needed without jumping through bureaucratic hoops. What if she had to wait a full year for her MRI?

And just how safe will the so-called death panels be?

Obamacare will punish those who are married with higher premiums and will punish those couples who also earn more. It will place a greater burden on younger Americans.  The Manhattan Institute did an analysis of the Health and Human Services deceitful report this and explains how “Obamacare will increase underlying insurance rates for younger men by an average of 97 to 99 percent, and for younger women by an average of 55 to 62 percent.”

If you are in this country illegally you will be rewarded, like businesses, with an exemption from Obamacare’s mandates. As will Congress.  Those that fought hardest to implement this law have now exempted themselves from it.

Anarchist Thomas Jefferson frequently used the Latin phrase malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem which, translated, means, “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” The American people are about to be enslaved by a law, and we can’t quietly accept that. We were never meant to. Our country was founded on dissent. How could we ever have supported a bill that was passed before anyone was allowed to read what was in it? It has grown from the original 2,000 pages to over 20,000 pages. What part of that spells more freedom for the American people?

I don’t want a “ruler” over my healthcare and if wanting more freedom makes me part of “the new anarchy” then that’s fine with me. All I need is a Guy Fawkes mask.

 http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/27/welcome-to-the-new-anarchy/#ixzz2gO7VRfIz

Obamacare Website Quietly Deletes Reference to 'Free Health Care'

 Even as President Obama and his administration are making a last minute push to encourage enrollment in Obamacare, a quiet change was made on the Healthcare.gov website regarding those who will still not be able to afford coverage after the program kicks in. From at least June 26, 2013 to as recently as September 15, under the topic, "Where can I get free or low-cost care in my community?" the following statement appeared: "If you can't afford any health plan, you can get free or low-cost health and dental care at a nearby community health center." Here is how the page in question appeared:

However, sometime between September 16 and September 23, the reference to "free" care was dropped. The title of the topic was changed as well, and now reads: "Where can I get low-cost care in my community?" Here is how the page currently appears:


 

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamacare-website-quietly-deletes-reference-free-health-care_757348.html

Oppose the Medical Device Tax Repeal

Republicans are attempting two tricks to convince conservatives the GOP is still with them.

The first is the Vitter Amendment, named for Senator David Vitter, which would require Congress to adhere to Obamacare like the rest of us. I consider it a shiny object and you should not be cheering the GOP is they get it. Congress will always game the system to benefit itself. Pass the Vitter amendment and within a year you’ll see Congress have a full medical station in its basement where congressmen and their staffs can go. Likewise, the Vitter Amendment fixes something that is only temporary, if the Office of Personnel Management is to be believed.

Just wait. The Vitter Amendment will be hailed by seal clapping conservatives as a major win and, while distracted by flippers in the air, Congress will find a way around it. Aristocrats are always able to exempt themselves. If it isn’t a doctor in the basement, it’ll be a pay raise for congressmen and their staffs to offset the burden of Obamacare.

But the more pressing and important matter is the Medical Device tax. Republicans want to repeal this tax and will see doing so as a big win. Democrats, with them, call it a stupid tax. Conservatives, preternaturally disposed to support the repeal of any tax, want to support it. Heck, I want to support it.

But we should oppose it with every fiber of our being. 

It is crony capitalism at its worst and, more importantly, repealing it expands the precedent of nibbling away at Obamacare to make it more palatable. Repeal the medical device tax and lose just another portion of the coalition that supports repeal of Obamacare because their issue has been taken care of.

But back to crony capitalism.

Brett Loper was the senior lobbyist for the medical device companies working to kill the medical device tax in Obamacare. They lost. But after making roughly a half-million dollars a year working for the medical device companies, Brett Loper jumped to Capitol Hill as a Hill staffer. Where did he wind up? As John Boehner’s senior policy advisor in the House.

Over the past two years, Republicans in Congress have rallied toward the medical device tax as the ultimate shiny object of repeal. House leadership, in particular, has wanted to get rid of the medical device tax for a while. A few months ago, Brett Loper left the House to be American Express’s lobbyist in Washington, but he left behind a House leadership intent on this repeal.

In addition to Mr. Loper, medical device companies have poured out big money to members of Congress in dollar amounts you and I cannot.

You and I cannot get our preferred provisions of Obamacare repealed, but lobbyists can send it their own to work for Congress to get the job done and pour in lots of outside cash to influence the system. This is crony capitalism. This is Congress — Republicans in Congress — listening to K Street and doing K Street’s bidding, not Main Street’s bidding.

Separately, Republicans like Paul Ryan and Tom Coburn keep telling us that Obamacare is so bad it will collapse on its own. But they keep fixing portions of Obamacare. How the heck is it going to collapse if Congress keeps fixing it.

We may all love the repeal of taxes, but we should oppose the medical device tax repeal. It fixes part of Obamacare, thereby removing one constituency from the coalition demanding its repeal, and it further establishes how in the tank for K Street that the GOP Leadership is. 

We should demand John Boehner hear us, not K Street. And on the Vitter Amendment, while you all are clapping like seals, just remember that like water flowing, Congress will always find a way around Obamacare. But your seal clapping will give them every indication they’ve done good enough to surrender.

http://www.redstate.com/2013/09/30/oppose-the-medical-device-tax-repeal/

As Obamacare exchanges open, Hollywood campaigns to enroll younger people

The Hollywood humor site “Funny or Die” is rolling out an extended campaign to encourage young people to enroll in Obamacare exchanges beginning on Monday, joining a slew of celebrities doing their best to convince the demographic upon which the program depends to ignore their economic interests and shoulder the cost of older Americans’ health care.

The studio’s first video, seemingly meant to remind the “young invincible” demographic of 18 to 35-year olds that freak accidents and grave injuries can befall them at anytime, depicts “a little girl tumbling head-first off her rocking horse, a skateboarder’s ill-fated trick, a boy attempting a jump on his bike and ending up limp on the asphalt,” according to The Chicago Tribune, which viewed a secret preview of the propaganda campaign on Sept. 20.

“Valerie Jarrett loved this video,” said “Funny or Die” production president Mike Farah, speaking of the the Secret Service protectee who is President Barack Obama’s closest senior adviser.

Farah, who is pictured smiling and wearing a casual, checkered shirt and jeans, worked with administration officials for months on a marketing plan to promote the transformative overhaul of the U.S. health care system, finally meeting with Obama and several other celebrities — including Amy Poehler, Michael Cera and Jennifer Hudson — in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in July.

Farah offered to use his firm’s resources, otherwise used to generate profits and please customers, to do the legwork for a health care law that will wipe out the existing plans of 58,000 residents of the studio’s home state of California.

“The simplest way to put it was, they had spent all this time and energy and money on the biggest movie of their lives and had no marketing budget in which to promote it,” Farah said. “I just thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard.”

It is unclear what health care policy expertise Farah or 25-year-old celebrity Michael Cera, actor and “occasional musician,” possess or how they will convince young Americans to ignore their economic self interest and enroll themselves in the costly exchanges. A study conducted by the National Center for Public Policy Research discovered that the millions of young, childless and single adults — on which the program depends to subsidize the immense cost of caring for aging, ailing Americans — could save a significant sum of $500 by paying a penalty and forgoing insurance. The Center also found that taxpayer subsidies meant to offset the prohibitive cost of enrollment vanish for any younger person making more than $34,470 annually, far below the promised $45,960.

These perverse incentives posed to this key demographic could spell trouble for Obamacare’s success.
“This demographic is critical. If you mostly have high-risk people, premiums go up. It becomes a death spiral,” Caroline Pearson, a vice president at Washington-based consulting firm Avalere Health LLC, told Bloomberg.

Unexciting research reports struggle to compete with the glamorous alliance between the Obama administration and Hollywood. Back in August, singer Katy Perry retweeted a message from Obama’s Twitter feed reminding young people to enroll in the exchanges on October 1. 


All of Hollywood’s and the White House’s efforts to launch Obamacare and keep it running smoothly may be in vain if the White House and its Hollywood allies fail to convince enough young people to enroll, however. To some, that may have been the plan all along. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in August that the U.S. must eventually “work [its] way past” an insurance-based system, and Obamacare is only the first step towards a national single-payer health care system.

Farah plans to produce 20 videos to promote Obamacare throughout 2013.

 http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/29/as-obamacare-exchanges-open-hollywood-campaigns-to-enroll-younger-people/#ixzz2gO3CZFP5

The Renewable Fuel Standard is Another Taxpayer-Funded Bailout

We’re all paying more at the pump. It’s hurting consumers and dangerous for the fragile economy. And, it’s because of a Washington handout to corn farmers and big Wall Street banks – all disguised as a measure to promote renewable energy and clean-burning fuels.

The Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) mandates an ever-increasing floor of ethanol be mixed with gasoline. The bill, which was expanded under President Obama, ensures a baseline level of demand for ethanol, distorting the market and sending the price of corn substantially higher. That’s because gasoline refiners have to purchase ethanol, regardless of the price.

So, corn prices tripled, which has factored its way into the prices of other agriculture products. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the impact of the RFS is so broad that ethanol subsidies account for 10-15 percent of the rise in overall food prices. In terms of the overall economy, the RFS is expected to cause a decline of $770 billion in GDP in 2015 alone. That’s real economic activity, which translates to real jobs and incomes for Americans throughout the country.

And, hardly anyone in Congress or the Obama administration thinks the current law is working. TheEnvironmental Protection Agency, which is run by leftist environmentalists, said that it does not “foresee a scenario in which the market could consume enough ethanol […] and/or produce sufficient volumes of non-ethanol biofuels to meet the volumes of total renewable fuel and advanced biofuel as required by statute for 2014.” So, in other words – Washington has once again imposed unachievable burdens on the private sector.

But what may be worse than this indirect subsidy to corn farmers is the way that big Wall Street banks are exploiting it at the expense of consumers. That’s because if a gasoline refiner cannot meet the demands of the RFS, it can purchase credits, called renewable identification numbers (RINs), in a “marketplace.” But unlike transparent marketplaces like Amazon, the market for RINs is opaque and dominated by speculators with no interest except driving the price higher.

The New York Times recently reported that, “the price of the ethanol credits skyrocketed 20-fold in just six months.” A credit that went for 7 cents at the start of the year traded for $1.43 in July, according to Bloomberg. And that price is simply passed along to consumers at the pump – a large factor keeping gas prices above $3 per gallon nationwide for 1,000 consecutive days.

But Congress has approached the RFS from a weak position, intimidated by powerful lobby groups who like these handouts. Though the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Fred Upton (MI), has assigned four members to find a solution, just one – Rep. Steve Scalise (LA) – has called for full repeal. The others – Reps. John Shimkus (IL), Lee Terry (NE) and Cory Gardner (CO) – are calling for “reform.” Such reform could even get attached to the must-pass bill that will raise the debt ceiling. According to recent reports, that could even include a one-year delay to the RFS mandates.

While a one-year delay will certainly help the stagnant economy, it does little but push the can down the road. As long as the RFS exists, it will damage the economy. Congress is just debating the degree to which they will let that happen. Conservatives in Congress need to stop trying to save the RFS – and repeal it in its entirety. Doing that will relieve some of the pain at the pump, stop the increase in food prices and save Americans $770 million in economic activity in 2015.

http://m.townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2013/09/30/the-renewable-fuel-standard-is-another-taxpayerfunded-bailout-n1712865

Dems Attempt Power Grab That Could Kill Keystone Pipeline

With all eyes trained on the fight over government spending and Obamacare, the House is scheduled to take up a non-controversial land-swap bill that would trade 2000 acres of  federal land in Arizona for 5000 acres of pristine land owned by Resolution Copper mine.  The bill has bipartisan support and should it be enacted, it is estimated that nearly 4,000 jobs will be created in the area.  Radical environmentalists of course oppose this swap and have joined with local tribes to offer an amendment to the swap bill that, if adopted, would become the environmentalists' most powerful tool to kill economic development throughout the nation.

Rep. Ben Lujan (D-NM) has promised to offer an amendment to the legislation that would empower the Secretary of Interior to override existing laws that protect tribal sacred sites and designate land as an Indian “cultural site.”  Such a designation would kill the mine project, its 4,000 jobs and serve as a model to kill other projects.  Federal law already protects Native America “sacred” land. 

So, what is  a “cultural” site?  No one knows for sure.  Proponents of the Lujan Amendment argue that any land where Native Americans have prayed and gathered is enough to trigger the designation.  Is there any land in the United States that does not meet that threshold?

The impact of the Lujan amendment cannot be measured.  The copper mine in Arizona, for instance, is 20 miles form the nearest reservation.  The Forest Service did an impact study and found there were no sacred sites to be found on the land.  That’s why Mr. Lujan and his supporters are trying to lower the threshold.  The lower threshold kills the project and its 4,000 jobs.  But more critically, the amendment sets the precedent that has environmentalists’ mouths watering.

Many observers believe that this precedent-setting amendment is a dry run to kill the Keystone Pipeline project specifically and set up a new paradigm for development in America.  Can anyone say with a straight face that somewhere along the thousands of miles of pipes, there will not be a parcel of land where Native Americans once slept, gathered or ate?  If the same logic being used on the land swap bill is applied, the Secretary of Interior--an avowed radical--would have the power to unilaterally pull the plug on the project.  We have already seen what happened when one agency —the EPA — has the power to issue regulations that kill jobs.  Could Republicans be so naive as to give another government agency the same power?

The Lujan amendment, as written, only applied to the copper mine in Arizona.  But if there are enough votes to pass through a Republican House, it will be a precedent setter that will weaponize opposition to economic development for years to come on nearly every square inch of American soil and threaten the property rights for land owners all across the nation.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/29/Dems-Attempt-Power-Grab-That-Could-Kill-Keystone

A final blow in the
War on Coal?

A funny thing happened on the way to the coal plant the other day. But it wasn’t ha-ha funny. In fact, it was tragic – and on multiple levels. Tragic in that the federal government is overreaching yet again. Tragic in that it is making a major policy change based on questionable assumptions – again. And most tragic of all in that it is openly destroying an industry for no other reason than some people in Washington do not like it.

On Sept. 20, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a new carbon dioxide emission standard that analysts say will preclude the construction of new coal-fired power plants. This is a bold move, even from the administration that brought us Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. Coal power has long been Americans’ most affordable source of electricity, mainly because we have so much of it here at home.

As much of the nation continues to struggle with significant unemployment, higher electricity bills are the last Christmas present anyone needs. Yet, President Obama seems more concerned about the demands of his environmentalist supporters, who will implement their anti-carbon agenda at any cost.

I have to give the man credit for finally acknowledging something that my organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has been saying for years: Yes, Virginia, there is a war on coal. And just like other governmental regulatory wars – on tobacco, genetically modified crops, even lawn darts – it is nothing more than the use of power to force individuals and businesses to change behaviors that some in government find offensive.

The EPA’s proposed emissions standard would, for the first time, place uniform national limits on the amount of carbon dioxide coal and natural gas power plants will be allowed to emit in the future.  It would mandate use of carbon capture and sequestration technology that is not even commercially available – and no doubt will be extremely expensive even if it does become available in future decades. Think about that for a second. The federal government has told an industry that to continue operating it must start using technology that essentially does not exist.

You might say, “Well, we do want clean air, right?” Sure, everyone wants clean air, just like everyone wants cleaner sidewalks, safer streets and cheaper medicine. But when the government institutes sweeping regulation purportedly to advance any one of these goals, we must ask: Does this regulation actually do what it’s supposed to do, and at what cost? Not even the wiliest Washington bureaucrat can mandate a free lunch into existence.

There is much about this new emissions standard that is upsetting.

First, its very foundation is questionable. The EPA’s proposed performance standards, which require carbon capture and storage, are largely modeled on a facility in Mississippi that is still under construction and not expected to begin operation until next spring and could not have been built without government money to begin with. In other words, the heavily subsidized facility that is supposed to theoretically demonstrate a plant’s appropriate performance level does not even exist yet!

Second, the EPA’s justification for the rule depends on a concept called the “social cost” of carbon – a highly subjective estimate of carbon dioxide emissions’ effect on humans and the environment.

Measuring it relies on assumptions about climate sensitivity and other complex issues – for example, how much an incremental increase in carbon will affect warming, how warming will affect sea levels, how much sea level changes will affect agriculture and how people may adapt to any changes. These issues are in no way settled. Yet, by feeding certain assumptions into a model and tweaking the parameters, government officials claim to be able to “measure” a social cost of carbon well into the future that justifies significant emissions regulation. Essentially, this would involve bureaucrats putting models in place that effectively give them the results they want.

Here’s the bottom line. Industries come and go all the time. Companies go bankrupt and the towns where they are located go quiet when market demand shifts to make a once-valued product obsolete. It’s a tough thing when people lose their livelihoods after an industry falls out of favor with consumers. But when industries die naturally through the ever-regenerating processes of creative destruction and competition, that’s a consequence of living in a free society – and essential for innovation and progress.

Yet, when the federal government decides to use the law to kill an industry, that’s an entirely different animal. It’s not just the thousands of people who work in the coal industry who will suffer – it’s all of us. Politicians and bureaucrats have an atrocious record in their efforts to pick industrial winners and losers. Giving them more power to decide which industries live or die is the surest way of bringing innovation and progress to a screeching halt.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/30/a-final-blow-in-the-war-on-coal/

Sometimes you have to let government go

There is an awful lot of government going on in Washington. Which is what happens when you spend $3.8 trillion – as DC is doing this year.  Up from $2.9 trillion just five years ago. We’ve increased the size of the Leviathan by just short of 25% under President Barack Obama.

In 2013 came the budget sequestration – $85 billion in spending cuts.  So we increased by $900 billion – then rolled it back $85 billion.  We’re still up 90+% over 2008 – not exactly Draconian or austere.

That every penny in this nearly $4 trillion annual pile is vitally important, being spent wisely and well – and in fact isn’t nearly enough – is one of the colossally dubious arguments of all time.  Yet many make it.
President Calvin Coolidge’s last budget was smaller than his first – and was a MUCH smaller portion of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

1923
Federal outlay: $3.14 billion.
GDP: $85 billion.
% of GDP: 3.7%.

1929
Federal outlay: $3.13 billion.
GDP: $103 billion.
% of GDP: 3.0%.
Federal spending flatlined. And the private economy grew by nearly 20%.  Roaring Twenties, indeed. And note the now-freakishly minuscule portion of the nation’s economy the feds spent – less than 4%.
How about under President Obama?

2008
Federal outlay: $2.9 trillion.
GDP: $14.2 trillion.
% of GDP: 20.4%.

2012
Federal outlay: $3.54 trillion.
GDP: $15.7 trillion.
% of GDP: 22.5%.

The Feds have basically built the 2009 “Stimulus” into every subsequent year. They have grown even further their obscene chunk of the GDP. And added nearly $7 trillion to the federal debt. How’s that Huge Government been working?

Since Obama has been president, seven out of every eight jobs that have been “created” in the U.S. economy have been part-time jobs.

The number of full-time workers in the United States is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007 (under the eeeeevil, failed President George W. Bush).

40 percent of all workers in the United States actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968.

During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000. That far exceeds any previous four year total.

During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.

To expect our economy to recover and grow when the Leviathan takes and spends a quarter of what it creates is asking a bit much. To say it isn’t nearly enough is absurd on stilts.

So to paraphrase Clint Eastwood, “When something isn’t doing the job, we’ve got to let it go.” Big Government isn’t getting it done – we’ve got to let a lot of it go.

There are departments, agencies, boards, and commissions that can be closed entirely – with negligible to no negative effect. In fact, it would do quite a lot of good.

Human beings have engaged in commerce for ten thousand years. We did it for 9,900 years without a Department of Commerce. We have been educating our children since we’ve been having them. And we did so until 1979 without a Department of Education.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) maybe – maybe – served a purpose once upon a time. It began in 1926 as the Federal Radio Commission – created basically to make sure people didn’t broadcast on top of one another. It was transmogrified into the FCC by the 1934 Communications Act.

Flash forward to today. The FCC is a bureaucracy looking for shreds of relevancy to the modern communications landscape – which has long since left it in the dust. Most of what it does is damaging. And/or redundant – also handled by one or more other arms of the Leviathan. Or it alone does things that could ably be handled elsewhere in the federal web. At this point, the FCC basically just adds a layer of harmful, communications-specific redundancy.

The FCC approves or denies media mergers. But so do the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice – just as these two do for all major deals. The FCC looks to ensure media competition – just as the FTC does on all things. The FCC peeks in on homeland security – where we have the FBI, Homeland Security, and myriad other departments. Do we really need to add the FCC to the Frisk Us Parties at airports?

Idle bureaucrat hands are the Devil’s playground. Under President Obama, they have been Disneyland. In duplicative regulatory fashion, and/or with no authority whatsoever or little to no market reason to do so, the Obama FCC has:

1. Imposed Network Neutrality.
2. Asked Congress to insert it into what should be a private sector secondary spectrum market auction.
3. Been contemplating the imposition of anti-free market rules for said auction (which is probably why it asked Congress to insert it).
4. Imposed cell phone price caps.
5. Imposed prison phone call price caps.
6. Time and again micro-managed cable TV’s channel placement.

Amongst other anti-free market, utterly unnecessary things.

We as a nation need to be looking for many, many ways to cut government (sadly, of course, we really aren’t). A good place to hack is a 1930s New Deal holdover commission whose sector long ago passed it by. A commission that increasingly looks to illegally assert its non-existent authority – in some vain attempt at relevance, in search of something to do.

We should at the very least dramatically limit the FCC to what it alone handles. Or determine what other departments can do those finite things, re-allot them – and shudder the Commission.

Which would certainly free up the private sector to create a lot of additional coin. And allow for the Feds to take a little less of it.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/30/sometimes-you-have-to-let-government-go/

Awkward: Group embraced by Obama hit by Canadian government for terror support

Canada's version of the IRS, The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), has revoked the charitable status of The Islamic Society of North America (INSA) over charges that the group has channeled over $280,000 to a group in Pakistan linked to a terror outfit. Shawn Jeffords of the Toronto Sun writes:

The CRA announced Friday it will strip the Islamic Society of North America Canada's Development Foundation of its charitable status.

After a nearly two-year-long audit of its books, the CRA said it found evidence linking the group to an organization that funds a terrorist organization in Pakistan.

"The Government of Canada has made it clear that it will not tolerate the abuse of the registration system for charities to provide any means of support to terrorism," a press release from the CRA said.

In a 71-page "letter of revocation," complete with flow charts which illustrate the alleged link between the Canadian group and the Pakistani terrorist group, the agency lays out its case against ISNA.

However, INSA is a group that President Obama has been quite friendly toward. In fact, he issued a gushing congratulatory video addressed to the group some time ago on the occasion of its fiftieth annual convention.
In Obama's world, tax authorities harass groups supporting the US Constitution and congratulations are offered to groups funneling money to terror groups.


http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/awkward.html#ixzz2gODD90bJ

U.S. intel: Official’s leak to media about Al Qaeda’s terror plot may have hurt us more than Snowden’s leaks

To refresh your memory, the terror threat that forced the closing of 19 U.S. diplomatic outposts abroad in early August was treated as unusually dire by U.S. counterterrorism because of the people involved in the communications about it. They couldn’t reveal who those people were, though, for fear that the targets would then realize that they were being bugged and clam up. But then, on August 4, somebody blabbed to McClatchy:

An official who’d been briefed on the matter in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, told McClatchy that the embassy closings and travel advisory were the result of an intercepted communication between Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, and al Qaida leader Ayman al Zawahiri in which Zawahiri gave “clear orders” to al-Wuhaysi, who was recently named al Qaida’s general manager, to carry out an attack.

Result: Yup, they clammed up.

Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August, senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda’s leaders and operatives.

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs…

“It was something that was immediate, direct and involved specific people on specific communications about specific events,” one senior American official said of the exchange between the Qaeda leaders. “The Snowden stuff is layered and layered, and it will take a lot of time to understand it. There wasn’t a sudden drop-off from it. A lot of these guys think that they are not impacted by it, and it is difficult stuff for them to understand.”

Other senior intelligence and counterterrorism officials offer a dissenting view, saying that it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate the impact of the messages between the Qaeda leaders from Mr. Snowden’s overall disclosures, and that the decline is more likely a combination of the two.

That makes me think that my hunch in this post was correct. Weeks after the first leak, U.S. officials started whispering to reporters that they hadn’t intercepted the Zawahiri chat live while it happened but had rather gotten a transcript of it off of a storage device held by a captured jihadi courier. That seemed like damage control — a way to reassure Zawahiri and his deputies that we couldn’t listen in real time, in which case it was safe for them to start talking again. No dice. But a nice try.

The Times’s intel sources claim that jihadi chatter doesn’t so much tail off after new Snowden revelations in the press as become temporarily consumed by chitchat about the revelations themselves. Which makes sense: Most of it so far has had to do with the NSA hoovering up communications in the U.S. and allied nations. Whether Snowden’s waging war on the surveillance state in particular or American espionage more broadly, revealing sensitive info about countermeasures against AQ and similar groups would be catastrophic for his cause. All he’s really telling AQ in his leaks is that the feds can access virtually any Internet platform — which AQ seems to have already assumed, given the effort described at the end of the NYT piece that they’ve given to building their own encryption. Of course, the NSA can bust lots of encryption too; my sense from the NYT piece, in fact, is that AQ probably used their “Mujahedeen Secrets” encryption for Zawahiri’s chat about the terror plot not knowing that U.S. intel has (probably) cracked it. Well, now they know. No more chatter.

You would think Obama and the DOJ would want to make a big show of prosecuting this leak, just to prove that they care more about people revealing their spycraft against Al Qaeda than against American citizens. If James Rosen’s e-mails were worth reading, surely McClatchy’s are too, right? I think there’s a simple explanation, though: The official who blabbed to McC wasn’t an American but a Yemeni. McClatchy didn’t identify his nationality in the original leak, but they seemed to the next day in a follow-up story. Frankly, given how Yemen’s likely to handle internal leaks, that guy probably wishes he was in an American jail now.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/30/u-s-intel-officials-leak-to-media-about-al-qaedas-terror-plot-may-have-hurt-us-more-than-snowdens-leaks/ 

Twitter Not Only Allows Terrorist Accounts, But Suggests Terrorists to Follow

As terrorists increasingly have embraced social media, Twitter has increasingly come under criticism for hosting terror feeds. Al-Shabaab is on it sixth account after getting suspended in the past for tweeting photos of a dead French special ops soldier, and most recently the Somali terror outlet blazed through a few accounts after suspensions for gloating about the Westgate mall massacre. Their latest account, @HSM_PR, has remained active for many days now and has racked up 59 tweets. During the attack and its aftermath, journalists were checking the Shabaab feed for its latest claims and links to statements.

So when al-Qaeda announced it had launched its first official Twitter account, I, like other journalists who cover terrorism, hit the follow button. The @shomokhalislam account was suspended Sunday by Twitter after being allowed to remain open since Tuesday, posting nearly 50 tweets that included an attack on “the servants of worshipers of the cross” in a bombing that targeted staff of Pakistan’s interior minister in Peshawar.

On Saturday, I received one of those occasional emails from Twitter offering suggestions based on a recent follow — suggesting that I follow other terrorists:



The first suggested account, “Islam Workshop,” is that of an al-Qaeda web forum to “rouse the believers” — shamikh1.info. On Saturday the feed posted a video removed by YouTube for violence, showing Qaeda- and Muslim Brotherhood-backed jihadists Ansar Beit al-Maqdes fighting Egyptian forces in the Sinai.

The second appear to be linked to the Al-Battar training camp, al-Qaeda’s program that has offered DIY as well as hands-on terrorist advice. These days Muaskar Al Battar (Camp of the Sword) concentrates largely on bringing together groups with the same goal in a loosely connected network. The feed even has a nice camp photo as its backdrop, with more than a few Tsarnaev look-a-likes in the wooded hills:

The third suggested Twitter account appears linked to a Kurdistan-based affiliate of al-Qaeda.

The fourth claims to be “one of the foot soldiers” of Al-Shabaab, and posted several press photo from the Westgate attack while gloating about Shabaab’s gruesome accomplishments.

The last account, posing with the girl, is former Guantanamo Bay detainee Abdulaziz Sayer Owain al Shammari, who was arrested by Pakistan in 2001 and transferred to his home country Kuwait in 2005.
“Based on detainee’s deception history, it is assessed that he as received training on advanced counter-terrorism techniques, as well as above average terrorist training typically taught by Al-Qaida,” reads a 2004 Defense Department memo. “…Detainee is assessed to have connections to high-ranking Al-Qaida members.”

Twitter has said it can’t comment on users when asked to explain why terrorist accounts remain up. The only reason Al-Shabaab’s account fell a couple of times after the horrific Westgate attack was because of intense pressure from angry Twitter users in Africa and around the globe.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/09/30/twitter-not-only-allows-terrorist-accounts-but-suggests-terrorists-to-follow/