Current Events - October 8, 2013

By not raising the debt ceiling, congress is not reneging on bills already racked up. The existing debt--which can be serviced by paying the interest due--covers those obligations.
Raising the debt ceiling simply permits Congress to run up new bills. Abandoning that debt ceiling discipline, as many in the financial community suggest, to let congress to spend as it pleases would be the peak of folly.
- See more at: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/08/Raising-the-Debt-Ceiling-a-Fools-Journey#sthash.NlB8VgrN.dpuf

Raising the Debt Ceiling, a Fool's Journey

By Peter Morici
....By not raising the debt ceiling, congress is not reneging on bills already racked up. The existing debt--which can be serviced by paying the interest due--covers those obligations.
Raising the debt ceiling simply permits Congress to run up new bills. Abandoning that debt ceiling discipline, as many in the financial community suggest, to let congress to spend as it pleases would be the peak of folly.

Governor Bars State From Asking Job Applicants About Felony Records

llinoisans with a felony on their records will no longer be asked about their criminal past when they apply for state jobs.
Promoting the decision to what he calls “Ban the Box,” State Rep. LaShawn K. Ford (D-Chicago) says the governor’s administrative order doesn’t mean private employers will be required to hire ex-cons. It simply means applications for state government jobs will no longer include a box indicating whether an applicant has pled guilty, or been convicted of a criminal offense, other than a minor traffic violation.

PK'S NOTE: Yeah, celebrating a juvenile delinquent isn't something to be proud of. 

Parents Upset After Trayvon Martin Day Planned During Local Homecoming Week

PITTSBURGH  – Parents were upset after Carrick High School approved a plan to have a Trayvon Martin theme day during the school’s homecoming.
The homecoming committee, and school voted and approved the theme which is part of school spirit week.
Parents were upset that kids were being encouraged to wear hoodies to school during the Wednesday theme.

Long Island Middle School Bans Footballs, Other Recreational Items

Concerns About Injuries Prompted Ban, Port Washington Officials Say

Worries about injuries at a Long Island school have led to a surprising ban.
As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.

One sacred song for every five secular songs? Wisconsin school district cracks down on Christmas music

The Wausau, Wis. School District says it’s okay to jingle bells and don gay apparel but lay off the Baby Jesus stuff – and that has parents and students ready to deck somebody’s halls.
The community became enraged after the elementary schools canceled their upcoming Christmas concerts and the school district issued guidelines that curtailed the number of sacred holiday songs the high school choir could perform.

VA Asked to Explain Blowing Half a Million Bucks on Art

By Bridget Johnson
Some lawmakers are outraged that as part of federal departments’ use-it-or-lose-it spending sprees before the end of the fiscal year on Oct. 1 the Department of Veterans Affairs blew more than half a million dollars on artwork....
Veterans Affairs staff had been working 20 hours of overtime a week to push the number of backlogged claims — pending for more than 125 days — under 500,000, working toward the goal of clearing the backlog by 2015. In 2011 alone, 20,000 veterans died waiting for their claims to be processed.
 
'Shutdown' Day 7: Government Buys $47,174Mechanical Bull

The government shutdown may be keeping furloughed federal workers at home, but on Monday the U.S. Army contracted to buy a mechanical bull.

Shutdown Lies of Omission: 'Washington Post' Exploits Cancer Victim 

Shutdown Lies of Omission: 'Washington Post' Exploits Cancer Victim - See more at: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/10/08/shutdown-lie-of-omission-wapo-eploits-cancer-victim#sthash.Wt5c07cA.dpuf

 
Monday, the Washington Post's Sarah Kliff told the story of Michelle Langbehn, a women suffering from a rare form of cancer who was counting on the kind of treatment she apparently can only get through the National Institutes of Health. Because of the government shutdown, she may not get those treatments. While this is a perfectly appropriate story for the Post to tell, its very premise is based on an extraordinary lie of omission.


Nowhere does the Post tell its readers the truth: that House Republicans have offered a compromise spending bill that will fund the National Institutes of Health and get Ms. Langbehn the treatment she needs. The problem is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't allow the compromise legislation a vote in the Senate, and President Obama has promised to veto it.

PK'S NOTE: Guys, it's time to vote the RINO's out. 

Here’s the Republican Senator Who Allegedly Insinuated FreedomWorks Supporters Are Traitors in Ruthless Closed-Door Meeting

Glenn Beck on Tuesday revealed the name of a Republican senator who allegedly insinuated that supporters of FreedomWorks and the Senate Conservatives Fund are traitors to the party: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.....
...“Here is what happened [at the meeting],” Beck continued. “As they are all standing in there, they are told in not so many words, that they are on the wrong side. That these people have been here for a very long time, and you new senators come in and you think you know it all.  And if anyone is working with the Senate Conservatives Fund or FreedomWorks, you’re a traitor.”

Bureaucrats at tiny federal agency FMCS buy legions of luxuries with purchase cards

All of these examples happened at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, an obscure runaway government agency where the median annual salary is $120,000.
That amount far exceeds the national median household income but it wasn't enough for many FMCS employees, many of whom routinely charged nearly every conceivable expense to government credit cards known as “purchase cards,” according to bank records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

Medieval Liberals

  Unlike classical liberals, the liberals of today hew to doctrine in the face of the evidence

By Victor Davis Hanson

...Reactionary is a good adjective as well, since notions of wealth and poverty are frozen in amber around 1965, as if the technological revolution never took place and the federal welfare state hadn’t been erected — as if today’s poor were the emaciated Joads, rather than struggling with inordinate rates of obesity and diabetes, in air-conditioned apartments replete with big-screen TVs, and owning cell phones with more computing power than was available to the wealthy as recently as the 1980s. Flash-mobbing sneaker stores is more common than storming Costcos for bags of rice and flour.
...The medieval world of two classes, lord and peasant, continued for centuries. What was hated, then and now, was the newcomer, the upstart, the man without contractual obligations, neither rich nor poor, neither dependent nor surrounded by dependents, the skeptic who Tocqueville thought would keep America from becoming what it is becoming.

Obama as Chaos

 By Victor Davis Hanson
Amid all the charges and countercharges in Washington over the government shutdown, there is at least one common theme: Barack Obama’s various charges always lead to a dead end. They are chaos, and chaos is hard to understand, much less refute.
By that I mean when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

 The Left Hates Anything Old

But old white Democratic males are okay.

By Dennis Prager
...What, then, is at the core of the Left’s contempt for the old, and its celebration of the new and of “change”?
There are two primary answers.
One is the yearning for utopia. Since Marx, the Left has sought utopia in this world. And that means constantly transforming every aspect of society. As then-Senator Barack Obama said before the 2008 election: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
By definition, those who seek to transform consider the old essentially worthless.

Eric Holder's 2014 Racial Politics

The Attorney General tries to reverse a Supreme Court ruling by the back door.

For Eric Holder, American racial history is frozen in the 1960s. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is no longer justified due to racial progress, but the U.S. Attorney General has launched a campaign to undo the decision state-by-state. His latest target is North Carolina, which he seems to think is run from the grave by the early version of George Wallace.
The real current Governor, Republican Pat McCrory, signed a law in August that requires voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polling station, including a state driver's license or military ID. Voters who show up without one can still cast a provisional ballot pending their return with a photo ID. The law also shortens early voting to 10 days from 17 and ends a program that preregistered high school students before they were eligible to vote....
...All the evidence suggests that Mr. Holder's real motive here is political. Portraying voter ID laws as racist helped to drive Democratic voter turnout among minorities in 2012, and the White House wants a repeat in 2014. Never mind if the suits eventually fail in court. The goal is to elect more Democrats in the meantime, even if it means needlessly increasing racial polarization. 

The Shutdown Government: Powerful, Punitive And Petty

The federal bureaucracy tried to show its importance. Instead it revealed its vindictive cruelty.

By Mollie Hemingway
...Byron York had a question prompted by the particular manner bureaucrats and the Obama Administration were handling the shutdown: “Does the punishing way the Obama administration has run aspects of the shutdown reveal anything about how it will run national health care?” ...
...The United States was built on the idea that the government is beholden to its people. Not the other way around. The way the bureaucracy has handled the government slowdown suggests a belief that the bureaucracy is opposed to the people. And if the the bureaucracy is opposed to the people, then it is opposed to freedom itself. Whether it’s NSA, the IRS or the National Park Service, there is a tension between American freedom and the bureaucracy. If nothing else, we can thank the Obama Administration for reminding us of that fact.

Understanding the Game Being Played in Washington

By Justin Fox
Some portray it as a Manichean struggle between good and evil. Warren Buffett says it’s “extreme idiocy.” I’d like to recommend another way of looking at the government shutdown and the looming battle over the debt ceiling in Washington. It’s a game, played by flawed-but-not-crazy human beings under confusing circumstances. In other words, it’s an interaction among “agents” who “base their decisions on limited information about actions of other agents in the recent past, and they do not always optimize.”

PK'S NOTE: So much for freedom of speech and diversity of opinion...

Ole Miss forces whole play audience into re-education camp over mysterious gay slurs

...The Ole Miss administration is not letting the mere fact that it can’t figure out who disrupted the play bog down its disciplinary efforts. Instead, Ole Miss is making every single student who was in the audience on Oct. 1 attend something called an “educational dialogue session.”
Faculty members will lead the “educational dialogue session.” Also taking the lead in the re-education session will be an organization called Allies, a campus group that supports gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students.

Tom Steyer: The shady billionaire with millions of reasons to kill Keystone XL

....While this year alone Steyer poured $1.8 million into a super PAC supporting anti-Keystone candidates and burned through another $1 million creating an advertising campaign attacking Keystone, he has refused to criticize the TransMountain pipeline – even though TransMountain pipeline is functionally identical to Keystone. That’s because if he succeeds in killing Keystone, TransMountain will be “the only game in town for transporting oil directly from the oil sands to export terminals, up to 900,000 barrels a day,” according to Investor’s Business Daily.
In other words, Steyer will be sitting on a North American pipeline monopoly if Keystone is out of the picture.
Of course, Steyer is working hard to make his disgusting money grab look like genuine concern for the environment – and, even then, he stands to make millions.
 Steyer’s anti-Keystone ads are rooted in unreasonable climate change hysteria. But fortunately he just happens to have a cure for climate change: Greener Capital, a venture capital firm Steyer funded with $15 million from his own pocket. Greener Capital profits from green energy handouts and tax credits – the same handouts and tax credits enacted by the progressive lawmakers who happily snatch up Steyer’s hefty campaign contributions

Study: US Adults Lag in Job Skills vs. OtherCountries

Study: US Adults Lag in Job Skills vs. Other Countries - See more at: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/08/Study-US-adults-job-skills#sthash.WAeonHXH.dpuf

According to a study released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), American adults lag significantly behind other countries in their job skill sets. Young adults lag behind in literacy, math, and technology, as do middle-aged Americans. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan predictably called for more education funding, saying that the statistics “show our education system hasn’t done enough to help Americans compete — or position our country to lead — in a global economy that demands increasingly higher skills.”

According to a study released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), American adults lag significantly behind other countries in their job skill sets. Young adults lag behind in literacy, math, and technology, as do middle-aged Americans. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan predictably called for more education funding, saying that the statistics “show our education system hasn’t done enough to help Americans compete — or position our country to lead — in a global economy that demands increasingly higher skills.” - See more at: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/08/Study-US-adults-job-skills#sthash.WAeonHXH.dpuf

According to a study released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), American adults lag significantly behind other countries in their job skill sets. Young adults lag behind in literacy, math, and technology, as do middle-aged Americans. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan predictably called for more education funding, saying that the statistics “show our education system hasn’t done enough to help Americans compete — or position our country to lead — in a global economy that demands increasingly higher skills.” - See more at: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/08/Study-US-adults-job-skills#sthash.WAeonHXH.dpuf

Bombshells and Baby Daddies: How Single Moms Are Destroying Kids and Society, Part 1

Any woman who decides to have a baby without a husband (not a baby daddy or a guy who visits on the weekend) needs to understand she is making the choice to put her baby and society at risk for the unforgivable disadvantages of poverty, teen pregnancy, sexual abuse, a life of crime, and incarceration and suicide. The first part of this series will deal with the crippling scourge of poverty....
...And the numbers are escalating. NBC news reported that 28% of American women have at least two children with different fathers. Ann Coulter did extensive research on single motherhood and the cost to children and society in her book Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America. In her heavily-annotated tome, she discovered shocking numbers.
From a 2008 study led by Georgia State University economist Benjamin Scafidi: single mothers are six times more likely to be in poverty than married families. More than 80 percent of homeless families are led by single mothers. Not surprisingly, unmarried women with children are much more likely to use government programs that cost taxpayers billions. According to Scafidi’s research only 16% of married couples receive food stamps while 42% of single mothers collect them. The government has replaced the role of the husband in many of these women’s lives. Had they chosen marriage instead, the numbers would be drastically different.

A Blockbuster Supreme Court Term

Jonathan H Adler
...the Supreme Court opens its term with a docket full of weighty issues. While no single case will be as closely watched as was NFIB v. Sebelius or the same-sex-marriage cases, the term as a whole could be no less significant than those of the past two years. With only half of the term’s docket filled, the Supreme Court has a surfeit of significant cases in the October 2013 term implicating a wide range of important questions.

The Obama Administration Opens the National Mall - for Pro Illegal Immigration Rally

...The reason giving for allowing the exception for the immigration rally (sponsored by the non partisan SEIU and AFL-CIO) is that it was their First Amendment "right." Apparently, the veterans who fought and bled to defend those rights are not extended the same consideration. The weak rationale offered by the administration as to why these low or no maintenance venues are being closed is that there is no one available to pick up the trash. Apparently the Obama administration thinks that veterans are less hygienic than illegal immigration activists. Nancy Pelosi and Senator Robert Menendez (who were invisible during the lock out of the World War II veterans) will be present to cheer on the celebration of illegal behavior.

So, are these the people you want running your health care?

...The government is using its police power against the public interest to make what it thinks is a clever anti-Republican point about the government shutdown...

...And so, we come to the big question.  Suppose the government was running our health care as it so dearly wants to do and toward which Obamacare is the first step.  Cones in front of the ER?  The lights turned off in the hospital?  Maybe not in Chicago, safely blue, but in Houston?  Once the government starts attacking the public, where does it end? 

The president has decided that the people need to be punished, to "show them" what happens when he doesn't get his way.  Yes, we get it that this is a technique to try to damage the reputation of Republicans.  But the American tradition is that it's politics during elections and it's governing between elections.

Obama's Shutdown and Public Choice Theory

 ....Here's how it works. If you want to build a new road in the county, the people that won't benefit won't want to pay for it. But if you offer them enough money, then you can get them to agree to vote for your road project. How much money will it take for them to change their minds? Who knows? That's what negotiation is for.
When President Obama says he shouldn't have to negotiate he is saying that he doesn't want to pay for the costs he is imposing on the minority.
It's settled science. To avoid visiting injustice on the minority you must negotiate until they agree to go along.

When Wealth Disappears

...The White House and Congress, unable to reach agreement in the face of a fiscal black hole, have turned over the economic repair job to the Federal Reserve, which has bought trillions of dollars in securities to keep interest rates low. That has propped up the stock market but left many working Americans no better off. Growth remains lackluster. ...

...These five factors induced, if not complacency, an assumption that economies could expand forever...

... Not knowing who, ultimately, will lose as a consequence of our past excesses helps explain America’s current strife. This is not an argument for immediate and painful austerity, which isn’t working in Europe. It is, instead, a plea for economic honesty, to recognize that promises made during good times can no longer be easily kept.

That means a higher retirement age, more immigration to increase the working-age population, less borrowing from abroad, less reliance on monetary policy that creates unsustainable financial bubbles, a new social compact that doesn’t cannibalize the young to feed the boomers, a tougher stance toward banks, a further opening of world trade and, over the medium term, a commitment to sustained deficit reduction.