Saturday, August 31, 2013

Video clip of the day




Alternate headline: The Long National Nightmare is Over



In honor of football kicking off this weekend all over the country at the high school and college levels (NFL starts next weekend) we've posted a Dick's Sporting Goods commercial that you may have seen over the past month or so.


They did a baseball-themed commercial a while back that was good but this single shot, 360 degree take on a Friday night under-the-lights has it all: intensity, realism, smack-talking and best of all... blitz recognition!



A shout-out to our two older brothers and El Dorado Golden Hawks football.








Exit question: Wonder what high school team(s) got the honor of participating in that commercial?





Thursday, August 29, 2013

What we and others have been tweeting









Some humor and miscellany to start things off:


Seriously, check this out:






















Ethanol back in the news:





















Mark Steyn proving, once again, that he is one of the best:















Gotta click and read. Restore-faith-in-humanity stuff:












The Jets are a mess but you knew that already, right?










Follow this guy:
















We want to be shocked or amazed but we're not... they're simply hypocrites:



















We know how this will play out...






because...








And most people aren't really too stoked about it:









Miley Cyrus happened...



































Dude who buys guns and ammo for DHS is a militant racist homophobe, so guess what?


















Back to Syria:




















The North Korean regime executed Kim Jong Un's former girlfriend and 12 members of a couple of musical groups. They were accused of selling pornos of themselves and some apparently were found with Bibles on them. One person was executed via a mortar round. Charmed, we're sure.















Slate writer: You're a bad person if you send your kid to public school:




















Just one for that hack-fest that was the 50th anniversary commemoration of MLK's "I have a dream speech". What a shame:










We're out. Thanks for reading.










Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Your mid-week, martini-worthy photo images



A departure from our semi-regular Wednesday series when we usually feature some pix and music from mid-century(ish) artists and/or celebs.



The usual August monsoon swell moving northwards from Mexico has produced some massive and spectacular thunderclouds out over San Diego's east county including a super cloud on Tuesday from the combining of three separate thunderstorms.


We saw it coming out of work but never thought to snap off any pictures of the monster that dropped an inch of rain on the Laguna Mountains. These pictures are from today:


(please click to enlarge)















Check out the San Diego Union-Tribune's slide show and write-up on Tuesday's supercloud, here.



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Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Railing against lobbying is so last administration


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What happens when you have a massive and massively complex law that effects virtually everybody in the country of which the regulations for that law are still being written just in front of its start/stop "no just kidding" delayed rollout? You get more lobbyists than you can shake a stick at. A lot more.


Back in 2004, over $2.1 billion was spent lobbying Congress and in 2010 the year the Affordable Care Act was passed, that figure grew to $3.55 billion. This was no coincidence as Congress was er, writing the law, there were going to be people filing into K Street and marching up to Capitol Hill to influence members of Congress into writing a law in a manner that had their best interests in mind.


Of course, the lobbying of ObamaCare did not stop once it became law... Oh, no. As we inferred in the first paragraph, the law is merely the law, it's the interpretation of the law in the form of how the rules and regulations are written is where the money is:


From Reuters via Peter Suderman of Reason.com:



A Reuters review of lobbying records found that more than 500 companies, business groups, consumer advocates, unions and other organizations weighed in on the Affordable Care Act during the second quarter of this year.

A typical issue in Washington attracts 15 interest groups at any one time, according to research by Beth Leech, a Rutgers University political science professor who has written three books about lobbying. At the height of political debate over the law, just before Congress passed the legislation in March 2010, more than 1,000 stakeholders lobbied on the bill.

"The Affordable Care Act, from beginning to end, has had an extraordinary amount of lobbying," said Leech. "All these rules are being made for the first time, so there's a great urgency to have that first rule be a rule you like."



Lobbying... or as the President likes to call "consultation with businesses" was the reason Big Business was granted a one-year reprieve of the employer mandate. The fact that Big Business got this one year delay while the individual mandate is still a go for October 1st is no coincidence, gang. You might have noticed, there is no young, healthy people lobby. And the fact that the entire sustainability of this still-unsustainable law absolutely depends upon them paying into the system to offset the costs that will be generated by the elderly sick is not a coincidence either.


And while candidate Obama bemoaned the influence of K Street and the revolving door between administration positions and congressional staffs and K-Street, his administration has damn near turned it into an art form:


More than 30 former administration officials, lawmakers and congressional staffers who worked on the healthcare law have set up shop on K Street since 2010.

Major lobbying firms such as Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock, The Glover Park Group, Alston & Bird, BGR Group and Akin Gump can all boast an ObamaCare insider on their lobbying roster - putting them in a prime position to land coveted clients.

Veterans of the healthcare push are now lobbying for corporate giants such as Delta Airlines, UPS, BP America and Coca-Cola, and for healthcare companies including GlaxoSmithKline, UnitedHealth Group and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association
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Don't be too hard on the President, however. All this lobbying is simply the natural response to a sprawling law of which we are still finding out about and which the rules and regulations have yet to be fully written and promulgated. Can you necessarily blame any of these big boys from throwing their weight around to save as much of their hide as possible (or game the system as much as possible) from this wretched law?


We knew if we were running things for the Little Guy Lobby we'd certainly be doing much the same, unfortunately for the little guy, his lobby is very poorly funded.






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Monday, August 26, 2013

Your California high-speed choo-choo update




A little over a week ago we reported out on a Sacramento judge that ruled against California’s high speed rail commission stating that the project had not met the financial nor environmental promises made to the voters of California when the high-speed choo-choo project was put on the ballot 5 years ago.


This was called a “major blow” to the project but we remained skeptical for two reasons: 1) The judge never levied a stop work order and 2) the lawless nature of the state's political class that is all-in on high-speed choo-choos would’ve simply ignored any cease and desist handed down from the bench.


State honchos argued that the lawsuit brought about by Central Valley farmers was moot as the facts on the ground currently didn’t match the conditions under which the Farmers were bringing suit… which is kind of a problem when you think about.


Anyway, here’s what we wrote regarding the subject 9 days ago:


What is meant by “revised its business plan to scale back the cost” is to eliminate the funding of the infrastructure required to power the rail system and to eliminate the funding for the actual choo-choos. No lie, gang. This is how you get a project that was advertised as costing in the $33-40 billion range when high-speed rail was put on the ballot back in 2008 to the current $68 price tag when estimates for a fully functioning rail system has been put in the $100-120 billion range.



The state’s powerbrokers did not disappoint when they went on the record this past week with respect to Judge Michael Kenny’s ruling:


Gov. Jerry Brown said Monday that California's high-speed rail project will not be stopped by a judge's ruling that project officials failed to comply with provisions of Proposition 1A, the initiative in which voters approved initial funding for the project in 2008.

"It's not a setback," Brown told reporters at the Lake Tahoe Summit.

He said the ruling "didn't stop our spending, so we're continuing. As we speak we're spending money, we're moving ahead."


Please note that spending appears to be the main focus of activity rather any actual building. The good statist that Brown is, he is really, really excited about spending California tax dollars.


For his part, Judge Kenney has requested more information from both opponents and proponents of the project before taking up the matter again.


Stay tuned to these pages for the latest on the greatest public works boondoggle in the history of western civilization.


Video Clip of the day



Ninety seconds of ObamaCare fun:









Excellent. Only thing we would've done differently in this video that is obviously geared towards young people is to point out the ObamaCare mandate is forcing those same young people into bed with the big, moneyed, K Street health insurance lobby as the law is working to serve their interests at the expense of smaller insurers who will not be able to keep up with the added complexities and resulting costs burdened by ObamaCare..


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Saturday, August 24, 2013

Video clip of the day




We are unfamiliar with this concept of a freshman convocation certainly never having experienced one while attending Seminary back in New York and certainly never experiencing anything quite this awesome which may explain a few things.


This went down at Georgia Tech a few days ago:







Don't know about you all but we're ready to run through a couple of brick walls.




I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech, and a hell of an engineer—
A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer.
Like all the jolly good fellows, I drink my whiskey clear.
I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer.

Oh! If I had a daughter, sir, I'd dress her in White and Gold,
And put her on the campus to cheer the brave and bold.
But if I had a son, sir, I'll tell you what he'd do—
He would yell, 'To hell with Georgia!' like his daddy used to do.

Oh, I wish I had a barrel of rum and sugar three thousand pounds,
A college bell to put it in and a clapper to stir it round.
I'd drink to all the good fellows who come from far and near.
I'm a ramblin', gamblin', hell of an engineer!

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Thursday, August 22, 2013

Not all free speech created equally






If you think all western democracies view and think of free speech in tightly similar manners, you would be mistaken. A few years back, we chronicled the travails of Canadian publisher Ezra Levant who reproduced, in one of his publications, the depictions of Mohammed that originally stirred a violent row over in Denmark. He was hauled before something called the Alberta Human Rights Commission for questioning whereby he leveled some of the most inspiring free speech smack at the hapless bureaucrat assigned to question him before he was exonerated of any wrong-doing. Past blog posts on the subject can be found here.


This past July, an American was arrested by the London police for what was charged as "homophobic" speech.




An American evangelist preaching on the streets of London was arrested July 1 on a charge of using "homophobic" speech. Tony Miano, a pastor and retired 20-year Los Angeles County deputy sheriff, was arrested by London police in front of the stadium holding the Wimbledon tennis championships, after a woman told police she was offended by Miano's words concerning homosexual behavior.

The London Telegraph reported that Miano was speaking to passersby from the New Testament book of I Thessalonians (chapter 4), warning of the eternal dangers of sexual immorality, including homosexuality. A woman, who can be seen on a video of the incident on the Telegraph website, complained to police, who took the man into custody, arresting him for using "homophobic" speech. "During the subsequent questioning at Wimbledon police station," the Telegraph reported, Miano "was asked about his beliefs on what constitutes 'sin' and about how he would treat gay people in hypothetical situations."

Miano recalled that "as the questioning started it became apparent that the interrogation was about more than the incident that took place in the street, but what I believed and how I think." He added that "I was being interrogated about my thoughts."




Yeah, we'd be pretty freaked out as well coming to the realization that our British cousins were taking this notion of "thought police" in quite a literal sense. The police let Miano cool his heels in jail for 7 hours before releasing him without charge.


That no charges were filed, we do not find particularly comforting. The real crime is that he was brought in at all.


What's lost on many people including those on this side of the pond is the 1st amendment provides protection for speech that is unpopular or that we may find offensive, otherwise why have it. If we are all singing from the same sheet of music, so to speak, free speech protection becomes unneeded.


And as far as this sort of thing not happening over here, please recall the tweets/statements from people that should absolutely know better calling for the head of the man who made that crappy Youtube video (pictured) upon which the Obama administration tried to blame the Benghazi consulate attack. It was disgusting. Of course, Team O knew the video did not instigate the attacks but the man is still in jail for parole "violations". He is, indeed, a political prisoner.


The take-away here is that when this country's arbiters of what is correct thinking and proper speech espouse such a casual disregard for free speech, popular opinion shifts after a time and which makes passing speech-restricting laws that much easier.


We're hell-bent on copying Britain's wretched healthcare system, what makes you so sure we won't start adopting some of their horrible speech laws as well?




Update #1: Thanks for the Instalanche, Glenn! If you like, I can be followed on Twitter @deanriehm

Also, check out the SLOBs (San Diego Local Order of Bloggers) for news and opinion from a libertarian/conservative perspective.


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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Some not-so-random thoughts on something we did not write





Instapundit aka Glenn Reynolds (or is it the other way around? Man, all these interwebs/social media protocols have us wrapped around the axle) penned an excellent piece a couple of days ago in USA Today regarding the breakdown in trust in our nation's institutions and which has been exacerbated of late by the spate of scandals that has hit Washington D.C. and which all point to the integrity of our elected officials and the people those folks appoint to operate our governing infrastructure.


We're not here to argue the legitimacy of what should be more properly termed crisis... we have made our case(s) on an individual basis in other posts. Perception is reality, gang, and, of late, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that perhaps the NSA has reached beyond their original charter and scope with their domestic data gathering operation, to trot out just one example.



We forgot where we saw or read this but we felt the following was profound:

People will stop participating in society when they feel that society has nothing to offer them.



If you are regular reader of this blog then you are savvy enough to realize what is being offered is nothing monetary nor societal-provided benefits in the way of, say, a government safety net.


This is about a social contract that says not only will being a law-abiding and productive person be its own reward, it will be rewarded in turn by a law-abiding and productive society in which that person lives. Our betters in government are not holding up their end of this contract, however, and things are breaking down. A government that lacks transparency and integrity will soon lose the trust and confidence of the citizenry and that is precisely what we are seeing now.


A cynical and increasing disengaged citizenry only invites more bad acting by its government and you wind up in a constitutional republic death spiral.


We have always believed that a going-in assumption that your governing authorities are incompetent and/or over-reaching in their authority is not an unhealthy one.


This is not borne of paranoia or any extremist "rugged individualism" rather the inevitability of the frailty and fallibility of mankind. Perhaps to say it another way: You cannot forever bury your head in the sports section because someone, somewhere is going to screw up and/or screw you over and it will have negative consequences so you need to pay attention. This is an unavoidable fact.


We have stated several times in the past and as the Figurehead would suggest, we had fully intended to make Beers with Demo primarily a sports blog but the campaign for President in 2008 changed that forever. This coincided with our cracking open the front page and local section of the fish wrap before we got to the sports section, a sequence never before exercised.


There just seemed to be too much at stake and that is something that should never ever be said with respect to politics/governance. We shouldn't have to care so much. We should not have to pay this amount of attention. This only speaks, then, to the amount of authority we have granted to those aforementioned flawed human beings.


Do we wish we could revert BwD to a sports blog? You better believe it. And though ignorance may be bliss, if we are indeed being led to slaughter, we'd prefer it done eyes wide open so we can get a few wacks in on the way down.


Again, do yourself a favor and check out Reynolds' article at the link.



Update #1: Thanks for the Instalanche, Glenn. #Grateful #humbled. If you like, I can be followed on Twitter @deanriehm.


Also, for opinion and views from a libertarian/conservative perspective, check out the SLOBs (San Diego Local Order of Bloggers). Really nice people with excellent insights.



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Monday, August 19, 2013

What we and others have been tweeting





Some humor to get things started:


























So, that Missouri state fair rodeo clown that wore the Obama mask... We know it was so last week but at the time, it was sucking all the oxygen out of the room much to the joy of the President's supporters who have not found much to be happy about in another summer of discontent.













































Elon Musk was in the news last week when he unveiled very nascent plans for his Hyperloop transportation system in the Central Valley that would use tubed pods and magnetism to scoot people from San Fran and Los Angeles and visa versa in 30 minutes.

Hey, that has a ring of familiarity to it...






























That ain't no lie.

























ObamaCare... always with the ObamaCare and always with the ObamaCare delays, waivers and exemptions. This time, a one-year delay of the health insurance out-of-pocket expense caps:
































Here's some comforting news:























MSNBC not even trying anymore:









Getting ready for some football and asking the questions that need to be asked:






















The NSA spying scandal isn't going anywhere especially when the Commander-in-Chief has been less than truthful about it:






















The sexual assault crisis in our armed forces, if nothing else, provides the perfect opportunity for some grandstanding. Unfortunately, said grandstanding has had some actual, real-world negative consequences:























Middle East peace talks are the ultimate foreign policy make-work program:









Team O has asked courts to be able to go through cell phone records of people police have arrested without obtaining a warrant. Hey, only a liberal Democrat could further the cause of the surveillance state.




























The Greenwald mentioned below is the NSA whistleblower.





Got intimidation?






Finally, the pro-Filner crowd had there little rally downtown on Monday afternoon. "Due process" seemed to be the ubiquitous chant for our hometown's disgraceful creeper:














OK, that's it for today. Take care, y'all.














Saturday, August 17, 2013

Your California high-speed choo-choo update




The breathless lede to this linked article from the Associated Press regarding a suit filed by Central Valley landowners back in 2011 may certainly turn out to be a big fat nothing-burger if the past conduct of the state’s political power broker establishment is any indication. However, for whatever it’s worth…


No money? No problem:



A Sacramento County judge dealt a major blow to California’s high-speed rail project Friday, ruling the agency overseeing the bullet train failed to comply with the financial and environmental promises made to voters when they approved initial funding for the project five years ago.


Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny said the California High-Speed Rail Authority “abused its discretion by approving a funding plan that did not comply with the requirements of the law” and has failed to identify “sources of funds that were more than merely theoretically possible.”


However, he declined to halt funding for the project, saying it wasn’t clear he had the discretion to do so and he’ll hold another hearing to determine what happens next. A date hasn’t been set.


The 2008 initiative, Proposition 1A, required the rail authority to specify where the funding would come from for the first operable segment of high-speed rail and have all the environmental clearances in place. Kenny said the agency did not comply with either of those mandates, but Proposition 1A appears to leave it up to lawmakers to decide whether the funding plan is sufficient to warrant funding.


The office of Gov. Jerry Brown, who has championed the project, directed inquiries to the rail authority. Dan Richard, the Brown-appointed chairman of the authority’s board, said work on the project will continue until the judge determines the remedy.




You just saw the nothing-burger, there, did you not? Judge said he will leave it up to the lawmakers to figure their way out of this legal and financial conundrum and rail honcho Richard says this is all back on the judge. In the meantime, nothing to see here, all ahead, full, because…



Central Valley landowners and the Kings County Board of Supervisors argued in their 2011 lawsuit that the $68 billion high-speed rail plan did not meet the promises made to voters when they approved selling $10 billion in bonds for it.

However, the lawsuit was filed in 2011, before the authority revised its business plan to scale back the cost and revise the planned routes, and high-speed rail officials believe many of the arguments made in court no longer apply to the project.




What is meant by “revised its business plan to scale back the cost” is to eliminate the funding of the infrastructure required to power the rail system and to eliminate the funding for the actual choo-choos. No lie, gang. This is how you get a project that was advertised as costing in the $33-40 billion range when high-speed rail was put on the ballot back in 2008 to the current $68 price tag when estimates for a fully functioning rail system has been put in the $100-120 billion range.


Of course lawsuits mean nothing when you just start making up stuff along the way.


It gets better, though. In order to qualify for $3.3 billion in federal stimulus money, the first 130 miles of track have to be built (between Madera and Fresno) before 2017, a construction pace whereby the consensus has been described as “unprecedented”. Of course, the state has said they will tap into that $3.3 billion before and/or during the construction of that initial stretch of steel in violation of the law.


Again, probably another nothing-burger as the Obama administration will claim extremis, executive privilege, gridlock, newly-found constitutional powers as they have done in the past to throw more money into this black hole.


It must be fun being a statist and having that ability to suspend disbelief and simply ignore budgetary math and the rule of law.


While people like Elon Musk are truly getting outside the box with privately-funded 21st century ideas like Hyperloop, we’re going to be spending in the neighborhood of $100 billion on 19th century technology.


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Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Quote and graphic image of the day



Bono of U2:

Aid is just a stopgap,” he said. “Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse.”









James Pethokoukis breaks it all down here.





And since we're feeling generous this evening, allow us to uncork a Milton Friedman classic:







"And where are you going to find these angels to organize society for us?"




After all these years, still love the look on Donahue's face. Who is this guy?



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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Reistance is futile... unless they're the ones doing the resisting





Polling data has indicated that though the Affordable Care Act, as a whole, remains unpopular with the American people, individual aspects of the law are viewed upon quite favorably. It's a damn shame then that those favorable aspects of the law keep getting delayed.


To date, the Obama administration has delayed implementation of the employer mandate and delayed the subsidy qualifying verification mechanism both by one year. The administration has also acknowledged there are no background checks in place for the tens of thousands of state health insurance exchange "navigators" they will be hiring that will have access to personal and private medical, income and tax information leaving many Americans open to fraud and identity theft.


And on Monday, Team O announced a one year delay of the the cap on out-of-pocket medical expenses:


ObamaCare's limit on out-of-pocket costs is being delayed until 2015. According to the New York Times, the cap, which includes co-pays and deductibles, "was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014."


"Federal officials" should not be confused with "Congress" who are the people that actually make the laws that most of us are required to live by. Here again, we have a completely arbitrary and unilateral selective enactment of a law.




More from linked article:


'The health law, signed more than three years ago by Mr. Obama, clearly established a single overall limit on out-of-pocket costs for each individual or family. But federal officials said that many insurers and employers needed more time to comply because they used separate companies to help administer major medical coverage and drug benefits, with separate limits on out-of-pocket costs."



This is indicative of that "consults with businesses" clause of the constitution that our constitutional scholar-in-chief told us about on Friday and which he used as legal mechanism to delay the employer mandate. That ObamaCare is the law of the land doesn't really seem to faze the guy as being the smartest guy in the room apparently gives him the discretion to do whatever the hell he wants with respect to a law we absolutely had to have yesterday.


And speaking of ObamaCare is the law of the land, Health and Human Services HMFIC, Kathleen Sebelius (pictured), kindly warned (?) of this fact at a meeting of pols and health officials on Monday:


Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told several hundred legislators and state health officers Monday that resistance to the 2010 health-care overhaul should end, and that they can play a role in implementing the still hotly debated act.


"This is no longer a political debate; this is what we call the law," Sebelius told a group that includes Democrats and Republicans, elected officials, political appointees and bureaucrats. "It was passed and signed three years ago. It was upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago. The president was re-elected. This is the law of the land."

(italics, ours)


That happened.


The hack's boss has been the biggest obstructionist to the full implementation of his own law but... Republicans.


We have news for this woman: if this be the law then the law be an ass.


We will continue to be relentless in our criticism of this monstrosity and we will forevermore work via civil and peaceful means to subvert and undermine this law at every turn as it will turn out to be the very antithesis of keeping your healthcare decisions between yourself and your doctor and which will also be the largest incursion to our personal freedoms and liberties that we have known in our lifetime. We cannot in good conscience act in any other manner but to resist.








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Monday, August 12, 2013

2 links, 1 post



A list post, if you will.


First up is a reminder why the IRS is a rogue and un-accountable agency and should be abolished.


The agency has apparently targeted tens of thousands of small businesses with form letters asking them whether they have under-reported cash revenues. There is no rhyme nor reason as to who gets these letters and why they are getting them so the implication is clearly that these businesses have, indeed, not been compliant with the tax code and thus time, money and resources are expended by Mom and Pops when they clearly do not have these in ample supply in order to answer the IRS and their baseless implied accusations.


At the link, here, is Entrepreneur’s “5 Reason the IRS’s New Focus on Small Businesses is Ridiculously Egregious.”



4. The IRS isn’t transparent.

Want to know how the IRS has determined that your business might be underreporting cash sales? Tough. Clearly there is an algorithm based on reporting from banks and credit-card companies, but the IRS isn’t offering the extent that data is used. In fact, it is offering very little. It only says that the businesses receiving the letters have reported cash sales that are “unusually low.” It is difficult to refute any accusation when you don’t know what information went into it in the first place. Is it based just on the percentage of cash sales? Does the algorithm take into account the average size of a transaction? Are some sectors being targeted more than others? Business owners know nothing about why they are getting these letters.




The sooner we get to a flat tax or some sort of national sales/consumption tax and put these bureaucratic thugs permanently out of business, the better.







We haven’t blogged about the worst energy idea ever in a while and having said that, we’ll let FreedomWorks do the heavy lifting for us in their latest: "Top Ten Reasons to Eliminate Renewable Fuel Standards."


Central to the article is the political class policy taste-maker’s unhealthy and unholy obsession with ethanol. What's not to like about about a massively tax payer-subsidized alternative fuel that bad for your car’s engine (alcohol), is not as energy efficient as gasoline, has a larger carbon footprint with respect to producing and bringing ethanol to market than gasoline and is responsible for driving up food prices worldwide in an increasingly hungry planet?


Yeah, insert locker room humor as to what your buddy sees in what is clearly his mean, unforgiving and ball-busting girlfriend. It’s gotta be something, huh?


Well, in the case of ethanol we know what that something is: a hugely disproportionately powerful farm lobby and the hugely disproportionately powerful Iowa Caucus as one of the first events on the Presidential primary calendar every 4 years, where no candidate in either party is going to come out against ethanol subsidies and the renewable fuel standards to which it is wed.

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Saturday, August 10, 2013

Constitutional scholar locates a "consultation with businesses" clause





At his press conference yesterday, the President was questioned with respect to his delaying by one year the employer mandate whereby businesses of over 50 employees would have to provide federally-approved health insurance plans for the same.


Here was his response:




With respect to health care, I didn’t simply choose to delay this on my own. This was in consultation with businesses all across the country, many of whom are supportive of the Affordable Care Act, but — and who — many of whom, by the way, are already providing health insurance to their employees but were concerned about the operational details of changing their HR operations if they’ve got a lot of employees, which could be costly for them, and them suggesting that there may be easier ways to do this.

Now what’s true, Ed, is that in a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what? This is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. It has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify the attestation of employers as to whether they’re already providing health insurance or not. It looks like there may be some better ways to do this. Let’s make a technical change of the law.

That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do, but we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to, quote- unquote, “Obamacare.”

We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so. But this doesn’t go to the core of implementation.



No. No he doesn't have the authority to unilaterally delay implementation of policy he signed into law.


And to imply blame for this on the opposition party is pathetic and weak-minded. Republicans were froze out of the negotiations during the crafting of this monstrosity but now they are being blamed for the President's unconstitutional unilateral action as if they are now suddenly required to bail the man out of the mess of his own making.


But back to the "consultation with businesses" clause... It doesn't exist.


Nowhere in either the law (“ObamaCare”) nor the Constitution is authority granted by which the President can just start winging it and choose which parts of the law he wants to implement and choosing to whom the law will or will not apply. This power is simply not granted to a single person.


We hope all the 99%ers out there are paying attention to this: the person you most likely voted for is forcing you to purchase health insurance from the big health insurance complex as this law is effectively driving the smaller health insurance providers out of the market.


The person you most likely voted for President did not consult with you, rather he consulted with the monied interests of this country before making this decision. There are many names for this government-corporate hand-in-hand arrangement: corporatism, economic fascism, Peronism… call it what you want but it is lawless and it is un-constitutional and does not belong whatsoever in the governance of this country. We cannot wait until there is an (R) back in the Oval Office whereby fidelity to the Constitution and rejection of corporate interests will matter again with all the cool kids.


3-1/2 years after ObamaCare became law, the man is diminished to unlawful actions and blaming others for the already fantastic failure of his “signature” piece of legislation.



Parting thought: perhaps the best case in favor of the Constitution is to protect us against those who do not think we need it anymore.






Thursday, August 8, 2013

Video clip of the day



Reason.com presents their Nanny of the Month:


(video approx. 2 minutes long)






Protected status? Protect from what? Are they endangered? If the city charter or ordinance has a blanket anti-discrimination policy, then who exactly needs special protection status?

Oh, that's right. We're talking municipalities here as the great incubators of leftist identity politics because regardless of what you may have been taught in school read in some ancient document somewhere, we are all created equal and some folks just a little more equal than others.



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Wednesday, August 7, 2013

What we and others have been tweeting










Yeah, we have our share of issues here in California but our weather, craft beer and women all of which cannot be beat more than make up for our shortcomings in the fraternity of U.S. states. Others... not so much:











On closing our embassies across the Middle East:



















We couldn't keep our inner cynic under wraps, either:











A pro-ObamaCare hashtag popped up on Sunday and was promptly high-jacked by the loyal opposition. Some of our contributions:
























































We really love our Pandora, however....











So, Huma has decided to stand by her Weiner. Charmed, we're sure.









Go to the link and check out the headline from Bloomberg:

















And a reminder to those who believe the tea party's influence is waning:










Performing a public service, we feel the need to remind everyone of what we thought was pretty obvious:


















Benghazi isn't going away:








More PSAs in case you were away;


















We won't wait for the statist spin, We'll just do it for them:









And one more out the door and which is dedicated to the man who has redefined what it means to be a liberal since 2009:








OK, gang, y'all take care. Out.