Ann Coulter told Hannity tonight what will happen to the international criminal Julian Assange for leaking the 250,000 US security documents… Nothing.
Because democrats are in the White House.
“America is a helpless, pitiful giant because democrats are in the White House.”
"Blackmail or jizya? Same thing.
Muammar Gaddafi has demanded that the European Union give him more than £4 billion to fight illegal immigration, or else Europe will turn "black" and be swamped by Muslims. Uh, Islam is not a race, Moe Moe.
Hell of a way to talk about your own people ............ who knew Gaddafi was a racist-islamo-phobic-anti-muslim-bigot? Does CAIR know?
Gaddafi demands £4 billion from EU or Europe will turn 'black' Telegraph
Muammar Gaddafi has demanded that the European Union give him more than £4 billion to fight illegal immigration or else Europe will turn "black" and be swamped by Muslims.
During an EU-Africa summit, that ended on Tuesday in Tripoli, the Libyan leader described European's economic relationship with the African continent as a "failure".
Unless "Christian, white" countries gave him extra funding, Colonel Gaddafi predicted that Europe would be flooded with illegal immigrants leaving impoverished Africa.
"We should stop this illegal immigration. If we don't, Europe will become black, it will be overcome by people with different religions, it will change," he said.
The Hill now reports that its earlier story on Congressman Eric Cantor’s backpedaling on repeal of Obamacare was incorrect. He does not seek to preserve the proscription on exclusion of patients with preexisting conditions or the provision allowing 26-year-olds to remain on their parents’ policies. No indeed: Cantor continues to favor a full repeal of Obamacare.
Except that “We too don’t want to accept any insurance company’s denial of someone and coverage for that person because he or she may have [a] pre-existing condition. And likewise we want to make sure that someone of your age has the ability to access affordable care, whether it’s under your parents [sic] plan or elsewhere.”
So there we have it. Cantor favors a repeal of Obamacare; but promises separate legislation essentially reinstating it, with some differences in details from current law. Oh, please. If there is not actuarially fair pricing of coverage and no denial of coverage because of preexisting conditions, then the private insurance market will collapse, in that incentives to buy “insurance” only when sick will be powerful. Perhaps Cantor believes that we simply can subsidize the purchase of coverage for those with preexisting conditions. Not so fast: Will the Beltway really be able to define such conditions carefully and calibrate the appropriate subsidies? As the subsidies and the subsidized pool grow in response to the inevitable political pressures, how will a federal takeover of the insurance market be avoided? Etc.
Just as Mitt Romney inevitably will fail in his desperate quest to differentiate Romney-care from Obamacare -- sorry, but they are identical in their essentials -- so too will Republicans fail to prevent the descent into a single-payer system, with all of its perversities, by allowing the polls to dictate their policy proposals. We need to get the government out of the market for insurance contracts, out of the doctor-patient relationship, and out of the business of price controls on health-care services. The best we can do is subsidize the purchase of private coverage by those in financial need. The Cantor approach -- if the reporting by The Hill is accurate -- is worse than merely unprincipled. It will accelerate America’s metamorphosis into France.
--- Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
Is there any business sector the administration won’t harm? And….another cool 15,000 jobs lost, but that’s no big deal. The economy is just fine. From the press release:
The EPA scheme to undermine domestic production of Portland cement hit a legal pothole this week as Congressman John Carter (R-TX) revived the Congressional Review Act to file a resolution of disapproval against the proposed rule.
The Republican Conference Secretary on Tuesday introduced H.J. Res. 100, which would disapprove the new regulations calling for greatly restricted production of Portland cement, the most-used material in construction worldwide. If the regulations are allowed to become effective, industry analysts predict U.S. manufacturers will be forced to move production to China and elsewhere, where there are few if any environmental standards.
The U.S. cement industry currently employs 153,000 workers, with $1 trillion dollars in annual sales. While even the EPA concedes their new rule would cost over 15,000 industry jobs lost to overseas competitors, industry analysts say the regulations could lead to the complete collapse of American cement production by 2013, severely undermining the overall U.S. economic recovery. Ironically, the rule also is estimated to result in an increase in global air pollution as producers move to countries without the current high U.S. air quality standards.
Carter, joined on the House floor last night by Congressmen Geoff Davis (R-KY) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), called for Congress to renew its oversight authority over federal rulemaking agencies by exercising its right to block onerous federal regulations under the Congressional Review Act, 5 U.S.C. § 801(a)(2)(A) (CRA).
The CRA became law in 1996 but has fallen into disuse under a Democrat Congress. The law mandates that all federal agencies must submit major new regulations to the House and Senate for a 60-day review period before they take effect. Congress can vote to block the proposed rule under a resolution of disapproval during that period, and if signed by the President, the regulation is void. Congress can also vote to override a Presidential veto on a resolution of disapproval.
“Folks at home see these awful infringements on their rights and pocketbooks and think Congress is at fault, when in fact it is usually federal bureaucrats writing regulations that Congress never contemplated when passing legislation,” says Carter, a former Texas judge. “There’s no better public example of this than the current TSA scandal over strip-searching and groping airline passengers with no more probable cause than the use of public transportation. While the Portland cement scheme doesn’t have the same media appeal, it will certainly have as great an economic impact on working Americans unless Congress stands up and fights for the people against the out-of-control bureaucrats in Washington.”
Video here.
UPDATED:
Not a government of laws, but regulations.
Cut funding to the EPA, I say.
And more on the Biomass industry.
"
Only one man could have a more grotesquely distended ego than Barack Hussein Obama — Obama's boss, the sinister zillionaire who bought the Democrat Party, Nazi collaborator George Soros:
Wouldn't it be interesting to learn what Soros knows about the financial collapse of 2008 that ushered his minion B. Hussein into power?
On a tip from American Citizen.
"Maybe Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN) feels even freer to speak his mind since he decided not to seek a tenth term in the House of Representatives. Here’s the LA Times:
Monday, the presiding speaker was California’s Democratic Rep. Laura Richardson.
When Indiana Republican Rep. Steve Buyer sought recognition to speak for….
…five minutes about some pending veterans legislation, she said no. He revised his request to one minute.Looking confused and taking verbal directions from someone off-camera, Richardson again denied the request.
Buyer persisted, growing outraged that one sitting representative was highhandedly refusing to recognize another, even for one minute. “This is why,” Buyer declared, “the American people have thrown you out of power.”
I have a couple versions of the video — including a bonus part you won’t want to miss. Here’s the condensed version:
Here‘s the medium length version that ’s getting most of the viral play right now:
Finally we have the “official” 4:30 version on the C-SPAN YouTube channel. Here’s why you should watch:
After Buyer is finally permitted to speak on this video, there is a short gap before Richardson is told to call a recess. Keep watching the bottom of the screen then for an entertaining gesture of exasperation by Buyer, who leaves his seat to walk by where he knows the main House camera is pointing.
So pay attention to the quiet mini-demonstration that begins around 3:23. And then don’t miss the last few seconds!
Rep. Buyer is now doing some post-rant analysis:
The GOP lawmaker who loudly voiced his displeasure over being denied an opportunity to speak said Tuesday the House has become “dark, mismanaged“ and ”undemocratic.”
Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.), the outgoing GOP lawmaker and ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said he could have been more “civil” when he unleashed a tirade on the acting House Speaker after she denied him an opportunity to speak on the floor.
“Listening to myself — I was pretty upset yesterday,” he said on the conservative Sean Hannity radio show.
Hannity advised Buyer not to apologize. Here’s how Buyer is playing it:
"“We all try to control ourselves. I am pugnacious,” he said. “But I also believe we have to be very civil. I was dumbfounded that I would not have been recognized to speak.”
Bad news for Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange. Interpol, the international police agency, added Assange to its “most wanted” list Tuesday as the activist’s website continued its leak of U.S. diplomatic cables. But the charges are reportedly not related at all to the information leak. Rather, the Wikileaks founder is being sought to answer charges of sexual assault in Sweden.
According to CNN, the Stockholm Criminal Court last week issued an international arrest warrant for Assange on probable cause, saying he is suspected of “rape, sexual molestation and illegal use of force.” Sweden had then asked Interpol to issue a “Red Notice” after a judge ordered he be brought into custody.
PC Magazine has more:
The arrest warrant is actually being issued by the International Public Prosecution Office in Gothenberg, Sweden. Under the “Categories of Offenses” section, Interpol has listed “Sex Crimes”.
In August, the Swedish courts issued another arrest warrant after indicting Assange of raping two women. However a judge threw out the ruling within the same week due to insufficient evidence. …
On Nov. 18, a district court in Stockholm approved another a request from the alleged victims’ prosecutor, Marianne Ny, to detain Assange in his absence. He was indicted for “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion,” the statement said. “To execute the court’s decision, the next step is to issue an international arrest warrant,” the court added.
Assange’s London counsel, Mark Stephens, has said in a letter that Ny has repeatedly turned down Assange’s attempts to either meet in person or discuss the accusations over the phone.
Stephens added that the rape charges were insubstantial to begin with.
“As various media outlets have reported ‘the basis for the rape charge’ purely seems to constitute a post-facto dispute over consensual, but unprotected sex days after the event,” he wrote. “Both women have declared that they had consensual sexual relations with our client and that they continued to instigate friendly contact well after the alleged incidents. Only after the women became aware of each other’s relationships with Mr. Assange did they make their allegations against him.”
In the midst of all the controversy surrounding the Australian native, Assange has officially been offered no-questions-asked residency in Ecuador
“We are open to giving [Assange] residency in Ecuador, without any problem and without any conditions,” Kintto Lucas, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister, said in a statement this week. “We are going to try and invite him to Ecuador to freely present, not only via the Internet, but also through different public forums, the information and documentation that he has.”
No one seems to know exactly where Assange is hiding out or whether he’s currently living in a country that would extradite him to Sweden, but many believe Assange may be living in or near London. The Australian attorney general is reportedly currently considering revoking Assange’s Australian passport.
Update: Ecuador President Rescinds Residency Offer to Assange
"A federal judge rejected a challenge brought by Liberty University, the second time the law's insurance mandate has been upheld.
"The California residents who elected Jerry Brown should be overjoyed at tomorrow’s news story in the Wall Street Journal: 40,000 state convicts were ordered released so that they can roam the streets.
A three-judge panel in a California federal district court ruled in January that overcrowding in the state’s prison system, the nation’s largest, is the main cause of substandard medical and mental health care that violates prisoners’ Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment…
The state houses 164,000 inmates in a system designed to hold about 80,000, and the prisons have been beyond capacity for two decades. The judges ordered the state to cap the inmate population at 137.5% of their capacity within two years, which would be about 110,000 inmates this year.
Of course, the father of this debacle is none other than Governor-Elect Jerry Brown, who has been in bed with the prison guards’ union since his career began. The union — which the right-wing rag called The Huffington Post calls “one of the state’s richest and most reviled special-interest groups” — has fought sensible sentencing measures for decades. Just two years ago, the union and Brown teamed up to keep the prison population artificially high.
The California prison guards’ union… is funding a multi-million-dollar attack on Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act. The prison guards’ newest ally is Jerry Brown, attorney general and former governor of California.
Prop. 5 is a modest and sensible reform of California’s corrections system that promises to reduce the state’s bloated prison population and, in the process, cut state spending by billions of dollars. The measure is supported by a wide-range of treatment professionals, good-government types and former high-ranking corrections and law enforcement officials.
The prison guards, however, oppose Prop. 5. They don’t like the math. Fewer prisoners will mean fewer jobs and less overtime pay for prison guards…
That’s how it’s been for years. Brown fought relentlessly to maintain California’s ‘Three Strikes Law‘, which hasn’t helped deter crime at all, but has certainly kept the union fat and happy at taxpayer expense.
And, best of all for California’s voters, Brown was endorsed again this year by the union.
Worse still, Brown is an outspoken proponent of illegal immigration. And you can just imagine the impact of illegals on California’s prison population. Oh — wait, you don’t need to imagine:
As of Dec. 31, 2009, California prisons had 22,173 inmates with an immigration hold or potential immigration hold, according to a Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation analysis. That represented 13 percent of the state’s 168,830 inmates.
Inmates self-identify their country of birth, so the citizenship breakdown may not be entirely accurate, according to CDCR spokesman Gordon Hinkle…
Because the inmates self-identify citizenship, the estimate of 22,000 illegal immigrants in the prison population is most certainly low. The real number may never be known, but as recently as 2003 the Department of Justice (the real DOJ, pre-Holder) reported that 108,000 illegals living in California served time during the year.
So, as a reward for that failure, Californians reelected him to the highest state office.
Am I the first to suggest building a fence around California?
Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.
(Washington Post)
It was rumored that the US Government, specifically the US Attorney’s office in Alexandria Virginia, is going to charge Julian Assange with Espionage. Obviously, the Interpol warrant, being worldwide, takes precedence.
Via The Sydney Morning Herald -
Interpol, the international police organisation, has issued a global arrest warrant for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, as the activist website continued its US diplomatic cables leaks today.
The 39-year-old Australian was added to the organisation’s “wanted” list for alleged sex crimes committed in Sweden this year.
He is suspected of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion, after an investigation by Swedish prosecutors into his encounters with two women in Sweden in August.
Mr. Assange has made some powerful enemies. One wonders if he might be safer in custody rather than jet setting around the world.
"Pakistani-Saudi relations were not the only casualty from the Wikileaks release this week. The far left Obama Administration is getting pummeled by the disclosures. And, democratic darling Hillary Clinton is taking a huge hit.
Now there’s this…
Leftist hero Julian Assange called for Hillary Clinton to resign today.
Talk about a major political dilemma?
Do the anti-American leftists listen to their fabulous new anti-American hero or do they rush to defend liberal icon Hillary Clinton?
What to do?… What to do?…
TIME Mag reported:
"Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange said, “should resign.” Speaking over Skype from an undisclosed location on Tuesday, the WikiLeaks founder was replying to a question by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel over the diplomatic-cable dump that Assange’s organization loosed on the world this past weekend. Stengel had said the U.S. Secretary of State was looking like “the fall guy” in the ensuing controversy, and had asked whether her firing or resignation was an outcome that Assange wanted. “I don’t think it would make much of a difference either way,” Assange said. “But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that.
Sweden braces for record freeze - The Local - m.thelocal.se
Hmmm.
Offered as a correction to this morning’s Headline item. Initially, the Hill reported that Cantor wanted to retain ObamaCare’s framework for preexisting conditions. Not so, as they now note in a postscript to the article: He wants to repeal the whole thing, then replace it with a GOP bill that will have its own, different [...]
"
"
Jihad recruitment in the U.S. 'Somali woman in terror money case to stay in jail,' from The Associated Press, November 30:
SAN DIEGO -- A Somali-born woman in San Diego accused of routing money and people to a terrorist organization in her native country will remain in jail for now."Nima Ali Yusuf appeared briefly Tuesday in U.S. District Court, where she waived her right to a custody hearing and agreed to remain in jail with the option of arguing for her release at a later date.
Prosecutors say the 24-year-old permanent U.S. resident sent about $800 to al-Shabab and tried to recruit fighters....
But remember: the real problem is Christian 'extremists' who oppose gay marriage. Obama campaigned for Odinga, although he has denounced an initiative similar to this one in Uganda. Sharia Alert from Kenya: 'Arrest gays, Kenyan PM orders,' by Bernard Momanyi for Capital News, November 29:
NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 28 - Prime Minister Raila Odinga has ordered a nationwide crackdown on homosexuals in Kenya."Mr Odinga on Sunday said that police should arrest anyone found engaging in such behaviours and take appropriate legal action against them.
'We will not tolerate such behaviours in the country. The constitution is very clear on this issue and men or women found engaging in homosexuality will not be spared,' Mr Odinga said.
'Any man found engaging in sexual activities with another man should be arrested. Even women found engaging in sexual activities will be arrested,' the premier warned....
'This [homosexual] kind of behaviours will not be tolerated in this country. Men or women found engaging in those acts deserve to be arrested and will be arrested,' he told the crowd....
A move by Uganda to introduce a Bill calling for long jail terms or death penalty in some cases of homosexuality received international condemnation, with US President Barack Obama describing it as 'odious'.
He said: 'But surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and lesbians for who they are, whether it is here in the United States or... more extremely, in odious laws that are being proposed more recently in Uganda.'
But notwithstanding Obama's remarks, homosexual acts are now illegal in Uganda and attracts jail terms of up to 14 years in prison.
Is there any business sector the administration won’t harm? And….another cool 15,000 jobs lost, but that’s no big deal. The economy is just fine. From the press release:
The EPA scheme to undermine domestic production of Portland cement hit a legal pothole this week as Congressman John Carter (R-TX) revived the Congressional Review Act to file a resolution of disapproval against the proposed rule.
The Republican Conference Secretary on Tuesday introduced H.J. Res. 100, which would disapprove the new regulations calling for greatly restricted production of Portland cement, the most-used material in construction worldwide. If the regulations are allowed to become effective, industry analysts predict U.S. manufacturers will be forced to move production to China and elsewhere, where there are few if any environmental standards.
The U.S. cement industry currently employs 153,000 workers, with $1 trillion dollars in annual sales. While even the EPA concedes their new rule would cost over 15,000 industry jobs lost to overseas competitors, industry analysts say the regulations could lead to the complete collapse of American cement production by 2013, severely undermining the overall U.S. economic recovery. Ironically, the rule also is estimated to result in an increase in global air pollution as producers move to countries without the current high U.S. air quality standards.
Carter, joined on the House floor last night by Congressmen Geoff Davis (R-KY) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA), called for Congress to renew its oversight authority over federal rulemaking agencies by exercising its right to block onerous federal regulations under the Congressional Review Act, 5 U.S.C. § 801(a)(2)(A) (CRA).
The CRA became law in 1996 but has fallen into disuse under a Democrat Congress. The law mandates that all federal agencies must submit major new regulations to the House and Senate for a 60-day review period before they take effect. Congress can vote to block the proposed rule under a resolution of disapproval during that period, and if signed by the President, the regulation is void. Congress can also vote to override a Presidential veto on a resolution of disapproval.
“Folks at home see these awful infringements on their rights and pocketbooks and think Congress is at fault, when in fact it is usually federal bureaucrats writing regulations that Congress never contemplated when passing legislation,” says Carter, a former Texas judge. “There’s no better public example of this than the current TSA scandal over strip-searching and groping airline passengers with no more probable cause than the use of public transportation. While the Portland cement scheme doesn’t have the same media appeal, it will certainly have as great an economic impact on working Americans unless Congress stands up and fights for the people against the out-of-control bureaucrats in Washington.”
Video here.
You absolutely, positively have got to love it:
Jimmy Carter wants to see President Barack Obama drop his efforts at bipartisanship during the next two years, and he thinks the president will heed his call.
“In the next two years, President Obama will be much more independent in fighting hard to prevail and not trying to reach out,” the former president said in an interview with CBS News on “Washington Unplugged.” “I think he’ll be a much more tough proponent of what he stands for in the future, giving up on Republicans’ support and taking his case to the American public.”
Meanwhile, Carter will meet with Obama on Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs confirmed.
Carter had planned to meet with the White House’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon. Obama then asked Carter if he would stop by for a meeting, Gibbs told reporters on Tuesday.
Gibbs wouldn’t say whether Carter’s visit was related to North Korea.
“That is all I know, and I will try to find more,” Gibbs said before leaving the briefing room.
Er, um – I’d looove for President Obama to take Carter’s advice when it comes to suggesting our celebrity President not be bipartisan the last few years because, frankly, I’m not really onboard with the GOP majority in the House being bipartisan if that bipartisanship equates to watered-down legislation that advances liberal ideas more so that conservative ones. But on the issue of North Korea, if that is what Obama is seeking advice about from Carter, I hope like hell he doesn’t take it – considering Carter’s absolutely dismal record on the issue of North Korea, for which he laughably won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Ya gotta wonder, though, at the logic of asking Carter – a failed one-term Preisdent – for advice on anything, really. Then again, what do you expect from a man who consulted with liberal actor George Clooney on foreign policy matters duing the 2008 general election campaign season? Not only that, but his administration, cabinet, and czars consist of little more than diehard left wing ideologues who will continue to “stay the course” on all fronts both foreign and domestic, in spite of not only the left’s election day shellacking but also in spite of the lack of positive results that have come from their endeavors both stateside and worldwide.
Is it November 2012 yet?
"
Cable shows ambassador asked Alistair Darling to waive tax on new building as construction would create jobs
The current US ambassador to London, Louis Susman, tried to persuade the Labour chancellor Alastair Darling to waive the VAT on the planned construction of America's palatial new Thames-side embassy.
Susman reported in a cable to Washington that during a meeting in September 2009 he impressed on Darling that 'the $1.2bn [£745m] project would spur redevelopment of a blighted area and create jobs' at the proposed Nine Elms site in Battersea. Darling refused, however, 'citing the recession, tight budget and elections'.
Will someone finally do something to stop Julian Assange and his Wikileaks?
We know Obama, being as weak kneed as a 90 year old grandmother, won’t but it appears the Russians will. According to Philip Shenon the Russians are pissed and are about to do something about it:
American intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, outraged by their inability to stop WikiLeaks and its release this week of hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables, are convinced that the whistleblowing website is about to come up against an adversary that will stop at nothing to shut it down: the Russian government.
As U.S. officials struggle to control damage from the secret cables exposed by Wikileaks, Russia is planning to block a similar dump about the Kremlin.National-security officials say that the National Security Agency, the U.S. government’s eavesdropping agency, has already picked up tell-tale electronic evidence that WikiLeaks is under close surveillance by the Russian FSB, that country’s domestic spy network, out of fear in Moscow that WikiLeaks is prepared to release damaging personal information about Kremlin leaders.
~~~Assange has courted attacks from the Russian government, telling a reporter from the pro-government daily newspaper Izvestia last month that WikiLeaks had obtained damaging information “about Russia, about your government and businessmen” and “we will publish these materials soon.” Another WikiLeaks spokesman was quoted as describing the Russian government as “despotic.”
~~~Russian intelligence agencies have suggested, none too subtly, that WikiLeaks could be destroyed through cyberwarfare methods if the whistleblowing site did begin to create trouble in Moscow. Last month, the Russian news agency Life News quoted an official from the FSB’s Center for Information Security as saying that the government would be capable of organizing “the right team” to target WikiLeaks and “shut it down forever.”
And within an hour of this report the Wikileak site was brought down:
The WikiLeaks website said it came under a forceful Internet-based attack on Tuesday morning, making some of the content, including the controversial “Cablegate” documents, inaccessible for hours to users in the U.S. and Europe.
The site appears to have responded by switching its main hosting base from Sweden to the U.S., making it available again.
~~~“We are currently under a DDOS attack,” according to one tweet early Tuesday. Shortly after 9 a.m., another tweet was sent, saying, “DDOS attack now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.”
~~~…. According to a study by Internet security company Arbor Networks, the average denial of service attack over the past year was 349 megabits per second, 28 times slower than the stream Wikileaks reported.
The question is, will they stop at cyber attacks? Putin has friends in organized crime, wealthy and powerful friends, and I’m sure they can get it done. Or will the Russian FSB do it themselves?
I know…sounds like a movie, but don’t discount it. Assange has the arrogance, narcissism, and stupidity to follow through with his threats and the Russians won’t have any of it I’m thinking. Even now he is lecturing Hillary Clinton to resign:
Hillary Clinton, Julian Assange said, “should resign.” Speaking over Skype from an undisclosed location on Tuesday, the WikiLeaks founder was replying to a question by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel over the diplomatic-cable dump that Assange’s organization loosed on the world this past weekend. Stengel had said the U.S. Secretary of State was looking like “the fall guy” in the ensuing controversy, and had asked whether her firing or resignation was an outcome that Assange wanted. “I don’t think it would make much of a difference either way,” Assange said. “But she should resign if it can be shown that she was responsible for ordering U.S. diplomatic figures to engage in espionage in the United Nations, in violation of the international covenants to which the U.S. has signed up. Yes, she should resign over that.”
In his twisted mind he thinks he has the world on its knees, and while Obama is most certainly a man who can be pushed around, I find it highly unlikely Vladimir Putin is.
"
 |
It will be interesting to see if he is questioned for the rapes or once arrested will be extradited to the US.
Mark Stephens, his London-based lawyer, has described the allegations as 'false and without basis', adding that they amount to persecution as part of a cynical smear campaign.
Nonetheless, the Swedes appear determined to force Assange back to Sweden for questioning. Stockholm's director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny, said last month: 'So far, we have not been able to meet with him to accomplish the interrogation.'
Assange contests this too. But if he declines to return to Sweden voluntarily, and the UK decides to enforce Sweden's arrest warrant, things may get tricky. Some friends believe Assange's best strategy is not to go to ground but to get on a plane to Sweden and face down his accusers.
"
"
As House Republicans prepare to take the reigns, it’s clear that incoming House Government Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa is taking his responsibilities seriously. National Journal reports that Issa is doubling his investigation staff and is planning a hearing a day on Obama Administration abuses. Potential hearings include Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Medicare fraud, wasteful stimulus money and hopefully attempts to ration drugs and treatments under ObamaCare.
Within three weeks, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to decide whether breast cancer patients be denied access to the life-extending drug Avastin because of its cost. The FDA does not have the authority to deny access to drugs based upon cost but that is what is happening. During deliberations, Jean Grem let the cat out of the bag when she explained her anti-Avastin vote by observing, “We aren’t supposed to talk about cost, but that’s another issue.”
Calling Mr. Issa.
What we have here is clear – it is government attempting to ration drugs based upon their cost. Does the FDA have the authority to take such action? It’s clear the answer is no. But as government begins to ratchet the cost curve on heath care down, government agencies will attempt to deny care and treatment to the sick and elderly in order to save money – if we let them.
Mr. Issa needs to draw the line in the sand now and put the FDA on notice. Perhaps Ms. Grem could be the first witness.
Big Government has obtained an advance copy of Homeland Security’s Inspector General report detailing ACORN’s misuse of a federal grant from FEMA. The report will be released to the public on December 8th. We’ve included it below.
EMBARGOED 12-8-10 DHS IG Report – ACORN Grants
Contacted by Big Government about the report, incoming Chair of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Rep. Darrell Issa, had this comment:
It is really unthinkable that anyone would use the guise of public safety and helping victims of a tragedy like Hurricane Katrina as a calculating way to inappropriately obtain taxpayer dollars. As the discussion over how to reign in government’s growth and spending moves forward, there couldn’t be a more important time to ensure that the grants awarded with taxpayer dollars meet rigorous criteria and are subject to vigilant oversight to ensure that grant recipients are not given access to taxpayer dollars under false pretenses.”
The key things in the DHS IG’s report were:
In response to aSeptember 16, 2009 request by Issa and Senator Collins, the Office of Inspector General (OIG), Inspections and Evaluations Division of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has released a report “detailing the results of its investigation of grant funds awarded under HUD’s Housing Counseling Program to ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc. (AHC) of Chicago, now operating as Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA).”
“For continued approval as a HUD-approved housing counseling agency and for future awards consideration, AHC (now operating as AHCOA) must bring its operations into full compliance with applicable laws, regulators, and policies governing HUD’s Housing Counseling Program,” the OIG’s report recommends.
“The inability to fully support salary expenses allocated to the HUD grant raises serious concerns about the integrity of those charges, particularly given the millions of Federal and non-Federal dollars made available to AHC in FY 2008 and 2009. Further, services procured from ACORN “associated” organizations failed to meet the required tests of ‘open and free competition’. We recommend that HUD’s Office of Single Family Housing, Program Support Division consider placing AHCOA in ‘inactive’ status while its initiatives corrective actions to address the exceptions and recommendations in this report.”
The OIG’s findings included:
The unaccountable lame duck Congress is preparing to put Americans on the hook for an additional $1.15 billion in spending on a Pigford II settlement program that is rife with fraud despite the fact that current law caps the amount to be spent on these claims at $100 million.
To make matters worse, the Democrats who temporarily control the Rules Committee will not even allow my amendment protecting taxpayers from this excessive and fraudulent spending to be presented on the House floor for a vote.
By cutting off consideration of my amendment, and by refusing to investigate serious allegations of Pigford fraud prior to voting on legislation allocating an additional $1.15 billion to the program, the lame duck Congress is, in effect, enabling Pigford fraud and this calls for an investigation by the 112th Congress.
Repeal! Reform! Let the market offer heterogeneous solutions for heterogeneous consumers! We are the new Republicans and we know that we're on probation!
Well, apparently not. Having only begun the lame-duck session -- and well before the seating of the new Congress that heard the voice of the people -- Eric Cantor, soon to be the House majority leader, has already caved on an essential element of eliminating central planning in health care. According to the Hill, Cantor said yesterday that “we want to keep the preexisting condition clause” as well as the provision allowing “children” as old as 26 to remain on their parents' coverage policies.
Can it be that Cantor does not understand that elimination of the mandate to purchase insurance, combined with the preexisting condition clause and price controls on health coverage, will lead quickly to a collapse of the private insurance market and, accordingly, to a single-payer system? After all, if people with preexisting conditions cannot be denied coverage, and if actuarially fair pricing is verboten, then why would anyone buy health coverage before they needed expensive care? And will all 26-year-olds remain on their parents' policies? Or only those with expensive medical conditions? Has Cantor never heard of adverse selection in insurance markets?
Cantor's response to a question from an individual with a chronic health condition bespeaks a lack of both seriousness and the courage to speak truths to sympathetic supplicants in pursuit of government favors. Apparently, he was unprepared for a question that obviously was going to emerge sooner rather than later, after almost two years of national debate about the perversities of central planning in health insurance.
What's next? Jerry Lewis as chairman of Appropriations? Lisa Murkowski for Energy and Commerce? Cluelessness and lack of principle: at least Nancy Pelosi represented truth in advertising.
— Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
Guess where Van Jones is popping up now? The former Green Jobs Czar shared emcee duties at the Brave New Voices Speak Green poetry slam — a competition where “youth from around the country, ages 13 – 24, compete for the opportunity to travel on behalf of Youth Speaks to some of the key conferences and summits on the Environment to date.” The topic of this year’s event? Global warming.
As you’ll see, the young poets stayed on point. One blasted BP head Tony Hayward and made sure to include the “F” word and mock the man’s wife. Another said Bush didn’t deserve his second term, and alluded to the former President not caring about hurricane Katrina.
That’s where Van Jones comes in. This year’s annual poetry slam was held in L.A. and featured the deposed Green Czar. After the event, Jones spoke candidly about young people embracing the green movement as “social justice,” and how that’s been his plan for the last 10 years.
“To see young people, this new generation, they have a new vision for the environment,” he said. “They don’t see the distinction between social justice and the environment — they want to see healthy people and healthy planet. That‘s what I’ve been talking about for 10 years.”
He went on to call the poems and their messages “beautiful.” The full 11 minute video is below, featuring two poets and Jones at the end:
[Content WARNING: The following videos contain graphic language]
Here‘s the full video of the first young person’s poem chiding BP and Tony Hayward. The poet’s name is Ceez Live, a 19 year-old from Philadelphia:
According to the site of Human Nature magazine, Ceez Live said it was important for youth to be leaders in the going green movement. “This competition is important because it’s the youth,” he told the site. “The youth being the next generation the people who are going to become your presidents, your lawyers, your doctors and your environmentalists.”
The poetry event aired on HBO this month.
(H/T: Original video via Right Scoop.)
"Republican Sens. Bob Bennett (UT), Thad Cochran (MS), Susan Collins (ME), Jim Inhofe (OK), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Richard Shelby (AL), and George Voinovich (OH) all just voted against an amendment in the Senate that would have banned Congressional earmarks. This is terrible public policy for their states, for their constituents, and for our country.
Harvard research shows that states that experience an increase in earmark spending suffer from decreases in corporate capital expenditures and employment. Earmarking also robs money from local government transportation priorities to pay for Senator’s vanity projects. And there is a strong correlation between high numbers of earmarks high total spending by Congress. As George Mason University Law School professor David Bernstein explains, earmarks are a key part of a broader system of corruption in Washington:
"Let’s say Congressman X is an idealistic young Congressman. Some constituents in his rural district ask him to get federal funding for a new emergency room in a local hospital, because the nearest emergency room is 100 miles away. Congressman X is skeptical of earmarks, but this particular one both seems like a good idea and a way to help ensure his reelection–he won his first term with only 52% of the vote. He manages to slip the hospital funding into an appropriations bill.
Soon thereafter, Congressman X becomes aware of a new $5 billion initiative that is a complete and utter boondoggle, but will benefit the districts of several influential congressmen. He starts sending out press releases opposing the initiative, and threatens to a force a vote on an amendment removing the initiative from the bill to which it is attached.
The senior Congressmen who support the initiative schedule a meeting with Congressman X. Like mafia thugs, they tell the Congressman, “It would be a real shame if anything was to happen to your hospital funding–and any future funding for your district, for that matter.” The message is clear; if Congressman X wants any hope of bringing federal money into his district, he had better stop opposing wasteful spending supported by his colleagues. He drops his opposition to the $5 billion project, gets the hospital funding, is reelected easily, and never again shows any “spending hawk” tendencies. Soon, in fact, he is rather senior himself, and finds himself meeting with a junior Congressman, telling him “It would be a real shame if anything was to happen to your hospital funding–and any future funding for your district, for that matter.”
So, even though earmarks are a small percentage of the federal budget, they are a very important part of a broader system of corruption that leads to out-of-control federal spending.
In light of the impending Obama Tax Hikes, Mercatus Center senior research fellow Veronique de Rugy created the chart to the right illustrating Hauser’s Law which Standford University professor Kurt Hauser recapped in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal:
Over the past six decades, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP have averaged just under 19% regardless of the top marginal personal income tax rate. The top marginal rate has been as high as 92% (1952-53) and as low as 28% (1988-90). This observation was first reported in an op-ed I wrote for this newspaper in March 1993. A wit later dubbed this “Hauser’s Law.”
Ms. de Rugy’s chart comparing the top marginal personal income tax rates to tax revenues as a percentage of GDP over the past 80 years is very similar to one we produced earlier this year here. And here is another chart that tells the same story but with the corporate tax:
Professor Hauser explains the behavior behind the data shown in these charts:
Over this period there have been more than 30 major changes in the tax code including personal income tax rates, corporate tax rates, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, investment tax credits, depreciation schedules, Social Security taxes, and the number of tax brackets among others. Yet during this period, federal government tax collections as a share of GDP have moved within a narrow band of just under 19% of GDP.
Why? Higher taxes discourage the “animal spirits” of entrepreneurship. When tax rates are raised, taxpayers are encouraged to shift, hide and underreport income. Taxpayers divert their effort from pro-growth productive investments to seeking tax shelters, tax havens and tax exempt investments. This behavior tends to dampen economic growth and job creation. Lower taxes increase the incentives to work, produce, save and invest, thereby encouraging capital formation and jobs. Taxpayers have less incentive to shelter and shift income.
Our federal deficit problem can not be solved by raising taxes. The expected revenues will never materialize. Cutting spending, shrinking government, and allowing for more economic growth is the only way we can climb out of the hole we are in.
"EXCERPTS:
Senators tried twice on Monday to amend an unrelated food safety bill to repeal the filing requirement. Both proposals, one by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and another by Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority.
“Billions of taxpayer dollars sit in unspent accounts and a very small percentage of those funds would give small businesses a much-needed break from the impending tax paperwork tsunami,” Johanns said.
