The 2014 Cherokee could be the first Jeep produced in China in nearly 6 years. Jeep CEO Mike Manley said that the Cherokee was an “obvious choice” for local production, as Jeep looks to expand its customer base in China.
Manley noted that the Cherokee could double Jeep’s current 46,000 unit sales. Local production would allow Jeep to avoid import tariffs on the new model, which according to Jeep, has proved overwhelmingly popular in consumer clinics. Currently, the Compass accounts for just over 70 percent of Jeep sales in the country.
And while China has tariffs on our goods, they are suing us in the WTO to stop all of our tariffs (another treaty we should never have gotten involved in because international enforcement would be pretty much one way against the United States).
China has turned to the World Trade Organization to help block U.S. tariffs on 22 types of Chinese products, including solar panels, pipes for oil wells, coated paper and steel wheel hubs.
The Chinese appeal to the WTO takes aim at the U.S. Commerce Department, which has recently imposed stiff duties on Chinese products. The department has cited Chinese subsidies, especially those funneled through state-owned enterprises, that it says give Chinese firms an edge over American competitors.
With so many of these green energy boondoggles it looks like this – Obama hands over tax-dollars to a fund raiser who is an owner in a junk “green energy company”. Said owners pay themselves in a big way, give big money to Democrats and go out of business.
As of last November (2012) there were 50 such companies. Obama Administration emails released show how green energy money was steered to Obama cronies with sham, junk bond companies.
A jaw-dropping revelation came to light in December 2011 by the Trib Total Media, yet it was ignored by the media and even missed by those of us watching the solar world unfold.
China’s major solar panel companies — whose low-cost products led some American factories to close, helped create the Solyndra controversy and spawned talk of a trade war — were bankrolled in the United States by the world’s largest investment banks.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, USB Investment Bank and others raised $6.5 billion for seven young Chinese solar panel makers in the mid-2000s by underwriting their securities on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, a Tribune-Review investigation has found.
The Trib goes on, “It’s not clear how the idea of using offshore tax havens to get listed on U.S. exchanges developed. But the Trib learned through SEC reports how Chinese solar companies grabbed onto the idea.” The first was Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd., now the world’s largest solar company. It began operating as a Chinese company in May 2002, and by 2004 reported sales of $85.3 million…”
However, Bloomberg News reported last week, “Suntech Power Holdings Co. (STP) [was] forced to put its Chinese solar unit into bankruptcy last month, “becoming the latest casualty of a painful slump in the global solar industry,” wrote Townhall.com. But Bloomberg noted that Suntech “began that slide into insolvency in 2009 when customers linked to the founder couldn’t pay their bills and the company booked the sales as revenue anyway, regulatory filings show.”
What most don’t know is that Suntech is a tiny fraction of “Obamanomics Outsourced,” whereas his administration is responsible for steering billions in stimulus funds (and other “green” money) to foreign companies and shipping green jobs overseas. This is clearly a broken 2008 energy campaign promise, but worse, a violation on how the 2009 trillion-dollar stimulus package was sold –– to create jobs and grow the economy here in America.
Most charities help the wounded, the ill and/or the poor. Obama constantly claims that Republicans want to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and the old, but Obamacare and his budget do exactly that. Democrats often blame Republicans for exactly what it is they are doing. Obamacare’s transfer of $714 Billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare bureaucrats has caused premiums for the elderly to rise.
President Obama’s long-awaited budget proposal, to be released today, does not come right out and say that it intends to reduce contributions to charity—but that is almost certainly what would happen were it to become law. Here’s why. The White House has effectively doubled down on a tax change it has been pushing for four years that would limit the value of the charitable tax deduction. The Administration has, since 2009, pushed unsuccessfully to allow only 28 cents on a dollar donated to charity to be deducted—even though the top tax rate for the wealthy donors who make most use of the deduction has been 35 percent. In the budget released today, the President again proposes to cap the charitable deduction at 28 percent—despite the fact that the top rate on the highest earners has increased to 39.6 percent. Think of it this way: the White House proposal would raise the cost of giving to charity from 60 cents per dollar to 72 cents per dollar. That’s a 20 percent increase in what can be called the “charity tax.”
When one taxes something more, of course, one gets less of it—and it’s likely that the current $168 billion in itemized charitable giving would decline. Indeed, Indiana University’s Center for Philanthropy has previously estimated that capping the charitable tax deduction’s value at 28 percent—even when the top income tax rate was 35 percent—would lower giving by 1.3 percent, or some $2.18 billion in 2010. The new proposal would likely take an even bigger bite from giving. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that the reduction in giving could be as high as $9 billion a year.
The question and answer part comes at 23:00. be sure to watch.
Here are senator Paul’s prepared remarks:
I’d like to thank President Ribeau, the Howard University faculty, and students for having me today.
Some people have asked if I’m nervous about speaking at Howard. They say “You know, some of the students and faculty may be Democrats…”
My response is that my trip will be a success if the Hilltop will simply print that a Republican came to Howard but he came in peace.
My wife Kelley asked me last week do you ever have doubts about trying to advance a message for an entire country?
The truth is, sometimes. When I do have doubts, I think of a line from T.S. Eliot, “how should I presume to spit out all the butt ends of my days and ways, and how should I presume.”
And when I think of how political enemies often twist and distort my positions, I think again of Eliot’s words: “when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, how should I presume?
And here I am today at Howard, a historically black college. Here I am, a guy who once presumed to discuss a section of the Civil Rights Act.
Some have said that I’m either brave or crazy to be here today. I’ve never been one to watch the world go by without participating. I wake up each day hoping to make a difference.
I take to heart the words of Toni Morrison of Howard University, who wrote: “If there is a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
I can recite books that have been written, or I can plunge into the arena and stumble and maybe fall but at least I will have tried.
What I am about is a philosophy that leaves YOU – to fill in the blanks.
I come to Howard today, not to preach, or prescribe some special formula for you but to say I want a government that leaves you alone, that encourages you to write the book that becomes your unique future.
You are more important than any political party, more important than any partisan pleadings.
The most important thing you will do is yet to be seen. For me, I found my important thing to do when I learned to do surgery on the eye, when I learned to restore a person’s vision.
I found what was important when I met and married my wife.
Although I am an eye surgeon, first and foremost, I find myself as part of the debate over how to heal our sick economy and get people back to work.
I truly believe that we can have an economy that creates millions of jobs again but we will have to rethink our arguments and try to rise above empty partisan rhetoric.
My hope is that you will hear me out, that you will see me for who I am, not the caricature sometimes presented by political opponents.
If you hear me out, I believe you’ll discover that what motivates me more than any other issue is the defense of everyone’s rights.
Of strong importance to me is the defense of minority rights, not just racial minorities, but ideological and religious minorities.
If our government does not protect the rights of minorities, then democratic majorities could simply legislate away our freedoms.
The bill of rights and the civil war amendments protect us against the possibility of an oppressive federal or state government.
The fact that we are a Constitutional Republic means that certain inalienable rights are protected even from democratic majorities.
No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never waivered in my support for civil rights or the civil rights act.
The dispute, if there is one, has always been about how much of the remedy should come under federal or state or private purview.
What gets lost is that the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.
Because Republicans believe that the federal government is limited in its function-some have concluded that Republicans are somehow inherently insensitive to minority rights.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Republicans do, indeed, still believe many rights remain with the people and states respectively.
When some people hear that, they tune us out and say: he’s just using code words for the state’s right to discriminate, for the state’s right to segregate and abuse.
But that’s simply not true.
Many Republicans do believe that decentralization of power is the best policy, that government is more efficient, more just, and more personal when it is smaller and more local.
But Republicans also realize that there are occasions of such egregious injustice that require federal involvement, and that is precisely what the 14th amendment and the Civil Rights Act were intended to do-protect citizens from state and local tyranny.
The fourteenth amendment says, “No state shall . . .” The fourteenth amendment did change the constitution to give a role for the federal government in protecting citizenship and voting regardless of race.
I did not live through segregation nor did I experience it first-hand. I did grow up in the South in public schools comprised of white, black, and Latino students largely all getting along with each other.
So, perhaps some will say that I can never understand. But I don’t think you had to be there to have been affected by our nation’s history of racial strife.
The tragedy of segregation and Jim Crow in the South is compounded when you realize that integration began in New England in the 1840’s and 1850’s.
In 1841, Frederick Douglas was pulled from the white car on the Eastern Railroad, clutching his seat so tightly that he was thrown from the train with its remnants still tightly in his hands.
But, within a few years public transportation was integrated in the northeast.
It is a stain on our history that integration didn’t occur until more than 100 years later in the South. That in the 1960’s we were still fighting to integrate public transportation and schools is and was an embarrassment.
The story of emancipation, voting rights and citizenship, from Fredrick Douglas until the modern civil rights era, is in fact the history of the Republican Party.
How did the party that elected the first black US Senator, the party that elected the first 20 African American Congressmen become a party that now loses 95% of the black vote?
How did the Republican Party, the party of the great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race?
From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, for a century, most black Americans voted Republican. How did we lose that vote?
To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.
In Kentucky, the history of black voting rights is inseparable from the Republican Party. Virtually all African Americans became Republicans.
Democrats in Louisville were led by Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson and were implacably opposed to blacks voting.
Watterson wrote that his opposition to blacks voting was “founded upon a conviction that their habits of life and general condition disqualify them from the judicious exercise of suffrage.”
In George Wright’s “Life Behind the Veil,” he writes of Republican General John Palmer standing before tens of thousands of slaves on July 4th, 1865, when slavery still existed in Kentucky, and declaring:
“my countrymen, you are free, and while I command, the military forces of the United States will defend your right to freedom.” The crowd erupted in cheers.
Meanwhile, Kentucky’s Democrat-controlled legislature voted against the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th amendments.
William Warley was a black Republican in Louisville. He was born toward the end of the nineteenth century.
He was a founder of Louisville’s NAACP but he is most famous for fighting and overturning the notorious Louisville segregated housing ordinance.
Warley bought a house in the white section in defiance of a city segregation law. The case, Buchanan v. Warley, was finally decided in 1917 and the Supreme Court held unanimously that Kentucky law could not forbid the sale of a house based on race.
The Republican Party’s history is rich and chock full of emancipation and black history.
Republicans still prize the sense of justice that MLK spoke of when he said that “an unjust law is any law the majority enforces on a minority but does not make binding upon itself.”
Republicans have never stopped believing that minorities, whether they derive from the color of their skin or shade of their ideology should warrant equal protection.
Everyone knows of the sit-ins in Greensboro and Nashville but few people remember the sit-it in the Alexandria public library in 1938.
Samuel Tucker, a lawyer and graduate of Howard University, recruited five young African American men to go to the public library and select a book and sit and read until they were forcibly removed.
Tucker’s sit-in set the stage for students who organized the sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro that brought down Jim Crow in many areas, years before the civil rights act of 1964.
I think our retelling of the civil rights era does not give enough credit to the heroism of civil disobedience.
You may say, oh that’s all well and good but that was a long time ago what have you done for me lately?
I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.
African Americans languished below white Americans in every measure of economic success and the Depression was especially harsh for those at the lowest rung of poverty.
The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible-the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets.
Now, Republicans face a daunting task. Several generations of black voters have never voted Republican and are not very open to even considering the option.
Democrats still promise unlimited federal assistance and Republicans promise free markets, low taxes, and less regulations that we believe will create more jobs.
The Democrat promise is tangible and puts food on the table, but too often doesn’t lead to jobs or meaningful success.
The Republican promise is for policies that create economic growth. Republicans believe lower taxes, less regulation, balanced budgets, a solvent Social Security and Medicare will stimulate economic growth.
Republicans point to the Reagan years when the economy grew at nearly 7% and millions upon millions of jobs were created.
Today, after four years of the current policies, one in six Americans live in poverty, more than at any other time in the past several decades.
In fact, the poor have grown poorer in the past four years. Black unemployment is at 14%, nearly twice the national average. This is unacceptable.
Using taxes to punish the rich, in reality, punishes everyone because we are all interconnected. High taxes and excessive regulation and massive debt are not working.
The economy has been growing at less than 1% and actually contracted in the fourth quarter.
I would argue that the objective evidence shows that big government is not a friend to African Americans.
Big government relies on the Federal Reserve, our central bank, to print money out of thin air. Printing money out of thin air leads to higher prices.
When the price of gas rises to $4 per gallon, it is a direct result of our nation’s debt. When food prices rise, it is a direct result of the $50,000 we borrow each second. Inflation hurts everyone, particularly the poor.
If you are struggling to get ahead, if you have school loans and personal debt, you should choose a political party that wants to leave more money in the private sector so you will get a job when the time comes.
Some Republicans, let’s call them the moss-covered variety, mistake war for defense. They forget that Reagan argued for Peace through strength, not War through strength.
The old guard argues for arms for Ghaddafi and then the following year for boots on the ground to defeat Ghaddafi.
I want you to know that all Republicans do not clamor for war, that many Republicans believe in a strong national defense that serves to preserve the Peace.
In Louisville, in the predominantly African American west end of town, it was recently announced that 18 schools are failing. The graduation rate is 40%.
The head of Kentucky’s education called it academic genocide. Johns Hopkins researchers call these schools dropout factories.
I defy anyone to watch Waiting for Superman and honestly argue against school choice.
A minister friend of mine in the West End calls school choice the civil rights issue of the day. He’s absolutely right.
By the sixth grade, Ronald Holasie was failing most of his classes, but through school choice he was able to attend a Catholic school in the DC area.
There he learned that he had a natural gift for composing music, but before that, his reading level was so low that he had struggled to write lyrics. Ronald then went on to matriculate at Barry University.
There are countless examples of the benefits of school choice – where kids who couldn’t even read have turned their lives completely around.
Maybe it’s about time we all reassess blind allegiance to ideas that are failing our children.
Every child in every neighborhood, of every color, class and background, deserves a school that will help them succeed.
Those of you assembled today are American success stories. You will make it and do great things.
In every neighborhood, white, black or brown, there are kids who are not succeeding because they messed up.
They had kids before they were married, or before they were old enough to support them, or they got hooked on drugs, or they simply left school.
Republicans are often miscast as uncaring or condemning of kids who make bad choices. I, for one, plan to change that.
I am working with Democratic senators to make sure that kids who make bad decisions such as non-violent possession of drugs are not imprisoned for lengthy sentences.
I am working to make sure that first time offenders are put into counseling and not imprisoned with hardened criminals.
We should not take away anyone’s future over one mistake.
Let me tell you the tale of two young men. Both of them made mistakes. Both of them were said to have used illegal drugs.
One of them was white and from a privileged background. He had important friends, and an important father and an important grandfather. You know, the kind of family who university’s name dorms after.
The family had more money than they could count. Drugs or no drugs, his family could buy justice if he needed it.
The other man also used illegal drugs, but he was of mixed race and from a single parent household, with little money. He didn’t have important friends or a wealthy father.
Now, you might think I’m about to tell you a story about racism in America, where the rich white kid gets off and the black kid goes to jail.
It could well be, and often is, but that is not this story. In this story, both young men were extraordinarily lucky. Both young men were not caught. They weren’t imprisoned.
Instead, they both went on to become Presidents of the United States.
Barack Obama and George Bush were lucky. The law could have put both of them away for their entire young adulthood. Neither one would have been employable, much less president.
Some argue with evidence that our drug laws are biased-that they are the new Jim Crow.
But to simply be against them for that reason misses a larger point. They are unfair to EVERYONE, largely because of the one size fits all federal mandatory sentences.
Our federal mandatory minimum sentences are simply heavy handed and arbitrary. They can affect anyone at any time, though they disproportionately affect those without the means to fight them.
We should stand and loudly proclaim enough is enough. We should not have laws that ruin the lives of young men and women who have committed no violence.
That’s why I have introduced a bill to repeal federal mandatory minimum sentences. We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.
The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism.
Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.
Big and oppressive government has long been the enemy of freedom, something black Americans know all too well.
We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white.
Such freedom is essential in achieving any longstanding health and prosperity.
As Toni Morrison said, write your own story. Challenge mainstream thought.
I hope that some of you will be open to the Republican message that favors choice in education, a less aggressive foreign policy, more compassion regarding non-violent crime and encourages opportunity in employment.
And when the time is right, I hope that African Americans will again look to the party of emancipation, civil liberty, and individual freedom.
In April 2007, Professor Mike Adams of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington filed a federal lawsuit against his institution, alleging that he had been denied promotion in part due to political viewpoints he had expressed in columns written for non-university publications. Nearly six years and one successful appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit later, a federal district court has ruled that Adams’ First Amendment claim may proceed to trial.
Adams’ April 2007 complaint, filed with the cooperation of the Alliance Defense Fund (now the Alliance Defending Freedom), accused UNC-Wilmington officials of violating his First Amendment rights by denying his promotion on account of his expression as a conservative columnist. Adams also alleged that he had suffered religious discrimination and an equal protection violation.
Three years later, in a March 2010 ruling, a federal district court rejected Adams’ claim of First Amendment retaliation, finding that the columns constituted speech “made pursuant to his official duties” as a professor and were thus not protected by the First Amendment. The court reached its decision by relying on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006). In Garcetti, the Court ruled that public employees do not enjoy First Amendment protections when engaging in speech pursuant to their official duties. Applying Garcetti‘s holding to Adams’ case, the district court determined that the columns could not be cited as grounds for retaliation in violation of the First Amendment.
From a faculty speech standpoint, the district court’s ruling was very problematic, as I explained here on The Torch a few years back:
We here at FIRE found the district court’s ruling against Adams deeply worrying. For one, we felt the facts provided significant support for Adams’ First Amendment claim. But even more ominously, the district court’s reliance on Garcetti made the ruling against Adams just the latest in a quickly–growingstring of Garcetti-based defeats for public university faculty members. The problem with Garcetti is that in lessening First Amendment protections for public employees generally, it particularly impacts faculty members, whose speech in fulfilling teaching and research duties differs greatly from the speech of, say, district attorneys, police officers, or public administrators. Because while the government as employer may reasonably expect a significant amount of control over the public speech of district attorneys, that same amount of control over the scholarly research and teaching of public university faculty members is inappropriate and amounts to an infringement on academic freedom.
To address this exact concern, Justice Anthony Kennedy inserted a crucial caveat into the majority opinion he penned in Garcetti, writing:
There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court’s customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.
Justice Kennedy thus specifically and explicitly declined to extend Garcetti‘s analysis to bear on cases involving the speech of public university faculty, reserving the question. Unfortunately, in application, Justice Kennedy’s careful carve-out has been largely disregarded by courts, and Garcetti‘s impact on faculty speech has been so significant in recent years that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) mounted a campaign to push back against Garcetti and what it has deemed “judicial hostility or indifference” to academic freedom.
Adams appealed the district court’s ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. In support of Adams’ appeal, FIRE joined an amici curiae brief with the AAUP and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, asking the Fourth Circuit to recognize Garcetti‘s inapplicability to Adams’ situation.
Thankfully, the Fourth Circuit did just that. Reversing the district court’s dismissal of Adams’ claims, the court wrote that “the district court applied Garcetti without acknowledging, let alone addressing, the clear language in that opinion that casts doubt on whether the Garcetti analysis applies in the academic context of a public university.” Continuing, the Fourth Circuit observed:
Put simply, Adams’ speech was not tied to any more specific or direct employee duty than the general concept that professors will engage in writing, public appearances, and service within their respective fields. For all the reasons discussed above, that thin thread is insufficient to render Adams’ speech “pursuant to [his] official duties” as intended by Garcetti.
[…]
Applying Garcetti to the academic work of a public university faculty member under the facts of this case could place beyond the reach of First Amendment protection many forms of public speech or service a professor engaged in during his employment. That would not appear to be what Garcetti intended, nor is it consistent with our long-standing recognition that no individual loses his ability to speak as a private citizen by virtue of public employment.
The case was remanded back to the district court for further proceedings.
Last Friday, March 22, Senior United States District Judge Malcolm J. Howard issued an order denying the UNC-Wilmington defendants’ motion to dismiss, finding that Adams “has brought forth evidence from which a reasonable jury could find that his speech was a substantial or motivating factor in the decision to deny tenure to plaintiff.”
Once again, never does a week go buy were we do not see the most fantastic idiocy coming from the public education sector.
Even many of the authors of the now thoroughly discredited UN IPCC report on global warming, which abandoned even basic academic standards, have called out the report for what it is, the entrenched far left public education establishment is cramming it down children’s throats.
Climate change may soon be coming to every classroom in the country.
Pending nationwide science standards will recommend that K-12 students at public schools learn about climate change to help fill a knowledge gap concerning the subject, while skepticism will be discouraged.
“Only one in five [students] feel like they’ve got a good handle on climate change from what they’ve learned in school,” Mark McCaffrey of the National Center for Science Education told NPR, adding that many teachers will also need climate change science training. “So the state of climate change education in the U.S. is abysmal.”
New science standards are being developed by the National Research Council with help from 26 states to identify science that “all K–12 students should know,” according to the website promoting the standards.
It has been almost 15 years since the last time the National Research Council and the American Association for Advancement in Science published recommendations on which states base their standards.
“There was never a debate about whether climate change would be in there,” says Heidi Schweingruber of the National Research Council. “It is a fundamental part of science, and so that’s what our work is based on, the scientific consensus.”
Schweingruber added that much consideration was put into how to teach what can be a depressing topic and not alarm students.
“We’ve heard stories of students who learn about climate change,” said McCaffrey. “Then they go home and tell their parents, and everybody’s upset because the parents are driving their kids to the soccer game, and the kids are feeling guilty about being in the
NPR notes that educators say the controversy surrounding climate change encourages many teachers to avoid the topic or show competing viewpoints — like Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” against the British documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” — which they say just causes more confusion about the issue.
No matter what the tax is, it is sold to help fund “the children”, “the sick”, “the disabled”…. and what kind of sick greedy capitalist bastard are YOU to oppose it!! YOU HATE CHILDREN!!
The good ole “bait and switch” is almost the oldest trick in the book, and is used by the left as a matter of routine.
[Editor’s Note: For more on how the Proposition 63 Tax was a failure and how the resources were misused and eventually misappropriated to pet projects click HERE.]
Mercury News – Prop 63 hasn’t solved California’s mental health care crisis:
If President Barack Obama wants a model for solving the nation’s mental health care crisis, he needs to find a better one than California.
Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg urged Obama to adopt California’s Proposition 63 as the nation’s model following the tragic shootings in Newtown, Conn., which raised awareness of mental health as well as gun control issues. Steinberg has asked Obama to consider matching dollar for dollar the money that states put into their mental health programs.
Proposition 63, approved by voters in 2004, was sponsored by Steinberg. It has, indeed, been good at raising money. The 1 percent tax on millionaires’ incomes has netted more than $8 billion over eight years.
But what does California have to show for it? Fewer psychiatric hospital beds, fewer doctors treating patients and fewer clinics across the state. An estimated 750,000 California adults failed to receive mental health treatment they needed last year.
And if California is making any progress in reducing the use of its jails and prisons to warehouse the mentally ill, it’s news to us. About half of the counties in the state have no inpatient psychiatric services.
The formula for distributing Proposition 63 money allocates significant amounts to counties for new programs for new patients rather than older but still-needed programs for longtime patients. And last year’s budget cuts made matters worse. While Proposition 63 raised $1 billion in dedicated funding, the Legislature took $798 million of nonrestricted money away from other mental health programs.
The result is a two-tier system in which a wave of new programs is flush with cash while long-standing programs serving the vast majority of patients are crunched for money.
“If we could fund the programs we need, we could greatly reduce the number of people in our jails and prisons,” says Jessica Cruz, executive director of California’s branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, who supports the Proposition 63 programs but thinks more money is needed for others. “We could help reduce the number of mentally ill crowding our hospital emergency rooms and the homeless wandering our streets.”
A Department of Justice study found that 56 percent of state prisoners and 64 percent of local jail inmates have symptoms of serious mental illnesses. And 75 percent of those inmates received no treatment while incarcerated. Three out of every four people with serious mental illnesses can be successfully treated for a fraction of the annual cost of $47,102 of housing an inmate in California’s prisons.
Cruz notes that only 2 percent of mentally ill people are violent. If California could reach them before their problems manifest themselves in horrific fashion, we could make communities safer, save taxpayers money any improve the lives of thousands who now have nowhere to turn for help.
Senator Lindsey Graham is a strange fellow. At times he is capable of inspiring moments of clarity where he really does “get it” and at other times he is not on Planet Earth. This is one of the better moments. This is also an example of why Eric Holder is the most radical and incompetent Attorney General in the nation’s history.
The Obama Administration has been using the EPA and the permitting process to make easy permitting for friends and campaign donors, but a GOP state like Texas gets the hand. This is the type of bnana republic abuse of power that is so typical with this administration. Welcome to Chicago.
Chase Power, the parent company behind the $3 billion Las Brisas coal power plant in Corpus Christi, Texas, announced yesterday that it was cancelling the project.
“Chase Power … has opted to suspend efforts to further permit the facility and is seeking alternative investors as part of a plan of dissolution for the parent company,” Chase CEO Dave Freysinger told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
Freysinger made it very clear who was responsible for the projects death. “The (Las Brisas Energy Center) is a victim of EPA’s concerted effort to stifle solid-fuel energy facilities in the U.S., including EPA’s carbon-permitting requirements and EPA’s New Source Performance Standards for new power plants,” he said.
And she is right. With the leadership of the GOP seeming to be all over the place, and an RNC that isn’t leading a rhetorical, philosophical, or policy battle; traditionalists, conservatives and those simply wanting some fiscal and regulatory sanity feel like people without a party, and for some they feel like aliens on their own country, but in reality such people are the majority.
[Note: The staff of Political Arena resides in South Bend, Indiana, the home of the University of Notre Dame, although we have no affiliation with the university.]
When Laura Hollis, a Notre Dame University business and law professor, looks at America’s path forward, she cannot help but see a dead end.
“Many people say to me, ‘If it gets worse than this, I’m not sure we can survive it,’ and I’m inclined to agree with them,” Hollis said in an interview with The College Fix. “It’s never been as bad as it is now.”
Hollis, who in addition to her professorship is a popular conservative columnist and political commentator, is the author of a post-election column titled “Post Mortem” that went viral across America. It was reposted on many websites, spread like wildfire across social media sites, and emailed far and wide, landing in mom-and-pop inboxes across the nation.
In fact, just as recently as Dec. 28, the popular left-leaning political blog Daily Kos posted an “open letter to Laura Hollis” denouncing her piece.
This ongoing whirlwind of a world wide web debate was prompted by Hollis’ Nov. 8 column, which analyzed the state of the union the day after President Barack Obama was re-elected.
It argued, among other things, that: conservatives are outnumbered; they’re losing the culture war; too many Americans are immature, seeking only self-gratification; and the so-called Republican War on Women played a role in the election outcome.
“America is on a horrific bender; has been for some time now,” Hollis wrote. “The warning signs of our fiscal profligacy and culture of lack of personal responsibility are everywhere – too many to mention. We need only look at other countries which have gone the route we are walking now to see what is in store. … I see the country I love headed toward its own ‘rock bottom,’ and I cannot seem to reach those who are taking it there.”
In an interview this week with The College Fix, Hollis said feedback she’s received from that piece has led her to believe millions of Americans feel as if they have no voice. But the answer, she argued, is not to cower in the corner and give up.
“Speak up,” Hollis said. “Because being polite does not mean being silent.”
First and foremost, the culture war must to be addressed, she said. It’s time to stop worrying about stepping on people’s toes or hurting people’s feelings, she said.
Some Republican and conservative commentators argued after the election the solution to regain the White House, Congress and the country is to become more moderate, acquiesce to the social norms promulgated by the Left.
Bad idea, Hollis said.
“We have to decide we need to change the tone and tenor of culture in the country,” Hollis said. “In order to change the culture, you have to be a part of the culture.”
Take, for example, the alleged War on Women. During the presidential campaign, women’s rights discussions served as a façade for something more sinister, she said. What appeared to be a discourse about access to birth control was really about expanding abortion services and physician-assisted suicide, Hollis said.
“I’m pro-better choice—all choices are not equal,” Hollis said. “If my father is suffering from advanced dementia, I don’t have the right to smother him with a pillow.”
Hollis said advances in science have provided new and startling information about life from conception through natural death that every American should learn. This is one example of the kinds of things that could help turn the culture war tide in conservatives’ favor.
Hollis said “the left” has become politically adept at demonizing people, but it is important for all Americans to understand everyone wants to make things better, she said.
While Hollis’ first point in her “Post-Mortem” work declared Americans who champion free enterprise are outnumbered by those who want free stuff, she said that did not mean throw in the towel.
“No matter where you are, that can be ground-zero for changing things,” Hollis said.
“Did Jesus Die for Klingons too?” was just one session at a recent workshop funded by the Defense Advances Research Projects Agency:
Further, DARPA paid nearly $100,000 for a strategy planning workshop on the 100 Year Starship project last year included an interesting discussion involving the Klingons, a fictional alien species who were villains and then later allies of humanity in the Star Trek series. The session entitled “Did Jesus die for Klingons too?” featured philosophy professor Christian Weidemann of Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum who pondered the theological conflict to Christianity if intelligent life was found on other planets. (page 17)
At another DoD-funded gathering, the brainstorming sessions covered topics such as how to make deep space travel most efficient, how scientists would go about creating a “warp bubble,” and whether or not humans would need to wear clothing during space travel.
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s $60.4 billion request for Hurricane Sandy relief has morphed into a huge Christmas stocking of goodies for federal agencies and even the state of Alaska, The Post has learned.
The pork-barrel feast includes more than $8 million to buy cars and equipment for the Homeland Security and Justice departments. It also includes a whopping $150 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to dole out to fisheries in Alaska and $2 million for the Smithsonian Institution to repair museum roofs in DC.
Other big-ticket items in the bill include $207 million for the VA Manhattan Medical Center; $41 million to fix up eight military bases along the storm’s path, including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; $4 million for repairs at Kennedy Space Center in Florida; $3.3 million for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center and $1.1 million to repair national cemeteries.
Budget watchdogs have dubbed the 94-page emergency-spending bill “Sandy Scam.”
Matt Mayer of the conservative Heritage Foundation slammed the request as an “enormous Christmas gift worth of stuff.”
“The funding here should be focused on helping the community and the people, not replacing federal assets or federal items,” he said.
While the media pants with exhilaration over a dip in the unemployment level that was created by over a half-million people giving up and dropping out of the workforce, a deep-dive into the employment numbers also reveals that it’s mainly government workers benefitting from what meager job growth we are seeing. Over the last five months, 73% of all jobs created were government jobs. Moreover, the unemployment rate for government workers plunged to 3.8% in November — which is considered full employment.
Even though deficits rule the day at every level of government, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 847,000 new jobs created since June, a full 621,000 were government jobs. In November alone, 35,000 new government jobs were created.
In other words, as the labor participation rate plummets to a thirty year low — which means we have fewer taxpayers — we’re not only increasing the number of taxpayer-funded jobs, but the government is using the creation of these jobs to juice the employment numbers in a way that makes it look as though the job situation is actually improving.
Naturally, none of this would be possible without a compliant media working overtime to bring out the pom-poms and cover up what’s really going on.
Let me tell you something, if Obama had an “R” after his name and creating the exact same economic results, the media would make damn sure the public was familiar with what “labor participation rate” means. [Emphasis ours – Political Arena]
At least it is starting to improve after years of socialized medicine bringing quality down to the gutter. Largely because of the efforts of Prime Minister Harper and his TEA Party brand of economic conservatism have been introducing reforms and partial privatization back into the Canadian Healthcare System.
CALGARY, AB—Patients face a median wait of 17.7 weeks for surgical and other therapeutic treatments in Canada, down from 19.0 weeks in 2011, according to the 22nd annual edition of Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, released today by the Fraser Institute, Canada’s leading public policy think-tank.
On a national basis, median wait times have hovered between 16 and 19 weeks since 2000, following a marked deterioration in wait times during the 1990s when surgical waits grew steadily from 9.3 weeks in 1993 to 14 weeks in 1999. This year’s median wait of 17.7 weeks is 91 per cent longer than in 1993.
“While wait times have improved since last year, Canadians are still forced to wait more than four months, on average, for medically necessary treatment. Physicians, not to mention patients, consider this unreasonable,” said Nadeem Esmail, Fraser Institute senior fellow and co-author of the report.
Parents, what you are about to read here is commonplace on American universities today. And you may be thinking, “I am in a conservative town so not my local university”…. well you are sadly mistaken.
This very writer is from South Bend, Indiana. Mike Pence is our new governor, Jackie Walorski is our new Member of Congress, and Indiana was the first state to go to Mitt Romney in the election. Yet, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Christians, traditionalists, and conservatives face discrimination and persecution on campus.
This very writer, when faced with persecution on campus, went very high profile on campus and used a strategy of making the left fear me. Having been a radio talk show host and a person with some resources I had that option, but many traditional students don’t.
Pro-life professors at Notre Dame, the largest Catholic University in the world, are persecuted on campus because the radical left has all but taken over the institution since Father Hessburg actively recruited Marxists to work at the university.
Hundreds of thousands of communists didn’t suddenly become libertarians after the East German wall fell. They had to go somewhere and most of them ended up “teaching” our kids. There are plenty of them on almost every campus in America.
At Tufts, a conservative newspaper committed “harassment” by printing accurate quotations from the Koran and a verified fact about the status of women in Saudi Arabia. Lukianoff says that Tufts may have been the first American institution “to find someone guilty of harassment for stating verifiable facts directed at no one in particular.”
He documents how “orientation” programs for freshmen become propaganda to (in the words of one orthodoxy enforcer) “leave a mental footprint on their consciousness.” Faculty, too, can face mandatory consciousness-raising.
In 2007, Donald Hindley, a politics professor at Brandeis, was found guilty of harassment because when teaching Latin American politics he explained the origin of the word “wetbacks,” which refers to immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. Without a hearing, the university provost sent Hindley a letter stating that the university “will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct.” The assistant provost was assigned to monitor Hindley’s classes “to ensure that you do not engage in further violations of the nondiscrimination and harassment policy.” Hindley was required to attend “anti-discrimination training.”
Such coercion is a natural augmentation of censorship. Next comes mob rule. Last year, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the vice provost for diversity and climate — really; you can’t make this stuff up — encouraged students to disrupt a news conference by a speaker opposed to racial preferences. They did, which the vice provost called “awesome.” This is the climate on an especially liberal campus that celebrates “diversity” in everything but thought.
“What happens on campus,” Lukianoff says, “doesn’t stay on campus” because censorship has “downstream effects.” He quotes a sociologist whose data he says demonstrate that “those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view.” This encourages “the human tendency to live within our own echo chambers.” Parents’ tuition dollars and student indebtedness pay for this. Good grief.
The fastest way to undermine a country is to undermine its history, and the best place to begin is in the nation’s classrooms where pliable young minds are easily influenced. This is precisely what the left has been doing for decades, and with evident success. The left has made great strides in undermining the family, taking over the public square, and dominating education at all levels. But some of its most effective work has been in revising America’s history. Russian philosopher Alexander Solzhenitzyn said: “To destroy a people you must first sever their roots.” Patrick Buchanan said: “To create a ‘new people,’ the agents of our cultural revolution must first create a new history; and that project is well advanced.”
In 1992 that bastion of liberal thought, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), received a two-million-dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education to develop new standards for history books for grades five through twelve. UCLA completed this assignment in 1997. Since that time, its standards have had the intended effect. UCLA’s standards for history books for public school children have resulted in the following:
No mention in history books of such American luminaries as Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or the Wright Brothers. It is the lives of exceptional Americans such as these, among many other factors, that validate the concept of American exceptionalism. Consequently, to undermine the concept, liberals must remove any reference to exceptional acts and exceptional people in American history.
The founding dates of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women are given special significance. In truth, the only thing that warrants inclusion of these organizations in history books is that they are considered sacred institutionsby the left.
Instructions for teachers concerning how to teach the unit which covers the traitor Alger Hiss and the spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg encourages leeway to teach the unit either way. In other words, teachers are given the leeway to teach the unit as if Hiss was not a traitor and the Rosenbergs were innocent. This is the same Alger Hiss who was convicted by a jury on the basis of hard evidence, evidence that since his conviction has been validated many times over by further discoveries. These are the same Rosenbergs who gave America’s atom-bomb secrets to Joseph Stalin.
The Constitutional Convention is not even mentioned. One of the reasons for this is that the deliberations of America’s founders as recorded in numerous documents such as the Federalist Papers as well as those of the anti-federalists are clearly at odds with today’s liberal orthodoxy. The tactic of the left is simple. If the founder’s views do not reinforce those of the left, eliminate any reference to their views in history books.
George Washington’s presidency is not mentioned nor is his famous farewell address. Rather than learn about the two terms of our country’s first president—two terms in which everything Washington did was precedent setting—students are encouraged to develop an imaginary dialogue between an Indian Leader and General Washington at the end of the Revolutionary War. What students are supposed to learn and how students are supposed to benefit from this hypothetical dialogue is not explained.
The Soviet Union is commended for its great strides in space exploration, but America’s moon landing is not mentioned.
Teachers are urged to have students conduct a mock trial for John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil. No mention is made of the fact that the homes of most of the students are heated by energy derived from petroleum and the gasoline in the cars driven by teachers comes from petroleum.
The new history standards developed by UCLA have had far-reaching effects. Look at any history book written for public school students in the K-12 system and you will be appalled at what is included and what is not. There are now history books being used in America classrooms that give more coverage to Madonna than to George Washington. Further, America is often portrayed in the way that Barack Obama appears to view it: as a villainous nation bent on world dominance, imperialism, the perpetuation of slavery, and a variety of other evils. What is less likely to be found is any positive coverage concerning a Constitution that guarantees the rights of everyone, including liberals who are bent on the destruction of America as the founders envisioned it.
Parents, this kind of nuttery on campus is not uncommon. Most universities pay very low wages, barely enough to pay one’s student loans, so universities tend to often attract the least capable of academics who cannot make it in the private sector, or ideologues like Prof. Jensen who are so radical that the private sector is out of their reach.
Forget all that turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, today should be a day of fasting and atonement for American “sin.” That’s according to Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Jensen, known for his hard-left politics, also calls Thanksgiving a “white-supremacist holiday.”
Jensen’s opinion piece “No Thanks for Thanksgiving,” appeared on the far-left, Soros-connected website Alternet on Thanksgiving eve. In it, he wrote how Native Americans suffered because of the “European invasion of the Americas.” He went on to compare the Founding Fathers to Nazi Germany. “How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis?” he asked.
But Obama says that he is transferring wealth to protect the middle class……
The only ones who get rich when government transfers wealth is government, because they transfer a LOT more to themselves per person than they do to the poor.
WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The median net worth of American households has dropped to a 43-year low as the lower and middle classes appear poorer and less stable than they have been since 1969.
According to a recent study by New York University economics professor Edward N. Wolff, median net worth is at the decades-low figure of $57,000 (in 2010 dollars). And as the numbers in his study reflect, the situation only appears worse when all the statistics are taken as a whole.
According to Wolff, between 1983 and 2010, the percentage of households with less than $10,000 in assets (using constant 1995 dollars) rose from 29.7 percent to 37.1 percent. The “less than $10,000″ figure includes the numerous households that have no assets at all, or “negative assets,” which is otherwise known as “debt.”
Over that same period of time, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households increased their average wealth by 71 percent.
[Political Arena Editor’s Note – in that 1% are government bureaucrats many of whom make six figures:
The person who needs help to get out of poverty gets about what $11,000 a year if they are lucky while the Democrat appointee who runs welfare gets over $187,000 a year.
Government programs are not anti-poverty program, they are government appointee and government union enrichment programs. It is no different than “paying protection”.]
As noted by Daily Finance, from 1983 to 2010 the share of total wealth held by the richest 10 percent of American households increased from 68.2 percent to 76.7 percent. Meanwhile, all the rest of Americans lost financial ground.
An August Pew Research Center study found that many in the middle-class are divided on how they believe his gap widened.
Fully 85 percent of self-described middle-class adults say it is more difficult now than it was a decade ago for middle-class people to maintain their standard of living.
In the video below Mark Levin very gently takes apart Dr. Teresa Gilarducci. She works for George Soros now, but before that she was an econ professor at Notre Dame. She was also on President Clinton’s Social Security task force.
When she was at Notre Dame I debated her when I was an undergrad in front of an audience, as I was the only one between IU and Notre Dame who would take the partial privatization position point of view on Social Security. Her incredible hypocrisy, that Levin exposes so well in the video below, showed itself in true form in my debate with her as well. Her “logic” is entirely political, circular and based largely on denial and misdirection. She is sweet, attractive and charming, and well knows it as she uses that as a weapon in her arsenal.
Dr. Gilarducci thought she was going to be debating a “college republican” undergrad, what she got is a former radio talk show host who passed the state exams and used to sell retirement and insurance products.
I will not outline the entire debate, but in short I did two things.
First: I outlined the Galveston Plan which has worked wonders as a legal exception to Social Security. I also pointed out the government managed, but partially privatized retirement plan that Members of Congress have which has been a great success through thick and thin. Such a plan would serve as a good model to grow at least a small percentage of Social Security to at least attempt to have a growth to pre-fund our retirement benefits.
All she would say about these partially privatized plans is that the retirees wouldn’t get the money and even though retired Members of Congress and some in Galveston were already getting great benefits now she insisted that soon that money would vanish because only government transfer payments can be trusted. She kept saying again and again, “Until you go to get your money at retirement and it’s not there.”
Ironically in the video below, the type of plan she insisted could never work because the “greedsters” in the private sector would steal it all, is the exact same plan that she has for herself for her own retirement by her own admission.
Second: Dr. Gilarducci had written some good papers on 401K reform. She argued that too much of the 401K investment is in the employers own stock, so if the employer goes under said employee looses a lot of their retirement. As a fix she proposed that 401K laws be changed to require diversity of investment to more reliably pre-fund such retirement plans. Social Security has much the same problem as all of the eggs are in one basket, there is no diversity of investment and people’s retirement’s are not pre-funded.
So I used her own words and arguments on how to have a reliable and secure 401k, but replaced the term “401k” with “Social Security”. I used those near verbatim arguments to make most of my case.
All through the debate she insisted that (what she didn’t realize were her own arguments in her own published work) were just bad arguments from a young undergrad who just didn’t know better and that is how she treated me……until the end when I dropped the bomb that many of the arguments she so cutely poo-poohed were actually her own published work. She was floored.
During my last few shows, including as recently as yesterday, I have alerted you to Obama’s desire to nationalize your 401-k plan and eliminate your mortgage interest deduction.
Some background on the former. Back in October 2008, I got word that Professor Teresa Ghilarducci of the New School had testified before Rep. George Miller’s committee in support of a plan to nationalize private pension plans — in particular, 401-k plans. I not only spoke about it on my show back then, but we tracked down the professor and I conducted the first interview on talk radio. I will discuss this at more length on my program this evening, but I thought you might want to be among the first to listen to that interview again. Please pass it along to as many people as you can. See below.
It is an undeniable truth of life that wealth, capital and labor go where they are treated well. It is this economic truth more than any other that prevents socialism, communism, fascism, and kleptocracy from yielding positive economic benefits in the long term.
When you raise the tax rate, people will modify their behavior to avoid paying the tax, even if that means halting economic activity. As Ronald Reagan said:
The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.
Almost two-thirds of the country’s million-pound earners disappeared from Britain after the introduction of the 50% top rate of tax, figures have disclosed.
In the 2009-10 tax year, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million to HM Revenue and Customs.
This number fell to just 6,000 after Gordon Brown introduced the new 50% top rate of income tax shortly before the last general election.
The figures have been seized upon by the Conservatives to claim that increasing the highest rate of tax actually led to a loss in revenues for the Government.
It is believed that rich Britons moved abroad or took steps to avoid paying the new levy by reducing their taxable incomes.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, announced in the Budget earlier this year that the 50% top rate will be reduced to 45% from next April.
Since the announcement, the number of people declaring annual incomes of more than £1 million has risen to 10,000.
However, the number of million-pound earners is still far below the level recorded even at the height of the recession and financial crisis.
Last night, Harriet Baldwin, the Conservative MP who uncovered the latest figures, said: “Labour’s ideological tax hike led to a tax cull of millionaires.
Far from raising funds, it actually cost the UK £7 billion in lost tax revenue.
“Labour now needs to admit that their policies resulted in millionaires paying less tax and come clean about whether they would reintroduce this failed policy if they were in power.”
Mr Osborne argued earlier this year that the 50% rate was deterring entrepreneurs from coming to Britain.
The British Meteorology Office, commonly referred to as the “British Met” has been on the paranoid tip of global warming fraud and alarmism for years. After the Climategate scandal where “top” climate scientists own emails revealed that they were rigging some data-sets and hiding others to make it appear as if man made global warming was real resulted in more oversight and ethics rules. After years of false claims of doom and incorrect predictions the British Met is now admitting the truth.
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it
The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
Research: The new figures mean that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996.
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia [Editor’s Note – Jones is one of the busted Climategate scientists and had a long record of making over the top doomsday claims], last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.
Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.
There is some very wrongheaded thinking in part of the establishment GOP. They believe that in order to get in power Republicans should pander, and move to the left.
Those who hold such a view actually seem to believe that the Democrats will then stop calling Republicans racist and every dirty word in the book.
Look at what the Democrats do to black and Hispanic Republicans, they release their credit history to the public illegally like they did to Michael Steele, they release their social security number publicly like they did to Allen West, and they use every racial attack they can think of.
Democrats sent agitators to Michael Steele events to literally throw Oreo’s at him. They accused Allen West of being a part of a motorcycle drug gang, they trashed his military service, they trashed his family and even went after his children. They they engaged on what is now well reported outrageous vote fraud to unseat him, and replace him with a rich white guy.
Then the Democrats said it was Republican’s fault that Congress is richer and whiter.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee trashed Miquel Estrada when he was nominated to the DC Court of Appeals saying in their own committee memo’s that they must stop him “because he is Latino”.
Democrats trotted out campaign ringers to call South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian-American, a slut.
I’ll start with the General Social Survey (GSS), the most widely used database for monitoring social trends. All the results that follow are based on the biennial GSS surveys conducted from 2000 to 2010.
Latinos aren’t married more than everyone else. Among Latinos ages 30–49, 52 percent are married. Everyone else: 54 percent.
Latinos aren’t more religious than everyone else. Among Latinos, 29 percent attend worship services regularly (nearly once a week or more). Everyone else: 31 percent. Among Latinos, 18 percent not only attend regularly but also say they have a strong affiliation with their religion. Everyone else: 24 percent.
Latinos aren’t more opposed to gay marriage than everyone else. Among Latinos, 44 percent disagree or strongly disagree with the statement that “homosexuals should have the right do marry.” Everyone else: 50 percent.
Latinos are a little more opposed to abortion than everyone else, but not by a landslide. Among Latinos, 12 percent are opposed to abortion under all circumstances. Everyone else: 9 percent. Among Latinos, 21 percent are opposed to all abortion unless the mother’s health is seriously endangered. Everyone else: 14 percent.
Latinos aren’t more conservative than everyone else. Among Latinos, 14 percent describe themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative.” Everyone else: 20 percent.
What about the Latino work ethic? For indicators on that, I turn from the GSS to the Current Population Survey (CPS). I restrict the results to the surveys from 2000–2008, before the financial meltdown—that is, we’re looking at work behavior in years in the normal range of unemployment.
Latino men are only fractionally more likely to be in the labor force than everyone else, and those with jobs work slightly fewer hours. Among Latino men ages 30–49, 92 percent were in the labor force. All other men ages 30–49: 91 percent. Among men ages 30–49 who had jobs, Latinos worked an average of 42 hours in the preceding week. All other men ages 30–49: 44 hours.
Latino women are substantially less likely to be in the labor force than everyone else. Among Latino women ages 30–49, 68 percent were in the labor force. All other women ages 30–49: 78 percent. Among those with jobs, hours-worked in the preceding week were virtually identical: 37.3 for Latino women, 37.5 for everyone else.
I can understand why people think Latinos are natural conservatives. Just about every Latino with whom I come in contact is hard-working and competent. I don’t get into discussions with them about their families and religion, but they sure look like go-getting, family-values Americans to me. But note the caveat: “with whom I come in contact.” There’s a huge selection artifact embedded in that caveat—I always come in contact with Latinos because they are on a work crew that’s doing something at my house or office, or at my neighbors’ houses. That’s the way that almost all Anglos in the political chattering class come in contact with Latinos. Of course they look like model Americans.
The data I used for the numbers above come from the most trustworthy, carefully conducted surveys available. They paint a portrait that gives no reason to think that Republicans have an untapped pool of social conservatives to help them win elections.
A March 2011 poll by Moore Information found that Republican economic policies were a stronger turn-off for Hispanic voters in California than Republican positions on illegal immigration. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanic voters were suspicious of the Republican party on class-warfare grounds — “it favors only the rich”; “Republicans are selfish and out for themselves”; “Republicans don’t represent the average person”– compared with 7 percent who objected to Republican immigration stances.
[In other words Republicans have allowed themselves to be maldefined, have been timid in the battle of the narratives, and not aggressive enough to show why capitalism and freedom work when given the chance. Conservatives have also not been active in pop-culture and public education. – Political Arena Editor]
And a strong reason for that support for big government is that so many Hispanics use government programs. U.S.-born Hispanic households in California use welfare programs at twice the rate of native-born non-Hispanic households. And that is because nearly one-quarter of all Hispanics are poor in California, compared to a little over one-tenth of non-Hispanics. Nearly seven in ten poor children in the state are Hispanic, and one in three Hispanic children is poor, compared to less than one in six non-Hispanic children. One can see that disparity in classrooms across the state, which are chock full of social workers and teachers’ aides trying to boost Hispanic educational performance.
Democrats love the death tax. It creams most small farms and small businesses while their super rich corporate donors get off the hook. It makes family farms easy targets for big corporate buyers. It also punishes larger companies for being privately held. It is yet another tax that the little guy has to pay while the mega-corporate interests that run the Democratic Party benefit from. Fox News:
Ranchers, farmers brace for ‘death tax’ impact
Rancher Kevin Kester works dawn to dusk, drives a 12-year-old pick-up truck and earns less than a typical bureaucrat in Washington D.C., yet the federal government considers him rich enough to pay the estate tax — also known as the “death tax.”
And with that tax set to soar at the beginning of 2013 without some kind of intervention from Congress, farmers and ranchers like Kester are waiting anxiously.
“There is no way financially my kids can pay what the IRS is going to demand from them nine months after death and keep this ranch intact for their generation and future generations,” said Kester, of the Bear Valley Ranch in Central California.
Two decades ago, Kester paid the IRS $2 million when he inherited a 22,000-acre cattle ranch from his grandfather. Come January, the tax burden on his children will be more than $13 million.
For supporters of a high estate tax, which is imposed on somebody’s estate after death, Kester is the kind of person they rarely mention. He doesn’t own a mansion. He’s not the CEO of a multi-national. But because of his line of work, he owns a lot of property that would be subject to a lot of tax.
“Our number one goal is to repeal the estate tax, to get rid of it, not have it for every generation, when I die and my kids die and so on,” he told Fox News. “For everyone to have to re-purchase the ranch or farm over and over for each generation, that’s inherently unjust. So what we’re doing is asking our politicians to understand that and repeal the estate tax.”
That, however, is unlikely. Currently, the federal government taxes estates worth $5 million dollars and up at 35 percent. When the Bush-era tax rates expire in January, rates increase to 55 percent on estates of $1 million or more. While some Republicans want to eliminate the death tax entirely, President Obama has proposed a 45 percent rate on estates of $3.5 million and up.
“The idea behind the estate tax is to prevent the very wealthy among us from accumulating vast fortunes that they can pass along to the next generation,” said Patrick Lester, director of Federal Fiscal Policy with the progressive think tank — OMB Watch. “The poster child for the estate tax is Paris Hilton — the celebrity and hotel heiress. That’s who this is targeted at, not ordinary Americans.”
Editor’s Note – Wait just a minute. Why can’t Paris Hilton’s family pass their fortune on to their children? The Hilton’s provide a valuable service and also provide tens of thousands of good jobs. They also pay massive amounts on taxes and give to charities. Why should they be targeted for punishment by the federal government?
Where did we adopt the tyrannical Marxist idea that just because someone has it, it then becomes another’s right to take it? Do we have the rule of law or the law of the jungle?
The Democrats do not take that money to pass out to you and me, they spend the money over seas or hand it out to campaign donors and cronies just as they have dome in the emerging Green Corruption scandal.
Isn’t the “American Dream” to pass on something to your kids so they can do better than you? This is how radical the Democratic Party leadership has become.
More from Fox News:
But according to the American Farm Bureau, up to 97 percent of American farms and ranches will be subject to an estate tax where the exemption is set at $1 million. At that rate, the federal government will pocket $40 billion in 2013 and up to $86 billion in 2021. That contrasts with just $12 billion this year.
It’s Friday morning, and so far today, the Obama administration has posted 165 new regulations and notifications on its reguations.gov website.
In the past 90 days, it has posted 6,125 regulations and notices – an average of 68 a day.
The website allows visitors to find and comment on proposed regulations and related documents published by the U.S. federal government. “Help improve Federal regulations by submitting your comments,” the website says.
The thousands of entries run the gamut from meeting notifications to fee schedules to actual rules and proposed rule changes.
In recent days, for example, the EPA posted a proposed rule involving volatile organic compound emissions from architectural coatings: “We are approving a local rule that regulates these emission sources under the Clean Air Act (CAA or the Act),” the proposed rule states. “We are taking comments on this proposal and plan to follow with a final action.”
Another proposed rule will provide guidance for FDA staff on “enforcement criteria for canned ackee, frozen ackee, and other ackee products that contain hypoglycin A.” (Ackee is the national fruit of Jamaica; unripened or inedible portions can be toxic.)
Some of the proposed regulations revise regulations already on the books.
The website also links to a video of a speech President Barack Obama gave at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 7, 2011, in which the president promised to remove “outdated and unnecessary regulations.”
“I’ve ordered a government-wide review, and if there are rules on the books that are needlessly stifling job creation and economic growth, we will fix them,” the president said.
A number of groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, expect a rush of new regulations now that President Obama has won a second term:
CEI expects the EPA to move ahead on delayed rules on everything from greenhouse gas emissions to ozone standards. “Rules from the health care bill and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill will also likely make themselves known in the weeks to come,” the group said on its website.
According to conventional progressive wisdom, regulation is the means by which a compassionate government protects the weak and innocent from the strong and malevolent.
Try telling that to Brad Jones.
Jones is one of the owners of Buckingham Slate, a Virginia business a little over an hour’s drive west of Richmond. The company is distinguished by the quality of the highly valued Arvonia slate it produces. And by the fact that its roots trace back almost to the Civil War. And by the fact that federal regulators smacked it with a $4,000 fine.
Over a trash can.
The offending can — or “waste receptacle,” in the words of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s official citation — was “not covered.” What’s more, “the receptacle was full.” It “could be smelled.” There were — brace yourself — “flies fl[y]ing in and around the receptacle.” And to crown all, “management engaged in aggravated conduct constituting more than ordinary negligence” by allowing this “condition to exist.” The horror.
Buckingham Slate has racked up other fines, too — such as a $70,000 fine imposed because one of its trucks had an inoperable horn. Perhaps regulators were following the approach advocated by Al Armendariz, the former EPA official who said enforcers should “crucify” offenders to “make an example” of them, which would then make others “easy to manage.”
According to President Obama’s campaign rhetoric, Republicans have nothing to offer but “the same prescription they’ve had for the last 30 years. . . : ‘Feel a cold coming on? Take two tax cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning!’ ”
Funny stuff. But Martha Boneta isn’t laughing.
Boneta, a Fauquier County farmer, hosted a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls — an occasion for which she lacked the proper “events permit.” For this, the county slammed her with a $5,000 fine. She also got in hot water for selling items, such as yarn and birdhouses, that she had not made herself.
Outraged over how the county was treating her, local farmers showed up at a zoning-board meeting a couple of months ago with pitchforks in hand. But the demonstration was only so useful. She ended up closing her shop anyway.
Americans should place more trust in “the guiding hand of government,” according to the president and his supporters.
But try telling that to Nathan Hammock and his family. The Hammocks own a dairy farm in Museville. Because of drought, they wanted to put an irrigation pond on their property. They eventually managed to — after three years trying to get permission from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers. “I think we’ve spent close to $30,000” in the process, Hammock says.
Hammock made the comment in a video you can find on the website of Rep. Robert Hurt (go tohttp://hurt.house.gov/ and click on “Videos”). Hurt, who represents Virginia’s Fifth District, has introduced legislation to let farmers farm without having to navigate a “tremendous bureaucratic maze.” It is moving through Congress — slowly.
This is a disaster and this is not partisanship, it is a cold reality.
The federal response in New York and parts of New Jersey is not going well. After 72 hours FEMA and the military should be engaged full speed ahead. It isn’t. Main roads still have boats sitting on them.
Mayor Bloomberg is keeping out the National Guard because they have guns… no kidding. Obama should assert FEMA emergency powers since this is a multi-state disaster and over rule the Mayor. Bush did the same thing after Louisiana Governor Blanco refused to cooperate during Katrina. Bloomberg may know how to make money, but that is all he knows how to do. His failure as mayor is truly epic.
There is a shortage of water. So what you do is call in the Navy as the ships have large desalination machines to make fresh water which could be sent inland.
After Katrina Bush sent in the Navy, the Coast Guard and Army General Honore into New Orleans and the General got it under control and had choppers and trucks moving debris just after 72 hours. Bush also parked the US Navy a hospital ship just off the coast. By the way, federal guidelines say that FEMA’s and the federal response time should be 48-72 hours.
Honestly I was expecting the disaster response for this hurricane to go well like it did in Mississippi for Katrina. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour had asked for the military and national guard to come in before Katrina even hit. The damage to the Mississippi Gulf Coast was FAR worse than the damage in New Orleans, but they got things going in a hurry, got relief delivered well. This is what happens when Governors and local authorities cooperate with and coordinate with FEMA like they are supposed to. The reason the press didn’t tell you this was because what news is there report when the news is good?
Staten Island resident John Tabacco told Neil Cavuto this morning that Staten Island is still alone. ** There is no federal help. ** The feds just drive by with their clipboards. **We just found three more dead people in the pile this morning.
In a nutshell: 150 more Obama Administration emails released showing how green energy money was steered to Obama cronies with sham junk bond companies. The list of green jobs companies gone or going under grows to 50. That is your money folks.
With so many of these green energy boondoggles it looks like this: Obama gives big taxpayer money to a fund raiser who is an owner in a “green energy company”. Said owners pay themselves in a big way, give big money to Democrats and go out of business.
While the administration claims that this was all science and no politics, a slew of leaked emails show the corruption and influence peddling.
Our friends Christine Lakatos at Green Corruption and Marita Noon at Townhall have been tracking the list of green jobs boondoggles that are going out of business after paying themselves lavishly with your money. That list went from 15, to 16, to 36 and now 50 green jobs enterprises paid for with your money that either have shut down or are about to. See that list here:
Via the research from Lakatos and Noon, the Daily Caller is now running with this story, as is former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich:
Newt comments on the erupting “green corruption”story after he discusses the emails showing that the order to let or embassy staff die was from the White House.
Erupting indeed. Emails showing the influence peddling and corruption keep coming out.
The House Oversight Committee has released a new set of 150 emails that show how your money was steered to cronies in the name of green jobs. More on this story from Marita Noon in today’s Townhall (excerpt):
The 1705 loan guarantee program had 460 applicants, but only 7% were approved—26 projects were funded. Of those 26 projects 22 were junk-bond rated—meaning private investors wouldn’t fund them. So why did we, the taxpayers?
Our research showed that at least 90% of the projects had close ties to the White House and other high ranking Democrats. Despite the obvious connection, President Obama has repeatedly denied any involvement—preferring to blame “career bureaucrats” who could take the fall with no political consequence.
In March, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, testified that, “We looked at the loans on their own merits.” Also, back in November 2011, he said: “I am aware of no communication from White House to Department of Energy saying to make the loan or to restructure.”
Just last week, on October 26, President Obama affirmed Chu’s position when he said: “Decisions made in the loan program office are decisions, by the way, that are made by the Department of Energy, they have nothing to do with politics.”
However, late Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a new report of “over 150 emails that contradict statements by the President, Secretary Chu, and White House and DOE officials.” The emails reveal a series of questionable practices, including coercion, cronyism and, cover ups.
Says Noon, “The Obama green energy program is the largest, most expensive, and deceptive case of crony capitalism in American history”.
See the rest of our green jobs scam and Solyndra coverage HERE.
UPDATE – Even MORE from the House Oversight Committee: Obama Administration lying about the influence peddling; caught again with more of their own emails.
KYLE CLARK: In a national address, you touted the stimulus money going to Abound Solar – a Colorado company connected to one of your billionaire fundraisers. Now, as you may know, Abound Solar is out of business and under criminal investigation. The jobs are gone and taxpayers are out about 60 million dollars. How do you answer critics who see Abound Solar as Colorado’s Solyndra – a politically connected clean energy company that went under and took our money with it?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: (Laughs) Well, Kyle, I think that if you look at our record that these loans that are given out by the Department of Energy for clean energy have created jobs all across the country and only about four percent of these loans were going to some very cutting-edge industries that are going to allow us to figure out how to produce energy in a clean, renewable way in the future and create jobs in Colorado and all around the country. And some of them have failed but the vast majority of them are pushing us forward into a clean energy direction. And that’s good for Colorado and good for the country. And these are decisions, by the way, that are made by the Department of Energy, they have nothing to do with politics.
CompleteColorado.com has obtained emails that seem to directly contradict Plouffe’s answer, and also challenge the President’s notion that the DOE’s loan decisions were universally autonomous within the agency. The emails also lend even more credence to the theory that the loan to Abound Solar was political payback to Colorado’s wealthy Democratic benefactor and Gang-of-Four member, Pat Stryker.”
In the above email thread, DOE loan executive Jonathan Silver tells DOE credit advisor Jim McCrea, “You better let him know the WH wants to move Abound forward.” It appears to be a mild scolding to a Treasury advisor, Ian Samuels, who is not moving fast enough to schedule calls regarding Abound.
The second page of the email thread makes mention of “…transaction pressure under which we are all now operating…” This entire email thread happened just a few days before President Obama would hail the government-backed loans as a job creator for Colorado.
This is infuriating but not a surprise. Here is the story of LG Chem, they bosses take the government money, pay themselves, make a donation to the Democrats. And when the money runs out they close the doors.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
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