"The travel costs for vacations taken by the first family and the Bidens have reached over $40 million with the Air Force's revelation that two golf outings by President Obama this year cost $2.9 million, according to the taxpayer watchdog group Judicial Watch."It's good to be the king.
I like the "suddenly owed" part."That morning, a government official from the Bureau of Land Management told him to come down to a seizure site where the 132 cattle he owned were about to be impounded.When he arrived, men brandishing handguns told him he couldn't get any closer than 250 yards from his cattle. He watched from a distance as the government loaded the livestock onto stock trailers.Within a week, the cattle had been sold at a private auction – for what Yowell estimated to be a quarter of their market price. The proceeds belonged to BLM, officials told him, paying a portion of the grazing fees he suddenly owed. It wasn't enough to cover the full debt, and BLM sent Yowell a bill for $180,000."
"In 1994, Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt rushed through a total overhaul of cattle and sheep grazing regulations on over 260 million acres of land that was managed by the BLM and Agriculture Department's U.S. Forest Service, The Washington Post reported. "I remember the uproar in the west over this.
"Back in 2009, it was 200 million climate refugees according to this article in the NYT"Desperate, they're cranking up the alarmism, hoping to generate headlines and scare people.
"Anti-Zionist Jewish journalist Philip Weiss has written this post quoting Palestinian activist Mustafa Barghouthi as saying that Israel already is an apartheid state, but that Americans perhaps could use the term “segregation” to better describe the society there."The word apartheid really seems to be the problem, not the substance.
"A surge in the number of aggressive al-Qaida affiliates and like-minded groups the Middle East and North Africa poses a serious threat to U.S. interests and allies, the State Department said Wednesday in reporting a more than 40 percent increase in terrorist attacks worldwide between 2012 and 2013."This is good for the war profiteers in power, but bad for the rest of us.
"The Fed said it would reduce its monthly bond purchases by another $10 billion to $45 billion. The stimulus is intended to hold down long-term interest rates and support the mortgage market. The Fed also reaffirmed its plan to keep short-term interest rates low to support the economy "for a considerable time" after its bond purchases end, likely late this year."Talk about a disconnect from reality.
"The new focus on bringing criminal charges against major banks bucks a regulatory trend in Wall Street, whose largest institutions have been largely immune to criminal prosecutions over wrongdoing for two decades. The planned prosecutions against BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse could help mollify public outrage over banks’ apparent immunity to criminal charges."This is for show.
"“There was no mocking,” he told reporters at a press conference after the meeting. “You all know me. You tease the ones you love, alright? But some people misunderstood what I had to say, and I wanted to make sure members understood that the biggest impediment we have to moving immigration reform is that the American people don’t trust the president to enforce or implement the law that we may or may not pass."I doubt Republicans appreciated the supposed joke.
"Compiling reports of compliance costs from various government agencies and outside sources, author Clyde Wayne Crews found that the "regulation tax" imposed on the economy now tops $1.86 trillion.Wow.
By comparison, Canada's entire GDP is $1.82 trillion. India's is $1.84 trillion."
"The mini helicopter, which weighs around 49 pounds, and, in a military setting, could be fitted with a single- or multiple-shot 40mm grenade launcher, 25mm grenade launcher or 12 gauge shotgun, according to Vanguard Defense Industries."No wonder the police like it.
"This article explains how the United States Postal Service swiftly crushed their plan to make mail better. The founders were summoned to a meeting with the Postmaster General, who told them. 'We have a misunderstanding. You disrupt my service and we will never work with you. You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.' The USPS's Chief of Digital Strategy said Outbox's business model 'will never work anyway. Digital is a fad.' The USPS wouldn't work with Outbox to forward customers' mail, and that eventually destroyed the business."Of course they don't work for us.
"What we found, while hardly surprising for those who read out post from also a year ago, "At $72.8 Trillion, Presenting The Bank With The Biggest Derivative Exposure In The World (Hint: Not JPMorgan)", is just as jarring. "That's 20 times greater than German GDP.
"Although it was claimed that those killed were “militants,” according to press reports at least three civilians were killed and at least five others wounded. That makes at least 92 US drone attacks against Yemen during the Obama administration, which have killed nearly 1,000 people including many civilians."This is going to end up blowing back on Americans.
"So Alexander is flat out lying in saying that there were 12 non-self-reported cases that got caught. In fact, it's pretty clear that if most of those 12 had chosen to keep their abuses secret, we'd have never known about them. Which should lead to the obvious question: how many people within the NSA abused the powers to spy on people, didn't self-report, and therefore were never caught. It's incredible for him to basically be arguing that everyone who abused the system was caught, when the details show they actually failed to discover most of the intentional abuses until someone admitted to them much later. "Of course he's lying. Why would anybody expect him to tell the truth?
"But as Henry Kissinger argues, “the demonization of Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for the absence of one.”"Excellent.
"There were 485 vehicles that went through the checkpoint conducted from 7 to 11 p.m. at 1001 Shiloh Springs Road, said Trotwood police Sgt. Brent Rasor."Checkpoints are now 7-11, trying to catch happy hour people now.
"The apparent goal of "Chicagoland" was for CNN to use its resources as a way to portray the "mayor in a positive light" at a national level and showcase Emanuel "as the star he really is." "Typical.
""Chicagoland's" executive producer is Robert Redford."
"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 53% of Likely U.S. Voters think it is fair to say that neither party in Congress is the party of the American people. "The other 47 percent are stupid.
""We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems and it's remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don't want to ... They'll take the path of least resistance.""Bizarre.
"Boehner said he's been working for 16 or 17 months trying to push Congress to deal with immigration reform.By easy he means supported by the people.
"I've had every brick and bat and arrow shot at me over this issue just because I wanted to deal with it. I didn't say it was going to be easy," he said."
"They don’t make war propaganda like they used to – or maybe it has something to do with this newfangled thing they call the internet – but the latest "evidence" of Russian troops supposedly directly involved in east Ukraine turmoil was debunked almost as soon as it was made public."No surprise there either. Stop the alarmism. I don't want anybody to die, but what's going on Ukraine since the US-backed militias took over is gentle compared to a US invasion.
"Kettering project moves ahead despite protests"Typical.
"A reporter for the Ottawa Citizen wrote a plagiarized, completely incoherent paper about soils, cancer treatment, and Mars.This is what government control of science has done to science.
And eight scientific journals want to publish it."
"Seymour Hersh explains in chapter and verse, based on a DIA secret report among other high level sources, how this abomination unfolded, and became the horrific gas attack in Ghouta on August 21, 2013. But the gravamen of the piece is his description of how the Obama White House came within two days of launching a Bush style war on Syria after it had already been warned that the proof of Assad’s complicity was lacking; and that a weapons testing lab in England had already concluded that a sarin sample obtained on the scene was of a homemade variety and not of the military grade known to be in the Assad arsenal.Obama busted for multiple lies.
Despite all this, the White House apparatus pushed an increasingly resistant Joint Chiefs of Staff through more than 35 iterations of an attack plan that had nothing to do with spanking Assad for his alleged barbarity or surgically disabling his chemical weapons capacity. The attack was to involve an armada of British, French and American air strikes along with sea-based barrage of Tomahawk missiles to take out Assad’s entire military capacity."
"At the eleventh hour Obama backed down when General Dempsey said flat out no—and then lied that he had changed his mind after a walk around the White House with his clueless chief of staff. The foolish incumbent in the White House and his clownish Secretary of State, the man with the big head of hair and self-evidently not much underneath, then had to suffer the indignity of being rescued from their disastrous schemes and misadventures by Vladimir Putin."Thank goodness.
"Our borders have, conveniently enough, long been Constitution-free zones where more or less anything goes, including warrantless searches of various sorts. In the twenty-first century, however, the border itself, north as well as south, has not only been increasingly up-armored, but redefined as a 100-mile-wide strip around the United States (and Alaska). In other words – check that map again – our “borders” now cover an expanse in which nearly 200 million Americans, or two-thirds of the U.S. population, live. Included are nine of the 10 largest metropolitan areas. If you live in Florida, Maine, or Michigan, for example, no matter how far inland you may be, you are “on the border.”This is crazy.
Imagine that. And then imagine what it means. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as Todd Miller points out today, is not only the largest law enforcement agency in the country you know next to nothing about, but the largest, flat and simple. Now, its agents can act as if the Constitution has been put to bed up to 100 miles inland anywhere. This, in turn, means – as the ACLU has written – that at new checkpoints and elsewhere in areas no American would once have considered borderlands, you can be stopped, interrogated, and searched “on an everyday basis with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing.”"
"According to a report released by the CDC last September, more than 2 million Americans get drug-resistant infections each year. And about 23,000 die from these diseases that are increasingly resistant to the strongest antibiotics that doctors use to fight the infections."Thanks, government.
"Having an implacable enemy of unrivaled evil supposedly bent on our destruction has its advantages – yes, a US Secretary of State actually does seem to believe this. Having nuclear-armed enemies is a Good Thing – because it makes the job of US officials so much easier. Should we support a South American dictator who murders his own people for looking at him cross-eyed – but of course we should, because he hates the Russkies! Do we really need to build more nuclear weapons than it would take to incinerate the world one-hundred times over? The answer – back then – was an obvious yes, at least to our wise rulers (who never considered how dangerous our arsenal would become once it started to age….). And how about getting involved in a war in Southeast Asia that would take tens of thousands of American lives – and easily a million non-Americans – a war this same John Kerry would refer to with unmitigated contempt as he threw his war medals right back at the Pentagon?It was much easier for rulers to convince Americans to give them whatever they wanted.
Ah, yes – the beauty of simplicity! No hard decisions. No moral conundrums."
"“I am deeply concerned about the notion that the Bureau of Land Management believes the federal government has the authority to swoop in and take land that has been owned and cultivated by Texas landowners for generations,” General Abbott wrote. “The BLM’s newly asserted claims to land along the Red River threaten to upset long-settled private property rights and undermine fundamental principles—including the rule of law—that form the foundation of our democracy. Yet, the BLM has failed to disclose either its full intentions or the legal justification for its proposed actions. Decisions of this magnitude must not be made inside a bureaucratic black box.”"They must not be made at all.
"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Asian men and women have median earnings higher than white men and women. Female cafeteria attendants earn more than their male counterparts. Females who are younger than 30 and have never been married earn salaries 8 percent higher than males of the same description. Among women who graduated from college during 1992-93, by 2003 more than one-fifth were no longer in the workforce, and another 17 percent were working part time. That’s to be compared with only 2 percent of men in either category. Hymowitz cites several studies showing significant career choice and lifestyle differences between men and women that result in differences in income."Exploded.
It's nice to be the king."The Internal Revenue Service has paid more than $2.8 million in bonuses to employees with recent disciplinary problems, including $1 million to workers who owed back taxes, a government investigator said Tuesday.More than 2,800 workers got bonuses despite facing a disciplinary action in the previous year, including 1,150 who owed back taxes, said a report by J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. The bonuses were awarded from October 2010 through December 2012."
"In the 2011 budget year, more than 70,000 IRS workers got cash bonuses totaling $92 million, the report said. In the 2012 budget year, nearly 68,000 workers got cash bonuses totaling $86 million."
"According to PEER, air travel can emit 2 to 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person on cross-country flights. The Daily Caller News Foundation reported that McCarthy travels home to Boston nearly every week to see her family, mostly via air travel.I wonder if hypocrisy warms the planet. Rulers don't have to live like serfs.
“Hasn’t EPA heard of Skype?” Ruch said.
A rough calculation of the carbon dioxide emissions of her nearly weekly flights shows she emits between 7.5 tons of carbon dioxide per year to 9.4 tons per year — nearly equivalent to the yearly carbon emissions of the average American.
“Yes, Administrator McCarthy flies home regularly to see her family. And yes she is a leader in fighting to protect our environment and improve public health,” the EPA said in response to TheDCNF’s article on McCarthy’s airline emissions. “While head of the Office of Air and Radiation, she led EPA’s efforts to create mercury and air toxics standards, the fuel economy standards and national air quality standards for particle pollution.”"
"In both instances the underlying agenda is the same: humans are an unwelcome parasite and land must be left undeveloped and undisturbed. This agenda is actively pushed by the greens both inside the government agencies and without, who are unwilling to actually purchase the land and keep it “pristine”, preferring instead to use the power of the government to advance their goals."Socialism is anti-human too, except not for the greens and socialists, who are the same people.
"Reporting from a city under siege. Train stations closed, streets shut down, military helicopters flying overhead, and state & local police armed with rifles and shotguns every ten feet checking IDs and performing illegal searches and seizures. I was nearly arrested this morning heading into the office and had my briefcase searched – twice – within a distance of fifty feet. Police don’t like it when you remind them of the necessity for probable cause or articulable individualized suspicion."No recourse.
"Space Exploration, known as SpaceX, had planned to launch its Dragon cargo ship in March, but was delayed by technical problems, including a two-week hold to replace a damaged U.S. Air Force radar tracking system."Blame Air Force radar.
"If higher mandated wages increase willingness to offer labor services, the reverse must also be true. Lower wages must reduce workers willingness to offer labor services. But if that is so, rent controls must also reduce landlords’ willingness to provide housing, and rent control will restrict rather than expand tenants’ housing options.These policies are not about economics. They're about politics.
Similarly, if legislated lower rents increase willingness to rent housing, the reverse must also be true. Higher rents would reduce families’ willingness to rent housing. But if that is so, higher minimum wages must also reduce employers’ willingness to hire low-skill workers, and the minimum wage will restrict rather than expand low-skill workers’ labor market options. That backers of both policies use not only faulty, but logically contradictory, arguments reveals how flawed their cases are."
"The unemployment directly and indirectly caused by raising the minimum wage will require additional government welfare spending and thus higher taxes and/or greater budget deficits to finance it. "Democrats know this. This is what they want.
"In fact, Gen. James Cartwright has not gone to jail and the above paragraph remains – as yet – a grim Washington fairy tale. There is indeed a Justice Department investigation open against the president’s "favorite general" (as Washington scribe to the stars Bob Woodward once labeled him) for the possible leaking of information on that virus to the New York Times, but that’s all. He remains quite active in private life, holding the Harold Brown Chair in Defense Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as a consultant to ABC News, and on the board of Raytheon, among other things. He has suffered but a single penalty so far: he was stripped of his security clearance."Should have gone to jail.
"Cherry-picking data in climate science gained notoriety during the joint Committee Hearing chaired by Representative Barton on the “hockey stick.” Steve McIntyre reported, “D’Arrigo put up a slide about “cherry picking” and then she explained to the panel that that’s what you have to do if you want to make cherry pie.” There’s another form of cherry-picking central in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science that involves finding people to produce the science you want. They bring the cherry-picked data with them."Scientists don't do this.
"The college in Hoboken says the students range in age from 18 to 21. All were fully vaccinated with two documented doses of mumps-containing vaccine."So much for that vaccine.
"Overall, the IRS audited fewer than 1 percent of returns by individuals last year, though the chances of getting audited increased with income, according to IRS statistics."Except for the ultra-rich plutocrats.
"It has cosied up to governments around the world so effectively that its chairman, Eric Schmidt, is a White House advisor. In Britain, its executives meet with ministers more than almost any other corporation.
Google can’t be blamed for this: one of its jobs is to lobby for laws that benefit its shareholders, but it is up to governments to push back. As things stand, Google – and to a lesser extent, Facebook – are in danger of becoming the architects of the law."This is nothing new.
"Look at the polls. This week’s Fox News poll has Clinton’s favorable rating at its lowest point in six years. She is at 49 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable—similar to her 47 percent favorable, 46 percent unfavorable rating when she ended her last presidential campaign.
More important than the individual results, however, is the trend. Since leaving office as secretary of state, Clinton’s favorable rating has been on a downward trajectory. And this is before the rigors of a campaign, before a Biden or a Warren or an O’Malley or a Cuomo or a Schweitzer or a Sanders throws a punch or two, before Christie, Bush, Rubio, Walker, Jindal, Paul, Kasich, Ryan, Perry, and Pence go for the Cobra Clutch Bulldog."
"The most important of the documents, “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” originally some 331 pages, was reduced to only 28 pages in the sanitized and heavily redacted version posted by the presidential library."That redaction is a scandal in itself.
"The more surprising part of the Fox poll, though, might be how people view the Republican Party. It shows Americans are now evenly split -- 45 percent to 45 percent -- on the GOP. As recently as October, the same poll showed just 30 percent of Americans viewed the GOP favorably, compared to 63 percent unfavorable."
"But the pace of job growth in Ohio remains sluggish, and much of the decline in last month’s unemployment rate can be attributed to a dramatic decline in labor force participation, or the number of Ohioans working or actively seeking work."This is bad news, not good news.
"When Bundy’s one (adult) son got Tasered and his aunt got knocked down, the footage further fueled the righteous rage of the militia and Tea Party supporters who came in to support the family. During Waco, the Davidians’ film from inside Mt. Carmel was never released to the media for fear of humanizing the group too much. The press was kept more than a mile away from the Davidians during the standoff, meaning they had to depend almost entirely on the FBI’s spin to gather information. And though the footage of the Bradley Fighting Vehicles busting down walls and pumping CS gas into a building that contained more than 20 children was chilling, it was still distant enough not to unsettle certain folks more afraid of cults than of feds. As was the fire. Before, during, and after Waco, the feds controlled the story. This is no longer as easy to do. And it’s a great way to demand the government have patience – though admittedly they surely want to avoid another Waco for their own PR. "But once smartphone makers "voluntarily" implement kill switch technology, the Feds can shut down all smartphones in an area without affecting their own communications, so they can once again control the story as they massacre Americans. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they already planned to shut down cell towers around the Bundy ranch and obtained different communication tools for themselves in their upcoming raid on the Bundy ranch.
"Reasonable people don’t do what Bundy has been doing. If there is any blood spilled in the next few weeks, you could blame him for refusing to back down. And you would be correct. Randy Weaver could have saved his wife and son if he had come in on firearm charges before his Ruby Ridge standoff began. And Koresh could have done the same for his followers had he surrendered before things spun out of control. Hopefully, the next group that makes a stand or doesn’t comply with orders will not have so many awkward religious beliefs. Maybe if you teach your children racist views, they deserve to get shot in the back by a US Marshal like Weaver’s son."This is a poorly executed attempt at taking the opposite perspective.
If this story is true, I'm surprised they would be this brazen."Telling the gun store worker he was tasked with visiting all the firearms outlets in the local area to check on “suspicious purchases” for counterterrorism purposes, the agent then began discussing what in actual fact were “completely normal transactions,” such as, “paying with cash, purchasing long guns, and other similarly innocuous behavior.”The FBI agent then reportedly made a shocking remark that almost seems too chilling to believe.“If you see some Middle Eastern guy come in, you don’t have to be so worried about that. What we’re really looking for are people talking about being sovereign such as sovereign citizens or people talking about big government,” the agent reportedly stated.Before the agent left the store, he handed the employee a flyer which lists paying with cash, buying in bulk, along with other seemingly innocuous behavior as suspicious activity."
"When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'"Talk about discovering the obvious.
"Washington set a new record in 2013 by issuing final rules consuming 26,417 pages in the Federal Register. While plenty of government employees deserve credit for this milestone, leadership matters. And by this measure President Obama has never been surpassed in the Oval Office."Using Cloward and Piven's strategy, Obama is doing this on purpose to strangle the economy.
"The image of the American West as a place of private property and blissful independence from government control has long been a myth, and the fact is that life in the West has involved the federal government much more so than life in the East much of the time. This is because the land and other natural resources in the West are controlled by a vast socialist bureaucracy governing water, land, and minerals going back to the late nineteenth century. Certainly, within the larger framework of federal control, heavily asserted by a central government bloated by the Civil War, there were many communities that did live extremely independently and in ways that might be considered anarchistic. However, since the 1890s, the overall economy of the American West is best viewed as one that has been dominated by federal land ownership, regulation, subsidies, and bureaucracy. "Bundy seems to have changed his mind when the BLM stopped doing what he wanted. Of course he did. His family homesteaded that property for over a century. Also not mentioned in these stories is how and when the Feds took control of the property which apparently they didn't have at the beginning.
"When I look at this, it’s hard to not see this as just a dispute between different rent-seeking interest groups trying to profit off federal lands. Bundy now says that the feds don’t have a right to own land. Bundy is far too moderate for me of course, since I dispute that any state has the moral right to own land, but it’s quite clear that the legal right of the American state to own land was well established in the 19th century."But when and why was the land "transfered" to the Feds? That seems to be at the core of Bundy's dispute. That's the state's rights issue he talks about that is not addressed in these articles.
"According to Mack, the so-called retreat was nothing more than theatrics. “It was a ploy to get people to back off, to get people out of the way. They weren’t expecting us to get this amount of people here. They were surprised by the numbers and so they wanted a way to get us out of here. This was a ploy to get us out of here and then they’re going after the Bundys.” Mack said that when he was at the Bundy ranch on Saturday there were an estimated 600 to 800 protesters present when federal agents were releasing the cattle."Exactly as expected.
"I suspect the CIA gave full assurances to the Junta leaders that the U.S. will continue to give massive Black Ops support, satellite data on the Russians, and weapons for full scale war.It's a hot war now, and I expected it would become.
That reassured them and they began this massive attack in the East as soon as they could, last night our time, day time in the Ukraine."
"This Ukrainian Civil War is now extremely dangerous, far more so than any of the many other wars the U.S. is waging around the world. Russia is not a poor, weak country like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Bahrain, Pakistan, and all the other victims of U.S. annihilations and civil war attacks by mercenaries and drones."I still doubt the US will send troops into Ukraine. The Europeans don't want that and will stop it even if US rulers wanted to do it.
"It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn — and that this is because of discrimination.But it gets women to vote Democrat.
It would certainly be discrimination if women were doing the same work as men, for the same number of hours, with the same amount of training and experience, as well as other things being the same. But study after study, over the past several decades, has shown repeatedly that those things are not the same."
"The Ohio Board of Regents reported that 28 percent of students at four-year colleges and 55 percent of students at community colleges enrolled in math or English refresher courses to bring their skills up to acceptable standards.So in 2001, government understood the problem and intended to fix it. In 2012, the DDN reported how well the government did.
In all, 36 percent of the freshmen in 2000 enrolled in remedial math or English classes.
“It's clear that we as a state need to better educate Ohioans,” said Chancellor Roderick Chu. “Parents need to demand a college-prep curriculum for their children.”"
"Ohio colleges and universities spent $146 million on remediation in 2010. That year, 41 percent of students who graduated from a public high school in Ohio and went to a public college in the state needed at least one remedial class, according to the Ohio Board of Regents.It got worse.
“We need to fix that. We want to make sure that that number goes down radically,” said Brett Visger, deputy chancellor at the Ohio Board of Regents. “People don’t go to college to enroll in remedial courses. Remediation is a speed bump.”"
"Research has shown that students who begin their college career in those preparatory classes are far less likely to ever graduate."Well, duh. College isn't for everybody. It's not for dumb people. This 2012 DDN article says the number was 42 percent. 2014 article claims the current number is 40 percent.
