Blogline of the Day – It’s about Choice

With the Senate voting (barely) to advance debate on Obamacare: This isn’t about Americans “losing” health insurance. It’s about them making their own choices on insurance coverage once the individual mandate is gone. (H/T: Heritage) The Democrats took away the ability to choose for ourselves – they put the Federal Government in charge of making … Read more

Muslim anti-semitism on full display – in America. Really, the Religion of Peace?

Rather shocking to see and hear this.  The Muslim community, especially CAIR, is often warning us about “Islamophobia” and backlashes.  Well, a phobia is an unsubstantiated fear.  If I was Jewish, well, this is some substantiation for why that fear exists.  It is clear that some mosques are at the forefront of radicalization.  I’m not sure that this rises to the level of some but the elevator has certainly left the Lobby level.

Imam Ammar Shahin is the Iman at the Islamic Center of Davis (CA) and an Islamic instructor at University of California-Davis.  Just like in Europe, we are seeing a more hateful environment on US campuses towards those of the Jewish faith; I’m betting that this is one nail in that process.

 

“Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews. Oh Allah, destroy those who closed the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Oh Allah, show us the black day that you inflict upon them, and the wonders of your ability. Oh Allah, count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one. Do not spare any of them.

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Exeter Selectman Declare Support for Paris Climate Accord

With apologies to William Shakespeare and Macbeth, Exeter is but a walking shadow, a poor Climate player That struts and frets its hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Unless of course, Exeter is planning to build … Read more

Wasserman Schultz’s IT Aide Arrested by FBI Trying to Board Plane to Pakistan After $300K Wire

popcornIf you missed this from Monday, Pakistani-born Imran Awan, long-time right-hand IT aide to the former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman is being investigated by the FBI.

The Capitol Police are involved, there is a criminal investigation, and it looks like Imran, who had extensive access to a number of congressional networks, is in some serious trouble, a problem which THIS news from today can only make more interesting.

The top information technology aide to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., was arrested Monday attempting to board a flight to Pakistan after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to that country.

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About those millions “LOSING” their Obamacare insurance coverage

I’ve been listening to a lot of nonsense about the impact of the different GOP “replacement” plans for Obamacare and the numbers just didn’t make any sense. After all, none of them drastically did much on the core structure of Obamacare.  They deleted most (but not all of the taxes).  They started to tinker with Medicaid Expansion implementations (showing their backbones made of Silly String while yammering about it). The only part that made a whole lot of sense in pulling that initial string out of the tangled ball of yarn that is Obamacare (since none of them dared to add in the Freedom for us to be able to buy across State lines) was the elimination of the individual and employer mandates.  Yet, the CBO numbers made the GOP look bad.

And now we know why – Avik Roy clues us in.  Take a look at this chart and then peruse the snippets I copied over:

1-Impact of Individual Mandate Repeal

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Notable Quote – Frank Dowd

“The Obama agenda…attacked the notion of personal responsibility, killed on the altar of universal ‘rights’ and the politics of victimhood. The Left preached that everyone has a ‘right’ to free child care, free health care, a free college education and a roof over their head. And that the State will provide no matter what, so … Read more

If Republicans fail, will single payer be next?

As the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, continues to disintegrate, and Republicans endlessly fumble their plan to repeal and replace it, support is growing in this country for a single payer system. That concept, originated by Democrats and the left, has now begun to spread, possibly helped by the new entitlements Obamacare provided. The Pew Research Center recently reported that 33 percent of the public favors a single payer approach to health care. While that’s still a minority, it represents a five point increase since January and a 12 point increase since 2014.

Perhaps more significant is the number of Americans who now believe that, in principle, the federal government should be responsible for providing health care for all its citizens. According to the Center, that figure is 60 percent, the largest number in nearly a decade.

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Poor teary Boehner – he hates the new media

boehner_clownYet another failure by an old style politician to adapt to the speed of the Internet (emphasis mine, reformatted):

…Any interaction with a Democrat risks being covered by conservative outlets as a potential betrayal of the GOP, he said.  “Boehner blamed figures on the right who purchase lists of conservative activists and then position themselves as leaders of a movement. He said talks between party leaders can be ruined by ‘one person who creates a committee to preserve the Constitution’ and can ‘blast out information quickly. You used to have a little breathing room–24 hours, 48 hours before it actually got in the press. Well, that’s gone. Everything today is instant,’ he said.

…“Boehner pointed to the fragmentation of the national media as another reason for the paralysis and what he sees as alarming intensity and partisanship in politics. “’What’s making everything even worse today is because we have so much news, people get to choose where they get their news,” Boehner said. “It used to be we had three big TV networks, five big newspapers, and five big radio stations and whatever they said was the news. Everybody else followed what they do.’”

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90% of all Electric Vehicle Tax Credits In the US Go To The Top Income Quintile

Green CarIn July 2015 Severin Borenstein and Lucas Davis released a report titled, The Distributional Effects of U.S. Clean Energy Tax Credits. It sought to examine the distribution of government handouts (incentives) to invest in things the government insisted would be better for the environment. The government is incredibly bad at so many things but thinking it can change the weather is second only in stupidity to the foolishness of the rubes who believe that the weather or the planet has anything to do with these “policies.”

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Ha! Too good to check

Via RedState:

Bernie Sanders and his wife Jane when they are in Washington DC, live in this house on Capitol Hill, ok? Part of their vast real estate empire. They’re like wannabe Trumps with their real estate holdings.

The next-door neighbor…their neighbor on Capitol Hill called the Washington Post and told the Washington Post that they were cancelling their Washington Post subscription because their very expensive Sunday Post stopped showing up. Not there this week, last week, the week before, then it was there one week but the week before it wasn’t delivered, so I’m cancelling my subscription to the post because your delivery person never gets to me. I’m paying for it but it never gets to me.

The Washington Post said, “Please, do not cancel your subscription to the Washington Post. We will investigate with the delivery person and we will get back to you.”

So the Post investigated. They got back to the person cancelling their subscription to the Post and they said, “Listen, we talked to the delivery person. Our delivery person claims has seen you come out of your house again and again and grab the paper on Sunday mornings. Immediately as the paper delivery person delivers the paper, they’ve seen you come out of your house and pick up the newspaper. So, sir, you are lying to us.”

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Data Point – Concealed Carry Permits

Abstracted from Fox News: Concealed handgun permits surging, blacks, women lead growth

  • Concealed handgun permits in the United States soared by 1.83 million since last July,
  • New record for the fourth consecutive year
  • Concealed handgun permit holders in the country = 16.3 million
  • Largest rate of growth among women and African-Americans, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) said.
  • More than 6 percent of American adults hold CCW licenses
  • Outside the restrictive states of California and New York, that figure rises to about 8 percent.

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More and more, the GOP not acting up to its own PR is being noticed

Winning is only the precursor; what you do afterwards is most important

upside down GOP logoStephen Green (“the VodkaPundit”) makes a few observation about what the DC GOP has been doing that runs counter to what they SAY they stand for.  It’s the reason why I’ve been saying for years is don’t LISTEN to politicians. Instead, pay attention to what they DO. And in this case, especially what they DO as they OWN DC politics.  We gave them what they wanted – are they keeping their word in “being Republicans”?

I hate to ask, but how’s that GOP majority workin’ out for ya?

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“The Key Facts About Slavery That the Left Conveniently Ignores.”

“Everybody does it” is no excuse, but not everybody fights a horrible Civil War over it, then constitutionally elevates former slaves to full citizenship.”

SlaveryYes, were there slaves in the Colonies at the start of the Revolutionary War?  Were there slaves when the Constitution was written?  Of course there were and no conservative would argue the opposite (even as the Left now has migrated from calling everyone that disagrees with them from Birchers to TEA Partiers to extremists and now, to fit their latest narrative, White Supremacists).  But it seems that in reading about the college campus rampages and watching the “man in the street” interviews, it seems that our young’uns seem to think that ONLY the US had slavery in our history.  Why?

They aren’t taught actual history – the Leftist Academy conveniently leaves that out.  Makes it easier, I guess, to undermine the Founders with that “old white rich slave-owners” which, in turn, is meant to discredit the Constitution.  Which, in turn, makes it easier to “turn” a coupla few generations:

Slavery is by no means peculiar, odd, or unusual. It was common among ancient peoples such as the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Armenians, and many others.

Large numbers of Christians were enslaved during the Ottoman wars in Europe. White slaves were common in Europe from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages. It was only after A.D. 1600 that Europeans joined with Arabs and Africans and started the Atlantic slave trade.

As David P. Forsythe wrote in his book, “The Globalist,” “The fact remained that at the beginning of the 19th century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.”

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“The Annoying Party” – Nurse Ratchet instead of Nanny Mary Poppins

Nurse Ratchet
                          Nurse Ratchet

Yep.  The Democrat Party.  They are the ones with “the Political is Personal; the Personal is Political” and have turned it into the absolute weapon.  NOTHING in life can be made, seen, or discussed outside of their political realms – even eating a hamburger has life and death ramifications.  They haven’t figured out that sometimes eating a hamburger is just eating a hamburger with no other nuance that it tastes good.

Progressives have a problem: They ladle unto every decision, even the most mundane and trifling one, an unattractive glop of gooey political significance. They can’t resist warning the rest of us that we’re abetting the destruction of the planet every time we, say, tuck into a Quarter Pounder.

Josh Barro is a recovering ex-Republican who is now a member of a niche political group: the non-crazy Democrats. He coined a cute phrase — “the hamburger problem” — to describe the relentless politicization of everything by progressives and Democrats. He writes, “Democrats’ problem isn’t that they’re on the wrong side of policy issues [I vehemently disagree  -Skip]. It’s that they’re too ready to bother too many ordinary people about too many of their personal choices, all the way down to the hamburgers they eat.” He cites nonstop Democratic hectoring on, inter alia, the team name of the Washington Redskins, the way men sit on subway trains, and even some Americans’ choice not to abide by China’s one-child standard as the reasons why the party is today as electorally wobbly as Rocky Balboa in the 15th round. Yet the GOP’s success puzzles him still, because so many core Democratic cultural ideals (notably, gay marriage and marijuana decriminalization) poll more and more strongly.

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BlogQuestion of the Day – it was set up to do just that (what happened)?

Silent Cal is one of my favorite Presidents: Calvin Coolidge, pictured below with his ghostly Jedi halo, once said that one of his administration’s greatest accomplishments was that it minded its own business. The Tea Party’s goal, as Glenn has said, was a government that would leave us alone. In the days of Leviathan government, … Read more

Palate Cleanser: THAT is some scary driving!

“When a huge set wave nearly trapped the safety boat in the impact zone at Jeffreys Bay, they skillfully skirted disaster by ripping their way across the big green wall. #WSL #jbay” This boat just “drifted” across that wave face! (H/T: LIKECOOL)  

Notable Quote – Sarah Hoyt

“When a culture is invaded and occupied, the first thing the occupiers do is take over the education of children (sometimes by force), the means of disseminating news (there is a reason we joke about invaders taking radio and TV stations first), the cultural life of the country including entertainment. All of these mechanisms are … Read more

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