Income Tax When It Began...And Today, In 2015 Dollars

Courtesy of Against Crony Capitalism.Org

Obama Dept. Of Agriculture SWATS Up With Machine Guns And Body Armor

Under this president, over 70 federal bodies have put together heavily armed SWAT teams, complete with automatic weaponry, drones, MRAPS and other accouterments suited for waging what amounts to domestic warfare. It's already a matter of record that these agencies,including Fish and Game and the EPA have ordered billions of rounds of ammunition and the DHS has ordered training targets designed to 'overcome resistance' to shooting fellow civilian citizens.

The latest buy involves the Federal Department of Agriculture, who also now has their own SWAT team and as some of you know, recently ordered a bunch of submachine guns with 30-round magazines.

Their latest acquisition? Body armor to go along with their new firepower:

A May 7th solicitation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture seeks "the commercial acquisition of ballistic vests, compliant with NIJ 0101.06 for Level IIIA Ballistic Resistance of body armor."

According to the solicitation, "The U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Inspector General," seeks "Body Armor [that] is gender specific, lightweight, [having] trauma plate/pad (hard or soft), [and] concealable carrier." The order includes "tactical vest, undergarment (white), identification patches, accessories (6 pouches), body armor carry bag, and professional measurements."

"All responsible and/or interested sources may submit their company name, point of contact, and telephone number." The solicitation says those sources received in a "timely" manner "shall be considered by the agency for contact."

Now, ask yourself. Why on earth would the Department of Agriculture need a heavily armed SWAT team?

My guess would be that none of these governmental SWAT teams have anything to do with the actual purpose of their agencies, but are designed to operate as that domestic security force President Obama said way back when that he wants in place of our military, 'just as well trained, just as well funded':



The thought also comes to mind..is the Obama Administration planning on taking over agriculture, perhaps even instituting food rationing of some kind?

If a government controls food, medical care, transportation and communications, it controls the populace. Medical care is already under control, and the president already has the authority to shut down the internet whenever he wants. And transportation is the easiest to control of all.

The only thing left is food..that, and disarming the populace while putting a heavily armed domestic 'security force' on the streets to 'keep order'.

Far fetched? Unlikely? Perhaps. But definitely possible, especially considering what's going on in Washington these days.

Is Cliven Bundy A Racist? And If He Is, What Changes?

This comes from Pravda-on-the-Hudson, so it's highly suspicious. It's certainly not like they haven't lied for partisan purposes many times before. But they're claiming that their reporter overheard Bundy say the following (h/t Hot Air):

Cliven Bundy stood by the Virgin River up the road from the armed checkpoint at the driveway of his ranch, signing autographs and posing for pictures. For 55 minutes, Mr. Bundy held forth to a clutch of supporters about his views on the troubled state of America — the overreaching federal government, the harassment of Western ranchers, the societal upheaval caused by abortion, even musing about whether slavery was so bad.

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Hmmmm. If Cliven Bundy said this - and considering the source and the timing let's really emphasize that 'if' - he's going to forfeit a lot of sympathy from me and others. 'Family life' under slavery certainly existed, but whether it was in ancient Rome or 1840's Georgia, it was always subject to the owner's approval and changing financial circumstances at any given time.

That doesn't change the fact that contrary to what you're hearing,  he may in fact have had a legal case of sorts (look up 'prescriptive easement' and 'adverse possession', especially as they apply to Nevada law for details) nor does it change the fact that the Bureau of Land Management tried to seize land under false pretenses, participated in the illegal taking of private property without compensation by stealing Bundy's cattle and sent an armed SWAT team to lay siege to Bundy's home and  act like Nazi brown shirts in general.

This purported statement  does serve quite conveniently to distance Bundy from people that were supporting him politically. As such, the timing is pretty suspicious, but I will merely report this, wait to see what if anything Cliven Bundy has to say about it and let you draw your own conclusions.

A Few Words On The Nevada BLM Standoff

For now, it appears as if the Bundy family have won at least a temporary victory over the Bureau of Land Management and its SWAT team.

Yesterday, Clark County Sheriff Douglas C. Gillespie announced that the BLM would end their siege of the property of cattle rancher Cliven Bundy's home.

“We had a lot of fears. Individuals being shot, trampled. Individuals being run over on the highway. So it took a lot of resources, a lot of resources to associate with this,” Assistant Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said to KLAS-TV.He also stated that Bundy’s cattle would be allowed to graze on the disputed land that was the flashpoint of the entire episdode.

In addition, Bundy's cattle that were confiscated by the BLM will be returned to him..at least the ones that weren't shot and killed. The BLM refused to release the number of cattle killed, saying 'they have protocols. and the information isn't available.'

Here's what ostensibly sparked this incident. Cliven Bundy's Mormon family have been ranching in this remote area of Southern Nevada since the 1870's. And his cattle have always grazed on an adjoining area of county land, for which he paid grazing fees. In a surprise move without any notice or right of appeal by Bundy, that county land was 'reclassified' by the BLM as federal land. The excuse behind this was so transparent as to be ludicrous. The BLM claimed they were trying to protect the supposedly endangered desert tortoise..even though the tortoise population has exploded to the point where the BLM admittedly has killed over 1,000 of them.

When Bundy refused to move, we saw the spectacle of the BLM moving in with SWAT teams, beating and abusing members of the Bundy family, confiscating Bundy's cattle and putting the ranch under virtual siege.

The real reason the land was reclassified is something that has occurred throughout the west..well connected pols want the region's ranchers and farmers out of business so they can gift the land to someone else for their own personal financial benefit.

The head of the Federal Bureau of Land Management is none other than Neil Kornze, Democrat Senator Harry Reid's former Chief of Staff. It's no exaggeration to say that Kornze has the job as a 'Reid appointment.'

The land Bundy was using and paying grazing fees on was in the sights of Harry Reid and his son Rory because it stood in the way of a $5 billion solar plant being built in the county by a Chinese company Reid was connected to, with undoubtedly an undisclosed amount of under the table cash headed Reid's way if he could get the land re-classified and the project moving.

Bundy is the last one left it what was once an area filled with independent cattl4e ranches.According to a statement he made recently, there used to be 52 other ranchers in the vicinity of his property not too long ago - and they're all gone.

As my friend Sara Noble relates at the Independent Sentinel, selling oil and gas leases to foreign buyers while refusing to let American companies drill and explore is another favorite trick of politicians like Harry Reid and his ilk:

Natural News reported that the Bureau of Land Management is in the business of leasing government lands to energy companies. Significant exploratory drilling is being conducted in precisely the same area where the Bundy family has been running cattle since the 1870′s. The “Gold Butte” area can be clearly seen in the map of areas drilled (purple demarcations).

 

Oil has been found in nearby areas but oil and gas drilling have worked alongside ranching over the years without a problem. Of course, if the government can lease the land on which the cattle graze, it will be lucrative for them.

In July 2011, the federal government agreed to allow China to buy up 600,000 acres of gas & oil fields in Texas. This is the same administration that would not allow new drilling; kicked Shell out of Alaska after billions of dollars of investments; shut down most offshore drilling; and tried to shut down Texas oil fields on the remote possibility that it might harm a tiny useless lizard that was most often known for being road kill.

The acreage takes in the Gold Butte area where Bundy grazes his cattle.

Once that story broke, mainly on Drudge and new media, ( and I have to give the usually suspect InfoWars a hand here) the stench was so bad that the BLM removed documents from its website showing that the move to kick the Bundys and their cattle off of the land was because their presence 'impeded development of solar energy' on the land.

And it was then that the BLM backed off..at least for now. The next move will probably be lawfare by Eric Holder and the Obama Justice Department paid for by your tax dollars in an attempt to bankrupt Bundy.

This is the natural fallout from the abuse of eminent domain that started with Kelo v. City of New London, where 'conservative' Supreme Court Justice David Souter was the swing vote that allowed government to seize an individual's private property because they felt like they could make a use of it that would do more to fatten Big Government's coffers.

And Big Government's kleptomania applies, also, to all other resources. For instance, in California, there's a drought, mainly because a lot of the water that used to make the state's Central Valley one of the greatest farm areas on the planet has been locked away due to environmentalist lobby's concern about a fish called the delta smelt. The area is now filled with fields, orchards and farms that are now fallow because they're no longer viable without the water the taxpayers of California paid to harness, and a surprising amount of that once private land has now been 'reclassified' for projects like the bullet train to nowhere. or the ridiculous express train to Las Vegas, something Senator Reid also has his claws into.

In California, there's plenty of water for San Francisco, Silicone Valley, Los Angeles and other places where the coastal,Blue voting elites hang out and do business. It's the other parts of the state that are beinbg his with a 'water shortage.'

Fast Food CEO: Gov't Regulation Is Driving Us Abroad, Killing US Jobs

I found this interesting as a reflection of how business in general has been affected by Big Government. In response to increased government regulation, major fast food companies are expanding rapidly - overseas.

In China, customers don't order french fries—they're shu tiao. In Turkey, they're called patates and in Russia, you would ask for kartofel' Fri.

Andy Puzder, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Hardee's and Carl's Jr., should know. His company is expanding rapidly abroad due to higher potential outside the U.S., which is hampered by what he sees as too much government regulation.

"It's difficult to open in the U.S., but we love the U.S. and continue to fight the good fight to open restaurants and create jobs," Puzder said. "It's just that the government is making it hard for us to build those restaurants."

Over the last three years, Hardee's and Carl's Jr. opened more restaurants internationally than in their own backyards—a first, he added. CKE now operates restaurants in 30 foreign countries.{..}

"Under the current U.S. business climate, regulatory and tax restrictions tend to curb otherwise dynamic entrepreneurial energy," Puzder said. "We'd love to see more growth in domestic markets. Unfortunately, it's easier for our franchisees to open a restaurant in Siberia than in California."

So aside from bureaucratic red tape, large fees and massive building and environmental regulations, what is stopping companies like CKE from opening more of their restaurants in America?

Puzder names ethanol regulation, which has resulted in higher beef costs, a rising minimum wage and higher labor costs because of Obamacare.

CKE's solution is simply to open less restaurants in America, and to turn increasingly to automation to eliminate as many positions as possible, with things like tablet ordering..and eventually, robot preparation as those costs come down compared to live employees.

"I think it satisfies the needs of younger people. It also reduces your costs," [Puzder] said. "When they talk about raising the minimum wage or providing health care for employees over 30 hours, you're really encouraging automation."

I would imagine that other food companies are doing the same thing.And something else to consider..opening up a small hamburger joint or other fast food restaurant used to be a very basic form of entrepreneurship available to many Americans, as well as providing summer and entry level jobs for a lot of people. If large corporations like CKE aren't opening up these establishments here, it means that a lot of individuals without the resources of CKE won't even try to open their doors.

I'm a non-consumer of fast food, but this strikes me as just one more instance of Big Government killing American entrepreneurship by making it as difficult as possible for the average American to open a business of their own.

That is not a good trend.

Stone Soup: A Parable

 

Once upon a time, there were some travelers headed for a town some miles away. This being before the days of mass transit, they were going on foot, traveling as a group.

One chilly evening after the day's trek, they were all gathered around the fire and some of the group started talking about cooking a communal meal with everybody pitching in. They had just about decided on doing that when one of them, a middle aged woman with conspicuously high cheekbones spoke up and said, "Ah, if only I had a stone. this would be a perfect night for some delicious stone soup."

"Stone soup?" said one the group. "I've never heard of that. How can you make soup out of a stone?"

"Oh, trust me, it's absolutely delicious" she replied. "And just the thing for a chilly night like this. But I don't have a stone, so...."

Another member of the group piped up, asking, "What's in stone soup? What's it taste like?"

"Oh, it's hard to describe" the woman,whom we'll call High Cheekbones said with a wave of her arm. "I can't really tell you,but once you've had it, you'd love it! So delicious! But of course, without a stone, well, no sense even talking about it."

Another man chimed in, saying "Well, if all you need is a stone, I saw some nice ones back by that river we passed. I could go and get a stone for you."

"Oh, wonderful!" said High Cheekbones. "You do that and I'll make the soup. Best thing you ever tasted."

So the man dutifully got up from the fire and walked back towards the river to get the stone.

While he was gone, High Cheekbones continued to talk to the others abut the stone soup, how good it was and how they were all going to love it.

After about twenty minutes, the man, whose name was Hugo returned to the camp with a round stone about as big as a man's fist. "Will this do?" he asked High Cheekbones.

"Yes, that's fine", she replied. "Oh, but I'm going to need a pot. And some water."

Another man, Ernest, stood up and said, "I have a cauldron. If I go get you some water, can I have some of the soup?"

"Why certainly" said High Cheekbones.

"You know", said Hugo, "If you had mentioned we needed a pot and water, I could have gotten them while I was there, and we could start cooking the stone soup right now. This way, we have to wait for Ernest to come back from the river. And what if he spills some of the water? He'll have to go back again."

"Well", replied High Cheekbones, "That sort of thing happens with a big project like this. But instead of complaining, just think about how delicious the stone soup is going to be when it's done. You're going to absolutely love it!"

About twenty minutes later, Ernest returned with the cauldron and the water,  and Hugo, on High Cheekbone's orders, placed the stone in the bottom.

"What happens now?" said Hugo."Are you going to put it on the fire?"

"Oh,yes, that", sighed High Cheekbones. "I guess we're going to have to figure out some way to to hold the pot over the fire, aren't we? Any ideas?"

"Why of course", replied a third man, LeRoi. "What you need is a trestle made out of two sticks and a pole in between to hang the cauldron on. I would have volunteered to do that before, but no one asked me. Can I have some soup if I go ahead and put that up?"

"Why certainly", said High Cheekbones.

"That's going to mean another delay" said Hugo. "Couldn't you have thought of that before?"

"I can't imagine why you're so mean spirited" High Cheekbones snapped. "It's almost as if you're trying to hog more of the soup for yourself and deny others the opportunity to share in this great project!"

In due course the trestle was completed and the water and the stone placed over the fire.

Several of the other travelers had heard from High Cheekbones over and over again how wonderful the delicious stone soup was going to be, and boy, did they want some!

"Y'know, I was wondering", said one woman named Delores, "Can stone soup have onions  in it? I'm taking some onions to market to sell, and I'd happily contribute a couple of them if I could have some of that delicious stone soup..."

"Well, why not?" responded High Cheekbones. "I've made it that way before, and it's really good with onions.You have my permission to just go ahead and cut them up and put them in."

That started a whole stampede of offers. Another traveler contributed salt, pepper and spices, others offered potatoes, carrots, peas and parsnips, and one man even provided a chicken carcass.Still another, a crockery trader, offered the use of bowls and a large ladle. All were promised a share of the stone soup and all were convinced how absolutely marvelous it was going to be.

After awhile,the fragrant aroma of the soup filled the campsite. Finally, High Cheekbones produced a large tureen from her own belongings and filled it to the brim with the soup. Then she announced to the rest of the group that the soup was done. She then called each traveler by name and served them in turn.

As High Cheekbones doled out the soup to the others and they began to eat, they noticed two things. First of all, the soup, while it was certainly welcome was simply ordinary chicken vegetable, and not the delicacy they had been promised. And second, that they had each received a lot less soup than they expected, and certainly less than High Cheekbones.

The first to voice this discontent was, as you would imagine, Hugo.

"Wait just one minute", he cried. "This is ordinary chicken vegetable soup, and pretty average chicken vegetable at that.We could have made this ourselves, and we were just about to before you came along with this marvelous plan for stone soup. What going on here?"

"Yeah", added Mark, who had contributed the spices. "And I notice you got your soup first, and more than any of us. The amount of soup I got doesn't even cover the cost of the spices I put in!"

"I can't believe what I'm hearing from you two" retorted High Cheekbones. "I create a project that results in something that benefits all of us, and you do nothing but find fault. Okay,you have your spice business, good for you. But you didn't build that alone. The community pays taxes for the watchmen on the roads to make sure your shipments don't get robbed, they pay to maintain the roads, the ships that bring you your spices use wharves we all pay for...so why would you be so greedy as to not want to give a little something back?"

"But I pay those taxes too!" shouted Mark. "Isn't that enough giving back?"

Hugo said, angrily,"You know, I think this whole idea of stone soup was just a trick to get High Cheekbones a free meal. We were talking about making soup on our own anyway. We provided all the stuff to make it, we provided all the labor and if you think about it, we could have done this a lot quicker and more efficiently on our own. The only thing she really contributed was that nonsense to convince us all about how delicious stone soup was. And in the end, she helped herself first and took more than any of us!"

"Wait just a minute here!", High Cheekbones snapped back. "I represent the community, and I organized the stone soup project for everyone. It was my organizing ability and leadership that got everybody the soup and saw to it that it was, you know,spread around instead of being limited to just a few special people."

"Then how come you got yours before anyone else and took more than anyone else?" Mark asked with a puzzled look. "The way you organized things, the soup took longer to make, it cost us more and except for you, we ended up with less soup at the end of it. It still seems somehow like this was all about you getting a free meal".

High Cheekbones unsuccessfully tried to stifle a belch (she really had eaten a large amount of soup)and gave Mark a look of utter disdain for a long time.

Finally, she shook her head and said, "Don't you know anything about how government works?"

Government Shutdown And ObamaCare Roundup

It's the first official day of the government shutdown and of ObamaCare's rollout..here are some worthy reads on the matter:

The Other McCain: Fear And Loathing In Moocher Nation:"People who don’t currently have health insurance are likely to believe that ObamaCare will “help” them, if they think of it as a something-for-nothing giveaway — “Free Stuff!” — but as P.J. O’Rourke once observed about rent-control policies, the problem with something-for-nothing is that you quickly run out of something and end up with a whole lot of nothing. Demand for anything worth having will inevitably exceed the supply, and this is why we have prices. Attempts to evade the market mechanism of prices, whether through mandates or subsidies or some other government regulatory apparatus, tend to produce market distortions and shortages.

Federal and state governments have been interfering with the market mechanisms of the medical industry and health insurance for decades, and have “succeeded” in the way such interventions usually do, by making everything more complicated, and more expensive for everybody except for those who get health care “free.” Of course, someone must pay for “free” health care, and the transfer of this cost from the recipient of treatment to taxpayers has consequences.

If people need “free” health care because they are able-bodied but unemployed, wouldn’t we have more jobs and better jobs if the economy were prosperous and growing? And if we had lower taxes and fewer regulations, wouldn’t the economy be more healthy?

Furthermore, wouldn’t the economy be stronger overall — wouldn’t there be more demand for goods and services — if people had more incentive to work harder, work more efficiently and work longer hours, in order to make themselves so valuable as workers that employers would compete to hire them, offering health-insurance benefits as a bonus to secure their services? Yet if we establish a system where people receive health insurance whether they are working or unemployed, whether they are efficient and diligent or unproductive and slothful, haven’t we thereby removed a basic incentive to hard work? And, when you think about it, haven’t we removed an incentive to good health?

Have another donut, fatso! Don’t worry about the consequences, because the government will pick up the tab for your heart medicine, your diabetes treatments and therapy for your bad knees.

Also, they’ll pay for your Viagra, because fat guys need love, too."

PJ Media Despite Three-and-a-Half Years to Prep Obamacare, A Fiasco Takes Shape: "The facts, whatever the PR turns out to be, are that the administration and the press have failed Obamacare tests for three-and-a-half years. Admittedly, they have had assistance from the law’s opponents, who have inexplicably failed to highlight easily understood and financially crippling design flaws which — if conveyed to the public — would have caused the program’s meager popularity to crater.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has had since March 2010 to prepare for open enrollment’s October 2013 rollout. Besides churning out thousands of pages of regulations, what have she and her army been doing?

Someone performing as Sebelius has in the private sector would have been fired at least a year ago, when it become obvious that her implementation plan — having already missed critical deadlines almost two years ago – was still hopelessly behind."

Edward Isaac Dovere and Reid J. Epstein/Politico Government shutdown: President Obama holds the line: "President Barack Obama started September in an agonizing, extended display of how little sway he had in Congress. He ended the month with a display of resolve and strength that could redefine his presidency.

All it took was a government shutdown.

This was less a White House strategy than simply staying in the corner the House GOP had painted them into — to the White House’s surprise, Obama was forced to do what he so rarely has as president: he said no, and he didn’t stop saying no."

Nick Gillespie Welcome to the Age of Unlimited Government! :"It’s a telling coincidence that the latest scandalous revelation about the National Security Agency (NSA) is hitting the front pages just as the enrollment period specified by the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare) is getting started.

Each of these things underscores different but related aspects of the virtually unlimited state that has ruined the peaceful slumber of libertarian-minded Americans for decades. Whether we’re talking about surveilling citizens without any sort of serious legal oversight or forcing them to participate in economic activity in the name of health care über alles, the answer always seems to favor the growth and power of the state to control more and more aspects of our lives. Is it any wonder that a record-high percentage of Americans think the federal government is too powerful?"

Dana MilBank, WAPO In Congress, a not-so-brief case of delusion over government shutdown : "I almost shut down the government.

As I waited outside a meeting of the House Republican caucus in the Capitol basement Monday afternoon, I put down my briefcase next to a flowerpot and walked around the corner to catch lawmakers as they exited. Minutes later, an aide to Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) came bounding down the hall toward me, calling out, “Is that your bag?”

The Capitol police had identified it as a suspicious package and isolated it. Had I not claimed the briefcase, they may well have evacuated the Republicans from their strategy session — and I would have been responsible for them failing to come up with a final plan to avert the shutdown.

As it turns out, the Republicans didn’t need help from me to blow things up."

Michelle Malkin Obama Lied, My Health Plan Died : "Like an estimated 22 million other Americans, I am a self-employed small-business owner who buys health insurance for my family directly on the individual market. We have a high-deductible PPO plan that allows us to choose from a wide range of doctors.

Or rather, we had such a plan.

Last week, our family received notice from Anthem BlueCross BlueShield of Colorado that we can no longer keep the plan we like because of “changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA).” The letter informed us that “(t)o meet the requirements of the new laws, your current plan can no longer be continued beyond your 2014 renewal date.”

In short: Obama lied. My health plan died."

Sean Trende The Politics of the Government Shutdown : "With the government having lurched into its first shutdown since the 1990s, many commentators are focusing on the potential ill effects that it might have for Republicans. Almost all of these analyses use the shutdowns of 1995-1996 as their starting point. While I don't think this development will be great for Republicans, many of the concerns are likely overwrought. Here are four points to ponder:

1. While the GOP’s tactics are similar to those employed in the mid-’90s, the goals are different. The earlier budget debates were broad in nature and dealt with the scope of government. The 104th Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, believed that they were the culmination of the realignment supposedly begun by Ronald Reagan, that Bill Clinton’s election was a fluke caused by Ross Perot’s candidacy, and that they had been elected with a mandate to shrink the size and scope of government dramatically."

Jay Cost/Weekly Standard Roll It Back: "Obamacare remains decisively unpopular with the American people, and most Republicans are staunchly committed to its repeal. And why shouldn’t they be? The ideological core of the bill runs contrary to the vision of limited government, market-based solutions, and individual choice that has formed the foundation of the party’s economic program since the statism of the First New Deal. Moreover, the party’s purpose is to win elections, and Obamacare still looks like a winning issue for the GOP.

Against the airtight ideological and political arguments for Republican repeal efforts, Democrats and their liberal allies in the mainstream media have resorted to variations on a single theme: Opposition violates our sacrosanct political traditions. The Supreme Court upheld (most of) Obamacare; the president won reelection; ergo, continued efforts to undo the health law, especially those to defund it, are in grossly poor form. As Harry Reid so gracefully tweeted last week: “We will not bow to Tea Party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law.” According to Reid, the effort to defund this particular law is tantamount to opposition to the concept of law itself.

The position that leftists have adopted here is absurd, for two reasons. First, the notion that Obama’s reelection in 2012 was a plebiscite on the relative merits of Obamacare is wishful thinking. American elections are rarely, if ever, plebiscites. Politicians work to make elections about a whole host of things; more often than not, electoral campaigns scrupulously avoid the big issues of the day. It is much better, from the politicians’ perspective, to turn the election into a contest of personalities or valence issues, those on which the public concurs."

Guess What? The Obama Admin Has No Idea How Many Agencies They're Funding!

 

The Feds have just revealed a deep, dark secret...they have no idea how many agencies they're asking us to pay for!

There is - wait for it - no complete official government list of federal agencies and programs telling the federal government what your tax dollars are supporting.

Needless to say, there are laws that say the feds are supposed to compile this information. The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA) — which President Obama signed into law on January 4, 2011 — established required quarterly performance assessments of all government programs, and also mandated that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) create a website that was supposed to publish quarterly performance reports by the heads of each agency.

Not only does that website — Performance.gov. launched in 2011 — only a partial list of government programs,(even the FCC isn't on the list) but the quarterly performance reports for even the agencies listed are conspicuous by their absence.

This should give you a clue about how the vast bureaucracy mandated by ObamaCare is going to function.


There isn't even a uniform standard about how strategic and performance plans data is published, something GPRAMA also mandated. Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute was quoted by the Daily Caller as saying that not only isn't there a list of federal agencies that exists, but that there's no standard machine-readable federal government organization chart or report format.

According to Harper, Many reports are currently published in formats like PDF instead of XML or StratML, which make it more difficult for the data to be useful to a computer.

There was a bill to establish reporting these kind of reporting standards supported by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa that successfully made it through the House in 2012.. only to die in the Senate.

Ah Washington! It's fun spending other people's money!

ATF Creating 'Massive' Database of Personal Info: 'Assets, Relatives, Associates and More'

The same Federal Bureau that did such a sterling job providing Mexican drug cartels with illegally purchased firearms and shipping them across the border in the 'Fast and Furious' operation has a brand new project.

According to a notice posted by the agency on FedBizOpps.gov, entitled "Investigative System" they're seeking corporate contractors to help create what they describe as a 'massive' new data base system on private citizens they deem worthy of surveillance.

The new system is to be used by ATF staff "to provide rapid searches on various entities for example; names, telephone numbers, utility data and reverse phone look-ups, as a means to assist with investigations, and background research on people, assets and businesses."



The proposed system will utilize "a number of internal databases as well as external sources to provide timely and relevant information and intelligence products to law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels."

The system "provides a means to rapidly check records across the country" and is "necessary in assisting investigators, agents and analyst to find people, their assets, relatives, associates and more."

And it will allow ATF to "obtain exact matches from partial source data searches such as, incomplete social security numbers, address, VIN numbers, etc."

Keep in mind that the data entered into this database isn't necessarily on criminals, or even people suspected of a crime. And there are no court orders or warrants involved.

The database can cover a ton of private information for anyone the ATF - or the Obama Justice Department, who controls ATF - feels like putting into the system, for reasons they needn't disclose to anyone.

One of the applications is obvious, and the ATF being used as the Federal Agency involved is a clue. Universal background checks aren't legal under federal law yet, and neither is gun confiscation. The new system is an extra-legal tool that could facilitate both when the time is right, perhaps in response to a White House declared 'national emergency' that involves new, sweeping powers to the occupant of the Oval Office.

Sort of like what Hitler did with the Reichstag Fire.

The Obama DHS Stocks Up on 2,700 Mine Resistant Armored Vehicles

This is fairly interesting, especially in context with the $2 million in new 'no hesitation' targets the Department of Homeland Security purchased for their agents to practice shooting at and the huge 1.6 billion rounds of ammo the DHS has stockpiled.



We have never had domestic law enforcement beefed up like this before, with what amounts to APCs, almost light tanks. Sure seems like they're preparing for something, doesn't it?

I wonder if a 'reichstag fire' incident that would necessitate 'emergency powers' and martial law is coming our way?

Adolf Hitler - Progressive Pioneer

President Obama's second inaugural was a speech that the Obama Media literally drooled over as a straight forward and forceful expression of progressivism unmatched in American history. I agree, it was, but there was one thing that bothered me...the tendency of these media personalities to ignore the sources of many of the ideas the president expressed so well.

In the interest of fairness and as a debt to history, I think it's important that we take a minute to give due credit to one of the greatest progressives in history, someone who undoubtedly should be an inspiration and influence to all progressives - former German leader Adolf Hitler, who against strong odds rose to power and fundamentally changed Germany and for a while, the world.

Like our president, Adolf Hitler came from humble beginnings, the son of an Austrian civil servant in Linz whom died when he was fourteen. Some biographers have said that Alois Heidler provided the young Adolf with his first example of government in action and how it could affect people's lives. Young Hitler's early years also undoubtedly gave him a sense of the importance of education and how government could strengthen it. As a young student, Adolf Hitler was frequently at odds with his non-unionized teachers, who seemed content to teach by rote and lacked strong support from government.

When Adolf Hitler gravitated to Vienna as a young man to pursue a career as a painter, not only was he influenced by other progressive thinkers like Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke, but also by an extraordinary activist progressive politician, Karl Lueger, the Burgomaster (Mayor)of Vienna, whom Hitler later called 'a genius' and claimed as a model. Lueger, whose Christian Socialist Party was organized along many of the same lines that Hitler would later adopt for his National Socialist Party could best be described as a early practitioner of Saul Alinky's political ethics, balancing one special interest group against another for his own political advancement. At one point, when some of his anti-Semitic supporters questioned his taking campaign contributions from wealthy Jewish donors, Luegar famously shut them down by telling them that he was the one whom would decide who was a Jew! Lueger is also credited with municipalizing utilities and instituting public transportation in Vienna,along with a number of other shovel ready public works projects.

During this period,Hitler also experienced first hand what happens when government does not institute an adequate social safety net. After falling into dire poverty in Vienna, Hitler was forced to live in a homeless shelter for some time, and later a men's hostel for the disadvantaged. He remained a socialist and a champion of the 99% ever after, although rejecting pure Marxism as being unworkable and unsuitable to those who favored strong, nationalist views and German exceptionalism.

In WWI, Hitler served in the German Army, suffered combat wounds and was a decorated veteran.

He later decided to truly make a difference in his adopted homeland by entering the public sector via the National Socialist Democratic German Worker's Party (NSDAP in German, or Nazi using the typical German diminutive).

Hitler,being a spell binding orator and a charismatic speaker soon took over the party and refined its progressive agenda and message. With the exception of calling for a strong military and a renunciation of the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, two issues unique to that place and time, Hitler and the Nazi's message hardly sounds out of place in our political climate of today.

The German Hyperinflation and resulting economic crisis of 1921 occurred just as the Party and Adolf Hitler came of political age.




It destroyed the savings of Germany's middle class, created massive unemployment and was blamed by most Germans on the financial establishment, poor governmental fiscal management, profiteers, and speculators. Or as today's progressives call them, 'banksters', 'Wall Street' and the 'one per cent'.

In this 3 year period, 1921-1923, Hitler's political star rose as he became a vociferous champion of the middle class and Germany's 99%. He and the Nazis called for reining in German financial institutions, job creation, making the fat cats pay their fair share and for increased spending on social welfare programs. The main difference in Hitler's program as opposed to main stream socialists and communists was his championing of a resurgent German military and his  fierce opposition to the restrictions and the huge reparations demanded by the Versailles Treaty. Hitler's patriotic message, particularly coming from a decorated war hero resonated with a surprising amount of the German people.

The Nazi Party also won friends and influenced people by community organizing. They ran soup kitchens, promoted youth programs and championed the 99% in issues like landlord tenant relations, particularly in their main base of Munich.

And it was in Munich that Adolf Hitler made his first serious political miscalculation, misjudging his popular support in Bavaria with an attempted 'putsch',  a takeover. It failed, but Hitler's personal popularity ensured that he received an extraordinarily light sentence of 8 months in comfortable circumstances, where, like a lot of other revolutionary figures, he used the time to refine his message further and wrote his political testament, Mein Kampf ('My Struggle').

After he was released in 1924, Hitler used the rest of the 1920's to consolidate the Nazis and turn them into a nationwide movement. The SA (known colloquially as Brownshirts) were reorganized into an effective force of street activists, Hitler established his own national daily newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, and continued to build his following and spread his message of nationalism mixed with progressive social policies. The Nazi banner is a superb symbol of Hitler's ideology - the red banner of socialism with the Aryan nationalist symbol of the swastika in the middle.

 



Hitler was one of the first modern politicians to recognize how important media and messaging were to popularizing progressive policies:

"The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses." [...]

"This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood."

"Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side. (...) The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. (...) Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula."

What Adolf Hitler wrote about messaging in Mein Kampf predates and almost exactly mirrors what Sol Alinsky wrote many years later in Rules For Radicals, a book that many progressives consider their political bible, but with one exception...Hitler was much more open about referring to what he was doing as propaganda for political purposes.

In fact, Hitler could be said to be the originator of Alinsky's famous Rule 13: 'Pick the target, freeze the target, personalize it and polarize it.'

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi's moment came with the worldwide depression of the 1930's which devastated Germany's economy. The chancellor at that time, the Catholic Centre Party's Heinrich Brüning attempted to stave off some of the worst effects with various austerity measures, similar to those of President Hoover in America. However, the measures were unsuccessful and only added to dissatisfaction with the Weimar government, which many Germans felt had been forced on them by the victorious allies anyway.

The same sentiments ordinary Germans had voiced during the Hyperinflation were repeated..that the misery was due to the government's policies, the fat cats, the speculators. This was amplified by the failure of several large banks.

Such an environment was almost tailor made for Hitler, his Nazis, and their message, targeting the 99% and assuming the mantle of the champions of the middle class and social justice. In the 1931 elections, the Nazis gained 18.3% of the votes and became the second largest party in the Reichstag.

In the years between 1931 and 1933, The Nazis increased their share of the German electorate, getting to 43.9% of the vote. Germany's government was ineffectual and unable to act because of partisan politics and the difficulty in consensus between the Nazis, the Communists, The Catholic Centre Party, President Paul Hindenburg's German National People's Party (DNVP) and some of the other smaller parties. In those conditions, Hindenburg was convinced to appoint Hitler as Chancellor in 1933 as part of a coalition of the Nazis, DNVP, And Catholic Centre Party. The idea was to unify and take action for the good of the nation, or as a group of influential German politicians, industrialists and military figures wrote to President Hindenburg, to appoint Hitler as leader of a government "independent from parliamentary parties", which could turn into a movement that would "enrapture millions of people".

Hope and change with a gemütlichkeit flavor, nicht wahr?

After the burning of the Reichstag ( which, really, can be considered street theater and legitimate protest designed to provoke a public response) Adolf Hitler wasn't one to let a good crisis go to waste. He promptly brought the Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) to a vote in the newly elected Reichstag. It was designed to bypass partisan gridlock in Berlin, gave Hitler's cabinet full legislative powers for four years and allowed Hitler's cabinet to bypass Germany's constitution. After the Catholic Centre Party agreed to support it, it passed by a vote of 441–84.

Adolf Hitler was now in power to enact a number of important reforms and institute his progressive program without being impeded by a set-in-stone constitution or partisan bickering. He promised Germans a new society and his word for this was 'volksgemeinschaft', a 'people's community.'

He ended labor abuses and a number of strikes plaguing Germany by creating the German Labor Front as an umbrella organization to represent all workers, administrators, and company owners. He banned strikes, firings without government approval and lockouts. This ensured that government would be the ultimate protector of worker's rights and the arbitrator of all labor disputes, something American labor leaders like Richard Trumka and Jimmy Hoffa Jr. have been advocating for years.

Farmers received subsidies and guaranteed prices for their crops in exchange for increased government supervision over what they grew and how they did it, and were given loans for tools, livestock and seed, as well as  labor to work their farms by the state if needed.

While Hitler recognized the sanctity of private property, he also was emphatic that the government should have the power to regulate the use of private property for the good of the nation since it had been acquired with the help and use of public personnel and infrastructure, thus anticipating Elizabeth Warren by over seven decades.

At Hitler's direction his finance minister Hjalmar Schacht instituted Keynesnian policies with large deficits and and low interest rates combined with stimulus programs of pubic works to reduce unemployment. Hitler also mandated price freezes to prevent a recurrence of inflation. He started numerous public sector programs that actually got built, including the construction of dams, the autobahns, railroads, and public buildings as well as a military build up that later superseded the public works policies while maintaining high employment and job creation.

Hitler financed much of Germany's rearmament and rebuilding with promissory notes known as MEFO bills, which ensured that the 1% contributed their fair share of the cost. While Hitler's government like FDR's here in America ran a deficit, the MEFO bills allowed the German government to defer payment on goods and materials for needed projects while keeping Germans working and moving the economy forward. Another progressive idea was Hitler's creation of the "Reinhardt Program" for growth that combined indirect incentives like tax credits and reductions with government investments in infrastructure.

Hitler and the Nazis also were very involved in picking winners and losers among Germany's corporate and manufacturing concerns, swapping preferential treatment,government contracts and loans  and policies that benefited specific well connected and supportive companies in exchange for political and financial support for Hitler and his policies.In essence, Hitler made sectors of German business his partners in building the Third Reich while suppressing other, non-supportive players..certainly a tactic we've seen used recently with great success.

Another aid to the German economic recovery was the gradual removal of Jews and other political enemies from business, the arts. the professions and civil service, about which more later. German unemployment, which stood at six million in 1932 had been reduced to one million by 1936, the year the world saw a refurbished and invigorated Germany first hand as it hosted the Olympics.

Like his economic program, many of Hitler's social programs also struck a resounding progressive chord.

Hitler revamped Germany's healthcare system and made it truly universal as well as state subsidized.Hitler and the Nazis considered healthcare to be the right of all Germans, and there were numerous public-health campaigns in Nazi Germany urging healthy eating and exercise, and even no smoking campaigns at a time when cigarettes and cigars were being puffed with abandon worldwide. Water supplies were cleaned up, lead and mercury were removed from consumer products, and women were urged to undergo regular screenings for breast cancer.

Strict gun control? Ja, richtig!  Hitler enacted the Weapons Law in 1938 under the pretense of ending crime and unrest, effectively disarming almost all of Germany's private citizens from owning firearms except under strictly limited circumstances. As a matter if fact, the Nazi Weapons Law was so exciting to one of America's progressives that it became the template for the Gun Control Act of 1968, championed by Democrat Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut ( former Senator Chris Dodd's father). The late Senator Dodd, who served as a member of the Judge Advocate Corps was part of the prosecution team at Nuremberg and owned personal copies of this and other laws.Unfortunately for Dodd, Hitler's law got watered down quite a bit in congress, but once again, Hitler's gun control law anticipates today's progressives and remains an inspiration and something for them to shoot for, if you'll excuse the pun.

Hitler enacted strong environmentalist legislation, such as the 1935 "Reich Nature Protection Act" which sought to control air and water pollution, reduce the use of coal and promote forest management and preservation.While the necessities of WWII eventually overrode many of these laws, it's no exaggeration to refer to Adolf Hitler as a staunch environmentalist. And an outspoken champion of animal rights. As an animal lover and a  strict vegetarian whom PETA would have been proud of, Hitler saw to it that extensive animal rights laws were passed, and even made an effort to ban hunting.He was a pioneer in this regard also. Many of the current animal welfare laws in Germany are adapted from laws originally introduced by Hitler and the Nazis.

 

But where Adolf Hitler showed himself a true progressive in his interest in education and children. All teachers were required to join the German Teacher's League (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund) and were required to attend seminars and classes in teaching progressive values in the classroom.All German university professors were required to be members of the National Socialist Association of University Lecturers.

For Germany's children, Hitler formed two compulsory organizations, the Hitler Youth for ages 14-18 and the Jungvolk, for ages 10-14. They were trained in Hitler's progressive national Socialism, wore uniforms, performed public service, did physical fitness and were given meals and other benefits by the State. For girls, there were the League of German Maidens and the Young Girls League where girls along with similar activities to the boy's groups were taught homemaking skills. Both the German Maidens and the Hitler Youth had to complete a year of 'land service' working on Germany's farms or performing other public service.German women were encouraged to be mothers and homemakers, and had their own organizations, the National Socialist Women's League and the Strength Through Joy movement.

 


Hitler deviated from the progressive ideal in that he was not a feminist, although he employed women as secretaries and was universally remembered by all of them as an ideal, courteous and sympathetic employer.Nor did he favor abortion on demand. But you have to consider both the prevailing social climate and morals of that time and place,the fact that much of Germany was Catholic, and the fact that he knew Germany needed a larger population to fulfill his political and territorial ambitions. To Hitler, Germany's children were its future.




But in reality  Hitler actually did introduce  certain progressive policies in this regard as well.

The Nazis enthusiastically embraced eugenics  and had no qualms about abortion and sterilization for those they considered unfit, weak minded, or inferior. In this, they agreed with progressive heroine Margaret Sanger,  likewise a strong believer in eugenics who formed Planned Parenthood expressly with the idea of limiting non-white births and the reproduction of 'the unfit'.

The Nazis were also were quite open about the need to ration healthcare when it came to what they called 'useless mouths', This included the mentally ill, the disabled and handicapped, and in many cases people whom were simply terminally ill.Almost 300,000 people - that we know about - were killed by lethal injection in this way, not in concentration camps but in German medical facilities. Horrific as this may seem to some, this bears remembering when we look at the conversations about healthcare in our own time and examine the views of some of President Obama's healthcare appointees. Hitler may once again come to be proven to be a pioneer.

One of the major problems progressives have with embracing Hitler totally are his racial policies, particularly the ones directed at Jews. He also was anti-gay, although several prominent Nazis are rumored to have been gay or at least bi-sexual. Yes, these policies  were problematic, even horrible. But if we examine these policies in detail, we find them to be largely a product of the existing political and moral climate of that time. Certainly that shouldn't stop progressives from celebrating Hitler's achievements while disapproving of some of his excesses and mistakes.

Anti-semitism in Germany has a long history and was a mainstream attitude in Germany's social and  political culture, as it was in much of Europe and perhaps remains so even in our own time. When Germans talked about profiteers, speculators and the financiers they blamed for the Hyperinflation and the miseries of the Depression, not a few of them meant 'Jews', and certainly not just in Germany.
Some of the progressives here in America like Father Coughlin and his Silver Shirts, among others, certainly employed similar language and code words.

Our own times are certainly not divorced from this.As the idealistic protestors of the OWS movement and other parts of the progressive movement have shown us, many of them use terms like 'banksters', 'Wall Street', 'neocons', 'zionists' and the like  as code words for 'Jews' today, and mask actual anti-semitism under the cover of 'anti-Zionism'.

Obviously, these particular progressives in America have never gone quite as far as Hitler did when it came to Jews, but it's also true that they've never had the power to do so either, and that anti-semitism in America was never as much of a mainstream popular belief as it was in Europe.

But in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's, it definitely was.And Adolf Hitler,  as a populist progressive  gave voice to those feelings, just as he  also reflected the popular attitude in the Germany of his time towards homosexuals. If Hitler were alive here in America and say, running as a Democrat for the Senate in California or Massachusetts,  would  gay bashing even be one of his issues, at least on the surface? Would opposition to abortion? Of course not. Hitler was a pragmatic and canny politician. If anyone asked,or even pointed to something he'd written or said, he's simply say his views had evolved on the subject. And if he had, shall we say, certain views on Jews, he would undoubtedly be able to express them in vague terms about the need for a two state solution, a public embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood and its various front groups,  endorsing military aid to anti-semitic Arab regimes  or maybe even a few quips about the Jewish lobby or the need for daylight between America and Israel.There's no doubt in my mind that in many respects, a modern Adolf Hitler with evolved positions on abortion and gay rights  would be an acceptable candidate for office in our own era.I could certainly see the New York Times endorsing him!

Without the unfortunate history,  the errors and excesses that stigmatized him, today's progressives would feel much better about embracing a true pioneer of their movement - Adolf Hitler.

Fascism And Theft Surfaces In California

You may remember the Supreme Court's Kelo decision, which gave government a legal option to use eminent domain not for public use like building roads or schools, but to transfer property to other private ownership for things deemed more lucrative for the local tax base, like large commercial buildings, industrial sites or resort properties.

Well, California has gone Kelo one better. They want to use it as a legal basis not to seize property, but to seize the mortgages on them and take the loans away from the investors who legitimately own the notes:

Eminent domain allows a government to forcibly acquire property that is then reused in a way considered good for the public—new housing, roads, shopping centers and the like. Owners of the properties are entitled to compensation, which is usually determined by a court.

But instead of tearing down property, California’s San Bernardino County and two of its largest cities, Ontario and Fontana, want to put eminent domain to a highly unorthodox use to keep people in their homes.

The municipalities, about 45 minutes east of Los Angeles, would acquire underwater mortgages from investors and cut the loan principal to match the current property value. Then, they would resell the reduced mortgages to new investors. …

For a home with an existing $300,000 mortgage that now has a market value of $150,000, Mortgage Resolution Partners might argue the loan is worth only $120,000. If a judge agreed, the program’s private financiers would fund the city’s seizure of the loan, paying the current loan investors that reduced amount. Then, they could offer to help the homeowner refinance into a new $145,000 30-year mortgage backed by the Federal Housing Administration, which has a program allowing borrowers to have as little as 2.25% in equity. That would leave $25,000 in profit, minus the origination costs, to be divided between the city, Mortgage Resolution Partners and its investors.

To bring this down to a personal level, imagine you loaned someone $50 bucks, and he agreed to pay you back $12 a week for five weeks, a total of $60. Then a large thug armed with a revolver comes along and tells you he wants the loan papers or else, and all he's going to give you is $30 as payment in full. He then goes to his pal at the local pawnshop and has him write up a new loan for your friend at only $20 plus interest, to be paid not to you, but to the pawnshop. The thug and the pawnshop owner then split the profits. I doubt you'd put your hard earned money into a similar type of investment again.

Yes, this kind of criminal activity is just what the already unstable housing and mortgage market needs - a major disincentive for investors to go anywhere near mortgages for fear of getting robbed by politicians looking to bribe voters by appealing to 'the people'.

Not only that, but it will make it a lot tougher for future homeowners to buy a home. Because when risk increases, so does the rate of return. So this wonderful little tactic, if it spreads, will force lenders to raise bond yields to attract investors, if they can still be found, which will mean higher mortgage rates for borrowers.

Investors holding the current mortgages predict the move will backfire by driving up borrowing costs and further depress property values. "I don't see how you could find it anything other than appalling," said Scott Simon, a managing director at Pacific Investment Management Co., or Pimco, a unit of Allianz SE.

Tell me..is this any different that what goes on in your typical Junta-style dictatorship?

Yet Another Spending Hang Up - Free Phones Cost Taxpayers $2.1 Billion Per Year

A coupla billion here, a coupla billion there...soon you're talking about real money.

The Food stamps program has vastly expanded, from $35 billion in 2008 to $75 billion last year. One thing that's under the wire is that being on food stamps, Medicaid, Head Start or other public assistance makes you eligible for a free, taxpayer funded cell phone and free monthly minutes.

As this Breitbart piece reveals, the program is called Lifeline, it's growing by leaps and bounds and of course, fraud is rampant:

Lifeline was started in the mid-'80s to reduce the cost of phone service to rural and needy customers. The program's costs are covered by a tax included on every monthly phone bill called the Universal Service Charge. The program eventually grew to include discounted cell service but took off in 2009, partly because TracFone announced a new program whereby eligible individuals could get a free phone and free monthly minutes. As a result, participation in the program (and costs) skyrocketed:

Program participation was stable from 2005 to 2008, from 6.9 million to 7.1 million participants, but increased to 8.6 million in 2009. Likewise, support payments were relatively stable from 2005 to 2008, from $802 million to $823 million annually, before increasing to approximately $1 billion in 2009.

The rapid growth of the program has continued since then. In 2011, the FCC estimated the cost (page 153) of the program would be $2.1 billion and said it would reach $3.3 billion by 2014 absent major reforms. The FCC also found that part of the problem with the program was rampant fraud:

[O]ur ongoing oversight has revealed that a substantial number of subscribers are receiving duplicative Lifeline support, which includes individuals receiving two or more Lifeline benefits from ETCs as well as two or more individuals in a household receiving benefits from multiple ETCs.

Not only that, but as word gets around, even people who are paying for their cell phone service now will turn them in to take advantage of this new 'free' benefit.

The FCC recommended the creation of a national database to keep track of multiple users. That will be a non-starter in many Blue urban areas, which have iron-clad privacy rules designed to prevent various public assistance programs from cross checking their rolls - and of course, facilitates double and triple dipping by savvy 'customers'.

Not only that, but the feds have been discussing expanding the goodies by provided free broadband services with every phone. So taxpayers could soon be paying for internet features on recipient's 'free' phones if the feds have their way.

Originally, Lifeline service was designed for a limited use land line to allow elderly and needy customers to call for essential services like police, fire and ambulances. Now, it's morphed into something entirely different.

Nobody needs a cell phone. It's a luxury. The FCC already requires phone companies and cell carriers to transmit 911 calls for police, fire and emergencies free of charge,so this is not a question of depriving anyone of anything except the joy of yakking and surfing the net on someone else's dime. Not only that,but many cell phone carriers have cheap, limited use programs that can be afforded by even the average public assistance recipient.

This is an example of exactly the kind of ridiculous wasteful government program that needs to be eliminated as we return to fiscal sanity.

Bill Maher Shows 'Welfare Queen' Video HBO Refused To

Last week, HBO ran a controversial video showing white Mississippians who essentially fit the Leftist stereotype of 'toothless,racist rednecks' saying inflammatory things about President Obama. The video was made by Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's daughter.

She then made another video showing multiple welfare recipients in New York City proclaiming they were at the welfare office to get their "Obama bucks" and that they supported Obama because he "gives me stuff."

According to Ms. Pelosi, HBO balked at showing the second video. Nevertheless, to her credit and Bill Maher's, they pushed back and showed the video anyway, and Ms. Pelosi had a number of intelligent things to say about the entitlement culture that goes with it.

As expected, the majority of the recipients were black, and made the predictable remarks about it being reparations for slavery, and also as expected, Maher recognized that as 'more authentic' than the white Mississippian's 'chip on their shoulders' he put it. He obviously needs a few history lessons, but he's certainly entitled.

But again, they did show both videos. And the reaction of Maher's audience, largely Lefties was interesting, catcalls and laughter during the clips of the white Mississippians and dead silence after the welfare recipients video underlines what both Pelosi and Maher said.

We've gotten to the point where the extremes, manipulated by cynical politicians, are driving the narrative to the detriment of the majority.

It's a pity that neither Pelosi nor Maher were willing to look at a lot of the divisive and even racist rhetoric the Obama Administration and its surrogates are using as one of the prime culprits, but let's take the small victories where we can.

(h/t,Breitbart.com)

The Latest Proof Rick Santorum Is No Conservative

His latest crusade? In a statement on his website, he promises "vigorous enforcement" of laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.”

“The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.”

Regardless of how you feel about pornography, keep in mind that this is exactly how the Left behaves..stretching laws and engaging in selective prosecution in order to impose its morality on the general public.

What Santorum would have to do to put this into place is quite interesting.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the private possession of most kinds of porn is not illegal, there's no particular protection for distribution.

What a President Santorum would have to do, first of all, is shut down a $14 billion plus industry completely. To put this in perspective, that's bigger than the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball combined.

That would include blocking domestic websites, shutting down rental channels, studios and outlets that retail DVDs. Aside from the dislocation taking a $14 billion industry down and putting thousands of people out of work would cause in an already shaky economy, it's a fact that a number of very large corporations have a significant amount of money invested in these companies, and they're not going to let these valuable assets be destroyed without a long, bitter and expensive court fight.

And that also doesn't account for the fact that Rick Santorum's standards on what's obscene likely differ quite a bit from the mainstream. That's another recipe for court fights galore, especially when the selective prosecutions start.

To add to the irony, foreign websites and marketers would be unaffected...unless President Santorum either goes to congress to get legislation for blanket filters for foreign sites or simply decides to impose by executive order if the votes aren't there. Sounds like another president we're familiar with, doesn't it? And just where does the line get drawn according to Mr. Santorum? Just porn, is it going to include sex toys as well? Is he planning on reviving the sodomy laws too? In his statement Santorm pledges to appoint an Attorney General that would carry out his wishes to the letter.

Don't misunderstand me. I can empathize with the feelings people have about what talk show host Laura Ingraham calls 'the pornification of the culture'. But frankly if people wish to watch what I'll call mainstream porn (the naked bodies of consenting adults assuming various poses or engaging in various kinds of sexual activities) they have a perfect right to, and the cure someone like Rick Santorum proposes is far worse than the disease. People, at some point, need to take a certain responsibility for what they read, see, or allow into their homes.

This is simply Big Nanny Government from the Right side of the spectrum, and it tastes just as foul as it does coming from the other side.

I can only imagine what the Obama Campaign would do with this if Santorum actually got the nomination. If you absolutely hate Mitt Romney and are firmly in Santorum's camp for whatever reason, I'm sure nothing I say would convince you, but it would be an absolute disaster for him to be the GOP candidate.

If he's the nominee and runs against Obama, I'll vote for him, holding my nose while I do it. I'd vote for Daffy Duck instead of the current occupant of the White House. But mark my words....a Santorum - Obama match up is going to look a lot like the map after election day in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson ran against Barry Goldwater.

Big Government Run Amuck - Louisiana Bans Cash Sales On Used Items

This is such a comical example of the mindset of most of those who presume to govern us that it actually makes me giggle, even though the joke's actually on us.

The State Legislature of Louisiana in its wisdom just passed House Bill 195, which bans cash transaction for second hand or used items,unless the seller is a licensed pawnshop - they're exempted.

State representative Rickey Hardy ( a Democrat,of course), who co-authored the bill explained it this way, saying, "they give a check or a cashiers money order, or electronic one of those three mechanisms is used."




According to Hardy, the bill is targeted at thieves stealing anything from copper to televisions who then sell them for cash. Hardy thinks that somebody who just broke into a Garden District apartment in New Orleans and got away with an IMAC, some jewellery and maybe a TV set is going to ask the fence he deals with for a cashier's check or a money order, especially if he's going to rush from the fence to go hit up his connection for a fix or some crack.

"It's a mechanism to be used so the police department has something to go on and have a lead," explains Hardy.

Of course, if most of N'awlin's Finest ever did track down the kind of burglar I mentioned above and the stuff was in good condition, it would likely just end up in their homes. But then combatting crime isn't reallywhat this is about. I could be wrong,but I doubt even State Rep. Hardy is that stupid.

No, the idea of banning cash payments is designed to accomplish a number of other ends. When there's a money order, a credit card purchase or a cashier's check, there's a paper trail not to a criminal but to the seller involved. That means that sales tax has to be collected and remitted to the state, whether you're selling something out of a shop or at a garage sale (frequently known as tag sales in that locale) or gran'pa's old vintage radio or the gee-tar you stopped playing six months ago via a classified ad in the local paper or something like Craig's List. Th ebill evens targets non-profit sellers of used items like Goodwill. Not only is it designed to collect more tax but to collect additional fees for reseller permits and allow Big Government to add a whole new layer of regulations and regulators and additional law enforcement.

It also makes it easier for Big Government to add special new and improved taxes and fees on any particular items it thinks it can - used cars or firearms, for instance. Or to ban legal sales of them entirely. Read between the lines on that one.

Another benefit for fans of Big Government is that it creates an entirely new criminal class out of generally law abiding people, who usually have enough money and property to be capable of paying hefty fines if they're caught.

The ones targeted will of course be generally law abiding, because the criminals the bill is supposed aimed at aren't going to give a damn about breaking a new law. They and those they deal with will keep right on doing business as usual.

By the way, I wouldn't want anyone to go away thinking this was anything less than a bi-partisan effort. Not only did this bill pass with majorities from both parties, but it was signed into law by Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, someone some folks still cite as a 'conservative' icon.

Yes, there are Republicans who enable Big Government too...when it's doing something they like.

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