If you think the ACLU would have a conniption over that, imagine how they would have reacted had they been around for some of these other events in the video. The "separation of church and state" doesn’t mean what they, and liberal judges, think it means.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Last month, UPS executives proudly detailed the profitable quarter that drove the company cash trove above $4 billion. Wall Street’s response? “Show me the money.”
“You’re sitting on a lot of cash,” complained one analyst in a conference call last month with executives, joining a chorus of investors who wanted to know why UPS wasn’t paying them higher dividends or using the money to expand the company.
It’s a question that could be asked of a lot of companies these days.
Economic growth has been anemic overall, yet corporations that cut deeply during the Great Recession are seeing soaring profits. And they’re stuffing mountains of cash into their bank accounts.
But they are not hiring.
Company cash reserves topped $1.84 trillion in the first quarter, up $382 billion from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve.
The nation’s businesses are sitting on that cash for a variety reasons, including still-weak customer demand and an uncertain outlook for the global economy. After the recent painful downturn, businesses say they’re also worried about how taxes and regulatory policies could change under President Obama’s administration.
“A lot of companies had near-death experiences in the last year,” said Kurt Kuehn, chief financial officer at Sandy Springs-based UPS. “People are still feeling the shock.”
Most companies probably will remain jittery — and slow to spend or hire — for several more months until there’s a brighter forecast for the economic and business climate, he added.
Companies are looking for stability in the economy, so they can plan for it. But, as John Stossel explains, the government keeps throwing the economy out of kilter, not allowing businesses to be able to plan.
Why isn’t the economy recovering? After previous recessions, unemployment didn’t get stuck at close to 10 percent. If left alone, the economy can and does heal itself, as the mistakes of the previous inflationary boom are corrected.
The problem today is that the economy is not being left alone. Instead, it is haunted by uncertainty on a hundred fronts. When rules are unintelligible and unpredictable, when new workers are potential threats because of Labor Department regulations, businesses have little confidence to hire. President Obama’s vaunted legislative record not only left entrepreneurs with the burden of bigger government, it also makes it impossible for them to accurately estimate the new burden.
In at least three big areas — health insurance, financial regulation and taxes — no one can know what will happen.
And hence they’ll take a wait-and-see attitude. When the stock market is up and down all over the place, investors sit on their cash and wait for a definite bull, or even bear, market. The same goes for corporations. If there is no trend, they aren’t going to jump into the volatility. And the government is creating that volatility in the name of removing it. But the result is:
New intrusive rules for health insurance are yet to be written, and those rules will affect hiring, since most health insurance is provided by employers.
Thanks to the new 2,300 page Dodd-Frank finance regulatory act, The Wall Street Journal reports, there will be “no fewer than 243 new formal rule-makings by 11 different federal agencies.” These as-yet unknown rules will govern lending to business and other key financial activity.
The George W. Bush tax cuts might be allowed to expire. But maybe not. Social Security and Medicare are dangerously shaky. Will Congress raise the payroll tax? A “distinguished” deficit commission is meeting. What will it do? Recommend a value-added tax?
Who knows? But few employers will commit to a big investment with those clouds hanging over our heads.
Stop tinkering!
David Koyzis has been writing about oppression, here and here.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Declaration that the purpose of government is to preserve and protect Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. While it is pretty clear what Life meant, and that Happiness for Jefferson ran along Aristotelean lines, which is to say along the lines of something like eudemonia. But Liberty … now there is a tricky word. In colonial America, historian David Hackett Fischer in a book everyone should read (or at least have as a reference) Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History), identifies four folkways or distinct communities in colonial America. These folkways had very different about almost every aspect of life but in particular they all had distinct and non-overlapping ideas of what the word Liberty meant. Alas, while I say (and really think) this is a great reference book it turns out my copy is at work … and not here at home where I’m writing this so some of this is going to be from memory. Read the rest of this entry
Once again, government tinkering screws things up. It gave out and $8000 home buyer’s tax credit earlier this year, which boosted sales a bit, but now they’ve crashed to the worst low point since the National Association of Realtors started keeping stats in 1999.
Just like Cash for Clunkers, all we’ve done is shift future buying to the present, and then pay the price not very far down the road. Worse, I’m wondering how many of these sales were made by folks, spurred on by the additional money, bought more home than they could afford, which is what got us into this situation in the first place.
And what got folks back then buying too much home? Government tinkering. There’s a trend here.
Government doing what it does best. Finally, government cracking down on illegal operations.
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Going to university just isn’t what it used to be –
It might not be the best move to get that higher education within the halls of college.
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Rubber figures, handed out at a public school, and considered offensive. No, they weren’t anatomically correct blow-up sex toys… they were rubber fetuses. Evidently, a group of Christian high school students were handing out 2 inch rubber fetus dolls, in an effort to promote abstinence – until school officials stopped them.
Our society has very misplaced values. In an age where gratuitous violence, such as Pulp Fiction, is glorified, and the humanity of the fetus is censored. If one is offended by the sight of a rubber fetus, then there should be a traceable path back to the root of that offense. I would contend that a rubber fetus too readily expresses the inherent humanity of the fetus. Logic would dictate that such a connection be then applied to the practice of abortion.
But logic has never been a weapon of the pro-abort crowd.
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A novel approach to lawn mowing.
Well, besides the fact that I have two other interesting ideas in the hopper, this notion occurred to me and I thought I’d get it down before I forget.
This question is admittedly in the context of the BP/Gulf spill, but I want (on the outset) to make it clear that I am making no allegation here. I have no factual basis or even hearsay reports which would back up my question. But … the problem is, is that if my question has merit, there wouldn’t be would there?
Let me begin with a legal question about liability.
Say I’m doing a particular activity, and am following the legal restrictions and regulations regarding that practice. But, what I don’t realize is that by following the legal regulations disaster is inevitable. That is I’m in a catch-22 situation, if I fail to do as required I break the law, if I do follow the law then a disaster occurs. Suppose “not doing” this thing is not really feasible. As an aside, I might mention it is for this reason that I think that regulatory approval should indemnify a company which follows said regulations from liability.
But my question here doesn’t hinge on legal question but political ones. If the disaster that occurs turns out to loom large on the public stage then an investigation is undoubtedly going to follow. This investigation is going to closely tied with those same people and parts of the government which put the regulations in place which both led to the disaster and which were the responsibility of that same said part/party of the government.
So, here’s the question: How likely is the government culpability going to come out investigation? Will that side of it get a fair hearing? And furthermore, is it necessarily in the interest of the injured party to blame the government regulator when their livelihood depends on a working relationship with that same party?
Consider the BP/Gulf disaster directly here. BP and all the Gulf oil contractors and drillers are required to use government provided survey and risk models in their business. How and what manner of safety devices are regulated by law, you can’t use something different or better, e.g., you have to use the mandated “cutoff valves” as specified. So it seems a big culprit in this story will be, as in the Challenger disaster, a failure in government run QC/QA practices. At the same time, I’m guessing it’s not in BPs interest in the long run to fight to have the blame correctly assigned with the feds as they (and everyone in their industry) has to work with the feds to get anything done. So, the government (especially in our semi-continual election season) will not want to be blamed. BP will not fight getting blamed. So, even if BP/Deepwater ultimately is not the true culprit here, they will in fact be made the fall guys.
You know racism is seriously on the decline when the New York Times is left to complain about the insufficient diversity of third base coaches in baseball.
Highly-placed Muslims around the word are coming out against the mosque near Ground Zero. In fact, there is apparently a widespread belief among Muslims that opposing any mosque construction is a sin, so we’re probably not hearing as much opposition as it out there.
For the purposes of the November campaign, Democrats won’t be trying to sell ObamaCare as a cost savings. Rather, they’re going to try to sell it as an improvement to health care, never mind the cost. Oh, and that cost? Paid for by the wealthy, so don’t worry. Like they have an unlimited supply of cash to finance this administration’s unprecedented red-ink-o-rama. The link has loads of claims in a recent presentation and how they just don’t pass "Common Sense 101". One of the slides says that the Dems will work to improve the bill. For cryin’ out loud, it just passed! Why wasn’t it improved before passing it, if the improvements are so obvious?
New unemployment claims rose by 500,000…unexpectedly! We’ve tried it the Democrats way for over a year now, and the stimulus just ain’t stimulating anything. But their solution to failed plans is more of the same. Prepare for more unexpectedness in the months to come.
Chuck Asay says it best, in pictures. (Click for a larger version.)
Under the state-run health plan in Massachusetts, emergency room usage has gone up, the costs to the state and to patients has gone up, and many doctors are now refusing new patient that are only covered by the state plan. In addition, business is booming for brokers that help other firms dump their current plan for the state-run one. "Keep your current plan"? Not likely.
As Bruce McQuain of Q&O notes, this epic is coming to a government near you.
MassCare is almost identical to ObamaCare – many of the same people who authored it were instrumental in putting the federal monstrosity together. Reviewing the above 4 items, I’d say they’re 0 for 4 in their promises. The sad thing is we had this example at a state level there to study and as usual, the media wasn’t able to manage the comparison during the weeks of hype surrounding the bill before its passage.
This is you life on ObamaCare. More money, fewer choices, less care.
That’s what happens when the gullible buy into the “something for nothing” political promises of a pack of charlatans and snake oil salesmen.
None of this should be news, especially if the media had been doing its job, but Democrats will simply, once again, come up with excuses why it won’t happen this time, and, when it fails on cue to deliver the promises they made, will convince their blind followers that indeed what we wind up with is "better" than if they’d done nothing.
I’ve seen this movie before, and it always ends badly.
That’s what happens when I take a Friday vacation day.
Democrats are in a struggle with Republicans to see who can repeal portions of ObamaCare first. And now that Harry Reid has actually read the bill, he’s finally realized that this is going to hurt the hospitals in his state more than it’s going to help them. As much as Democrats complained about the delays in getting the thing passed, you’d think they’d have read it by the time it did.
Put Obama in the Oval Office, and he’ll repair our standing with the world…or so went the campaign thought. A poll of Arab public opinion, supposedly an area where Bush had destroyed our credibility, shows that little had changed. In fact, some indicators are even worse than under the eeevil Bush.
A very interesting article suggesting that Evangelical Churches are the new “Mainline” Christian churches, and that the traditionally “mainline” denominations, as they have become more liberal, shrink and thus have less influence on society (spiritually speaking). A very good interview of Rodney Stark, who’s been following this a long time.
I’ve been asked, regarding the Tea Partier’s wish to reduce government spending, why now? Why not during Bush or Clinton or even Reagan. I keep saying that the spending going on now is unprecedented, and Bruce McQuain explains some of the reasons and ramifications of this spend-fest.
How’s that stimulus stimulating the economy? Not so well, actually.
The “classy” Left, taking its usual name-calling tact against the Tea Party. And lest you dismiss this as some loner in a basement, it’s got huge funding partners.
And finally, a study in religious tolerance from Chuck Asay. (Click for a larger image.)
In 2005 I had a short series, “King for a Day”, in which I pompously pronounced what the Imperial Highness (which would be me (us?)) would do if I (we) had complete dictatorial powers and could set and establish law and policy in given venues. I invite (and had invited) commenters to either comment on my policy (or give me trackbacks or comments relating to what they would do in the same place. In the following with slight editing changes, I re-post that now.
The “public” educational system in this country is in disarray. Waste of resources combined with poor results demands some action. Acountability as proposed by Mr Bush & Mr Obama is/are a first step, but does not go far enough. Some of these ideas I’ve proposed before, but I’ll re-iterate here, now that We’ve been proclaimed King.
Read the rest of this entry
What will cost billions of dollars, make demands on you never made before, and look like this?
It’s your new health care system! (Click for a PDF suitable for zooming in on.) Don Sensing notes that this is just a third of the whole picture.
Feeling better yet?
Read more about this behemoth at his blog.
I’ve come out in favor of the Electoral College before (see here). Among other things, the EC ensures that Presidents get broad support as opposed to simply the most support, it gives minorities a bigger voice, and it makes vote fraud much more difficult. See here for an FEC paper on the origins of the EC, and it makes for very informative reading, especially on the reason that the Founders decided not to go with a direct popular vote for the President. (The paper was last updated in 1992, but the history is what’s important.)
In Wednesday’s "Best of the Web Today" column, James Taranto takes on the National Popular Vote Interstate Coalition. What they’re trying to do is get enough states, accounting for at least the 270 electoral votes needed to win, to agree to direct their electors to vote for whoever wins the national popular vote, regardless of how the vote in their particular state went.
Taranto notes that the states currently supporting it, or who’s legislatures have at least passed a bill on to their governor, all voted Democratic in at least the last 5 elections, usually by double-digit margins. Taranto surmises (though, not really having to make a big logical leap):
It’s no mystery why this idea appeals to Democrats. They are still bitter over the disputed 2000 presidential election, in which Al Gore "won" the popular vote but George W. Bush won the actual election. Changing the rules wouldn’t necessarily benefit Democrats, but you can see why trying to do so might make them feel good.
After all, it was after the 2000 election that the NPVIC got it’s start. Again, not much of a leap.
But there are problems with this, not even related to the question of popular vote vs electoral vote. While the measure would be indeed constitutional, Taranto contends it would be unenforceable.
Think about that old Philosophy 101 question: If God is omnipotent, can he make a rock so big that he can’t lift it? It seems like a puzzle, but the answer is clearly no. The premise that God is omnipotent leads to the conclusion that he can both make and lift a rock of any size. "A rock so big that he can’t lift it" is a logically incoherent construct, not a limitation on God’s power.
The NPVIC is based on the similarly illogical premise that lawmakers with plenary powers can enact a law so strong that they can’t repeal it. In truth, because a state legislature’s power in this matter is plenary, it would be an entirely legitimate exercise of its authority to drop out of the compact anytime before the deadline for selecting electors–be it July 21 of an election year or Nov. 9.
Call it the problem of faithless lawmakers–somewhat akin to the question of faithless electors. Legal scholars differ on whether state laws requiring electors to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged are constitutional. But because the power of legislatures to choose the method of selecting electors is plenary, there is no question that the Constitution would permit faithless lawmakers to exit the NPVIC.
If one or more states did so, and it affected the outcome of the election, the result would be a political crisis that would make 2000 look tame. Unlike in that case, the Supreme Court would be unable to review the matter because it would be an exercise in plenary lawmaking authority. Challenges in Congress to the electoral vote count would be almost inevitable. Whatever the outcome, it would result from an assertion of raw political power that the losing side would have good reason to see as illegitimate.
The problem here is that we’d be giving the election of our President over to what amounts to a gentleman’s agreement; an agreement that not even the Supreme Court would be able to work out, since they wouldn’t have jurisdiction.
I’m still entirely behind the Electoral College system, and please read the link for the details (and especially the FEC paper; history is important). But Taranto winds up with something to think about, should this gentleman’s agreement get put in place.
Since the NPVIC would be legally unenforceable, only political pressure could be brought to bear to ensure that state legislatures stand by their commitments to it. Would this be enough? Let’s put the question in starkly partisan terms: If you’re a Republican, do you trust Massachusetts lawmakers to keep their word, and to defy the will of the voters who elected them, if by doing so they would make Sarah Palin president?
Consider this.
Obama’s executive order forbidding the use of ObamaCare money for abortions has been rendered useless by … the Obama administration. Did anyone, other than hyper-partisan liberals, really believe him when he signed it? I certainly didn’t.
The Obama administration has officially approved the first instance of taxpayer funded abortions under the new national government-run health care program. This is the kind of abortion funding the pro-life movement warned about when Congress considered the bill.
The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new "high-risk" insurance program under a provision of the federal health care legislation enacted in March.
It has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of pro-abortion Governor Edward Rendell under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania.
Tabitha Hale writing at RedState explains that the so-called "high risk" qualifier is just another fig leaf.
The loophole comes in the wording:
The section on abortion (see page 14) asserts that “elective abortions are not covered,” though it does not define elective — which Johnson calls a “red herring.”
Therein lies the problem. Anything that is not hard worded is a gray area that will be manipulated by the most pro-abortion administration we’ve ever seen. What, then, determines an “elective” abortion? Is the mother who chooses to terminate her baby with Down’s Syndrome “electing” to have an abortion, or is she forced by circumstances?
The National Right to Life Committee has determined that the only abortion that will not be covered under the plan is gender selection. It’s dangerous territory, which is why there should be no Federal funding for abortions, period. Everyone has a different definition of what is “elective.” We know all too well what happens when Washington has room to maneuver within the wording of the law.
Bart Stupak caved, and I agree with Tabitha that the term "pro-life Democrat" is an oxymoron. The Democrats flat-out lied to get their agenda through, both (at least) in that this would be a a cost saver (whereas now they’re defending it in court as a tax increase) and what it would pay for. This is big government. It’s what it does. The more power you give it, the more it’ll lie to you (and bribe you) to get more.
We’ve not seen the end of the surprises.
Not that we really needed a commission to tell us this, but Obama apparently did.
The co-chairmen of President Obama’s debt and deficit commission offered an ominous assessment of the nation’s fiscal future here Sunday, calling current budgetary trends a cancer "that will destroy the country from within" unless checked by tough action in Washington.
The two leaders — former Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton — sought to build support for the work of the commission, whose recommendations due later this year are likely to spark a fierce debate in Congress.
They’re talking mostly about a future economic crisis, not even the current one.
Bowles said that unlike the current economic crisis, which was largely unforeseen before it hit in fall 2008, the coming fiscal calamity is staring the country in the face. "This one is as clear as a bell," he said. "This debt is like a cancer."
So where’s all the money going?
The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans — the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries," Simpson said.
Entitlement spending has become the federal government’s primary purpose these days, despite there not being anything in the Constitution specifying this role. And because people feel, indeed, entitled to it, cutting always has been and always will be, extremely difficult if not politically impossible.
And remember, this is before ObamaCare.
What’s their recommendation?
"We can’t grow our way out of this," Bowles said. "We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can’t tax our way out. . . . The reality is we’ve got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We’ve got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."
Bowles pointed to steps taken recently by the new coalition government in Britain, which also faces an acute budgetary problem, as a guide to what the commission might use in its recommendations. That would mean about three-quarters of the deficit reduction would be accomplished through spending cuts, and the remainder with additional revenue.
I remember what got George Bush (the first one) essentially fired from the Presidency. He promised, "Read my lips; no new taxes." He then proceeded to go along with Congressional Democrats who bargained with him to raise taxes with promises of spending cuts to come later. The taxes went up, but the spending cuts never happened. The public blamed Bush, but they were only half right.
Democrats now control Congress (for now). Do you really think they’ll go for such spending cuts? Their history over the decades suggests they’ll have nothing to do with them, and they’ll run us into the ground with debt.
If Republicans win big enough in November to change the balance of power, they had better start living up to their talk of fiscal conservatism. But if they do, will the entitled public go along with it?
They check immigration status at traffic stops. This can only be referring to those racists in … Rhode Island. Do you think we’re likely to see a lawsuit from the Justice Department there? Yea, me neither. In fact, it’s already been upheld by the First Circuit Court of Appeals when a private citizen sued. Yet the government is going after Arizona for this. Can’t have anything to do with who each state voted for in the last election, right?
“A federal district court judge in Boston today struck down the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union exclusively between a man and a woman.” I’ve read portions of the ruling, and I can actually see the judge’s point. However, I think the 10th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause is being misused a bit to now refer to things like health benefits, which doesn’t really strike me as “protection” from a government’s viewpoint. And Jack Balkin, a supporter of same-sex marriage incidentally, wonders (among other things) if liberals really want to go down this path with the 10th Amendment. “As much as liberals might applaud the result, they should be aware that the logic of his arguments, taken seriously, would undermine the constitutionality of wide swaths of federal regulatory programs and seriously constrict federal regulatory power.”
The “biggest revolution in the NHS [Britain’s National Health System] for 60 years” is … giving doctors responsibility for overseeing patient care! Yes folks, it took 60 years of socialized medicine for them to realize that. Do you want to lose those 60 years of common sense here?
Much of the media is saying that the report that was commissioned by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia to investigate the ClimateGate document dump exonerated the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Except there’s the issue of the biggest thing critics have been harping on; the “hide the decline” suggestion that inconvenient data has been reworked to be consistent with the conclusion already drawn. Buried in the report is this gem:
On the allegation that the references in a specific e-mail to a “trick” and to “hide the decline” in respect of a 1999 WMO report figure show evidence of intent to paint a misleading picture, we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the IPCC Third Assessment Report), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was Misleading.
Terry Miller explains:
The researchers were not trying to hide evidence of a decline in global temperatures over the last decade—we have plenty of actual thermometer readings to show temperatures in recent years. What they were trying to hide was the discrepancy between actual temperature readings and the temperatures suggested by tree ring data. They have relied on tree ring data to show that the earth was cooler in the past. If the tree ring data is not reliable (as the discrepancy in recent years would suggest), then maybe the earth was actually hotter in the past than these researchers would have us believe—and perhaps the hot temperatures of recent years do not represent unprecedented global warming but just natural variation in climate.
So the big issue that critics latched on to is, indeed, still a big issue.
