Repealing Obamacare will increase the deficit by $109 billion over 10 years. That was a headline from a CBO report in May when Republicans voted on full repeal of Obamacare. Somehow, when it comes to ascertaining the costs of wrongheaded policy, CBO wants us to engage in willing suspension of disbelief. The most costly entitlement will actually reduce the deficit, they claim. In Washington, up | Read More »
In an afternoon press release, the Colorado Secretary of State has verified that the effort to recall Senate President John Morse (D-SD11) will proceed. Colorado Springs activists who were concerned with Morse’s leadership and votes in the 2013 session gathered over 16,000 signatures to initiate a recall, after a verification process conducted by the Secretary of State the total number of valid signatures was 10,137, | Read More »
Who knew that a beauty pageant could be brimming with so much socio-political insight? The Miss USA pageant on Sunday gave us not one, but two, remarkable observations on the state of the Union. First, here’s Miss Alabama, Mary Margaret McCord, offering her thoughts on the surveillance state: “I think the society that we live in today, it’s sad that if we go to the | Read More »
The real issue with the immigration debate is not a question of what to do with those illegals already here; it is a question of what to do with the next wave.,.and the next wave….and the next wave. While everyone is focused on the past – what to do with those already here – and the future – whether the promises of more enforcement will | Read More »
Well, this should be interesting: Alaska Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell (R) announced Tuesday that he will officially challenge Sen. Mark Begich (D) in 2014, transitioning from an exploratory committee to a full-fledged campaign. “This intense exploratory effort has convinced me that I have the support necessary to build a winning campaign,” Treadwell said on his Web site. “Today I’m taking the next step by announcing | Read More »
With friends like these… Life News confirms Georgia Right to Life is opposed to one of the most pro-life pieces of legislation to come out of Congress since the partial birth abortion ban. While the rest of the pro-life movement lobbies today for the ban on abortions from 20 weeks to the point of birth, one pro-life organization is apparently calling members of Congress to | Read More »
It is a funny thing about American foreign policy. The Democrats are the peacenik party until they have an opportunity to send American soldiers off to die for no reason other than to make them feel good about their higher morality. This scenario is playing out again in Washington as the Democrat foreign policy elites begin beating the drums for a US intervention in Syria. We need to oppose any intervention in Syria as the outcome would mean sacrificing national interests and our values for the sake of a feel good moment.
Read More »Amidst the buzzwords, bull-feke and innumerable” Powerpoint masterpiece” slides, you will find a kernel of indisputable truth in the Lean Six Sigma pile of pony poop. Take any process with random variation affix its mean result to an acceptable value and then limit variations to the point where they are miniscule. This will yield a consistent and reliable acceptable result that people can trust and store value in. It works best in the mechanized environment of the modern fabrication plant but it can be and has been applied to numerous environments across at least two centuries of history* with a reasonable likelihood of success. This was true because there was always an identifiable standard by which we could tell what right looked like.
If you are fortunate enough to have read The Metaphysical Club** by Louis Menand, then you are well aware of one man’s attempt to apply a primitive version of Lean Six Sigma to Jurisprudential Thought. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was heavily influenced by Charles Darwin’s Origin of The Species. In this book Darwin famously argues that natural variations occur in a random pattern from a pre-established mean and that the most suitable adaptations enable an organism to out-reproduce similar organisms with less effective mutations. Another influence on Holmes’ legal views was the outcome of an 1830 court case Harvard College vs Armory. This case was one of the first adjudicated through application of The Prudent Man Rule which roughly reads as stated below.
Read More »From the diaries by Neil…
Today, the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing (at 2:30 EDT) on President Obama’s nomination of venture capitalist Tom Wheeler as FCC Chairman (hashtag: #FCC). As we progress into an increasingly digital economy, the FCC will play a central role in determining the size and scope of government in our lives. Here are the top ten questions Senators should ask Wheeler:
Read More »Last week, Senator Mike Lee and Representative Justin Amash proposed legislation that would repeal the Export-Import Bank in its entirety. As Senator Lee stated, “The Ex-Im Bank has outlived its usefulness … It’s time to end the Bank’s market distortion and political cronyism.” This is a smart observation from the Utah Senator – one that many of his colleagues and predecessors have pointed out as | Read More »
On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Dr. Alieta Eck to discuss her run for US Senate in New Jersey, how her status as a physician can help her in the healthcare debate, and how she can win this short sprint to the ballot box.
Read More »As part of the GOP Pledge to America in 2010, they made the following observation regarding suspension votes during the Pelosi Congress (page 34): The number of House legislative days devoted to action on noncontroversial and often insignificant “suspension” bills is up significantly in this Congress by comparison with the past several Congresses, wasting time and taxpayer resources. Of the bills considered under the suspension | Read More »
House Republicans have the opportunity to save the lives of children and put the Democrats on defense all in one turn. They are set to consider legislation that would prohibit abortions in the United States after 20 weeks, which is the point a child in the womb can feel pain. In light of the Kermit Gosnell horror story, you would expect a majority of Americans | Read More »
War on women much? … many Americans face substantial increases in their health insurance premiums. Much of the debate has focused on young men, the “bros” who will bear the brunt of Obamacare’s rate hikes. But in California, women and men will see equally high jumps in the underlying cost of individual-market premiums. This is because the Golden State already bars insurers from charging different | Read More »
China is ‘demanding’ information about what the NSA is up to, wink wink. Because they’re totally, 100%, absolutely not in cahoots with Snowden or anything, of course not.
I hope these SWATters are found and get prison time.
Read More »I agree with Erick’s point this morning that Senator Marco Rubio does not deserve tar and feathers for something one of his aides said. The quote in question went as follows: “There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it… There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get | Read More »
Best known, of course, for his advocacy of (and eventual fall over) health care rationing, Sir* Donald Berwick has modestly decided to run for Governor of Massachusetts: “As a doctor, an educator, an innovator and someone who has dedicated his professional career to making things work better and to helping people – I am ready to lead,” the Newton Democrat said in a statement announcing | Read More »
We have written before about Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who seems determined to seize the mantle of Latin American Lefty Authoritarian of the Decade from Hugo Chavez’s dead body. However, lost in the news of recent weeks focused on various scandals and transgressions perpetrated by the executive branch of the US federal government under the control of President Obama, was some rather worrisome information showing | Read More »
OK, I don’t normally fisk, but I gotta do this one. From The New Republic’s rather alarmed profiling of Senator Rand Paul: In the Senate, Paul gained a reputation as an eccentric. Staffers often saw him wandering alone into the cafeteria, buying his own coffee, getting his own lunch—which, they noted, was not very senatorial. That’s a damning indictment of the Senate, frankly. Nor was | Read More »
On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss Japan’s Abenomics, the market volatility it has caused, and what lessons the Fed can learn from Japan’s roller-coaster ride.
Read More »Believe it or not, I agree with Marco Rubio on much of the immigration issue, but I think the actual legislation produced is a bad piece of legislation not worth supporting. I know many of you are deeply hostile towards him now and the quote that lingered much of yesterday from an aide was not helpful. As I noted in that post, I doubt, and | Read More »
Our cognitive block here is the assumption that all people are equal, which means “identical” in the common parlance, and thus that we can just replace a whole bunch of our people with others and everything will be fine. Even more, however, I think our people want to be replaced. They want to die. Just not now, but they want to know they destroyed this society. Because they hate it. They hate it for being weak, for being in a state of dying, for being a hateful place that sucks them in and makes them whores to money with no greater purpose.
America has a significant and over-arching problem. A problem that explains the flaccid economy and the dystopic dysfunction that is Bulletmore, Murderland or Chicago, ILLinois. It’s a problem that a very smart and evil man-spider named Charles Schumer has figured out and that a very ambitious and amoral man name Marco Rubio suffers from as he seeks to acquire more power and dominance. It’s a problem that arises when a civilization spends itself out and doesn’t understand and believe that it has a purpose beyond being a giant pez-dispenser of goodies to a clamoring populace. We are a nation that no longer believes that it holds any particular special moral high ground and the immigration debate in Congress is just another attempt to either fix this problem or make it go away.
Schumer, Rubio and the rest of the Gang of 8 seek to make the problem go away. If you have a population that you believe sucks and can’t cut it in the modern world, you can solve this problem two ways. You can upgrade this populace and seek to improve them as human beings, or you can hose them out the way Hercules cleaned the Augean Stables and replace them with harder workers. Senator Rubio explains below.
Read More »When it comes to the issue of immigration, the open borders “right” has adopted the parlance, tactics, and ad hominem attacks that traditionally emanate from the left. They impugn the motives of those who desire strong border security and orderly/gradual immigration as racist. However, in recent days, it is they who have been exposed as individuals who harbor deep-rooted prejudges…against native border Americans. It started | Read More »
Five years ago I put up a post at RedState asking if, after four years of knowing each other online, did anyone want to get together in Atlanta to meet face to face. I expected a few dozen to say yes. More than 400 did. Thus the RedState Gathering was born. Each year, the first weekend in August, we meet somewhere. Elected officials and candidates | Read More »
Executive summary: Heritage scholar Dr. Salim Furth was testifying to the Senate Budget Committees about European austerity programs, and how “to date, ‘austerity’ in Europe has consisted mainly of tax increases.” This apparently upset Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat from Rhode Island, and don’t worry if you don’t recognize the name: he’s usually a complete nonentity, frankly)… So when Whitehouse got his turn to ask the | Read More »
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