The Futility of it All

How can we not be disgusted by these systems, totally out of control, as we watch the political class talk about "transformation" or so other meaningless gibberish.  Government employees holding us hostage to absurd federal rules about pay, transfers and moving expenses.

We know we needed get upset about this kind of absurdity because no matter the outrage, it will only get worse.

Despite all of the dark whispering the NRA and “dark money,” the right-wing bogeymen mostly are minor players. The two major teachers’ unions are between them the biggest political spender in Washington, with the NEA and the ATF spending a combined $50 million in the 2014 cycle. AFSCME, the government-employees’ union, spent $11 million that cycle, and was the twelfth-largest overall political spender. The NRA, which barely cracks the top-300 list, spent less than $1 million. Beyond spending on (overwhelmingly Democratic) political campaigns, government workers and their unions also show up to vote, to knock on doors, and to bully, harass, and threaten nonconformists. They are the backbone of the Democratic party — and they are thieving, lazy, grasping, thieving, dishonest, thieving, pervy, thieving, detestable, despicable, thieving, thieving thieves with a minor sideline in violence and intimidation.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430537/melissa-click-university-missouri-assault-tenure-veterans-affairs

"What A Muldoon"

In January, 2006 — when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.” Well, the ten years passed today, we’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430380/al-gore-doomsday-clock-expires-climate-change-fanatics-wrong-again

Trust? Or Subjugation?

But none of that will quickly repair the deep, pervasive damage to the public’s trust in government, say experts and others involved in the crisis.

“People have realized they’ve been lied to, and EPA knew about this, and the state knew about this,” said Virginia Tech engineering professor Marc Edwards, a national authority on municipal water quality whose tests exposed the extent of Flint’s lead contamination. “What you really have as it spun out of control is a total loss of trust in government, which failed [residents] miserably. They don’t believe a word that anyone tells them.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/flints-water-crisis-reveals-government-failures-at-every-level/2016/01/23/03705f0c-c11e-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html

The whole mess occurred because Flint decided against renewing its 30-year contract with the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) and switched instead to Karengondi Water Authority (KWA). KWA was planning to build its own hugely expensive pipeline, parallel to DWSD's, to harness water from Lake Huron and service the Genesee County area where Flint is located. This left the city in the lurch for a few years when its contract with DWSD ended but the new facility had not yet gone online, prompting it to reopen a local mothballed facility that relied on the toxic Flint River as its source (more on the rank stupidity of this decision later).

The rationale for the original decision to switch Flint's water providers was that, in the long run, KWA would generate substantial savings for the cash-strapped city. Not only was this false but Snyder had very good reasons at that time to believe that this was false.

The Flint Water Crisis Is the Result of a Stimulus Project Gone Wrong

WSJ: Climate Snow Job

"Surface temperatures are indeed increasing slightly: They’ve been going up, in fits and starts, for more than 150 years, or since a miserably cold and pestilential period known as the Little Ice Age. Before carbon dioxide from economic activity could have warmed us up, temperatures rose three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit between 1910 and World War II. They then cooled down a bit, only to warm again from the mid-1970s to the late ’90s, about the same amount as earlier in the century.

"Whether temperatures have warmed much since then depends on what you look at. "

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-snow-job-1453664732

Just keep changing the parameters until the stats say what you want them to say.  In other words, figure lie and liars figure.  Or, "liars, damned liars and statistics".

For Us, Truly Unbelievable

For those of us that did our jobs within the rules, it's truly galling to see the pigs that are a little more equal than others violating the laws they held us accountable to.  But of course, they are more equal than we are ...

"To work around the closed, classified systems, which are accessible only by secure desktop workstations whose hard drives must be removed and stored overnight in a safe, Clinton’s staff would have simply retyped classified information from the systems into the non-classified system or taken a screen shot of the classified document, Fournier said. “Either way, it’s totally illegal.”

"FBI agents are zeroing in on three of Clinton’s top department aides. Most of the Clinton emails deemed classified by intelligence agency reviewers were sent to her by her chief of staff Cheryl Mills or deputy chiefs Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan.

‘It takes a very conscious effort to move a classified email or cable from the classified systems over to the unsecured open system and then send it to Hillary Clinton’s personal email account.’

 - Raymond Fournier, veteran Diplomatic Security Service special agent

In one email, Clinton pressured Sullivan to declassify cabled remarks by a foreign leader.

“Just email it,” Clinton snapped, to which Sullivan replied: “Trust me, I share your exasperation. But until ops converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it.”

In another recently released email, Clinton instructed Sullivan to convert a classified document into an unclassified email attachment by scanning it into an unsecured computer and sending it to her without any classified markings. “Turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” she ordered."

http://nypost.com/2016/01/24/hillarys-team-copied-intel-off-top-secret-server-to-email/

The HC Alternative: Less Government, More Care

"While America’s health-care system has long needed reform, President Obamaunfortunately made many parts of it worse. His Affordable Care Act is based on more federal spending, regulation and coercion—and Americans are now experiencing the many unhappy consequences. 

These include millions forced out of their previous insurance plans and into new ones with higher costs and more-restricted access to physicians; premiums increasing by double digits, even for the lowest-price silver plans offered in states using the Healthcare.gov website; and insurance companies losing billions of dollars because many healthy, middle-class families want no part of ObamaCare. And those not-for-profit “co-ops” established by the law? More than half have failed."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/instead-of-obamacare-giving-health-care-power-to-the-people-1453502774

Outrage. Even Mine Is Waning

"And this comes as President Obama’s own former defense secretary, Robert Gates, admitted, “the odds are pretty high” that her home server was accessed by one or more hostile foreign governments.

"Governments like China or Iran — or Russia, notwithstanding the famous “reset” button Hillary gave to Vladimir Putin.

"Meanwhile, ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey writes in The Wall Street Journal that it’s now “nearly impossible to draw any conclusion other than that she knew enough to support a [criminal] conviction at the least for mishandling classified information.”

"But will she ever even be charged?"

http://nypost.com/2016/01/22/the-shoes-are-raining-down-in-hillarys-e-mail-mess/

They Are Plenty Smart at Being Politicians

Brilliant.

The whole article.

"Facing additional headwinds were the long-planned D.C. stores, and not just due to the regulatory hurdles and lobbying fees the company endured before being permitted to enter the market. Since then, a ballot measure seeks to boost the local minimum wage to $15 from $11.50, and the city has proposed legislation to mandate minimum hours for part-time workers and impose new family- and medical-leave requirements.

So Wal-Mart told city officials that the stores couldn’t be profitable and it was nixing them. 

To the politicians who serve as gatekeepers to opportunity, which first requires erecting obstacles to opportunity, the company has become unfit for citizenship in their republic of rent-seeking. “I’m blood mad,” Mayor Muriel E. Bowser told a news conference. “This is devastating and disrespectful to the residents of the East End of the District of Columbia,” former Mayor Vincent Gray told the Washington Post.

The proverbial Martian would wonder why politicians are surprised by a shortage of jobs for their constituents, when they continually promote policies that drive jobs away."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/bad-days-for-wal-mart-americans-1453247631

The Experiment of Federalism

Connecticut has the second-highest property tax in the nation, ranking 49th out of 50. The Tax Foundation ranks Connecticut 42nd out of 50 in terms of tax climate (Massachusetts ranks 24th), and second highest in terms of state and local income-tax collections per person.

Massachusetts? It dropped its corporate tax to 8 percent from 9.5 percent and has a flat income tax of 5.15 percent. Connecticut, on the other hand, jacked its corporate tax to 9 percent from 7.5 percent and its top income-tax rate to 6.99 percent from 5 percent.

These are sizeable differences in favor of Massachusetts. Taxes don't matter?

And the dirty little secret is that the pension and health-care benefits of the government unions -- which dominate Democratic state politics -- are roughly 50 percent unfunded. This spells many future tax hikes. GE's Immelt knows it.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/01/16/taxes_chased_ge_out_of_connecticut_129345.html

A great test case - burden the citizens with a union for government workers that extracts punitive benefits from the citizens they "serve", which forces tax increases, and then watch and see what happens.  Growth?  Innovation?  High paying jobs?  Figure the odds.

If You Want the Truth ...

...don't look to governments.

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/15/the-u-s-radically-changes-its-story-of-the-boats-in-iranian-waters-to-an-even-more-suspicious-version/

High Speed Rail to PC Crazy Town

It's in the NRO meaning it is likely to be factually accurate, but still, unbelievable.  Is this was the future of a de-masculinized, government dominated and speech limited society falls to - inability to establish basic standards of individual safety?  This is a third world problem in the "first world".

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429746/mass-sexual-assault-europe-us-still-denial