Friday, May 24, 2013
History Lessons For The Day!
How many wars - declared and undeclared - and military actions of various kinds has been officially sanctioned and fought since the end of the Revolutionary War? A lot! You may find this page in Wikipedia dealing with the U.S. military casualties of those actions more than interesting. Most of them you will have never heard of, but many of those early actions laid intellectual ground work for what happens today. Take some time and read the information about each conflict......Click Here.
Anti-Business and Anti-Freedom: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
In the American Spectator, CEI Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray and Geoffrey McLatchey explain why the Senate should be skeptical of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which fell six votes short of the 67 needed for ratification last December. As they note, “the treaty would enable an enormous increase in the potential power of UN bureaucrats over the American people and undermine national sovereignty.” Moreover, although “CRPD proponents argue that it merely reiterates existing U.S. disability law,” this is simply false, based on the treaty’s plain language.
It also delegates authority to a UN committee, they note, resulting in a “loss of U.S. sovereignty.” UN committees like to define free speech as discrimination against minority groups in violation of international treaties, making it dangerous to ratify such treaties. For example, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has ruled Germany violated international law by not prosecuting a former legislator for remarks to a scholarly journal about Turkish-immigrant welfare recipients that were deemed racially offensive. The UN committee ruled Germany’s failure to prosecute the speaker violated the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination…..To Read More….
NAPOLITANO: Tyranny just around the corner
The president’s men trash the Constitution to pursue antagonists
By Andrew P. Napolitano
A few weeks ago, President Obama advised graduates at Ohio State University that they need not listen to voices warning about tyranny around the corner, because we have self-government in America. He argued that self-government is in and of itself an adequate safeguard against tyranny, because voters can be counted upon to elect democrats (with a lowercase “d”), not tyrants. His argument defies logic and 20th-century history. It reveals an ignorance of the tyranny of the majority, which thinks it can write any law, regulate any behavior, alter any procedure and tax any event so long as it can get away with it.
History has shown that the majority will not permit any higher law, logic or value — such as fidelity to the natural law, a belief in the primacy of the individual or an acceptance of the supremacy of the Constitution — that prevents it from doing as it wishes….To Read More…..
The EU green hell
Limits to growth ideology a self-fulfilling prophecy
| 13/05/13
The European Union’s utopian scheme of transforming itself into a green energy powerhouse is faltering as its fantasy plan is colliding with reality. As the EU’s economic and financial crisis deepens and unemployment continues to rise, what used to be an almost all-embracing green consensus is beginning to disintegrate.
The spectre of green stagnation, the loss of competitiveness and economic decline has replaced 20 years of collective wishful thinking. The green folly was founded on two apocalyptic fears: firstly, that global warming was an urgent threat that needed to be prevented at all cost, and secondly, that the world was running out of fossil fuels, which meant that oil and gas would inexorably become ever more expensive. Both conjectures, however, turned out to be bogus.
The unpredicted arrest of the global warming trend since 1997 has made clear that the IPCC’s climate models had artificially inflated the immediacy of any climate risk, while the sudden arrival of enormous amounts of shale gas and oil terminated the peak oil hysteria….. Green prophecies of climate doom and salvationist central plans for the creation of millions of green jobs are no longer trusted. Instead of the blooming green economy promised by political leaders and activists, Europe is facing a competitiveness crisis and an economic nightmare with almost 27 million people out of work and many countries facing bankruptcy.......To Read More….
EU summit backs shale gas 'revolution'
By Benjamin Fox, 22.05.13
BRUSSELS - EU energy policy must shift towards diversifying supply, with natural shale gas likely to be part of the mix, EU leaders said at a summit in Brussels on Wednesday (22 May). UK Prime Minister David Cameron offered robust support for European exploitation of shale gas, telling journalists: "No regulation must get in the way." "Europe has 75 percent as much shale gas as the US, yet the Americans are drilling 10,000 wells per year while we in Europe are drilling less than 100," he noted. He added it is "no surprise that over the last decade Americans have increased their energy from shale from just 1 percent to 30 percent, and here in Europe we are now paying twice what the US pays for wholesale gas."…To Read More….
My Take - Ahhhh....I do hope everyone remembers when the Euro-elite smugly looked down their nose at the U.S. for not jumping on board with the Kyoto Accords. Wisdom is the application of knowledge and understanding, and now they have learned wisdom! And what was the beginning of this new found wisdom? The price of energy!
But.....those on my side of this issue knew this day was coming....and a little schadenfreude really is nice.
EU summit set to turn climate agenda upside down
Arthur Neslen Published 22 May 2013
Europe’s plan to decarbonise its economy by 2050 could be turned on its head at a summit today (22 May) if EU heads of state and government sign off on measures prioritising industrial competitiveness over climate change in draft conclusions seen by EurActiv. The draft text says that EU policy must ensure “competitive” energy prices, and declares it “crucial” that Europe diversify its energy supply and develop “indigenous energy resources” – a reference to renewable energies, but also coal, nuclear power and shale gas.
One high-profile German MEP Holger Krahmer (ALDE), hailed the end of “climate hysteria” in a jubilant press statement.
“For the first time, rising energy costs and the declining competitiveness of the European economy will be rated higher than obviously unenforceable global climate change ambitions,” he said.
“The economic and social consequences of collective hysteria can no longer be ignored, as the governments of the EU member states admit in this paper,” Krahmer added, saying that it was right to give more attention to energy sources such as gas and coal.
The draft summit conclusions also pledge to review the causes and nature of Europe’s energy price costs by the end of the year, and look more closely at industrial competitiveness. Luxembourg MEP Claude Turmes (Greens) branded the document “appalling” in its entirety and a “dramatic setback” for environmentalists….To Read More….
My Take - Appalling to the environmentalists? How bad can that be? Can't be all bad!
Morning Examiner: Obama has droned more Americans than Bush waterboarded terrorists
May 23, 2013
President Obama will announce a new phase in his administration’s counter-terrorism operations Thursday, one day after Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Congress admitting that Obama’s drone program has killed four Americans, three of them by accident. President Bush’s administration killed just one American by drone during his tenure and also water boarded three al Qaeda terrorists. At the National Defense University at Fort McNair, Obama will stress the transparent nature of his drone program, announce new limits to its targeting practices, and renew his efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison……To Read More…
Thursday, May 23, 2013
The Enviro-Fix Is In
Green groups and EPA get their way — and you pay.
By Jillian Kay Melchior May 23, 2013
Green groups are using the courts to co-opt the Environmental Protection Agency, and taxpayers are being forced to cover the activists’ legal fees.
Here’s how it works: Environmental groups craft lawsuits to force the EPA and other agencies to issue regulations. But because the EPA agrees with green groups’ radical environmental agenda, it often chooses not to defend itself, sometimes even providing environmental-advocacy organizations with information that will help them bring the case.
The EPA then settles, negotiating the terms with the environmental groups without including those pesky states or industries sure to be affected by the new regulations. The court approves the consent agreement without analysis, as if it were a simple agreement between private parties. ……the court orders the EPA to issue rules according to the terms of its agreement……“It’s huge because it allows the EPA to reprioritize agency actions without going through Congress,” says Bill Kovacs, senior vice president of environmental, technology, and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s an amazing process that allows the EPA to address the issues the environmental groups want addressed . . . while using congressional appropriations to achieve the goals of private parties.” Furthermore, Kovacs says, the EPA is “able to tell Congress, ‘The court made us do it.’”
And here’s the kicker: The environmental special-interest groups’ legal expenses are often covered by taxpayers.…..To Read More…
The Book of Progressive Chauvinism
There is a reason why snobby elites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan generously donate to leftist causes and support leftist politicians. Snobs and radicals often act in accord because they are not opposites, as some believe, but rather spiritual cousins – equally despising “the bourgeois,” sharing a low view of humanity as herd animals, and sorting people not on their individual merits but by color, income, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and any other characteristic except the content of their mind.
Elitists share the presumption that people of the world cannot think for themselves and have no room in their souls for individual ambitions and achievements outside of what the government is giving them. Short of stating it explicitly, elitism implies that “the masses” are mindless, spiritless creatures without free will, always in need of the largesse of the state, and for their own good the state ought to nationalize the country’s resources in order to feed its subjects.
While the road to tyranny is paved with elitist beliefs, it still takes a nation to take this road, and a self-appointed vanguard to convince, organize, and lead them…..To Read More….
Afghanistan Comes to London
May 23, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield
After telling the story of Mohammed’s boast that he would make the mountain come to him, only to be forced to go to it, Francis Bacon observed, “If the mountains will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the mountain.” Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen and countless others went to the Muslim world hoping to turn it into another Boston, another London and another Paris. Instead, Boston, London and Paris are turning into another Kabul, another Islamabad and another Mogadishu. Mohammed has come to the mountain. Five years ago, the sight of Muslim terrorists beheading British soldiers was a horror that could happen in Afghanistan or Iraq. Now it has happened in broad daylight in the capital of the United Kingdom…..To Read More....
'Multiculturalism' blamed for violent Muslim riots
STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Three nights of violent rioting by immigrant youth in the suburbs here have seen dozens of cars burned, multiple police officers injured, numerous windows shattered, schools set ablaze and more.
The riots began on Sunday in Husby, just outside of the capital, where about 80 percent of the population is either first or second generation immigrants. Most of them come from largely Muslim countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Somalia. Chaos quickly spread on Monday and Tuesday, with authorities reporting that at least six areas of Stockholm were affected by rioting and violence. A police station was also attacked. Roving youth gangs threw Molotov cocktails and rocks at first responders trying to rein in the disorder and clean up the mess. By early Wednesday, even more vehicles and buildings were burned out as first responders worked to put out the flames. It was the worst turmoil experienced by Sweden in years, with hundreds of youth participating in the riots. Police say at least 15 have been arrested so far…To Read More….
See what was really transpiring inside doomed compound
Is this why U.S. was attacked in Benghazi?
TEL AVIV – In a largely unnoticed speech to a think tank seven months before the Benghazi attack, a top State Department official described an unprecedented multi-million-dollar U.S. effort to secure anti-aircraft weapons in Libya after the fall of Muammar Gadhafi’s regime.
The official, Andrew J. Shapiro, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, explained how U.S. experts were fully coordinating the collection efforts with the Libyan opposition. He said the efforts were taking place in Benghazi, where a leading U.S. expert was deployed. Shapiro conceded that the Western-backed rebels did not want to give up the weapons, particularly Man-Portable-Air-Defense-Systems, or MANPADS, which were the focus of the weapons collection efforts. The information may shed light on why the U.S. special mission in Benghazi was attacked Sept. 11, 2012….To Read More….
We are the idiots for listening to eco-alarmism
Dr. Henry Miller, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Gregory Conko, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in their Forbes article "Rachel Carson's Deadly Fantasies" (9/5/2012), wrote that her 1962 book, "Silent Spring," led to a world ban on DDT use. The DDT ban was responsible for the loss of "tens of millions of human lives -- mostly children in poor, tropical countries -- have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors (birds). This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century." DDT presents no harm to humans and, when used properly, poses no environmental threat. In 1970, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences wrote: "To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. ... In a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that otherwise would have been inevitable." Prior to the DDT ban, malaria was on the verge of extinction in some countries....To Read More.....
Google Needs Extra Time to Spy on Your Kids
It seems that Google is constantly falling afoul of conservatives, consumers, pundits, regulators and really everyone else on earth (except for the Obama campaign) for its privacy-infringing tendencies. It got hammered for “alleged” spying in the Safarigate scandal, where it wound up agreeing to a record-breaking $22.5 million fine in connection with charges it surreptitiously tracked Apple Safari users who Google had said could opt out of tracking, and did what Google said was necessary to opt out. This spying of course enabled Google to grab data it shouldn’t have had, to improve its highly profitable targeted ad business, and do it in a way that amounted to a violation of its contract with users....To Read More....
Why Jindal is Right To Reject Medicaid Expansion
By Jeff Landry - jefflandry (Diary) |
Right now, the Louisiana Legislature is considering legislation to force Governor Jindal to accept the Medicaid expansion portion of Obamacare, and some Republican legislators are supporting it. While I may not agree with our governor 100 percent of the time, Gov. Jindal is 100 percent right in rejecting the expansion.Over time, the Medicaid expansion will impose a greater financial burden on Louisiana’s state government, leading to further budget shortfalls and jeopardizing funding to our educational system and vital infrastructure projects that create jobs. Additionally, those Louisiana citizens who are currently receiving services under Medicaid will find their services diminished...To Read More....
A Timeline of Islamic Expansion In The Dark Ages - By The Sword
Dan McLaughlin (Diary) |
Let me put down here some facts that are worth returning to from time to time, as arguments over the history of Islam and Islamism are back in the news with today’s beheading in London. In debates over the history of tension between Muslims and Christians, the Crusades are often cited, out of their historical context, as the original cause of such clashes, as if both sides were peaceably minding their own business before imperialist Westerners decided to go launch a religious war in Muslim lands.
This is not what actually happened, and indeed it is ahistorical to treat the fragmented feudal states of the West in the Eleventh Century as capable of any such thing as imperialism or colonialism (although, as Victor Davis Hanson has noted, even in the centuries after the fall of Rome, Western civilization retained a superior logistical ability to project force overseas due to the scientific, economic and military legacies of ancient Greece and Rome). Moreover, when Islam first arose, much of what we think of today as Islamic ‘territory’ in Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa was Christian until conquered by the heirs of Muhammad, such that speaking of one side’s incursions into the other’s territory requires you to ignore how that territory was seized in the first place. That entire region had been part of the Roman and later Byzantine empires, and was culturally part of the West until it was conquered by Muslim arms – Rome is closer geographically to Tripoli than to …..To Read More....
It’s the ‘Wacko Birds’ vs. the Wackos Again
Daniel Horowitz (Diary) |
If I were granted one wish about the state of today’s politics it would be for the Democrats to be saddled with their own version of John McCain. Once again, McCain is working to score points for Democrats and undermine Cruz/Paul and Lee – the “Wacko Birds” – in their attempt to prevent a free debt ceiling increase.
Back in January, Republicans and conservatives got together at Williamsburg and agreed to “suspend” the debt ceiling law until May 18 in return for the Senate passing a budget. I never liked the idea because, among other reasons, a Senate-passed budget is not such a good thing. Yes, they are not so excited about publicizing their blueprint for more debt, and yes, the fact that they didn’t pass a budget for over 3 years was a good talking point. But do we really want them to have a vehicle for fast-tracking tax increases, debt ceiling increases, and other nefarious policies through reconciliation?..... In comes John McCain….To Read More…
A Deadlier Disaster for the Third World: Unemployment
The recent collapse of a garment factory building in Bangladesh, resulting in the death, at latest count, of more than 1,100 workers who were employed there, has led to international outrage not only against the building’s owner but also against the various retailers in the United States and Europe, many of them prominent, that have sold clothing produced in that building. It is demanded that they assume responsibility for working conditions in the factories that supply them and not deal with factories that do not provide safe and humane conditions and pay fair wages.
Such demands rest on the belief that, if left free of government interference, the profit motive of businessmen or capitalists leads them to pay subsistence wages to workers compelled to work intolerable hours in sub-human conditions. And, more, that the profits wrung from the workers in this way exist in the hands of the capitalists as a kind of disposable slush fund as it were, at least some more or less substantial portion of which can be given back to the workers from whom they were taken, or used on behalf of those workers, with no negative effect except to deprive the capitalists of some of their ill-gotten gains. It is generally taken for granted that the reason the kind of conditions that prevail in Bangladesh and the rest of the Third World do not exist in the United States and Western Europe is the enactment of labor and social legislation, and that what is needed is to extend such legislation to the countries that do not yet have it…..To Read More…
Firing Government Employees Is Too Hard; the Constitution Intended for It to Be Easier
by Hans Bader on May 22, 2013 in Economy, Employment, Legal
The IRS has admitted to sitting on applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party groups for political reasons.
According to the government’s own investigation, applications containing terms such as Tea Party and Patriot were singled out for delays and holds even as groups with liberal-sounding names like “Bus for Progress” and “Progress Florida” sailed through the process.
President Obama said “the report’s findings are intolerable and inexcusable” and even fired the acting head of the Internal Revenue Service.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
By Alan Caruba
This appeared here. My thanks to Alan for allowing me to publish his work. RK
From its earliest days, even before the Revolution, Americans valued their newspapers and understood they played a crucial role in the issues and events of the times in which they lived. It would take a while, however, before newspapers evolved from highly partisan advocates of the early political factions to their role as watchdogs of government.
A literate population depended on them for news that revealed the increasing futility of dealing with a British monarchy and parliament that found new ways to tax the essentially independent colonies. Newspapers became the glue of the new nation, eagerly read in every state, providing news of Congress and the presidency.
By contrast, authoritarian governments understood the need to keep a tight control over the news and none more than the Third Reich of the Nazi Party and in the Soviet Union.
On May 21st, Kirsten Powers, writing in the Daily Beast.com, borrowed from words of pastor Martin Niemoller, a German who witnessed their rise to power and who framed the manner in which the Nazis targeted, jailed and killed all those they deemed enemies of the state.
His poem, “First they came” was echoed by Powers who wrote “First they came for Fox News, and they did not speak out—because they were not Fox News. Then they came for government whistleblowers, and they did not speak out—because they were not government whistleblowers. Then they came for the maker of a YouTube video, and—okay we know how this story ends. But how did we get here?” The “we” to whom she referred are the nation’s journalists.
“Turns out,” said Powers, “it’s a fairly swift sojourn from a president pushing to ‘delegitimize’ a news organization to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters.”
“Where were the media when all this began happening?" asked Powers. “With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers.”
This is what I and many other conservative observers and analysts of the President and his administration have been saying since 2009 and earlier. “These series of ‘warnings’ to the Fourth Estate,” said Powers, “were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.”
In his book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler demonstrated his contempt for the public. “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” Obama’s 2008 slogan was “hope and change.” He was vague about the change he had in mind, but we have been learning about it since his election.
Hitler and his minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, set up a department that dealt solely with newspapers. An instructive history of the press in the Third Reich can be found on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“When Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis controlled less than three percent of Germany’s 4,700 newspapers.” The elimination of the German multi-party political system ended hundreds of newspapers that would offer any opposition to the Nazi Party. What followed in the first weeks of 1933 was the systematic use of radio, press, and newsreels to stoke fears of a pending “Communist uprising.” This occurred in a pre-television and, of course, pre-Internet era, but it was effective when backed up by the thuggish behavior of Hitler’s paramilitary units that were used to “brutalize or arrest political opponents and incarcerate them in hastily established detention centers and concentration camps.”
Not unlike the popularity and influence of Fox News, the well-known Berlin daily, the Vossische Zeitung, was targeted, along with the Berlin Tageblatt. The former employed 10,000 people, but in 1933, its owners, the Ullstein family, were forced to resign and, a year later, sell the company assets. The latter newspaper was owned by the Mosse family that published a number of major liberal papers “much hated by the Nazis.” When Hitler took power, the family fled Germany.
This is not to suggest that Fox News or the Associated Press will suffer a similar fate, but it is no accident that their reporters are being intimidated by an administration that has seized telephone records as a message to their owners and editors to curb any criticism, any investigation of what they are doing.
Asserting that James Rosen, a Fox reporter, engaged in criminal behavior for doing what any reporter would do, seek out information about the government, has outraged many in the press, but whether they will stand firm or buckle under remains the real question. In Germany, the press became an arm of the Nazi regime.
If history is any guide, we have real cause to fear the intent of the Obama administration—one now distinguished by its leadership for having no memory of any steps they have undertaken to oppress organizations that oppose its agenda, mobilizing the IRS and Department of Justice.
We are looking into a tyrannical abyss and it is time to be afraid, be very afraid.
© Alan Caruba, 2013
Miller: Okay Fine, That Terrible ‘Planted Question’ Idea Was Mine
Guy Benson | May 21, 2013
One of the bizarre permutations of the ongoing IRS scandal is the manner in which the agency made the story public. As you'll recall, the revelation came in the form of IRS official Lois Lerner's response to a question asked at a public Q&A session with the American Bar Association. National Review's Kevin Williamson quickly surmised that the question itself may have been coordinated in advance to give the appearance of an "unplanned," and therefore forthright, public mea culpa. His suspicions were confirmed by acting IRS commissioner Stephen Miller during last week's House hearings. The source of the supposedly impromptu question has since copped to her role in the scheme as well. But what remained unresolved, though, was the issue of who dreamed up the secretive plan. Until today. Take it away, Stephen Miller:… |"I'll take responsibility for that...[it] was an incredibly bad idea." Yeah, it was. It was even a worse idea for Lerner to mislead the public about whether the question was planted (the questioner also initially denied any such arrangement). She was the one who planted it, apparently at Miller's behest. Lerner's lies continue to pile up, yet she somehow still has her job……Miller again insisted that the widespread targeting program was not the product of partisan bias (cough), but rather arose from a desire to be more "efficient." Allahpundit flayed this talking point yesterday:
If the IRS’s big problem circa 2010 was that it was overwhelmed with nonprofit applications (or so the agency falsely claims), why did that lead to unusually onerous demands for information? The typical government response to unmanageable workloads is to cut corners, yet the agency ended up asking Engelbrecht to send them copies of every Facebook post and Tweet that she ever sent, amid hundreds of other questions. That’s odd, no? You would think the big scandal to come out of a glut of tax-exempt petitions is that those petitions were being approved unusually quickly and with little scrutiny. Instead the opposite happened. Go figure.
Activism vs. The Rule of Law
Why is the Obama administration turning a blind eye to criminal activity? Simple: Politics.
In May of last year, the New York Times did something extraordinary: On the front page, the paper not only ran a photo of a Massachusetts woman in flagrante delicto committing multiple federal and state felonies and civil torts, but also identified her and the scene of the crime. You would think an ensuing investigation and prosecution would be a slam-dunk, but federal regulators and law enforcement officials have been nowhere to be found. The crimes? This woman and other activists were defacing food labels to "warn" consumers about alleged dangers of genetically modified foods.
This is far from a harmless prank. Federal law prohibits "The alteration, mutilation, destruction, obliteration, or removal of the whole or any part of the labeling of, or the doing of any other act with respect to, a food, drug, device, or cosmetic, if such act is done while such article is held for sale (whether or not the first sale) after shipment in interstate commerce and results in such article being adulterated or misbranded."
In plain English, homemade, ad hoc warning labels like those described in the Times' expose make the products "misbranded," and they can no longer be sold legally….To Read More….
Lois Lerner invokes Fifth Amendment in House hearing on IRS targeting
The head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, faced with allegations of improper targeting of conservative groups, told a House committee Wednesday that she has done nothing wrong but declined to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Lois G. Lerner told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in an opening statement that members of the panel have already accused her of providing false information to Congress.
“I have not done anything wrong,” she said. “I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations. And I have not provided false information to this or any other congressional committee.” But on the advice of counsel, she said, she would not answer questions or testify before the committee……Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the committee chairman, asked her to reconsider, to no avail, then dismissed her and her attorney from the hearing room. At that point, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) objected, saying Lerner waived her right to invoke the Fifth Amendment by making an opening statement. “She ought to stay here and answer our questions,” he declared.….To Read More……
IRS Calumny - "Infinity and Beyond!"
By Rich Kozlovich
The word calumny means: a misrepresentation intended to harm another's reputation, the act of uttering false charges or misrepresentations maliciously calculated to harm another's reputation - Synonyms and related words for calumny - aspersing, blackening, slander, character assassination, defamation, libel, maligning, smearing, vilification, aspersion, innuendo, much, mud, smear, backbiting, detraction, abuse, invective, vituperation, attack, censure, criticism, denunciation, hatchet job, contempt, distain, scorn, belittlement, denigration, disparagement, cattiness, despite, hatefulness, malevolence, malice, maliciousness, malignancy, malignity, meanness, nastiness, spite, spleen, venom, viciousness.
Today has been so full of articles over this scandal, and this is my busy season, so I can't take the time to reset them in the usual manner, but I didn't want anyone to miss them. I have tried to make sure there are no repeats, but if there are I apologize. Here is my list of links for today, starting with the Lois Lerner saga! Please enjoy....sort of!
The word calumny means: a misrepresentation intended to harm another's reputation, the act of uttering false charges or misrepresentations maliciously calculated to harm another's reputation - Synonyms and related words for calumny - aspersing, blackening, slander, character assassination, defamation, libel, maligning, smearing, vilification, aspersion, innuendo, much, mud, smear, backbiting, detraction, abuse, invective, vituperation, attack, censure, criticism, denunciation, hatchet job, contempt, distain, scorn, belittlement, denigration, disparagement, cattiness, despite, hatefulness, malevolence, malice, maliciousness, malignancy, malignity, meanness, nastiness, spite, spleen, venom, viciousness.
Today has been so full of articles over this scandal, and this is my busy season, so I can't take the time to reset them in the usual manner, but I didn't want anyone to miss them. I have tried to make sure there are no repeats, but if there are I apologize. Here is my list of links for today, starting with the Lois Lerner saga! Please enjoy....sort of!
Lois Lerner Says 'I Have Not Done Anything Wrong,' Then Takes the Fifth
Ten Thousand Commandments Released Today
by on May 21, 2013 in Regulation
Today marks the release of the twentieth anniversary edition of Ten Thousand Commandments, Wayne Crews’ annual overview of the regulatory state. Over at the Daily Caller, Wayne and I briefly summarize of few of the report’s findings. Here’s a taste:
Since the first edition of Ten Thousand Commandments was published in 1993, a touch less than 1.43 million Federal Register pages have been published. That’s an average of 71,470 pages per year. Considering that an average year has 250 workdays (the Federal Register is not published on weekends or holidays), that roughly averages out to 286 pages per day. It takes a very busy federal government to fill that many pages each and every workday.
We also ran a few numbers and found something very interesting:
A standard ream of 20-pound weight paper, standard for office use, is about two inches thick. From that, we can calculate that our 1.43 million-page stack would be 476 feet tall. It would also weigh more than seven tons. Fittingly, this regulatory tower would rival the Washington Monument’s 555 feet for supremacy of Washington’s skyline. In fact, if the tower were to keep growing at its 20-year average pace, it would surpass the Washington Monument in 2016.
Global Warming Policy Foundation Press Release 22/05/13
Global Warming Policy Foundation Invites Royal Society Fellows For Climate Change Discussion
London, 22 May: In response to a suggestion by Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, the Global Warming Policy Foundation has invited five climate scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society to discuss the current state of climate science and its wider implications.
In a letter to Lord Lawson, the GWPF chairman, Sir Paul stated that the Royal Society “would be happy to put the GWPF in touch with people who can offer the Foundation informed scientific advice.”
Sir Paul suggested that the GWPF should contact five of their Fellows: Sir Brian Hoskins; Prof John Mitchell; Prof Tim Palmer; Prof John Shepherd and Prof Eric Wolff.
The GWPF has now invited the five climate scientists to a meeting with a team of members of the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council and independent scientists and has proposed a two-part agenda:
1. The science of global warming, with special reference to (a) the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide and (b) the extent of natural variability;
2. The conduct and professional standards of those involved in the relevant scientific inquiry and official advisory process.
“I hope the Fellows of the Royal Society will be happy to meet with our team of scientists so that something positive can come out of Sir Paul’s recommendation,” said Dr Benny Peiser, the Director of the GWPF.
Additional Information:
see also: Global Warming Policy Foundation Accepts Royal Society Offer For Meeting
Contact:
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, The Global Warming Policy Foundation
1 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5DB
tel: 020 7930 6856
mob: 07553 361717
benny.peiser@thegwpf.org
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