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Quote of the Day–Anonymous(10/25/2012)

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We had to have people from the DNR with our firefighters making sure they didn’t dig up some protected grass.  Not only that but other times we have been prevented in fighting fires because of things like frogs that were “protected.”

Anonymous – PHARC Ham Club Meeting

[We listened to one of the local deputy fire chiefs who also happens to be involved with ICS in Spokane.  He was discussing a wild land brush fire where they were prevented from properly fighting the fire because of the status of some grass and a frog in the area.  See they were protected and thus you couldn’t dare disturb them or do anything that might disturb them.  This included trying to head the fire off.  To which I replied:

“So it was better to just let them all burn to death instead of stopping the wild fire and possibly saving a bunch… Our government at work.”

Yeah, that’s about par for the course. –B]

But I thought It Had Popular Support!?

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Conversely, not even André Carson, holder of an hereditary sinecure in the Bluest district in Indiana south of the Chicago ‘burbs is coming out and saying "…and I voted for Obamacare!" in commercials otherwise gloatingly touting his Bolshevist voting record in Congress since he took the seat over from the embalmed corpse of his grandma.

Tam – “Instead of the cross,the Albatross / About my neck was hung”

[I find it interesting that Obamacare and many of the negative effects that are screaming up on us quite fast are being ignored and suppressed.  Last night I noticed something very interesting since I hadn’t bothered to connect the dots between this and this.  To save you some reading one links to the fact that taxes will be increasing for 51% of the population come January.  The other links to the fact that people working 40 hour weeks without healthcare will probably all the sudden be working 29 hour weeks.

Think about that, tax burden is increasing, by government regulation, and hours are going to end up being cut because of government regulation.  It’s the low income worker who is really getting the short straw here and it’s not businesses doing the screwing, it’s the government.  Their main lever to do it, Obamacare.  The sad thing is I don’t ever see them actually killing it. –B ]

TSA Tab Clearing

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There’s been a bunch of incidents in the news lately and many of them worthy of serious note.  My being busy with other more pressing items, my photo gallery needs to get moved post haste, I haven’t had the time to write up everything I would.

So I want to at least clear out a few browser tabs since these are becoming “old news”.

Capping a year-long investigation prompted by reports of theft in a baggage room at Newark Liberty International Airport, the Transportation Security Administration said it it was moving to fire 25 employees and suspend 19 others for failing to ensure that checked bags were being screened adequately.

So they’re not adequately searching bags but I’m sure that agent made sure to feel up Tiffany’s boobs, in a random pat down I’m sure.

One airport TSA worker learned the hard way this week that if you see something, you should probably say something — instead of stealing it.

Andy Ramirez was the only officer caught in a national sting operation aimed at gauging how bad TSA theft actually is in light of recent data showing that 381 officers were fired for theft between 2003 and 2012.

I am surprised that the laptops didn’t go 10 for 10 on being stolen.  However this is worthy of note:

Pythias Brown, a former TSA employee at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, who spoke to ABC News recently in his first public comments after being released from prison, said he was part of a “culture” of apathy within the agency that permitted corrupt employees – and there are a lot of them, apparently – to prey on passengers’ luggage and personal items with abandon, thanks in large part to nonexistent oversight and tips from fellow TSA workers.

“It was very commonplace, very,” said Brown, who admitted lifting in excess of $800,000 worth of items from luggage and security checkpoints over a four-year span. “It was very convenient to steal.”

Imagine that, a culture of stealing.  What that test did show is many are wary of “easy prey”.  When something seems way to easy, odds are it’s a trap.  One agent failed that test.

Lastly we have an incident out of my backyard:

The TSA is denying any wrongdoing involving the recent pat down of leukemia patientMichelle Dunaj. Dunaj says the screeners at Sea-Tac Airport made her lift up her shirt to check under bandages after refusing to give her a private search.

She also claims a TSA agent forced open one of her saline bags, contaminating the important fluid she relies on to survive. Agents also made her lift up her shirt and pull back bandages holding in feeding tubes.

Given their treatment of someone with an insulin pump, do we want to guess who’s story is worth believing and who’s probably telling the fib?

The TSA is merely a job program for idiots and the lazy so the training is remedial at best so most don’t even know the actual policies.  Show up with a copy of the policies in hand and they don’t care.  How bad can it be?  A GBR one of the attendees relayed a story about a TSA agent insisting that he hand over the key to his firearm case and allow him to inspect it without the owner being present.  That’s right, the agent wanted the owner to hand over the key that is NOT supposed to leave his possession  because that case is NOT to be opened without him being present.  Ultimately for fear of not being allowed on the plane he handed over the key.  See how this works, policies don’t matter at the national level, each local can do as the please because they put the passenger between a rock and hard place.

This is what happens when you give someone with less intelligence than a monkey the power to tell others what to do.

SSCC #438 – EPA

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been sued in federal court for allegedly conducting illegal experiments on human beings. The case tests whether a government agency can violate the law and the most sacrosanct ethics of scientific research — and get away scot-free.

Based on thousands of pages of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, since 2004 and continuing through theObama administration, the EPA intentionally has been exposing dozens, if not hundreds, of human subjects to extraordinarily high levels of air pollutants such as diesel exhaust and fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5. The experiments occurred at an EPA facility located on the campus of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

Know what sucks, I can think of a perfect moment in history to compare this to but I can’t without invoking Godwin’s law.  Ain’t that a !@#$.

If you’re not sure exactly why and don’t want to read the whole article, let me provide you with one more paragraph.

Many of the study subjects were health-impaired — suffering from asthma, metabolic syndrome, old age (up to 75 years) or, worse, combinations of those factors. They were all financially needy, since they enrolled in the experiments for compensation of $12 per hour.

Sounds an awful like a serious war on poverty and “undesirables”.

State Sponsored Criminal #438: The EPA

Because when you’re a giant government bureaucratic nightmare  when you break the law and kill people, who are they going to be able to hold accountable?

h/t Ry

Adventures in Venture Capitalism

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It’s been known for a while that green-energy is suspect and has serious issues.  Yet our fearless leader has shoved more money at failed projects that most could comprehend.  If this man ran a venture capitalist firm his clients would have left long ago because he was driving them to be broke.

What exactly am I talking about, well here’s a list of companies that have failed that received funding from Obama.

  1. Evergreen Solar ($24 million)*
  2. SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
  3. Solyndra ($535 million)*
  4. Beacon Power ($69 million)*
  5. AES’s subsidiary Eastern Energy ($17.1 million)
  6. Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
  7. SunPower ($1.5 billion)
  8. First Solar ($1.46 billion)
  9. Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
  10. EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
  11. Amonix ($5.9 million)
  12. National Renewable Energy Lab ($200 million)
  13. Fisker Automotive ($528 million)
  14. Abound Solar ($374 million)*
  15. A123 Systems ($279 million)*
  16. Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($6 million)
  17. Johnson Controls ($299 million)
  18. Schneider Electric ($86 million)
  19. Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
  20. ECOtality ($126.2 million)
  21. Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
  22. Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
  23. Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
  24. Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
  25. Range Fuels ($80 million)*
  26. Thompson River Power ($6.4 million)*
  27. Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
  28. LSP Energy ($2.1 billion)*
  29. UniSolar ($100 million)*
  30. Azure Dynamics ($120 million)*
  31. GreenVolts ($500,000)
  32. Vestas ($50 million)
  33. LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($150 million)
  34. Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
  35. Navistar ($10 million)
  36. Satcon ($3 million)*

*Denotes companies that have filed for bankruptcy.

Total waste?  $8.108 Billion dollars.  Yes that’s billion with a B.  People keep insisting that to fix the budget problem we need to make massive cuts to the big pieces of the pie.  What people don’t seem to understand is that the biggest pieces are all the small tiny pieces added together.

Look at all that money that’s been wasted.  Debt that has now been laid upon our children and working class.  For what?  So that some donors to the Obama administration can go buy a new vacation house?  So that some leftist can feel good about his view on the environment and forcing others to pay for his moral views?

Seriously, why is anyone even thinking about continuing to vote for a man who so willingly and blatantly has been robbing the American public blind.  Not only is he robbing them but selling your children into slavery.  There is no such thing as a free lunch yet everyone seems to think they’re getting one.

That stimulus so heavily lobbied for has $80 billion in politically tied energy projects.  Yet we see how those projects actually worked, not to mention how it actually delayed existing projects.  Over 1900 investigations have begun to look into waste, further costs to the American tax payer.

To put this into even greater perspective, 10% of the funding for energy projects provided by the stimulus is nothing but waste.  That’s to a cost $25.82 per every man, woman and child, just in waste.  If you just count the tax payers, it’s an extra $70.81 in cost.  If you don’t believe me, do the math yourself.  Here’s where I got the numbers for population and taxpayers.  To take it further we have another 6 trillion in debt overall, that comes out to be another $51,000 dollars for every man, woman, and child.  The overall debt burden in this country is enough for most people to buy a house, again, every man, woman, and child, even babies.

Lets look at the issue in another way focusing on spending during 2012 overall:

Under Obama, for every $7 we’ve had, we’ve spent nearly $11 (or, to be more exact, $10.95).  That’s like a family that makes $70,000 a year — and is already knee-deep in debt — blowing nearly $110,000 a year.

Joe also put it really well a while ago before we ended up even further in this hole:

If your family income were $50,000 then:

Now that has brought the spending problem into a better perspective, let me ask, why is the out of control spending and economy not at the fore front of the presidential race?  I hope all of you who continue to not see a problem with this reckless spending and endless growth of government are happy selling your soul and children’s soul into slavery.  Because you honestly have no business writing checks your ass can’t cash and putting your kids name or my name on it.  Period.

Quote of the Day – Stephen Moore (10/17/2012)

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For well more than one of every three Americans, April 15th isn’t tax payment day, it’s payday from Uncle Sam.

Stephen Moore – Who’s the Fairest of Them All?
October 9th, 2012

[It is deeply disturbing that 40% of income earners didn’t pay income taxes but instead received payments.  I keep hearing people use the term “fair share” and well as I used all so often lately:

What is fair about one group of people paying out taxes while another group collects a part of them for themselves?  Fair would be a flat tax, hell a flat income tax would even be a better start than what we have now. -B]

You Keep Using That Word…

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You keep using those words and I don’t think they mean what you think they mean….

It’s amazing the number of people who just shrug this behavior off and claim it as acceptable.

h/t Kevin

Socialism First Hand, A Warning

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Now, with his comments about taking away the incentives for success and people losing interest in working hard in mind.  Lets look at another video:

Think about this for a second.  They’re penalizing success and there are large groups of people who instead of working live off of entitlements from the government.  As RobertaX said, we cannot reverse the slope, but we can at least change it to give us some time.  Given time we might be able to reverse it.

The ACA is going to have some serious repercussions that many probably don’t even realize.  Especially in large parts of the voter base that is most likely to support Obama. What am I talking about?  College internships are liable to get screwed.

There is no way a company is going to bother paying for benefits for an intern, doubly so since usually they are on school or their parents healthcare.  So now when you’re working 40 hour weeks in the summer they’ll have to provide care of face a fine.  Well instead they’ll limit you to 29 hour work weeks.

This is significant because during the summer I regularly worked 40+ hour weeks to pull overtime to save up for my upcoming semesters.  Now instead students will have to incur more debt because they will be prevented from earning money to pay for school.  Wait, who is it that subsidizes most of the loans, which are exempt from most laws governing debt, that’s right the government.

That’s right folks, the government passed legislation that will force more people to take loans and pay them interest.  Nice huh?  Don’t worry though, they’re from the government and they’re here to help…

Ultimately though Bill Whittle nails it with this one:

The money quote:

The left has these same failed ideas from about a 20 year window at the end of the 19th century.  That have never worked, don’t work now, and will never work.  And this clinging to an ossified discredited model based on envy and resentment has killed no less than 100 million people.  And many people call this progressive as they cover themselves in glory, but not in the blood or the failure.

It may be the recent history of the 20th century, however I think it’s certainly in the current path of the future for the United States.