We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The American federal government has gone crazy, and power-mad. VDH: It Can Happen Here:
Government has become a sort of malignant metasisizing tumor, growing on its own, parasitical on healthy cells, always searching for new sources of nourishment, its purpose nothing other than growing bigger and faster and more powerful—until the exhausted host collapses. We have a sunshine king and our government has become a sort of virtual Versailles palace.
I suppose that when a presidential candidate urges his supporters to get in someone’s face, and to take a gun to a knife fight, from now on you better believe him...
For some reason, these guys never followed up on all the stories about Obama hanging out in gay bars in Chicago. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
A look at the text of the health care law reveals that much of it consists of amending the Internal Revenue Code to give the IRS more power. When Obamacare goes fully into effect in January, every American will have to prove to the IRS that he or she has "qualifying" health coverage, meaning coverage with a list of features approved by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. That will be done by submitting a document to the IRS, something like a W-2, to confirm coverage...
In addition, the IRS will keep track of even the smallest changes in Americans' financial condition. Did you get a raise recently? You'll need to notify the IRS; it might affect your subsidy status. Have your hours been reduced at work? Notify the IRS. Change jobs? Same.
For five years, this president has been making the case that a growing and activist government has good intentions and can carry these intentions out with competence. Conservatives have warned that government is dangerous, and even good intentions get bungled in the execution. In different ways, the IRS uproar, the Justice Department leak investigations, the Benghazi tragedy and the misleading attempts to explain it, and the growing problems with implementation of health care reform all bolster the conservative worldview.
Big storms are on the horizon, headed towards Washington DC.
The mainstream media, after over five years of protecting, insulating, glorifying, romanticizing Obama and his administration, is beginning to realize that, if they continue on that same path, they will be left behind. With the MSM running interference for the admin., perhaps they felt invulnerable in Washington.
I recall Michelle Obama once bragging about that. No longer. Now the election is over.
I suspect the MSM and talking heads feel torn between doing their job and protecting their political hero and Leftist ambitions in general. Probably many Dems in Washington are feeling the same way this week.
This administration is dead in the water, will need to be towed to harbor, will not recover even with MSM help. Too many problems, with maybe more to come, and the MSM has already focused on constructing a Hillary narrative as the next savior.
But how likely is it that Americans would elect two Chicago Alinskyites in a row?
On Jan, 25, 2012, the criteria for flagging suspect groups was changed to, "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement," the report says.
So, by implication those who still believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are if not enemies of the US, then certainly subject to far more scrutiny by the country's tax collectors?
Educating on the Constitution seems very dangerous. Subversive. The populace can not be trusted to read it because they won't understand that it doesn't mean what it says. Something like that.
The IRS never got to auditing Maggie's Farm's accounts as far as I know. Whew. Under the radar. We're just a bird-watching site, anyway. We hide our vast advertising income in the Caymans, like everybody else, and it is delivered to the contributors to Swiss accounts, in gold bullion carried on private sailboats to the port at Zurich and thence by courier to our private bank.
Posting for Maggie's is a good, tax-free gig if you don't mind spending the income overseas. But who would mind doing that, as long as it's done quietly at the craps tables in Monte Carlo?
Going after the Jews too? To get serious for a moment, political corruption of the IRS is about as bad as it gets in America. Criminal at the least. Not funny.Heads must roll for this. I will assume that smart lawyers are on top of this already because it is an outrageous abuse of power in a free country.
Unlike Watergate, an unremarkable political dirty trick with a dumb and unnecessary White House cover-up (if a handful of people had been fired it would have been a big nothing), in this case American public servants died seemingly because of State Dept and possibly White House incompetence or indifference, and both may have been complicit in an attempted cover-up a few weeks before a national election. Possibly the CIA too. People have been intimidated about speaking out, but maybe no longer.
If this is the way it smells, this is a big problem for Washington. One more from Jim Hoft:
In a week in which the IRS finally admits that they were harassing Conservative organizations prior to the elections, the administration is looking terribly corrupt. Whatever happens, I think this Chicago administration has blown itself up and lost whatever credibility it ever had. Plus, with the low-life Putin making John Kerry wait three hours to meet with him, it's looking sort of pitiful too.
Buddy suggested that I add the tar and feathers image to this post. Seems right.Even though we disagree with the administration on most policies, we take no pleasure in seeing our USgovt in this position.An embarassment for all of us. Respect must be earned, and these people thought they could easily fool us low-information citizens.
I hate bubbles. I am 100% out of equities right now. My self-directed IRA. Market is just floating on hot air. Just my humble opinion, of course. Time will tell whether I was lucky or unlucky.
As we have said ad nauseum, if this had happened under Bush, imagine the media uproar. However, they are attempting to run interference for Hillary ("at this point, what does it matter?") Clinton.
For the purposes of income, satisfaction, challenge, skill-enhancement, personal growth, relationships, and pleasure, I have been planning and pursuing my life goals for ten years. Like Prof. Boudreaux, I have zero interest in income equality. I want to be prosperous, but I recognize that most people do not if they have to work or plan for it too hard, or take too many risks. I want to support a wife and kids without help, I want to help my parents when and if they need it, I want to keep learning, I want to be my own boss and to learn how to lead, I want my own Conquest, I want a white picket fence, I want a cushion of cash in the mattress, and I want to go places the way Bird Dog does.
Also, I am also entirely opposed to the idea of minimum wage, especially for people under 18 or 20 years old. All it does is to deprive the youth of valuable work experience. Labor is a market, same as cars or arugula. Child labor is a good thing, much better than teen tours. Work never hurt anybody. Not working seems pretty bad for people unless they are Moms raising a young litter.
Not so very long ago, its national mythology notwithstanding, the United States was little different from most other countries. In 1970, its foreign-born population was 4.7 percent. And, while most of the West has embraced mass immigration in the last half-century, America differs significantly from those developed countries, like Canada and Australia, that favor skilled migrants. Personally, I don’t see what’s so enlightened and progressive about denuding Third World nations of their best and brightest to be your doctors and nurses, but it does demonstrate a certain ruthless self-interest.
By contrast the majority of U.S. foreign-born residents now come from Latin America, and more than a quarter of them — 12 million — from Mexico. A policy of “family reunification” will by definition lead to low-skilled immigrants: An engineer or computer scientist is less likely to bring in an unending string of relatives — because his dad’s a millionaire businessman in Bangalore and his brother’s a barrister in London, and they’re both happy and prosperous where they are. Insofar as there is any economic benefit to mass immigration, it’s more than entirely wiped out by chain importation of elderly dependents and other clients for the Big Government state.
Jared Bernstein was Biden's economic advisor. An economist. He thinks that the lack of jobs is a market failure: Where Have All the Jobs Gone?
I'm sorry Jared, but it's a government failure, and more government will never fix it. Whenever government intrusions cause problems, Lefties love to shout "Market Failure!" They do not like free markets, or freedom for that matter except in abortion and gay marriage.
We do not need to go the dispirited and failing way of Old Europe. All that needs to be done is to push government back and unleash America's red-blooded enterprising spirit. Most Americans dream of being enterprising, but it is getting far too difficult due to government intrusion, regulation, Obamacare, taxation, etc.
After that, presumably the warming crisis will resume to great alarm. No wonder they have changed the name to "Climate Change." Can't go wrong there, because weather happens. Here in the Northeast, climate tends to change daily, and seasonally too.
This is a bit of good thing for Mamet - he gets to be a cultural outsider again, which is a legitimate stance for an artist. And his critics at the Times? The Times is written by people who wish they were Mamet.
Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.
Europe has three big problems: The return of the Reich (or the Holy Roman Empire, if you prefer), the return of the Ottomans, and the persistence of state socialism. Learned nothing at all from their long, crazy history.
"... the liberals who spent four days hoping and praying and predicting that this heinous atrocity was perpetrated by right-wingers are now busy telling us that we shouldn’t focus on the Islamic beliefs of these Chechen terrorists — disciples of radical imam Feiz Mohammad – or the fact that these guys were immigrants.
Our Moral and Intellectual Superiors are now lecturing us that it’s wrong to speculate about motives."
The day’s exercise could cost up to $333 million in lost business, according to
BusinessWeek, which also notes that the Dunkin Donuts stayed open
per request from law enforcement.
Heard a bit of NPR this morning discussing the terror brothers. A number of the Boston professors and MIT students they interviewed opined along the lines of "this is what can happen when we aren't welcoming enough to immigrants." They all refused to opine on the Muslim angle (scared to?). An MIT Prof of Poli Sci said "One message is that each of us as individuals should try to do all we can to help immigrants feel more at home."
Gun and Bible-clinging redneck New Yorker that I am, even I did not really object to the background check law in itself. Seemed harmless enough, but also seemed pointless to me because the bad guys never get background checks. Even Sen. Feinstein acknowledged it would do nothing for gun violence.
No you will not "win", and definitely not as long as politicians and celebs and rich folks get their own personal protection from armed guards. Peons like me do not have those perqs or the money to hire them.
Barack Obama is a lame-duck president. Nobody listens to what he says anymore, nobody is interested in winning his approval and nobody much cares if he thinks they have “let the country down”. This is typical for a second-term president who has lost all their leverage because they’re no longer running for office and everybody is patiently waiting for the day when he quits the White House. But Obama's difficult personality has doubled the size of the challenge. Gloating in victory, adolescent in defeat – the Prez doesn’t make it easy to work with him. Why should conservative senators give him a legislative victory after he has spent four years painting them as knuckle-dragging rednecks who hate women and the poor?
Whatever your position on gun control, yesterday’s events are a damning indictment of Obama’s presidency – a flash of style, lots of soaring rhetoric and, when the votes are actually counted, little show for any of it. America has four more years of this lame-duck president telling them that it has let him down. If only he could tear up the Constitution and rule by diktat he might save himself a little disappointment. Alas, American democracy is a stickler for rules.Barack Obama can't pass gun control despite 90 per cent support. Truly, he is a lame-duck president.
Photo is, once again, our dear friend Marianne's home protection Taurus Judge. No elderly woman with a disabled husband should be without one in her knitting basket, whether in town or country.
Marriage rights, abortion rights, adoption rights, medical rights, housing rights, gun rights, speech rights, etc., etc.
I am realizing that I object to the language of "rights" as if they were things doled out by the state, or as if our rights were at the pleasure of the state. That, I think, is an adolescent view of government as parent. The reality and the history is the opposite. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were never meant to limit the freedom of the people, or free enterprise.
I prefer the entirely different vantage point and language, the language of freedom and the limited rights and powers of government. Government powers stingily doled out to the state by free, intelligent, self-sufficient citizens. Land of the free and home of the brave, and all that. There is nothing at all intelligent about people in government, especially in a democratic republic. After all, you could not even run a corner candy shop with a democratic republic, much less with the doofus losers and sociopaths who mostly want to run for office.
Is it possible to be a Conservative Libertarian? I try, but I run into logical inconsistencies and conflicts. Take gay marriage as an example. The Conservative in me believes that Judeo-Christian ideals and ordinary family units are the foundation of society and of our civilization. Precious things. My Libertarian impulses want government entirely out of marriage except insofar as people want to make it a legal contract or a sacramental vow.
I have always figured that we are free to transport firearms from state to state. In the Northeast, it may be getting more complicated. My friends and I shoot and hunt in upstate New York often, and have NYS hunt licenses. I assume we're allowed to own our firearms and to transport them.
But are we? Nobody wants to become a felon just because the laws are too complicated to understand, but maybe that's the point.
In Massachusetts, a permit to possess firearms is required. I have one. But with the new CT laws, I am confused. Can I transport a firearm through CT from MA to New York? I know that I can take a firearm to the airports in NYC because we have done that many times and it's no big deal (provided they are in locked cases).
Today, he asks me to contact my senators about gun violence. For one second, I thought I might ask my senators to do something about urban handgun violence committed by crims with already-illegally-owned weapons, but I quickly decided it wasn't worth the effort because they don't care about that.
They only care about my legal firearms. I don't think the crims bother with background checks. My senators are hopeless and it's not worth the trouble to write to them.
It's a fundamental issue, isn't it? One of the things that stunned De Toqueville was the abundance of voluntary affiliations and organizations in the US. Of course, The Collective doesn't do voluntary. I hate the very concept.
By and large, my friends and my friends’ friends are all intelligent, educated, gregarious, and creative. They’re insightful and thoughtful. They’re critical and ambitious. So why do so many employers put them in positions that don’t take full advantage of what they’ve got to offer?
and
I’ve thought seriously about changing my LinkedIn profile blurb to something like, “My career goal is to gain a position that energizes, excites, challenges, and values me, so that I can continue to develop my skills and talents, and grow as a person.” I wonder if that would catch anyone’s eye?
Kate, we're all special, aren't we? But I think you're a little too special for my shop. Trust me, anybody who read that would gag.
Big storms are on the horizon, headed towards Washington DC.
It is, indeed, looking much worse than Watergate. 
23 
Heard a bit of NPR this morning discussing the terror brothers. A number of the Boston professors and MIT students they interviewed opined along the lines of "this is what can happen when we aren't welcoming enough to immigrants." They all refused to opine on the Muslim angle (scared to?). An MIT Prof of Poli Sci said "One message is that each of us as individuals should try to do all we can to help immigrants feel more at home."
Gun and Bible-clinging redneck New Yorker that I am, even I did not really object to the background check law in itself. Seemed harmless enough, but also seemed pointless to me because the bad guys never get background checks. Even Sen. Feinstein acknowledged it would do nothing for gun violence.