Saturday Links – We’re Famous Edition

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) executives are witnessing the largest manpower expansion — at least since withholding taxes were first introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II – to enforce the new tax mandates and penalties included in the health care law, according to Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX). According to Brady, a new analysis by the Joint Economic Committee and the House Ways & Means Committee staff estimates up to 6,500 new IRS personnel will be necessary to collect, examine and audit new tax information mandated on families and small businesses as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

One of the more interesting reactions to the [SCOTUS] decision, was when the MSM realized that Roberts had changed his mind; Why he changed his mind wasn’t the shocker they had to deal with, but THAT Justice Roberts ‘changed his mind’, that was mind blowing for some in the media, One report investigated the phenomenon and said “Reportedly a Justice might change their mind once a term” and the New York Times called in a Harvard Law Professor to assure folks that,

“It is not particularly unusual for justices to change their minds while writing and exchanging drafts. Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School said that the more it happens, the more it gives you confidence that there was a serious exchange of ideas.”

It is apparently a shocking revelation to those in the news media, that on deeper consideration of an issue, a person can, actually, change their mind on finding that what at first seemed obvious was less true than might have first appeared (sort of like Welfare’ seems kind on the surface.. but… never mind, that’s beyond questioning for them). This is much less revealing about Roberts, than a surprising self revelation of the media – leftists don’t actually approach ideas in order to discover what is true and best (believing in neither ‘True’ or ‘best’), instead they have positions and use ‘Reason Seen More as Weapon Than Path to Truth‘, in this view, ideas and reasoning are simply tools with which they try and manipulate and contort data (they can’t really be called ‘facts’ once they are shorn of their context) to match those positions. They don’t change their minds, they simply restate their positions with rationalizations that better fit their purposes.

Today SCOTUS ruled there are no practical limits to federal power.Supreme Court upholds individual mandate, ObamaCare survives

Score one for tyranny in the battle of Ameritopia.

The Statists In Black have not only punted in this act of judicial cowardice, they have in fact forfeited their very purpose in our original constitutional system. Having ruled the government has the power to universally mandate something, why wouldn’t it have the power to universally mandate anything? So, why even have judicial review of anything at all? Tyranny. Period. End of sentence.

“This is a radical, savage religion.  The people aren’t all radical, thank God!  But the religion is the worst, most deadly idea in the history of the world.”

Nullification appears to be a viable way for the states to say, “Whoa, dude – that’s not constitutional and I think we’ll take a pass.”  Enter the Supreme Court, who will of course say, “sure it’s constitutional because the Constitution is a “living document”, and we’ll twist it any old way we want.”  Naturally, Roe v Wade and the matter of abortion comes to mind – an issue best referred to the individual states.In the New York Ratifying Convention of 1788, Hamilton stated:

“I maintain that the word “supreme” imports no more than this: that the Constitution, and laws made in pursuance thereof, cannot be controlled or defeated by any other law. The acts of the United States, therefore, will be absolutely obligatory as to all the proper objects and powers of the general government. The states, as well as individuals, are bound by these laws: but the laws of Congress are restricted to a certain sphere, and when they depart from this sphere, they are no longer supreme or binding.”

The federal government does not exist and has no power outside of the Constitution. Thus, the States have the absolute right to nullify any act outside the Constitution.

It appears to me we have people who are trying to uphold the Constitution, while others are trying to turn it into some sort of document that changes and morphs to suit purposes that may or may not be constitutional.  It is clear we can’t always depend on the SCOTUS to interpret things correctly, or we wouldn’t have decisions like Roe v Wade.

There is a lot to think about in this post …

DENVER, CO, July 4, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) Days after Personhood USA president Keith Masons home was attacked in the night leaving his wife and children traumatized, a Personhood volunteer, 69-year-old Everett Stadig, was assaulted, sustaining a broken hip.On Saturday, Stadig a soft-spoken and slender gentleman – was thrown off his bicycle while peacefully gathering signatures for the Personhood amendment in Colorado, and as a result has had to undergo surgery to replace part of his hip.

Once again, the left is all about tolerance … unless you disagree with their position.

An emotional Ohio voter personally thanked President Obama for passing a health care overhaul, relating the story of her late sister’s battle with cancer. After Obama’s speech in Sandusky, he encountered a sobbing Stephanie Miller.

When was the last time a politician or bureaucrat give up authority?

Much bigger than the mandate itself are the insurance exchanges that will administer $681 billion in subsidies over 10 years, which will require a lot of new federal workers at the IRS and health department.

A friend caught me the other day making a simple but profound mistake. While bemoaning the recent SCOTUS decision on ObamacareTax, I brought up the wrongness of striking down the Stolen Valor Act, which made it illegal to claim to be a war hero. “Why do we need a law against that?” He asked.

…

The right to free speech is one of the many things our heroes fight for. We would do them a grave disservice by diminishing that right in the slightest, especially with some attempt to defend their honor which can never, ever be stolen by anyone.

What is LIBOR and why should we care?

You may remember the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision, which gave government a legal option to use eminent domain not for public use like building roads or schools, but to transfer property to other private ownership for things deemed more lucrative for the local tax base, like large commercial buildings, industrial sites or resort properties.Well, California has gone Kelo one better. They want to use it as a legal basis not to seize property, but to seize the mortgages on them and take the loans away from the investors who legitimately own the notes.

I have to say it.  I HATE California.  You gotta read this.

In the summer of 1775, a letter from a British army officer in Boston circulated widely in London. Dated 5 July 1775 and stripped of a signature, it reported critically on the Battle of Bunker Hill. On the performance of the Royal Artillery, the officer wrote:

As they were marching up to attack, our artillery stopped firing, the General on enquiring the reason was told they had got twelve pound balls to six pounders, but that they had grape shot; on this he ordered them forward and to fire grape. . . .

The wretched blunder of the over sized balls sprung from the dotage of an officer of rank in that corps, who spends his whole time in dallying with the Schoolmasters daughters. God knows he is old enough he is no Sampson yet he must have his Dalilah.

Great article with a great title!

Lassie, a Collie who likes to hang out with United States Forest Rangers has spent the night in police custody after being named a Collie of interest in the raging wildfires devastating Colorado. Suspicions were first raised about Lassie when Bob Erickson and Scott Turnerthe two forest rangers who adopted Lassie noticed burns on Lassies paws.

Who’d a thunk?  Never trust a collie!

What does the transportation bill which Barack Obama is expected to sign have to do with tobacco? On the surface that seems like a silly question with the obvious answer being nothing. After all, transportation and building highways is  one of the legitimate expenditures granted by the constitution in Article 1 Section 8, and transportation and tobacco are two separate issues altogether, but when it comes to the federal government nothing is quite as it seems and such is the case with the transportation bill.

There are a few decent colleges in America, including Hillsdale and Liberty, where conservatives can safely ensconce their offspring. But if they pony up the dough to send them to Harvard, Yale, Berkeley or even the University of Michigan, they’ve really got no business griping if the kids return home convinced that Obama is the messiah, that Israel is on the wrong side of the Middle East conflict and that socialism is the most wonderful economic system ever devised by the mind of man.

A chronicle of hypocrisy by Obama supporters…

Many people are unhappy about the June 25th Court decision on Arizona’s controversial immigration law (SB1070) and the fact that the Court struck down three out of the four provisions of the bill that had been challenged. Now, if this were a game of tennis or baseball, losing three out of four would be a near defeat. But the ruling on SB1070 is not about sports, and a mere count of the provisions the court affirmed or struck down is not a measure of the success or failure of SB1070. The court’s ruling was, in fact, a great victory. There is no cause for mourning over SB1070.

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” — Mark Twain

Hard to believe some ostensible conservatives are still pathetically trying to peddle this nonsense. Just because America and the Constitution lost, doesn’t mean Obama won. A week after Chief Justice Roberts’s shock heard round the world and contrary to the medias verdict on the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare’s constitutionality, Obama did not win here.

America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind. There the politician has come to be looked upon as the very scum of society. ~Peter Kroptkin, speech, 1891

Once again the absurd notion that criticism of Islamic ideology and doctrines is “racist” is undermined by the fact that (according to ITV, The Sun etc.) Richard Dart, an Englishman who is as white as a pint of milk, converted to Islam some time ago and in the news today it is reported that he has been arrested in a “terror raid” along with five others, over “suspected plots on UK targets”.

This guy Dart appeared in a rather disturbing documentary not long ago, entitled “My brother the Muslim”. In that film, Mr. Dart made it clear to his brother (who was making the documentary) that he put Islam before his family.

The real tragedy of the recent decision on Obamatax is not that it was upheld on the grounds that the government has the right to regulate commercial activity and thus can make people engage in commercial activity (a line of reasoning that I disagreed with but would see how the backwards folk out there would come to), but that it was upheld because the anything that might be considered a tax is always legal (or some such grounds- like clear thinking really matters any more in this political world). The door has been opened- to both Republicans and Democrats and Fascists and Socialists and Libertarians- for the government to now require you to buy any product or you pay a penalty and then the Supreme Court will find this legal by changing it into a tax

The only purpose of a tax is to raise revenue for the government so that it can perform its limited functions. A tax is not a means to coerce people into engaging in business or not engaging in business, nor is a tax a vehicle by which the government can force a free man to perform an action (buy a product) that he does not which to perform. The Supreme Court’s decision is bad because it gives legitimacy to the idea that we are not free men and women any more, merely slaves to the masters who run the state, and that the masters now have the power to make us do whatever they want to do.

The Obamatax decision killed liberty.

The article includes a great list of other things that the government may now “tax.”

Spreading the wealth thinner… (Townhall) –The Obama Administrations green jobs agenda is apparently not limited to the United States. According to CNS News, the administration created a $20 million grant that will go toward creating green projects…in Africa. The U.S. government is spending $20 million to help clean energy projects in Africa get started.

The U.S. government is spending $20 million to “help clean energy projects in Africa get started.” Those projects include wind farms and solar panels, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced at the recent Rio +20 Conference in Brazil.

In what is sure to rankle the feathers of many conservatives, MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry took to her show Sunday to ponder the meaning of Independence Day, highlighting mostly the stains on American history. Its ours, all of it, she said. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery . . .

Ah yes, we must never forget to flog ourselves in some guilt-obsessed effort at redeeming our wicked past – even as we celebrate our nation’s birth.

Disgusting, just disgusting.

Every month on the first Friday of the month, the Bureau of Labor Statistic releases two tables of jobs data. The A Tables contain employment, unemployment, the unemployment rate and labor force numbers. This is where we get the unemployment rate from. The B Tables contain detailed payroll data and a breakdown of payrolls by industry and sub-industry. This is where we get the “XYZ new jobs” number from. Due to the level of detail in the BLS B Tables, there is a lot of insight to be drawn from which industries are rising or falling (including public sector vs private sector jobs).Political Math blogger has  created a system where he can quickly snag all the BLS data from the most recent jobs report and display it in a treemap visualization, making it easy to explore.

This is a visualization of jobs as reported by the BLS for June 2012. The size of each box relates to the number of jobs currently in that particular industry or sub-industry.

You gotta check this out!  (This is the guy that did all the penny videos.)

One aspect of Brett Kimberlin’s life story that’s easy to forget is the incidents that led him to commit those acts of domestic terrorism that won him the title of The Speedway Bomber.  They involve the possible rape of a young girl, possibly starting at the age of ten, and the brutal murder of that girl’s Grandmother.

Is the story Barack Obama tells about his upbringing an American story? When you look at his background, it would seem that it isn’t so much an American story, but a story he has manipulated to make him appear more American. This is the theme that is being explored by a Fox News story about Obama’s autobiography and another book that examines some of the stories told by the President in Dreams From My Father.

If you missed it, there was a minor debate on the blog Facebook page last week over Obamacare.  It didn’t come as much of a surprise since so many people were fired up over the situation.  I didn’t fully expect the comment I made to strike up such a conversation, nor did I expect the biggest thing I got out of the conversation to have nothing to do with healthcare or politics.We can talk for months about the healthcare ruling and I’m sure many of us will, but a comment made about taking on a fight of “revolutionary proportions” is what has inspired me to write an article about a completely different topic.

Check out the debate on the Facebook page for yourself if you want to see the context of the comment; it isn’t really essential to this article.

To put it very simply, I was basically told my fight against big government was one of ‘revolutionary proportions’ and in my opinion, was being told it may not be a fight worth fighting.  In the end, we may never win that battle, but if you know what it right, why would you settle for anything less?

A good question, indeed.

The idea that the Republican Party is the party of limited government is a joke.

Kicking off her tenure with the issuance of a report linking military veterans, Tea Party members and other everyday conservatives to terrorism, saying “the system worked” when the underwear bomber nearly succeeded in blowing up a plane on Christmas 2009, presiding over TSA’s “third base” program of airport security, “enhancing” our homeland security by refusing to enforce our borders — Napolitano has racked up quite a record as one of the most clueless busybodies ever to hold the power to make people disappear.

Recall that the president has but two supposed achievements to call his own after countless failed programs. He: (a) he gave the order to cap Bin Laden (a stunningly straightforward decision for any president not named B.J. Clinton); and (b) he “saved” General Motors (never mind that it still owes the American taxpayer $35 billion).It turns out that the National Legal and Policy Center has a more accurate description of GM’s “impressive results”.

…government purchases of GM vehicles rose a whopping 79% in June.

The discovery of the pick-up in government fleet purchases at the taxpayers’ expense comes just weeks before GM announces its second quarter earnings. Overall fleet sales (which are typically less profitable than retail sales) at Government Motors rose a full 36% for the month, helping to drive decent sales improvements year over year.

GM claimed that sales increases did not rely on incentive spending, which appeared to remain in check, but one analyst during GM’s sales conference call questioned whether the company’s “stair step” incentive spending was accurately depicted. This incentive spending kicks in after dealerships report final sales figures for the month and may be yet another deceptive way for GM to fudge its numbers. Not mentioned was GM card rewards programs that do not get counted as incentive spending.

It had all the trappings of a re-election rally: thousands packing a convention center, Barack Obama T-shirts, videos celebrating the health care law, and a wall-size banner with encouraging messages to the incumbent president.

“Now that Garfield was dead, Americans’ greatest fear was that Guiteau would get away with murder – not because he was innocent, but because he was insane. The insanity defense was already widely known and almost uniformly despised. Even Garfield, ten years before his own murder, had expressed deep skepticism about the plea.“

Nothing you say matters to the hardcore liberal. I want you to say that three times and embed it in your nugget. No matter the facts, the evidence, the history, and the reality of the world we live in your words mean absolutely nothing to those committed liberals who believe in big government solutions and a nanny-state environment. They have signed up, drank the utopian Kool-Aid and have bought into the leftist ideology lock, stock, and barrel.