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Rubio: On Tax Day 2014

April 15, 2014/in News, Politics, Regulation, Taxes, Video, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Rich Swier

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Tax Day 2014 notes, “Tax reform is critical. And it’s not just critical to take the hassle out of our lives. It’s critical for the economic future of our country. Our economy is stagnant. It’s not growing fast enough. It’s not creating enough jobs. And by the way, about 40% of the jobs that it is creating pays $16 an hour or less.”

Is reform of the tax code needed or a scraping of the entire income tax? Many are calling for either a flat tax or FairTax system.

To mark Tax Day 2014, Rubio sent out the below video addressing constituent concerns about the broken tax code system. Rubio points to the tax codes stifling effect on the economy as proof of the need for tax reform:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/RteG2ceXtk8[/youtube]

In the video, Rubio outlines various disconcerting facts about the increasingly complicated tax code and the unnecessary burdens it places on taxpayers:

It takes 13 hours for the average taxpayer to file their taxes, including record keeping, planning, as well as filling out forms.
Last year, Americans spent 6.1 billion hours and $168 billion complying with all their tax filing requirements.
The tax code, rules and regulations now totals more than 73,000 pages, as opposed to 400 pages when it was created in 1913.
Americans will pay $3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.5 trillion in state and local taxes this year.
Americans must work 111 days this year to pay their federal, state and local taxes.

Rubio:

“One of the things holding back our economy is a broken tax code. We have a tax code, for example, that punishes companies for investing their profits back into their businesses, to hire more people, to give their workers raises, to expand their operations. We have a tax code that actually encourages our employers to take their business overseas. Those are some of the things we have to fix as well. So I agree with you wholeheartedly, and that’s why I hope this November we’ll have new leadership here in Washington that will move on this important item.”

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) Was Behind BLM Land Grab of The Bundy Ranch

April 14, 2014/in Environment, Featured, National Security, News, Policy, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Joseph R. John

Neil Kornze, Principal Deputy Director, Bureau of Land Management.

A article by Kit Daniels from InfoWar.com outlines in detail how corrupted Senator Reid was behind the land grab of the Bundy Ranch. It turns out that Neil Kornze, who was raised in Elko, Nevada, was a former senior advisor on Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid’s staff. Kornze joined the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2011 and had been leading the agency as the Principal Deputy Director. He was subsequently appointed Director of the Bureau of Land Management, by a US Senate vote of 71 to 28. The BLM oversees more than 245 million acres of public lands nationwide, including 48 million acres in Nevada.

So why did Senator Reid’s aide who owed his appointment to his old boss go after Cliven Bundy’s cattle ranch that had been in the Bundy family since 1870?

It turns out that in 2012, Harry Reid’s son, Rory Reid who is lawyer with the prominent Harvey Whittemore law firm in Las Vegas, became the chief representative for a Chinese Communist Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group. Journalist Marcus Stern with Reuters reported that Senator Reid was heavily involved in a “DEAL,” as well as his oldest son Rory Reid who works for lobbyist Harvey Whittemore. Whittemore was convicted in 2013 of illegally funneling $100,000 to Senator Reid’s campaign.

Rory and his father were both involved in an effort to get the ENN Energy Group to build a $5 billion utility scale solar energy facility and panel manufacturing plant in the Nevada desert. Rather than helping a US energy company benefit from such a development, Harry Reid helped the Chinese develop a utility scale solar energy plant. Marcus Stern wrote that that Senator Reid has been the most prominent advocate of recruiting the Communist Chinese Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group on his trip to Communist China in 2011. It was during this same time frame that Senator Reid placed his senior senate advisor, Neil Kornze, in the BLM as the Principal Deputy Director.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)

Marcus Stern reported that Harry Reid applied his political muscle on behalf of developing the ENN project in Nevada (Regional Mitigation Strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone : Technical Note 444). Then in 2012, Rory Reid facilitated ENN in developing plans to build the $5 billion solar plant on public land in Nevada by helping the ENN locate a 9000 acre desert site that it planned to buy well below the going market value of land sold by Clark County. Rory Reid as the former Chairman of the Clark County Commission helped facilitate the deal.

Unfortunately the problem with the area was that the 908 head of cattle in the herd on 67 year old Cliven Bundy’s family Bundy Ranch roamed and grazed free as they had been doing since the 1870, their grazing on open range would interfere with the Chinese Communist Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group’s solar field.

So Rory Reid, working with Neil Kornze, trumped up the bogus charge that the grazing cattle were destroying an endangered species, the desert tortoise. The desert tortoise were proliferating (they were not in danger), despite the fact that the cattle from the Bundy Ranch had been grazing in their habitat for over 140 years, in fact the Interior Department had implemented euthanasia of the desert tortoise to keep the population from getting out of control.

The BLM’s official reason for encircling the Bundy Ranch and family with sniper teams and helicopters was to protect the endangered desert tortoise which the Interior Department had been killing in mass for some time. Journalist Dana Loesch wrote “The tortoise wasn’t of concern when US Senator Harry Reid worked with the BLM and his former senior aide, Neil Kornze, who was now in charge of the BLM when they were literally changing the boundaries of the tortoise habitat to accommodate the development plans of the Communist Chinese Energy Giant, ENN Energy Group and the second most powerful man in Nevada, after Senator Reid, Harvey Whittemore,” who just happened to be the employer for Rory Reid’s and Rory’s three brothers (Harry Reid’s four sons).

Unfortunately, the media establishment spun the story so Americans would view Cliven Bundy as grossly violating federal regulations and a law breaker, not the true story of how Senator Reid was facilitating a Communist Chinese Energy Giant to come into the United States, displacing any possibility of a US Energy Company from getting to develop solar energy in Nevada.

Reid arranged for the Communists to get ownership of US public land in Nevada below the going market price, while using Gestapo-style tactics to illegally remove a Patriotic Cattle Rancher off the land his family owned since the 1870s in violation of the rights accorded him by the US Constitution, the Tenth Amendment, and the Bill of Rights. It should have been a story about the overreach by yet another bloated, corrupt, and out of control bureaucracy that was doing absolutely nothing to manage the overgrowth on public land that they were supposed to be doing. In fact, the cattle from the Bundy Ranch were feeding on the overgrowth keeping the overgrowth under control.

The principle and courageous stand by Cliven Bundy in the face of an oppressive BLM and the prosecution by Holder’s Justice Department, while fining him $1 million, illegally rustling 400 cattle of his herd, surrounding his family with snipers, knocking down his pregnant daughter-in-law, grinding Clive’s head into the dirt with boots on his head, arresting his son for taking photos of the Gestapo-type tactics, and tazing his son three times. Cliven Bundy’s principled stand was a seminal event, Patriotic Americans from all over the Republic mobilized, rode to the aide of the rancher with American flags flying, and supported the Bundy Ranch against an out of control government bureaucracy.

When Neil Kornze realized the magnitude of the opposition he and Reid engendered from throughout the Republic, resulting in over 3000+ armed Americans who had arrived on the Bundy Ranch (with thousands more enroute), in opposition to his 200 federal armed guards, Kornze released the 400 rustled cattle he intended to sell, and pulled his 200 federal armed guards back from the brink of an armed conflict with very angry American citizens from throughout the Republic, who now had their own snipers in place at the ranch aimed at the 200 federal armed guards. This attempt at grand larceny by the BLM, and violation of Cliven Bundy’s freedoms all Americans are afforded by the US Constitution requires a Congressional investigation and actions in the courts to charge the BLM.

We wonder if the Republican leadership in Congress will do anything about this attempt by an agency of the US Government to support a group in Nevada commit grand larceny on behalf of the Chinese Communist Energy Giant, or will they just let it ride, and hope it goes away?

Bureau Of Land Management Versus Cliven Bundy Post Mortem

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of InfoWars.com.

The Fifteen Charts Obama Doesn’t Want You to See

April 11, 2014/in Culture War, Featured, Healthcare, News, Policy, Regulation, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Rich Swier

Amy Payne from The Foundry writes, “Talking about Obamacare’s effects is one thing; seeing hard data is another. Heritage’s newly updated Obamacare in Pictures has 15 charts that show the law’s effects on Americans—from canceled insurance policies to new taxes, Medicare cuts, reduced choice for plans, and more.”

Obamacare in Pictures: Visualizing the Effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act from The Heritage Foundation

The Methane Hoax Cranks Up

April 11, 2014/in Commentary, Environment, News, Policy, Science, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Alan Caruba

Having spent decades trying to convince everyone that carbon dioxide (CO2) was a “greenhouse gas” that was going to cause the Earth to heat up, the same environmental charlatans are now embarking on a campaign to do the same with methane. In the U.S. the first move was announced by the White House in late March.

The carbon dioxide hoax fell apart in the wake of a cooling cycle affecting the Earth that began around 1997 and continues to this day. Warming and cooling cycles are natural events and both are tied to the activity or lack of it of the Sun. Humans have nothing to do with the climate other to enjoy or endure it.

Why methane? It has a lot to do with the development of hydraulic fracturing, commonly called “fracking”, and the way it unlocks natural gas, aka methane, all of which portends an America that is energy independent, along with its huge reserves of coal and oil. If, of course, the government permits this to occur.

As we know, the Obama administration does not want that. It would mean more jobs, greater prosperity, and the ability to pay down the national debt, not to mention drive down the cost of electricity, gasoline, and everything else that depends on energy.

Despite the cooling cycle that is likely to last for many more years, Steve Hamburg, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was quoted by the Washington Post saying that “ounce for ounce, methane is 84 times as potent as a greenhouse gas over 20 years” compared to carbon dioxide. “More than a third of the warming that we’ll see as a result of today’s emissions over the next couple of decades comes from, essentially, methane. We need to remain focused on carbon dioxide emissions, but doing so is not enough.”

Excuse me, but the Environmental Defense Fund and countless other Green advocacy groups have been focused on carbon dioxide for decades and the Earth is cooling, not warming. What part of this does Hamburg not understand?

James M. Taylor, the managing editor of Environment & Climate News, a national monthly published by The Heartland Institute, reported in January that “Natural gas fracking is not causing a spike in the U.S. methane emissions”, citing Environmental Protection Agency data. “Methane emissions specific to natural gas are in a long-term decline, down ten percent since 1990 and down seven percent since 2007 when the fracking boom began.”

The Washington Post, however, asserted that emission levels “are set to rise by 2030 as shale oil and shale gas production expands in the United States.” Do you remember all those predictions about the increase of carbon dioxide emissions and how, in ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred years, the Earth would heat up?

This is not about methane, it is about finding a way to shut down fracking and the extraction of natural gas and oil in the same way the Obama administration’s “war on coal” has caused the loss of over 150 coal-fired plants that until it began, were providing electricity. Reducing sources of electricity drives up its cost to everyone. As more natural gas came on line by 2013 it had become the second greatest source of U.S. electricity, but overall the amount of electricity produced was less than in 2007 before the war on coal began.

A natural component of the Earth, it has a number of sources, but one that has also caught the eye of government regulators involves cow flatulence and belching.

The White House has proposed cutting methane emissions from the dairy industry by 25% by 2020. The Environmental Protection Agency has been tracking cow farts since 2012 and now the dairy industry has to worry along with the oil and gas industry. In addition to the EPA, the Bureau of Land Management will be announcing “new standards this fall to reduce venting and flaring from oil and gas production on public lands.”

It’s often best just to let the Greens speak for themselves, revealing their never-ending efforts to attack the energy industry that keeps our lights on, heats and cools our homes, and fuels our cars and trucks. “President Obama’s plan to reduce climate-disrupting methane pollution is an important step in reining in an out of control industry exempt from too many public health protections,” said Deborah Nardone, the director of the Sierra Club’s Keeping Dirty Fuels in the Ground campaign.

“However,” said Ms. Nardone, “even with the most rigorous methane controls in place, we will still fall short of what is needed to fight climate disruption if we do not reduce our reliance on these dirty fossil fuels.”

What the heck is a climate disruption? A blizzard, a hurricane, a flood, tornadoes? None of these phenomena have anything to do with using fossil fuels. This is the kind of utter drivel we have all been hearing for decades.

It has nothing to do with the climate and everything to do with denying access and use of the greatest reserves of coal, oil and natural gas that exist in the greatest nation on Earth, the United States of America.

The EPA’s Taking of Nevada 1-2-3

April 10, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Policy, Regulation, Video, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Joseph R. John

The Freedoms guaranteed individuals by the US Constitution continues to be eroded by the Obama administration. When the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) took possession of millions of dollars in private property and cattle herds in violation of the provisions of the Bill of Rights and the Tenth Amendment, the Federal Government violated Nevada’s State Sovereignty, Nevada’s State Law and the Clark County Sheriff’s Law Enforcement authority. The Environmental Protection Agency pushed for the confiscation of the land and confiscation of the ranch owner’s herd of 908 cattle, in order to protect the food source for the desert tortoise; yet there has always been plenty of food available to feed the grazing cattle and the desert tortoise for 144 years.

VIDEO: Protesters at the Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada take on the Feds and stand their ground. Bundy Ranch Protesters were tasered by federal agents and attacked by K9’s. WARNING STRONG LANGUAGE:

The Bureau of Land Management, in support of the Environmental Protection Agency, imposed fines of $1 million on a rancher for allowing his cattle to graze on the open range, which is public land. The family owned ranch has had cattle grazing rights on the public land which is the open range, since 1870, for a period of 144 years. Although the US Government’s action was opposed by the Governor of Nevada and the County Sheriff in whose jurisdiction the land grab occurred, 200 heavily armed federal agents ignored the State and County’s opposition and moved in on the rancher.

While the federal agents were taking possession of the ranch owner’s herd of 908 cattle, they were threatening the rancher’s family members, in order to prevent them from taking photos of the land and cattle grab (his son was arrested for taking photos). The federal agents also arrested the rancher and one of the federal agents ground the rancher’s head into the dirt with his boot on the rancher’s head.

Over the last 5 years, the Obama administration has had a great deal of experience oppressing American citizens, in the US Armed Forces, who did not have the freedom to object; the above action against the rancher seems to be a shift in the oppression of freedoms from military personnel to civilians. In the US Armed Forces, Chaplain’s Freedom of Speech in the pulpit has been curbed, Religious Freedom of military personnel who oppose homosexuality on religious grounds is restricted, refusal of the resident of the Oval Office to send a rescue force to save the lives of 4 Americans murdered in Benghazi has resulted in a loss in faith by military personnel of their leaders, the failure of the resident of the Oval Office to protect 14,000 straight military males from sexual assaults by new gay members entering the military has been covered up, and forcing new and dangerous Rules of Engagement (ROE) on military personnel in combat has resulted in an increase casualty rate of 358%.

The oppressive actions by the Obama administration over the last 5 years, toward personnel in the US Armed Forces, is negatively affecting “Combat Effectiveness” and/or has been in violation of the US Constitution; those restrictions of freedom in the military personnel, seems to be migrating toward civilians in the US as well, and if nothing is done to oppose the action in Nevada by the Obama administration, the restrictions of freedoms of American citizens, guaranteed by the Bill of Rights will continue to increase.

The Obama administration has been employing government agencies to apply pressure on Obama’s political opponents, and those government agencies have been restricting the freedoms of Americans citizens in the Republic. Examples of how the Obama administration has been employing government agencies to oppress Obama’s opponents are as follows: the IRS scandal prevented hundreds of conservatives organization from participating in the 2012 Presidential election, the Fast & Furious gun running scandal executed by DOJ was designed to restrict gun rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment, the Socialist Obamacare Law was passed to take control of one-sixth of the US economy and replace The Free Enterprise System with a Socialist system.

Cancellation of the stockholders ownership of General Motors that they paid for, and giving control of General Motors to unions was unlawful. Directing the NSA to gather information on organizations and individuals that are opposed to the Obama administration has been opposed by conservative organizations, Obama’s refusal to enforce Federal Immigration Laws designed to protect American citizens from dangerous Illegal Criminal Immigrant resulted in Obama freeing 68,000 Illegal Criminal Immigrants into the general public, and the current assault on the rancher in Nevada by the BLM is in violation of Nevada State Laws, the Tenth Amendment and The Bill of Rights; if the BLM and the Environmental protection agency is allowed to get away with the illegal confiscation of personal property, more of those actions in violation of the US Constitution will be perpetrated by the Obama administration.

Will the Republican leadership in the House take action to protect the individual Freedoms of American citizens guaranteed by the US Constitution—they have the power of the purse to put pressure on all government agencies?

Revisited: Penn State’s ironic ‘child sex abuse’ conference

April 8, 2014/in Culture War, Featured, News, Policy, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Judith Reisman

Rodney A. Erickson, President of The Pennsylvania State University

Rodney A. Erickson, Ph.D., the new president of Penn State, delivered welcoming remarks to attendees at the very first Penn State Child Sexual Abuse Conference Oct. 29-30, 2012. Erickson assumed the presidency Nov. 9, 2011, after the disgraced Graham Spanier was forced to resign as president following exposure of his foreknowledge of Coach Jerry Sandusky’s infamous rapes of young boys.

The 2009 well-funded Penn State Justice Center for Research partnered the conference with the College of the Liberal Arts and University Outreach. The Justice Center’s “press releases,” which appear on the Web, began in 2010. These press releases, like the October conference speakers, ignored the infamous child sex abuse Penn State network.

I never heard the names of former “Coach Sandusky” or “President Spanier” mentioned by a single carefully vetted Penn State child sex abuse speaker. Nor was there a mention of The Second Mile, the nonprofit charity founded by Sandusky & Co. – of course, to help local underprivileged and at-risk youth. The conference speeches are posted on the Internet, so if someone noted these names or events when I sneezed, kindly email those citations to me.

While Mr. Sandusky was convicted of child sexual abuse in June 2012, Mr. Spanier has recently been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. In plainer English, Spanier is accused of a long-time cover-up of Sandusky’s homosexual child rapist preferences.

The conference, attended largely by sexuality “experts,” therapists and survivors, was visible in its denial of a multitude of related facts about the violation of children.

Indeed, many therapists and survivors in the audience were stunned to hear the famous keynoter boldly claim a steep decline in substantiated child sex abuse (Finkelhor) and public safety resulting from sex offender treatment (Kaufman).

Although it would be dandy to believe Finkelhor and Kaufman’s fantasy “statistics,” telling us that all is improving so we must be doing things right, one critic said the massive child sex abuse decline parroted by the sexperts suffers from “the smell test – we on the ground see the problem of child sex abuse getting worse, not better.”

In fact, the expert child abuse denier, Dr. David Finkelhor, is the director of the Crimes against Children Research Center, co-director of the Family Research Laboratory and professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire. Finkelhor has so successfully pleased all big-government political administrations that he – like the Kinsey Institute and similar agencies – has received government grants from 1978 to today.

Despite the exposure of 5,200 Pentagon staffers found downloading “child pornography,” neither this well-known phrase nor “pornography” make it into the sexperts’ prevention lexicon. Who were these people at Penn State to protect? Not children.

Earlier in writing about pornography’s link to adult and child rape, I exposed some of the phony stats cooked by law professor Glenn Reynolds. Glenn and Northwestern law professor Anthony D’Amato claim “Porn up, Rape down” – with psychologists and therapists grabbing onto that shibboleth like a hungry dog on a bone.

The child abuse speakers didn’t dare claim, like D’Amato, that since “teenagers and adults” are using pornography fewer children are raped, yet their silence strongly implied that is the case. They all know the truth. U.S. News and World Report (April 24, 2000) said, “Facing political heat to cut crime in the city, investigators in the New York PPD’s Sex Crime Unit sat on (thousands of) reports of rapes and other sexual assaults.” One officer snarled, “The way crime was solved was with an eraser.”

In 2000 even the FBI admitted that one district “failed to report between 13,000 and 37,000 major crimes.” “A 2000 Philadelphia Inquirer report found from 1997-1999, of 300,000 sex crime reports, thousands of rapes got relabeled ‘investigation of persons’ or ‘investigation, protection, and medical examination’ – non-crime codes.” “This puts one in four rapes in a non-crime category.”

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, U.S. Army (ret.), a West Point psychology professor, said, “Violent crime … is still about five times greater today, per capita, than it was in 1957.” He adds, “We’d have to let 1.5 million convicted offenders go to get down to a 1970s-level incarceration rate. We are lying about the
data.”
The National Institute of Justice Managing Adult Sex Offenders (1997) reported: “The number of adults convicted annually of rape, child molestation, or other forms of sexual assault and sentenced to state prisons more than doubled between 1980 (8,000) and 1992 (19,100). In 1994, state prisons held 88,100 sex offenders compared to 20,500 in 1980.”

Adds Grossman, “Crimestat” had cops bring down crime. “When the NYPD police union went over the data the crime rates doubled in New York City.” Other than murder (reduced via medical technology), “police artificially ‘bring crime down,’ we cook the books.”

“The American Police Beat,” May 2005 quotes Denver Police Lt. James D. Ponzi, a Regis University professor: “Compstat turned into ‘Compscam’ as departments cooked the books to lower crime rates,” never making it into the “National Incident Based Reporting System [NIBRS].” Adds Ponzi, “These ‘lower’ rape statistics don’t reflect what is truly happening in sex related crimes.” For example, “LAPD reported a 28 percent drop in violent crime in 2005, the same year the department reclassified domestic assaults in which the victim suffered minor injuries or had no injuries.”

“In Atlanta, 22,000 crimes were left out of the crime reports. In New York, the crime rates doubled in a precinct when the proper classification was applied by the police union. The list goes on.” Bureaucrats are happy, but “the citizens … get nothing but a false sense of security about the safety of their cities.” Although pornography is absolutely causal in child sexual abuse, other critical falsehoods were given to the attendees.

Again ignoring the massive increase in child sex abuse that coincides with “school sex ed,” Finklehor wants more of the same to lower child sex abuse rates. He claims boys who are “gay” should be supported in their decisions, without any reference to any sex abuse that these boys probably experienced. Hence we lower rates of child sex abuse by labeling children “gay” and saying they liked it.

All speakers ignored the fact that younger victims are more likely to have developed traumatic amnesia; they ignore the increasingly violent nature of child sex abuse, pedophile rings, pedophile proponents, child sex trafficking, institutions harming large numbers of children, child protective services workers refusing to protect and instead reunifying children inappropriately, courts ordering children to live with reported offenders and coordinated disbelief of children when they report sex abuse. Attorneys and advocates in divorce situations advise their clients not to report child sex abuse, since the children are almost always placed with the abusers (Neustein & Goetting 1999 and Steubner, 2011).

Finkelhor also claims “low” recidivism for sex offenders. Ludicrous. Numerous studies show a steady increase in recidivism over time. One attendee stated, “Dr. Kaufman’s talk was disturbingly offender friendly.” Statistics are commonly used to falsify reality. I’ve written extensively on that in my books on the statistical and criminal frauds of Alfred Kinsey. Interesting, that one of the speakers defined statutory rapists as children’s “partners,” the word coined by Kinsey for child rapists.

The speakers claims that a rapist is a child’s “partner,” that children are “engaged in prostitution” and that “children with a crush” can lie to have sex speaks to adopting a predator worldview.

The objection to sex offender registration as “draconian measures” is more predator-protector language, as is, “Children may like the attention,” and “not all victims experience problems.” These claims are disingenuous since problems develop throughout the life cycle and there is no way to assess that truth. “Kids having problems prior to the abuse put them at risk of being abused” again lays the blame on the children. All this while hiding the role of mainlining pornography as the primary culprit in child-on-child and adult-on-child sex abuse.

A very serious complaint came from one survivor who said, “The family courts are really criminal enterprises. Even the Center for Missing and Exploited Children is part of the problem. I collected fliers over five years and found that NCMEC sent four times more fliers looking for women abductors than for men, although men abduct more often. I was appalled. I confronted the president and shortly NCMEC stopped sending fliers and moved to the Internet.”

As violent sex crimes increase, including all sodomy and use of objects, and photos, etc., many professionals, themselves users and/or abusers, must minimize the horror of the growing child sex abuse pandemic. To many hearing these speakers, this appears to have been the subtext of the first Penn State Child Sexual Abuse Conference.

RELATED GRAPHIC:

Gerald_Sandusky_Sexual_Abuse_Findings_of_Grand_Jury

Gerald Sandusky Sexual Abuse and Related Cover-ups. Illustrated from “Report of Thirty Third Statewide Investigating Grand Jury”. Pennsylvania Attorney General. Retrieved 10 November 2011. For a larger view click on the chart. Chart courtesy of Skoch3.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo “Penn Campus” was taken by Bryan Y.W. Shin. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Gross Dereliction of Duty

April 6, 2014/in Commentary, Culture War, Immigration, News, Policy, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Joseph R. John

Obama administration political appointees in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been recruiting and appointing many pro-amnesty lawyers in key management positions throughout DHS. The goal of the Obama administration in placing those pro-amnesty lawyers throughout DHS was to dismantle the deporting infrastructure it took 12 years for the US government to create. Those pro-amnesty lawyers have been preventing ICE Agents, Border Patrol Agents, and CBP Inspectors from enforcing the Federal Immigration Laws they were sworn to uphold.

Those pro-amnesty attorneys have instructed ICE Agents to “walk away” from hundreds of thousands of cases that should be prosecuted. They eventually directed ICE Agents to release 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” into the general public, thus completing the corruption of that once proud Federal Law Enforcement Agency. The “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” were not in jail because of driving infractions—-they were felons who had been tried and convicted in Federal and Superior Courts because of serious criminal infractions, or had been convicted of very serious misdemeanors. Traffic violations like driving under the influence of alcohol or even vehicular manslaughter do not count toward ICE’s description of “Criminal Illegal Immigrant.”

The 68,000 serious “Criminal Illegal Immigrants,” released by the Obama administration will pick up where they left off, and continue with their very serious crime sprees, committing murders, rapes, burglaries, car theft, drug dealing, drug smuggling, human trafficking, armed robberies, attacking law enforcement officers, and much more that they were previously arrested and convicted for.

The pro-amnesty attorneys at DHS could have deported the 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” to Mexico, but opted instead to release those dangerous convicted criminals into the general public.

American citizens who are concerned about the safety of their sons, daughters, grandchildren, sisters, wives, mothers, grandparents, small businesses, etc. will have to be on high alert to protect them from this new and very dangerous threat foisted upon them by the Obama administration.

The “Criminal Illegal Immigrant” releases occurred without the required formal notification of local Law Enforcement Agencies (law enforcement has a need to know whenever dangerous felons are released prematurely, so they can alert police officers of the perceived spike in criminal activity in their jurisdictions), and those dangerous felons were released without notifying the victims of those “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” who will be in fear of their lives because they testified against those felons in court, in order to get them convicted. The political appointees at DHS simply unlocked the jailhouse doors and let 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrant” walk free. Those “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” will now prey on American citizens, and will seriously complicate the task of law enforcement officers in their attempt to protect law abiding American citizens.

That unlawful release of those serious “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” and the complete corruption of DHS by Obama’s appointees into key management positions, is further proof that Obama continues to violate the US Constitution with impunity, as well as violate Federal Immigration Laws of the United States.

In an interview on WBEZ-FM in Chicago on September 6, 2001, Obama said “The US Constitution reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day” and said “the US Constitution has deep flaws, and the Founding Fathers had an enormous blind spot when they wrote it.” He also implied in that interview that the US Constitution was outdated, because he said, “it only reflects the time period of the Colonials and our Founding Fathers.”

Obama raised his right hand twice sworn on a bible to uphold the US Constitution when he was inaugurated in 2008 and 2012; he swore “I, Barack Hussein Obama, pledge to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”—–we know by his actions over the past 5 years, that his two sworn pledges were two more lies to add to:

“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” and “If you like your current health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” and “Your health care premiums will be lowered by $2500.” and
“The public will have 5 days to look at every bill that lands on my desk before I sign it.” and “I knew nothing about the IRS targeting conservative groups before the 2012 election.” and
“I knew nothing about the “Fast and Furious” gun running operation to Mexican drug cartels.” and
“I will have the most transparent administration in history.” and
“I will restore trust in government.” and
”In a speech at the UN two weeks after he knew four Americans were murdered in Benghazi by Al Qaeda terrorists, Obama told the entire world; “The attack on the US Mission in Benghazi was the outgrowth of a demonstration against a YouTube video that went bad.”

American citizens are now used to witnessing one lie after another by the occupant of the Oval Office, yet the left of center liberal media establishment continues to cover up the lies emanating from the Oval Office.

You will be able to read the details of the illegal release of the “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” in the below listed news article. We have information that although 870,000 Illegal Immigrants have been ordered to be deported from the United States, following their conviction in trials in US Federal Immigration Courts, that the pro-amnesty attorneys in key management positions at DHS have ignored those court orders, and those 870,000 Illegal Immigrants remain in the United States; ICE has been told to leave them alone, to “walk away” and “not enforce Federal Immigration Laws.”

Over 40 million unemployed Americans citizens are searching for employment in the 5th year of the worst economic recovery in 70 years, yet their search for employment continues to be undercut by nearly 20 million Illegal Immigrants being paid very low wages under the table with no taxes deducted from their cash payments by US employers. There were over 11 million Illegal Immigrants in the United State when I was recruited as an Armed Federal Law Enforcement Officer in the newly established Department of Homeland Security in 2002—DHS knows that over 800,000 Illegal Immigrants continue to enter the United States thru the wide open borders each year, and for the 12 years since 2002 approximately 9.6 million Illegal Immigrants have come across the wide open borders (you might find it interesting to learn that a DHS official testified that US authorities are not “routinely” notified when foreign sex offenders enter the United States.). So the 11 million Illegal Immigrants figure that the Obama administration and the left of center liberal media establishment has kept referring to for 12 years, is more accurately 20 million Illegal Immigrants, not the 11 million figure that were illegally in the US in 2002. It is interesting to note that US military personnel are employed to secure the borders of South Korea, Afghanistan, and the Sinai, and are not employed by the US Congress or the occupant of the Oval Office to secure US borders.

The American people are wondering, whether the Republican leadership of the House and Senate, intends to do anything about the violation of Federal Law by Obama’s civilian appointees at DHS in the unlawful release of 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrants,” many of whom are violent criminals. The Speaker of the House John Boehner has control of the purse strings and funds DHS. He could have put pressure on DHS’s by threatening to only approve very low salaries for the pro-amnesty lawyers who are aggressively corrupting enforcement of Federal Immigration Laws at DHS.

The current Republican leadership could have done something to stop the release of 68,000 “Criminal Illegal Immigrants” and could insist that the DHS deport the 870,000 Illegal Immigrants who were ordered deported by US Federal Immigration Courts.

It was always the primary responsibility of every one of the previous 43 US Presidents to enforce all Federal Laws passed by Congress, to protect and defend the US Constitution, to enforce Federal Immigration Laws, and to ensure that American citizens were protected from the threats of foreign convicted felons who had been preying on them. The current occupant of the Oval Office, by his actions over the last 5 years, has been intentionally shredding the “Rule of Law” and preventing Federal Law Enforcement Officers from “ enforcing the “Federal Laws” of the Republic that the 43 previous US Presidents upheld in the execution of their office.

SSA Michael Cutler, INS (Ret) provided the below listed information from Senator Jeff Sessions, and highlights how Obama continues to “shreds the Immigration Laws” that he swore to uphold, and cites examples of how Obama “refuses to preserve, protect, and defend the US Constitution”:

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) recently released a critical alert about the status of immigration enforcement in the United States. In it, he writes, “DHS has blocked the enforcement of Immigration Law for the overwhelming majority of violations – and is planning to widen that amnesty even further.”

Put another way, “At least 99.92% of illegal immigrants and visa overstays without known crimes on their records did not face removal.”

Senator Sessions’ alert continues:

“Those who do not facially meet the Administration’s select ‘priorities’ are free to illegally work in the United States and to receive taxpayer benefits, regardless of whether or not they come into contact with immigration enforcement.”

What we have is an Administration that is creating a de facto amnesty and encouraging more Illegal Immigrants to illegally enter the United States, granting employment authorization to “DREAMERS” and other illegal aliens, all the while American workers continue to struggle to find employment.

SSA Michael Cutler’s most recent commentary for California for Population Stabilization (CAPS) addresses the serious damage being done to America, and Americans by the ongoing expansion of the use of what the Obama administration claims is “prosecutorial discretion” but which, in reality amounts to “Gross Dereliction of Duty.”

SHOCK: New paper advocates ‘exaggeration’ & ‘manipulation’ about global warming to ‘enhance global welfare’

April 4, 2014/in Culture War, Environment, Must Read, News, Science, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Marc Morano

A new peer-reviewed paper published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, titled “Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements”, is openly advocating that global warming proponents engage in mendacious claims in order to further their cause.

The paper appears to openly advocate lying or “information manipulation” to further the cause of man-made global warming and “enhance global welfare.”

The authors, Assistant Professors of Economics Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao, note how the media and environmental groups “exaggerate” global warming and then the offer their paper to “provide a rationale for this tendency” to exaggerate for the good of the cause.

The paper was published on February 24, 2014.

The author’s boldly note in the abstract of the study that the “news media and some pro-environmental have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency.”

“We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA (International Environmental Agreements) which will eventually enhance global welfare.”

The authors of the paper are Fuhai Hong, an assistant professor in the Division of Economics, Nanyang Technological University and Xiaojian Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. (fhhong@ntu.edu.sg)

The complete Abstract of the paper is reproduced below:

“It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency by using a modified International Environmental Agreement (IEA) model with asymmetric information. We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA, which will eventually enhance global welfare. From the ex ante perspective however, the impact that manipulating information has on the level of participation in an IEA and on welfare is ambiguous.”

Reaction to the paper has been very critical. Craig Rucker of Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow CFACT (Climate Depot’s parent company) noted in an April 4 blog: “What will shock you is that two professors not only candidly admit it, but published a paper in a peer reviewed journal touting the beneficial effects of lying for pushing nations into a UN climate treaty in Paris next year!”

Rucker added: “The authors not only believe that their dubious ends justify their shady means, they institutionalize ‘information manipulation’ as a tactic, host panels about it at climate conferences and publish it in journals. They’re shameless.”

CFACT Davi’s Rothbard noted: “Global warming skeptics have long charged that alarmists are over-hyping the dangers of climate change. Now comes a new paper from two economists in Singapore and Hong Kong that actually advocates exaggerating global warming fears to get countries on board international environmental agreements.”

According to Kevin Glass of Townhall.com, the paper claims that the urgency of climate change makes it OK to deceive the public about the projected consequences of global warming. They don’t actually use the word “lying,” but by calling for “informational manipulation and exaggeration,” they certainly think the ends justify these very questionable and over-heated means.”

This is not the first time that global warming advocates have been accused of being deceptive.

The late Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider wrote in 1989: “So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” Discovery Magazine (October, 1989, p. 45-48).

Former NASA global warming scientist James Hansen conceded in a 2003 issue of Natural Science that the use of “extreme scenarios” to dramatize global warming “may have been appropriate at one time” to drive the public’s attention to the issue.

Sarasota County, FL Public School District: Allegations of fraud, waste and abuse answered

April 3, 2014/in Education, Must Read, News, Taxes, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Rich Swier

Sarasota County School Board. Front row: Todd, Zucker, Brown. Back row: Goodwin, Kovach

I received a letter from a Sarasota County School District employee. The letter contained a number of concerns/allegations in it. I asked Sarasota Superintendent Lori White to respond to three of those concerns/allegations directed specifically at district activities.

Here are the specific Sarasota County school district allegations (bolded) verbatim and the RESPONSES from Scott Ferguson, Communications Specialist, Sarasota County Schools:

I have never seen such waste as what this [Sarasota school district] administration does with tax money. We have seen them toss brand new books in the dumpster that are still wrapped in cellophane.

RESPONSE: Below you will find the language from the state statute regarding disposal of instructional materials. We are very frugal in our purchasing efforts and buy only what is needed and will be used by our teachers and students. Textbooks typically rotate on a five-year purchase cycle. If textbooks or ancillary materials are still in reasonably good condition after the five years, we offer them to our charter schools on a first- come, first-served basis and they are responsible for boxing them and picking them up. During last year’s replacement of elementary reading materials, we also encouraged teachers to keep the leveled readers as additions to classroom libraries or send them home with students. One school raised money to ship some of the old materials to a school in Guatemala and some books were donated to local churches and after-school programs.

This year’s adoption of English-Language Arts materials for grades six-12 will replace 11-year-old resources. Older materials will all be recycled due to their condition. Our district implemented a new recycling program at each school last year; the district earns a small rebate based on the weight of goods recycled. Incidentally, older textbooks are often shrink-wrapped before being stored; the fact that a book is shrink-wrapped does not mean that it is new.

Language from state statute 1006.41: Disposal of instructional materials

(1) Instructional materials that have become unserviceable or surplus or are no longer on state contract may be disposed of, under adopted rule of the district school board, by:

(a) Giving or lending the materials to other public education programs within the district or state, to the teachers to use in developing supplementary teaching materials, to students or others, or to any charitable organization, governmental agency, home education students, private school, or state.

(b) Selling the materials to used book dealers, recycling plants, pulp mills, or other persons, firms, or corporations upon such terms as are most economically advantageous to the district school board.

(2) The district school board may prescribe by rule the manner for destroying instructional materials that cannot be disposed of as provided in subsection (1).

(3) All moneys received for the sale, exchange, or other disposition of instructional materials shall be deposited in the district school fund and added to the district appropriation for instructional materials.

An outrageous amount was spent on basketball hoops at an area high school so that they could be electronically lifted up after hours so that no one could use them when school was out. (How does the sum of $40,000 seem to you)

RESPONSE: The most recent gymnasium project is at Venice High School. It includes electronic basketball backboards; six backboards and system/hardware/wiring was about $39,000. We have similar systems in all of our comprehensive high schools. They are not there to prevent people from using the courts, but rather to respond to various changing needs of the space. Gym floors are first and foremost instructional spaces, used for classes like physical education. In addition, they support a large number of extracurricular activities, which often require different configurations of the space, including, in some cases, the use of the gyms as emergency shelters. Home games and assemblies in gyms require the four side basketball backboards to be lifted up, so that bleachers can be pulled out. Electronic basketball backboard lifts allow staff to change the configuration more quickly and safely than the previous manual systems.

Over $25,000 each was spent on several people to train them in the same course. One of these people is set to retire this coming month [March-April]. I guess now the schools will hire him as a consultant at an outstanding price – let the taxpayers beware!

RESPONSE: We know of no training for district employees that cost over $25,000 per person. We can research specific allegations but without specifics of what training the person alleges cost this much, we can’t further address this allegation.

I appreciate the candid replies from the School District and employees who voice concerns about expenditures of property taxpayer dollars. I will leave it up to the readers of this column to decide if Sarasota County School Board is properly supervising district expenditures or not.

U.S. taxpayers to spend $400,000 for a camel sculpture in Pakistan

April 1, 2014/in Budget and Finance, Must Read, News, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Jihad Watch

It isn’t enough that U.S. taxpayers have for years now been subsidizing the Pakistanis’ support for jihad terrorists. The New York Times reported on that at length back in 2008. No,that jizya is not enough. There has to be more, more, more — more money spent, more submission, more tribute. Even up to and including a fiberglass camel.

“Exclusive: U.S. Taxpayers To Spend $400,000 For A Camel Sculpture In Pakistan,” by Aram Roston for BuzzFeed, March 31 (thanks to Jerk Chicken):

The State Department is planning to spend $400,000 in taxpayer funds to buy a sculpture for the new American embassy being built in Islamabad, Pakistan, according to contracting records.

The work, by noted American artist John Baldessari, depicts a life-size white camel made of fiberglass staring in puzzlement at the eye of an oversize shiny needle — a not-so-subtle play on the New Testament phrase about the difficulty the wealthy have in entering the kingdom of heaven.

Officials explained the decision to purchase the piece of art, titled “Camel Contemplating Needle,” in a four-page document justifying a “sole source” procurement. “This artist’s product is uniquely qualified,” the document explains. “Public art which will be presented in the new embassy should reflect the values of a predominantly Islamist country,” it says. (Like the Bible, the Qur’an uses the metaphor of a camel passing through the eye of a needle.)

To emphasize Baldassari’s fame, the contracting officials pulled a section from Wikipedia. “John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images.”

In a statement, State Department press spokeswoman Christine Foushee said the proposed purchase comes from the department’s “Office of Art in Embassies.” In new construction projects, she said, a small part of the total funds, about 0.5%, is spent on art purchases.

Steven Beyer of Beyer Projects, the art dealer for the project, said the government reached out. “They approached us,” he said in a phone interview. “We were, of course, quite surprised.”

The $400,000 price tag “is actually a very a reduced price for this sculpture,” he said. “There is an art market that makes these prices, and this is one of the most prominent American artists.”

Another copy of “Camel Contemplating a Needle” is on display at Hall Wines in Napa Valley, Calif., and Beyer said that copy sold for far more then the State Department would pay.

He points out that while some Americans may find it frivolous for the government to pay for art, others will find it important. “It depends on what part of the public you are in,” he said. “If you go to the museum and enjoy art and are moved by it, things cost what they cost.”

To put the sculpture’s price tag into a local perspective, the average yearly income in impoverished Pakistan is about $1,250 per year, according to the Agency for International Development.

Christie angrily defends appointment of Muslim judge — opposition to appointment is “crap”

5 Things the National Guard Jihadist Wants You to Know About Islam

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is John Baldessari: Camel (Albino) Contemplating Needle (Large) courtesy of Beyer Projects.

Power Play: Political influence of Florida’s top energy corporations

March 31, 2014/in Featured, News, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Rich Swier

The nonpartisan government watchdog group Integrity Florida released a research report titled “Power Play: Political influence of Florida’s top energy corporations”.

The findings conclude that, increasingly, the Florida Legislature sets its agenda and policy outcomes based on the needs of large political donors rather than the public interest. In one recent example, the sitting state senate president openly explained his position on a public policy issue as supporting whatever one major campaign donor tells him to support. A large Budweiser distributor contributed nearly $300,000 to political candidates and committees aligned with Senate President Don Gaetz and had the edge on its smaller craft beer industry competitors.

A similar pattern exists for the energy sector in Florida where the Florida Legislature maintains a traditional, regulated monopoly-utility model. This report examines the political influence of the state’s four largest electric utility companies: Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy (formerly Progress Energy), TECO Energy and Gulf Power.

These four corporations registered, on average, one lobbyist for every two state legislators each legislative session between 2007 and 2013. For the last five election cycles, these electric utilities were among the largest donors to state-level campaigns in Florida.

In the same period of time, the policy wins for the four electric utilities included rate increases for customers, legislation that allows early cost recovery for nuclear facilities that have not been built, the defeat of a proposal that would have increased electric bill transparency and the removal of consumer-friendly state regulators who opposed two proposed rate hikes.

Summary of Research Findings

Major campaign donations. Electric utilities contributed more than $18 million to state-level candidates and party organizations between the 2004 and 2012 election cycles.
Significant lobbying. Lobbying spending by Florida’s four largest electric utilities was more than $12 million between 2007 and 2013.
Revolving door and cronyism. Electric utilities have made a point of hiring former state regulators and have employed the firms of several sitting state legislators.
Higher electric bills for consumers. Floridians have faced higher electric utility bills from each of the four corporations examined in this study in recent years.
Anti-consumer regulations. The Florida Legislature and the Florida Public Service Commission routinely side with electric utilities rather than consumers.

Summary of Policy Reform Recommendations

Apply uniform ethics rules for legislators and local officials. If local officials are banned from legislative lobbying, then apply the same rules to legislators lobbying local officials.
Put inspector general reports online. Inspector general investigative reports and audits should be posted online by the Florida Public Service Commission and all state and local agencies.
Put gift and client disclosures made by all state and local officials online.
Require additional disclosure for political donations from government vendors and companies regulated by the Public Service Commission.
Establish electric bill transparency. Unbundle bills with detailed disclosure of rate components.

ABOUT INTEGRITY FLORIDA

Integrity Florida is a nonpartisan research institute and government watchdog whose mission is to promote integrity in government and expose public corruption. More information at www.IntegrityFlorida.org.

Obamacare is an American Catastrophe

March 31, 2014/in Healthcare, Must Read, News, Policy, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Alan Caruba

If you type in “Obamacare” on Wikipedia you will discover 25,500,000 links. That’s a lot of news coverage and related commentary about the Affordable Care Act. Most of it is negative. The more people have learned about it, the less they like it and, if we had a Congress that could or would do anything about it, it would have been repealed by now.

A March 28 Associated Press poll revealed that only 26% of Americans support Obamacare, a point less than December 2013 and January 2014.

The Republicans in the House of Representatives have voted more than 60 times to repeal or dismantle Obamacare. The Senate, namely Harry Reid its Majority Leader, has killed all efforts to address what is clearly a national catastrophe. When passed in 2009, not one Republican member of Congress voted for it. When it was passed, then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, famously said they had to pass the 2,700 page act in order to find out what was in it.

In 2010, voters gave power in the House to Republicans, but the Senate remained under Democrat control. The fact that Barack Obama, when campaigning to become President in 2008 and thereafter lied repeatedly to Americans about it has tarnished his reputation and his approval ratings. Since then he has altered the law unilaterally despite the fact that he utterly lacks any constitutional right to do so.

In February the Heritage Foundation’s legal experts put together a list of seven illegal actions by the President that included delaying Obamacare’s employer mandate, giving Congress and their staffs special taxpayer-funded subsidies, preventing layoff notices from going out just days before the 2012 election, as well as non-Obamacare actions that included gutting the work requirement from welfare reform, stonewalling an application for storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, and making “recess” appointments when the Senate was still legally in session.

The first element of the Obamacare catastrophe is an utterly lawless President who Congress has done little to restrain and nothing to impeach.

Another element of the Obamacare catastrophe has been the failure of the mainstream media to address the impact the law has had on America. On March 26, the Media Research Center reported that “They’re just burying the story. They aren’t in denial. They know the truth. They’re just choosing to ignore it. They are pretending there are no broken promises about keeping your insurance plan, or keeping your doctor, or lowering your premium by $2,500 a year.”

An analysis by the Center of the three network evening news broadcasts in 2014 “found only 12 stories on three networks in almost three months.” For example, “NBC Nightly News” broadcast only one story on Obamacare and that was on January 1st when Lester Holt called it “a new era in health care in this country.” ABC “World News” provided only six minutes and 58 seconds on Obamacare and “CBS Evening News” managed to provide only 19 minutes and 17 seconds over the course of three months.

“None of the networks,” said the Center’s analysis, “dared to report the ongoing opposition of the American people to Obamacare in 2014, even when they were the ones doing the polling.”

Sen. John Thune, (R-SD) posted an article from the Washington Free Beacon on his website, “Fourth Anniversary of Obamacare Brings Billions in Costs to Economy” that cited a report by the American Action Forum that concluded that “From a regulatory perspective, the law has imposed more than $27.2 billion in total private sector costs, $8 billion in unfunded state burdens, and more than 159 million paperwork hours on local government and affected entities.”

Sen. Thune said, that “Four years after Obamacare became the law of the land, millions of Americans have little but canceled policies, fewer choices, and skyrocketing costs to show for it. From seniors to young adults, to middle-class families, and small businesses, Obamacare has been to be an equal opportunity offender…people living under this law are acutely aware of the harm Obamacare is causing in their lives.”

I have held back from writing about Obamacare because so many others are doing so, but it is impossible to hold back from declaring it the worst law ever passed by Congress and to urge readers to go to the polls in the November midterm elections and remove from office those Democrats who voted for it and are seeking reelection.

There is little need for me to do an Obamacare analysis, but I can recommend one that appeared in The Weekly Standard on February 17. Those who have been following the history of lies and broken promises will find it a detailed study. Is author, Christopher Conover, summed it up saying that “Obamacare has failed miserably on nearly every major promise made about it. The processes used to enact and implement the law have been tarnished by actions of questionable legality and a pervasive lack of transparency.”

The ultimate impact of Obamacare on the economy must wait for a calculation, but the demand for its repeal must increase to a point where a future Congress must respond to the voter’s demand. Without that, we are headed for an economic collapse.

Democrats Being Democrats

March 31, 2014/in Elections, Featured, News, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Paul R. Hollrah

Having begun my career as a lobbyist under the dome of the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I know a thing or two about political corruption in the Keystone State and the City of Brotherly Love… I’ve seen it “up close and personal.” So it came as no surprise when the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story on March 16, detailing the results of a sting operation launched in 2010 under then-Pennsylvania attorney general, now governor, Tom Corbett.

However, to fully understand the evolution of the sting operation it is necessary to begin at the very beginning. The central character in the sting is a man named Tyron B. Ali, age 40, an immigrant from the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad. Ali is the owner of a day-care center in North Philadelphia and a registered lobbyist in Harrisburg.

Ali first came to the attention of law enforcement officials in April 2009 when he was arrested in connection with a $430,000 fraud. According to the Inquirer, Ali was accused of submitting phony invoices and forging hundreds of bank statements, tax forms, and paychecks in a Pennsylvania program designed to aid low-income families and seniors. State prosecutors were also aware that, in order to circumvent statutory campaign contribution limits, Ali was found to have been lining up illegal “straw” contributions for the campaign of Daniel D. McCaffery, a Democratic candidate for Philadelphia DA, now a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge.

In that case, campaign finance records showed that four contributions of $2,500 each were made to the McCaffrey campaign, all from associates of Ali. However, at about the same time that Ali delivered the four checks to the McCaffrey campaign, McCaffery staffers learned of Ali’s arrest in the unrelated fraud case. McCaffery’s campaign manager telephoned the four donors and one admitted that the money was not his; the money was Ali’s.

Then, in a surprising move for a Democrat, McCaffery reported the violations to attorney general Tom Corbett, a Republican, and promptly refunded the illegal contributions. It was then that a top prosecutor, Frank Fina, chief of the attorney general’s Public Corruption section (who earlier led the criminal investigation of Penn State assistant head football coach, Jerry Sandusky), was assigned to handle the Ali investigation. In the hope of receiving a more lenient outcome in his fraud indictment, Ali agreed to assist Fina’s investigation into widespread official corruption by wearing a body wire.

In order to keep Ali from “wandering off the reservation,” the attorney general assigned a 24-year veteran of the attorney general’s office to serve as his driver and constant companion. In the eighteen month period between October 13, 2010 and April 23, 2012, Ali produced some 400 hours of audio and video recordings detailing 113 conversations with Pennsylvania political figures, Republicans and Democrats. And although Ali dangled inducements before a great many politicians, of both political parties, only four Democratic lawmakers and a Philadelphia traffic court judge took the bait.

Rep. Louise Bishop took $1,500; Rep. Vanessa Brown took $4,000; Rep. Michelle Brownlee took $3,500; Rep. Ronald G. Waters accepted multiple gifts totaling $7,650; and Traffic Court Judge Thomasine Tynes received a Tiffany bracelet. All are Democrats, all are from Philadelphia (representing precincts that gave not one single vote to Mitt Romney in 2012), and all are African-Americans.

According to the Inquirer, “Things were going so well that, in the summer of 2012, prosecutors considered setting Ali up in a fancy lobbying office near the Capitol. The plan was to rig the office with hidden cameras and expand the hunt…” However, before they could implement the plan, Pennsylvanians went to the polls and elected Democrat Kathleen Kane as attorney general. Within days after taking office Kane brought the investigation to an abrupt halt.

Thumbing through the Democrat Party playbook, Kane found that the simplest and easiest ploy to support her brazenly partisan contempt for the rule of law would be to do what Democrats always do when they find themselves without a plausible argument: she threw down the race card. In a statement to the Inquirer on Friday, March 14, Kane called the investigation “poorly conceived, badly managed, and tainted by racism,” saying it had “targeted African Americans.”

In truth, what motivated Kane was the need to keep Philadelphia’s black voters on the Democrat political plantation. It just wasn’t smart politics for a Democrat attorney general to prosecute four black Democrat lawmakers and a black Democrat judge for accepting bribes, even though most of their crimes were caught on audio and/or video tape.

The Inquirer report reminded readers that, during her 2012 campaign for attorney general, Kane had been critical of what she felt was the slow pace of the Sandusky investigation at Penn State. Once elected, she hired a former Philadelphia federal prosecutor to investigate Fina’s handling of the case. After a full year of investigating the investigation, Kane declared that her investigation was taking longer than she had anticipated.

In Democrat-speak, that is another way of saying that it takes a lot longer to uncover Republican wrongdoing when there is no wrongdoing to be uncovered. But that doesn’t normally stop Democrats when they’re out to find dirt on Republicans. According to the Inquirer, within hours after taking office, when Fina was in his last week on the job, Kane sent technicians into his office on a “black bag” mission, after working hours, for the purpose of removing the hard drive from his computer… apparently in the faint hope of finding some usable tidbit of damning evidence relating to his conduct of the Sandusky case.

If nothing else, the mess in Pennsylvania is a perfect example of what happens when the people elect Democrats to public office. Since the publication of the Inquirer story on March 16, the Democrat Party has been hit by a long list of scandals, from New York to California, where State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), an outspoken foe of 2^nd Amendment gun rights, has been charged with multiple offenses, including charges relating to illegal gun trafficking.

But the biggest Democrat fish caught in the corruption net is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)… the most despicable Democrat in a long list of despicable Democrats. Reid is charged with digging into his campaign chest to give his granddaughter, Ryan Elizabeth Reid, a gift of $17,000, even though she is an aspiring actress in New York and did no useful work for the Reid campaign. Several members of Congress have gone to prison for committing similar crimes. It remains to be seen how “Dingy Harry” manages to slither out of this predicament.

This is not to say that there is not an occasional rotten apple in the Republican barrel, but in all my years as a lobbyist and as a political operative I have found very few Republicans who’ve demonstrated the sort of moral and ethical lapses that we regularly see among Democrats. During my years in the political arena I can recall only two instances in which I was solicited for a bribe. The first was a member of the Kentucky State Senate and the second was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Both were Democrats. My immediate response in both instances was, “I’m sorry, but we just don’t work that way.”

I have long felt that it is impossible to be elected to public office as a Democrat without first making a deal with the devil. And while there exists a single common thread of ideology that binds all Republicans… of all ages, races, creeds, professions, and economic status… the same is not true of Democrats. The Democrat Party is a coalition of special interests, each of which demand something specific, and quite different, from government.

For example, when a Democrat candidate appears before a black audience, his/her stance on quality education must be vastly different from the message he/she delivers before an audience of unionized public school teachers. And when that same politician campaigns before a group of radical environmentalists, his/her message on issues such as the Keystone XL pipeline must be vastly different from the message he/she would deliver before a roomful of blue collar workers.

In order to be successful as a Democratic candidate it is absolutely essential to have a separate position on all of the major issues for each of the party’s many constituencies, and to remember without fail which lies you’ve told to each of them. It is such a flexible moral compass… standard equipment for all Democrats… that made it possible for all those members of the Pennsylvania Black Caucus to succumb so easily to Mr. Ali’s proffered goodies.

But all is not lost; the Pennsylvania bribery sting may yet have a silver lining. It is possible that the greatest beneficiary of the Black Caucus political scandal will be Republican governor Tom Corbett. As matters now stand, Corbett’s approval rating is somewhere in the mid-30s and his reelection chances appear to be in a bit of trouble. But when the Democrats choose a candidate from among seven candidates running in the May primary, that candidate will be called upon to defend attorney General Kane and the bribe takers of the Black Caucus. Yes, the fish does rot from the head and it’s clear that Barack Obama’s Chicago-style politics has infected Democrats all across the country… just in time to backfire on the Democrat Party and its candidates in November.

LIST OF DESPICABLE Ds: Camden, NJ – Mayor Dana Redd; Flint, MI – Mayor Dayne Walling; Detroit, MI – Mayor Dave Bing/Mike Duggan; Oakland, CA – Mayor Jean Quan; St. Louis, MO – Mayor Francis Slay; Cleveland, OH – Mayor Frank Jackson; Gary, IN – Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson; Newark, NJ – Mayor Corey Booker/Luis Quintana; Bridgeport, CT – Mayor Bill Finch; Birmingham, AL – Mayor William A. Bell.

CNN Won’t Cover “Local Story” of Dem State Senator Busted by FBI for Missile Arms Deal

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Djembayz. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Dozens of Elected Lawmakers Arrested by the FBI: Guess What — They’re all Democrats!

March 29, 2014/in Courts & Law, Featured, News, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Joseph R. John

World Net Daily reported that the FBI executed a dozen arrest warrants against elected officials in eight states. Elected officials like Democratic mayor of Charlotte, N.C., Patrick Cannon, who was arrested Wednesday. The offices of Democratic New York state Assemblyman William Scarborough were raided Wednesday, and Democratic state Senators John Sampson and Malcolm Smith were indicted on federal corruption charges. In Rhode Island, House Speaker Gordon Fox resigned after his office was raided this week as part of a joint investigation of the IRS, the FBI, the U.S. attorney’s office and state police.

These arrests all have one thing in common, that the media has been reluctant to report, every one of the elected officials are “Democrats” The arrests are explained in more detail in the World Net Daily article here. The arrests were executed by my former colleagues in the FBI in the states of New York, New Jersey, California, Rhode Island, Michigan, Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina.

The American people must be wondering when Obama will try to interfere with the FBI and tell Holder to rein the FBI in? It doesn’t look good to have so many corrupt Democrat elected officials arrested—without a single Republican arrest.

The corruption and scandals which occurred in the Democratic Party have gotten completely out of hand over the last 5 years. We have witnessed the Fast & Furious illegal gun running operations in Mexico & Syria, the cover-up by Admiral Mullen of the fact that Obama refused to execute “Cross Border Authority” resulting in the death of 4 Americans (including 2 courageous Navy SEALs who saved 32 lives). We watched as the IRS targeted conservative groups so they couldn’t participate in last national presidential election. Democratic appointees in DOD have been violating the “Freedom of Religion” of Chaplains & members of the US Armed Forces.

President Obama’s repeated violation of the US Constitution with impunity and his refusal to uphold the valid laws of the land he disagrees with and that he swore to uphold in his oath of office. The Democrats in Congress are allowing the President to illegally change the flawed Obamacare Federal Law, thirty-nine times to date, in violation of the US Constitution.

Democratic appointees at DOD are destroying the “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Army and the US Navy preventing the US Armed Forces with the capability to defend the Republic from foreign and domestic enemies. The FEC is allowing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to funnel thousands of dollars in political donations to his granddaughter’s company. Americas citizens have been witnessing democratic appointees in government abuse the freedom accorded to all Americans by the Bill of Rights.

Growing numbers say in polls they do not trust Obama to use the information NSA has gathered on them to target them like Democrats used the IRS to target conservatives. Finally, the Democrats are keeping the borders “wide open” in order to facilitate the free flow of illegal immigrants into America, which is facilitating the infiltration of Middle Eastern terrorists from a safe house in Mexico City.

By its own actions the Democratic party, a party we once respected, no longer is protecting and defending the US Constitution. Rather it is intentionally restricting the US Armed Forces from their ability to defend the Republic from enemies both foreign and domestic. The Party of JFK is facilitating the destruction of the 238 year old free enterprise system that built the most effective economic engine in the history of mankind. Sadly, they are facilitating Obama’s turn to Socialism.

Socialism has failed where ever it has ever been tried—in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, Communist Cuba, Socialist Venezuela, Communist East Germany, Communist Romania, Communist Czechoslovakia, Communist Poland, Communist Bulgaria, Communist Yugoslavia, Communist Hungary, Communist Latvia, Communist Lithuania, Communist Estonia, Communist Ukraine, and Communist China.

Yet the corrupt Democratic party, led by Pelosi, Reid, Obama, and funded by Soros, is trying to drive the United States economy into a $24 trillion debt, continue to increase oppressive taxes on both the American people and businesses, overregulating business driving them out of the country, restricting energy production, and installing a socialist system where distribution of wealth will be the cornerstone of its economic policy resulting in the majority of the population being on government welfare.

The destabilizing and un-American activities and programs executed by the Democratic party over the last 5 years, listed above, goes hand and glove with the “Voter Fraud” perpetrated and supported by the democrats thru the ACORN organization they supported. ACORN was charged with multiple criminal activity in many states following the presidential election of 2008; subsequently, all 30 ACORN state chapters were closed, because the Congress restricted government agencies from providing funding ACORN, so ACORN simply decided to change its name.

New and different names were adopted for each of the 30 different state ACORN chapters; for the most part, they kept the same leadership, and reopened with new names in 30 states (the goal of the reorganization was to be able to continue receive federal funding thru HEW). Those newly named ACORN organizations are now being funded by the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Catherine Sibelius.

In the general presidential election of 2012, Sibelius used federal funds to pay the organizations that changed their names from ACORN, and they again engaged in massive voter fraud in the key battleground states in 2012 like they did in 2008. Despite of the disastrous & incompetent roll out of the flawed Obamacare Law, Sibelius was not removed; she was probably retained because of her experience in employing programs at HEW to fund the follow-on organizations that replaced ACORN; Sibelius is again funding the follow-on organizations that changed their names from ACORN so they can engage in voter fraud again in the 2014 election.

From what we have been able to determine, with only 7 months to go to the 2014 mid-term election, the Republican party has done relatively little to stem the expected massive violation of federal election laws that will take place again in 2014.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of handcuffs is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

A History of the Disastrous Global Warming Hoax

March 28, 2014/in Environment, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Science, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Alan Caruba

“It is the greatest deception in history and the extent of the damage has yet to be exposed and measured,” says Dr. Tim Ball in his new book, “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science”.

Dr. Ball has been a climatologist for more than forty years and was one of the earliest critics of the global warming hoax that was initiated by the United Nations environmental program that was established in 1972 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established in 1988.

Several UN conferences set in motion the hoax that is based on the assertion that carbon dioxide (CO2) was causing a dramatic surge in heating the Earth. IPCC reports have continued to spread this lie through their summaries for policy makers that influenced policies that have caused nations worldwide to spend billions to reduce and restrict CO2 emissions. Manmade climate change—called anthropogenic global warming—continues to be the message though mankind plays no role whatever

There is no scientific support for the UN theory.

CO2, despite being a minor element of the Earth’s atmosphere, is essential for all life on Earth because it is the food that nourishes all vegetation. The Earth has passed through many periods of high levels of CO2 and many cycles of warming and cooling that are part of the life of the planet.

“Science works by creating theories based on assumptions,” Dr. Ball notes, “then other scientists—performing their skeptical role—test them. The structure and mandate of the IPCC was in direct contradiction of this scientific method. They set out to prove the theory rather than disprove it.”

“The atmosphere,” Dr. Ball notes, “is three-dimensional and dynamic, so building a computer model that even approximates reality requires far more data than exists and much greater understanding of an extremely turbulent and complex system.” No computer model put forth by the IPCC in support of global warming has been accurate, nor ever could be.

Most of the reports were created by a small group of men working within the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia and all were members of the IPCC. The result was “a totally false picture supposedly based on science.”

The revelations of emails between the members of the CRU were made available in 2009 by an unknown source. Dr. Ball quotes Phil Jones, the Director of the CRU at the time of the leaks, and Tom Wigley, a former director addressing other CRU members admiting that “Many of the uncertainties surrounding the cause of climate change will never be resolved because the necessary data are lacking.”

The IPCC depended upon the public’s lack of knowledge regarding the science involved and the global warming hoax was greatly aided because the “mainstream media bought into and promoted the unproven theory. Scientists who challenged were denied funding and marginalized. National environmental policies were introduced based on the misleading information” of the IPCC summaries of their reports.

“By the time of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report, the politics and hysteria about climate change had risen to a level that demanded clear evidence of a human signal,” notes Dr. Ball. “An entire industry had developed around massive funding from government. A large number of academic, political, and bureaucratic careers had evolved and depended on expansion of the evidence. Environmentalists were increasing pressure on the public and thereby politicians.”

The growing problem for the CRU and the entire global warming hoax was that no clear evidence existed to blame mankind for changes in the climate and still largely unknown to the public was the fact that the Earth has passed through many natural cycles of warmth and cooling. If humans were responsible, how could the CRU explain a succession of ice ages over millions of years?

The CRU emails revealed their growing concerns regarding a cooling cycle that had begun in the late 1990s and now, some seventeen years later, the Earth is in a widely recognized cooling cycle.

Moreover, the hoax was aimed at vast reductions in the use of coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as nuclear power to produce the electricity on which all modern life depends. There was advocacy of solar and wind power to replace them and nations undertook costly programs to bring about the reduction of the CO2 “fossil fuels” produced and spent billions on the “green” energy. That program is being abandoned.

At the heart of the hoax is a contempt for mankind and a belief that population worldwide should be reduced. The science advisor to President Obama, John Holdren, has advocated forced abortions, sterilization by introducing infertility drugs into the nation’s drinking water and food, and other totalitarian measures. “Overpopulation is still central to the use of climate change as a political vehicle,” warns Dr. Ball.

Given that the environmental movement has been around since the 1960s, it has taken decades for the public to grasp its intent and the torrents of lies that have been used to advance it. “More people,” notes Dr. Ball, “are starting to understand that what they’re told about climate change by academia, the mass media, and the government is wrong, especially the propaganda coming from the UN and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

“Ridiculous claims—like the science is settled or the debate is over—triggered a growing realization that something was wrong.” When the global warming advocates began to tell people that cooling is caused by warming, the public has realized how absurd the entire UN climate change argument has been.

Worse, however, has been “the deliberate deceptions, misinformation, manipulation of records and misapplying scientific method and research” to pursue a political objective. Much of this is clearly unlawful, but it is unlikely that any of those who perpetrated the hoax will ever be punished and, in the case of Al Gore and the IPCC, they shared a Nobel Peace Prize!

We are all in debt to Dr. Ball and a score of his fellow scientists who exposed the lies and debunked the hoax; their numbers are growing with thousands of scientists signing petitions and participating in international conferences to expose this massive global deception.