Where Are My Keys?

Why the Democrats lost the Obama Sequester battle..

Pretty simple, really.  The disaster scenarios advanced by the White House didn't materialize:

Problem was, when the spending cuts came, nobody noticed. This led the Obama administration to try to up the pain by focusing cuts in places where people might feel the pain: canceling White House tours for schoolchildren, or furloughing air traffic controllers.

That didn't work either. The tour-canceling just looked mean, and the problem with targeting air travel is that members of Congress, and their top donors, fly a lot. Huge bipartisan majorities in Congress thus quickly passed legislation forcing the FAA to make cuts elsewhere instead.

The whole thing was a bust, and has me thinking that someone in Congress -- or, if he's smart, President Obama -- ought to propose more across-the-board cuts as a means of addressing our swollen deficit and national debt. Critics of across-the-board cuts always say that we should make "smart cuts" instead of using a "meat axe." But the reason why we have a ballooning national debt is that our politicians are clearly incapable of making "smart cuts."

Rich get richer under Obama..

Like pretty much everything he has set out to do, the opposite happens.

I'm sure the fact that their kid doesn't have autism isn't helping to ease the pain..

I'm sure Jenny McCarthy will show up for the funeral:

Orange County health officials said a baby died from whooping cough last week.

This is the first whooping cough death the county has seen in decades. Officials said it's been at least 20 years or more since someone died of the disease.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, and other diseases are making comebacks, because so many parents are deciding not to vaccinate their kids.

"It's really unfortunate. We're saddened to hear that an infant died of something like this," said Dain Weister with the Florida Department of Health in Orange County.

Officials said the family chose not to vaccinate their child. Some parents are choosing not to fully vaccinate their children because they worry there is a link between the vaccinations and autism.

"A lot of people may not know (that) even the person who did that study admitted that study was flawed," Weister said.

Health officials said that has caused vaccinations to drop and the number of cases of measles, pertussis and other preventable diseases to go up.

Last year, Orange County had one case of measles and 42 cases of pertussis. This year there have already been four cases of measles and 12 cases of pertussis.

 

Disgusting that a child died from something easily preventable.

Breitbart was right, NYTimes finally "finds" the story..

Today, Andrew Breitbart is vindicated.

Andrew Breitbart would tell anyone who would listen, at great length, about the Pigford fraud. Pigford was a class action lawsuit brought by black people who claimed to be farmers, and said the Agriculture Department had discriminated against them in making loan decisions. A court case had identified 91 potential claimants — but the Obama administration decided to engage in a more massive payout: $50,000 to virtually anybody who claimed that they had “attempted to farm” but could not because of discrimination.

Dangling $50,000 checks in front of people, while requiring almost no documentation (an affidavit from a pal backing you up was plenty good enough), predictably led to rampant fraudulent claims:

“It was the craziest thing I have ever seen,” one former high-ranking department official said. “We had applications for kids who were 4 or 5 years old. We had cases where every single member of the family applied.” The official added, “You couldn’t have designed it worse if you had tried.”

. . . .

In 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina, the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.

In Maple Hill, a struggling town in southeastern North Carolina, the number of people paid was nearly four times the total number of farms. More than one in nine African-American adults there received checks. In Little Rock, Ark., a confidential list of payments shows, 10 members of one extended family collected a total of $500,000, and dozens of other successful claimants shared addresses, phone numbers or close family connections.

The scope of the problem runs into billions of dollars:

[A]n examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion.

Especially infuriating: when prosecutors were given a test case of fraud, in which the claimant admitted lying in his application, they declined to prosecute — and the reason both amuses and infuriates:

In Arkansas, prosecutors rejected a test case against a Pine Bluff police officer who had admitted lying on his claim form. Paula J. Casey, the United States attorney in Arkansas in 2000, said that singling out one individual raised questions of selective prosecution.

“The defendant could go to the jury and say: ‘Everybody else did this. Why am I standing here?’ ” she said.

There’s so much fraud, you see, that you can’t prosecute just one person. So you can’t prosecute anybody.

This is, of course, absurd logic. If it’s hard to prosecute people for reasons of proof, and you have someone who confessed, it’s not “selective prosecution” to charge that person. This reasoning, followed to its logical conclusion, would make it impossible to prosecute Internet fraud, which is certainly rampant and difficult to prosecute.

Somewhere, Andrew is smiling.

Media Matters (and others) relentlessly attacked Breitbart when he first brought this massive fraud to light.  Big surprise, they are silent on a story that appeared on page A1 of the New York Times.  I wonder why?

This should help make long-distance relationships easier..

Pretty cool use of technology:

 

Settled science, right?

Fracking is safe:

Shale gas resources are a blue bridge to our green future, said a Stanford University geophysicist.

Hydraulic fracturing can be done safely, and it’ll have to be, because the world will be doing more of it, said Dr. Mark Zoback.

“We cannot stop thinking toward the future just because we have abundant natural gas. If it’s a bridge, there has to be something on the other side. And what’s on the other side is a carbon free energy future,” Zoback said.

Zoback was part of the Vail Global Energy Forum. He was also part of a committee formed to study the safety of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that releases natural gas trapped deep underground.

The committee was small and diverse, composed of industry types, academics and environmentalists, Zoback said.

“We determined that there was no question shale gas could be developed safely. But we put forth a number of questions,” Zoback said.

For example, they’d really like to know what’s in those fracking fluids, Zoback said.

“Our committee called for full disclosure. We frankly thought that for the best way for industry to make its point, was to get it all out there and tell the public that they’re not putting anything dangerous in there,” Zoback said.

Tens of thousands of wells over millions of hydraulic fractures raise issues such as surface water contamination and air pollution, Zoback said.

He said he appreciates fact-based discussion, but has little use for shriekers and sloganeers.

“Instead of fact-based and intelligent discussions, unfortunately those issues tend to get caught up in those no-fracking bumper stickers. It has become a cause celeb,” Zoback said as a slide of Yoko Ono flashed onto the screen.

“Sometimes it’s frustrating to hear hysterical people talk about issues that really don’t exist. But that’s one of the ways these regulatory improvements occur,” Zoback said.

Of course the Left will scream that this is junk, because someone (probably Big Oil) paid off this group to say what they want to hear.

Isn't is funny how that only works in one direction with the Left?  Whenever the issue is something they believe in, the motives of "their" scientists are pure.  If the data suggests otherwise, those "scientists" have been bought off by Special Interests.

Good Guy with a gun stops Bad Guy with a knife..

Doesn't fit the narrative set by the Left and the MSM, so don't expect to hear much about it.

Police say the suspect purchased a knife inside the store and then turned it into a weapon. Smith's employee Dorothy Espinoza says, "He pulled it out and stood outside the Smiths in the foyer. And just started stabbing people and yelling you killed my people. You killed my people."

Espinoza says, the knife wielding man seriously injured two people. "There is blood all over. One got stabbed in the stomach and got stabbed in the head and held his hands and got stabbed all over the arms."

Then, before the suspect could find another victim - a citizen with a gun stopped the madness. "A guy pulled gun on him and told him to drop his weapon or he would shoot him. So, he dropped his weapon and the people from Smith's grabbed him."

By the time officers arrived the suspect had been subdued by employees and shoppers. Police had high praise for gun carrying man who ended the hysteria. Lt. Brian Purvis said, "This was a volatile situation that could have gotten worse. We can only assume from what we saw it could have gotten worse. He was definitely in the right place at the right time."

Cool GIF..

Here's Yu Darvish throwing five pitches at once.  Notice how his arm is in the same place at the point of release, and how hard it is to try and hit a ball thrown by this guy.

 

 

 

Calm before the Obama Sequester storm on Weekly IUC?

Weekly IUC improves, with the number dropping to 339,000.  Consensus was for 350,000, so a nice surprise.  What won't be nice will be the reality of all those furloughed FAA employees hitting the lines next week.

A point-blank admission, and the MSM yawns..

Remember how folks on the Left tried to pin the actions of the crazy guy in Tucson (who shot Gabby Giffords and others) on the "crosshairs" on Sarah Palin's website map?  Remember also how there was absolutely zero evidence that the shooter was aware of the website, or that it contributed to his shooting spree?

Well, what happens when a shooter does admit that a website influenced his behavior?  Front-page news, right?

 

I guess it's only news if it is a Conservative.

How many times do we need to see these examples of double-standards and media bias, before some of the critical thinkers on the Left stop eating what is being spoon fed to them?