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NEW YORK (AP) — Scores of hotel rooms paid for with public money for people displaced by Superstorm Sandy have been vacant for weeks.
It's only costing a million dollars - chump change to this administration. Wasn't it interesting to see the frenzy engendered by the recent Powerball drawing? Millions jumped at the possibility of snagging part of less than a billion dollars while the federal government continues its program of credit-card spending; running through a billion in a week.
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Larry Summers, chair of the White House National Economic Council when the 2009 stimulus was developed, suggested that President Obama will eventually tax and regulate junk food to drive people to eat more healthily.
Of course, there are a number of questions: what is "junk food"? being one. Another: is it the perogative of the government to tax and regulate what was once considered freedom of choice? Is it okay for them to decide that you must "go vegan"?
There are precedents, and many of them: if you drive, you must pay federal taxes on fuel, tires, and other necessities. You must wear a seat belt. If you smoke, you must pay a tax, and where you may do so is regulated.
Now that government will be requiring you to purchase health-care insurance, what limitations - if any - exist in regard to their ability to tax and regulate what you consume? If they decide that a bacon-cheeseburger is unhealthy, are they not within their rights, as defined by precedent, to tack on a $5 surcharge?
If you're concerned about rampant taxation, fear not: they'll just call it a "fee". After all, they're from the government, and they're here to help.
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Satellite imagery has recorded a
massive die-off of vegetation, apparently linked to human activity and prompting calls for increased regulation in an effort to head off global catastrophe.
"We were amazed at the continental scale that this die off occupied", said Dr. John Jorgenson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
While the exact mechanism for the phenomenon is unclear, the researchers believe that it is related to increasing fossil fuel use, especially home heating oil, during the fall when temperatures turn cooler. "We know that particulate pollution from the burning of fuel oil can have a negative effect on healthy vegetation, and so the correlation between heating fuel use and vegetation die-off constitutes 'smoking gun' evidence for this association", Jorgenson said.
As observed in the image above, areas of reddish-brown, indicative of dead or dying vegetation, already occupy large swaths of the New England area in North America.
By contrast, note that Iceland, which predominantly uses clean, geothermal energy for home heating, reveals no such anomalies.
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Environmeddlists have been pushing the lab-rat lifestyle (not for themselves, in general - but for everyone else). It's become part of the environmeddlist mantra: you consume too much, your comfort level is too high, and everything that they view as wrong is all your fault. If they can't guilt-trip you into acceding to their demands, then they'll sue you into compliance with their beliefs.
Up on Mt. Hood, Timberline managers want to build a set of mountain-bike trails, to be used in the summer months when ski-season is largely shut down. The trails would criss-cross the empty ski runs. That's a lawsuit: environmeddlists claim that it might harm salmon. If they can't use spotted owls, then they use fish, as seen in the second link, embedded above.
Environmeddlists always know more than biologists, and they almost always sue to block whatever the biologists have in mind.
Audubon Society, Sierra Club, and others litigated for years against plans by USFWS and a couple of zoos to capture all 21 remaining California condors, place them in an intensively-managed captive-propagation program with an eye toward expanding the birds' constricted gene-pool, and eventually release suitable candidates into suitable habitat. Eventually, the environmeddlists lost at all levels, and the program moved forward.
Today, there are over 350 condors, and a number have been successfully reintroduced - and by successfully, I refer to not only surviving, but mating and rearing young. Audubon subsequently took credit for the effort with a cover story in their magazine describing their "fight" to save the condor. Unsurprisingly, they failed to note exactly which side of the fight they'd been on.
It's all about separating the gullible from their money, so that they can fight on to further restrict your freedom.
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They decided to push even higher taxes on the wealthy, and - who would ever have guessed? - two-thirds of the millionaires in the country left.
Far from raising funds, it actually cost the UK £7 billion in lost tax revenue.
It is of course unrealistic to expect American Democrats to learn through simple observation; they are determined to do whatever it takes to ensure that all Americans are equally impoverished. It increasingly appears that the only reasonable course of action is to let them do their thing - and when the inevitable occurs, they will be unable (try as they might) to blame anybody else.
Personally, I'm tired of all of their "fairness and equality" crapola. Equality has never been, aside from inception (all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights), part of America. We have equality at the start; equality in outcome is not part of the deal. Democrats and other Leftists want to impose that, but it will never be so: as Orwell noted, such efforts at imposition always result in some being more equal than others. Democrats want to ensure that they're part of the former.
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This was briefly mentioned a few
days ago: N.H. Democrat Stacie Laughton, a convicted felon still on probation and still paying restitution for its crimes, was nonetheless elected to the state's House of Representatives. A Really Big Deal was being made by the media over "her" victory as the first openly transgender elected official in the state.
That hoopla was quickly sublimated as its past and present became known; legal questions emerged because, while it is legal for a convicted felon in the state to run for office and to serve, once the sentence has been completed, the current probation and restitution components have clearly not been fulfilled. Apparently with an eye toward avoiding a potentially protracted legal battle with its attendant publicity, it has chosen to step down.
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Surprisingly, the feds are completely unprepared to open the much-vaunted "health exchanges"; technologically and financially, they have nothing but an empty mandate. Barky and company assumed that states would all create their own exchanges, each of which would report to the feds for authorization and guidance, but to date only around 17 states (all Democrat) have even begun the task.
Cost is part of the problem:
Ohio estimates it will cost $63 million to set up an exchange and $43 million to run annually, based on a KPMG study.
But it's only part of the problem, as over half of Americans are opposed to the law; as a result, many states are passively fighting back by simply "going limp" - in effect, forcing the feds to set up exchanges for them. This is that part of the law where Barky and Nanny Pelosi, having passed it, get to find out what's in it:
ObamaCare gave states the option to let the federal government set up an exchange for them.
Who'd ever have guessed that states might actually take them up on that?
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(Punta Arenas, Chile) Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from South Pole Station, by the pilot of a ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.
"At least James died for something he believed in", said Mrs. Schneider. "He died while trying to raise awareness of the enormous toll that global warming is taking on the Earth."
Dang. Almost made it, too. Filming the devastation caused by global warming would've sent a powerful message.
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A guy who runs a small computer shop in the beautiful Portland suburb of Lake Oswego took offense at Barky Obama's famous claim that "you didn't build that!" and posted a sign in his shop window expressing his dissatisfaction. Shortly thereafter, a woman from nearby Dunthorpe entered the store and, in a display of the sort of tolerance™ so often associated with the Left, berated him over the sign - and allegedly slapped him when he refused to remove it. It was a harbinger of things to come.
Following the election:
"I had all sorts of obscene letters taped to my window. I had [manure] thrown at my window. I just left it there as a reminder of how these people really are."
But the fun didn't stop there; the City itself has now got involved, offering cash money to his landlord in an effort to get the sign removed (in the name of "beautification", naturally). There may be a way around it all, though: the new "requirement" being pushed by the city states that window signs be explicitly for "business purposes only". As it happens, business has increased since the sign went up.
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Last May, some 800 union members walked off the job at a Caterpillar hydraulics plant in Joliet, Illinois.
After a few weeks, more than 100 returned to work, fed up over the lack of progress in the talks and pinched by the union's $150-a-week strike pay, some workers say.
“They are not effective,” says Steven Olson, 54, a former IAM member who crossed the picket line last summer. “With high unemployment and companies willing to relocate, you just don't have the options that you did 30 years ago. The whole world has changed.”
This month, Mr. Olson and another Caterpillar worker filed an unfair labor practices charge against the union local with the help of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, saying it's illegal to punish them for returning to work. Mark Mix, president of the foundation, says 61 other Caterpillar workers who also crossed the picket line have called the organization looking to lodge similar complaints. “I suspect we will have some more charges here shortly,” he says.
The natives are growing restless - and fed up with union bosses who're insulated from any strike effects: strikes don't affect the cushy pay and premium benefits enjoyed by the bosses; only the rank-and-file ("brothers and sisters) take the hit.
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