Well, 2012 stunk the place up. Let's dump
that thing and see if we can do any better in the coming year. For a retrospective on the year 2012, it's always worth a visit here.
As the old bromide goes, only the good die young, and so we're still stuck with the usual jerks, most of whom are career politicians - though the media remain over-represented as well. You could detonate nukes in Washington and New York City, and a week later, Barky would pop up, bowing to Mecca and then lecturing us on the need for balance, while the media types would be frantically throwing questions at him regarding his feelings on the latest Kardashian pregnancy. True to form, Barky would take no questions, due to an important engagement at the golf course.
The past year truly sucked for many people, although our local tax-law perfesser's pick for the presidency, Johnny Edwards, seems to be getting on well with his former mistress - they may even get married. Their neighbors have reportedly been complaining, however, so they may have to move - rumor has it that he's contemplating purchasing the country of Brazil to limit the possibility of future noise complaints.
Things have been only marginally crappy
around here, though my bumper-sticker has attracted mixed reviews. Some people, as it happens, have no sense of humor. Generally, I find that they drive Subarus with roughly three dozen stickers adhered to the back (and occasionally the side) of their ride. It's easy to spot a confirmed Lefty. They always wave, though they only use one finger. It's nice, though, to see those with disabilities are still able to get out and about on their own.
Best wishes for a much improved new year, from all of me to all of you.
It seems that young people are increasingly skeptical of the cost/benefit ratio when faced with paying $150,000 for an art history degree and then finding that the only jobs they can get are at coffee shops. It could be that, anyway - or it could be the fact that "liberal" has lost a lot of its cachet in recent years, which is why so many now refer to themselves as "progressives", despite the inherent contradiction. They just hope nobody'll notice that their "progressive" goals are uniformly regressive.
What's really needed, these days, is a complete paradigm shift: we've had liberal arts colleges for years, and they're going down the tubes, so the time has come for some real Hope'n'Change™. Let's give conservative arts a try. Can't hurt; might even be valuable, as conservatives don't tend to pee money away on artsy and feel-good stuff. They do cost/benefit analysis on a daily basis.
Let's face it: the liberal arts colleges are home
to some of the most regressive leftists you'll ever find. They're all about making you poor, so that everybody (except them) is equal, and then they'll give you "free stuff".
It may not be what you'd like, but it's all that they figure you need.
Conservatives aren't going to give you an Obamamobile.
Though if you can qualify to purchase a gun, we'll be more than happy to help on control. Just ask.
No, this isn't about the Fecal Cliff; it's about the collision of federal courts, and whether or not freedom of religion persists in the USA:
On Nov. 11, U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton refused to grant a preliminary injunction to stop the mandate from being enforced on the Greens while the court decided their case on its merits. In his ruling on the injunction, Judge Heaton determined that the Greens were not likely to establish they had a right to “free exercise” of religion while operating Hobby Lobby.
The Greens appealed their request for an injunction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. A panel of two appeals court judges refused their plea.
As a result, the Left was ecstatic: Hobby Lobby either complies or gets whacked with daily fines of $1.3 million, starting tomorrow. But wait - out of the blue of the northern sky comes...Sky King! Well, maybe not, but in a similar case, the 7th Circuit not only issued an injunction, it slammed the 10th Circuit decision as well:
The government also argues that any burden on religious exercise is minimal and attenuated, relying on a recent decision by the Tenth Circuit in Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, No. 12‐6294 (10th Cir. Dec. 20, 2012). Hobby Lobby, like this case, involves a claim for injunctive and declaratory relief against the mandate brought by a secular, for‐profit employer. On an interlocutory appeal from the district court’s denial of a preliminary injunction, the Tenth Circuit denied an injunction pending appeal, noting that “the particular burden of which plaintiffs complain is that funds, which plaintiffs will contribute to a group health plan, might, after a series of independent decisions by health care providers and patients covered by [the corporate] plan, subsidize someone else’s participation in an activity condemned by plaintiff[s’] religion.” Id. at 7 (quoting Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. v. Sebelius, 870 F. Supp. 2d 1278, 1294 (W.D. Okla. 2012)). With respect, we think this misunderstands the substance of the claim. The religious‐liberty violation at issue here inheres in the coerced coverage of contraception, abortifacients, sterilization, and related services, not—or perhaps more precisely, not only—in the later purchase or use of contraception or related services.
The decision in the 7th Circuit not only gets it exactly right, it also opens the door to Hobby Lobby for immediate injunctive relief. Those daily $1.3 million fines that the Left was crowing about aren't going to happen.
Nor is this a situation in which an evil corporation declines to provide health coverage, or declines to provide contraception coverage. They're very clear about their willingness to continue to provide preventative contraceptive coverage:
They simply ask that they not be forced to subsidize what their religious beliefs tell them is infanticide. Their employees are in no way prevented from purchasing abortifacients on their own, nor are they discouraged from doing so; the owners of the company simply object to a government mandate that would force them to pay to provide these for employees despite the religious views of the owners.
Another aspect, left entirely unaddressed, would appear to involve issues of equality - clearly, the mandate applies only with respect to female employees; male employees would never have any use for such products. And this brings up a fundamental disparity in so-called "healthcare insurance" in regard to governmental interference: it ignores the fact that men and women are different.
Why should either gender be obliged by government mandate to pay for coverage that they will never need? What is fair, or even rational, about requiring men to pay for "well baby care" and contraceptives when the men are not themselves reproductive? And why should women pay for prostate exams when they lack a prostate?
If lower health care costs are the goal, then every service should be selectable; as any cable subscriber can attest, "bundled" packages generally suck.
Barky packed the place with a bunch of supporters and went yapping along (anybody else noticed that TOTUS has been replaced? Instead of two big teleprompters, the Bark now has a couple of tablets side-by-side on his podium). The most unbalanced president in the history of the country talked for a bit about - you guessed it - balance. As in:
I’m willing to do more, but it’s going to have to be balanced. We’re going to have do it in a balanced responsible way.
In other words, as has been mentioned here before, his plan is to pull the same stunt that the Democratics pulled on H.W.: raise taxes with a promise of future spending cuts that somehow never materialize.
Some terms have simply become so over-employed as to have achieved the status not only of complete meaninglessness, but annoyance as well. It's time for them to go.
"Fiscal Cliff": "If only those who utter these words would take a giant leap off of it."
That about sums it up. LSSU has its list of contenders for elimination here. "Assault rifle" seems a good candidate as well, as almost nobody who uses the term has any idea of what they're talking about.
Up to 60,000 patients die on the Liverpool Care Pathway each year without giving their consent, shocking figures revealed yesterday.
A third of families are also kept in the dark when doctors withdraw lifesaving treatment from loved ones.
Despite the revelations, Jeremy Hunt last night claimed the pathway was a ‘fantastic step forward’.
As might be expected, a fair number of folks disagree. The LCP, as it's referred to, amounts to nothing less than protracted euthansia, in which the target selected for death is sedated as food and hydration are withdrawn. Expect this - or a similar protocol - to be implemented in America as Obamacare is fully deployed; the old farts and the disabled children, after all, make no contribution to the economy.
Put down the magazine and put on your thinking cap, boys - a couple of Kansas lesbians wanted to experience the joy of birthing, ao they found some schmuck on Craigslist to be a sperm donor. They all signed papers absolving him of any responsibilities, financial or otherwise; all nice and legal. Then they took his delivery, went home, and broke out the ol' turkey baster. And eventually, lo and behold, they had a baby!
And so it was that after a time, the lesbian couple broke up, and as surely as the sun rises in the east, the biological mother applied for welfare, unleashing the legal beagles of hell. It turns out that, since the insemination was not performed by a doctor, the state of Kansas held that the donor is the father, and all paperwork aside, he nonetheless owes child support for the lesbians' little bundle of joy.
Mooch probably can be forgiven for assuming that the coveted title of "most admired woman in America" would fall naturally to her. After all, her husband, Barky, snagged the Gallup pollsters' "most admired man in America" nod. Alas, 'twas not to be: the Benghazi biach got it again, for the 17th time in her illustrious career. America clearly has passed the point of no return.
Not to be out-done, Joe Biden was named the 2012 Joke of the Year.
In his characteristically subtle way, Biden has been hinting that he might run for the White House in 2016, when he would be even older than John McCain was when Biden said the Arizona senator was too old for the presidency. No one has ever successfully sought the presidency before from an assisted living home. It would be Biden's third unsuccessful presidential bid.
That talking head over at CNN - the Brit guy - is just a hoot! Not content to make it clear on television alone that he is, in fact, a pompous idiot, he's been over on Twitter, "educating" Americans about our country's founding documents:
You may recall that Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson submitted her resignation within two weeks of announcement that investigation had begun into illegal use of "alias" email addresses for agency correspondence among Lisa, various subordinates, and extragovernmental organizations. At about the same time, I noted that it's fairly likely that another investigation will be opened on another front - her diversion of EPA documents to private academics; placing them out of the reach of pesky congressional and FOIA requests. The idea behind this was simple: to regulate, claiming that science was on their side, without ever having to produce supporting documentation.
Those diversions appear to have come too late: a noted advocate for sound science has already received some 3500 pages of documents, and due to the revelations contained therein, has filed suit against Lisa Jackson and the EPA. The suit pertains largely - and most damningly - to the "science" that EPA apparently intended to conceal in relation to their recent push to regulate particulate emissions and dust at the 2.5 micron level - which they refer to as fine particulate matter, or PM2.5. These particulates were of special interest as they are commonly associated with vehicle exhaust and emissions from coal-fired powerplants (though abundant through natural sources as well).
As you may realize, EPA has only to publish a regulation in the Federal Register for it to have the effect of law.
In July 2011 EPA stated in the Federal Register announcement of its Cross-State Air Pollution Rule that “a recent EPA analysis estimated that 2005 levels of PM2.5 and ozone were responsible for between 130,000 and 320,000 PM2.5-related and 4,700 ozone-related premature deaths….”
And to cap it all, last September EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson told the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, “Particulate matter causes death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should.”
How did they determine this? According to the lawsuit, they engaged in illegal human experimentation:
“EPA obtained their PM2.5 from a diesel truck,” explained Dr. David Schnare, a former EPA litigator who is now director of American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, which filed the lawsuit in Virginia. “It is difficult to overstate the atrocity of this research.
“In the context of rules established after scientific horrors of World War II and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments,” Milloy said in a press release announcing the lawsuit, “the notion that EPA would pipe high levels of PM2.5 and diesel exhaust into the lungs of unhealthy people to see what would happen is simply appalling.”
Milloy claims that subjects were not informed of health risks, much less that they would be participating in tests of substances that EPA suspected may be lethal. Three doctors who allegedly participated in the project; two of whom work for EPA, while the third is a university physician. No word on whether or not they goose-step and salute.
Interestingly, the very media which so zealously bombarded Americans with stories about Watergate and Iran-Contra are conspicuously absent of late.
