Free Republic

“Kaiser started this, right? “

No Roosevelt and the unions. They saw it as a way to make unionizing easier. Then it spread and became the defacto way folks get health insurance.

“How do we reverse engineer the Federal Leviathan?”

It would be pretty easy. Just get several million people and give them way more power, guns, and money than anyone else and tell them to do whatever they want. Tell them that if anyone questions or challenges them, they can do whatever they want to that person.

Voila. You have reverse engineered the federal government.

“It DOES help them to quit their job. I heard Rush say that if they quit or retire they are allowed to continue on their EXISTING HC plan. Unlike us schmucks who lose coverage when we lose our jobs, we get to keep paying for their healthcare coverage even after they move on. “

Well then, the solution is to make them take Obamacare after they quit. The rest of us have to.

“Democrat panties are rapidly bunching.”

Nah. If Venezuela sells them, they won’t end up in the hands of law abiding Americans, conservatives or Christians. That’s the only firearm issue that worries dems.

Will misses the mark. The founders did not. They knew we should always distrust the government. It is made up of fallible people who will always eventually abuse their powers. The more power, the more money, the more abuse.

So Lerner is just the face of the inevitable. Anyone who thinks her sin is that she causes people to mistrust the government has completely misdiagnosed the problem.

Martin is on trial. The prosecution needs to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Martin did not act so as to place Zimmerman in reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily injury. So Martin’s acts are on trial.

“Should she be told to just point in the general direction of the bad guy and empty the magazine?”

No. Try it sometime at a range. You won’t hit anything. She won’t either.

Have you considered suggesting she dry practice? Cheaper and you can develop your skill a LOT that way.

“What’s not in doubt is that they were collecting this data and storing it. For what purposes and could any other organizations (Organizing for America) gain access to this collected data and use it for political purpsoes?”

Attack the messenger. The reactions of Feinstein, McCain, Graham et al effectively admitted the truth of what Snowden said. I really don’t care much about him or his defalcations.

“When the state has the capability to know everything except the difference between right and wrong, it won’t end well.”

The money quote.

“So whose lungs are they going to rip out?”

Lungs would really be better for the common good in a randomly chosen 12 year old than in some Tea Partier, don’t you think? And, you can make the 12 year old’s parents beg their Lord for the lung also—a nice side benefit.

“222 people are waiting for lung transplants in Sarah’s region alone, including six children aged 10 and younger. Nationally, about 1,700 people are waiting for lung transplants, including 31 children 10 and younger. Lung transplants are very high risk — only 50 percent of recipients survive longer than five years.”

Of course, noone is asking the foundational question. Why is the director of HHS even relevant to this process? Where does government get the power to take one person’s organ and give it to someone else? Is that an enumerated power of congress?

LOL

“Authentic conservatism is the only way it’s going to work”

Maybe he’s authentic. He sure as heck ain’t conservative.

“His favorables are actually highest among Democrats per NBC/WSJ. “

I wonder why that is. Duh.

The republican party is over if it nominates Christie. It’s hard to imagine they could find a candidate more obnoxious to the base than McCain, Dole, and Romney. But there he is!

Big deal. So Napolitano lies and signs a certification. Maybe if you required a certification also from house (recorded vote) and the Senate (recorded vote) of at least 60 votes.

“I think these Tea Party groups got greedy and thought the $$$ would come rolling in if people could exempt their donations...something that didn’t happen. They gave up their freedom for the prospect of making money.”

Nonsense. Contributions to a 501(c)(4) are not tax deductible. That status means that the organization is not taxable. But that’s because inflow and outflow are supposed to be about equal over time. It’s a form of non-profit organization.

“You can’t rail against the big government mess while taking advantage of it. That’s hypocrisy and leads to the compromising of principles.”

Nonsense again. If you mean business, you will take advantage of every crack in the death star to destroy it. Once it is disintegrating into space, I’ll go back to worrying about ideological purity.

He would like to appoint a democrat. But that would hurt his presidential ambitions.

“Number three, many of those meetings were for healthcare implementation.”

Whew. That makes me feel so much better. Thanks Stephanie.

“CTA and Metra buses and trains,.. “

In other words, you can have guns, but you can’t take them with you anywhere useful.

“Obama will condemn her actions, he will demand that she be terminated and he will be applauded for his bravery.”

Don’t forget that after a brief period, she will end up a tenured professor or director of some NGO at a huge salary. The left takes care of its own who take a bullet for the cause.

“To purchase a product that has the potential to maim or kill another human being you can (now) walk into a gun store, no questions asked,”

So there will follow, I assume, a registry for baseball bats and buckets?

This decision is a pretty big deal here in Colorado and one of our first bits of good news in quite a while.

“In ‘07, I asked McCain what was the most fundamental problem with his reform proposal. “What I underestimated was the lack of trust and confidence in government,” he told me. “I mean, I said time after time, ‘We’ll enforce the borders. We’ll enforce the borders. Here’s X billion dollars to do it. We’ll enforce the borders.’ They just didn’t believe us.”

And we were right. The border was never secured despite McCain’s solemn promises. There was never a serious attempt to secure it. It was all smoke and mirrors to get amnesty.

“By contrast, 68% of requests were issued only with a subpoena...”

Hmmm. So 50% are conservatives. I wonder who the other 18% are?

I note the democrat senators are not raking GE over the coals. It has huge foreign cash holdings too. I wonder why?

“He is forming a second business and placing 29 under eachh one.”

I’m pretty sure there are new HHS regulations prohibiting that, too. Common ownership means the businesses will be consolidated.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see the CA legislature one day pass a bill that will not allow businesses to leave.”

Actually, the FTB already makes it hard. They keep trying to tax you for several years after you have left the state. They levied on my personal bank account for several thousand dollars more than eight years after I left CA, with no warning on a completely bogus claim.

It took me months to get the money back. No interest paid on the free loan they had confiscated.

“Good luck proving that. No employer would be dumb enough to admit as much.”

Juries will be allowed to infer that. And, company emails will be killers in this regard. Because companies are doing exactly that for exactly that reason, as Obama expected them to. And there will be emails in most companies discussing exactly that. The penalties are a big part of the financing of Obamacare.

“This is as far as the See?BS investigation will go. They will abandon any effort to tie responsibility to Obastard.”

Actually, the following parties are expendable to the left in the following order: Susan Rice and Zero. Hillary is widely viewed as a 2016 shoe-in against any R. I don’t think the Old Media will let her go down without a big fight. I don’t think Biden has the juice to take HRC down. And Kerry isn’t smart or tough enough—he’s a putz and she and Bill are vicious street-fighters and Dems are scared of them.

So my prediction is Susan Rice takes the fall first. If that doesn’t calm things down, maybe Zero gets hurt enough to be a badly lamed duck for three years. But HRC comes out minimally injured. She doesn’t get any Heinz ketchup money for 2016, though.

“or becomes a surplus despite Obama”

Not to worried about that. Gas prices are high and Obamacare is coming. They will prevent any big revenue producing boom. It would require a REALLY big revenue producing boom to create a surplus.

Besides, if the deficit gets too low, Congress will spend it up again.

“Quick - spend it on something!”

LOL. The California approach. Spend it when you have it. Spend it when you think you might have it. Spend it when it won’t have to be paid for ten years. Or to paraphrase Al Davis, “Just Spend, Baby!”

Reid has one vote. Cruz has one vote. Each vote comprises 1/100th of the vote on the floor.

Reid needs to get over himself. I like that Cruz is getting under his skin. That means he is effective in a good way.

Texas would have to fend off millions trying to move there from liberal states were it to secede.

But it’s moot. Washington would never put up with the loss of tax revenue out of Texas without a war. Nor would it tolerate another nation located so close to the mouth of the Mississippi river. Look at a map of east Texas and the distance from New Orleans. The Mississippi river system is the largest system of connected navigable waters in the world. And it connects the American midwest to the rest of the world.

“Who was the architect of the “US Movie to Blame” meme ? I want that person arrested and tried for treason.”

It’s not illegal for politicians to lie, unless they are under oath. Then, as a practical matter, the rule only applies to Republicans who lie under oath.

Actually, backing off at this point is logical. He has done huge damage in his five or so years in office. He’s just about played out. The immigration bill is his last gift to tyranny. And it is being run mostly by Republicans for him.

The infrastructure changes made are fundamental and institutionalize a different form of government that we have had before. It is unlikely they will be reversed anytime soon. So all the left has to do now is run out the clock, prevent reversal of the changes, and let time crush the country.

“What kind of powerful drug is this dude on?”

Money and Power.

“Sadly, half of America has good reason to be skeptical of the White House.”

Actually, it’s 100%. But about half are willfully blind.

“The secretary-general urges respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries in the region...”

Except, of course, Israel.

“Last week, Energy Department researchers found that rules requiring utilities to use renewable energy were under attack in over half the states they exist in; such laws might have better luck fending off Bachmann-esque fusillades if they re-focus their rhetoric around their cost-savings, energy independence, or other benefits,...”

LOL. The problem is that message would have to be focused on explaining to conservatives how requiring utilities to use renewables is a “cost saving measure” for which consumers will have to pay about 25% more.

Did I read correctly that this stuff causes ectopic pregnancies? My wife almost died from an ectopic pregnancy.

“The new world order oligarchs don’t indict their members ...”

Oh yeah? What about Jon Corzine?

Never mind.

“But instead, our politicians have stood idly by as we have lost tens of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.”

I differ here. It’s not the job of politicians to save jobs. They cannot do it and if they could, they shouldn’t. It’s their job to create an infrastructure—courts, police, property recordation systems, etc within which people create jobs.

Sounds like a great business opportunity for a gun friendly lender to generate a lot of new, high-quality business.

“And will the GOP summon the courage to do anything about getting the story.”

The Saudi royal family owns a substantial portion of both parties. None of them want to jeopardize cushy consulting jobs after congress.

“I think of entropy as a tendency toward thermal equilibrium. I think the “disorder” explanation is misleading.”

I think so too. A high entropy system could also be regarded as a system where the probability distribution over all possible outcomes is uniform. The spiker the distribution, the lower the entropy.

I think it’s easier to think about this causal entropy concept this way—making the probability of all possible outcomes in the future as equal as possible.

You see that happening in the author’s video demos of Entropica. The system pieces shown seem to me to be moving toward low probabability states and making them more likely—thus, making the distribution across states more uniform.

I’m not real comfortable with the emergence aspect of this. I suspect the authors are giving the system a goal—maximize the entropy across possible future states. That forces emergence the behaviors noted. But tying that to the universe implies, I think, a mechanism that makes inanimate systems know how to do that. Once you have intelligence, I can see how humans might maximize in that manner. But suggesting that flatworms or rocks might be maximizing their entropy across possible future outcomes is a pretty big leap.

“The Utah prairie dog isn’t exactly on the brink of extinction the state is home to an estimated 40,000 but the rodent is protected under the Endangered Species Act.”

Here in Colorado, there are that many within one mile of my house. They are clearly the dominant species South of Denver. Dems will be voting soon to give them scoped rifles with hi-cap magazines to keep the population of Republican pests down.

“Why do we even have a DHS?”

To harass Christians and other enemies of Zero’s brave new world.

“The problem is they will demand the Scouts accommodate them.”

Yup. And the first time a parent refuses to let their son tent with a teenage homosexual unsupervised, there will be a lawsuit.

“Holy Sh*t, he’s really in trouble now.”

Not really. Seems to me NOW is OK with Muslim domestic violence. It’s a cultural thing, you know?

“Actuaries are self-regulated, which some say makes them unaccountable.”

Well, we can’t have that. They need to be government employees so the powers that be can tell them what conclusions they should reach. It will make the actuarial computations a lot easier. “What’s that boss? Only a 2% projected increase. Sure thing.”