Free Republic

Exactly. It would have been a more interesting and informative article if it compared the amount of fecal matter and bacteria of various types in swimming pools to that present in natural bodies of salt and fresh water that have animals doing their business in them and have all kinds of run-off going into them. I am taking a wild guess that swimming pools are cleaner than “nature”.

My question: is the misuse of the audit power for a political purposes a crime? Same question for the disclosure of confidential taxpayer information? There were criminal charges in the State Department passport scandal and this appears to be a bigger, worse attack on our democracy.

We should be grateful that Rubio has exposed himself this far in advance of the election. Here’s a novel idea: how about enforcing the law? All this talk about the Rubio plan not being amnesty is a total fraud: those who register for the program will have achieved legal status and will not be required to leave the country. How is that not amnesty? Rubio’s focus on how strict the citizenship process would be misses two points: first, those here illegally should be required to leave the country (anything else is amnesty); and second, is this a bit anachronistic - how many low-income immigrants really want to become US citizens if they can stay here legally without citizenship? Maybe that is what immigrants wanted a couple decades ago, but how important is to most illegals today, separated from the right to remain in the country?

I remember when as a child one would hear in Catholic families, in my family, ‘No, we cannot go to their house, because they are not married in the Church, eh!’. It was as an exclusion. No, you could not go! Neither could we go to [the houses of] socialists or atheists. Now, thank God, people do not says such things, right? [Such an attitude] was a defense of the faith, but it was one of walls: the LORD made bridges.

I do not intend this as criticism of the Holy Father as I am sure he is not intending to give the opposite message but do note that sound parenting does require controlling who your children have contact with, who your children see you associating with, etc... This is not to say that they should be kept in a bubble. But it is very necessary and completely appropriate to put thought into who children spend time around and for how long & often, and in what context.

This is a really important lawsuit. As the law is clearly written (well, at least this part of the law is clear), federal subsidies only go to people in states where there are state exchanges. If you live in a state without a state exchange, you are not eligible for the subsidies. And if you are not eligible for the subsidies, then your employer is not subject to the penalties imposed on employers (over a certain size) who fail to provide health insurance to their employees. This is another aspect of the law that renders it completely non-functional in large parts of the nation. So the IRS is attempting to essentially re-write it by regulatory fiat.

I think the question is CIA / Graham Fuller support for the Chechen rebels back during the Cold War and whether and to what extent our government’s ties with the rebels were maintained after the collapse of the USSR - whether for intelligence purposes or perhaps in the context of our support for the Georgians or for other reasons. And whether the Boston bombing is in any sense blowback from that, just as the rise of AQ was in some sense related to our support of the Afghan rebels. I certainly would not dismiss this as just a coincidence without taking a hard look at it.

My guess is that the U.S. Attorney set up the whole thing with the Magistrate Judge. The FBI claims to have not been a part of this. Interesting because the FBI / Marshall’s Service is controlling access to the hospital room.

If I am reading this correctly, he went missing a month before the bombing and left his cell phone and wallet behind. So where was he between then and his body being found? It is not at all clear that the accusations had anything to do with his death. Or if there is a connection, the article is so poorly written as to make it impossible to discern.

IIRC, Eddie Antar (”Crazy Eddie”)’s foreign travels were unknown to investigators of his fraud for a number of years because one whatever forms he filled out, he used to put his first name in the last name box, and vice versa. Just a simple “mistake” that threw off the Feds for years. I would hope that we have a better system now.

A man can be a strong leader and impose discipline and maintain high standards without cursing and without using physical contact in anger. The examples of coaches and parents and other leaders who have accomplished this are many. It’s one thing to grab a player to move him into proper position, but it is something else entirely to use force in anger and while appearing out of control. The man clearly has no business being a coach, in my opinion. And Rutgers should be embarrassed that it required national exposure of the videos to get them to take the appropriate action.

Capitals vs. Panthers!

Nuts!

DOD and the services have something like 800,000 civilian employees total. That’s an amazing figure. Some do critical tasks but surely many do not. That’s where I would start cutting. Also, if I understand this correctly, sequestration brings the Pentagon back to its 2006 budget adjusted upward for inflation - it seems to me that this should be enough money to adequately defend us.

Whenever cuts are threatened, the first thing bureaucrats do is announce that the most important spending will be cut first, in order to stir up opposition to any cuts. So we read articles about not being able to refuel aircraft carriers. This is just another version of what the public education racket does: any threatened cuts will lead to fewer teachers, overcrowded classrooms, hungry students, and a whole parade of other horribles.

Hey India, that looks like an Irish flag on the tail!

This is nonsense - “sheriff” is a position created by state law. Unless a state law requires him to, a sheriff can but is not required to arrest someone for violating a federal criminal law.

I don’t think federal law can or does require a state or local official to actually do anything to enforce any federal law. There’s a huge legal difference between a sheriff violating a federal law and refusing to enforce it. I think that our federal system relies in large part upon local officials enforcing federal laws. There simply are not enough federal agents to do much federal law enforcement within a nation of over 300 million people, so they rely on heavily on active local cooperation. Which is not actually required (beyond the threat of withholding federal funds) as we see all the time on the issue of immigration where the lefty jurisdictions refuse to cooperate with the feds.

I am also guessing that Powell is very resentful of the fact that he put his credibility on the line by going to the UN and essentially telling the world that the US had solid evidence of substantial WMD in Iraq. When the WMD turned not be there (more or less, at least not anywhere near the extent that had been thought) and then the war turned into a fiasco, Powell likely felt humiliated and harbored a grudge against the Administration for having nudged him into doing it.

Part of the problem is the AP’s politically correct definition of Islamist. The definition leaves out anything about imposing Koranic government through violence. Sure, violence is inherent in the Koran but any reasonable definition of Islamist would spell out the connection between Islamist and violence, which after all is why we care about it in the first place.

Remember her husband’s supposed fall at Greg Norman’s house?

(1) Obama is not willing to make real, substantial, painful spending cuts.
(2) Our fiscal problem is a result of over-spending not under-taxing.
(3) The federal government cannot spend a dime without the approval of the Republican-majority House of Representatives.
(4) There is no fiscal “cliff” in the sense that anything earth-shattering will happen when the ball drops and the new year begins (taxes and spending are frequently changed retroactively and that can happen months into the new year).
(5) Conservatives have in the past fallen for deals involving promised spending cuts that never materialized.
(6) The sequestration caused by over the cliff is not all that radical, except to the Beltway crowd. But it would make a real dent in spending and would only reduce defense spending to 2006 levels (in real dollars, i.e., adjusted for inflation since then).
(7) It is bad for the Bush tax rates to expire across the board but if we aren’t willing to see that happen, we will never achieve real meaningful spending cuts.
(8) Negotiating on your back foot, telegraphing that you must reach a deal at all costs and cannot conceive of walking away from the table is a no way to negotiate - anyone who has ever done a serious negotiation of any kind knows that.

Putting this all together:
(1) We need a new Speaker.
(2) We need to go over the Cliff.
(3) After going over the Cliff, we need the House to only approve spending that it deems appropriate and if that leads Obama to shut the government down, as it surely would, then so be it.

My point is simply that as a result of the deduction for state and local taxes, low tax state residents (Texas) pay a higher net percentage of their income in federal income taxes than do high tax state residents (New York, California...). This means that Texans (and others) end up paying more than their fair share of federal taxes in order to make up the taxes not collected in the high tax states, due to the deduction.

My point is that if you live in Texas with no state income tax, you do not get any deduction for state income taxes paid so the federal government gets full freight from you on your federal income tax. If, however, you live in New York City and are paying over 12% of your income in state and local income taxes, you get to deduct those amounts from your income and the federal government receives less money from you than it would if you made the same income in a no-state income tax state. This amounts to a diversion of would-be federal tax revenues to spendthrift states, i.e., a subsidy by the taxpayers in Texas (Florida, etc...) of the bloated state budgets of the high-tax states. In other words, all other things being equal, Texas taxpayers pay a higher percentage of their income to the federal government than do New Yorkers or Californians.

Armed security need not equate to a police state. Why not just have parents with handgun permits volunteer to sit around and drink coffee and b.s. in the teacher’s lounge all day? I think there are plenty of grandfathers who’d love nothing better and there’s a fair number of parents who could do their work on a laptop in the school once in awhile. (It will never happen because liberals are a bunch of pantywaists and are incapable of adopting real solutions.)

Speaking of crazy deductions, how about the uncapped deduction of state income taxes paid? Is this not a subsidy by the taxpayers in low state income tax and no state income tax states to the taxpayers in high state income tax states?

When did Hillary last speak on camera? I suspect there may be something more serious wrong with her than has been reported.

1. I do not believe that shooting the driver is taught in police training as an approved method to stop a car from running over or dragging the officer. It is a way to stop a car from getting away. But if the only purpose is avoid injury to the officer himself, I doubt that any respectable police training program teaches this. Instead, I think that police officers are taught to avoid putting themselves in a position where they can be run over or dragged.

2. If I am reading this correctly, in this case the officer’s bullets did not hit the driver but instead killed a passenger who had earlier hit him and whom he was pursuing,

3. There were children in the car.

It is certainly one more criminal off the streets but I personally view the officer’s conduct as highly suspect. I think that allowing police officers to shoot and kill fleeing suspects in a case like this on the basis of the purported fear of being run over is dangerous for society and a bad thing.

If Boehner agrees to one dime in increased taxes, he should go — regardless of whether he calls them “revenues” instead of taxes or just “closing loopholes” instead of higher rates....

How hard is it to understand that our federal government is bringing in more than enough money and that it just needs to spend less, a vast amount less?

Yeah, except for the hundreds of abortions in NYC each day. And except for who knows how many sick people are killed in NYC hospitals each day through the denial of basic necessities like hydration, nutrition and antibiotics. Other than that, everything’s going great.

I am not saying it is not a nightmare. I am saying that it should not result in a $37 billion payment from the taxpayers of the other 49 states. And definitely without a lot more hard facts. See the link below where FEMA's estimate was 500 buildings destroyed and 5,000 more with major damage. If that number is correct, even if you add in infrastructure, $37b is still a ludicrous figure. And I do not think that federal money should be used to rebuild industry (such as marinas) right on the Atlantic coastline, where this could (obviously) happen again.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/11/hurricane_sandys_destruction_a.html An analysis of aerial imagery by the Federal Emergency Management Agency shows more than 500 buildings were destroyed outright, reduced to piles of debris, caved in or sliced into chunks.

An additional 5,000 structures suffered major damage from flooding or high winds, and some 24,000 were seen with minor damage. Floodwaters settled in tens of thousands of others, according to the federal agency’s preliminary damage assessments.

This is laughable. The idea that Sandy caused more damage along the New Jersey shoreline than the entire state budget of New Jersey is just crazy. Christie says that 30,000 homes and businesses were destroyed OR sustained substantial damage. The devil is in the detail of what "substantial" means. For argument's sake, let's say that the 30,000 structures suffered an average of $500,000 in damage. 30,000 x 500,000 = 15 billion. And I think that is a ludicrously high figure. And a lot of this was or should have been covered by insurance. The public has got to wake up to there being no such thing as free money and stop accepting as compassion the taking of other people's money by taxes, dilution by running the printing presses or the indebting of future generations.

The language you quoted from the U.S. Constitution says nothing at all about the Union being perpetual, or about whether and how secession could occur.

I do not think that is important whether federal law permits states to secede from the Union. Surely, British law did not permit the American colonies to unilaterally decide to become independent. It was clearly illegal under British law. Yet, the Patriots relied upon the superior, natural rights of man, citing their God-given rights and declaring that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...” Who would expect the United States government, including its Supreme Court, to declare secession legal? I would presume the very opposite.

the Constitution explicitly made the Union perpetual until and unless the States ratify the secession of a State in exactly the same means by which the State secured accession to the perpetual Union.

You are saying that this is explicit in the Constitution - please refer me to the provision that you are talking about. Thanks!

This is a joke of an article. Apart from adultery, she has a great resume. The fact that a couple of Harvard professors did not like her is, if anything, a plus.

Let’s see: Petraeus was given an extra 180k by the Administration via a job for his wife (on top of his 220k military pension and 180k CIA director salary). He was living high on the hog and had little reason to rock the boat. Especially since he knew at the time he testified that the FBI was aware of his affair and he likely presumed that White House was as well.

Thank you, American Hero Jim Robinson - well said!!

I am surprised they left the obligatory “nonpartisan” out the headline in front of CBO.

If Team Boehner starts from the position that the GOP cannot end up being blamed by the MSM for anything, then all they will be negotiating are the terms of surrender, which will end up being unconditional.

On the spending side, the “fiscal cliff” would take military spending back to what we were spending in 2006. That is in real dollars, i.e., adjusted for inflation. This is not the crisis for the military that has been portrayed. Obviously, a massive tax increase would be disastrous but we should not start from the perspective that military spending cuts should be off the table because we certainly can achieve efficiencies there without compromising national security.

There is absolutely zero evidence (to my knowledge) that Ranger Tillman was murdered by his fellow soldiers, as opposed to having been killed by accidental ‘friendly fire’. That is a far out wacky allegation which as far as I know has no basis whatsoever in reality. If you have some real evidence of that, as opposed to the repeating of looney speculation, you should publish your source and also report it to Army CID or Inspector General or the FBI. Short of that, I think the speculation is disrespectful.

Your contend that freedom of religion = freedom from religion and imply that the Founding Fathers supported this. I disagree. Several if not most of the original states had ‘official’ religions at the time of their adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The freedom that was intended was freedom of government imposition of a particular denomination. [And just as an aside, for most of our nation’s history this was not understood as a limitation on state governments (”Congress shall make no law...”).] There was never understood, at least widely, to be any absolute freedom from religion in general, or even from Christianity in general. This is reflected in the fact that the Almighty, albeit in generic terms, has been invoked from the Declaration of Independence to the “In God We Trust” motto on our money to chaplains in our military from the Continental Army to present. So I think you are really overstating things.

This former SEAL was on the board of the “Military Religious Freedom Foundation” which claims to be against “proselytizing” in the military by religious groups. I think our servicemen should be free from getting particular religions pushed on them through the chain of command and from religious-based hazing or other clearly improper conduct. However, I think activist groups like this, in practice, are actually hyper-sensitive and often very hostile to even pretty mild expressions of Christianity in the ranks (which is not to say there are not legitimate concerns once in awhile). A la the ACLU. That’s just my own personal observation and opinion, and it does nothing at all to take away from this American’s service and sacrifice. I only point it out because it would perhaps be consistent with a “liberal” mindset that apparently his mother shares.

I smell a wagging of dog.

Obama is down in the polls and suddenly NATO finally feels the urge to use force against Syria in “defense” of Turkey, which has reportedly been giving sanctuary and other support to the Syrian rebels (who I suspect are very likely to be Islamists).

"Although President Obama had nothing to do with cell phone welfare..."

I reject this description. The man has presided over the government during the explosive growth of the program. Either he believes in the program and is fine with it, or he has been asleep at the switch. Either way, he is responsible for it. Paying for free cell phone service for millions and millions of Americans is not some little detail that is so far below his pay grade that we can presume he know nothing about it, or excuse him if that is in fact the case.

How about getting the federal government out of the school meals business? I don’t care what their mandatory menu is — they should have nothing to do with school lunches in the first place. It is completely beyond any federal responsibility authorized by the Constitution, at least by any normal reading of it. If there is a real need for any of this, I can’t think of anything more suitable for handling at the state and local level.

Enough with bed wetting The man was great. The trend on FR seems to be for a vocal minority to jump on the Beltway wuss bandwagon at every opportunity.

If we have a good election nationally and Barry is sent packing, I am not so gloomy, with or without Akin remaining in the race. Every single election there are one or more Republican candidates whose candidacies go horribly awry. It does not have to upset the whole applecart unless everyone on our side goes all wobbly. Also, there are more Senate seats where, in a bad year for Democrats, the Republican candidates can do better than currently expected (Mass., Maine, Conn.....). The other point is that although controlling the Senate is great, we never had any chance of having 60 Republicans, let alone 60 conservatives. So the whole notion of a conservative Senate juggernaut was a bit of fantasy. This Akin (who outside of Mo. had even heard of this guy a few days ago?) does not have to become the focus nationally unless we collectively roll over and allow the MSM to dictate the terms of battle. I think we need to toughen up!

The article is essentially telling businesses (like NBC) how to run themselves. If Notre Dame is paid too much, then whoever is paying them will lose money, at least relative to what could have been made. It is market discipline, not the opinion of a sports commentator with nothing at stake. And I have never understood this obsession over ND not being in a conference for football - if it is such a bad financial decision then it is money out of ND’s pocket; why should anyone else care in the least? This is just a lazy article - meet a deadline by beating up on Notre Dame football.

from the article: “Winters nicely deconstructs, in both senses of the word, Ryan’s assertion that his opposition to federal social spending reflects the Catholic doctrine of “subsidiarity” — the notion that issues should be resolved “at the level of social organization closest to the individual.” Problem is, Winters writes, Ryan is not advocating innovative anti-poverty programs at the local level.”

This does not make sense: Ryan is not running for local office. If he were running for local office, that it might make sense to ask him about his positions on local issues.

Further, the article assumes that federal social welfare spending is actually good for the poor. All the evidence is to the contrary. First of all, are the poor really poor? In America, the “poor” are on average more obese than the non-poor. They also tend to have mobile phones, air conditioning, cable television, free time, clothing, medical care, shelter, public education, etc... - all things that the poor, as understood in the rest of the world and in, at least as I read it, the Bible, would not be expected to have. So I am not really sure how applicable Catholic social teaching is to this situation. One also has to look at the differences in competence on the part of the bishops when it comes to different kids of issues. For example, when it comes to which economic policy will best help the American poor, assuming they really are poor, the bishops have zero claim to greater competence than anyone else (and many of them are quite daft on the subject). However, when it comes to faith and morals, such as whether it is ok to kill unborn children or same-sex sexual activity, then yes if you are Catholic you should get on board with the bishops. All of this is to say that Paul Ryan has a far greater claim to Catholicism than do the likes of liberal so-called Catholics like Pelosi, Biden, John Kerry, the Kennedys, et al.

Maybe it is time to revisit the scientific dogma that oil is exclusively biogenic in origin, i.e., whether it really is a fossil fuel. (Not only is there more than previously thought but aren’t there fossil fuels on other planets in the solar system that presumably never had fossils?)

Well, I have to question how effective he has been in running the defense appropriations subcommitee. It seems that he has had very little success in controlling the huge price of Air Force procurement programs (F-22, F-35), for one thing. Plus, I certainly do not feel that we are getting our money’s worth in Afghanistan, where we are wasting tremendous amounts of money building gold-plated facilities for our Afghan “allies”. In any event, I don’t think that anyone belongs in Congress for over forty years.

Why show only Greece, Spain and Italy - where is the rest of Europe? And what about California’s enormous share of the federal debt?

A forty year veteran of Congress with multiple taxpayer-funded buildings and a reservoir named after him is certainly not my cup of tea! But two opponents sounds like a bad idea - anyone down there have a sense of where this primary is headed?