Ever since the Obama administration came up with their "jobs created/saved" metric to promote their disgraceful "stimulus" package, we, like many others, have been saying that their metric is bogus and totally arbitrary. Christina Romer, chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, admitted to that fact. When asked by CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo whether the administration knew just how many jobs had been "saved or created," Romer said:
It’s very hard to say exactly—you don’t know what the baseline is," Romer said in a live interview. "Because you don’t know what the economy would have done without it. (the stimulus plan)."
very week, according to yahoo news: the House spends a couple of days churning out non-controversial bills. Beyond honoring sports achievements, they name post offices, praise armed service members, mourn distinguished people who've died and recognize historic anniversaries. This year the House has come together to support national pollinator week, national dairy month and national train day.
hould there be a "gatekeeper" regulating internet bloggers? In the aftermath of the Shirley Sherrod incident, that's
.
Anchors Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discussed the "mixed blessing of the internet," and agreed that there should be a crackdown on anonymous bloggers who disparage others on the internet.
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Azcentral writes: State and university employees with families can expect to see their monthly health-insurance costs rise as much as 37 percent next year, depending on the type of plan they choose. Figures provided by the Arizona Department of Administration show that health plans for families and single adults with children will shoulder the most-expensive monthly premium increases The Department of Administration cited federal health reform as the reason the state's health plans will carry "greater expenses and higher premiums for members," http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2010/07/21/20100721arizona-workers-to-see-insurance-fees-increase.html ------------------------------------------------
The Wall St. Journal opines: The Justice Department announced last week that it would defend the new
federal health-insurance mandate as an exercise of Congress's "power to lay and collect taxes," even though Barack Obama had insisted before the bill's passage that it was "absolutely not a tax increase." The truth is the mandate is not a tax—and if it were it would be unconstitutional.
A tax is when the government takes money from individuals, puts it in the Treasury, and plans to spend it. With the health-insurance mandate, the government is not taking money from private individuals; rather, it is commanding them to give ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703724104575378910443018730.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
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The NYT writes that even as Obama continues his push to take over Americans' healthcare: Even as the new coalition government
[In England] said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the
National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.
Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from
hospitals and other health care providers.
The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government’s goal to effect $30 billion in “efficiency savings” in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.
[I'm sure this Administration sees the failure of socialized medicine to be in the stupid why in which others have done it.] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/world/europe/25britain.html?_r=2&hp
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Meanwhile: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, seeking to console liberal activists who were disappointed by the final version of the national health care law, assured them that there would
eventually be a public option.
"We're going to have a public option," Reid said. "It's just a question of when."
[Surprise, surprise!] http://spectator.org/blog/2010/07/24/reid-to-netroots-were-going-to
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The Washington Examiner reports: In response to a request from Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee, the Department of Interior's acting Inspector General, Mary Kendall, announced she is opening an investigation into whether a Department of Interior report recommending an offshore drilling ban was manipulated to appear as if the ban was endorsed by seven experts from the National Academy of Engineers. (Snip) ''If the Obama Administration purposefully manipulated the views of known experts on deepwater drilling and deceived the public, there should be serious consequences," Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., the ranking Republican on the Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. "The current moratorium on deepwater energy exploration is costing Americans their jobs and causing significant economic harm to a region that cannot afford more hardships."
Read more at the Washington Examiner:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Department-of-Interior-Inspector-General-investigating--99176764.html#ixzz0uhTWLMuP
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World Net Daily writes, several years ago: As the nation debates whether more guns or fewer can prevent tragedies like the
Virginia Tech Massacre, a notable anniversary passed last month in a Georgia town that witnessed a dramatic plunge in crime and violence after mandating residents to own firearms.
In March 1982, 25 years ago, the small town of Kennesaw – responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill. – unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of
household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite dire predictions of "Wild West" showdowns and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting – as a victim, attacker or defender.
The crime rate initially plummeted for several years after the passage of the ordinance, with the 2005 per capita crime rate actually significantly lower than it was in 1981, the year before passage of the law.
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=41196
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ExposeObama writes: A federal judge pushed back Thursday against a contention by the Obama
Justice Department that a tough new
Arizona immigration law set to take effect next week would cause "irreparable harm" and intrude into federal immigration enforcement.
"Why can't Arizona be as inhospitable as they wish to people who have entered or remained in the United States?" U.S.
District Judge Susan Bolton asked in a pointed exchange with Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler....
http://www.exposeobama.com/2010/07/26/judge-slams-obama-in-arizona-lawsuit/?utm_source=Expose+Obama&utm_campaign=cadbabc6e7-EO_7_26_107_26_2010&utm_medium=email
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ABC News reports: At its peak last month,
the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.
Today, ABC News surveyed
a marsh area and found none, and even on a flight out to the rig site Sunday with the Coast Guard, there was no oil to be seen.
Still, it doesn't mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small
oil patches remain below the surface, but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment.
"[It's] mother nature doing her job," said Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University.
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/bp-oil-spill-crude-mother-nature-breaks-slick/story?id=11254252
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From the NYT: The Senate on Tuesday refused to take up a bill that would require more disclosure of the role of corporations, unions and other special interests in bankrolling political advertisements, after Democrats failed to persuade even one Republican to support it. The bill was drafted in response to a Supreme Court decision in January allowing unlimited campaign spending by corporations and interest groups. President Obama and Democratic leaders have been seeking to use the Republicans’ opposition to the bill to portray them as beholden to corporate interests.
t a news conference and in an impassioned floor speech, the Senate Republican leader,
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, denounced the legislation and chided Democrats for diverting the Senate’s agenda from a bill aimed at helping small businesses in a bid to take up the campaign finance disclosure measure.
“This bill is about protecting incumbent Democrats from criticism ahead of this November’s election — a transparent attempt to rig the fall election,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/us/politics/28donate.html
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