Saturday, August 27, 2011

Justice Dept. heeds India law, not ours; Obama administration ruling by decree on union rights; Kaiser Permanente and Inova Health System both announce large lay-offs; Flash mob in Montgomery County follows typical scenario; Exxon Mobil suing federal government; Texas Governor sues Dept. of Homeland Security for $350 million; Boehner again requests list of planned regulations with $1 billion economic impact; Cosmic rays are cause of global warming; Chicago township stops building of $1.5 million civic office

Redstate reveals: The Department of Justice is under fire for taking the bold step of sending armed agents into the factories of Gibson Guitar in Nashville and Memphis to seize what it believes to be illegal wood.
Via press release from Gibson:
The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.
Unbelievably enough, this was not the first time that the Gibson factories have been raided for this same reason. http://www.redstate.com/aglanon/2011/08/25/doj-raids-gibson-guitars-looking-for-illegal-wood/
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Redstate writes: Obama, ruling by decree: The National Labor Relations Board has issued a Final Rule that will require employers to notify employees of their rights under the National Labor Relations Act as of November 14, 2011.
Private-sector employers (including labor organizations) whose workplaces fall under the National Labor Relations Act will be required to post the employee rights notice where other workplace notices are typically posted. Also, employers who customarily post notices to employees regarding personnel rules or policies on an internet or intranet site will be required to post the Board’s notice on those sites. Copies of the notice will be available from the Agency’s regional offices, and it may also be downloaded from the NLRB website. http://www.redstate.com/laborunionreport/2011/08/25/obamas-job-killing-nlrb-strikes-again-all-employers-must-post-union-notices/
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[Closely following the news that Kaiser Permanente of Washington D,C, is laying people off comes this news from the Washington Post: Inova Health System has cut 13 percent of its management jobs to reduce costs, a spokesman for the Northern Virginia company said this week. Inova, which operates five hospitals and is one of the Washington region’s largest health systems, said it cut 117 senior and mid-level jobs across all its hospitals. At the four community hospitals — Fair Oaks, Alexandria, Loudoun and Mount Vernon — the leadership teams were restructured to eliminate the position of chief operating officer. There were no cuts to nurses or doctors directly involved in patient care, said spokesman Tony Raker.
Of the 117 positions eliminated, 84 were the result of attrition and 33 were through layoffs. Employees were told Monday. The cost reductions were in response to anticipated health-care changes, including continuing reductions in Medicare compensation, Raker said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post_now/post/inova-health-systems-cuts-management-jobs-to-reduce-costs/2011/08/25/gIQAJ7KrdJ_blog.html
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The Washington Examiner reports: Montgomery County police say 17 people have been charged in a flash mob theft of a Germantown convenience store.
A group of 25 young people stormed the 7-Eleven at 13001 Wisteria Drive shortly before 2 a.m. on Aug. 13. In just about a minute, they stole snacks, drinks and other items from the store, then left.  [Yes, once again, the perps had black skin....- unreported in article, verified by video.]
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CNS News reports: ExxonMobil, the world’s largest energy company, filed a lawsuit against the federal government for canceling an oil-drilling lease in the Gulf of Mexico that held “billions of barrels of oil,” according to the company. In the suit, filed Aug. 12 in federal court in Louisiana against Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar and related parties, Exxon alleges that the Interior Department made an “arbitrary, capricious” decision in canceling the deepwater leases, arguing that the government’s action “deprives ExxonMobil of property without due process of law.” http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/exxonmobil-sues-obama-administration-can
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Fox News reports: Texas Gov. Rick Perry has asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for nearly $350 million to cover the costs he says Texas has incurred incarcerating illegal immigrants in state prisons and county jails.
In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Perry reiterated a claim he's often leveled against the federal government: that it's not doing enough to secure the border with Mexico and as a result, has allowed illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. and use taxpayer-funded resources, including the prison system.
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USA Today writes: House Speaker John Boehner wrote President Obama today seeking a list of all planned federal regulations with an economic impact of more than $1 billion.It's the same request Boehner made of Obama a year ago -- to no avail. And it signals what could be a bruising legislative battle this fall over government regulations.  http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/08/republicans-ask-obama-to-disclose-1-billion-regulations/1
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  The UK Telegraph reports: Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long postulated – it’s [global warming] the result of cosmic rays which act as a seed for cloud formation. The scientists working on the project are naturally euphoric: this is a major breakthrough which will not only overturn decades of misguided conjecture on so-called Man Made Global Warming but will spare the global economy trillions of dollars which might otherwise have been squandered on utterly pointless efforts to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.
The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.
In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100102296/sun-causes-climate-change-shock/
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The Wall St. Journal reports: In these tough economic times, the sight of angry taxpayers filling the auditorium of a suburban high school isn't unusual.
But those gathered in this Chicago suburb earlier this month weren't facing off against impassive town officials. In a rare expression of direct democracy that invoked a 100-year-old state law, all 200 people present got to vote, and resoundingly overturned the township's plan to build a new $1.5 million civic office.
"We directed an out-of-control government to listen to the people," said Debra Holscher, the campaign's leader, who kicked off the insurrection by scribbling out a petition and getting 17 people to sign it at the town's annual meeting in April.
Keri-Lyn Krafthefer, attorney for the township of 45,000, says she is studying whether the vote is legally binding. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904070604576514413282874424.html?mod=WSJ_article_LatestHeadlines
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