What a Tangled Web Government Weaves

Oh, the horror.  The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that the government cannot require religious people to provide something against their religious beliefs just because they opened a business.  Now, rather than having their employer pay for their contraceptives, some women (those who voluntarily chose employment at Hobby Lobby or likeminded corporations) will have to pay for them.  Yes, the horror, the tragedy.  Next, it will be rent, food, car insurance, and cable TV.  What, the employer doesn't pay for any of those?  Huh.

I have long held that the corporation should provide nothing but a paycheck.  How the employee chooses to spend the money is then no business of the business.  You want health insurance, buy health insurance.  You want condoms, buy condoms.  The moment you force others to purchase your desires, it is inevitable that there will be conflict.  Furthermore, if someone else is buying it, the person using it has no incentive to keep costs down.  If someone else was paying the phone bill, will the user pay attention to roaming charges?  No.  This is always the problem with third party payers.  And that leads to rationing, like we see at the VA.  Unable to meet the demand, the VA would force veterans to wait long periods before getting care.

 

How did it come about that healthcare was provided by business?  Government interference in the market.  Yes, the government decided to play around with wage and price controls.  Always trying to find ways around such government meddling, businesses started offering 'benefits' that weren't classified as wages.  Voila!  Therefore, our current mess is the result of previous government efforts to fix things.  It worked out so well that the government needs to fix it again.  And that has worked out so well that President Obama has issued hundreds of waivers, multiple rewrites of the law, delays of enforcement, and accusations of Republican intransigence.

 

Government fixes usually lead to unforeseen problems that call for another government fix that leads to unforeseen problems that call for a government fix.  This process goes on until the government has complete control of an underperforming and wasteful industry, like education or Amtrak.  A better option is to get the government out of these industries (for which there is no Constitutional authority, by the way) and let private companies innovate.

Electoral Shenanigans

Thad Cochran, Senator from Mississippi, recently won a runoff election against Chris McDaniel, a Tea Party challenger.  Of interest, he only won thanks to the votes of black democrats who took part in the Republican primary.  This is one reason I think open primaries are silly since it allows the other party to potentially choose its competitor.  However, those are the rules and it can bite both ways.  So far, so good.  But now it turns out that the Republicans were behind this.  Former Governor Hailey Barbour's nephew was involved in getting black Democrats to vote against McDaniel by selling the idea that the Tea Party candidate would bring back segregation.  Really?

Looking at the numbers, the Tea Party candidate got more Republican votes than Thad did.  It was Democrat voters who gave Thad the win.  That is not good for the party.  Thad will not get those Democrats to vote for him in the November election and these shenanigans may have convinced many Republicans to sit out the election.  Republicans and Democrats will join forces to defeat Tea Party candidates.  Why?

 

Of course, both parties have already said that the Tea Party is "far right-wing" and "racist."  For the uninformed, that is enough.  In fact, the Tea Party generally has 3 goals: Constitutional restoration, responsible budgeting, and economic freedom.  Our government has long since breached the limits of the Constitution but has recently become tyrannical.  The government needs to shrink back to the specified limits of the Constitution.  Next, the overspending has gotten out of hand and the huge deficits spell doom if not reined in.  Lastly, there must be a return to economic freedom.  There has been entirely too much regulation and corporatism (aka crony capitalism) in recent years.  The government should not be deciding which businesses prosper and which don't.  Entrenched politicians of both parties dislike these goals since it inevitably strips them of power.  Few willingly surrender power; doing so is what made George Washington so great.

 

http://www.teapartypatriots.org/ourvision/

Global Warming Hoax Revealed! Yet Again!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

Who has been saying that it is a hoax so the government can coax more tax dollars out of your pocket?  And who has been cooking the numbers?  A government agency!  If your grants and awards depend on a continued warming trend, you will find a way to make sure the numbers show warming.  However, eventually the truth will out.  Of course, the truth has been out for years but there are so many who are willfully blind to the fact.  Once invested in a belief, it is very hard to let it go, regardless of the evidence.

Email Archiving! What a concept!

Came across this link on Instapundit.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/20/the-irs-had-a-contract-with-an-email-bac

The IRS has had an email backup solution since 2005 with a company that advertises as 'Email Archiving Done Right.'  Huh.  Either this company is going to take a major hit for such a huge - and growing - failure or it might say, "Here they are."

 

Again, the idea that the emails are lost is ludicrous and will only convince the ignorant or willfully blind.  This is an obvious cover-up.  I'm sure the media would be equally understanding if a Republican administration apparently used the IRS to squash opposition and then stonewalled a Congressional investigation.

You don't have mail

There are times when I am astonished at the stories the administration will tell.  As an IT guy who has a basic understanding of email, I look at the story of Lois Lerner's lost emails on account of a hard drive crash as an obvious lie.  We use Exchange at my work.  My email is not on my computer, it is on the Exchange server.  It is also in the inbox to whomever it was sent.  So, unless Ms. Lerner only sent email to herself, one hard drive failure can't destroy any of her emails.  Our server has multiple backups in case of failure and the data is backed up to tapes should the building burn down.  I was doing this sort of backup 16 years ago, which makes it unbelievable that the IRS isn't doing it today.  How many hard drives, servers, and offsite tape backups would have to be destroyed or fail to get rid of Ms. Lerner's emails?  A lot more than the one that is claimed.  This story is even worse since most people must see that it doesn't make sense.  Your average smartphone user can access email on the phone, or on the computer, or even on a tablet.  Most know that if their computer crashes, they haven't just lost all their emails.

If these emails really have been lost, it is because someone chose to lose them.  That would be a crime.  Why commit a crime to hold back these emails?  Much like Nixon's tapes, there is something in those emails the administration or the IRS doesn't want revealed.  If this same thing happened in a Republican administration, the media would be howling day and night.  This cover-up is so obvious as to insult the intelligence of anyone with even a moderate amount of tech savvy.

Obama Achievement: Iraq Collapse

Three years ago when the President pulled the entirety of US forces out of Iraq, Vice President Biden declared this a great accomplishment of the administration.  We skedaddled and left the Iraqis to fend for themselves; mission accomplished.  Well, as Reverend Wright might say, those chickens have come home to roost.  Mosul has fallen to a branch of Al Qaeda.

Whether one agreed with the mission or not, thousands of Americans died to secure a democracy in the heart of the Muslim world.  I myself did not like the plan.  Short of a McArthueresque dictatorship, I view nation building as a doomed project.  Nonetheless, we spent years doing it and had more success than I expected.  Then we left.  By leaving, we abandoned whatever 'investments' were made and we see the result.  After WWII, we stayed in Germany.  70 years later, we are still in Germany and it is a functioning Western democracy.  After Korea, we stayed in South Korea.  We are still there.  It is a hugely successful country compared to its neighbor, North Korea.  Look at the difference between the part of Korea where the US stayed and the part that we lost.  After Vietnam, we left South Vietnam.  Catastrophe followed.  The record is pretty clear.

The US has lost prestige under Obama and no one can trust us.  Obama has betrayed allies and appeased enemies.  He has abandoned the idea of US leadership in the world.  Putin has made a fool of Obama and Obama appears not to mind.  Here is a president who was dealt a Straight Flush, discarded it, and asked for 5 new cards.  It is hard to credit this as mere incompetence.  Is the destruction of US foreign policy intentional, thus crippling future efforts?  Who can trust the US now?  We might just elect another Obama and abandon whoever counts on us.

Iran-Contra Redux

For those of you old enough, do you recall the firestorm that ensued when it was discovered that the US was giving weapons to Iran, who then 'intervened' on our behalf to get hostages released?  Hostage-taking was a popular pastime for Middle Eastern terrorists in the 1980s.  This was THE big scandal of the Reagan Administration and it lingered for his second term and into the Bush presidency.  Reagan had proclaimed that the US did not negotiate with terrorists and yet Iran-Contra contradicted that.

 

The Obama Administration has gone one better.  Rather than trading arms to Qatar to get them to convince the Taliban to release Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl (which would have been about equivalent to that aspect of Iran-Contra), the administration has released 5 terrorists from Gitmo who will spend a 1 year parole in Qatar before being released to resume their terror careers.  Much as Iran-Contra was a breach of the Boland Amendment, the Bergdahl-Taliban swap broke the law when Congress wasn't kept in the loop.  Now, if we were trading a handful of mid-level Nazis to get back a General Patton, I might be inclined to support the president.  Instead, we have traded an interior minister/Taliban co-founder, a chief of staff, a provincial governor, a deputy intelligence chief, and a member of a joint Al Qaeda-Taliban cell for a deserter who should be court martialed.  Well played, Taliban.  Well played.

 

Worse still, President Obama hyped this with a Rose Garden appearance.  He's running a victory lap over this?  Is he daft?  The president does stuff like this on a regular basis.  He distracts the media from bad news by provided some new bad news.  There are so many scandals that it is impossible to cover them.  Like a school of fish, it is hard to focus on just one.  The media, which has a short attention span, is never given the opportunity to delve too deeply into a scandal.  What were we talking about before Bergdahl?  Oh yeah, the VA scandal.  What ever happened to the IRS targeting scandal?  Fast and Furious?  Collecting phone records of the Associated Press?  Naming a reporter a co-conspirator to tap his phone?  "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" scandal?  Benghazi?  How about the collapsing foreign policy where the US is being played by Vladimir Putin?  It goes on and on.  There is so much that the populace has thrown up its hands.