Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde
Chart of the Day
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| Courtesy of Daily Signal |
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| via the Lihertarian Carholic |
Stupid Government Spending Tricks
I'm going to start a serial series focused on Sen. Coburn (R-OK)'s signature annual wastebook.
#1. Administrative Leave:
Officially, administrative leave is an “excused absence”with pay and continuation of other benefits, such as health insurance, life insurance, and retirement plans, that is not charged as annual leave or vacation. In 2014, eleven federal agencies spent at least $50 million paying the salaries of government employees on administrative leave status, one-third of which was for disciplinary reasons. Others [than, say, organ donation or volunteering] get paid time off to recover from an overseas trip, to attend a conference, to conduct union activities, or to go to a parade. Some administrators abuse it to remove and isolate whistleblowers. The Pentagon’s police chief encouraged employees to take administrative leave to go golfing. Several agencies even allow paid leave to attend Mardi Gras. These federal employees are literally being paid to party! The “predominant reason” for “large amounts of paid administration leave,” however, is personnel matters, such as misconduct, criminal matters, or security concerns. Nearly 60,000 federal employees received paid leave for an entire month or more over a two year period in addition to vacation time and paid holidays...Other VA employees were put on paid administrative leave for sexually abusing a female patient, causing a fatal car crash as a result of driving drunk, sexting on government computers, paying for booze and personal items on government charge cards, taking a patient being treated for addiction to a crack house and hooking him up with drugs, and failing to do their jobs.The above is a selective excerpt; there's more to disgust fellow fiscal conservatives, and I invite the interested reader to download Coburn's report (free for download except for any relevant ISP charges) to read the full chapter as well as the other 99 fiscal atrocities.
Choose Life
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| Courtesy of Wales Online |
ChurchMilitantTV Issues a Clarification
There's an attempt by the moderator to distance himself from a news report, apparently involving conservative Cardinal Burke's reassignment (potentially to Malta). A lot of the Catholic blogs are dismissing the report (see here) as speculative and uncorroborated, but let's point out that Francis, early in his tenure, removed three high-ranking Benedict-conservative bishops--and that was before Burke called out Pope Francis to reaffirm his commitment to traditional moral teachings on gays and marriage--sort of an unpredented Joe Wilson moment for the pontiff.
Given my recent puzzling soft readership numbers, I don't think the moderator is including me in his rant taking shots at the critics of Pope Francis, while constantly confirming Francis' authentic papacy and all due respect. I don't believe that God can be "surprising" in ways that Francis suggests. I noticed with some amusement his consternation of progressives vs. conservatives, but he doesn't list Kasper, one of the key supporters in his election, among the progressives. This is disingenuous because a simple Google search shows Francis tasked Kasper for a text outlining ways to accommodate divorced Catholic desires to receive communion, one of the two controversial issues at the recent Synod. I am not going to back off my criticisms of Francis' incompetent discussions of economics, I am going to continue to criticize his off-the-cuff speaking style which leads others to believe the pontiff will radically change moral dogma, and I am going to continue to challenge his leadership style--we need to go away from Obama-like "all hat and no cattle" to a rebuke of the hedonistic culture, a call to prayer and repentence, not appeasing the false gods of political correctness.
Bill O'Reilly: Wrong Again
Finding problems with Bill O'Reilly's commentaries is not that difficult. For example, he's a populist, and I loathe populism; he's got a neo-con perspective, and I'm a non-interventionist. Bill loves to spin conspiracy theories when the price of gasoline is going up; now prices have been dropping, do you think he's going to give market speculators credit?
From his Tuesday talking point ''Racist America?"
The Democratic Party believes that Washington should run the economy, but that has failed.
The Republican Party wants a free market economy with low taxation and aggressive job expansion.
The problem is, the free market economy was abused during the Bush administration, and the economy collapsed because of it.I think most of my libertarian group threads heads are exploding over the GOP wanting a free market. Bush slapped tariffs on steel imports, named Greenspan and Bernanke as Fed Reserve chairs, did nothing with the GSE's which used cheap Treasury credit to dominate the home mortgage sector, engaged in Keynesian stimulus nonsense and horrific economic interventions, including TARP, during the 2008 economic tsunami, nearly doubled the national debt, seriously increased domestic spending in areas like education, expanded entitlements with an unpaid Medicare drug benefit, and added thousands of federal regulations. The GOP seems to have never seen a defense budget big enough and it could have killed the Ex-Im Bank. We still haven't seen the GOP take a serious ax to federal spending, and some GOP governors have gone along with Medicaid expansion through ObamaCare. Spending cuts have literally been pennies on the dollar, and we haven't seen a balanced budget since early in the Bush Administration.
I don't like the "aggressive job expansion" which seems to suggest some fiscal policy. What we want is more savings and investment, less activist monetary and fiscal/regulatory policy, less regime uncertainty, less government spending crowding out private-sector investment. There are multiple aspects to tackling unemployment: roll back federal mandates on hiring, repeal morally hazardous policies that reward people for not working, eliminate occupation licensing, restore the right to work and economic liberty.
But most of my ire is directed at O'Reilly's incompetent diagnosis of the economic tsunami. Anyone thinking that Bush presided over a free market doesn't have a clue about our mixed economy. Banking for instance has been regulated, badly, since the early years of the republic, and Canada, which allowed branch banking and more flexible asset backing, has had a far more stable system. The US created moral hazard through deposit insurance, which provided an incentive to riskier lending. Don't tell me it was just stocks that bubbled through 2000 because of easy monetary policy; I remember when I moved to California in 1999, housing prices in the Silicon Valley area were starting in the mid-six figures; I knew places in Texas where you could buy a better house for a third of the cost. The boom continued into the Bush Presidency, and Bush was bragging about historically high ownership percentages, even though it was clear that the boom was aging: almost all the traditional 20% down buyers had dried up, and money was being made available to people with lower incomes and little if anything down. There were federal laws that pressured lenders to make loans to certain demographic groups. The point is, whatever this mess was, was not a "market failure"; it is an artifact of bad government fiscal and monetary policy. We free market people wouldn't have minded if Goldman Sachs had to take a haircut on bankrupt AIG's swaps or if a big bank was allowed to fail.
Facebook Corner
(Reason). Attempting to exercise basic free association rights sure is a nasty business when the union bosses fight back.
So quit. Problem solved. Why should he get the benefits of a union contract for nothing? Go work at a Catholic school if you don't like the unions. See how they feel about your free association rights.
Idiot OP parasitic union whore. "The Supreme Court, in Communication Workers v. Beck, 487 U.S. 735 (1988), a lawsuit that was supported by the Foundation, ruled that objecting nonmembers cannot be required to pay union dues. The most that nonmembers can be required to pay is an agency fee that equals their share of what the union can prove is its costs of collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment with their employer." Notice the agency fee does NOT include "release time" fees.
The fact that corrupt unions cut unsustainable deals with Democrat political whores behind taxpayer backs is no virtue. We have thrown money at public education and teachers with flatline improved criteria measures; In most schools, you have self-serving seniority layoff rules and it is all but impossible to terminate a rogue tenured teacher. Termination is a fraction of what happens in the private sector; teachers are often evaluated on subjective criteria, not performance/productivity.
(The Independent Institute). Research Fellow Stephen Halbrook sets the record straight.
Giving a slanted and cherry-picked unhistorical "version" simply reinforces the lie that the Founding Fathers believed in unfettered gun ownership and usage.Let’s look at the Constitution and read what it says: (Article 1, Section 8, Subsection 1) The Congress shall have the power; (Article 1, Section 8, Subsection 15) To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; (Article 1, Section 8, Subsection 16) To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; (Second Amendment) A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. As you may be aware, the Second Amendment was not written in a vacuum, but rather as a component of the well-regulated militia preferred by many of the Founding Fathers, rather than having a standing army. Many of the Founding Fathers were personally impacted by the recent experience of the Revolutionary War during which the British military and Hessian mercenaries, a traditional European standing army, overwhelmed and occupied numerous municipalities, terrorized civilian populations, and carried out a bloody and horrific war. This aversion to standing armies is reinforced by looking at the Third Amendment which reads as follows: “No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” And Stephen Halbrook’s implication that all or most of the persons (and by that he means male persons) in the newly formed United States were armed simply by referring to brothers Ethan Allen and Ira Allen as being both hunters and target shooters is both misleading and inaccurate. If most or all citizens were armed, there would not have been the need for armories in places like Williamsburg, Virginia (which still exists in colonial Williamsburg) and other municipal locations up and down the Eastern seaboard. Nor would the City of Boston pass an ordinance requiring all men who traveled through Boston Commons to carry a shotgun in the event of attack by Black Bears. If all male persons were armed all the time as Halbrook insinuates, why was such an ordinance passed, let alone necessary? Further, if arms were as prevalent as Halbrook implicates, why would the federal government have to pass legislation requiring gun ownership. The Militia Acts of 1792 provided for mandatory enrollment for all free white males between the ages of 18-44 in the militia and “that every citizen so enrolled shall within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock.”
There has been an interesting debate over gun ownership in the colonies/states using probate inventories. Lindgren and Heather dispute Bellesiles' numbers of roughly 15%. Other probate studies revealed guns to be one of the most listed items (even above chairs, Bibles, and cash), roughly from 50-73% in male estates and 6-38% in female estates; of those with1 or more guns, 90% or so were in usable condition; wealthier households were more likely to own one, but even in lower-asset estates, roughly a third owned guns. Community-owned guns and supplies were available to those who did not own their own and needed to participate in community defense. (There's also reason to believe that the real numbers may be higher than reported for some estates, given mandates, etc.) The bottom line is that OP is actually the one relying on disputed scholarship.
(separately)
Going back to "progressive" troll's rant on the Constitution, guns, of course, had multiple uses over and beyond common defense--self-defense, hunting, sport to list some of the most obvious. Anyone with a modicum of background in the Revolurionary War era knows that munitions depots, including storage of private gunpowder, were a key target of the Redcoats and they also sought to ban colonial imports of gunpowder and arms. And there were the infamous warrantless searches of homes for weapons and other things. The very idea that any central government, whether from London or DC, would be allowed to limit the people's ability to revolt from tyranny is a sheer state of denial of what the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are all about. As Jefferson wrote to Madison, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
(Economic Freedom). She didn't pay $95 because of a clerical error. Now she might lose her home.
Did you see this update to the story: http://www.wsbtv.com/videos/news/update-woman-able-to-keep-home-after-late-bill/vCyHG6/
Proposals
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Eric Allie via IPI |
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall |
Linda Ronstadt, "I Never Will Marry"
