Wednesday, July 31, 2013

ROBERT HALL 07/31/2013 CONSERVATIVE DIGEST

Scary: Detroit’s Fallout: How Safe Are Other Municipal and City Pensions?
Excerpt: What’s stunning is how well funded Detroit’s pensions were even at the height of the recession, claims Andrew Biggs, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
In 2009, Detroit’s pensions were 93% funded, according to the Pew Institute, compared to other cities like Providence, R.I, which was only 42% funded. (Detroit is not an outlier. It is the leading edge of a fiscal collapse that will stretch from other cities, then states into Medicare, Social Security and Obamacare, creating riots, bloodshed and wide spread hardship in the next two decades, as the money for the socialist utopia runs out. ~Bob.)

Is New York City the Next Detroit? By Daniel Greenfield 
Excerpt: While Bloomberg was playing hooky, using city resources to push gun laws in other states, the specter of Motown was creeping over the Big Apple.
New York City comes in second on the list of cities with the largest unfunded pensions. After Detroit.


On Point: Zimmerman Trial: Trayvon Martin was not Emmett Till. By Glenn Garvin
Excerpt: Hard cases make bad law and even worse fodder for the chattering classes. Most of the so-called lessons of George Zimmerman’s acquittal on charges of murdering Trayvon Martin amount to educational malpractice. There is no war on black men, at least not by white men. Last year, the Scripps-Howard News Service studied half a million homicide reports and found that killings of black victims by white attackers have actually dropped over the past 30 years, from 4,745 during the 1980s to 4,380 during the first decade of the 2000s. There were nearly twice as many white victims killed by black assailants: 8,503 in the 1980s, and 8,530 in the 2000s.

Why Letters to The Commandant and The President. By Andy Weddington
Excerpt: What perplexes me is how a silly YouTube video can realize millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of views overnight and yet something vitally important to personal well-being and, in turn, country struggles to get a yawn. Perhaps explanation is no more complicated than it's easier to ignore the difficult and distasteful and hope or pray it goes away. Or, it's more fulfilling to laugh, sometimes to tears, than to weep. Though a hard, long cry has proven cleansing - rejuvenating.

The IRS Does It Again–Refunds To The Same Addresses
The people who will run Obamacare—into the ground! ~Bob

Geez, you offer someone a sincere complement on their mustache and suddenly, she's not your friend anymore. (Her profile: Gun totin' Panty Store Owner. American Conservative. Hates freeloaders & whiners. Salty isn't a seasoning, it's a state of mind.)

Detroit Cops Arrested For Robbing Drivers At Gunpoint

Blistering Newspaper EditorialTake your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough
Excerpt: Forgive us if you are not greeted with the same level of Southern hospitality that our area usually bestows on its distinguished guests. You see, we understand you are in town to share your umpteenth different job creation plan during your time in office. If it works as well as your other job creation programs, then thanks, but no thanks. We’d prefer you keep it to yourself.

Bend The Healthcare Cost Curve Downward By Letting Healthcare Costs Rise. By Sally Pipes
Excerpt: Some wonks complain that expensive new medical technologies and therapies — some of which deliver only marginal improvements to patient health — are key drivers of health spending. European researchers surveyed 86 studies on the subject, they found that while some innovations raised health costs, others reduced them.

Excerpt: The editors of The New York Times are outraged by the idea of government agents reading their email and listening to their phone calls. They also object to the government requiring librarians to disclose what books they happen to be reading. But they have no apparent problem with the government having access to their medical records. Theirs and everyone else’s.
One of the goals of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) ― fully supported in editorial after editorial ― is to accumulate medical records in a national data base, so that researchers can better study what works and what doesn’t. In fact this has already happened in the state of Hawaii. Of course, the accumulators of your health records are supposed to respect your privacy. But so is the National Security Agency.


The Three Candidates Beating Weiner
And in NYC there isn't ONE good Republican who can beat these clowns? Holy cow, are they in tough shape. –Laura

Weiner - Quick, Hide The Children. By Andy Weddington
Excerpt: Though asked, some pleading, numerous times the past couple of weeks to comment about New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, I have resisted. There are more important matters of National concern to address and discuss - none related to Hebrews nor Ball Parks nor Nathans but important nonetheless.

Excerpt: Yesterday President Obama stopped by an Amazon Distribution center in Kentucky to take credit for the additional 7,000 hiring positions Amazon is establishing, though he had nothing whatever to do with that decision. That's okay...we're used to that now. What we're not used to was Obama's speech yesterday. He used the occasion to propose a "Grand Bargain" with Republicans with corporate tax reform. This after five years of Republican cajoling Obama to take action to bring America's corporate tax code in line with rates our foreign competitors are paying. Anxious not to sink further, from lame duck status, to irrelevance, Obama proposed lowering corporate taxes, from 35% to 28%, and a more favorable rate for manufacturers to 25%. (Before you announce a “grand Bargain,” shouldn’t you talk to the people you want to make the bargain with to see if they are interested? Otherwise, it’s just PR. ~Bob.) 

Obama Must Have Watched PBS. By Peter Rollins
Excerpt: President Obama’s recent extemporaneous remarks about Ho Chi Minh being a Jeffersonian Democrat may be the result of his viewing the PBS series entitled Vietnam: A Television History (1983). (Many people still consider Karnow's book the one to be put at the top of the Viet Nam bibliography. It reads well, hangs together very nicely, and makes no statements that immediately strike the reader as slanted or extreme. But it is in fact definitely slanted, and puts together a good deal of real history with slants and inaccuracies, so the final picture one gets of the war is quite flawed. The best antidote to it is the book "Losers Are Pirates", which dissects the TV series carefully and thus presents an alternate view to what is in the book. --Del)

Black Self-Sabotage. By Walter E. Williams
Excerpt: The truth is that black female-headed households were just 18 percent of households in 1950, as opposed to about 68 percent today. In fact, from 1890 to 1940, the black marriage rate was slightly higher than that of whites. Even during slavery, when marriage was forbidden for blacks, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. In New York City, in 1925, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. (Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of 'Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?' and 'Up from the Projects: An Autobiography.')

Iran and Syria sign $3.6bn oil deal
Excerpt: Tehran agrees to supply Damascus with oil in exchange for the right to invest in country devastated by conflict.

Pentagon Sees Support for Afghans After 2014
Excerpt: Following reports in recent weeks that the White House is considering a full withdrawal from Afghanistan when the NATO-led mission ends in December 2014, a Pentagon assessment released Tuesday says significant foreign military assistance and financial support for Afghan security forces will be required long after United States troops are expected to depart. (It won’t be that long. A year after we pull out, the Taliban will be in control, throwing acid in the faces of little school girls, stoning rape victims for adultery, and training terrorists to kill us. ~Bob.)

Lash and jail for Saudi web activist Raef Badawi
Excerpt: A Saudi online activist has been jailed for seven years and sentenced to 600 lashes for urging religious liberalisation, his lawyer has said.

The Age of Hyperbole: How Normal Weather Became ‘Extreme.’ A media without shame drives us towards energy poverty. By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris
Excerpt: Distortion and deception are accentuated by hyperbole. Television news and documentaries frequently report normal weather as “extreme weather,” implying it is abnormal and caused by human activity. But while a hurricane, for example, may inflict serious damage to our structures and cause major loss of life, it is a normal event in hurricane-prone regions, where it is foolish to live without preparing for the weather patterns of the area. The problem is accentuated when supposedly prestigious newspapers like the New York Times present provably false information. 


Phony Scandals? One picture refutes.

Delay in Employer Health Mandate Estimated to Cost $12 Billion
Excerpt: The Obama administration's move to delay a mandate on businesses to provide health coverage will mean $12 billion in lost tax revenue and additional costs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The nonpartisan CBO said one million fewer people will get employer coverage in 2014 as a result of the postponement, and half of those will turn to new government health-insurance exchanges or Medicaid for coverage.

Terrifying! Obama Regime Unveils Behavior Modification Program to ‘Nudge’ Americans
http://minutemennews.com/2013/07/terrifying-obama-regime-unveils-behavior-modification-program-to-nudge-americans/
Excerpt: FOX News reported on Tuesday that the government has created a “Behavioral Insights Team,” which is intended to influence the behavior of Americans. It is being referred to as a “nudge” because the team’s approach has been dubbed “subtle.” One can only assume that such “nudges” are intended to be the second part of a governmental, one-two punch, the first being ham-fisted executive orders.

CNN: We interviewed a lead Benghazi suspect, whom the feds apparently can’t find, for two hours
Excerpt: A nice catch from the Standard. Actually, John King never says that the FBI can’t find the Benghazi suspects, only that they’ve never contacted the guy whom CNN interviewed. Why? According to an AP story published in May, the feds are keeping their distance because they’re surveilling them electronically. 

The IRS scandal is so phony Lois Lerner had to plead the 5th to keep from incriminating herself with the truth.

Tampa bay Times Fact Checker: Obama says Keystone XL would mean "maybe 2,000 jobs"
Excerpt: Obama said the Keystone XL pipeline might produce about 2,000 jobs during construction, based on the most reliable estimates. The White House provided no supporting evidence and the administration’s own State Department predicted that while the pipeline would produce few permanent jobs, the construction process itself would create nearly twice as many jobs as the president said. We rate the statement False.

Activists aghast at Oakland law criminalizing possession of some household items at protests
Excerpt: The Oakland City Council moved closer on Tuesday to both expand authorities’ surveillance capabilities and authorize a ban on common household tools and paints it deemed “tools of violence and vandalism” at public demonstrations, raising concerns from local activists and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). (First they came for the guns, and the ACLU cheered. Then they came for the hammers and spray cans…~Bob.)

Hawaii sets aside $100,000 to offer its 17,000 homeless people one-way airfare back to their home states
Excerpt: Hawaii is hoping to take the burden off its welfare system by saying aloha to its 17,000 homeless residents. The state will offer one-way tickets home to any eligible homeless person to anywhere in the continental United States. (I don’t want to be on that flight. Thank God Hawaii is a Democrat-run state. This would be racist if a GOP-run state did it and Holder would step in. ~Bob.)

The happiest people don't have wonderful "things," they have wonderful experiences. Get outside and make a memory.

The Debt Is a Middle Class Issue
Excerpt: While deficits are coming down in the short term, the debt remains at levels not seen since the end of World War II. Our partner organization, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, projects the debt will rise from 73% of the economy today to nearly 75% in 2023 and continue to rise thereafter. (I think this is very optimistic, and doesn’t take into account the off-the-books unfunded liability for Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare, estimated north of $100T. ~Bob.)

Secret Sex Tape: Monica Lewinsky Caught On Explicit Recording Telling Bill Clinton, ‘I Could Take My Clothes Off…’
Remind me again why Clinton is annoyed at being compared to Weiner’s on-line affairs. ~Bob.

Tweet from RB ‏@RBPundit
The Lewinsky tape = "Let's get this out there so it's old news for 2016"

Charles Krauthammer on Obamacare Shutdown: If I thought it would work, I would support it. By Jeff Poor
Excerpt: "The real issue here is whether you’re playing the short game or the long game. The short game where you control one house of Congress, you have no chance of repealing Obamacare, zero, because the other side sees it as the signature issue of the President and the Senate. You play the long game, you don’t risk your popularity which I think is increasing for the GOP."

"Rock Star" Republican to Join Arkansas Senate Race. By Alex Pappas
Excerpt: [Tom] Cotton is particularly popular with the more hawkish wing of the Republican Party. Instead of choosing a more lucrative path after graduating from Harvard Law School, Cotton enlisted as an Army Ranger. He was elected to Arkansas’s Fourth Congressional District just last year.

Playing for Islam Against Ourselves. By Daniel Greenfield
Excerpt: WWI was caused less by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and more by Germany and Austria Hungary's eagerness in courting the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Before and during WW2, England and Germany both assiduously courted Muslim support in the Middle East. The Holocaust was one of the byproducts of this rivalry, as Germany courted Muslims by appealing to the genocidal impulses of the Mufti of Jerusalem, while England reneged on its agreements, and shut the door to Jewish refugees trying to reach Israel.

Sarah Palin Right All Along? Howard Dean's Surprising ObamaCare Claim
http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/07/30/howard-dean-op-ed-supports-sarah-palins-obamacare-death-panels-claim
Excerpt: There is more proof that the ObamaCare ‘death panels’ are alive and well. The former head of the Democratic Party, who also happens to be a medical doctor, is sounding the alarm. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Howard Dean calls out a “major problem” with the health care law, known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Sarah Palin, who warned against death panels in 2010, reacted on Tuesday night’s Hannity.

Vacationer Obama's Favorite Vineyard "Vulture." By Michelle Malkin
Excerpt: [David] Schulte [in whose home the Obamas are vacationing on Martha's Vineyard], you see, earned his money in much the same way the demonized Mitt Romney did: through corporate restructuring and rescuing debt-burdened companies. He and his former partner, Sam Zell, have happily embraced the nickname "grave dancers" since the early 1990s. By 1993, their billion-dollar "vulture fund" based in Chicago had purchased all or part of Jacor Communications, the embattled media conglomerate; Sealy Corporation, the mattress empire; and the distressed Schwinn Bicycle Company.

The Shrinking of the National-Security Right. Mark Steyn
Excerpt: In this struggle, our enemies hide in plain sight, but western governments will not confront them in plain sight. As I wrote here last month: "Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public."

Egyptian Muslim cleric instructs European Muslims on how best to beat their wives
Excerpt: When it comes to beating, he should never beat her harshly. He should never raise his hand. He should never beat her on her face. But he can use something very simple – like a siwak [dental stick] or something like this pen. The beating should not lead to breaking her arm or a tooth. He should avoid this, because the Prophet urged us and told us that when you beat someone, you should never beat him or her on his or her face. This is because the face is owned by Allah.

Russian billionaire seeks U.S. government financing for luxury jets
Excerpt: Billionaire Russian businessman Gennady Timchenko, a long-time associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, plans to seek U.S. government-backed funding to buy luxury aircraft, Reuters has learned.

Churches Bombed in Kano, Nigeria, Killing 45 People, Christian Leaders Say
Excerpt: Suspected terrorists from the Islamic extremist Boko Haram group set off four bombs that hit two churches in Kano city on Monday night (July 29), killing at least 45 people, sources said.

Who Will Rid Me of This Troublesome Weiner? Hillary, Fearing a Storyline Mentioning Her Own Tammy Wynette Act, Sets the Democratic Dogs to Weiner & Huma
Excerpt: Until this second wave of Weinermania broke, it had been said -- for years -- that Bill and Hillary Clinton consider Huma Abedin to be like a second daughter. Remember that as you read the following. She was a Second Daughter. Now she's a threat that must be destroyed. And also remember the Democratic Party is not a party, it is The Collective, and The Collective has a rigid hierarchy, as do colonies of insects and other meaner, lesser creatures and vermin.

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