December 17th, 2014
Time for another Texas vs. California update:
California’s unfunded health care obligations for retired employees hits $72 billion. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
Meanwhile, the state comptroller says that California’s unfunded pension liabilities has hit $198 billion. (Ditto.)
California may extend benefits to illegal aliens taking advantage of Obama’s amnesty.
Speaking of which, both California and Texas are on the hook for providing education for illegal alien children. “Today, those figures are $14.4 billion for California and $8.5 billion for the Lone Star state.”
California will go broke if it doesn’t adopt pension reform.
Lessons for California from Texas’ boom.
Costa Mesa police union tries to pin false DUI charge on City Councilman. Hilarity ensues. (Hat tip: Dwight.) And what caused the police union to go after him? Pension reform.
Pension spiking widespread in Cosa Contra County. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
California’s high speed rail boondoggle won’t work with the current tracks.
Health industry software company vitaTrackr announces relocation of its headquarters from Baltimore to Austin.
Builders FirstSource announces expansion in San Antonio and Conroe.
Tags: amnesty, Austin, Border Controls, California, Conroe, Costa Mesa, Crime, Democrats, pension crisis, Texas, unions, Welfare State
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Texas, unions, Welfare State | No Comments »
December 16th, 2014
Today “a federal court in Pennsylvania declared aspects of President Obama’s executive actions on immigration policy unconstitutional.”
From the text of the decision: “The Court holds that the Executive Action is unconstitutional because it violates the separation of powers and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.”
Note: This is different than the D.C. District Court, which has also agreed to consider whether Obama’s amnesty is unconstitutional.
It looks like all those liberal pundits opining that “Oh, it will be years before the case works its way through the court system, by which time it will be too late” to undo the amnesty may be mistaken…
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Tags: amnesty, Border Controls
Posted in Border Control | No Comments »
December 16th, 2014
If you answered “two,” thinking of the Sidney siege, BZZZZPP! I’m sorry, you don’t win the microwave.
The answer would be “a minimum of 143,” given that the Taliban killed some 141 (a death toll that continues to rise) at a school in Pakistan yesterday. They burned a teacher alive and beheaded children.
You know: the usual.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed a dozen or more jihad-related killings the barely made local international papers, much less the ones not reported on.
If that happened in the U.S., the freakout would go on for weeks on end. But pretty much a week doesn’t go by that Jihadists don’t carry out a school killing somewhere in Nigeria or Kenya or wherever. Indeed, attacks on schools are part of the standard Jihadest blueprint for terror.
Blow-back must be a bitch for the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who played a key role in creating the Taliban and supporting various jihadist activities. (Remember where Osama Bin Laden was found?)
Tags: Foreign Policy, Islam, Jihad, Pakistan, Pakistani ISI, Sydney seige, Taliban
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »
December 15th, 2014
This video, reportedly of Freguson’s own Mike Brown (and it does look a great deal like him) presents an glimpse of him distinctly at odds with the “Hand up don’t shoot” crowd’s characterization of him as a “gentle giant”:
Usual caveats for things found on the Internet apply.
According to the YouTube description for the video: “All the old gentleman was doing was passing out Jesus flyers.”
“Mike Brown was a gentle giant.” Except when punching people and taking their stuff…
Tags: Crime, Democrats, Ferguson, video
Posted in Crime, Democrats, video | 1 Comment »
December 12th, 2014
Now ABC has joined the Washington Post in debunking still more aspects of the Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone UVA rape story. ABC got hold of and interviewed “Jackie”‘s friends, all of whom contradict Rolling Stone‘s account of the event in ways both great and small.
And now we find out that while at the University of Pennsylvania, Sabrina Rubin Erdely was once disciplined for fabulation by Stephen Glass? This has to be the most unbelievable plot twist since the revelation of Shaw’s communist handler in The Manchurian Candidate. “Jackie is the kindest, warmest, bravest, most honest human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
Now here’s three links to commentary on the story I didn’t have time to link before the Washington Post piece dropped. Though superseded by Facts On The Ground, each still has important points to make:
Sharyl Attkisson
Margaret Talbot
Mollie Hemingway, on unbelievable aspects of Erdely’s previous stories.
(Hat tip: Ace of Spades)
Tags: Crime, Democrats, feminism, Media Watch, Mollie Hemingway, Rolling Stone, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Sharyl Attkisson, Social Justice Warriors
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »
December 12th, 2014
You might not know from scanning the headlines of what the mainstream media wants to focus on, but there’s been a lot of liberal meltdown this week, among the MSM themselves especially:
Social Security to become insolvent in 2024. Thanks Obama! (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
The Gruber hearings: More “I don’t remember” than a Peter Gabriel video.
Wendy Davis earns Texas Monthly‘s Bum Steer of the Year. You know a Democrat had to have an epic train wreck when the lefty sorts over there are pretty much forced to put them on the cover…
Rapes by Democratic bundler Terry Bean or Democratic Capitol Hill staffer Donny Ray Williams? “Meh.” “The Press isn’t all that interested in stories that reflect badly on Democrats.”
Feminists prefer narrative to truth. “There is nothing that is nice or kind or empathetic about the subordination of truth to narrative.”
More on the same theme: “When questions first emerged, a number of people treated quashing those questions as the moral equivalent of war, attacking the questioners as if being skeptical of a story was itself wrong — rather than exactly the spirit of inquiry that makes science, and public debate, work…When we get wedded to our narratives, we become blind.”
“After four years of disastrous liberal Democratic rule, led by President Obama, the desperation of the left is now contributing to its own decline. And it’s not just recent defeats at the ballot box: The Democrats’ systematic overreach is destroying the credibility of their messengers and belittling the causes they want to promote; making it harder for them to identify and solve real problems.”
35 federal agencies plan to share your health data. What could possibly go wrong?
Feminists have used Title IX as a far-reaching tool to reorganize higher education to their ideological agenda.
“How feminism left me.”
We have a strong candidate for Most Clueless Example of Liberal White Female Privilege On Salon. Granted, it’s a target-rich environment…
Obama official who enabled illegal alien flood is resigning in advance of hearings How convenient…
“It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.”
How 401Ks are killing off defined-pension plans. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
#GamerGate is winning. “The ‘gamergate’ controversy cost Gawker Media ‘seven figures’ in lost advertising revenue, the company’s head of advertising Andrew Gorenstein said at an all-hands meeting on Wednesday afternoon.”
“All lives matter.” “APOLOGIZE!” WTF? Congratulations, Social Justice Warriors. You’re now officially a cult.
ISIS beheads four children for refusing to convert to Islam.
Joe Biden lectures Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Islam, which is like Kayne West lecturing Stephen Hawking on quantum physics.
Indonesia editor to face blasphemy charges for mocking ISIS. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
India judge decides that country’s Child Marriage Act doesn’t apply to the Religion of Peace. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
Yet he who has never had a snake-throwing fight at a Tim Hortons cast the first stone. (Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
“Man With Gender Studies Degree Terrorizes Party”. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
And I’m not covering the CROmnibus debacle yet because I haven’t even read the summary of the summary of the summary of what’s in that monster…
Tags: #GamerGate, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Border Controls, Charles Cook, feminism, Gawker, Hitler, Instapundit, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Joe Biden, Jonah Goldberg, Jonathan Gruber, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Megan McArdle, National Socialism, ObamaCare, pension crisis, rape, Social Justice Warriors, Social Security
Posted in Border Control, Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Media Watch, ObamaCare, Welfare State | 1 Comment »
December 11th, 2014
After spending days pointing out Amanda Marcotte’s factual and intellectual fallacies over the unraveling Rolling Stone UVA rape story on Twitter, this finally happened:
I love the smell of Amanda Marcotte blocking me in the morning. It smells like…victory.
Henceforth, December 11, 2014 shall be known as “Victory Over Amanda Marcotte” day.
Tags: Amanda Marcotte, Democrats, feminism, Media Watch, Twitter
Posted in Media Watch | 2 Comments »
December 11th, 2014
There’s been a lot of talk of how low oil prices are screwing Russia, but Venezuela is, if anything, more screwed thanks to the Magic Power of Socialism™:
U.S. currency is vital to Venezuela, which imports as much as 80% of what it consumes; 96% of its exports are petroleum products…In effect, the one-third decline in the price of oil means that the state oil company must either raise or divert enough production because Venezuela effectively owes China 67 million barrels of oil, roughly 27 million more than it did before, for this loan alone. And there are billions of dollars in other loans to consider.
And the outlook for the immediate future is equally grim:
Venezuela’s economy is expected to contract in 2014 and 2015, and even though it’s already recognized as the 14th least competitive economy in the world (according to the World Economic Forum) and the eighth-worst economy for doing business (according to The World Bank), [President Nicolas] Maduro’s laws seem to discourage private investments even more. The new laws reinforce bureaucracy and the difficulty of doing business in the country, particularly in the area of taxes.
“Increasing numbers of low-income Venezuelans are souring on Maduro as they suffer a declining economy, the highest inflation in the Americas, chronic shortages of basic goods and one of the world’s highest murder rates.”
If Venezuela’s economy collapses, they might take Cuba down with them, since the Castro brothers are so heavily dependent on Venezuelan oil subsidies to prop up their own moribund economy.
Compounding Venezuela’s crises is the fact that it’s probably going to default on its bonds. So they’re finally reaching the point in socialism where the run out of other people’s money. Next to that singular problem, U.S. sanctions on government Venezuelan officials for killing protestors are a trivial irritation…
Tags: Cuba, Economics, Foreign Policy, hyperinflation, inflation, Nicolas Maduro, socialism, Venezuela
Posted in Budget, Communism, Foreign Policy, Welfare State | 1 Comment »
December 10th, 2014
Now the Washington Post has done a follow-up to the Rolling Stone UVA rape piece. If the first Washington Post piece “raised questions” about the story, this one absolutely demolishes it.
Read the whole thing.
Tags: feminism, Media Watch, rape, Social Justice Warriors, UVA, Washington Post
Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »