Monthly Archives: February 2014

Proposed Arizona law would allow people to discriminate

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Republicans in Arizona have passed a law that would legalize a business owner’s right to discriminate against homosexuals as long as it’s for “sincerely” held religious beliefs.  The Republican governor is under pressure by so called gay rights activists to veto the bill.  As far as I know, it’s legal to do this in Arizona already, but supporters of the law point to court decisions in other states that disallowed a business owner’s right to refuse service to same sex couples.  This Arizona law is sort of a proactive step to protect religious people who run businesses from being forced by the courts to provide their goods and services to homosexuals.

I can’t support this law, but not because I think a gay person or anyone else has a right to patronize any private business they want.  In fact the reason I can’t support this law is because I believe the exact opposite.  I believe any business owner should have the right to refuse service to anyone they want.  They should be free to give any reason for refusing service or give no reason at all.  The problem with this Arizona law is it only allows people to discriminate on religious grounds.  It also seems to me that it’s comparable to hate crime legislation in that it opens the door for thought police.  If someone refused service to a homosexual and the homosexual sued them, what would be the next step?  Most likely they’d end up in court trying to prove their religion forbids them from associating with homosexuals, and that they sincerely believe that part of their religion.  In other words, I’m not sure this law would necessarily benefit the religious people it’s supposed to protect.

I don’t personally have any problem with homosexuals.  If I owned my own company I would welcome their business.  In fact as a child I attended a Protestant church where the associate pastor was a lesbian.  Church wasn’t any better or worse in my opinion because of her lesbianism, and I imagine if there’s a God who looks favorably upon Protestants he appreciates her work as a minister.

But regardless of my own beliefs, freedom of association is the bedrock of any free society.  It is the person who wants to force someone to bake him a cake or take his picture that is really forcing his beliefs on the business owner is it not?  A Christian who refuses isn’t trying to forcibly convert the man to his religion.  He’s just exercising his right to not associate with homosexuals.  It is the homosexual in this case that is trying to force the Christian, under threat of State violence, to assist in his wedding and thereby accept homosexuality as a legitimate way of life.

I’ve never truly understood the rationale anyway.  If there is a portion of the population that really hates gay people, why do gay people want to patronize their businesses?  Is it just that some gays hate them back and want to humiliate them?  If these two groups of people really hate each other, why is it in the interest of “society” to have the State force them to associate with each other?

Despite the fears of left-wing pundits, I seriously doubt there would be widespread discrimination at private businesses based on race or sexual orientation if the State just stayed out of these affairs.  There would probably be some, but in general people tend to be motivated mainly by their own economic self interest when it comes to running their businesses.  It would not make economic sense to just refuse to sell your good or service to a specific segment of the population for ideological reasons.  The main cause of racial segregation in the South during much of the 20th century was due to the State itself.  Local and State governments in much of the country infringed on people’s freedom of association by not allowing business owners to serve both blacks and whites equally. Bringing in State violence on the other side and forcing groups to associate at gunpoint is not the answer.

 

Treasury Secretary Lew doesn’t want poor people working full time

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“It is not acceptable for people to work full time and live below the poverty line.”

So apparently the National Government gets to decide what’s an acceptable way for people to live their lives.

But putting that aside, the “poverty line” is a government construct as is the “minimum wage.”  You can simply set the minimum wage high enough so that anyone working full time will be above the poverty line.  Then anyone who can’t find a job for $7.25 (or the $10.10 that Lew would prefer) will be unemployed and collect government welfare. Problem solved.  This is how Democrats think.  They would rather a person not work than make less than whatever arbitrary hourly wage they come up with.  The fact that someone could take a job for $5.00 an hour, learn some skills through that experience, become a more valuable worker, and then begin to earn a higher wage is irrelevant.  After all, the minimum wage argument is to get ignorant people to vote for them and to appease Labor Unions who are some of their biggest campaign contributors.

To be fair, Republicans always go along with this for political reasons.  They don’t like having this argument so they eventually cave and accept a minimum wage hike.  The best you can hope for from them is a “compromise” where they agree to raise it slightly less than the Democrats want.

Still, I’m confused by the numbers.  Someone making $7.25 an hour working 40 hours a week earns about $15,080 per year.  If it’s a single person, they earned more than the government poverty line number of $11,490.  However, if they’re trying to support a family of four then they need to earn $23,350 so they’re well below this.  Now raise it to $10.10 and (setting aside the issue of all the people making between $7.25 & $10.10 who get laid off) the annual income is about $21,000.  So they’re still not making enough to support a family of four above the Government’s own definition of poverty.  Why so stingy then? Where did the $10.10 come from?  Why not at least raise it to the $11.22 necessary to earn $23,350 annually since the State is clearly able to legislate poverty out of existence? Hell, if raising the minimum wage doesn’t increase unemployment as advocates insist, why not just raise it to $100 an hour or $1000 an hour so we can all be rich?

For more on this nonsense, I would urge people to read Murray Rothbard.

Steve Israel Supports Israel

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Just for fun let’s do a little thought experiment and think about how Israelis might view a Knesset member named Abraham America who held these views:

MK America is one of the leading voices in the Knesset supporting the United States. He believes Israel should continue our commitment to pursuing peace in North America and defending our allies. In the 19th Knesset, MK America is a co-sponsor of the following:

  • A resolution that supports an American-Puerto Rican peace process and opposes Puerto Rican attempts to seek unilateral recognition of a Puerto Rican state.
  • A resolution to oppose aid to a Puerto Rican government that includes the Puerto Rican Independence Party.
  • A bill to prohibit Israeli assistance to Puerto Rico if the Puerto Ricans unilaterally declare a Puerto Rican state.
  • The United States -Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. This bill affirms the deep military ties forged over the years between the U.S. and Israel and reiterates our firm commitment to American security.
  • The Iron Dome Support Act. This bill would authorize the Prime Minister to help the United States procure additional Iron Dome defense systems. The Iron Dome is the United States’ key defense against gang violence by Drug Cartels in the border towns of Mexico and the US.

In May 2011, MK America led a bi-partisan letter to the Preisdent of Venezuela urging the Venezuelan government to intervene and stop a second flotilla from departing for Cuba. “Another so-called aid flotilla to Cuba is nothing but an attempt to provoke the United States. The Venezuelan government can help prevent violence by saying ‘no.’ We are urging President Maduro to actively work to put a stop to this and join with the United States in providing real humanitarian assistance to Cuba,” said MK America.

MK America has also worked to shut down the smuggling tunnels between Mexico and the United States. From his position on the Knesset Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, MK America has worked to provide assistance to the region so that these tunnels can be shut down and the supply of weapons that threaten the United States and harm civilians can be minimized.

MK America recently led a letter to the President of the International Olympic Committee and 21 of his colleauges expressing disappointment with the IOC’s decision to reject requests for a moment of silence during the London Olympic Games in memory of the September 11, 2001 New York victims and urging the IOC to reverse their decision.

Change the names of a few places and you’ve basically got the views of Rep. Israel on the State of Israel

Now Steve Israel is an easy target just because of his last name.  The majority of congressmen whether they’re Democrat, Republican, Jewish, Christian, or Atheist have some similar “commitment to Israel” sentiment on their websites and regularly vote the way AIPAC or the Israeli government tell them to.  But come on!  Would any other Nation on the Earth allow their government representatives to openly put the interests of a foreign power above the country they supposedly represent?  I mean how does Gaza or Hamas or Iran or any of these alleged enemies of Israel really threaten the average American in any way?

I’m just sayin’…

Happy Presidents Day

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Today is Presidents Day.  Technically we’re supposed to be celebrating George Washington’s birthday, but since only government parasites get Lincoln’s birthday off anymore, this has morphed into a celebration of the two of them and executive power in general.  Now we have a day to celebrate Barack Obama, two George Bushes, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and all the other thieves and war criminals that have taken up residence in the White House over the last couple centuries.

Historians will often use today as an excuse to type up a list of the best presidents in American history.  I could do that, but it would really be more of a list of which ones, in my opinion, did the least amount of damage during their reigns.  So rather than bore myself by reading through Wikipedia pages of the Grover Clevelands and Calvin Coolidges of the world, I’ll make a short list of who I consider to be the worst presidents.  You’ll notice these are mostly the same guys who would appear on a typical best presidents list.

1. Woodrow Wilson.

Where to start.  Woody solidified the Democrat Party as the “progressive” party moving forward, stealing the title away from the Republicans who had been the openly Big Government party since the Civil War.  He handed over control of the currency to bankers with the Federal Reserve Act.  He actually lowered tariffs which would be good except he made up for it with the first income tax since the Civil War.  The worst thing he did was plunge the formerly “isolationist” United States into World War I.  After getting a few hundred thousand Americans killed for the British and French Empires, he helped negotiate the Treaty of Versailles leading to World War II.  There’s a school of thought that had he stayed out and minded his own damn business, that the Europeans would have had to make a true negotiated peace.  This could have avoided Nazism and Communism, but hey, those isms were a small price to pay to make the world safe for democracy.  He reinstated the draft, locked people up for criticizing him, and did his best to nationalize the economy.  The best thing ‘ol Woody did was drop dead.  Unfortunately it was a few years after his second and final term ended.

2. Abraham Lincoln

Honest Abe’s number 2 on the list for the sheer body count.  One million casualties. 625,000 dead soldiers.  50,000 dead civilians.  The war that Lincoln unleashed set the standard for total warfare that the rest of Western Civilization would continue in WWI and WWII as the Union Army burned southern cities to the ground and starved women and children.  Slavery eventually ended following the Union victory, but considering the cost of the war, one would think he could have simply bought all the slaves and set them free.  It should be noted that he didn’t start the war to end slavery, that slavery existed throughout his presidency in several of the Union States, and that he actually supported the Fugitive Slave Act as well as a constitutional amendment saying the Federal Government would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.  The war was mainly fought so he could consolidate Washington’s power over the southern states and raise the protectionist tariff to benefit his crony capitalist benefactors.  He also sent the army west to clear the Indians for his former railroad company clients.  He was assassinated while still in office, and has since been considered a Christ-like martyr for adherents of a strong executive and expanding National government ever since.

3. Franklin Roosevelt

FDR’s New Deal prolonged the Great Depression and set the stage for government dependency that’s been growing among a larger and larger portion of the population ever since.  It also made the individual states ever more dependent on Washington so as to decrease any resistance to the Federal Government.  I won’t go into the details here, but the economic and political arguments I find persuasive are easy to dig up with a quick google search.  He also stole every American’s gold.  Roosevelt’s worst crime was certainly getting the US involved in World War II.  Like Wilson he lied about wanting to stay out of it while he was doing his best to provoke first Germany, and when that failed, Japan. He allowed the soldiers at Pearl Harbor to be murdered so he could get a back door entry into the European war.  He then proceeded to wage Total War on the civilians of Germany by fire bombing their cities.  For good measure he locked up Japanese-Americans in concentration camps based on their perceived disloyalty.  The one good thing he did was help repeal the 18th amendment.

4. Harry Truman

Truman tried his best to continue FDR’s interventionist economic policies, but he was thwarted to a large degree by a Republican Congress following WWII.  So what gets Harry on this list is his reckless foreign policy.  First off he continued FDR’s Total War policy and refused any negotiated surrender from either Germany or Japan, ensuring a much higher death toll. He firebombed Tokyo and dropped Atomic bombs on two Japanese cities for the sole purpose of killing as many people as possible.  Whether this was done just to show off to the Soviets or because he was trying to break the will of the Japanese people is irrelevant. There is no justification for the carnage he unleashed.  After WWII was over he helped his buddy Stalin continue slaughtering German civilians while he enslaved half of Europe.  He then started NATO and helped ignite the Cold War.  Later Truman launched the Korean War.  This was done without asking Congress for a declaration, setting the stage for the Imperial Presidency we have today.

5. Lyndon Johnson

Created the modern Welfare State.  Launched a bloody and senseless war in Vietnam which was eventually lost anyway.  I could go into more details, but I’m not sure there are many people who actually like this guy anyway.  Unlike the previous four, LBJ is usually not on any Great Presidents lists.

Dishonorable Mentions

I know that 4 out of 5 on my list are Democrats, but if I had kept going there would have been plenty of Republicans.  I’m a non-partisan hater:

Teddy Roosevelt, Bush 2, Obama, Nixon, Clinton, Grant, Bush 1, McKinley.

Kerry the scientist ends debate

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John Kerry is using money stolen from anyone forced to hold their wealth in US dollars to take a trip to Asia and tell those people how to run their countries. They can’t be allowed to use as much energy as he does because of dreaded man made global warming, which his kind has taken to calling “climate change.”

Let’s briefly walk through some of his quotes to those Indonesians dumb enough to listen to one of his speeches:

“We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,”

So any science that doesn’t confirm Kerry’s view of the earth’s climate is “shoddy” says the man who majored in political science at Yale.  Any scientific theory Kerry believes is a scientific “fact.”  The dozens of mainstream scientists who produce this “shoddy” work are a “tiny minority.”  The people opposing Kerry’s ideology that the governments of the world need to come together to regulate every person’s energy use on the planet are “extreme ideologues.”

“Nor should we allow any room for those who think that the costs associated with doing the right thing outweigh the benefits.”

A cost-benefit analysis of the billions and potentially trillions of dollars Kerry would like to spend on some scheme to regulate carbon is not to be allowed.  After all only “extreme ideologues” are against him.  What he wants to do is the “right thing” because he says so. I suppose this means anyone who opposes him is just plain evil and wants to do what’s wrong for the planet and humans everywhere.  They need to just shut the hell up dammit.  How dare they oppose Emperor Obama and Deputy Emperor Kerry.

Obama gets his own climate science wrong

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In this New York Times piece, it states that Barack Obama made a speech where he said the current drought in California is an example of the challenge “we” face from man made global warming (or as the reporter put it “human caused climate change”).

I’ll take the Times’ word for it that Obama said this because I could never listen to his Holiness read a teleprompter for twenty minutes straight.

Anyway, apparently “the latest computer models” (you know those things that always seem to be wrong) say that due to global warming, California should actually be getting wetter, not drier.  So the Emperor got his own phony science backwards.  Of course to Democrats all weather everywhere is an example of global warming and climate change.

It almost seems like the headline about there being some dispute in linking the California drought to global warming was a trick to get us “deniers” to read the damn thing.  After a couple paragraphs, the main point of the article seems to be that mostly unidentified “scientists” and “experts” all agree that this drought is probably worse due to global warming even though it would have happened anyway.

It’s poor or misleading reporting to be sure.  Look at the actual quotes:

“I’m pretty sure the severity of this thing is due to natural variability,” said Richard Seager, a climate scientist who studies water issues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

Nothing here links the severity of the drought to global warming

We are going through a pattern we’ve seen before, but we’re doing it in a warmer environment,” said Michael Anderson, the California state climatologist.

This guy is a government employee who works directly for a state government completely controlled by Democrats.

The White House science adviser, John P. Holdren, said in a briefing last week: “Scientifically, no single episode of extreme weather, no storm, no flood, no drought can be said to have been caused by global climate change. But the global climate has now been so extensively impacted by the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases that weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change.”

This “adviser” works directly for Emperor Obama so obviously there is no way he would contradict anything Dear Leader says.

“I think the situation is still pretty severe,” said Prof. Alex Hall, who studies climate at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Nothing about global warming.

“The surprise jumped out that, wow, all of a sudden it got a whole lot drier in the western part of North America,” Dr. Sewall recalled.

Nothing in this quote backs up the premise the author is making.  Everything else he says about Dr. Sewall’s decade old study doesn’t seem to be backed up by any quotes or footnotes.

“It (warmer climate) all adds up across the Southwest to an increasingly stressed water system,” he (Dr. Seager of Columbia University) said. “That’s what they might as well get ready for.”

This is the one quote from a scientist not directly on the government’s payroll that appears to suggest that global warming is causing a drought.  Although I’ll note that all of California is not entirely in the Southwest and there is nothing saying the warmer climate is man made.

This is shoddy reporting to say the least.  It’s a few misleading quotes interspersed with a bunch of garbage about unknown “scientists”, “experts”, and “studies.”  This is nothing more than an opinion piece dressed up as reporting.

Children’s entertainer debates climate science

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Apparently Bill Nye the Science Guy got the North Pole confused with the South Pole on NBC’s Meet the Press Propaganda Hour.  It’s interesting that the host of a kid’s TV show would be one of the main proponents of the Democrat’s favorite scientific theory.  Bill’s not shy about demonstrating why the party of Big Government loves the scientific theory of Big Government.

I guess having someone who spent most of the nineties dumbing down science for children could do the same for people dumb enough to watch NBC for a discussion of current events.

I also find it interesting that Bill Nye was born in Washington, D.C. (4th generation) to a mother who worked for US intelligence as well as a father who was in the army (I can’t find what he did for a living, if anything, as a civilian).  He then went to work for the war profiteer Boeing before landing a job teaching science to children on government television.  Now he teaches “science” to the child like minds of Obama supporters.