Political Privilege

Monday 26 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Mark Steyn on Obamacare applying only to those not granted special privilege by the government:

So what is it about? On Wednesday, the Nevada AFL-CIO passed a resolution declaring that “the unintended consequences of the ACA will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week.” That’s quite an accomplishment for a “health” “care” “reform” law. But the poor old union heavies who so supported Obamacare are now reduced to bleating that they should be entitled to the same opt-outs secured by big business and congressional staffers. It’s a very strange law whose only defining characteristic is that no one who favors it wants to be bound by it.

Meanwhile, on the very same day as the AFL-CIO was predicting the death of the 40-hour week, the University of Virginia announced plans to boot working spouses off its health plan beginning January 1 because the Affordable Care Act has made it unaffordable: It’s projected to add $7.3 million dollars to the university’s bill in 2014 alone.

As Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” But the problem with “comprehensive” legislation is that, when everything’s in it, nothing’s in it. The Affordable Care Act means whatever President Obama says it means on any particular day of the week. Whether it applies to you this year, next year, or not at all depends on the whim of the sovereign, and whether your CEO golfs with him on Martha’s Vineyard. A few weeks back, the president unilaterally suspended the law’s employer mandate. Under the U.S. Constitution, he doesn’t have the power to do this, but judging from the American people’s massive shrug of indifference he might as well unilaterally suspend the Constitution, too. Obamacare is not a law, in the sense that all persons are equal before it, but a hierarchy of privilege; for example, senators value their emir-sized entourages and don’t want them to quit, so it is necessary to provide the flunkies who negotiated and drafted the Affordable Care Act an exemption from the legislation they imposed on the citizenry.

[. . .]

But it also has a broader destabilizing effect: As I noted a couple of weeks ago, at the low end, about 40 percent of Americans now do minimal-skilled service jobs — the ones that, in the wake of Obamacare, are becoming neither full-time nor part-time but kinda-sorta two-thirds-time in order not to impose health-insurance obligations on the employer. In the middle, a similar number of Americans are diverted into those paper-shuffling jobs that do provide health benefits — say, in the “human resources” department of the bureaucracy; the kind of job in which you pass the time calling someone in Idaho to say you need them to fill in a W-9 before you can send them a 1099, or vice versa. And, at the top end, privileged Americans spend six-figure sums acquiring college degrees that admit them to an homogenized elite that tells itself Obamacare makes perfect sense for everyone except them. The U.S. economy can never recover until more of its real “human resources” are engaged in genuine wealth creation. Yet Obamacare instead incentivizes the diversion of more and more manpower into the Republic of Paperwork. (Emphasis mine)

It should be very telling that those who supported the law the most are the first to ask to be exempted from it. Instead, people stick to the talking points of their team and ignore that those who conceived of, drafted, passed this shitty bit of legislation and foisted it upon the American people want nothing to do with it. They know it’s a shit sandwich they made, and will do anything to avoid it.

Comments Off on Political Privilege  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-26  ::  madlibertarianguy

Wrong

Thursday 22 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

If, in the line of duty as a police officer, you find yourself using a taser on a septuagenarian in a nursing home, you’re doing it wrong.

Comments Off on Wrong  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-22  ::  madlibertarianguy

I Can’t Disagree

Friday 16 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

I can’t say that I disagree.

College-aged support for libertarians and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) represents the United States’ “only hope” in politics, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Campus Reform early Friday morning.

“The only hope as far as electoral politics… presently, is the libertarian section of the Republican party,” said Assange, in response to a question about the recent swell of college-aged and youth-based support for libertarianism.

“The libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice really in the U.S. Congress,” said Assange. “[I] am a big admirer of Ron Paul and Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the U.S. Congress on a number of issues.”

I’m not so sure that Paul is some kind of saviour, I don’t have that much faith in either politicians or the formal political process, but I agree wholly that Paul seems to be on the right side of many of the government abuse issues that are most important. He’s not perfect, but as long as he openly decries Constitutional abuses he’s one of the very few sane voices in DC.

Comments Off on I Can’t Disagree  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-16  ::  madlibertarianguy

Sick

Friday 16 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Our government is sick.

At the time of the meeting, the boy didn’t know that the United States had decided to kill a man named Adnan al-Qadhi, and had turned to its allies in Yemen for assistance. Now the Yemeni government needed the child’s help. The Republican Guard officers told him what they wanted him to do: plant tiny electronic chips on the man he had come to think of as a surrogate father. The boy knew and trusted the officers; they were his biological father’s friends. He told them he would try. He would be their spy.

Using children as pawns in war is unconscionable.

Comments Off on Sick  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-16  ::  madlibertarianguy

College Students

Friday 16 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Vietnamese college students much smarter than ours.

Market forces are working against college degrees in the ideology of Marx, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, where the Communist government has resorted to offering free tuition to attract students.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung recently signed a decree giving free tuition to students who agreed to take four-year courses on Marxism-Leninism and the works of Ho Chi Minh, the country’s revolutionary hero, at state-run universities.

Students have been shunning such degrees because potential employers are not interested in those programs, said Pham Tan Ha, director of admission and training at Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences and Humanities. Degrees in subjects like communications, tourism, international relations and English are more popular because students believe “they will have better chances of employment and better pay when they graduate,” he said.

Weighing your path of study economically? Who knew you’d be able to pay the bills if you planned your course of study according to what the market desires as opposed to getting degrees in Grievance Studies?

Comments Off on College Students  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-16  ::  madlibertarianguy

To The Bone

Monday 12 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

How can this be? I have been assured by those in power that the budget has already been cut to the bone and that if we cut one single thing we’ll end up just like Somalia in no time. The Telegraph:

Rooms have to be found for dozens of Secret Service agents, someone has to carry a selection of presidential basketballs, and of course the family dog needs his own state-of-the-art aircraft.

Arriving in the idyllic coastal retreat of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, Mr Obama left behind him in Washington DC high profile debates over the budget, government surveillance and his health care reforms. Instead, he will spend the next eight days playing golf, going to the beach, and buying books from the Bunch of Grapes bookstore.

In the air he swapped his suit and tie for khakis and a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves, while Mrs Obama wore a yellow-and-white summer dress.

Bo, the president’s Portuguese Water Dog, arrived separately on one of two MV-22 Ospreys, a hybrid aircraft which takes off like a helicopter but flies like a plane.

I have nothing against the president vacationing, but using tax dollars to facilitate travel for his fucking dog is goddamn insane. Fuck his dog. If he wants his dog to travel with him, great, but pay for it out of your own fucking salary, not mine, asshole.

Comments Off on To The Bone  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-12  ::  madlibertarianguy

Discretion

Monday 12 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Because selectively enforcing bad law is just as good as changing or repealing bad law. Reason on Holder’s announcement that they will selectively enter the amount of drugs found when filing a charge:

Holder’s announcement doesn’t repeal the laws that established mandatory minimums — it’s merely a declaration of executive branch restraint that could be dropped by a future administration.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing to show the desire to thwart mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, but being as Obama and Holder already have a horrendous record when it comes to using their discretion when they said they wouldn’t go after medical marijuana providers where it is legal, I don’t have much hope that this is anything but a ploy to curry public favor for the beleaguered-by-scandal administration. The right way to handle mandatory minimums is to support existing legislation to get rid of said dastardly practice by working with legislators who have already introduced a bill in the Senate and in the House, not to decree by fiat that you’ll use discretion when it suits you to skirt existing law (especially when it appears that the use of discretion has been used to punish the political opposition via the IRS), because discretion does not offer the same protections as repealing or changing bad law.

Comments Off on Discretion  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-12  ::  madlibertarianguy

Petty Tyrant

Saturday 10 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Fuck that petty tyrant Michael Bloomberg in the ass with a rusty chainsaw. “Why?” you ask?

The Bloomberg administration is quietly working to explicitly categorize electronic cigarettes as tobacco products and enact a sweeping ban on flavored e-cigs.

The details of the plan come from a newly leaked draft of three tobacco-related bills currently making their way through the City Council; one would raise the tobacco age to 21, while another would prohibit the display of cigarette advertising in stores. A third bill would prohibit the use of tobacco coupons, create a $10.50 price floor for cigarette packs, and increase the fines against those selling illegal cigarettes.

Initially the bills, drafted by the Health Department and introduced into the Council at the request of Mayor Bloomberg, were silent concerning the City’s position on electronic cigarettes.

“The bills were written with no intention of addressing electronic cigarettes at all,” Health Department Commissioner Thomas Farley told e-cigarette proponents [PDF] at a hearing in May.

The draft language reveals that this is no longer the case. While menthol and tobacco flavored e-cigarettes would ostensibly remain available at convenience stores, the burgeoning flavored e-cig market would ironically be relegated to “tobacco bars,” of which there are very few in New York City—mostly because they must have been in existence before December 31, 2001.

“This is a de facto ban on electronic cigarettes,” says Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health and a supporter of electronic cigarettes. “Pretty much all electronic cigarettes are flavored; they’re essentially flavored products. You’re basically telling a bunch of ex-smokers to go back to cigarettes.”
Dr. Siegel adds, “I think this would be a public health disaster.”

E-cigarettes save lives. Literally. All this ban will do is push those who have quit back towards cigarettes. I understand that rubbing out a ban boner is tough, but for fuck’s sake Bloomie, leave people the fuck alone.

Comments Off on Petty Tyrant  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-10  ::  madlibertarianguy

No Dogs Were Shot

Friday 9 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

At least in this horrific scenario, where the cops in Dekalb County, GA, resorted to terrifying a family at 1.30 in the morning over the collection of a civil fine, no dogs were shot.

Comments Off on No Dogs Were Shot  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-09  ::  madlibertarianguy

Deja Vu

Wednesday 7 August 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Journalists worry more about gaining access to their Dear Leader than with doing their fucking jobs. Noah Rothman on the media defaulting on its journalistic responsibility in favor of having direct access to Obama:

On July 31, CNN’s The Situation Room broadcast a portion of an interview conducted by reporter Arwa Damon with a suspect in the Benghazi attacks. The suspect revealed to Damon that no investigator has attempted to contact him regarding his involvement in that deadly assault. The following day, CNN’s Drew Griffin broke the news that more than 30 CIA agents were on the ground in Libya on the day of the attack and they are being pressured by the spy agency to not reveal to reporters or congressional investigators what they know of the events of that night. Some CNN reporters are reportedly fearful now that their access to the White House will be hampered following their probing into a story that members of the Obama administration would prefer remain uninvestigated.

“Access is a very serious consideration when it comes to stories that could adversely impact a show, correspondent, or network’s relationship with the administration, a campaign, or any political leader,” one source with insider information told Mediaite.

“I would suggest it’s not an accident that those who have been given a lot of access to the president have generally been AWOL when it comes to stories that might reflect poorly on him,” the source, who did not wish to be identified, continued. “It’s the name of the game. And it’s bad for everyone trying to do this job the right way.” Those reporters have reason to fear for their access to America’s executive branch. Some suspect that reporters who soft-pedal or underreport stories uncomfortable to the administration receive preferential access to White House officials.

It’s almost like we’ve seen journalists choose access to Obama over reporting important facts that might embarrass our government before.

Comments Off on Deja Vu  ::  Share or discuss  ::  2013-08-07  ::  madlibertarianguy