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Posts Made By: Dave Snope

January 21, 2013 05:11 PM Forum: Politics

Senate Dems Plan New Push To Raise Taxes

Posted By Dave Snope
They see a "great opportunity" ... to kill more jobs, further depress the economy, send more manufacturing overseas, engorge government even more, and, most importantly, to soak the rich. Because that's how they roll in demacatland.

(Washington Post) Senate Democrats plan to draft a budget blueprint that calls for significantly higher taxes on the wealthy, oil and gas companies and corporations doing business overseas, reopening a battle over taxes Republicans had hoped to lay to rest with the “fiscal cliff.”

For nearly four years, Senate leaders have ducked their legal duty to craft a comprehensive budget framework. Now, however, Democrats see the budget process as “a great opportunity” to pursue additional tax increases — and to create a fast-track process to push them through the Senate, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

January 23, 2013 04:56 PM Forum: Politics

Health Insurance Rates To Necessarily Skyrocket

Posted By Dave Snope
Who would have guessed that a government program with 13,000 pages of regulations would raise costs? Anybody with common sense, that's who.

A California insurance broker, who sells health plans to individuals and small businesses, told me that she’s prepping her clients for a sticker shock. Her local carriers are hinting to her that premiums may triple this fall, when the plans unveil how they’ll billet the full brunt of Obamacare’s new regulations and mandates.

California is hardly alone. Around the country, insurers are fixing to raise rates by double digits. They’re privately briefing politicians in Washington on what’s in store. Those briefings are leaving a lot of folks up and down Pennsylvania Avenue jumpy.

What’s gives? President Obama, after all, said he’d prevent these sorts of prices. His new health law gave state regulators the power to block premium increases. It even created a federal agency to oversee insurance rates. But these bureaucrats are spectators to the price hikes. They’re mere wallflowers. Even in the bluest of states.

Their silence is the best evidence of who is culpable for the increases. It’s the policymakers. It’s Obamacare. The President is accepting the premium hikes as an allowable consequence of his healthcare policies.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/01/22/health-insurance-brokers-prepare-clients-for-obamacare-sticker-shock/

January 23, 2013 07:01 PM Forum: Global Warming - REAL or NOT

Ex-NASA Scientist Team Concludes No AGW Threat

Posted By Dave Snope
WASHINGTON, Jan. 23, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – A group of 20 ex-NASA scientists have concluded that the science used to support the man-made climate change hypothesis is not settled and no convincing physical evidence exists to support catastrophic climate change forecasts.

Beginning in February 2012, the group of scientists calling themselves The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) team received presentations by scientists representing all sides of the climate change debate and embarked on an in-depth review of a number of climate studies.

Employing a disciplined approach of problem identification and root cause analysis honed from decades of dealing with life threatening safety issues in successfully sending astronauts up through Earth’s atmosphere and returning them safely home, the TRCS team concluded that no imminent threat exists from man-made CO2.



TRCS team is comprised of renowned space scientists with formal educational and decades career involvement in engineering, physics, chemistry, astrophysics, geophysics, geology and meteorology. Many of these scientists have Ph.Ds. All TRCS team members are unpaid volunteers who began the project after becoming dismayed with NASA’s increasing advocacy for alarmist man-made climate change theories.

H. Leighton Steward, chairman of CO2isGreen.org as well as the educational non-profit, PlantsNeedCO2.org, makes the following comments regarding the TRCS posting, which can be found at www.therightclimatestuff.com:
1.The science of what is causing global climate change or warming is clearly not settled and never has been.
2.There is no convincing physical evidence to support the man-made climate change hypothesis. The standard test of a hypothesis is whether it is supported by real observations, which seems to have been ignored by climate alarmists.
3.Claims made by proponents of catastrophic man-made warming are dominantly supported by non-validated computer models and the output of these models should not be relied upon by policy-makers. Some TRCS team members have been making critical decisions using complex computer models for decades.
4.There is no immediate threat of catastrophic global warming even if some warming occurs. The sea level is not going to suddenly begin a steep acceleration of its 18,000-year rate of rise. Global sea level rise is not currently accelerating despite what climate change alarmists claim.
5.The U.S. Government has overreacted to a possible catastrophic warming. The probable negative impacts to the economy, jobs and an increased cost of food, transportation and utilities will be severe and hurt the poor and middle class the most. Real experiments show that Earth’s habitats and ecosystems could be damaged if CO2 levels are actually reduced. Environmentalists have been grossly misled to believe CO2 is a pollutant.
6.Empirical evidence shows that Earth is currently “greening” significantly due to additional CO2 and a modest warming.
7.Money saved by abandoning a premature rush to lower CO2 emissions could be better spent by continuing research on alternative energies that are not currently competitive or reliable.

January 25, 2013 05:23 AM Forum: Politics

CA Energy Costs To Necessarily Skyrocket.

Posted By Dave Snope
We're already paying some of the highest energy costs in the country. If not the highest when you combine all forms of energy. But that's not good enough. We must squeeze the life out of the lower classes by setting up the most expensive living expenses possible. This is Obama's dream for America in action.

The report by the free-market Pacific Research Institute specifically focuses on the additional costs imposed by a state mandate that requires 33 percent of its power come from renewable sources, like wind, solar and geothermal by 2020. PRI estimates that the California renewable portfolio standard will be an additional $5 billion in 2020.

The mandate represents an implicit 27 percent tax on power generation in the state due to the “the forced substitution of expensive power in place of cheaper electricity, particularly in terms of transmission, backup, and generation costs.”

“Moreover, this implicit tax to be imposed upon the California economy will grow each year as the size of the electricity market expands and the RPS requirement forces ever-greater amounts of high-cost power onto the market,” writes PRI senior fellow and report author Benjamin Zycher.

“This perverse effect inexorably will be reflected fully in rising rates paid by consumers, whether directly or indirectly,” Zycher continues.


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/24/report-costly-state-energy-policies-to-raise-california-power-costs-by-33-percent/#ixzz2IxhPSCuR

January 26, 2013 07:10 PM Forum: Off Topic Discussions

North Korea’s Concentration Camps on Google Earth

Posted By Dave Snope

All of the kwan-li-so camps are located in remote areas, protected by electrified fences and guard posts. The penalty for attempting to escape is death. Until March 2008, only portions of these camps were visible to Google Earth viewers. Recent additions to Google Earth’s high and medium resolution coverage of North Korea now make it possible to delineate these camps more-or-less completely.

The camps do not exist merely to punish and isolate potential dissidents; they are also the foundation of the North Korean regime’s system of domestic terror. The system enforces obedience and suppresses thoughtcrime by threatening not just the life of the dissenter, but also the lives of his loved ones, according to Oh Gyeung Seob, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute.

One can begin to grasp the immensity of the camps’ size and cruelty, and to corroborate least some of what the witnesses have told us, by comparing their accounts with the strikingly clear imagery of Camp 22, where the excellent resolution makes it possible to identify individual people in the satellite imagery.

http://freekorea.us/camps/

January 26, 2013 07:46 PM Forum: Politics

Obama Ramping Up Another Housing Crisis

Posted By Dave Snope
By forcing banks to make more of the same subprime loans that that catalyzed the last crisis. As usual, his agenda has nothing to do with sound economic policy and everything to do with class warfare.

Despite new evidence the Community Reinvestment Act led to riskier lending and played a key role in the subprime mortgage crisis, the Obama administration is broadening the anti-redlining regulation's authority and scope, spooking bankers.

A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the nation's pre-eminent economic research group, states that the CRA "clearly" had a major impact on the flood of subprime loans made in the late 1990s and 2000s, which directly led to the housing crisis.

By quietly expanding the regulation, analysts say President Obama is picking up where President Clinton left off...

Read More At IBD: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/012413-641859-obama-community-reinvestment-act-low-income-loans.htm#ixzz2J72002RI

January 31, 2013 06:18 PM Forum: Politics

Mass Shooter's Use Handguns

Posted By Dave Snope
All this constant talk from Oblahblah and other democrat politicians about "assault weapons" is pure political theater. Entirely misdirected, entirely misleading, entirely misguided, entirely pretense for political gain.

This is what a mass killer looks like, according to a Department of Homeland Security analysis. He works alone. He uses a semi-automatic handgun. He’s a he. And he probably didn’t serve in the U.S. military.
That’s the conclusion of a November 28 analysis by the New Jersey branch of the Department of Homeland Security’s partnership with state and local law enforcement. The so-called intelligence “Fusion Center” sifted through data on 29 major mass killings in the U.S. since 1999, starting with the Littleton, Colorado school shooting. Its practical advice is to be more concerned by your co-worker with the bad hygiene who mutters about putting his “things in order” than by the war veteran in the next cubicle.

Typically, the immediate deployment of law enforcement is required to stop the shooting and mitigate further harm to victims. Typically, active shooter situations are over within 10 to 15 minutes.

Errr, what's the average response time of law enforcement in your area? 15- 20 minutes? It took 40 minutes for them to respond to a gang of Crips burglarizing the house next to mine.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/01/mass-killings-patterns/

February 1, 2013 08:04 PM Forum: My Favorite WIMP.COM or YOUTUBE.COM

Oscar-nominated short, "Paperman"

Posted By Dave Snope
Using a minimalist black-and-white style, the short follows the story of a lonely young man in mid-century New York City, whose destiny takes an unexpected turn after a chance meeting with a beautiful woman on his morning commute.
http://youtu.be/aTLySbGoMX0

February 5, 2013 01:17 AM Forum: Off Topic Discussions

Israel Struck Syrian Chem/Bio Weapons Center

Posted By Dave Snope
So it wasn't a convoy after all. From the NYT:

WASHINGTON – The site of the alleged Israeli strike in Syria last week was the country’s main biological and chemical weapons research center, the New York Times reported Monday.

Citing “senior US security sources,” the newspaper said that the center had known ties to a North Korean research center of the same kind. [...]

According to the NYT, the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, “Has been the target of American and Western sanctions for more than a decade because of intelligence suggesting that it was the training site for engineers who worked on chemical and biological weaponry.”

Several US security sources said that Jerusalem had informed Washington of the impending strike. A senior US military official said that “the Israelis had a small strike package,” meaning, according to the NYT, that “a relatively few fighter aircraft slipped past Syria’s air defenses and targeted both the missiles and the research center.”

February 5, 2013 04:48 PM Forum: Politics

"Death Panels and Sales Taxes Is How We Do This"

Posted By Dave Snope
Yep, that's Paul Krugman, the liberal's favorite economist, giving his recipe to solve the impending government insolvency caused by years of deficit spending. Because the children refuse to operate under a balanced budget, we must confiscate money and choose people to die.

Paul Krugman spoke at Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. last week:

The year 2025, the year 2030, something is going to have to give…. …. We’re going to need more revenue…Surely it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well.. We won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society will want without some increase in taxes… on the middle class, maybe a value added tax…And we’re also going to have to make decisions about health care, doc pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits . So the snarky version…which I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.

http://youtu.be/H9u2Lf0DdzA

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