Regulating the Future

Government pretends it's the cause of progress. Then it strangles innovation. We know government understands that new technologies are important. The military invests in robots and traffic cops use radar guns. But when the rest of us use robots or fly drones, government gets eager to put rules in place before things get "out of control."
Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

The Good Humor Rapist

One of the biggest viral stories on social media last week was a laughably idiotic Finnish "how to" video that ostensibly demonstrates the proper way for women to defend themselves against rapists. The video, produced by state-run broadcaster Yle, reveals the top three police-certified methods that women should use against an attacker: "No," "Push," and "Handbag."
Read more at Taki's Magazine Read More......

Nearly everyone dislikes CISA, so Congress will make it law

After spending months mired in the Senate, the latest incarnation of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) advanced to the floor this week and could face a vote as early as next week. The move to pass the CISPA rehash -- which the Obama administration has indicated it will sign -- comes despite mounting opposition from technology companies, security experts, and privacy advocates.
Read more at InfoWorld Read More......

Gov’t to creamery: Your milk is entirely too natural to not be labeled “imitation”

Sometimes government’s dishonesty, incompetence, wastefulness, and misguided nannyism combine to make a perfectly ridiculous story. Today’s comes to us from Florida, where the Ocheesee Creamery is being forced to dump gallons upon gallons of good, natural skim milk because the state is requiring the business to label its good, natural skim milk “imitation” because they haven’t added anything to it.
Paul and Mary Lou Wesselhoeft have been fighting this in federal court with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, which had formerly allowed them to sell their skim milk while calling it skim milk. No one seemed confused by this except the state government, which changed its requirements.


Read more at Hotair.com Read More......

Oyster Farmer: ‘We Are Terrified’ Of The Government

The National Park Service used falsified data to shut down an 80-year-old oyster company in Point Reyes, Calif, its owner claims.
Drakes Bay Oyster Company operated in Point Reyes for decades until National Park Service officials used falsified data to force Kevin Lunny’s family-run oyster farm to shut down. The experience has left its mark on Lunny: “We are terrified,” he told lawmakers during a hearing Thursday.
“Let me be clear, we did not fail as a business,” Lunny said in his prepared testimony. “This was not bad luck. Rather, the Park Service engaged in a taxpayer-funded enterprise of corruption to run our small business out of Point Reyes.”


Read more at the Daily Caller Read More......

America's Missing Wealth: The Real Cost of Government Will Stun You

...Now, 2% a year doesn’t sound like much. Most of us could spend 98% of our budget next year without too much pain. The quip about compound interest is noteworthy only because it would take a genius like Einstein to observe something so profoundly simple yet subtly opaque.

But run the numbers yourself–and prepare for a shock. If the U.S. economy had grown an extra 2% per year since 1949, 2014′s GDP would be about $58 trillion, not $17 trillion. So says a study called “Federal Regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth,” published in 2013 by Journal of Economic Growth. More than taxes, it’s been runaway federal regulation that’s crimped U.S. growth by the year and utterly smashed it over two generations.

Read more at Forbes Read More......

Bigger than President Obama

When four out of five citizens think their government is corrupt there is a big problem. When three out of five also think their government is incompetent the problem may be of historic proportions. The very fabric of a free society begins to come apart when so many people deeply distrust their own government. This is the opposite of the “we the people” model the Founding Fathers fought for and established. Newt Gingrich outlines THREE KEY STEPS BACK TOWARD COMPETENCE AND INTEGRITY.

Read more at Gingrich Productions Read More......

IMPRIMIS: The Tea Party, Conservatism, and the Constitution

By Charles R. Kesler
Editor, Claremont Review of Books
January 2014
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

The Tea Party movement is named, of course, for the famous event in late 1773 when cases of tea were dumped unceremoniously into the Boston harbor. The Boston Tea Party—a carefully orchestrated strike against a commodity that was being taxed and sold by a monopoly provider—was intended as a one-time thing, though it ended up being an important link in the chain of events that led to the American Revolution. Today’s Tea Party, on the other hand, has ambitions to become an ongoing force—maybe even the major force—in American conservatism. And it strives for a revolution of its own, a return to a more limited, more constitutional form of government. If I had to judge its performance so far, I would say that it has been courageous and right in its diagnosis of the problems facing American politics, but somewhat off in its prescriptions.

When I say the Tea Party is correct in its diagnosis, I mean it is correct in its very clear sense that Obamacare is not just another costly, bureaucratic, top-down, regulatory scheme, of which we have, alas, so many. There is something genuinely tyrannical (despite the good intentions of many of its supporters) about Obamacare. It threatens not only to ruin our medical care system, but indirectly and directly—and sooner as well as later—to subvert our form of government and our way of life, fundamentally changing the relation between citizens and government.

Hubris and Nemesis

In a way, you can see how dangerous Obamacare is by noticing how it has brought out the worst in liberals—which is evident in how they have responded to the Tea Party. Liberal impatience with partisanship—that is, with people who oppose their plans—arises from the fact that in contemporary liberalism, there is no publicly acknowledged right of revolution. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but if one looks at some of the political theorists who were most important to modern or statist liberalism—Kant and Hegel in Germany, say, or Woodrow Wilson here in the United States—they are usually quite explicit in rejecting a right of revolution. In their view, a people always has in the long run the government it deserves. So there’s no right of the people to “abolish,” as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, the prevailing form of government and substitute a better one. In particular, there is no conceivable right to overturn contemporary liberalism itself; as liberals today are so fond of saying, there is no turning back the clock. To liberals the Tea Party appears, well, bonkers, precisely because it recalls the American Revolution, and in doing so implies that it might not be such a bad thing to have another revolution—or at least a second installment of the original—in order to roll back the bad government that is damaging both the safety and happiness of the American people.

This is the position, for instance, of Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of The Death of Conservatism. For Tanenhaus, conservatism is good insofar as it consolidates and preserves the liberal order. If conservatism turns revolutionary, i.e., attempts to roll back the liberal order, then it exceeds its commission—it goes off the reservation, so to speak—because liberalism stands for progress and progress is final. President Obama himself made this point a few years ago regarding national health care: “I am not the first president to take up this cause,” he said, “but I am determined to be the last.” But in fact, Obamacare’s strained and narrow victory in 2010 looked not so much inevitable as desperate. It passed by a party line vote, with rampant side deals to buy out the relevant interest groups, and against bitter resistance that has not gone away. Then came its disastrous rollout and its failure to meet any of its own targets for success. All of which suggests overextension and hubris on the part of liberalism, and in the wake of this hubris the Tea Party has confirmed itself as Obama’s, and Obamacare’s, devoted nemesis.

What the Tea Party needs now is a strategy—something it has so far conspicuously lacked—to allow it to achieve its worthy ends. Thinking through a strategy will help clarify those ends: What is it, exactly, that the Tea Party means by limited government? Limited to what? And limited by what? Clearly the Tea Party’s form of conservatism points back to the Constitution as the basis for restoring American government. But how practically to move in that direction?

The Tea Party rightly concluded from the battles over Obamacare that what we are seeing in our politics these days is not two clashing interpretations of the same Constitution, but increasingly two different Constitutions in conflict: the old Constitution of 1787 and a “living” Constitution that is not just a different approach to the original, but an alternative to it. The extraordinary fight the Tea Party was willing to put up arose from this fact—that Obamacare amounted to a colossal battle between two different ways of government. And it was the Tea Party and President Obama who shared a clear understanding of the stakes; mainstream Republican leaders understood them with much less clarity and intensity.

Matching Means to Ends

The failure of the Supreme Court to strike down Obamacare and the individual mandate played into the Tea Party’s suspicions. The Court, after all, had come close to striking down the act. There were five votes to rule it unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause before Chief Justice Roberts changed the subject to the taxing power. When the Court punted on the main question and allowed Obamacare to become law, it suggested to Tea Party leaders in and out of government that the old constitutional mechanisms of judicial review and separation of powers did not seem capable of defending the Constitution against this fundamental challenge, and that the only recourse would be a direct appeal to the American people—to the ultimate source of authority for any constitution. To them, John Roberts’s about-face revealed the failure, maybe even the treachery, of the governing establishment—including the establishment Republicans who had nominated and backed Roberts as chief justice. That judgment might be unfair—at the very least it is not completely true—but in any case, the Tea Party concluded that it was now urgently necessary to raise the consciousness of the American people to this new threat.

At this point we should note the paradoxical character of the Tea Party: It is a populist movement to defend the Constitution, but the Constitution is meant, among other things, to limit populism in our politics—to channel, moderate, and refine popular passion through constitutional forms, such as elections, officeholding, and the rule of law. The point was to ensure, as The Federalist put it, that the reason, not the passion, of the public would control and regulate the government. So it was incumbent on the Tea Party to try to keep its populist means in line with its constitutional ends. And it is in this respect that the Tea Party has sometimes fallen short.

Last fall, the Tea Party seized upon the latest Continuing Resolution to try to bring down Obamacare. Granted, Continuing Resolutions, the multi-thousand page omnibus spending bills that pass for appropriations bills these days, are abdications of Congress’s own budget process and derelictions of its constitutional duty to protect the public purse. Yet bad things can sometimes be used for good purposes. But mainstream Republican leaders warned that the Tea Party senators never had a realistic plan to obtain the votes to defund Obamacare in the Senate, or beyond that to overcome Obama’s veto pen. President Obama needed to fund the government, but he felt, rightly it turned out, that he could hold out longer than the GOP could. The architects of the government shutdown could never answer the question of how victory might be achieved.

Apparently their hope was that an outraged American public—fresh from voting in 2012 to re-elect Obama and to increase the Democratic majority in the Senate by two seats—would rise up and put such pressure on recalcitrant Democrats that they would defund the program that their party had been longing for since Franklin Roosevelt. In relying on such an unlikely outcome, the Tea Party showed its own populist brand of impatience with the separation of powers, bicameralism, and the legislative process that the Constitution prescribes. In imagining that the American public could be persuaded to reconsider the results of an election hardly a year old, the Tea Party surrendered to its own version of the “leadership theory” that liberals have long preferred to legislative-executive politics of the constitutional sort. The implicit argument was that by going over the heads of party leaders and constitutional officeholders to appeal directly to the people, the Tea Party could generate its own mandate to trump the mandate just awarded in the election.

Appealing to the people, of course, is a time-honored tactic: Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that if you can’t make politicians see the light, you can at least make them feel the heat! But Reagan appealed directly to the people from the bully pulpit of the presidency, not from the Senate floor, and he made sure to explain the issue in pellucid and persuasive terms. We learned from Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in the 1990s that it really is impossible to run American government from Congress. So as the Tea Party’s unreasonable hopes faded, it had to settle for less and less: delaying the individual mandate rather than defunding it; verifying the subsidies of policyholders in the insurance exchanges; abolishing the medical devices tax; delaying the medical devices tax; and so on. The Tea Party leaders were pushed back and back and were forced to ask for less and less, until they ended up with virtually nothing.

The Need for Political Thinking

To summarize, the Tea Party has been right about the threat posed to the fabric of constitutional government by Obamacare and by other brazen assaults on the Constitution, such as President Obama’s asserted prerogatives to choose which laws to enforce and to make recess appointments when there was no recess. But the establishment Republicans were right about the outcome of the effort to defund Obamacare by tying it to the Continuing Resolution. One might conclude then that these two groups need each other—not only in the sense that they need each other to get to a majority in the House of Representatives, but also, at least for the time being, in the sense that each supplies the other’s defects. In that light it is neither wise nor moderate for members of either group to lambaste members of the other as political enemies—something of which both sides have been guilty.

The Tea Party could do itself and the country a great service by working out what a return to constitutional government might really mean, and thus the strategy and tactics appropriate to that. What is needed is less populism and more political thinking on its part, or on the part of its trusted advisors. Political thinking and constitutional thinking are not opposed, of course, any more than putting together a political majority and defending the Constitution are opposed. Indeed, these two great duties, properly understood, are implicit in each other. It’s doubtful that the Republican party can succeed without doing both.

After a century of Progressive mining and sapping of the Constitution, the great document we count on to defend us now needs our defense, and the form of government issuing from the Constitution is itself in need of restoration and renewal. Let me end by giving a few examples of how to bring the spirit of the Constitution and the spirit of conservatism closer together.

Tea Party leaders are eloquent on the point that the Constitution does not make the Supreme Court its final arbiter. Let them apply that insight to Obamacare. The problem with Obamacare is not merely that it will ruin health care, but that it undermines the whole notion of rights—natural rights—that come not from government but from our own nature and from God. Yes, it is unfair, unworkable, and unaffordable. But to leave the argument at that leaves the Constitution out of the picture. So when denouncing Obamacare, let’s hear more about its unconstitutional aspects.

The fattest target is the Independent Payments Advisory Board (IPAB), which is unconstitutional on its face. IPAB consists of 15 members who are not elected by the people but appointed by the president. Their job is to make recommendations to limit Medicare’s budget by reducing reimbursements to doctors. Unless both houses of Congress overrule IPAB by passing their own equal or greater cuts to Medicare, IPAB’s proposals automatically become law. What’s worse, Obamacare conspires to make IPAB permanent by mandating that no resolution to repeal it can be introduced before January 1, 2017, or after February 1, 2017. In other words, the Constitution would be operational for one month only—and even then the repeal must pass by August 15, 2017, in order to be valid, and it could not take effect until 2020!

Congress could presumably unravel these restrictions and undo IPAB anytime it wanted. Nonetheless, the spirit and the letter of this kind of regulation suggest just how averse (and adverse) to the Constitution Obamacare really is. To think that Congress couldn’t repeal it, except for one month, and that even then repeal wouldn’t take effect for three years afterwards, is astounding. Why don’t Tea Party leaders talk more about that in condemning Obamacare? I think the American people would be indignant over this attack on their liberty to govern themselves. But they won’t be angry if conservatives don’t inform them about this travesty.

Conservatives should be calling for other kinds of reforms as well, in order to apply the consent of the governed to regulations which form so much of the substance of modern government. Let’s call for a vote by Congress on all regulations costing $100,000,000 or more. That’s one idea already in circulation. Or why not require the Appropriations Committee, or some combination of committees and committee chairmen in Congress, to approve all regulations, approved by any agency, so that there has to be some democratic say-so before any regulations become law? That does not require changing the Constitution, only a change in the law. We should also require Congress to follow its own budget rules. This doesn’t require an amendment either, only vigorous partisanship on the part of Republicans of every variety. We should insist on 13 appropriations bills for the 13 departments, which would give both parties a chance to fight it out, make what cuts we can make, and decide what is more essential and what is less essential. These kinds of reforms, well short of constitutional amendments, would help to reinvigorate congressional accountability and constitutional government.

If conservative officeholders don’t start to correct these structural deformations in our government, and if the Tea Party doesn’t turn its formidable patriotism and energy to enlightening the American people about how we are losing control of our own destiny, then no matter how many good policies we enact, or how low we set tax rates, the body politic will continue to sicken, and self-government will slip through our fingers.

---

The above is adapted from a speech delivered on October 21, 2013, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

HARLES R. KESLER is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He received his A.B., his A.M., and his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. He is editor of the Signet Classic edition of The Federalist Papers; editor of and a contributor to Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding; co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought; and author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism. Read More......

After Repeal of Obamacare: Moving to Patient-Centered, Market-Based Health Care

HERITAGE FOUNDATION RESEARCH
Abstract: Obamacare moves American health care in the wrong direction by eroding the doctor–patient relationship, centralizing control, and increasing health costs. True health care reform would empower individuals, with their doctors, to make their own health care decisions free from government interference. Therefore, Obamacare should be stopped and fully repealed. Then Congress and the states should enact patient-centered, market-based reforms that better serve Americans.

Read more at Heritage.org

Note: Many of the solutions this Heritage paper presents are solutions Republicans have submitted in various bills since the healthcare debate began. Harry Reid and Senate Democrats have refused to consider free-market solutions, while the president deceitfully claims that Republicans have not offered any solutions for greater coverage and health care reform. --bc Read More......

Conservatives who backed Wisconsin Gov. Walker appear target of secret probe

Dozens of conservative groups that support Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker reportedly have been subpoenaed by a special prosecutor demanding donor lists and other documents pertaining to their backing of Walker's union overhaul and recall fight. ✧ The so-called "John Doe" investigation bars those subpoenaed from talking publicly. ✧ But Eric O'Keefe, director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, told The Wall Street Journal recently that investigators have raided at least three homes and that he "wants the public to know what is going on," despite the personal risk. Read more at Fox News/Politics... Read More......

School Test Teaches Kids: “Commands Of Government Officials Must Be Obeyed By All”

By Steve Watson - A parent of a ten year old was shocked to discover a grammar and writing test paper that their[sic] child brought home from school reads more like [a] document from an authoritarian country such as China. Read more at InfoWars…

(Hat tip: Tom) Read More......

Hume: Tea Party pushed budget stand-off because GOP 'utterly failed' to restrain bloated gov't

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume explained on "Special Report With Bret Baier" Monday night why Tea Party Republicans originally started their confrontation with Democrats over the bid to defund ObamaCare. He argued that they're taking an unconventional approach, because the mainstream GOP has "utterly failed" to stop the growth of government.

Brit Hume [excerpt]:

In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about. ✧ And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.

See video and full article at Fox News/Heard on Fox... Read More......

TII: Let’s Privatize the Welfare State

By John C. Goodman
Have you ever given money to the food stamp program? Do you know anyone who has? ✧ Actually, some people do occasionally make gifts to federal entitlement programs. But gifts to the entire federal government were a paltry $241 million in 2010, the last year for which statistics are available. ✧ By contrast, Americans donated almost $300 billion last year to private sector charities in addition to volunteer time valued at $158 billion. ✧ The money we spend on food stamps (technically called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) almost all comes from coercive taxation, rather than charitable contributions. EXCELLENT ARTICLE! Keep reading at the Independent Institute... Read More......

Idaho County commissioner: Shutdown proves state should manage public lands

Idaho County Commissioner Skip Brandt isn’t pointing fingers at Democrats or Republicans in Washington for the fact that national wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management campgrounds, boat ramps, visitor centers and other developed recreation sites, national forest developed areas and all national parks are closed. ✧ “Federal employees have decided to make their furloughs as painful as possible for the public,” Brandt wrote in an email. ✧ “So apparently the ‘Federal’ lands/ facilities are not 'true public' lands/ property after all, but rather are the bureaucracy’s property,” Brandt wrote in a email. “Thus if the bureaucrats/ Federal employees do not have a pay check the properties are off limits to the ‘subjects’” ✧ Brandt has a solution: “It is time that the Federal lands become managed/ accountable State lands.” Read more at Idaho Statesman
(Hat tip: Jo Rae Perkins for U.S. Senate) Read More......

Steyn: Shutdown Simulacrum

By Mark Steyn - Just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t be made even phonier.
Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to the first ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too — such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans. Read more at NRO... Read More......

Samuelson: Here comes the spoils society

By Robert J. Saluelson (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler)
We are, I fear, slowly moving from “the affluent society” toward a “spoils society.” In 1958, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith published his bestseller, “The Affluent Society,” which profoundly influenced national thinking for decades. To the Great Depression’s survivors, post-World War II prosperity dazzled. Suburbia offered a quiet alternative to crowded and noisy cities. New technologies impressed — television, frozen foods, automatic washers and dryers. Never, it seemed, had so much been enjoyed by so many.

This explosive abundance, Galbraith argued, meant the country could afford both private wants and public needs. It could devote more to schools, roads, parks and pollution control. Economic growth became the holy grail of government policy. Production was paramount. It muted social conflict.

The “spoils society” reverses this logic. It de-emphasizes production and fuels conflict. Here’s why:

Read more: Washington Post Read More......

House Votes to Delay Obamacare, Repeal Medical Device Tax

Shortly after midnight, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to repeal Obamacare’s tax on medical devices and delay the unpopular law’s implementation by one year. ✧ The two amendments to the Senate-passed continuing resolution would fund the federal government through December 15. The measure returns to the Senate, with the fate of a government shutdown now resting with President Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). In the event of a shutdown, the House approved a separate bill that would pay the U.S. military. Read more at Heritage/Foundry... Read More......

An Obama-Cruz Shutdown

Wall Street Journal, September 30, 2013
The President is refusing to compromise on anything. ✧ Washington is careening toward a partial government shutdown on Tuesday amid its usual synthetic outrage. As the partisan cries grow in volume, it's worth a few minutes to sort the truth from the nonsense. ✧ The first thing to keep in mind is that this does not mean "anarchy," in Harry Reid's typically subtle formulation, or even a complete government shutdown. Functions deemed "essential" will continue, and it's debatable how many of those really are crucial to daily American life. The military will be paid, Social Security checks will still go out. Many Americans will be inconvenienced, but tens of millions may come to realize how easily they can do without most of the vast federal Leviathan.

A second reality is that both parties are responsible for getting to this point. Americans chose a divided government in 2010 and again in 2012, electing House Republicans as a check on Democrats whose undiluted liberalism alarmed millions of voters when they ran the entire government in 2009-2010. The inability to compromise now is rooted in the wide disagreement about the role of government that now separates the two parties. We've criticized GOP Senator Ted Cruz for his strategy to make defunding ObamaCare a requirement of funding the rest of government. He and his allies know that Mr. Obama can never agree to that, and even millions of Americans who oppose ObamaCare don't agree with his shutdown ultimatum. It risks political damage for the House and Senate GOP in 2014 even as Mr. Cruz builds his email list for 2016.

Yet it takes two to tangle, and Mr. Obama is as much to blame for the partisan pileup as Mr. Cruz. This is a President who is eager to negotiate with dubiously elected Iranian mullahs but can't abide compromise with duly elected leaders of Congress. He refuses to negotiate at all over an increase in the federal debt limit, claiming this has never happened. Like so much that Mr. Obama says, he knows this is false. His own staff suggested the spending sequester during the 2011 debt debate, and Democratic Congresses have used the debt limit to extract concessions from Republican Presidents.

Mr. Obama also refuses to bend on any part of ObamaCare—except when he unilaterally announces bending in his own political interest. He decided on his own, and contrary to the plain text of the law, to delay for a year the business mandate to provide insurance for employees. He also unilaterally delayed verifying the income of Americans seeking subsidies. He did this to pile more people into the ObamaCare exchanges, lest they fail, and to limit the harm to job creation before 2014.

Yet now he'd rather see the government shut down than accept the ObamaCare compromises that House Republicans have put in their latest government funding bill. He refuses to delay the law for a year though his own actions reveal it is not ready for prime time. And he won't even accept repeal of the medical-device tax that 79 Senators, including 33 Democrats, are on record as supporting. The tax is already hurting innovation and sending jobs overseas.

Mr. Obama's refusal to negotiate suggests that he wants a shutdown—either over the budget or debt limit. His agenda is dying on Capitol Hill, because of Senate Democrats as well as House Republicans. With his approval rating down and independents leaning toward the GOP, he figures his only chance to salvage a second-term domestic legacy is to restore Nancy Pelosi as Speaker in his final two years. His best opening to make that happen is a shutdown or debt-limit crisis that he will try to blame on Republicans. A shutdown is as much his strategy as it is Mr. Cruz's.

A version of this article appeared September 30, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: An Obama-Cruz Shutdown. (Hat tip: Elias Sandervaal on Facebook) Read More......

Absurd Government Law Enforcement: The Great Organic Blackberry Raid

Government officials do some really crazy things in the name of law enforcement.

I recently wrote about an armed raid on an animal shelter in order to execute a baby deer.

That was paramilitary overkill (pun intended), though it probably didn’t waste as many tax dollars as the regulatory overkill of the year-long sting operation by the Food and Drug Administration against an Amish farm for the horrible crime of selling unpasteurized milk to consenting adults who prefer unpasteurized milk.

And let’s not forget Robert Norlander, the thuggish, dumpster-diving IRS agent, who sought to ruin the life of an innocent man because…well, for no reason.

Well, we now have something that may be even more absurd.

Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

Federally sponsored radio and TV programs coming soon to cable

Since 1948, American law has not allowed for government sponsored or funded propaganda programming. We should start seeing changes to that soon. As a result of new law reforms initiated earlier this year, the U.S. television audience will now have access to programs produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

“The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is an independent federal agency supervising all U.S. government-supported, civilian international media. The BBG’s mission is to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

The Broadcasting Board of Governors was established by United States International Broadcasting Act of 1994. The board was established primarily to carry out the mandates of the Smith Mundt Act, passed in 1948,

Read more at the Examiner Read More......