free headslaps

[ProblemAgain]

GOP Lawmaker Says Climate Change Is 'The Greatest Deception In The History Of Mankind'

The Huffington Post  | By Shadee Ashtari

Posted: 06/30/2014 7:17 pm EDT Updated: 4 hours ago

Print Article

• Share 335
• Tweet 64
• Email 17

• 

Louisiana state Rep. Lenar Whitney (R) is accusing liberals, such as former Vice President Al Gore, of advancing "the greatest deception in the history of mankind" -- man-made climate change -- in a scheme to empower the executive branch and increase taxes.

“A specter is haunting America,” Whitney, who is running for Congress in Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District, warned in a campaign video released Wednesday. “It is perhaps the greatest deception in the history of mankind.”

Mocking Gore’s 2006 Academy Award–winning climate change documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth,” Whitney claimed that the planet "has done nothing but get colder each year since the film’s release.”

“Quite inconveniently for Al Gore, and for the rest of the politicians who continue to advance this delusion, any 10-year-old can invalidate their thesis with one of the simplest scientific devices known to man: a thermometer,” Whitney said, citing record sea ice in the Antarctic sector.

Numerous GOP lawmakers and climate change contrarians have pointed to below-zero temperatures and seasonal snowfall as evidence against the legitimacy of human-induced climate change, despite numerous scientific reports debunking their claims.

Although many parts of the U.S. witnessed record-low temperatures this past winter, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are still rising, winters have become increasingly warmer over the past century and Arctic sea ice is still melting.

Whitney’s own state is one of the most vulnerable regions in the country to climate change, with rising coastal sea levels estimated to submerge the Louisiana coastline by 2100.

[ProblemAgain]

so with the public pension plan being only 60 percent funded to begin with, guess whose fault all this is going to be when 'those greedy bastards who taught school and worked on the roads and etc. start drawing their pensions'?

Kansas governor unveils plan to close budget gap

By JOHN HANNA 32 minutes ago

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — With Kansas facing a projected $279 million budget shortfall after enacting aggressive tax cuts, Republican Gov. Sam Brownback proposed Tuesday to trim spending and divert funds for highway projects and public pensions to general government programs.

The plan, which applies only to the current budget year, avoids reducing aid to the state's public schools, its Medicaid health care program for the needy, prison operations or state universities. Budget Director Shawn Sullivan outlined the details in interviews and said the administration believes agencies that do face cuts can find efficiencies to avoid hurting any programs.

"These first steps are a down payment in resolving the immediate budget issue," Brownback said in a statement, adding that his administration is addressing the shortfall with "good fiscal governance" while protecting education and public safety.

The plan drew immediate criticism because it would divert $41 million from the pension system for teachers and government workers. Obligations to retirees over the next two decades are only 60 percent funded, and that figure was expected to climb over time thanks to a 2012 law that increased both the state's and employees' contributions to stabilize the system's long-term health.

In his successful re-election campaign, Brownback pointed repeatedly to the pension fixes — which promised full funding of its obligations in 2033 — as a major accomplishment.

"It reneges on the commitment that was made," Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, said Tuesday.

The governor has the authority to order budget and pension-funding cuts to avoid a shortfall for the current fiscal year, which began in July. Major state departments, save the Department of Education, will face a 4 percent cut in spending for January through June, including the Legislature.

But some parts of the plan — such as diverting $96 million in highway funds — require legislative approval.

Brownback has not yet tackled an additional $436 million shortfall in the budget for the next fiscal year, nor has he proposed backtracking on the aggressive personal income tax cuts enacted at his urging in 2012 and 2013.

In a move meant to boost the economy, Kansas dropped its top personal income tax rate by 26 percent and exempted the owners of 191,000 businesses from income taxes altogether. Future rate reductions also are promised, embodying a long-term goal to eliminate state income taxes over time.

Some GOP state senators already are floating tax proposals, such as delaying future cuts or reinstating income taxes for the wealthiest business owners. Brownback hasn't publicly ruled out those ideas, but House Speaker Ray Merrick, a Stilwell Republican, has said he wants to consider spending cuts first.

Besides diverting nearly $96 million in funds set aside for highway projects, the plan announced Tuesday would trim nearly $8 million more from the Department of Transportation's operating budget. The shortfalls are projected for the state's main bank account, and highway projects are financed outside that account.

KDOT immediately said that it still would expect to finish the projects promised under a 10-year, $8 billion transportation program launched in 2010 because existing projects have cost less than expected. Also, the cut in its operating budget won't lead to layoffs, the agency said.

 

[grammyk]

Austerity works so well - NOT!!!

[LoveLife&Laughter]

They still don't understand nada, do they....

[ProblemAgain]

the politicians like scott walker do....cut the budgets and blame the terrible greedy employees for wanting the pensions they were promised when down the line the taxes will be astronomical since they refused to actually fully fund the pensions. there is going to be a pension crisis in the foreseeable future when the drawdown begins to accelerate as the boomers retire and begin to receive the pensions and the shit hits the fan about there being insufficient funds nd investments in the pension funds to meet the obligations. this has been an issue from the 70s on as actuaries have been warning both corporate and govt managers about the looming troubles that would arise due to their nutless refusal to face the facts because of the costs of fully funding those retirement accounts. in an ironic twist, the only organization which won't have this trouble is the us post office since congress 'fixed' the post office by requiring them under legal statute to fully fund their retirement obligations. of course it also caused them to lose money on their operations....

[LoveLife&Laughter]

We live on different worlds, don't we...

[ProblemAgain]

i was in a discussion last night with a group who decided that torture of the islamic prisoners was permissable since they do bad stuff too. they failed to comprehend my point that when one country resorts to torture, it becomes rather universally condoned because the bad guys do it too.these folks have no perspective of the arc of history or the brutality that war was before the geneva conventions were adopted. sure isis may not follow the geneva conventions but isis is a group of at most 75,000 and in the middle east. inn the 'good old days' , captured troops could look forward to being tortured and killed if they weren't lucky enough to be selected to be slaves or from a family rich enough to pay a ransom..

  seems this is a common occurrance for 'those people': tht they have no knowledge of real history, no comprehension of the cause and effect of actions and the way we end up with unexpected consequences when we commit an action. the use of torture in viet nam recruited more volunteers for the viet cong as sympathy for people like themselves and hatred of the perpetrators of atrocities  burgeoned. so the younger generation has lost all the lessons which could have been learned from the deaths of 58,000 americans.

[LoveLife&Laughter]

Ask if they would scream bloody hell if American POW were tortured that way.

[ProblemAgain]

Bill would let Michigan doctors, EMTs refuse to treat gay patients

iStock

• 477 Comments
• Shares
• Tweets
• Stumble
• Email
• More +

LANSING, Mich. -- Can doctors and emergency medical technicians legally refuse to give life saving assistance to a gay person, because of their religious beliefs? That question is being debated in the Michigan legislature.

The Republican-led House has approved the Michigan Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which essentially states that people do not have to perform an act that would violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.

"For example, a Christian doctor who does not believe in a gay lifestyle would not have to treat a gay patient," CBS Detroit legal analyst Charlie Langton said. "Or perhaps, a Jewish butcher would not have to handle non-Kosher meat."

Opponents say the bill, which is modeled after a federal law upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, legalizes discrimination. Critics say extreme cases may unfairly deny people basic rights.

House Speaker Jase Bolger,who sponsored the bill, said the intention is to protect people's religious beliefs from government overreach.

"The individual must show they have a sincerely held religious belief that has been substantially burdened," Bolger, a Republican, said in a statement. "This bill is not a license to discriminate; the courts have already demonstrated for decades that wild claims will not be supported."

"These bills are about the individual freedoms and rights that our country was founded on," Republican Rep. Greg MacMaster, who voted for the bill, said in a statement. "Michigan residents simply need the reassurance that they can practice their faith without the fear of being harassed or sued, or their businesses threatened by government action."

But Rep. Jeff Irwin, an Ann Arbor Democrat, warned it would "open the door to discrimination and the types of behavior that otherwise violates the laws of the state of Michigan."

He said while legislators may think the bill is about safeguarding a baker from having to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, it's "much broader." Democrats warned that government workers with sincere religious beliefs could be allowed to show bias against someone from another faith, mentioning that pharmacists could deny birth control to women.

If state senators want to act on the bill, they'll have to do it quick -- the legislative session ends next week, and the bill will die if it's not voted on, CBS Detroit reported.

At least 19 states have approved laws mirroring the federal law, which prohibits the government from imposing a substantial burden on the exercise of religion for anything other than a compelling government interest pursued in the least restrictive way, according to the Associated Press.

[ProblemAgain]

ISIS leader: "If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no ISIS"

By Zack Beauchamp 10 hours ago

• 
• 
• 
• 

View photo

.

http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/homerun/vox.com/600a2fa881d7cfbdd4f155..." height="" width=""/>

In an incredible scoop, the Guardian's Martin Chulov interviewed a senior leader of ISIS— one who came up through the ranks with the group's top leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The single most interesting quote from the ISIS leader, whom Chulov refers to as Abu Ahmed, is quite disturbing: he credits the group's rise, in large part, to American prison camps during the Iraq war, which he says gave him and other jihadist leaders an invaluable forum to meet one another and to plan their later rise.

"HERE, WE WERE NOT ONLY SAFE, BUT WE WERE ONLY A FEW HUNDRED METERS AWAY FROM THE ENTIRE AL-QAEDA LEADERSHIP"

Abu Ahmed was imprisoned in a US-run detention center in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca in 2004. That's where he met al-Baghdadi, among others who would later form ISIS. According to Ahmed, Baghdadi managed to trick the US Army into thinking he was a peacemaker, all the while building what would become ISIS right under their noses:

"He was respected very much by the US army," Abu Ahmed said. "If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all. It built our ideology."

When they entered the US-run prison, Baghdadi and many of the others were members of small Sunni militia groups. But the organizing space allowed them to unify under the name al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), led at the time by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"We could never have all got together like this in Baghdad, or anywhere else," Abu Ahmed says, sounding almost grateful to the Americans. "It would have been impossibly dangerous. Here, we were not only safe, but we were only a few hundred meters away from the entire al-Qaeda leadership."

Later, after Zarqawi was killed, and AQI's near-total defeat at the hands of a Sunni uprising and the American surge, Baghdadi and his compatriots rebuilt the group under the ISIS banner. Their network organized partially out of US-run detention centers has played a key role in that. The Iraqi government, Chulov reports, estimates that "17 of the 25 most important Islamic State leaders running the war in Iraq and Syria spent time in US prisons between 2004 and 2011."

In other words: without the Iraq war and American prisons there meant to detain possible terrorists, ISIS as we know it wouldn't exist.

[ProblemAgain]

and they are also talking about letting students on campuses carry....hey why not? what could go wrong?

Texas weighs allowing open carry of handguns

By JIM VERTUNO 19 hours ago

Wochit

Texas Weighs Allowing Open Carry of Handguns

 http://media.zenfs.com/en-US/video/video.wochit.com/3a59d40ddfcd7ed..." alt="Texas Weighs Allowing Open Carry of Handguns" class="W-100 D-b"/>

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Long depicted as the rootin'-tootin' capital of American gun culture, Texas is one of the few states with an outright ban on the open carry of handguns.

That could change in 2015, with the Republican-dominated Legislature and Gov.-elect Greg Abbott expected to push for expanded gun rights.

"If open carry is good enough for Massachusetts, it's good enough for the state of Texas," Abbott said the day after his election last month.

And if Texas, which allows concealed handguns, embraces open carry — rolling back a 140-year ban — it would be the largest state to have done so.

Open carry drew wide support in the 2014 statewide election, and at least six bills have already been filed for the upcoming session, which starts in January. Abbott has already pledged to sign one into law if sent to his desk.

Coni Ross, a 63-year-old rancher in Blanco, carries a handgun in her purse for personal protection and said she'd like the option to carry it openly on her belt if she could. She already does when she's on her ranch and feels comfortable with her gun by her side.

"In one-and-a-half seconds, a man can run 25 feet with a knife in his hands and stab you before you get your gun out," Ross said. "If your weapon is concealed you're dead."

Most of the country already allows some form of open carry of handguns, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a California-based group advocating gun control legislation.

But Texas, California, Florida, New York, Illinois and South Carolina, which make up more than a third of the U.S. population and include six of its seven largest population centers, do not.

Large urban areas have traditionally had the strictest controls on weapons in public because of concerns over guns in crowds and crime control, said UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, author of "Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America." He said it's "pretty surprising" that Texas still has an open carry ban that dates to the 1870s.

"We've been regulating guns in the interest of public safety, even in places like Texas, since the founding," Winkler said. "The battle over open carry of guns in public remains one of the most heated in the gun debate today."

Of the states that ban open carry, Texas easily has the most gun-friendly reputation.

From manufacturers to dealers, Texas has the most federal firearms license holders in the country. It has few restrictions on gun ownership, and Gov. Rick Perry and state lawmakers have actively lobbied gun makers to move to the state.

Texas allows the public display of long guns, such as rifles and shotguns, and open carry advocates have staged high-profile rallies at the Alamo and state Capitol. Concealed handguns are allowed inside the Capitol, where license holders can bypass metal detectors.

But Texas still insists handguns be kept out of sight.

Texas first banned the carrying of handguns "when the carpet-bagger government was very anxious about former Confederates and recently freed slaves carrying firearms," state Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said.

Overturning a century of law proved difficult, and a concealed weapons law failed several times until it finally passed in 1995 when Patterson, then a state senator, led the charge. Texas now has about 811,000 concealed handgun license holders, nearly equal the population of San Francisco.

Even among gun supporters in Texas, the idea of open carry was considered too radical when the concealed carry law passed. Since then, the Legislature has expanded gun rights incrementally. It made the licensing of concealed handguns easier and, during the last three sessions, held heated debates over concealed handguns on college campuses. Open carry backers believe these debates helped rally support to their cause and that an open carry law will pass.

Open carry opponents, such as Moms Demand Action for Gun Safety in America, say carrying guns on the street is less about gun rights than intimidation.

"There is no way to know ... if that person is a threat to moms and our children," said Claire Elizabeth, who heads the group's Texas chapter.

Despite the early momentum, there are no guarantees open carry will pass. Bills to allow concealed handguns on college campus appeared to have widespread support in 2009, 2011 and 2013, but were derailed by objections from universities and law enforcement.

Most of the open carry bills already filed for the upcoming session would still require a license. One, by Rep. Jonathan Stickland, R-Bedford, would eliminate the licensing requirement for concealed or open carry.

"The idea is we're going to return our Second Amendment rights," Stickland said. "I can't imagine what the citizens would do if they had to take a class or pay a fee to use their First Amendment rights."

[ProblemAgain]

oh so THAT is how conservatives handle finances....

The Governor Of Kansas Is Proposing A Budget ‘Fix’ That Will Cost H...

by Alan Pyke Posted on January 22, 2015 at 4:23 pm

72Share This 72Tweet This

"The Governor Of Kansas Is Proposing A Budget ‘Fix’ That Will Cost His State Billions"

Share:

CREDIT: Shutterstock/Visions Of America

Rather than retreat from the massive tax cuts that are crippling his state’s finances, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) wants to cut classroom funding for Kansas schools by $127 million and push pension fund payments off into the future.

The defining characteristic of the governor’s various proposals for fixing the nearly billion-dollar deficit is that they will create larger problems down the road. The proposed budget would replace the state’s current financing formula for schools with block grants that districts could use as they see fit. But that flexibility masks a significant cut in classroom resources for a state that has already been accused by judges of falling hundreds of millions of dollars short of the bare-minimum level of education funding required by the Kansas Constitution.

Even if courts don’t step in and order higher funding levels, economic research shows that under-investing in education raises longer-term costs in other areas. Future public assistance spending will be higher, (because education funding cuts produce higher poverty among the students affected, and the state will likely spend more medicating and jailing a sicker and more delinquent future adult population.

The state’s Department of Education estimates that Brownback’s block grants would cut funding that goes directly to educating children by $127.4 million. The definition of “funding to the classroom” gets very slippery though, as the Kansas Association of School Boards’ Mark Tallman told ThinkProgress prior to Brownback’s announcement. Republicans argue that the budget only actually cuts $22 million from school spending, because they count teacher pension spending increases in the proposal against the other cuts. But the Kansas City Star notes that almost half of the pension spending increase for teachers is a “make-up payment for this year’s cut” to that same funding.

More broadly, Kansas state workers’ pension funds are also being used to patch Brownback’s fiscal gap. He is proposing to cut state payments to pension funds by $446 million over three fiscal years including the current one while also refinancing some of the funds’ debts. But the executive director of the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System says Brownback’s proposed tweaks will ultimately cost the state more than 8 times what they save in the short term.

The near-term cuts would raise long-term costs by $3.7 billion — nearly a quarter of the current size of the pension system. Reneging on pension obligations in the short term and creating larger retirement system problems in the long term helps create political pressure to cut workers’ retirement benefits down the road, according to critics of similar maneuvers in states like New Jersey.

Another big-ticket Brownback cut strips roughly $300 million in transportation department funding over the next couple years — a move that shares the penny-wise, pound-foolish DNA of Brownback’s schools and pensions cuts. The road repair cuts will save a little bit of money now, but “all you’re going to do is create bigger problems for yourself later,” the head of a trade group for heavy construction firms in Kansas City told the Star.

All that short-term thinking in Brownback’s budget doesn’t even produce long-term solvency for the state, according to the Star’s editorial board. The paper criticized Brownback’s promise to “continue our march to zero income taxes,” noting that his cuts have not produced job growth in exchange for starving the state of resources. Brownback’s “proposals leave the state barely able to meet its statutory obligations, much less invest in its citizens and the future,” the editors wrote.

[ProblemAgain]

"we aren't really stupid. we just have zero logic circuits and fail to comprehend cause and effect so we'll buy any bullshit"

• About Us
• Subscribe
• Contact Us
• Donate
• RSS

Obama's Tax on Stay-At-Home Moms

January 21, 2015 - 6:39 AM

---

By Terence P. Jeffrey

Subscribe to Terence P. Jeffrey RSS

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

(AP Photo)

President Obama's disrespect for motherhood has manifested itself in policies ranging from support for same-sex marriage to defense of a form of abortion that involves forcing a baby into a drug-induced premature delivery and then leaving that little one to die.

When it comes to the most vulnerable and innocent human beings — those for whom great mothers have great hearts — Obama has a heart of stone.

It is demonstrably true that he does not believe a child has a right to a mother or a need for a mother. If he did, he could not support same-sex marriages in which two men can adopt a child or even hire a surrogate to incubate a baby for them.

God's commandment says: Honor your father and mother. Obama supports policies that deny a child the ability to even know a mother.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that as he closes out his presidency Obama is proposing a new policy that discriminates against married stay-at-home mothers and provides an incentive for mothers not to take care of their own children.

The president's tax proposal would "streamline child care tax benefits and triple the maximum child care credit for middle class families with young children, increasing it to $3,000 per child," says a White House statement on Obama's new proposal to adjust the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit. "The president's child care tax proposals would benefit 5.1 million families, helping them cover child care costs for 6.7 million children (including 3.5 million children under 5)."

"The president's proposal would make the maximum credit — for young children, older children, and elderly or disabled dependents — available to families with incomes up to $120,000, meaning that most middle-class families could easily determine how much help they can get," says the White House statement.

Most of Obama's tax proposals are structured to be sold with class-war rhetoric -- i.e., he is increasing taxes on the "rich" to help the poor. But that cannot be said of this proposal, which is designed to provide its maxium credit to families making $120,000 a year.

Who would this tax scheme help and who would it hurt?

For starters, an IRS webpage on the Child and Dependent Care Credit stresses: "The care provider cannot be your spouse." So, one beneficiary is daycare centers.

Compare two families, each with two children under three. In the first family, both the mother and father work full-time and each earns $55,000 per year. Their combined income of $110,000 is under the $120,000 threshold, so Obama gives them his full child-care tax credit. They are happy to take it, dropping off their 1-year-old and 2-and-a-half-year-old at a for-profit daycare center where a relative stranger deals with them during the majority of their waking hours.

In the second family, the mother — who has a college degree and a solid work history prior to the arrival of her children — has decided she should nurture her own children rather than pay a daycare center to hold them. She has given up a $60,000 per year job, and she and her husband now sacrifice and get by on his $58,000 per year salary.

What this mother gives her children for free is far more valuable than what the daycare center gives the children of the first family for a hefty fee.

The first family has an income $52,000 greater than the second. But Obama gives the first family, not the second, his tax credit.

The mother in the second family gave up income and material comfort to raise her own children. For this, Obama punishes her with the tax code.

The perversely logical corollary to Obama's desire to structure the tax code to the disadvantage of stay-at-home mothers is his desire to use tax dollars to replace working fathers with the government itself.

As this column has noted before, in each of the last six years on record — 2008 through 2013 — at least 40 percent of the babies born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. By contrast, in 1940, only 3.8 percent of the babies were born to unmarried mothers.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services' annual report on "Welfare Indicators and Risk Factors" it is a fact that "historically a high proportion of welfare recipients first became parents outside of marriage."

In 2013, according to the Census Bureau, there were 105,862,000 full-time year-round workers in the United States — including 16,685,000 full-time government workers. These full-time workers were outnumbered by the 109,631,000 whom the Census Bureau says were getting benefits from means-tested federal programs — n.b. welfare — as of the fourth quarter of 2012.

Every American family that pays its own way — and takes care of its own children whether with one or two incomes — must subsidize the 109,631,000 on welfare.

Perhaps if we started rolling back the welfare state — and reduced the burden of government on all families that rely on themselves and not the government — more mothers would choose to stay home even if that meant Obama and his ideological heirs would discriminate against them in the tax code.