Dec 17

The myth of “Austerity”: Congress Moves Forward with Monster Budget, Huffington Post Implies Congress Poised to Cut Spending

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Two of the largest news aggregator sites are Huffingtonpost.com and Drudgereport.com. Today, December 17, 2015, both sites led with headlines about the massive, record-breaking, unpaid-for federal budget that just cleared Congress.

Both sites linked to the same article in politico.com, which details the impending budget. The Politico tagline is “Budget austerity takes a back seat as lawmakers prepare to pass nearly $700 billion in unpaid-for tax cuts.”

Laughably, the Huffington Post linked to the story with this outrageous headline: “Austerity-Lovers Gun For $700 Billion Tax Cuts.”

Say that again? Are “austerity lovers” driving the budget process in Congress? The plain wording in the Politico headline is that “austerity” is taking a “back seat.” Huffingtonpost construes this as “austerity lovers” are “gunning” for $700 Billion in “cuts.”

Austerity means cuts in government payroll and spending. THERE HAS BEEN NO AUSTERITY in America or any western country in years!

The current budget moving through Congress REPRESENTS THE PRECISE OPPOSITE OF AUSTERITY; it (1) grows government spending by 700 BILLION DOLLARS, (2) without ANY cuts to offset this outrageous spending explosion.

The word ‘austerity’ is like the word ‘deregulation.’ It is often invoked, but rarely seen. See here.

Dec 17

Billings tobacco shop shuttered by government for displaying a “cigarette rolling machine”: State claims the shop is an “unlicensed cigarette manufacturer”

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In case more evidence is needed that Montana “Justice Department” officials need some budget cuts, the Department has recently targeted a Billings smoke shop because the smoke shop displayed a cigarette rolling machine. See here.

The State claims the display of the cigarette rolling machine–which tobacco buyers can use to roll a couple cigarettes on their way out the door–makes the shop a cigarette “manufacturing facility.”

Dec 15

Wal-Mart Shares Plummet 30 % after Company Hikes Wages

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Years of criticism and attacks have taken their toll on Wal-Mart. “Back in February, CEO Doug McMillon of Wal-Mart agreed to raise his company’s pay for entry-level employees to almost $9 an hour come April and up to $10 early the year after.” See here.

Announcing the company’s third-quarter results in November, Mr. McMillon had to admit that the pay raise was a significant cause of Wal-Mart’s 8.6 percent drop in corporate earnings from U.S. stores. The company now says the higher wages and other education programs have added $1.2 billion in annual costs to the company’s expenses this fiscal year and will probably add another $1.5 billion to the company’s balance sheet in the next. It’d be safe to assume most of that money, though, went to wages.

Wal-Mart stock is now down more than 30 percent so far in 2015.

“By substituting daydreams for common sense,” writes Paul Greenberg, “the character of a once great company” may have been lost forever.

Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s legendary founder, used to say that his dream was to serve the under-served by providing more value for lower prices. In doing so, he may have done more to help lower-income Americans than any government program ever.

Dec 15

Gov’t Workers ‘Absent’ 50% More Than Private-Sector Workers

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A government worker is 38 percent more likely to be absent from work for personal reasons or illnesses than a private-sector worker, and government workers miss 50 percent more of their usual work hours as a result of such absences than do private sector workers, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The BLS found that in 2012, 4.0 percent of government workers reported being absent from work in the typical reference week compared to 2.9 percent of private-sector workers.

See here.

Dec 14

Billionaires are Waking to the Fact that Political Spending Makes Little Difference.

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It is one of the biggest myths of modern politics: that repetitive advertising (or the spending of campaign money in general) can ensure electoral victory.

Every argument of “campaign finance reformers” is false. There is no (or almost no) correlation between campaign spending and victory. Only a slight number of voters (maybe 1, 2 or 3 percent) are manipulatable by repetitive ad spending.

The vast majority of voters do not change their votes in response to political spending.

Finally, political observers are waking up to this reality. See this fascinating expose here.
Most Americans never donate to political campaigns. They wisely view such spending to be an utter waste. Billionaires who have spent fortunes on politics are increasingly admitting that their contributions have made little difference.

Dec 14

“Journalists” cheer and jump wildly as Paris Climate-Change Agreement is announced

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Here is amazing video of alleged journalists supposedly covering climate treaty negotiations in Paris objectively. Watch as they scream and jump for joy at the announcement!

Now we know why such alleged journalists rarely report facts which undermine the government-controlled manmade-global-warming thesis.

Dec 13

Defense Contractors Assure Investors that their Futures Look Bright

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Spokesmen for Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin assured investors at a recent conference that “they stand to gain from the escalating conflicts in the Middle East.”

See here.

Dec 13

Forest Fire Burn Acreage Has Plummeted Since the 1930s

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It is frequently said that forest fires are increasing. Some who claim this attribute it to manmade global warming.

The reality is that the total U.S. acreage burned by forest fires has plummeted since the 1930s. See here.

Dec 10

Lone profitable Obamacare insurance co-op losing millions

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Every government policy that subsidizes health care increases demand without increasing supply, causing prices to rise.

Thus, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA program and the ACA (“Obamacare”) have all made health care more expensive. In turn, the poor (who are sometimes mentioned as the supposed beneficiaries of such government programs) find medical care more and more expensive.

Now we learn that the only insurance co-op firm which made a profit from Obamacare last year (2014) is on track to LOSE MILLIONS this year. See here.

The firm, “Community Health Options” headquartered in Maine, plans to stop offering medical coverage in 2016. Already half of the 23 insurance co-ops which started up to serve Obamacare patients have collapsed. All are losing money.

Stay tuned!

Dec 10

Climate Hysteric Michael Mann Speaks at Montana State University

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by Roger Roots, 12/10/2015

An amazing spectacle of doublespeak, smoke, and mirrors took a stage at Montana State University in Bozeman on December 9, 2015. At taxpayer expense.

Dr. Michael Mann, the overbearing pro-government climate scientist at the heart of the 2009 Climategate scandal, was invited by MSU faculty to lecture a large public audience. Mann’s speech was the capstone to a two-day extravaganza at MSU, with expensive, glossy global-warming literature and signage throughout.

Mann presented his case for manmade climate change in a wholly one-sided manner. At least twice, Dr. Mann claimed that global temperatures have increased precisely as predicted by the government-funded climate modelers of the 1990s. Mann showed a chart on a large screen with a line purporting to be a temp prediction model created decades ago by his friend James Hanson. He then overlaid this line with a wriggly line purporting to be the actual temps of the past 20 years. The lines appeared to correlate closely.

Mann must know, of course, that more than 100 climate models predicted temp trajectories that were later shown to overestimate actual temps by 2 to 3 times. Even the most accurate temperature predictions of the 1990s-era modelers have been shown to have overestimated global warming by more than a standard deviation. The crowd at MSU were left in the dark about these basic facts.

Dr. Mann also spun a tale of persecution for mainstream climate scientists, pointing to various subpoenas and demands for his emails by politicians over the years. He failed to mention the larger phenomena of skeptics being fired, persecuted, and denied grants and promotions.

He glossed over the scandal regarding his deceptive “hockey stick” temperature graph of 2005 that was once on the cover of the UN’s IPCC report. Researchers later found that Mann had discarded all data that disputed the catastrophic-global-warming theory of the IPCC.

Questions from the crowd seemed so “softball” in nature that I was tempted to guess that the questioners were pre-selected. I had my own hand in the air but was never offered the microphone. The first questioner asked Mann about his hope for the future. The second questioner asked Mann if he thought social scientists should play a role in promoting the hysteria of global warming. (Mann said yes.)