The Idiocy of Politicians that Passes All Understanding

http://news.yahoo.com/committee-passes-bill-address-sexual-assaults-233047697.html

WASHINGTON - With broad support from Republicans and Democrats, a House committee Wednesday approved legislation to tackle the growing problem of sexual assault in the armed forces by taking away the power of military commanders to overturn convictions in rape and assault cases.

The bill passed by the House Armed Services Committee also requires that anyone found guilty of a sex-related crime receive a punishment that includes, at a minimum, a dismissal from military service or a dishonorable discharge.

"The word should go out clearly and strongly that if you commit a sexual assault in the military, you are out," said Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio. Turner and Rep. Niki Tsongas, D-Mass., wrote many of the provisions in the House bill.

This sure sounds great, doesn't it?  But the practical impact will be that folks will be less likely to be charged or to be convicted on these charges.  Besides, the result is little different than now.  In any felony level conviction, service members will be involuntarily separated.

But I guess our legislators will be oh so proud they did something, eh?

SS Crashing

To really understand the crisis this program faces, the Trustees should be comparing the $55 billion in asset growth to the exploding growth in its unfunded obligations, which increased by $1 trillion during 2012. This also happened in 2011 when increased obligations of $2.1 trillion far outstripped the $69 billion increase in the program's Treasury security holdings.

The program's total unfunded obligations over the next 75 years has now grown to $9.6 trillion, more than one-half as large as the outstanding gross federal debt of $17 trillion.
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2013/06/06/social_security_falls_even_deeper_into_a_sinkhole_100378.html

In other words, this is how the politics of SS distorts what the SS reports say

Why Federal Unions Have to Go

Finally, it's important to focus on the political stew that many IRS employees marinate in as members of the National Treasury Employees Union, which is headed by Colleen Kelley. Ms. Kelley has publicly vilified "extreme Tea Party elements," portraying their agenda as a threat to the IRS workers her union represents. In 2011, Ms. Kelley mobilized IRS employees to "lean on" members of Congress against tea-party-backed spending cuts, boasting that "anywhere there's an IRS service center, we have four to eight thousand" union members. When you have a union boss who demonizes private citizens and conscripts front-line IRS employees as boots-on-the-ground activists, you've got toxic culture from the ground up.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323728204578517812641275502.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Way too many conflicts of interest, for starters.  

Just Another Infuriating Abusive Intrusion on Liberty

Government at its worst ...

For those of you interested in food freedom, Vernon Hershberger, an Amish father of ten children, is currently being tried for producing and distributing raw milk in Wisconsin, and could face up to $10,000 in fines and three years of jail time. My understanding is that he worked out an arrangement with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection (DATCP) in 2003 where the agency ruled that it would be legal for him to distribute raw milk through means of a private contract with consumers. He established a farm store that was open only to those who signed the contract, and sold raw milk there. In 2009, the agency made an about-face (perhaps because of pressure from the FDA?), raided his farm, destroyed 300 gallons of his milk, and began militantly persecuting him.

The prosecution is charging him with operating a "retail establishment" without a license, and its strategy is to disallow him from presenting evidence that 1) he is not operating a retail establishment, 2) he didn't need a license, 3) he couldn't have gotten a license anyway because he was selling raw milk, and 4) he is being pursued by the Wisconsin DATCP because he was producing and distributing raw milk. The judge has mostly enabled the prosecution thus far. In fact, he has so stringently forbidden any mention of raw milk at the trial that he forbid Mark McAfee, attending the trial as a member of the public, from wearing a "got raw milk?" shirt, which the judge declared was "heinous nonsense." Another woman attending the trial as a member of the public was forbidden from wearing a shirt that read "got initiative?" because the judge ruled it was an "implied reference to raw milk."

If you'd like to keep up with the trial, here are some useful links:

* VernonHershberger.Com http://www.vernonhershberger.com and the links therein
* David Gumpert's blog, The Complete Patient: The Business of Your Health http://www.thecompletepatient.com
* David Gumpert's Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/david.gumpert.16?fref=ts

Here's to day when the citizenry demands that governments defend liberty.

Who Chooses?

But this little scene -- lobbying for the right to medical treatment -- will play out so many more thousands of times in the future thanks to ObamaCare.

Ultimately, they'll start deciding who should live and who should die not merely on medical grounds, but on political ones -- not just expected life chances, but whether you're living a life they really want to save.

And for anyone who doesn't think that will happen, I have three words for you: I.R.S.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/340604.php

Who get's to choose in these example of essentially nationalized health care?  The bureaucrats, of course.

Skillfully Killing the Straw Man

At that point, the freedom-crushing regulatory burdens of Obamacare may turn into a blessing. And this, of course, is the entire concept of insurance. Insurance is the spreading of risk. What distinguishes health insurance from insurance against, say, fire, is that insurers can make a much better guess which customer is likely to need medical care than which is likely to have their house burn down. Some people are bad actuarial health risks, and some people are good actuarial health risks.

That's the whole dysfunction of our horrendous health-insurance system. The individual health insurance market is a tragic mess: People who need insurance the most can't buy it, while the only people who can afford insurance don't need it. That's the reason for health-care reform.

The objections to health-care reform present themselves as if they've uncovered some kind of nightmarish bureaucratic inefficiency. What they've actually discovered, to the extent that they aren't simply misleading people, is that a functioning insurance system takes money away from people who are healthy. Likewise, fire insurance screws people whose houses will never burn down.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/obamacare-a-war-on-bros.html

It sure is easy to kill a straw man.

In this case, the straw man is the concept of health insurance being an example of market failure.  In contrast, is was a market long "mal-nipulated" by the government.  At this point it is becoming illegal to buy a policy that insures one against catastrophic disease, and instead we are forced to buy pre-paid service plans.  We don't buy those for our cars because they are too expensive!

"Like We Said All Along ..."

"The rates are going to fall."
"The rates will fall like we've been saying."
"Like we've said all along, rates will go up but the reason is folks will be buying better coverage."
http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/05/higher-health-insurance-premiums-the-oba