This and That...

[Warph]

Site Outlining Obama's Promises,
Including Whistleblower Protections...

... DISAPPEARS

President Obama touted whistleblower protections as a priority on the campaign trail in 2008, but the administration has deemed it as a political liability, erasing a website outlining campaign promises.

http://redalertpolitics.com/2013/07/26/site-outlining-obamas-promises-including-whistleblower-protections-disappears/

[Warph]

Obamacare Call Center Reneges Offer For
Healthcare Benefits to Employees

(And the Obuma adm. lies roll on...
and this time the ObumaCare liberals took the hit)

In order to ensure Americans understand how to access the benefits available to them when many provisions of the Affordable Care Act go online October 1, the Obama administration announced last month that it is setting up a call center that will be accessible to Americans 24 hours a day.

One branch of that call center will be located in California's Contra Costa County, where, reportedly, 7,000 people applied for the 204 jobs. According to the Contra Costa Times, however, "about half the jobs are part-time, with no health benefits — a stinging disappointment to workers and local politicians who believed the positions would be full-time." The county supervisor, Karen Mitchoff, called the hiring process "a comedy of errors" and said she "never dreamed [the jobs] would be part-time."


The Times indicates that a job posting advertised all of the jobs as full-time, and one call center employee, who said no reason for the apparent change was provided, told the paper, "It reminded me of that George Clooney movie where he goes around the country firing people ('Up in the Air'). The woman said, 'I know you were led to believe you would be full-time, but things have changed...You are actually 'part-time intermittent.'"
The Contra Costa employees are currently in training, and the call center — one of three based in California — is set to go live on October 1.



.

[Warph]

Did Speaker Boehner Cut A Deal With Obama On Benghazi?

Earlier I asked why we still don't know what really happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, besides the obvious. If Speaker of the House John Boehner was doing his job, perhaps we would know, despite the Obama administration's attempt to just put this all behind us.

Mark Levin thinks perhaps Boehner cut a deal with President Obama. It's really the only explanation that makes much sense.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/07/24/mark_levin_boehner_cut_some_kind_of_deal_with_obama_on_benghazi.html

MARK LEVIN:You know, ladies and gentlemen, I hate to say this, but it's right in front of our faces. Obviously, John Boehner does not want to get to the bottom of what took place in Benghazi. It's obvious. He's been asked over and over again by a majority of the Republicans in the House to set up a special investigative committee as is the tradition in these types of investigations. So you concentrate expertise and resources and time in one special committee rather than multiple committees that are also investigating other matters and overseeing other matters and handling bills and so forth.

So, it's as if the Speaker of the House, the Republican Speaker of the House, doesn't want to get to the bottom of this. And I suppose his brain trust, Eric Cantor — by the law, Eric Cantor is on this Lecture America Tour about why illegal immigration is a wonderful thing for this country. Is he stopping it anybody's neighborhood? I haven't heard anything about it, have you Mr. Producer? He such a voice out there — in the wilderness, where he belongs. But, anyway, it's obvious at this point, ladies and gentlemen, that we have to draw a very sad conclusion: John Boehner does not want to know what took place in Benghazi on that horrific day. And I'm honestly starting to think that he's cut some kind of deal with Obama, because why else would he do this?

Obama has never answered for approximately eight-and-a-half hours of inaction, and I contend that he went to sleep. He's never answered for this. And it goes on and it goes on. It's preposterous that we can't find out from the president of the United States, the Commander in Chief, whose going to be running all around the country lecturing us, telling us why our economic system sucks, why we should replace it with a top-down tyrannical-type of economic system, why we have to listen to his spokesidiot, this guy Carney, dismiss any serious questions that are asked. I mean, what the hell is this? Is this a joke? I feel like we're living through a nightmare here.

So the greatest secret on the planet right now is what Obama was doing during eight-and-a-half hours when our consulate was under attack, our ambassador being slaughtered, two ex-SEALs coming to his rescue being slaughtered, and the security/information individual, gentlemen, being slaughtered. And we can't get an answer. And John Boehner doesn't want an answer, because John Boehner is what stands between setting up a special investigative committee and not.

And God bless this Frank Wolf from Virginia who will not take 'no' for an answer. He just continues to press and press and press, and Wolf is not some kind of rebel. He wants to get to the bottom of this. And why should this be partisan? Why should it be political? And why the hell should the Republican Speaker of the House obstruct the investigation? So the time for mincing words — not that I do, but others do — the time for mincing words is over.

John Boehner does not want to get to what's going on in Benghazi, or what took place, and he simply doesn't give a damn. And he's very, very busy, ladies and gentlemen, scheming in the shadows trying to figure out how to give tens of millions of illegal aliens a 'pathway to citizenship' so that they can vote 8-to-1 Democrat. This is the kind of insanity that we're dealing with. And believe me, it is insanity.

Every day the Republican Party is more of a disappointment. Sure, there are some good ones out there, but the leadership and the establishment RINOs are turning out to be nothing more than water carriers for the Democrats.

[Warph]

(Obama raises his hand for a point of order on the Snowden issue.  Putin, holding a dead fish, looks down. LOL....  
   

Stop mocking my POS President, Vlad!  Stop, or I shall say "Stop" again  )

[Warph]

How Nutty Is This World Getting When I Sign On To Get The Daily News

First, Todays headlines:

Amanda Bynes — Doctors Win Bid
to Keep Her in Psych Ward
– TMZ

Sydney Leathers Details Being At Center
Of Anthony Weiner Sexting Scandal
– Inside Edition

Weiner Had at Least 13 Sexting Partners
– 3 After He Left Congress
– American Power

Four More Women Accuse Filner
– KPBS-TV, San Diego

San Diego mayor to seek therapy
for 'inexcusable' behavior
– The Hill

Democratic Party officials ask
San Diego Mayor Bob Filner to quit
– Los Angeles Times

Obama Says Vietnamese Dictator
Inspired by Founding Fathers
– Fox News

Miley Cyrus ... POSES NUDE
– TMZ

Now, the serious commentary:

These are not the disease, these are merely symptoms of the disease, and the pattern is not coincidental, right?

Why has Amanda Bynes gone crazy?  Why is Sydney Leathers being treated like a celebrity?  Why can't Anthony Weiner remember how many women he "sexted"?  Why is Miley Cyrus naked?  Why does Bob Filner think "therapy," and not resignation, is the answer?

Don't tell me we don't know the answer to why President Ho Chi Minh is in the White House and Amanda Bynes is in the nuthouse.  This kind of escalating madness doesn't "just happen," does it?  I need a beer... wait, make that a 6-pak!

Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat

...Warph

[Warph]

Dept of Labor: Kids can't work on family farms....

(You can take the kids out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the kids...
And the criticism goes on against the Obuma Administration and the DOL)

A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it's attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families' land.

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work "in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials."

"Prohibited places of employment," a Department press release read, "would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions."

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government's approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

Rossie Blinson, a 21-year-old college student from Buis Creek, N.C., told The Daily Caller that the federal government's plan will do far more harm than good.

"The main concern I have is that it would prevent kids from doing 4-H and FFA projects if they're not at their parents' house," said Blinson.

"I started showing sheep when I was four years old. I started with cattle around 8. It's been very important. I learned a lot of responsibility being a farm kid."

In Kansas, Cherokee County Farm Bureau president Jeff Clark was out in the field — literally on a tractor — when TheDC reached him. He said if Solis's regulations are implemented, farming families' labor losses from their children will only be part of the problem.

"What would be more of a blow," he said, "is not teaching our kids the values of working on a farm."



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/25/rural-kids-parents-angry-about-labor-dept-rule-banning-farm-chores/#ixzz1t5QcU2lZ

[Warph]

Tea Party farmer: How the IRS targeted me

July 25, 2013

Self-described Tea Party Republican who repeatedly clashed with environment group says the
embattled agency improperly targeted her because of politics.

GretaWire:

[Warph]

Shaun Kenney: An Intellectual's Brain and Farmer's Heart

Between Intellectuals and Farmers

By Shaun Kenney | Monday, July 15th, 2013

Given all the brouhaha between Martha Boneta's Paris Farms and the utter and inexcusable harassment she has received at the hands of Fauquier County...
(see above post)
...this was a rather refreshing look at the importance of small farmers:

They answer to no one. They can make jam, build retaining walls, throw together a loaf of bread, make soap, sew scrub suits for the daughter who's a nurse, install an outdoor wood-burning furnace. Melvin has even been known to come in from milking at 2am and pick up whatever history book he's currently reading and not get to bed until dawn. It's a demanding way to live, but Jennifer and Melvin love it. Small farmers have to love what they do, because they're not in it for the money.

What makes this article truly interesting is Anne Buchanan's reflection on the distance between academics such as herself, and those who really do work with their hands and run small farms — like her sister, who operates a goat farm in Vermont:

Snow was saddened that, by 1959, his literary friends no longer understood the concept of acceleration or mass, and his scientist friends no longer read Dickens.

Snow's concern was not so much that people ought to share a culture for its own sake, but that without a shared intellectual culture, we would not be equipped to address the problems of the modern world. In particular, he worried about overpopulation, nuclear war, and the increasing gap between rich and poor nations. Ultimately, in spite of the two cultures divide, he believed that science would solve these problems, and that, for example, there was absolutely no reason that poverty would not be eliminated by the year 2000.

Snow's lecture was published as a book, Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), which is still available today, and still widely read, at least among academics. Some of his predictions, such as the end of poverty, were so wrong that it's easy to characterise him as terribly naive. And, 50 years on, the idea that it's possible to be well-educated in both science and the humanities is pretty much a pipe-dream. With the exponential growth of knowledge, particularly in science and technology, it's hard to see how it could be any other way.  (emphasis added)


This distance, one might assert, is the very problem that many small farmers face, whether it's against encroaching suburbia that prefers the smells and sounds of the farm be obliterated in favor of pretty pink houses, or an white-collar class that has so quickly forgotten that food doesn't come from a can, nor objects for consumption simply conjure themselves up from China.

It is an interesting concept that once upon a time, many Americans could have been expected to read from the same canon of literature.  Today, this is increasingly unlikely.  Whether on politics or religion, on how to make things versus their direct application, our modern American education system does not seem to be up to the task of offering us a single starting point — a problem touched upon by thinkers such as Cass Sunstein and further explored by Matthew Crawford as it relates to our ability to make things.

Today, we have a class of specialists in America who simply consume, but do not make.  Small farmers and the act of growing things help make that connecting bond between intellectualism and practicality in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson — when the world was arguably smaller and the limits of human knowledge fairly Newtonian in scope.

Perhaps Buchanan is touching on something here that we moderns could desperately learn from.  The act of creating and tending to things — whether that's raising goats, a small 4×4 plot of dirt, a farm, or even picking up a trade — is one step to bridging that gap.

Another item?  Rebuilding the American canon of "required reading" for the liberal arts.  You can pick up on shades of this from your high school English and History classes that once upon a time, Shakespeare and Wheatley, Steinbeck and Hemingway, Thurston and Thoreau, Emerson and Dickinson, Jefferson and Hamilton, Lincoln and Kennedy once occupied this hallowed space.

Today, I doubt this canon once readily identified by those who embraced the humanities early as a student are shared with similar enthusiasm among college freshmen more preoccupied with the rigors of a college schedule (or not) rather than an imposition of the highlights of American culture.

We have, in short, lost the American canon of literature, and from there the starting point which would allow the farmer and the specialist to converse.

Pity that.

[Warph]

Sarah Palin lists Obama's 'phony' scandals
on her redneck white board

GretaWire

Published on Jul 26, 2013

July 26, 2013 - Sarah Palin joined Greta Van Susteren on Friday night to slam President Obama for the comment during his big economic speech that Washington's too obsessed with "phony scandals." Palin wanted to know exactly which scandals the president was referring to as "phony," and held up a "redneck version" of Karl Rove's classic white boards to remind viewers of all the scandals currently plaguing Obama, from Benghazi to NSA snooping, asking in disbelief if he's really dismissing all of them as "phony."

Van Susteren noted how White House spokesman Jay Carney used the same word, calling it "obviously calculated." Palin likened Obama to a basketball player "trying to run out the clock" by hogging the ball and throwing "distractions and diversions at the American people." She called the president "cowardly," and said the only people listening to him at this point are journalists who aren't doing their jobs right.

She flashed back to the 2008 campaign, briefly conflating government whistleblowers trying to expose Obama administration abuses with people who were shouting about Reverend Wright five years ago. She told Van Susteren she was "banned" from talking about Wright and Bill Ayers because the Republican "elitists" running the campaign were too worried about the media backlash. She then held up what she described as a "redneck version of one of those elitist tactics of Karl Rove" using his white board to show all the scandals currently hurting Obama.

Van Susteren noted how people are actually able to see through what Obama's saying by going online, while Palin touted how "Americans are smarter than what the lamestream media's giving them credit for." She said with "lapdogs" in the press not doing their jobs right, they're leaving all the actual work of calling out Obama to the people instead.

[Ross]

Retired Army officer warns: DHS preparing for war against American citizens
DHS
March 23, 2013
By: Joe Newby


On Saturday, Terry M. Hestilow, a retired United States Army Captain from Fort Worth, Texas, posted a letter on Facebook that he wrote to Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, warning that the Department of Homeland Security is preparing to go to war with the citizens of the United States.

It is with gravest concern that I write to you today concerning the recent appropriation of weapons by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that can only be understood as a bold threat of war by that agency, and the Obama administration, against the citizens of the United States of America," his letter began.

The retired officer expressed deep concerns over "recent purchases of almost 3,000 mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armored personnel carriers, 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition (with associated weapons), and other weapons systems."

Capt. Hestilow added a statement that Barack Obama made during his 2008 campaign.

"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've gotta (sic) have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded [as the United States military]," he said.

He also accused the administration of "deliberately defunding, overextending, and hollowing the Department of Defense," which he said is the "only legitimate agency" with the mission of conducting combat operations.

In his letter, Capt. Hestilow called on Congress to demand that the DHS surrender their weapons systems to the Defense Department. He also accused the DHS of enforcing the "tyrannical acts of this president" and said lawmakers should dissolve the agency "as soon as possible."

"One needs only to look to the rise of Adolf Hitler, and his associated DHS organizations, the SA and the SS, of 1932-1934, to see the outcome of allowing an agency of government this kind of control over the free citizens of a nation," he added.

Capt. Hestilow said that Americans cannot "be so naïve" as to think that what happened in Germany cannot happen here.

Earlier in the week, Capt. Hestilow asked his Facebook followers who the DHS intends to kill with the weapons and ammunition that it has recently purchased.

"Short answer," he wrote. "You and me! Anyone they think is standing in their way to impose a new Marxist government! Anyone who stands for the U.S. Constitution!"

"If I live and still have a page to speak out on later this week, I will discuss a proper Constitutional response in a couple of days. Standby. Out," he wrote on Thursday.

Capt. Hestilow ended his strongly-worded letter with a simple declaration: "We refuse to surrender our Constitution or our nation!"

http://www.examiner.com/article/retired-army-officer-warns-dhs-preparing-for-war-against-american-citizens