Bureaucracy/Statism

Senate blocks repeal of health care provision that forces businesses to report every payment over $600. Even Democrats agree that’s a stupid provision that will cost businesses millions.

I’ve seen half of these. And those were good. I especially love the Thin Blue Line, one of the best documentaries I have ever seen.

It’s important to see how the legal system actually works, or should I say, doesn’t. Like any bureaucracy, time, size and pressure creates a bloated, corrupt inefficient mess. There’s a reason we limited government types don’t like statism. It doesn’t work.

It’s a fallacy of the left to believe that government is there to solve social injustice. The truth is, the state creates it and enforces social injustice. The bigger the state, the more unjust.

If getting groped and scanned by the TSA doesn’t bother you, maybe getting cavity searched will. There are new scanners that can check the contents of your rectum now. I’m sure the TSA will buy some once George Soros has bought enough shares in the company.

They’re already talking about bringing TSA check points to subways, bus terminals and train stations. So much for the land of the free.

And what about that recent move by Homeland Security and ICE, seizing the domains of 75 internet sites without even charging the owners first. It was all about punishing websites that sell replica watches and other junk, as well as some file sharers. But you can easily see, if they get away with this, of doing it to any other website they don’t agree with. After all, they were seized at will. No due process. How do you like that change now?

This is why people elected the Republicans on Novermber 2. They wanted them to counter the moves of the statist Democrats. Or the DemSocs as we can call them now. They’ve been using Orwell’s 1984 as a playbook and that fundamental change Obama talked about is not looking too utopian.

Not Only do they strip search a kid in full view of others, they are searching a little kid! Abolish the TSA.

Rather than explain it, I’ll just let you read it. If it doesn’t demonstrate how stupid things have gotten, I don’t know what does.

I stand by my previous statement. Abolish the TSA. Go with previous screening (pre-911) with profiling like they use in Israel.

Forbes is recommending it and I second the motion. The TSA has never caught one terrorist. It has, however, harrassed millions of people every year. And made them jump through absurd hoops that are pointless. As the terrorists always figure out something else. We should go back the the pre-911 security screenings and stop this insanity which is gone way past the point of reason.

The media and government have been preying on people’s irrational fears. We shouldn’t let them do that as they use it as an excuse to take away our liberties. The very idea that you can’t bring your own shampoo or toothpaste in a certain size in your luggage is ridiculous.

Bipartisan support should be immediate. For fiscal conservatives, it’s hard to come up with a more wasteful agency than the TSA. For privacy advocates, eliminating an organization that requires you to choose between a nude body scan or genital groping in order to board a plane should be a no-brainer.

But won’t that compromise safety? I doubt it. The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility. This might be beside the point: in 2003, William Anderson incisively argued that some of the steps that airlines (and passengers) would have needed to take to prevent the 9/11 disaster probably would have been illegal.

The odds of dying from a terrorist attack are much lower than the odds of dying from doing any of a number of incredibly mundane things we do every day. You are almost certainly more likely to die or be injured driving to the airport than you are to be injured by a terrorist once you’re in the air, even without a TSA. Indeed, once you have successfully made it to the airport, the most dangerous part of your trip is over. Until it’s time to drive home, that is.

The TSA has been a joke since its inception and it is a huge drain on the tax payer. Enough.

The recent Juan Williams debacle at NPR may have been a good thing because it exposed Vivian Schiller to the world. This creature (seen below in the post called The New McCarthyism) is working with the Obama Administration to take over the news business through the abuse of power in the federal agencies the FCC and the FTC.

Schiller, a former New York Times executive, is one of a few dozen power players working with the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and a leftist group called Free Press to “reinvent journalism.” That’s how the FTC describes it. The FCC calls what they are doing the “Future of Journalism.” Free Press, a think tank funded by leftist billionaire George Soros, among others, calls it “the new public media.”

It’s all the same thing, a plan to take over local news coverage from for-profit television, radio and print media, which Schiller and her friends claim is in danger of extinction. These “friends” get together regularly with the heads of the FCC and FTC to brainstorm the details in government and congressional meetings. These meetings include the leaders of all the country’s public broadcasting outlets, including PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and American Public Media.

Perhaps now some more scrutiny will be placed on these characters and hopefully the election next week will kill their chances of shutting down dissenting views in the press.

The first lady has decided, as part of the state’s control of the health care system to start measuring everyone’s BMI and forcing your kids to take drugs if they are over weight.

Oh yeah, and we’ll throw you in jail if you don’t buy our crappy healthcare insurance.

I don’t remember any part of the constitution that the first lady gets to issue edicts controlling people’s lives. Guess I missed that part in civics class.

And they’re wondering why people are so mad out there in electorate land.

Or should I say, a government of the fools, by the fools and for the fools. Obama’s former Car Czar Steven Rattner has wrote a book about the failed Obama administration. The first of many, one assumes. We all know that old saw about rats and sinking ships. According to Ratter, Obama was “out to get” the car companies from the start. Some other gems.

-When Obama was told of the plan to pay GM CEO Rick Wagoner a $7.1 million severance package after Obama ordered that he be sacked, Rattner writes: “Suddenly I felt that I was indeed in the presence of a community organizer…”

-Rattner describes presidential political adviser David Axelrod coming to car meetings armed with poll data to support the takeover and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel identify Congressmen in whose districts large Chrysler facilities were located.

-”[Obama's economic team] veered dangerously close to having the government take control of the two most troubled banks, Bank of America and Citigroup.”

-”If his team had linked arms with the outgoing administration, as President Bush’s advisers had proposed, billions of dollars could well have been saved.”

-Rattner says Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual dictated Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s schedule, public appearances and staff selections.

-He says Obama economic advisers Larry Summers and Austan Goolsbee and FDIC Chair Sheila Bair as enemies who slowed down decision making with infighting

-Rattner said Obama was frustrated with the auto companies from the start: “Why can’t they make a Corolla?” he has Obama asking.

Oh, the next couple years will be entertaining as the Republicans investigate this administration from top to bottom. There has to be all sorts of entertaining revelations to come.

Women already out number men in the work force. Diversity hiring is already far surpassing any era in history, but it’s not enough for the bean counters and corrupt bureaucrats. It’s a power game. And this could be very bad for business because it demands people be hired by their race over their talent. That’s how it will play out. How else did Obama get so far, so fast with little to show for it? Affirmative action nonsense.

In a major power grab, the new (Dodd-Frank financial regulationl) law inserts race and gender quotas into America’s financial industry.

In addition to this bill’s well-publicized plans to establish over a dozen new financial regulatory offices, Section 342 sets up at least 20 Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion. This has had no coverage by the news media and has large implications.

The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, the Board of Governors of the Fed, the National Credit Union Administration, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau…all would get their own Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.

Each office would have its own director and staff to develop policies promoting equal employment opportunities and racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of not just the agency’s workforce, but also the workforces of its contractors and sub-contractors.

Putting any group to the back of the line so some other group can do better is favoritism. Doing it based on race is racist. This is how “progressives” operate. Even though this bill was written by two old white men, it will punish white men who are already vilified by the media and the culture. Obama’s post-racial America isn’t one.

Democrats are trying to ensure they will be the ruling party in the future, so they are trying to gerrymander every aspect of society to make sure it is controlled by “the right people”. People they think will see them as being “on their side”. Except when you destroy economies and business, you will not be loved. And that is if they get this nightmare through. We shall see.