Some of you may have seen this, but it might give you a light moment this weekend. My son Benjamin showed me the video below on YouTube featuring singer Rob Cantor and his song, “Shia LaBeouf” — the actor best known for his role in Transformers as Sam Witwicky. The performances by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, the Argus Quartet, the West Los Angeles Children’s Choir, and other artists are brilliant.
Continue reading “Musical Number Explores The Dark Cannibalistic Side of Shia Labeouf”
I did my usual hike on Billy Goat Trail this morning at dawn and it was a beautiful crisp fall morning. While a bit chilly at 36 degrees, it was great for a vigorous hike. The leaves are down but the result is a quiet and stark forest with trees silhouetted on dark waters of the ponds and the Potomac.
By Darren Smith
What is it with government software? Voting machines are dysfunctional, Federal healthcare systems self-destruct under heavy load, billions wasted on Federal Retirement systems that no longer work. Now, Washington State presents us with another example: The Washington Health Care Exchange’s Washington Health Plan Finder.
The website began open enrollment and was shut down after a just a few hours when the system detected that tax credit calculations were incorrect. State software engineers and managers are working to correct the problem that somehow fell under the radar when the system was being developed. How such a basic component could be missed by their QA is remarkable.
Exchange CEO Richard Onizuka stated that the credits were off by “just” a few dollars in some cases.
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
O
n November 14th a grand jury in the Western District of Oklahoma issued a true bill indicting former Oklahoma City Police Officer Doug Williams for Obstruction of Justice, Witness Tampering, and Wire Fraud for allegedly being “…hired and paid to train customers how to conceal misconduct in other disqualifying information during Federal employment suitability assessments, Federal security background investigations, internal Federal agency investigations, and other proceedings.”
Williams proffers himself as a crusader having the hopes of eliminating polygraph examinations, informally known as lie detector tests, from government use in that fifty percent of truthful answers are deemed by polygraph operators to be lies. He maintains the website polygraph.com. Fees include one thousand dollars for his training locally and up to five thousand dollars for sessions in which air travel is requested of him.
In essence, Williams attests to the fact that innocent individuals are falsely accused of lying and that his service helps his customers bring out truthful answers. The website does not promise to assist customers to be successful in covering untruthful information.
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
The Seattle City Council is considering a resolution directing the city Law Department to investigate the possibility of imposing an excise tax on individuals having incomes in excess of one million dollars.
Washington has no state income tax. Seattle’s pursuit of this might be attractive to many voters who view income tax as a form of balance against what is considered by some to be the regressive nature of Washington’s taxation system. Yet voters over the years have resorted to the voting booth to end the discussion among some politicians who have tried to enact similar measures. The city garnered much national attention by working toward a controversial fifteen dollars minimum wage.
Seattle might have a difficult task if it chooses to enact such an ordinance as the State Supreme Court declared income taxes of this type to be unconstitutional.
Continue reading “Seattle City Council To Study Possible “Millionaires Tax””
By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
Congress is drafting legislation to deny Social Security benefits to those accused of participating in persecutions of others by the Nazis. HR 5706 directs the Justice Department to provide names of individuals suspected as such to the Social Security Administration which would then terminate all social benefits to these individuals. This could occur despite payments by these individuals into the social security system and who are presently receiving such benefits.
The Bill, titled the “Nazi Social Security Benefits Termination Act of 2014,” came into being after the Associated Press reported that millions of dollars in benefits have been provided to those beneficiaries, many of whom the AP claims received the promise of social benefits on the condition they removed themselves from the United States. The Justice Department disputes this claim.
While there is no question that those who participated in genocides should be held accountable for their actions, the steps Congress is taking has substantial long term risks to due process rights, entitlements, and using retirement benefits as a form of collective punishment to individuals deemed undesirable by the U.S. Government.
It appears that friends (albeit a dwindling number) of MIT professor Jonathan Gruber may soon have to put his face on milk cartons to locate the economist. After a series of frank but embarrassing statements on the strategies behind the Administration’s passage of the Affordable Car Act (ACA), Gruber has moved from the status of “disfavored” to “disavowed” to “disappeared.” This week, Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi expressed a complete lack of knowledge of who Gruber is, was, or will be — even though she previously cited his work and he was paid $400,000 as one of the architects of Obamacare and has made over $2 million from HHS. Such roles are often difficult for scholars in moving between the political and academic worlds, but it is rare to find an academic become such an issue in a national debate.
Continue reading “The Purging of Professor Gruber: ACA Architect Disavowed In The Beltway”
We have another man charged this week after posting pictures on Facebook. In the case of Andre Robinson, 22, his defense has outraged people as much as his crime. After being shown luring a stray cat over and then viciously kicking it, Robinson essentially insists that no animals were harmed in the making of his film. The prosecutors say that the cat was kicked some 20 feet. His team challenged the prosecutors to prove that the cat was actually injured.
Adrian Acevedo-Hernandez, 36, Jose Luis Montufar-Canales, 31, Jose Manuel Ortega-Torres, 30, and J. Nemias Reyes Marin, 31, are in need of some “friends” after their Facebook postings led to their arrest. The men were shown on pictures with an assortment of dead animals. One picture from Hiko, Nevada below shows Ortega-Torres carrying off a mule deer in Nevada but game officials were struck by the background of the picture that was clearly not in the hunting season. That prompted a 16-month state and federal probe that finally led to the arrest of the men who are described as carrying out “a systematic killing, illegal killing, of wildlife.” Authorities believe that Acevedo-Hernandez, Montufar-Canales and Marin are illegal immigrants.
Continue reading “Bagged: Four Men Arrested After Posting Pictures Of Poached Deer On Facebook”
There is a truly disturbing report out of Chicago that highlights the massive wealth gap in our country. The Springleaf Financial Strength Survey, found that 33 percent of Chicagoans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and have less than $250. Nationwide 43 percent of families are living paycheck to paycheck.
This week we discussed another videotape of Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who played a major role the ACA, or “Obamacare,” making revealing and highly embarrassing statements about the strategy behind the passage of the Act. Gruber had already previously attracted controversy with statements where he endorsed the theory at the heart of the recent decisions in Halbig and King by challengers to the ACA: to wit, that the federal funding provision was a quid pro quo device to reward states with their own exchanges and to punish those that force the creation of federal exchanges. That issue will now be decided by the United States Supreme Court. Gruber caused uproar when, after he had denounced the theory as “nutty” during the arguments in Halbig and King, he was shown later to have embraced that same interpretation. Gruber has become a major liability in the litigation. Gruber then was back in the news with an equally startling admission that the Obama Administration (and Gruber) succeeded in passing the ACA only by engineering a “lack of transparency” on the details and relying on “the stupidity of the American voter.” Now a new videotape has surfaced from Gruber speaking at the University of Rhode Island in 2012 and expressing the same contempt for the intelligence of citizens — suggesting again that they were hoodwinked to “the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” Gruber was paid roughly $400,000 to help design the ACA by the Obama Administration, but he is proving far far more costly in its aftermath.
We have previously discussed the controversy over Kennewick man, the 9,000 year old skeleton found along the bank of the Columbia River eighteen years ago. Putting aside the fact that the date of the skeleton once again contradicts those who believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, it also represented a major scientific find. Scientists stated that the skeleton did not appear to be Native American, but Native American groups insisted that under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) they had a right to take possession of the skeleton and stop any further scientific work at the site. To the astonishment of many (particularly in the academic world), Army Corps of Engineers sided with the tribe and fought to give the non-Native American skeleton to the local tribe and dumped 2 million pounds of dirt and planted several thousand trees on top of Kennewick Man’s burial site to stop further scientific work. Now, the results are in. Kennewick Man is not Native American but the Corps is continuing to defend its absurd position and its obstruction of important scientific work.
With temperature dropping around the country, I decided to grab what might be the last perfect day for a hike yesterday and went to the Shenandoah to tackle the Little Devil’s stairs and some surrounding trails. It was glorious.
Continue reading “A November Morning On Little Devil’s Staircase”
There is an interesting first amendment case developing in California where gun store owners are challenging a California Penal Code section 26820, a law from 1923 that bans gun stores from putting up signs advertising the sale of handguns. Shotguns can be advertised but not handguns. Four dealers are claiming that their freedom of speech is being curtailed on an arbitrary basis. They have a point.
Continue reading “Gun Stores Challenge California Law Barring Handgun Advertisements”
Television host Nancy Grace is again being sued this week over the latest example of her low-grade, gotcha programming. Grace is being sued by a man who she labeled the “selfie stalker” for allegedly taking a picture with a crime victim’s cellphone. The problem is that Ben Seibert is not a stalker and did not take such a picture with the phone. He was cleared of the allegations but that did not stop Grace from continuing to shred his reputation on-air. It is always shocking to see Grace appear not just on CNNHD but CNN generally. If, as the tagline reads, “this is CNN” it has truly experienced a fall from Grace.
Continue reading “This Is CNN? Nancy Grace Sued By Man She Labeled The “Selfie Stalker””