A federal criminal complaint alleges that workers for Delta Air Lines and the Transportation Security Administration helped a methamphetamine ring operate between southern California and Hawaii.Healthtechzone.com further reports that one of the five individuals arrested allegedly "arranged transportation of the drugs from California by using a Delta or TSA employee to bypass security and place 30- to 40-pound shipments of drugs in luggage that had already gone through screening."
At the two-year mark Friday, nearly everything that Democrats believed about the politics of health care has turned out to be false. And the cost of those miscalculations has been huge. They have haunted Obama’s presidency, soured business as usual at the Capitol and upended the conventional wisdom peddled by political strategists, who have rarely been so wrong about something so big.Are you still wondering what is ObamaCare?
This law is horrendously bad health-care policy, it rips at the fabric of our constitutional order and our economic order, it makes a joke of any notion of limited government, and it involves a faith in centralized expert management that is utterly disconnected from the realities of modern life. It is the culmination of the liberal welfare state in every respect, and it was enacted just as the failures of that welfare state were becoming most plainly and painfully apparent. It stands to exacerbate and accelerate all of those failures, and so to make the crisis our country faces far more urgent and grave...
What’s wrong with Obamacare begins with the basic vision of government and of American life that underlies it, and is evident in every provision, every new unrestrained regulatory power, every new agency and subagency, every assault on individual liberty, basic economics, and simple common sense in the law. Very little of it bears much relation (or could really, given the nature of our health-care system) to anything any state has done.Levin's article also cites a law school professor who claims that "Millions of people (e.g., those who make 401% of the poverty line – $43,000 for a single person) will be forced to pay up to $18,000 a year for health insurance without any tax credits or cost-reduction payments."
Big donors considering whether to work the phones raising money for President Obama’s reelection campaign might consider the fate of his 2008 bundlers. Many of them, it turns out, won plum jobs in his administration.
Obama campaigned on what he called “the most sweeping ethics reform in history” and has frequently criticized the role of money in politics. That hasn’t stopped him from offering government jobs to some of his biggest bundlers, volunteer fundraisers who gather political contributions from other rich donors.
More than half of Obama’s 47 biggest fundraisers, those who collected at least $500,000 for his campaign, have been given administration jobs. Nine more have been appointed to presidential boards and committees.Let's not forget that Obama has taken in more cash from Wall Street fat cats, a.k.a. the 1%, than any political candidate in history.
The US offered to give Israel advanced weaponry -- including bunker-busting bombs and refueling planes -- in exchange for Israel's agreement not to attack Iranian nuclear sites, Israeli newspaper Maariv reported Thursday.
President Obama reportedly made the offer during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington this week.
Under the proposed deal, Israel would not attack Iran until 2013, after US elections in November this year. The newspaper cited unnamed Western diplomatic and intelligence sources.This leak may or may not be just more posturing. Netanyahu said on FNC this week (see video below) that war with Iran is not inevitable. The prime minister added that "The paradox is that if they actually believe that they are going to face the military option, then you probably will not need the military option."
This charge, of course, is not only completely false but the inverse of the truth. If apartheid is indeed a crime against humanity, Israel actually is the only apartheid-free state in the Middle East – a state whose Arab population enjoys full equality before the law and more prerogatives than most ethnic minorities in the free world, from the designation of Arabic as an official language to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal days of rest.
By contrast, apartheid has been an integral part of the Middle East for over a millennium, and its Arab and Muslim nations continue to legally, politically and socially enforce this discriminatory practice against their hapless minorities.
Imagine a television comedy about an American who moves to an exotic foreign country. He utterly refuses to assimilate, flouts the local laws, beats up people who offend him... acts in pretty much every way as the stereotypical Ugly American, and yet comes out as a sort of a hero?
And imagine that this series was produced, not by some jingoistic American company, but by people from that very foreign land. And what if most of their countrymen loved it?Big Hollywood's John Nolte lauds the show for its perhaps inadvertent counter-balance against political correctness that would likely never find its way into American television:
Every year Norway holds their own 4th of July, and when Johnny sees that his girlfriend’s son has written a speech about tolerance, peace, love, and multiculturalism — he tells the kid not to apologize for Norway, but to be proud of his country and to stand up for it. The end result is one of the series’ highlights.Whether the series will "go left" in future installments to make up for its departure from PC orthodoxy remains to be seen.
I don't have a clue who can or will attempt to replace Andrew Breitbart...and it's probably way too soon to even think about such things...but at the end of this sad day in which we all recognize his passing and pay our much deserved respects for this hero, I do hope and pray that somebody of wisdom and boundless courage will at least take up his mantle and begin to try to do so. Indispensable is a great word for Andrew and his work...it speaks of the great and urgent need we have for men and women of his stature to keep the movement going forward. RIP, Andrew...We'll all be praying for your family and friends in their great loss today. Thank you for all you did for all of us.Tributes to Breitbart are ongoing.
...More than any other prominent conservative journalist/pundit/blogger, Andrew deeply understood the left. He understood the will to power which underlies left-leaning ideologies from orthodox Marxism-Leninism to mild mannered welfare-liberalism. He understood the utopian obsession, the elitism, the echo-chamber style of discourse (almost completely ignorant of the political/social opinions of the broader society…and proud of that ignorance) which are omnipresent in most leftist circles. Most importantly, he understood that the left will use any means to achieve its ends.
But that’s not all: He was also fearless. He successfully used leftist tactics against the left, and he did so mercilessly, masterfully, and without hesitation...And the London Telegraph's James Delingpole had this to say:
I keep going back to @andrewbreitbart's Twitter feed, still unable to believe that one of my conservative heroes has dropped down dead at the age of just 43. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised: Breitbart did enjoy a voraciously Type A lifestyle – smoking, drinking and burger-scoffing like there was no tomorrow. Which, sadly, for this big-hearted, generous, witty, rumbustious, intelligent, fearless father-of-four there now isn't. Like PJ O'Rourke, Breitbart was one of those rare types who manages to make conservatism look both fun and cool..
