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Let’s Compare Trump’s Record vs. Clinton and Obama – Breitbart
Let’s Compare Trump’s Record vs. Clinton and Obama
Why is everyone distorting or outright lying about Donald Trump’s record?
Why does no one compare Trump’s record with Hillary Clinton or Obama’s record?
Remember when Hillary held a press conference in front of Trump’s “failed” Atlantic City casinos?
Well it’s time for Trump to run TV ads standing in front of the entire Middle East. Stand in front of the ruins of Syria, Libya and even Egypt. Hillary presided over all of it. But her bad decisions didn’t lose her a dime. Her failures burned OPM- “Other People’s Money.” To be specific, YOUR taxpayer money.
Trump should run TV ads standing in front of the ruins of the Obamacare Co-Ops and exchanges. They are almost all broke and busted. He should point out the disaster of Obamacare has cost hundreds of billions. But it didn’t cost Obama a dime. Because he blew YOUR taxpayer money.
Now Hillary wants to expand Obamacare. Double down with YOUR money.
Do you have any idea what guts it takes to invest your own money in a business? I’ve done it dozens of times. Donald Trump has done it thousands of times. Obama and Hillary have never done it in their lives.
Now think of what balls it takes to invest hundreds of millions, or billions of dollars of your own money? Or to sign a personal guarantee for a $250 million-dollar bank loan. Trump has done it. Obama and Hillary have only spent billions of YOUR taxpayer money.
Courageous risk-takers, capitalists and patriots like Donald Trump should be congratulated & celebrated for their risk-taking and investment of their own money- which pays almost all the taxes, pays almost all the bills of government, and creates almost all the jobs in America.
But here’s the important point that 320 million Americans are not hearing or understanding.
Obamatrade cost GOP congressman his job
The populist uprising against phony “free trade” and Republicans who love it has taken its first scalp.
Rep. Randy Forbes, GOP establishment stalwart and longtime Obamatrade supporter from Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, will soon be unemployed. Voters rejected him in favor of his primary opponent Scott Taylor, who stridently opposed Obamatrade.
Taylor blasted Forbes for voting to give President Obama fast track authority to ram through Congress the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sweeping 12-nation international regulatory pact that would merge our economy with some of the poorest and most repressive on earth.
This move was especially hypocritical for Forbes, chairman of the House Prayer Caucus. Obamatrade would give special economic privileges to countries that persecute Christians, including Vietnam, Malaysia and the Shariah-law regime of Brunei.
After his disastrous vote for fast track, Forbes tried to tap dance around the Constitution-shredding, religious-liberty-trampling Obamatrade agreement.
In a letter to constituents, Forbes recycled the party establishment’s globalist talking points, saying free trade is “crucial to our economy” and to “our future as a country.”
Then Forbes said he would support Obamatrade if it were amended, glossing over the fact that his vote for fast track surrendered Congress’ power to amend the agreement.
While Forbes played cute, former Navy SEAL Scott Taylor issued a clarion call against the misbegotten pact.
10 Questions Donald Trump Supporters Need To Consider
I was watching a movie the other day.
“Anna and the King,” to be exact—and this time one scene stood out. It’s when Mr. Kincaid (a smarmy British businessman) comes to the palace to stop Siam from going to war with British Burma over unprovoked attacks:
“As you know, I do a lot of business with the Siamese, many of whom have ended up dead in recent months. Which, as I’ve discovered, is all part of some elaborate plot to make you think we British are the villains. Well, I happen to know we’re not. The acquisition of a particular little piece of information has cost me a small fortune, but the fact is, when all is said and done, I make more money with Mongkut on the throne. So, I think I’m about to become your best friend.”
Long story short, Mr. Kincaid isn’t there because he cares a wit about the Siamese people—he’s there because it’s in his best interest for Siam not to spiral into chaos.
Fair enough. And some people might say, “well, at the end of the day crisis is averted, so who cares how?”
14 Facts the ‘Women in Tech’ Movement Doesn’t Want You to Know
Every week, we are subjected to stroppy Gawker posts and soporific op-eds in national newspapers about how a woman in the technology industry who was fired for poor performance was secretly a high-achieving go-getter brought down by entrenched sexism and patriarchal oppression.
And every week we’re told that the reason more women aren’t working in technology is a combination of sexism, outdated social attitudes and stereotypes, historical prejudices and too few educational support programmes for women.
We’re told that women find it more difficult to get jobs and that when they do get jobs they’re subjected to hostile workplaces, sexism and bullying and that they’re paid less than their male counterparts for the same work.
We’re invited to believe, contrary to the evidence all around us, that the highly-progressive, socially-conscious and liberal-minded technology industry is in fact one of the most retrograde and oppressive places for women to work.
But here’s the dirty secret about the shrill and insatiable “women in tech” movement: none of that is true. And ordinary women innately sense that this is so, which is why — despite frenetic, wall-to-wall media coverage and endless plugs from politicians and celebrities, the women in tech movement is losing the sympathy of ordinary people and why, by some measures, the number of women going into tech is actually going down.
Encouraging women to take leadership and technical roles in technology, the Internet and gaming, if they want them, is a noble goal. But any plan designed to increase the number of women in a given STEM field is doomed to failure unless businesses tell themselves the truth about their supposed “women problem.”
1. The Women Who Want To Work In Tech Already Do
No woman has missed the news that technology is the industry to end all industries and that, as Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen puts it, software is eating the world. It has been twenty years since “tech is where the money is.”
And the idea that women are not exposed to technology at a young age is hokum: women love operating, owning, buying, and using technology. They just don’t, on the whole, seem to want to build it. But that’s almost certainly not because “stereotypes” are holding them back, which is fashionable nonsense.
2. Most Women Aren’t Interested In Tech, And They Never Will Be
By and large, women simply don’t want to build spaceships or code iPhone apps and there is absolutely nothing that the media, educational establishment, universities or campaigners can do about it.
Here’s something you probably don’t know: in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, the gender split in science courses at university can be as high as 50-50. But, when you look at more equal, enlightened societies such as Norway and Sweden, the number of women doing STEM subjects plummets and goes down every year relative to admissions.
The challenge for businesses isn’t how to get more women into technology. That’s impossible. It’s how to get a disproportionate slice of an ever-diminishing pie, by making their offerings as attractive as possible to prospective female employees. (That may include childcare and more flexible working hours.)
As societies get more equal and women have access to the full range of career options and every support mechanism the state and gender activists can devise, their choices actually narrow. It’s not about education, or sinister patriarchal forces, or the stereotypes we give young girls. So what else is going on?
3. Women’s Brains Aren’t As Well Suited To Programming As Men’s
IQ doesn’t quite measure a “totality of intelligence,” but it is a very good measure of the game-like and analytical skills needed to become a proficient computer programmer or chess grandmaster. Women tend to cluster towards the mean on the IQ scale, whereas men are more likely to be totally brilliant or utter knuckledraggers. (That explains why there’s no female Mozart but also why men fill our prisons. It isn’t, as you’ve probably been told, primarily to do with race or class.)
Code doesn’t care about “structural oppression”: only whether your logic is correct. Although it horrifies feminist campaigners to say so, there’s evidence that biological determinism, and not lingering prejudice, is the best explanation for the differences in male and female performance.
4. There Is No Evidence That ‘Diversity’ Improves Company Performance
Seriously: I am calling for someone to do a large-scale study of the diversity efforts of companies who have fallen for this nonsense so that someone, somewhere can show me citable evidence that this does anything for a company other than provide good PR.
Maybe there are some serious figures out there. I’m sure someone with blue armpit hair is brandishing them as we speak. But until a serious, nationwide study emerges that has gone through the (look away now, feminists) peer review process, this fundamental assumption of the women in tech movement remains questionable at best.
Sorry to be blunt. But a company’s obligations are to its shareholders, not Jezebel bloggers’ feelings. So it’s worth finding out what difference a woman’s presence in the workplace actually makes.
5. Feminist Campaigners Lie About The Numbers And Reclassify ‘Science’ To Make Things Look Worse Than They Are
There are highly technical subjects totally dominated by women: veterinary science, for example. But you’ll never hear about the preponderance of women in such fields, because it suits feminist campaigners to fixate on the few disciplines women don’t succeed in, such as astrophysics, philosophy and mathematics, in an attempt to prove entrenched sexism.
One thing you’ll never hear is calls for more boys in subjects dominated by girls — nor agitated complaints about the dearth of heterosexual men on fragrance counters. Or the number of women driving oil trucks and hanging off skyscrapers cleaning 55th story windows. You get the point: the complaints only ever cut one way.
6. There’s Vanishingly Little Sexism In The Tech Industry
You’re not going to like this, but the technology industry isn’t sexist. At least, no more than anywhere else in society and a damn sight less than the law, finance and politics.
“But Milo,” I hear you say. “Your hair is amazing. Also, I’ve noticed a lot of articles by women complaining about their treatment in the industry. Doesn’t that mean there’s a problem?”
In a word: no. Good marketing doesn’t mean there’s an underlying problem and there will always be a strong contingent of malcontents, particularly if you hand women a victimhood script that tells them every hardship they’ve ever faced in life is the result of sexism, rather than their own choices or shortcomings.
7. Identifying As A ‘Woman In Tech’ Is The Kiss Of Death For Your Career
That’s not because employers don’t believe women should have equal access, but because it tells them certain things about your personality. Namely, that you’re likely to be trouble. They worry, with some justification, about bogus sexual harassment claims, which are rampant.
If there’s a problem in the tech workplace it might be that women can bring frivolous gender discrimination lawsuits against their old firms, costing companies in some cases over $100,000 in lawyers’ fees to dismiss, at little or no cost to the woman, who was fired for perfectly acceptable reasons.
Just such a lawsuit is currently playing itself out in the London startup world with a spurious claim costing a young company tens of thousands of pounds to defend. I hope to be able to report on it soon.
The truth is, men working in the testosterone-rich tech world are desperate to have more women around them, not just because it looks good but because they want to be around the fairer sex. That’s why…
8. Women Already Have A Massive Advantage When Applying For Tech Jobs
Companies are desperate to hire women. So much so that women have a 2-to-1 advantage when applying for academic jobs in STEM fields. According to a 2015 Cornell study, they’re rated higher and seen as more hireable than identically qualified men by employers. All else being equal, employers go for women just because they’re women. This is textbook gender bias and a huge advantage to any female job applicant.
Say the researchers: “Anti-female bias in academic hiring has ended and now is a good time for young women to seek science jobs… The only sexism [women] face in the hiring process is bias in their favor.” In other words, if you’re a woman applying for jobs in tech and you’re not getting hired, it is almost certainly nothing to do with your gender.
9. Arbitrary Quotas Are Discriminatory And Sexist
Quotas are unfair to everyone. There’s an old meme about “white privilege” that shows a white homeless man having a bad time and a… I can’t remember, paraplegic Armenian lesbian, it doesn’t matter, on the other side. The point being: you can’t know a person’s story by looking at their skin or sex organs.
Everyone agrees with this principle until they encounter a heterosexual white man, at which point he is automatically assumed to be somehow unworthy of the same treatment as others — when in actual fact it’s women who have the advantages these days.
Just as women gaze upon my arresting visage and bewitching eyes and presume I must be after them (sorry babe, nope), so too do they think it’s OK to judge a man by his cover. It isn’t.
10. The Vast Majority Of Women In Tech Work In Marketing And PR, And That’s Totally Fine
If as a chick you do land a job in tech, it’s unlikely to be a brave new world of Python. But while women seem to have a tough time selling themselves to their bosses, men have a tough time selling themselves to… well, anyone.
Women have the upper hand in marketing, public relations, social media and all sort of other jobs that involve understanding, empathy and communication.
Why not leverage your ability to recognise when men communicate poorly with customers, and make a pile of dosh while you do it, rather than complain that your sloppy code didn’t land you the CTO’s job?
11. Being A Woman In Tech Is A Competitive Advantage
Winning in business is about finding your strengths and leveraging them, and attacking the weaknesses of your competitors. So I don’t quite understand this trend of high-achieving women pretending that low-achieving women are working to the same standards.
It’s simply not in the former’s best interests for her to allow a bunch of mediocre girls who “want it all” to ride on her coat-tails. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s not a male-female thing, just a winner-loser thing.
Anyway, as a woman, you’re more likely to get early press for your startup irrespective of its merits in any of the hundreds of women in tech supplements in the press every year. You’re more likely to be noticed in meetings and pitches. And you can, if you put the obstreperousness to one side and use your feminine wiles, play Queen Bee and have the men around you eating out of your hand.
More women in the industry is just competition for you.
12. Stroppiness And Self-Pity Will Not Get You Hired
The number one complaint men have about women they work with is the old “feelings over facts” problem. Stop looking for other people to blame for the results of your own life choices, hunker down and get on with it.
Sitting on Twitter complaining isn’t empowerment. It’s called grievance-mongering and it’s for losers.
What’s more, there’s even anecdotal evidence to suggest that the shrillness and aggression of women in tech campaigners, together with the fact that they don’t tell the truth, is actually putting women off getting involved, because they perceive tech to be an industry fraught with ugly gender divisions.
13. You Can’t Have It All
Pick raising a family or making CEO. You can’t do both, unless you’re as rich as Marissa Mayer and can afford a retinue of childcare staff. Even then, your attention will be divided.
You can compromise, and see your kids just enough while being reasonably professionally successful, but the history of business teaches us a clear lesson: those who succeed are laser-focused on one thing they do well, to the exclusion of everything else.
Fact is, successful people of either gender tend not to to have very balanced lives. That hits women hardest for obvious reasons. But it’s how the world works. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
That’s why I always say women working in tech jobs could learn a thing or two from the lesbians in tech movement, which seems to have a more ruthless focus on job performance, skills and science, leaving the whining to hormonal heterosexual colleagues.
14. The Number One Reason Women Don’t Work In Tech Is: Other Women
Most women are not highly competitive. The ones who are terrify the timid sorts, aren’t looking for a sisterhood and, like their male counterparts, compete for power, resources, and prestige.
While women who got by with their looks will often embrace feminism when they lose those advantages and have to survive on merit, the women who have been talented all along don’t have time for your nonsense, and are going to tell you so. And you are going to be triggered.
Women who can in tech don’t need to get by on their gender, and they are often the first people to push social climbers and weak performers out so they don’t have to be judged by them. (That’s why women have a reputation for backstabbing at work: it’s the hard asses kicking out the dead wood.)
So while they may sign your feminist e-petition or read your Tumblr post for a quiet life or for their own professional advantage, just watch what happens when you’re competing for a promotion. You’ll learn that sisterhood ends where Christmas bonuses begin.
In short? Other broads don’t have your back. Leave the coalition-building to politicians and focus on your own career, because the only people showing up to women in tech meetups and pounding the hashtag are losers, burn-outs and the terminally mediocre.
14 Facts the ‘Women in Tech’ Movement Doesn’t Want You to Know.
Obama’s Latest Non-Recovery Chokes Out – Breitbart
The Washington Post plays a sad trombone over the demise of the latest phony “Obama Recovery” narrative:
The gross domestic product grew between January and March at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department said, adding to the picture of an economy braking sharply after accelerating for much of last year. The pace fell well shy of the 1 percent mark anticipated by analysts and marked the weakest quarter in a year.
The economy had expanded at a rate of 2.2 percent in the final three months of 2014 and at a rate of 2.4 percent for the year.
If you guessed that Obama apologists would try to blame all this on the weather, give yourself a fool’s-gold star:
Economists, employers and policymakers now face the challenge of determining whether the slowdown is temporary — stemming mostly from an unusually snowy winter in the Northeast — or a sign of broader problems.
Snowy winters in the Northeast? Well, that’s never happened before. It seems like only yesterday that Obama was trying to convince us the climate was getting warmer. Actually, it was about three weeks ago. He even tried to blame global warming for his daughters’ asthma attacks. His faithful drones will now tell us an unexpectedly cold winter gave his “recovery” the flu.
Too hot, too cold, too many rich people, not enough government spending… the temperature for the “Obama recovery” will never be just right. We’ve been hearing this ridiculous garbage about cold winters freezing the engines of the mighty Obama growth engine every year for the past six years. The hard, cold truth is that we’ve never had sustained growth under this President’s policies that could do anything more than slow the bleeding in the American workforce. Everything he does, from ObamaCare to his amnesty orders for illegal aliens, is a job-killer. It’s a tribute to the underlying strength of the American economy that we’re not in even worse shape.
Not that politicians have any shame about such things, but the touchdown shuffle Democrats and their media allies were dancing during one utterly anomalous quarter of solid growth look ridiculous today. None of the factors contributing to that good quarter were particularly healthy, or sustainable. One of those factors was unnaturally high consumer confidence, goosed by a wave of media coverage about the supposed arrival of the “recovery” — years behind schedule and trillions of dollars over cost, but worth the wait! The phony enthusiasm didn’t last very long, did it?
Hopefully the current GDP flatline won’t last or degrade into an outright contraction or recession. We’ve dodged quite a few world-event bullets that could have triggered another recession. We’ll most likely return to the growth-equals-inflation equilibrium we’ve been slogging through for the past few years… achieved at a staggering cost in deficit spending. Spending a few trillion dollars you don’t have to artificially stimulate a boom is arguably unwise. Spending it for 2 percent growth is folly, bordering on fiscal suicide.
Meanwhile, even as Obama’s bummer economy increases the “income inequality” gap between hard-working people and oligarchs who donate lots of money to Democrats, the Left is still squealing about how they can fix the income gap if we just give them control over more of the private sector. The opposite is true; economic liberty is the one and only sustainable answer to “inequality.” America will start getting richer the moment we embrace that truth, and consider everyone who doesn’t unfit to hold public office, right down to the municipal level.
You might have noticed that the degree of failure in local governments is directly proportional to the level of Democrat political control, stretching across generations. Have you enjoyed watching the latest grim demonstration of that causal relationship in Baltimore?
Republicans have to be more than just the less-awful alternative. (But seriously, urban voters — shake up your moribund, corrupt local power structure by throwing Democrats out on their posteriors, en masse, and you won’t believe how much better things get. The new guys and gals will work much harder than the Jurassic left-wing machine politicians who run the show now, they won’t have as many payola connections, they’ll be really nervous about losing office in the next election, and your old bosses in the Democrat Party won’t take you for granted anymore. Win, win, win, win!)
To be perfectly clear, no Republican has a magic formula for engineering “fair” prosperity. Neither does any single magnate in the private sector, which is something you should bear in mind when the next liberal-approved “socially conscious” billionaire unspools his plans for Utopia. Fairness is something we all find together, and prosperity is something we all build together. Our riotous, uncoordinated, combined genius far surpasses the agenda of any politician or bureaucrat. Left to our own devices, with free commerce protected impartially by a light and clear burden of law, we find the answers to questions politicians don’t even know how to ask.
Not many of them are humble enough to admit that. They don’t have any incentive to admit it. They derive power by promising to overrule reality by decree. Reality has an unbroken string of total knock-out victories over politics, but politicians are constantly promising us the next big title bout.
What should our gross domestic product and unemployment rate be right now? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. I know what we’ve got now is far, far weaker than America’s demonstrated history. Every apologist for statism has a hundred carefully-rehearsed reasons for why all historical comparisons with Obama’s limp economy are invalid. The one indisputable truth is that we were more free when we did better.
Let’s try that again, and see what happens. Let’s rattle some cages, pull the bony hands of bankrupt Big Government off the national steering wheel, and see where we can go. The control freaks had their chance — far more of a chance than we should ever have given them — and they sold us stagnation at premium prices.
Regin, a new piece of malware, said to be spying on business targets
The cyber security firm Symantec on Sunday revealed that a malicious new piece of software is collecting information on individuals, companies, and government entities without their knowledge.
The malware, called Regin, is considered to be a mass surveillance and data collection tool (sometimes referred to as “spyware”). Its purpose and origin is still unclear, Symantec said, but researchers believe that the program is the work of a nation-state.
“We believe Regin is used primarily for espionage,” said Liam O’Murchu, a security researcher at Symantec. “We see both companies and individuals targeted. The ultimate goal is to listen in on phone calls or something like that. [Regin’s operators] target individuals and spread the attack to find whatever it is they’re looking for. All of these things together make us think that a government wrote it.”
Symantec SYMC -0.28% said Regin (pronounced “re-gen,” as in “regenerate”) monitors its targets with a rarely-seen level of sophistication. Internet service providers and telecommunications companies make up the bulk of the those that are initially infected, researchers said. Regin then targets individuals of interest—in the hospitality, energy, research, and airline industries, among others—that are served by those ISPs. Regin’s operators continue to use infected companies as a springboard to gain access to more individuals. Once they gain access, they can remotely control a person’s keyboard, monitor Internet activity, and recover deleted files.
More than half of observed attacks have targeted Russia and Saudi Arabia, Symantec said. The rest are scattered across Europe, Central America, Africa, and Asia. The initial infection can come from a wide variety of sources, such as copies of popular websites or web browsers and USB drives that have been plugged into contaminated systems.
Regin has five attack stages. It begins with an initial “drop,” also called a Trojan horse (or “backdoor”) breach, that allows it to exploit a security vulnerability while avoiding detection. The first stage deploys what is called a loader, which prepares and executes the next stage; the second stage does the same to complicate detection. The third and fourth stages, called kernels, build a framework for the fifth and final stage, called the payload. That’s when it can wrest control of a computer or leap to a new victim.
via Regin, a new piece of malware, said to be spying on business targets.
The True Reason Gas Prices are Falling (Hint: It’s Not Because of Green Energy)
American workers and motorists got some badly-needed relief this week when the price of oil plunged to its lowest level in years. The oil price has fallen by about 25 percent since its peak back in June of $105 a barrel. This is translating to lower prices at the pump with many states now below $3 a gallon.
At present levels, these lower oil and gas prices are the equivalent of a $200 billion cost saving to American consumers and businesses. That’s $200 billion a year we don’t have to send to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other foreign nations. Now that’s an economic stimulus par excellence.
There are many global reasons why gas prices are falling, but the major one isn’t being widely reported. America has become in the last several years an energy-producing powerhouse. And sorry, Mr. President, I’m not talking about the niche “green energy” sources you are so weirdly fixated with.
Oil prices are falling because of changes in world supply and world demand. Demand has slowed because Europe is an economic wreck. But since 2008 the U.S. has increased our domestic supply by a gigantic 50 percent. This is a result of the astounding shale oil and gas revolution made possible by made-in-America technologies like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Already thanks to these inventions, the U.S. has become the number one producer of natural gas. But oil production in states like Oklahoma, Texas and North Dakota has doubled in just six years.
Without this energy blitz, the U.S. economy would barely have recovered from the recession of 2008-09. From the beginning of 2008 through the end of 2013 the oil and gas extraction industry created more than 100,000 jobs while the overall job market shrank by 970,000.
When the radical greens carry around signs saying “No to Fracking,” they couldn’t be promoting a more anti-America message. It would be like Nebraska not growing corn.
We are just skimming the surface of our super-abundant oil and gas resources. New fields have been discovered in Texas and North Dakota that could contain hundreds of years of shale oil and gas supplies.
Here’s another reason to love the oil and gas bonanza in America. It’s breaking the back of OPEC. Saudi Arabia is deluging the world with oil right now, which is driving the world price relentlessly lower. The Arabs understand–as too few in Washington do–that shale energy boom is no short term fad. It could make energy cheaper for decades to come. As American drillers get better at perfecting the technologies of cracking through shale rock to get to the near infinite treasure chest supplies of energy locked inside, we will soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the dominant player in world energy markets.
You can’t have a cartel if the world’s largest producer–America–isn’t a member. OPEC will never again be able to create the level of economic turmoil that the Arab members of OPECs engineered in the 1970s with their oil embargo. And by the way: lower oil prices place increased pressure on Iran’s mullahs to abandon their nuclear program and curb Putin’s capabilities to engage in East Europe aggression.
Yet the political class still doesn’t get it. As recently as 2012 President Obama declared that “the problem is we use more than 20 percent of the world’s oil and we only have 2 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves.” Then he continued with his Malthusian nonsense, “Even if we drilled every square inch of this country right now, we’d still have to rely disproportionately on other countries for their oil.” Apparently, neither he nor his fact checkers have ever been to Texas or North Dakota. And we don’t have 2 percent of the world’s oil. Including estimates of onshore and offshore resources not yet officially “discovered”, we have ten times more than the stat quoted by the president–resources sufficient to supply hundreds of years of oil and gas.
America, in sum, has been richly endowed with a nearly invincible 21st century economic and national security weapon to keep us safe and prosperous. The plunge is gas prices is just one visible sign of this supply explosion. Think of how much bigger this revolution could be if we started building pipelines, repealed the ban on oil exports, expanded drilling on public lands, and stopped trying to punitively tax and regulate the oil and gas.
For much of the last forty years, oil’s periodic price spikes have remained a constant threat to growth. Higher consumer energy costs as well as increased industrial production costs weighted on the economy. Now oil is one of the primary accelerators; the new big drag on the economy is politicians who despise the carbon-based industry.
via The True Reason Gas Prices are Falling (Hint: It’s Not Because of Green Energy).
Apple’s Tim Cook, Gay American Hero Vs. Mozilla Firefox’s Brendan Eich, Evil Christian Villain
On Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook broke a secret even more shocking than Rosie O’Donnell’s: he is gay. Writing for Businessweek, he wrote that he had always “tried to maintain a basic level of privacy.” No longer: “I’ve come to realize that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important…I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.”
Put aside the religious objections to Cook’s statement, and the ambiguity as to whether he considers his sexual drive a gift from God or his choices about how to act on them a gift from God – the latter of which would be squarely antithetical to basic notions of free will. Put aside his puerile suggestion that being gay somehow makes people more empathetic and confident. Put aside Cook’s own self-aggrandizing nonsense about announcing his sexual predilections in order to help others, and his ridiculous arrogant references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Focus in on the fact that Cook doesn’t just come out as gay, he then says that he will use Apple as a political tool in the fight for homosexual rights:
The company I am so fortunate to lead has long advocated for human rights and equality for all. We’ve taken a strong stand in support of a workplace equality bill before Congress, just as we stood for marriage equality in our home state of California. And we spoke up in Arizona when that state’s legislature passed a discriminatory bill targeting the gay community. We’ll continue to fight for our values, and I believe that any CEO of this incredible company, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, would do the same. And I will personally continue to advocate for equality for all people until my toes point up.
No conservative is going to launch a boycott against Apple over this. Nor should they – we are not the ideological totalitarians those on the left are.
When news broke that Brendan Eich, CEO of Mozilla Firefox, had given money to the pro-traditional marriage Proposition 8 measure in California in 2008, he was quickly ousted from his position by the company after a boycott by OKCupid. In that case, Mozilla didn’t even endorse Eich’s position – he was a private person against whom there were zero accusations of mistreatment of homosexuals. That didn’t matter. He was ousted nonetheless. Being a Christian in today’s America means risking your career.
When Hobby Lobby, a company owned by the religious Christian Green family, cited religious freedom in refusing to pay for insurance coverage containing certain types of birth control pills, the left went fully berserk. The Obama administration attempted to force Hobby Lobby to pay for the pills; the left trotted out Hobby Lobby as the great representative of all conservative evil for not paying to violate its own religious convictions.
When Chick-Fil-A COO Dan Cathy commented on his opposition to same-sex marriage, the left launched nationwide boycotts against the chain. When it came out that the Cathy-family-operated WinShape Foundation made donations to a pro-traditional marriage group, the Chick-Fil-A boycott redoubled.
The left’s hypocrisy is truly unbounded here. They may see Tim Cook as a hero; that’s their prerogative, although his own overweening sense of self-righteousness is quite galling. But for them to then attempt to silence the personal views of corporate heads with whom they disagree – and for them to boycott companies that aren’t even acting out those personal views – demonstrates their tyrannical mindset.
via Apple’s Tim Cook, Gay American Hero Vs. Mozilla Firefox’s Brendan Eich, Evil Christian Villain.
Exclusive: Obama Administration Quietly Prepares ‘Surge’ Of Millions Of New Immigrant IDs
Despite no official action from the president ahead of the election, the Obama administration has quietly begun preparing to issue millions of work authorization permits, suggesting the implementation of a large-scale executive amnesty may have already begun.
Unnoticed until now, a draft solicitation for bids issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Oct. 6 says potential vendors must be capable of handling a “surge” scenario of 9 million id cards in one year “to support possible future immigration reform initiative requirements.”
The request for proposals says the agency will need a minimum of four million cards per year. In the “surge,” scenario in 2016, the agency would need an additional five million cards – more than double the baseline annual amount for a total of 9 million.
“The guaranteed minimum for each ordering period is 4,000,000 cards. The estimated maximum for the entire contract is 34,000,000 cards,” the document says.
The agency is buying the materials need to construct both Permanent Residency Cards (PRC), commonly known as green cards, as well as Employment Authorization Documentation (EAD) cards which have been used to implement President Obama’s “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) program. The RFP does not specify how many of each type of card would be issued.
Jessica Vaughan, an immigration expert at the Center for Immigration Studies and former State Department official, said the document suggests a new program of remarkable breadth.
The RFP “seems to indicate that the president is contemplating an enormous executive action that is even more expansive than the plan that Congress rejected in the ‘Gang of Eight’ bill,” Vaughan said.
Last year, Vaughan reviewed the Gang of Eight’s provisions to estimate that it would have roughly doubled legal immigration. In the “surge” scenario of this RFP, even the relatively high four million cards per year would be more than doubled, meaning that even on its own terms, the agency is preparing for a huge uptick of 125 percent its normal annual output.
It’s not unheard of for federal agencies to plan for contingencies, but the request specifically explains that the surge is related to potential changes in immigration policy.
“The Contractor shall demonstrate the capability to support potential ‘surge’ in PRC and EAD card demand for up to 9M cards during the initial period of performance to support possible future immigration reform initiative requirements,” the document says.
A year ago, such a plan might have been attributed to a forthcoming immigration bill. Now, following the summer’s border crisis, the chances of such a new law are extremely low, giving additional credence to the possibility the move is in preparation for an executive amnesty by Obama.
Even four million combined green cards and EADs is a significant number, let alone the “surge” contemplated by USCIS. For instance, in the first two years after Obama unilaterally enacted DACA, about 600,000 people were approved by USCIS under the program. Statistics provided by USCIS on its website show that the entire agency had processed 862,000 total EADs in 2014 as of June.
Vaughan said EADs are increasingly coming under scrutiny as a tool used by the Obama administration to provide legalization for groups of illegal aliens short of full green card status.
In addition to providing government approval to work for illegal aliens, EADs also cost significantly less in fees to acquire, about $450 compared to more than $1000. In many states, EADs give aliens rights to social services and the ability to obtain drivers’ licenses.
Vaughan noted there are currently about 4.5 million individuals waiting for approval for the green cards having followed immigration law and obtained sponsorships from relatives in the U.S. or otherwise, less than the number of id cards contemplated by the USCIS “surge.”
USCIS officials did not provide additional information about the RFP by press time.
Exclusive: Obama Administration Quietly Prepares ‘Surge’ Of Millions Of New Immigrant IDs.
Hong Kong’s democracy protests turn violent; 38 hurt – CNN.com
Hong Kong (CNN) — After a day of tense protests in Hong Kong in which at least 38 people were injured, organizers called on tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in the Chinese territory to head home late Sunday.
But early Monday morning, it appeared many of the protesters were set to continue to jam streets of the business district.
The sometimes violent demonstrations follow a week of student-led boycotts and protests against what many see as the encroachment of China’s political will on Hong Kong’s governance. They were responding to China’s decision to allow only Beijing-vetted candidates to stand in the city’s elections for chief executive, Hong Kong’s top civil position.
One student group, fearing police might use rubber bullets, asked late Sunday for demonstrators to leave. But while the mood at the primary protest had calmed, there was no large exodus.
Not all protest leaders were calling for people to leave. Pro-democracy activist and lawmaker Leung Kwok-hung, known by many as “Long Hair,” cheered on those who were staying.
Pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong Hong Kong youth demanding democracy Hong Kong democracy protest Hong Kong students rally for democracy
“Our demands have not changed. This is a peaceful civil disobedience protest,” he called out over a loudspeaker as midnight approached.
Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong and a leader of Occupy Central, was one of the organizers who called for demonstrators to disperse.
“Please go home, don’t sacrifice your lives,” he said to the protesters. Dialogue is impossible at this point, he told them.
At least 38 people were injured and hospitalized, the Hong Kong Information Services Department said Sunday. A spokesman gave no details on the extent of the injuries. The department earlier said six police officers were injured, but it was unclear whether they were included in the 38 figure.
Several of the young people occupying the business district told CNN they were going to stay overnight.
The student-led protests, which were joined Sunday by the like-minded Occupy Central movement, have sought to occupy government property and shut down the business district.
Arrests, batons, tear gas
In an early morning video statement addressed to all Hong Kong residents, Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung called for people to leave. He said police have exercised the greatest possible restraint in dealing with the protesters.
Riot police have occasionally wielded batons against protesters. They have also used pepper spray, and tear gas has been deployed against more than one group of protesters around the Central Government Offices. There were more reports of tear gas early Monday.
Protesters wore goggles or masks and raincoats, and many held umbrellas to protect against the possible use of pepper spray.
Early Monday, dozens of protesters moved barricades to block a main thoroughfare.
via Hong Kong’s democracy protests turn violent; 38 hurt – CNN.com.
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