I'd like to hear @algore's reasoning behind this. pic.twitter.com/5hNHoknIle
— Young Repubs (@YoungRepubs) January 3, 2014Maybe someone nearby can visit Al Gore's mansion in California (one of at least three massive residences) and ask him.
I'd like to hear @algore's reasoning behind this. pic.twitter.com/5hNHoknIle
— Young Repubs (@YoungRepubs) January 3, 2014Energy Policy: An oil-laden train collides with another and bursts into flames in a small American town, proving why pipelines are safer and why environmentalist opposition to a pipeline from Canada is misguided.
Casselton, N.D., had a near brush with tragedy after a train of tank cars carrying crude oil derailed, resulting in fiery explosions and a call from the town's mayor for a re-examination of how such fuel is transported across the United States.The railroad runs right through the middle of Casselton, a town of 2,400 people about 25 miles west of Fargo, and Mayor Ed McConnell said dozens of people could have been killed had the derailments had occurred in the town, not just outside.
It's time, he said, to "have a conversation" with federal lawmakers about the dangers of transporting oil by rail.
"There have been numerous derailments in this area," he told the Associated Press. "It's almost gotten to the point that it looks like not if we're going to have an accident, it's when. We dodged a bullet by having it out of town, but this is too close for comfort."
Thanks to a boom in oil production in the Bakken shale formation that runs underneath the state, North Dakota has become the No. 2 oil-producing state in the nation. It's creating a lot of the kind of high-paying jobs that the rest of America desperately wants — and needs.
An estimated 11 to 12 crude-oil unit trains depart daily from the oil region in western North Dakota. Due to lack of pipelines, some 69% of the state's oil is currently shipped to market by rail.
The state's top oil regulator has said as much as 90% of North Dakota's oil is to be carried by train in 2014.
QOTD: "The real reason [the establishment GOP] will be out there trying to defeat Reaganite conservatives/Tea Partier candidates is precisely because these candidates in victory have shown themselves to be a direct threat to the Washington way of doing business. So job one for the GOP Establishment is to deliberately pick Republican socialist candidates — candidates who are perfectly happy to talk the talk but once in Washington will refuse flatly to do what they promised to do.
As the 2014 election year proceeds, we will have many opportunities to spot these Republican Socialist candidates and their backers at work out there, just as our friends at Breitbart put a spotlight on the behind-the-scenes machinations of American Crossroads in the Kentucky Senate race.
The 2014 elections should be a bumper year for the GOP.
But it will quickly turn to disaster if those who are intent on making this year a victory for Republican Socialism get their way — and in turn drive the Reagan conservative base away from the polls." --Jeffrey Lord
Our economy, and personal liberty, are under assault in America, The threat to the country is much more stealthy and incremental than that faced by our nation’s founders two centuries ago. According to a Gallup poll this past week, 72% of Americans see the burgeoning power of the federal government as our greatest threat. This should serve as a wakeup call to the statists in Washington who are continuously expanding the role of government in micromanaging our lives.
Much of this expanded control comes in the form of regulation. Since 1993, over 1.43 million pages have been added to the Federal Register that includes all new regulations, regulatory revisions, and presidential documents. The passage and implementation of the “Affordable Care Act” alone has added 10,516 pages to the Federal Register; that’s more than eight times the length of the Bible.The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) 20th edition of “Ten Thousand Commandments,” which explicates the impact of the mountainous stacks of regulation on the country, estimates the cost burden of all this regulation at $1.8 trillion per year. To put that figure in perspective, that’s more than half the size of the federal budget, and nearly 12% of the entire U.S. economy.
The cost to the government in enforcing regulation is not that great, a relatively paltry $55.4 billion in 2010, according to the CEI. That allocation of the federal budget covers most of the cost of federal agencies and regulatory enforcement. By far, the greater cost is to the economy, and in abrogated liberty, whittling incrementally away at our individual freedom.
Photographer catches Ob in a rare & revealing moment. #tcot pic.twitter.com/BnREqiAmhg
— Andrew Malcolm (@AHMalcolm) January 2, 2014Food stamp spending is at historic highs—it has doubled twice since 2000. Now some on Capitol Hill say the House is trying to make major cuts to the program, but they’re really making some much-needed policy reforms that would achieve modest savings.
The House bill proposes a small 5 percent reduction, while the Senate proposes a mere one-half of 1 percent. Even if the House’s reforms are accepted, food stamp spending is projected to be nearly double 2008 levels. It is also projected to remain at or near historical highs into the foreseeable future.
The House’s savings come from closing loopholes and ending policies that are currently undermining the integrity of the program. These policies have allowed states to artificially boost food stamp levels and expand the program beyond its intended population. While the House takes steps in the right direction to reform food stamps, the Senate does [almost nothing].
Food stamps should be reformed to ensure that the program is serving those it is intended to serve. It should also be reformed to promote self-sufficiency through work, thus helping those who are able by encouraging self-sufficiency.
QOTD: "Gregory Hicks hearing the last words of Ambassador Stevens to the outside world was told, ‘We’re under attack.”‘And under oath when asked, if you — if the ambassador had seen a protest or anything else earlier, would he have reported it, he said ‘Of course, yes.
The fact is people from this administration, career professionals, have said under oath there was no evidence of any kind of a reaction to a video and, in fact, this was a planned attack that came quickly. That’s the evidence we have by people who work for the U.S. government and were under oath.” --Rep. Darrell Issa
Cold Climate: In an event chock-full of bitterly cold irony, perhaps even Al Gore has noticed that multiple icebreakers couldn't free a boat stuck in Antarctic ice that global warming was supposed to have melted.
Few of the media reports on the plight of the Russian-flagged research vessel MV Akademik Schokalskiy have noted the irony of a ship full of climate scientists getting stuck in an Antarctic ice sheet so thick that early attempts at breaking through the ice to free them were failures."We're stuck in our own experiment," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition said in a statement. "We came to Antarctica to study how one of the biggest icebergs in the world has altered the system by trapping ice. We ... are now ourselves trapped by ice surrounding our ship."
In a statement only climate-change die-hards could make, the group said, "Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up."
A Chinese icebreaker was unable to reach the ship, and another vessel, the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis, got within 10 nautical miles of the stranded ship but couldn't see it through a driving blizzard and had to turn back to open water, Fox News reported.
A makeshift helicopter pad on the ice sheet was being readied for a helicopter rescue.
QOTD: "All battles for the soul begin with culture. And while the battle against Obama’s unprecedented growth of government started with the tea party victories of 2010, the cultural battle against the left didn’t truly take until 2013. The seeds were planted for this cultural battle in earnest in 2012, when Obama and his Democratic Party allies put race, sexual orientation and abortion at the core of his reelection campaign. Americans were told by the media that Obama’s competence mattered less than the fact that half the country was mean, nasty, racist and homophobic. Todd Akin’s absurd comments on conception via rape were the issue, Americans were told, not the imminent takeover of the health care system; Obama’s sudden support for same-sex marriage was the issue, not his devastating regulatory state; George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin were the issue, not the destruction of entire swaths of the United States via leftist governance.
And it worked. Conservative Americans, bludgeoned into silence on cultural battles, decided to focus entirely on Obama’s economic buffoonery. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work; culture, as my friend Andrew Breitbart was fond of stating, is upstream of politics.
2013 marked a turning point. From Chick-fil-A to “Duck Dynasty,” conservative religious Americans found their footing: Whether you are for or against same-sex marriage, it is plainly un-American to override someone’s religious beliefs in the name of your politics. Conservative Americans seemed to realize, for the first time in a long time, that the battle over same-sex marriage came wrapped in a larger battle over religious freedom. And they fought back, and won." --Ben Shapiro
Picture a woman going to register to vote in New Jersey only to find the State has passed a law requiring her to undergo a background check, pay a fee, show proficiency in civics and, after meeting all those requirements, having to write a summary justifying her Need to vote.
Now, after attempting to justify her need to exercise her right (let that statement sink in) she is denied by a judge who has arbitrarily determined that she didn’t have an urgent need to vote.That judge’s lover and the local police chief’s sister-in-law however have miraculously passed all the above hurtles and can freely exercise that right with gleeful abandon.
Too farfetched? How about in the aftermath of 911, New Jersey passes a law requiring anyone wishing to practice Islam must apply for an Islam permit and show ‘justifiable need’ to pray to Allah. The State justifies this by claiming a large amount of terrorists are Islamic and therefore the Islam Permits will only be issued to very few people in order to protect the public, after all they can’t have NJ turn into the Gaza Strip.
If you find these examples offensive, you should, as they clearly violate an American’s rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and no amount of fearful justification merits such infringement. Unfortunately that same, arbitrary, subjective standard applies to most New Jersian’s right to protect themselves and their loved ones in public with a firearm.
New Jersey’s ‘Justifiable Need’ requirement to obtain a carry permit is the self defense equivalent of ‘Separate but Equal’ Jim Crow laws.
When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe, I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might.
At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends. The threat to the United States is the persistent decline in the middle class' standard of living, a problem that is reshaping the social order that has been in place since World War II and that, if it continues, poses a threat to American power.The median household income of Americans in 2011 was $49,103. Adjusted for inflation, the median income is just below what it was in 1989 and is $4,000 less than it was in 2000. Take-home income is a bit less than $40,000 when Social Security and state and federal taxes are included. That means a monthly income, per household, of about $3,300. It is urgent to bear in mind that half of all American households earn less than this. It is also vital to consider not the difference between 1990 and 2011, but the difference between the 1950s and 1960s and the 21st century. This is where the difference in the meaning of middle class becomes most apparent.
Which begs the question: who in the hell was this "reporter" and just what the hell was he doing during the attack -- and for the last 15 months? Biff Spackle offers some possibilities:NYT reporter says NYT knows who Benghazi attackers are > @ddknyt: we had a reporter on the scene talking to the attackers during the attack
—
Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) December 31, 2013What’s that? The New York Times had a reporter on the scene of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya? Reporter David D. Kirkpatrick, who wrote this weekend’s piece on Benghazi, says it was invaluable to have a reporter on the ground talking to the attackers during the attack.
@RichardGrenell @ddknyt Please see "Secret Benghazi Reporter Comics" for helpful illustration: http://t.co/m0UvQ4wkT4 pic.twitter.com/YNlC6HNmln
— Doug Ross (@directorblue) December 31, 2013QOTD: "Next time some lefty tells you how uninformed Fox News viewers are, remind them of this uncomfortable statistic:
81: Percentage of young Democrats who approve of the Affordable Care Act, according to December poll by Harvard's Institute of Politics.
Ahem. "Obamacare" and the "Affordable Care Act" are the same thing." --Jim Geraghty
58: Percentage of young Democrats who approve of "Obamacare."
| Rank | Source | Visits | % New Visits | New Visits |
| 1 | hotair.com | 103443 | 19.01% | 19664 |
| 2 | drudgereport.com | 84705 | 88.76% | 75188 |
| 3 | linkiest.com | 65924 | 50.26% | 33136 |
| 4 | badblue.com | 63399 | 14.96% | 9484 |
| 5 | thegatewaypundit.com | 25303 | 28.97% | 7331 |
| 6 | iowntheworld.com | 24638 | 24.99% | 6156 |
| 7 | ace.mu.nu | 20575 | 40.54% | 8341 |
| 8 | reddit.com | 19604 | 95.88% | 18797 |
| 9 | maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com | 17444 | 31.08% | 5421 |
| 10 | michellesmirror.com | 15615 | 20.90% | 3263 |
| 11 | pjmedia.com | 13957 | 42.27% | 5900 |
| 12 | rightwingnews.com | 12279 | 39.64% | 4868 |
| 13 | newsbusters.org | 10140 | 28.48% | 2888 |
| 14 | americandigest.org | 9458 | 25.05% | 2369 |
| 15 | legalinsurrection.com | 8556 | 16.80% | 1437 |
| 16 | smalldeadanimals.com | 8164 | 71.84% | 5865 |
| 17 | zerohedge.com | 8077 | 79.50% | 6421 |
| 18 | freerepublic.com | 7465 | 67.05% | 5005 |
| 19 | punditandpundette.com | 7161 | 20.64% | 1478 |
| 20 | theferalirishman.blogspot.com | 6518 | 30.45% | 1985 |
| 21 | ihatethemedia.com | 5558 | 48.96% | 2721 |
| 22 | godlikeproductions.com | 5500 | 90.80% | 4994 |
| 23 | curmudgeonlyskeptical.blogspot.com | 5009 | 29.33% | 1469 |
| 24 | jammiewf.com | 4560 | 25.70% | 1172 |
| 25 | im41.com | 4354 | 66.88% | 2912 |
| 26 | weaselzippers.us | 4187 | 51.97% | 2176 |
| 27 | astuteblogger.blogspot.com | 3375 | 11.29% | 381 |
| 28 | proteinwisdom.com | 3328 | 35.91% | 1195 |
| 29 | nicedeb.wordpress.com | 2843 | 15.20% | 432 |
| 30 | jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com | 2789 | 20.62% | 575 |
| 31 | stevequayle.com | 2782 | 94.36% | 2625 |
| 32 | bastionofliberty.blogspot.com | 2771 | 27.21% | 754 |
| 33 | dailypaul.com | 2750 | 80.76% | 2221 |
| 34 | coldfury.com | 2748 | 19.43% | 534 |
| 35 | michellemalkin.com | 2705 | 56.71% | 1534 |
| 36 | beforeitsnews.com | 2637 | 86.04% | 2269 |
| 37 | whitehousedossier.com | 2630 | 30.95% | 814 |
| 38 | thepiratescove.us | 2430 | 25.06% | 609 |
| 39 | yidwithlid.blogspot.com | 2410 | 28.46% | 686 |
| 40 | sondrakistan.com | 2359 | 19.08% | 450 |
| 41 | americanglob.com | 2350 | 20.81% | 489 |
| 42 | reaganiterepublicanresistance.blogspot.com | 2328 | 23.63% | 550 |
| 43 | adriennescatholiccorner.blogspot.com | 2192 | 10.63% | 233 |
| 44 | powerlineblog.com | 2121 | 68.65% | 1456 |
| 45 | moonbattery.com | 2079 | 31.07% | 646 |
| 46 | thenewscommenter.com | 1962 | 85.47% | 1677 |
| 47 | westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com | 1930 | 66.53% | 1284 |
| 48 | angrymikeshood.blogspot.com | 1815 | 35.26% | 640 |
| 49 | nicedoggie.net | 1813 | 46.22% | 838 |
| 50 | ninetymilesfromtyranny.blogspot.com | 1782 | 47.98% | 855 |