The Right Lane update 7.20.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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“You’re Fired. Want to Work Part-Time?”   by Gary North

Three-quarters of all small business owners say this will be their response to ObamaCare. As Nancy Pelosi famously said: “Are you serious?” They are serious. They will fire people. They will make part-time workers out of full-time workers. They will do whatever it takes to get out from under ObamaCare. This was obvious from day one, but it was not obvious to Pelosi. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce summarizes what the situation is. “Small businesses expect the requirement to negatively impact their employees. Twenty-seven percent say they will cut hours to reduce full time employees, 24 percent will reduce hiring, and 23 percent plan to replace full time employees with part-time workers to avoid triggering the mandate.”  Thanks, Nancy. Thanks Barack. You have just created the new normal for low-paid workers: lower pay!  This is why the government decided to delay implementation of small business rules until 2015. You see, there are Congressional elections in November of 2014.

But businessmen like to plan ahead. They understand calendars. They now have an extra year to prepare. They will begin making adjustments this year. They will start implementing them next year.

Subsidized health insurance? Only if you have a full-time job. Oops. Sorry about that.

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No More Communism! North Korea Capitulates: Farming.  by Gary North

The last bastion has fallen. The last hold-out is no longer holding out.  North Korea now allows collective farms to lease land to peasants. The peasants pay 30% of the crop to the collective.

This is sharecropping.  This is what the USA had in the South after 1865. This is a move to capitalism. We can be sure of this: output will rise. This is what Deng did in 1978. He freed up agriculture. The boom began within a year. Starvation is the mother of political invention. The peasants will buy into this if they believe they will really get to keep 70%. It may take a couple of years to persuade them. They have reasons to be skeptical. They are suspicious. But if the collectives abide by the rules, Communism is finished. The experiment has failed. Celebrate. Light up a Cuban cigar. (No. Sorry. That’s illegal in the land of the free and the home of the NSA.) In 1953, South Korea was poverty-stricken. Today, it is among the richest nations per capita in the world. Its economic growth per capita dwarfs China’s.

May the lights come back on in the North.

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Grassley to Holder: Why is Your Department Hiding New Fast and Furious Murders?

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder reminding him that the Department of Justice has an obligation to inform Congress when Operation Fast and Furious weapons are found at crime scenes. Just last week, the Los Angeles Times reported Mexican Police Chief Luis Astorga and his body guard were killed by cartels using guns from the lethal operation. “Since the beginning of this investigation, we have followed the link between Fast and Furious weapons and crimes committed on both sides of the border. On numerous occasions we have asked the Department to keep us apprised of Fast and Furious weapon recoveries — especially as they relate to violent crimes,” Grassley wrote.

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CDC Study: Use of Firearms For Self-Defense is ‘Important Crime Deterrent’ By Alissa Tabirian

“Self-defense can be an important crime deterrent,” says a new report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The $10 million study was commissioned by President Barack Obama as part of 23 executive orders he signed in January. “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies,” the CDC study, entitled “Priorities For Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence,” states. The report, which notes that “ violent crimes, including homicides specifically, have declined in the past five years,” also pointed out that “some firearm violence results in death, but most does not.” In fact, the CDC report said, most incidents involving the discharge of firearms do not result in a fatality.

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If It Weren’t For Double Standards, Liberals Wouldn’t Have Any by Margie Wilson-Mars

Reading the latest headlines, it just doesn’t seem to matter what this administration does (unless you’re a conservative who realizes our rights are being systematically removed). The double standards are astounding. Imagine the media firestorm if Alec Baldwin, with his continuous racist rants, was a Republican! He wouldn’t stand a chance and would have been fired from his credit card gig long ago. Meanwhile, many on the Right remain complacent and uninvolved, reminding me of the example Glenn Beck uses about the frog in the pot. If you try to put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out; but if you slowly heat it up, you get boiled frog. Well guess what, folks? We’re boiling over!

My mother was a young girl living in Frankfurt, Germany during World War 2. When I was growing up, she told me things that went way beyond what I was taught in school. Mother recalled how admired Hitler was when he promised to change the country for the better and how he did just that. Before she was shipped off to Poland (and later, Russia) for her protection, she saw friends die and she saw Jews being stolen away. Many have recognized the similarities with today’s administration and how our rights being taken away. I often wonder if my mother would have seen this, but as a lifelong Democrat, I don’t think so. Whenever conservatives compare the actions of Hitler (or Lenin, Mussolini, etc.) to President Obama and his goons, liberals either argue the semantics of the politics (“No, Hitler was a fascist!”) or they laugh, claiming any comparison is ridiculous.

I contend that news of the newly released Insider Threat Program (developed in 2011 after the Manning/Wikileaks scandal) proves how far Obama will go to try and prevent his dirty tricks from being exposed. Bottom line, if you don’t play along, you can go to prison. Sounds Marxist to me, if we want to talk semantics.

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What Democrats Won't Say About Race By Mark Alexander

"The best and only safe road to honor, glory, and true dignity is justice." --George Washington (1779)

Barack Hussein Obama asked a couple of questions about the Zimmerman/Martin case this week. I have a couple of answers. As you know, "White Hispanic" George Zimmerman was found not guilty last weekend of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the self-defense shooting of a 17-year-old "child" named Trayvon Martin. The state of Florida pumped all its resources into the high-profile case, including the appointment of special prosecutors by Gov. Rick Scott, and a judge who accepted the prosecution's desperate 11th-hour request to add the lesser manslaughter charge when it became readily apparent prosecutors were not going to win a murder conviction. Justice prevailed, however, and, consequently, legions of Democrat race-bait hustlers and their Leftmedia talkingheads were struck with acute apoplexy. The Left's pretentious political agenda aside, it was evident to the jury in this case -- and every unbiased viewer of the wall-to-wall media coverage of the trial -- that not only should Zimmerman have been acquitted, but this case never should have come to trial. Predictably, as the "not guilty" verdict was read, the race hustlers speed-dialed the Obama administration to insist that BO bring federal "hate-crime" charges against Zimmerman. But last year, the FBI conducted an exhaustive inquiry into Zimmerman's views on race, interviewing dozens of people who know him best. What did the Bureau find? Not only was there no basis for even suggesting racism was a factor in his altercation with Martin, but Zimmerman was very "tolerant and inclusive," in the current race-conscious vernacular. Thus, there is no basis for a civil rights case.  Countering the calls for federal charges, one of the most liberal defense lawyers in the nation, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, concluded, "I think there were violations of civil rights and civil liberties -- by the prosecutor. The prosecutor sent this case to a judge, and willfully, deliberately, and in my view criminally withheld exculpatory evidence. ... The prosecution should be investigated for civil rights violations, and civil liberty violations." (This is the first time Dershowitz and I have agreed on something.)

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Muscle Power Is Designed, Not Evolutionary By David Coppedge

C. David Williams created a 3-D computer model of filaments of myosin (in red) reaching out and tugging along filaments of actin (in blue, looking like stands of pearls twined together) during the contraction of a muscle. The model allowed researchers to consider the geometry and physics at work on the filaments when a muscle bulges. Credit: D Williams/U of Washington Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-biceps-bulge-calves-year-old-assumptions.html#jCp The wonder of muscle inspires both awe at its design and opportunities for evolutionary storytelling. Fifty years of assumptions about how muscle fibers work is being set aside, reported PhysOrg, with the discovery that its components don’t just slide in one axis, but bulge out in 3-D.   The article, titled “Biceps bulge, calves curve, 50-year-old assumptions muscled aside,” states:

The basics of how a muscle generates power remain the same: Filaments of myosin tugging on filaments of actin shorten, or contract, the muscle – but the power doesn’t just come from what’s happening straight up and down the length of the muscle, as has been assumed for 50 years. Instead, University of Washington-led research shows that as muscles bulge, the filaments are drawn apart from each other, the myosin tugs at sharper angles over greater distances, and it’s that action that deserves credit for half the change in muscle force scientists have been measuring.

It makes sense; if fibers stretched in only one direction, why would biceps bulge outward?  The fact that muscle fibers don’t simply slide past each other but buckle, generating forces in multiple dimensions, adds to the wonder of its design…..

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Preposterous Pro-Abortion Positions

Aristotle once wrote: “[T]he same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect…. [I]t is impossible for the same man at the same time to believe the same thing to be and not to be” (Aristotle, 4:4). It is impossible, for example, for a single door to be completely shut and completely open at the same time. Likewise, it is contradictory for a man to say, “Yesterday I never left my house to go to the store,” if indeed he did leave his house yesterday to go to the store. The fact is, nothing can both be and not be for the same person, place, or thing, at the same time, and in the same sense (cf. Jevons, 1928, p. 117). For a person to say otherwise, he is either a liar or delusional.

Consider the nature of a contradiction in light of the pro-abortion movement and related laws in America. How is it that the same unborn child can be a human being and not a human being at the same time? For example, if a mother and her six-month-old unborn baby boy are brutally murdered while walking into a hospital, the perpetrator may likely be charged with “double murder” (cf. Ertelt, 2009). Why double murder? Because both the mother and her unborn child are human beings. However, if that same mother walks into a medical facility to have someone remove the (alleged) non-human “appendage” from her body, the mother and her accomplice are protected by the law (in many states, even when the unborn child is nine months old). These positions are so blatantly contradictory that even Heather Boonstra, senior public policy associate at the pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute, stated: “The law cannot hold both that a pregnant woman is two persons and at the same time allow her to have an abortion” (as quoted in Simon, 2001).

It is no secret that President Barack Obama strongly supports the pro-abortion platform. He has been a consistent advocate of pro-abortion policies for many years. It is also no secret that Washington, D.C. has some of the least restrictive abortion laws in the United States (“State Policies…,” 2013), allowing for abortion for any reason at any point during the mother’s pregnancy. Astonishingly, as Dave Boyer reported in the Washington Times in 2012, “[t]he pro-choice Obama White House requires pregnant visitors to count their unborn child as a person for tours of the executive mansion” (2012, emp. added). So, in our nation’s capitol, a pregnant woman can visit the President’s home, only if she first fills out paper work in which she counts her unborn child as a human being. Yet, that same mother is free to leave the White House, enter a D.C. abortion clinic, and have her unborn child murdered, under protection of a blatantly contradictory law that our President endorses.

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Federal study finds fracking chemicals didn’t taint water By Kevin Begos
Drilling fluids didn’t travel to drinking water supplies
A landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural-gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site, the Department of Energy told The Associated Press.  After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking water, geologist Richard Hammack said.  Although the results are preliminary — the study is still ongoing — they are the first independent look at whether the potentially toxic chemicals pose a threat to people during normal drilling operations.  But Energy Department researchers view the study as just one part of ongoing efforts to examine the effect of a recent boom in oil and gas exploration, not a final answer about the risks.  Drilling fluids tagged with unique markers were injected more than 8,000 feet below the surface at the gas well bore but weren’t detected in a monitoring zone at a depth of 5,000 feet.  The researchers also tracked the maximum extent of the man-made fractures, and all were at least 6,000 feet below the surface.  That means the potentially dangerous substances stayed about a mile away from surface drinking water supplies, which are usually at depths of less than 500 feet.

“This is good news,” said Duke University scientist Rob Jackson, who was not involved with the study. He called it a “useful and important approach” to monitoring fracking but cautioned that the single study doesn’t prove that fracking can’t pollute, because geology and industry practices vary widely in Pennsylvania and across the nation.

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Benghazi Survivors Forced To Sign Non-Disclosure Agreements By The Obama Administration by Tim Brown

According to Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA), who put forth a resolution back in January to form a select House committee to investigate Benghazi, which was supported by 700 retired Special Forces and the mother of slain information management officer Sean Smith, said on Thursday that survivors of the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, had been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements by each of their respective agencies in the Obama administration. This would essentially prohibit them from speaking about the attack on September 11, 2012. “According to trusted sources that have contacted my office, many if not all of the survivors of the Benghazi attacks along with others at the Department of Defense, the CIA have been asked or directed to sign additional non-disclosure agreements about their involvement in the Benghazi attacks,” Wolf said on the floor of the House. “Some of these new NDAs, as they call them, I have been told were signed as recently as this summer.”  If proven to be accurate, Wolf said “this would be a stunning revelation.”  “It also raises serious concerns about the priority of the administration’s efforts to silence those with knowledge of the Benghazi attack in response,” Wolf said.  

Congressman Wolf also said that he was requesting a list of all personnel or contractors who were asked to sign non-disclosure waivers from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, and the State Department.  “Perhaps through a list of all the employees that have signed the NDAs related to Benghazi we may finally develop a witness list to subpoena for eyewitness testimony to learn what happened that night where we lost four American lives,” Wolf continued. “I do not expect the Obama administration to be forthcoming with answers, but if this Congress — if this Congress — does not ask for the information and compels its delivery the American people will never learn the truth.”

On Wednesday Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) issued a statement in which he praised the work of Representative Wolf. “Congressman Wolf has fearlessly led the fight for justice on this issue,” Stockman said. “The whole nation owes Congressman Wolf a deep debt of gratitude. Some House Democrats now appear to be openly interfering with the investigation and intimidating witnesses, which only raises more questions about the White House’s involvement. The only way we’re going to get a clean and thorough investigation is by forcing a vote with a discharge petition.”

Well isn’t that just like this administration? They swoop in and apply pressure not only on whistleblowers, but on those who would be able to provide valuable testimony as to the events of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi.  House Resolution 36 continues to gain support. When I first reported on it on April 11, 2013, Congressman Wolf’s office confirmed they had 89 co-sponsors and over that weekend the co-sponsors grew to well over 100. However, it was RINO House Speaker John Boehner who said he wouldn’t allow the select committee to investigate Benghazi because he doesn’t “think it’s risen to that level.”

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