Farm Bill Negotiators Pushing Passage Before The End Of The Year

Will a farm bill be pushed through before the end of the year?  Some lawmakers are working to make that a reality, but that accomplishment will not be favorable for taxpayers and consumers.

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) told reporters Monday, “There’s no reason not to get [a farm bill].  Every day we don’t get something done makes it more and more difficult.”  Rep. Conaway would like to see a farm bill passed before the end of the year.

CQ reports (sub. req’d) The principal farm bill conferees Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK), Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), andSen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) are meeting this Wednesday to prepare for some kind of agreement between the House and Senate.
A Trillion Reasons Not to Pass the Farm Bill

But the truth is there’s a trillion reasons not to pass a farm bill hastily!  The House and Senate bills would cost taxpayers nearly a trillion dollars.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported (sub. req’d) on the conservative perspective:
Some conservatives… say that lawmakers will be rewarded if they reject a farm bill that spends too much money or ends up resembling “corporate welfare” for farmers. “It’s an opportunity for them to say Washington is not in the business of handing things out to people,” said Dan Holler, spokesman for Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.



More at:

Young And Healthy? Be Ready To Pay Up

Now that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is actually being implemented, many Americans are not pleased with the law. One population of Americans that has begun to grasp the real import of ObamaCare on their lives is young adults. These people are the ones hardest hit by the law: Although they are currently least able to pay for the rising costs of health care, they are the most healthy and so have been made to subsidize health care for the older and less healthy populations.

So, what should we have known about the impact of the Affordable Care Act on the young and healthy adult population in South Carolina before we took federal funds to implement it?

What once stayed between you and your doctor will now go in a database.

The concept of doctor patient confidentiality is a wash. The data hub created under the the ACA will allow federal bureaucrats access to medical records through the patient’s insurance company. The insurance company will obviously get access to your medical records through your physician, who gets it from you. Answers to simple questions – do you smoke? do you drink? do you use, or have you ever used, illegal drugs? – and many others like these will all be available to the government. What choice do people have, then? They can tell the truth and fear what unknown consequences will stem from their responses, or they can in effect lie to their physician in order to protect their privacy. The latter option could lead to a host of problems – doctors may, for instance, find it difficult or impossible to properly treat some medical problems.



More at:

What Comes After The Welfare State?

Today the welfare state is omnipresent in every part of the United States. The federal budget is dominated by entitlement spending, with 45 percent of federal spending in 2012 going to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare (among other health care entitlements). Simultaneously, the states are struggling under the fiscal burdens imposed on them by mandatory entitlement programs: spending by the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (primarily on Medicaid) has averaged $1.21 billion over the last three budget years. Yet the federal appetite for entitlement spending is far from sated – consider Obamacare – and if history is any guide, we can expect more entitlement programs in the future.

The historical increase in spending has of course been accompanied by a rising portion of Americans who use these entitlement benefits; the Wall Street Journal reported that as of early 2011, 49.1 percent of the population lived in a household where at least one member received government benefits, up from 44.4 percent in late 2008. Further, the size of these programs perpetuates a cycle of dependency as the total benefits package of the average welfare family is actually larger than the average salary of jobs that pay higher than the minimum wage.


More at:

Blacks Afraid of Jews!

It wasn’t bad enough when Jesse Jackson called a Jewish enclave “Hymietown,” but now we have a new black race baiter explaining why Jews are getting knocked out!

    Councilwoman-elect Laurie Cumbo, who was elected to represent Crown Heights starting in January, released an open letter Tuesday saying that many of her black constituents told her they feel threatened by the growth of the neighborhood’s Jewish community — and she fears the tension could be spiking the recent violence.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle “Jew!”

Below is the abstract from a 15 page report from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service about Jewish crime:


More at:

Does Gun Registration Ultimately Lead To Confiscation?

In the wake of New York’s latest gun control law, the New York Police Department is now sending out notices to registered gun owners demanding that they give up their firearms, clear proof that gun registration leads to outright confiscations.

The notice provides gun owners, who possess firearms now prohibited under New York’s unconstitutional SAFE Act, the “options” to either surrender their firearms to the police, remove them from the city limits or otherwise render them inoperable.


The NYPD knew exactly who to send the notices to by using a centralized firearms registry which lists the city’s gun owners and what firearms they have in their possession.

With the gun database already in place, the police merely needed to compile a list of firearm makes and models now banned under the SAFE Act and send the notices to the appropriate owners.

More at:

How The Nazis Used Gun Control

The perennial gun-control debate in America did not begin here. The same arguments for and against were made in the 1920s in the chaos of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which opted for gun registration. Law-abiding persons complied with the law, but the Communists and Nazis committing acts of political violence did not.

In 1931, Weimar authorities discovered plans for a Nazi takeover in which Jews would be denied food and persons refusing to surrender their guns within 24 hours would be executed. They were written by Werner Best, a future Gestapo official. In reaction to such threats, the government authorized the registration of all firearms and the confiscation thereof, if required for “public safety.” The interior minister warned that the records must not fall into the hands of any extremist group.

In 1933, the ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized power and used the records to identify, disarm, and attack political opponents and Jews. Constitutional rights were suspended, and mass searches for and seizures of guns and dissident publications ensued. Police revoked gun licenses of Social Democrats and others who were not “politically reliable.”

During the five years of repression that followed, society was “cleansed” by the National Socialist regime. Undesirables were placed in camps where labor made them “free,” and normal rights of citizenship were taken from Jews. The Gestapo banned independent gun clubs and arrested their leaders. Gestapo counsel Werner Best issued a directive to the police forbidding issuance of firearm permits to Jews.

More at:

USDA To Let Industry Self-Inspect Chicken

Chicken is the top-selling meat in the United States.  The average American eats 84 pounds a year - more chicken than beef or pork.  Sorry red meat, chicken is what’s for dinner.

Now, the USDA is proposing a fundamental change in the way that poultry makes it to the American dinner table.

As early as next week, the government will end debate on a cost-cutting, modernization proposal it hopes to fully implement by the end of the year – a plan that is setting off alarm bells among food science watchdogs because it turns over most of the chicken inspection duties to the companies that produce the birds for sale.

The USDA hopes to save $85 million over three years by laying off 1,000 government inspectors and turning over their duties to company monitors who will staff the poultry processing lines in plants across the country.

The poultry companies expect to save more than $250 million a year because they, in turn, will be allowed to speed up the processing lines to a dizzying 175 birds per minute with one USDA inspector at the end of the line.

Currently, traditional poultry lines move at a maximum of 90 birds per minute, with up to three USDA inspectors on line.

Whistleblower inspectors opposed to the new USDA rule say the companies cannot be trusted to watch over themselves.  They contend that companies routinely pressure their employees not to stop the line or slow it down, making thorough inspection for contaminants, tumors and evidence of disease nearly impossible.

“At that speed, it’s all a blur,” one current inspector tells ABC News.

More at: