'NHS doctors would not give Ashya the treatment we wanted': Father who fled with brain tumour boy, 5, to Spain posts heartfelt video explaining move - but police say 'no apology' for arresting parents
...'We just want to be left in peace. He's very sick. I just want to get on with his treatment. I'm not coming back to England if I cannot give him the treatment I want, which is proper treatment. I just want positive results for my son.'

In the video, Mr King told how they had wanted to leave the hospital because the NHS could not fund the proton beam treatment that they wanted for their son, but that he would raise the money to pay for it.

'We couldn't take it any more - not knowing and not being able to question anything in fear that they say, "Sorry Mr and Mrs King, emergency protection order, you're no longer allowed in the ward",' he told the camera.

'Under that stress, our son has grade four brain tumour, we couldn't discuss or question them at all in fear that our son would be in that ward all day long by himself without his parents being able to come in.

'We couldn't be under that system any more. I was going to get the money to pay for the proton beam therapy but they have prevented that now because the Spanish police are involved and I can't do want I wanted to do.'...

Holder Cut Left-Wing Groups In On $17 Bil BofA Deal
Extortion: Radical Democrat activist groups stand to collect millions from Attorney General Eric Holder's record $17 billion deal to settle alleged mortgage abuse charges against Bank of America.

Buried in the fine print of the deal, which includes $7 billion in soft-dollar consumer relief, are a raft of political payoffs to Obama constituency groups. In effect, the government has ordered the nation's largest bank to create a massive slush fund for Democrat special interests.

Besides requiring billions in debt forgiveness payments to delinquent borrowers in Cleveland, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Oakland, Detroit, Chicago and other Democrat strongholds — and up to $500 million to cover personal taxes owed on those checks — the deal requires BofA to make billions in new loans, while also building affordable low-income rental housing in those areas.

If there are leftover funds in four years, the settlement stipulates the money will go to Interest on Lawyers' Trust Account (IOLTA), which provides legal aid for the poor and supports left-wing causes, and NeighborWorks of America, which provides affordable housing and funds a national network of left-wing community organizers operating in the mold of Acorn.

In fact, in 2008 and 2009, NeighborWorks awarded a whopping $25 million to Acorn Housing....

Obama Pursuing Climate Accord in Lieu of Treaty
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path....

Models challenge temperature reconstruction of last 12,000 years
...A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by the University of Wisconsin’s Zhengyu Liu delves into a problem with that pattern—and it’s not what climate models say should have happened....

...The new paper concludes, “If the [Holocene temperature] reconstruction is correct, it will imply major biases across the current generation of climate models. To provide a credible benchmark for future climate models, however, the proxy reconstructions will also need to be reexamined critically.”

Is the SUN driving climate change? Solar activity - 'and not just humans' - could be increasing global warming, study claims
It's not just humans that are to blame for global warming - natural activity from the sun also has an impact on climate change.

This is according to a Swedish research team that has reconstructed the sun's activity at the end of the last ice age, around 20,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The study shows that the sun's variation influences the climate regardless of whether the climate is extreme, as it was during the Ice Age, or moderate, as it is today....

WARMING STOPS WARMING
...Warming haults due to climate change...

The skulduggery of ousting Illinois candidates
...The Sun-Times has reported that armed investigators who work for Palos Township GOP Committeeman Sean Morrison's security firm visited the homes of people who had signed or circulated Libertarian petitions. The newspaper cited two examples of security company employees, with holstered weapons visible, allegedly telling the people that the petitions were fraudulent — a lie — and urging them to retract their signatures.

If true, this was a last-ditch effort to invalidate Libertarian signatures after a two-month fight at the State Board of Elections. Allies of the Republican Party had challenged the Libertarians' signatures line by line — then dragged petition circulators before the board to testify about their signature-gathering. The elections board found the circulators to be credible and enough of their signatures to be valid. So the Libertarian Party's statewide slate will appear on the ballot....

Revealed: How fear of being seen as racist stopped social workers saving up to 1,400 children from sexual exploitation at the hands of Asian men in just ONE TOWN
The sexual abuse of about 1,400 children at the hands of Asian men went unreported for 16 years because staff feared they would be seen as racist, a report said today.

Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, the council commissioned review into child protection revealed.

And shockingly, more than a third of the cases were already know to agencies.

But according to the report's author: 'several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist'. ...

Nurse struck off after she was jailed for falsely accusing her own grandfather of rape in bid to get her inheritance early
A nurse has been struck off after being jailed for falsely accusing her grandfather of rape in a bid to claim his inheritance money.

Natalie Mortimer, from Aberdeen, was disciplined at a one-day standards hearing at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) in London.

The 25-year-old was jailed for 22 months at Aberdeen Sheriff Court in January after being convicted of wasting 175 hours of police time by fabricating claims that her grandfather Gordon Ritchie sexually abused her.

Aberdeen Sheriff Court heard at the time how she had falsely accused her grandfather of raping her when she was a child so she could get her hands on inheritance money....

She Accused Her Husband of Downloading Child Porn. Now She’s the One with a Felony Conviction.
...“She download[ed] in excess of 40 images of different acts of child pornography to the family computer, took it to the state police and said, ‘My husband downloaded all this porn,’” District Attorney Patrick Dougherty said.

Investigators found that the images Woods claimed her husband sought out were date-stamped between Aug. 11 and 14, 2013, which meant they were downloaded after Woods’ husband had been forced out of the house by a protection-from-abuse order...

Report: Simon & Schuster imprint rejected book about Bergdahl because it might hurt Obama
...“I’m not sure we can publish this book without the Right using it to their ends,” Sarah Durand, a senior editor at Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, wrote in an email to one of the soldiers’ agents.

“[T]he Conservatives are all over Bergdahl and using it against Obama,” Durand wrote, “and my concern is that this book will have to become a kind of ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’”...

NY Times: Is There Anything Good About Men? And Other Tricky Questions
...Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did....

HuffPo: Why Great Husbands Are Being Abandoned
...Fifty percent of marriages are still ending in divorce, and women continue to be the gender that initiates those endings. In the past, their reasons for leaving most often had to do with infidelity, neglect, or abuse. Now they're dumping men who are faithful, attentive, and respectful, the very men they said they have always wanted. Why would women who have accomplished the female dream suddenly not be satisfied with it? Why are they leaving these ideal guys, and for what reasons?

I am currently dealing with several of these great husbands. They are, across the board, respectful, quality, caring, devoted, cherishing, authentic, and supportive guys whose wives have left them for a different kind of man. These once-beloved men make a living, love their kids, help with chores, support aging parents, and support their mate's desires and interests. They believe they've done everything right. They are devastated, confused, disoriented, and heartsick. In a tragic way, they startlingly resemble the disheartened women of the past who were left behind by men who "just wanted something new."

You may think that these women are ruthless and inconsiderate. Those I know are far from that. More often, they still love their husbands as much as they ever did, but in a different way. They tell me how wonderful their men are and how much they respect them. They just don't want to be married to them anymore....

'I am Charles Manson's wife'
Afton Burton was 16 and living with her parents in Illinois when she discovered Charles Manson.

Now, nine years later, her name is Star, she's 25 years old, and she considers herself Charles Manson's wife, even though it isn't official yet.

"He filed for the first round of paperwork," says Star, who says she's in love with the 79-year-old convicted murderer. "I'm completely with him, and he's completely with me. It's what I was born for, you know. I don't know what else to say."...

Will IRS’s Strategy of Destroying Evidence Pay Off?
...In two elusive and nebulous sworn declarations, we can glean that Ms. Lerner had two Blackberries. One was issued to her on November 12, 2009. According to a sworn declaration, this is the Blackberry that contained all the emails (both sent and received) that would have been in her “Outlook” and drafts that never were sent from her Blackberry during the relevant time.

With incredible disregard for the law and the Congressional inquiry, the IRS admits that this Blackberry “was removed or wiped clean of any sensitive or proprietary information and removed as scrap for disposal in June 2012.” This is a year after her hard drive “crash” and months after the Congressional inquiry began....

IRS back-up baloney
Some 15 months after Americans learned about the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups, we still have no clue how such an abuse was allowed to happen. And every day, the story only gets murkier.

This week, for instance, a government watchdog group, Judicial Watch, said administration officials admitted that all the “missing” e-mails belonging to Lois Lerner (the woman at the heart of the scandal) had been backed up after all — as part of a practice to back up all the government’s e-mails.

No government official had said anything like that before....

Irish Times David Robert Grimes Foams At The Keyboard…Mounting Frustration Now On The Verge Of Anger
...He writes: “If greenhouse emissions continue their steady escalation, temperatures across most of the earth will rise to levels with no recorded precedent by the middle of this century, researchers say.” Notice here how Grimes writes “temperature will rise” and not “temperature is rising“. He is telling us not look at the current model performance, but to just wait another 40 years. He has to do this because all the models have been dead wrong. And what Grimes fails to understand is that if the models are wrong today, then they can’t be used for the future. In fact neither Grimes nor any scientist has even a single scrap of data that would allow them to predict the future. It’s all scenario and speculation.

Misinterprets the warming stop as “bleak”

He writes: “The findings are bleak, but not unexpected.” False. The findings are unexpected. Not a single IPCC model got the temperatures for the last fifteen years correct. All overstated the temperature rise. So this is good news and certainly not “bleak”. Only psychologically abnormal persons would not feel some sense of relief. The stop in temperature rise is unexpected and thus can be nothing but good news – period....

...Grimes also hints that climate science is too complex to be decided by the public: “Climate is a deeply complex system, not a simple thermostat.” Unfortunately this is not what the alarmist climate scientists told us for more than 20 years. In fact they told us just the opposite: Climate and global temperature boil down to the concentration of trace gas CO2. Even Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber said so on camera. And all their simple climate models told us the same. It is us skeptics who have been telling the world that the climate is far more complex and that the simple CO2-global temperature correlation was preposterous. And now that there has not been any warming in 15 years, the alarmists are now finally waking up and coming around to this reality...

Suicides are surprisingly high among middle-aged men in the US
...Men are more likely to commit suicide when they’re without traditional support systems—family and employment, for example. This isn’t just an American occurrence: in the UK, another society where men’s careers often are touted as a key part of their identity, middle-aged men were far more likely to commit suicide during the last economic recession compared with people in other demographics....

Cops Kill Man In Wal-Mart Carrying An Air Rifle That He Might Have Planned To Buy
A man who was carrying an air rifle in an Ohio Wal-Mart told the police officers that fatally shot him that the gun was “not real,” according to a family member.

John Crawford was shot by police Tuesday evening at a Beavercreek store. The Ohio attorney general’s office announced Thursday that he was merely carrying a brand of air rifle that Wal-Mart sells....

Store Owner Says Bank Accounts Closed Because He Sells Guns
...Williams, who opened up two checking accounts with SunTrust in 2006, was given little explanation for the bank’s sudden decision.

“The only thing that they will tell us is that we have been deemed a prohibited business type,” he told Fox Carolina, adding that he believes his shop was targeted by the federal government because he sells guns.

Williams wouldn’t be the first to make such a claim. Lawmakers and consumer advocacy groups have blamed a Department of Justice initiative called Operation Choke Point for pressuring banks to cut off relationships with customers like Williams.

Operation Choke Point was designed to prevent crooks from using the banking and financial payments systems to conduct their business. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation also created a list of industries which it deemed “high-risk.” Those industries included gun sellers, pawn shops, coin dealers, pay day lenders and about two dozen industries....

Doctors Begin To Refuse Obamacare Patients
Obamacare plans have shrunk payments to physicians so much that some doctors say they won’t be able to afford to accept Obamacare coverage, NPR reports.

Many of the eight million sign-ups in Obamacare exchanges nationwide already face more limited choices for physicians and hospitals than those in the private insurance market. But with low physician reimbursement rates, the problem could get even worse.

For a typical quick patient visit, Dr. Doug Gerard, a Connecticut internist, told NPR a private insurer would pay $100 while Medicare would pay around $80. But Obamacare plans are more likely to pay closer to $80, which Gerard says is unsustainable for his practice.

“I cannot accept a plan [in which] potentially commercial-type reimbursement rates were now going to be reimbursed at Medicare rates,” Dr. Gerard told NPR. ”You have to maintain a certain mix in private practice between the low reimbursers and the high reimbursers to be able to keep the lights on.”...

Study: Climate Models Overestimated Global Warming For The Last 55 Years
Climate models relied upon by scientists and governments may be greatly overstating the warming that has occurred since the late 1950s, argues a paper analyzing the discrepancies between modeled and observed temperatures.

The paper, which was published in the journal Environmetrics, found that observed temperatures differed greatly from modeled temperatures in the tropical lower troposphere and mid-troposphere.

“Over the 55-years from 1958 to 2012, climate models not only significantly over-predict observed warming in the tropical troposphere, but they represent it in a fundamentally different way than is observed,” says Ross McKitrick, economist with the University of Guelph in Canada and co-author of the study.

According to McKitrick, all climate models predict that rising carbon dioxide levels will cause rapid warming in the troposphere over the tropics. But that’s not what has happened, as neither satellites nor weather balloons have detected much warming in the tropical troposphere — meaning something is likely wrong with the models.

Downscale
... It matters — a great deal — what government spends that money on. Even the wooliest anarcho-capitalist must look with some sympathy and admiration upon the small-scale model of township government that once characterized New England and the West. “But who will pave the roads?” is a standing libertarian punchline (“The federal government spends enormous sums of money getting monkeys addicted to cocaine, the police have murdered your puppies — But who will pave the roads?”) and, as noted in a certain volume of political speculation, the first paved intercity road in these United States was in fact privately built, suggesting that private enterprise is more than capable of road-making....

...Progressives argue that we need deeper government involvement in the economy in order to assuage the ill effects of economic inequality. But, as Joel Kotkin points out, inequality is the most pronounced in places where progressives dominate: New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago. The more egalitarian cities are embedded in considerably more conservative metropolitan areas in conservative states. “Part of the difference,” Mr. Kotkin writes, “is the strong growth of higher-paid, blue-collar jobs in places like Houston, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake, and Dallas compared to rapidly de-industrializing locales such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Even Richard Florida, the guru of the ‘creative class,’ has admitted that the strongest growth in mid-income jobs has been concentrated in red-state metros such as Salt Lake City, Houston, Dallas, Austin, and Nashville. Some of this reflects a history of later industrialization but other policies — often mandated by the state — encourage mid-income growth, for example, by not imposing high energy prices with subsidies for renewables, or restricting housing growth in the periphery. Cities like Houston may seem blue in many ways but follow local policies largely indistinguishable from mainstream Republicans elsewhere.” In Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, African Americans earn barely half of what whites earn — and in San Francisco, African Americans earn less than half of what whites earn....

...Progressivism is a luxury good for college-educated white people. It is the Hermes sneaker of political tendencies. California is not an especially wealthy state — its median income is right between Wyoming’s and Nebraska’s — but it is a state in which one needs to be pretty well off to live decently. The value of the median home in San Francisco is more than ten times the median income; in San Jose, it’s nine and a half times the median income; in Houston, it’s only four times the median income. California is a great place to be a technology executive or a screenwriter, but it’s a rotten place to be a truck driver. California-style progressivism is oriented toward serving the needs of rich people in San Jose, not those of middle-class people in Riverside County or poor people in the agrarian villages. If you’re a well-off lawyer in the gilded suburbs of Los Angeles, you have a great selection of poor, brown gardeners and housekeepers to lessen life’s burdens, which is great for you but stinks for them. It is not an accident that our nation’s most segregated cities are mostly strongholds of the Left: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Boston....

HOW YALE BRANDS INNOCENT MALES AS RAPISTS
...In the second case, the accuser (after discussing matters with Yale’s Title IX coordinator) elected not to file a formal complaint against the accused student. But even in a case without an accuser, Yale went ahead, and charged the student with “sexual assault.” (To Yale, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of an accused being able to confront his accuser seems quaint and old-fashioned.) And in a case relying wholly on hearsay, words of an accuser who chose not to participate in the proceedings, Yale deemed the student a rapist and expelled him....

Obamacare Enrollment Is Sinking Rapidly
...Aetna’s enrollment reached 720,000 by May 20, after the final end to the the extended open enrollment period. But by the end of June Aetna had less than 600,000 paying customers, IBD reports, and the company expects paying customers to fall to “just over 500,000″ by the end of 2015. That would be a drop of just under 30 percent from the May sign-up numbers — the last time the Obama administration released its official Obamacare enrollment tally.

Aetna’s reported drop-off rate appears to be more extensive than other companies. Cigna reported that between both its exchange customers and those in the private individual market, it expects to lose around 20,000 paying customers throughout the year, out of 300,000....

Americans Subsidize the World’s Medical Costs – Fair?
...In the best case scenario, Americans pay twice as much for popular prescription drugs. In the worst case, we pay five times more. Prescription drugs are not the only medical goods where this cost disparity exists. Prices in the United States are always higher for any medical good than in any other global market.

How the World Screws the US on Health Care

The key difference between American medical care and the medical care in foreign countries is not profit motive. It is not a public or private model, nor is it the role of health care insurance companies. The sole difference between American health care and health care around the world is the role of government in setting prices.

In other countries governments negotiate prices for every medical good from hospital beds to prescription drugs. They lowball on prices, paying for only part of the true cost of research and development. Americans then pay for the remainder....

Fifty Years Of Government Intervention Fails To Boost Home Ownership
Despite decades of federal intervention in the housing market, home ownership rates are virtually the same today as they were in 1968, according to an brief released by the Heritage Foundation on Monday....

...The pace of government intervention was especially frenetic in the 1990s, the report says, such that, “from 1990 to 2003, Fannie [Mae] and Freddie [Mac] went from holding 5 percent of the nation’s mortgages ($136 billion) to more than 20 percent ($1.6 trillion),” all with implicit government backing....

If You Have "Visit the Mosul Dam" on Your Bucket List, Better do it Soon
...This isn't a condemnation of Saddam's Iraq per se: It's a condemnation of ANY country where political connections among contractors and subcontractors, sketchy material suppliers and corrupt or frightened quality control inspectors come together in a big Venn Diagram of "Oh Shit!" Hell, it's hard enough to keep infrastructure standing tall in America (remember the I35 West bridge collapse in Minneapolis/St. Paul?), but The Third World? Fuhgeddaboudit!

Three Gorges? Toast. The Mosul Dam? Toast. Burj Dubai? Toast. It doesn't matter how many First World engineers and architects participate in the design process. As long as the construction or maintenance process is left up to a 3rd cousin of the King in the Middle East, or a business subsidiary of the PLA in China, the structure will never live up to the promise of its design life. Ozzymandias by any other name is still a big pile of debris. And a big-name project that is touted as a crowning achievement of a country where a significant portion of its population has to burn animal dung for cooking or haul their own "night soil" out to fertilize the crops will fail before it should. Every time....

'The border fence is a joke': Filmmaker crosses from US to Mexico dressed as Osama bin Laden as Border Patrol says 'we can't be everywhere at once'
...In Monday's video release, O'Keefe focuses on the implications for national security: He illegally crosses into Mexico twice and returns – first in street clothes and again in army fatigues, wearing an Osama bin Laden Halloween mask...

WaPo's Greg Sargent Devastates Vindicates Halbig Case Against Obamacare Federal Subsidies With Bombshell Reporting
...Sargent just helpfully informed us that an earlier version of the ACA -- not a draft, mind you, but one that was actually passed out of committee -- included explicit language granting subsidies to people on federal exchanges, language that was later dropped from the final bill.

If Sargent had been an attorney rather than a layman, this is the point where he would have hit "delete" on his draft post and forgotten all about it.

One of most fundamental rules of statutory interpretation used by courts when they are asked to discern legislative intent from ambiguous statutory language is this: if explicit language was in an earlier version of a bill but dropped from the final version, the court will treat that as proof it was removed on purpose.

For example, if the draft copy of the "Jeff B. Memorial RINO-Hunting Act" states that "no more than six mature RINOs" can be bagged by any one hunter during open season, but the final legislation lacks the word "mature," then every court in the land would apply standard canons of construction and say that the legislature therefore intended to allow people to go after RINOs of all ages -- the earlier language was dropped for a reason, and so long as it doesn't render the statute facially nonsensical it's not the place of the court to wade any deeper into the thicket and find out what that reason was, or whether it's a "good idea."

Similarly, the argument advanced by the Left (and Sargent) that "of course the ACA intended all along for subsidies to cover federal exchanges!" is runs squarely onto the rocks of this earlier language. Thanks to Sargent's crack reporting we have now confirmed that earlier iterations of the ACA specifically granted subsidies to federal exchanges...but that, for whatever reason, this language was later stripped from the bill.

The subsequent blathering about "why" this language fell out of the bill ("drafting errors," you see) is immaterial as far as the Court is concerned, and this is apparently what Sargent doesn't seem to realize; in a case where the wording of the statute is otherwise clear, the Court's inquiry will stop cold right here -- or at least it should....

Again: In Another Briefing in 2012, Jonathan Gruber Committed the Same "Speak-O" and Said that States Which Refuse to Set Up Obamacare Exchanges Would Lose "Hundreds of Millions in Tax Credits" (Federal Subsidies)
...Flashback: Senator Max Baucus: Hey, you know tax credits for Obamacare are only available on state exchanges.

Watch Obamacare Architect Jonathan Gruber Admit in 2012 That Subsidies Were Limited to State-Run Exchanges (Updated With Another Admission)
...What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this....

Oh, by the way: Obama just quietly suspended ObamaCare’s individual mandate until 2016
...The IRS was never going to enforce the mandate strictly this year, but now they don’t have to enforce it at all. Anyone who’s declined to buy insurance by April 1st can simply claim hardship and that’s that. This makes three major rule changes to the core components of ObamaCare in the past month alone: On February 10th, the White House delayed the employer mandate for small businesses until 2016, and then, 10 days ago, it extended for two more years the rule allowing insurers to un-cancel plans for consumers who want their old, cheaper coverage back. Little did we know until now that, on the same day, they also all but suspended the individual mandate until 2016. And like Levin says, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever bring it back. Why would the next president, eager to begin his/her term on a strong note, want to reinstate a harsh financial penalty for noncompliance with O-Care when the guy who signed the law was unwilling to? The mandate is dead. Obama’s repealing ObamaCare himself, piece by piece. And he’s creating a two-tiered, less sustainable health-insurance system in the process....

The U.S. Health Care System: The Global Sugar Daddy
A new pill for hepatitis C is unmasking a huge global inequality in pharmaceutical costs—one that disproportionately burdens the United States. The FT has a must-read report on Solvadi, a drug developed by Gilead Sciences that costs $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment for American patients, but sells for a song in other countries—as low as $11 per pill in Egypt, for example. As a result, an increasingly noisy movement in America is starting to ask why this is:

“The answer is because it can,” says [Chief medical officer of Express Scripts] Dr [Steve] Miller, one of Gilead’s fiercest critics. “Sovaldi has shone a light on the fact America is subsidising healthcare innovation for the rest of the world.”...

Obamacare: The Bait-And-Switch Double Whammy

Lois Lerner Called Conservatives ‘Assholes,’ Fantasized About Working At Obama Group
...New emails released by the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday provide more evidence that ex-IRS official Lois Lerner is not fond of conservatives.

“So we don’t need to worry about teRroists [sic]. It’s our own crazies that will take us down,” Lerner wrote in a Nov. 9, 2012 email exchange with an IRS colleague....

...Lerner’s email mocking conservative “crazies” came at the end of an exchange with an unnamed colleague.

“Well, you should hear the whacko wing of the GOP. The US is through; too many foreigners sucking the teat; time to hunker down, buy ammo and food, and prepare for the end. The right wing radio shows are scary to listen to,” wrote Lerner’s correspondent.

“And I’m talking about the hosts of the shows,” the colleague wrote. “The callers are rabid.”...

“A**holes”: Turns out Lois Lerner’s not a fan of conservative talk radio or its listeners
...She really is the perfect symbol for federal bureaucracy. Exit quotation from Becket Adams, paraphrasing the Lois Lerner view of reality: “Wow, these right-wing lunatics sure are paranoid, huh? Anyway, how close are we to turning the IRS into a weapon?”

Lois Lerner Warned IRS Employees to “be cautious about what we say in emails”
Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official who cannot provide email records to congressional investigators because of a computer crash shortly after a congressional committee began its probe, warned other IRS employees to be "cautious about what we say in emails" that could be released to Congress....

Lois Lerner’s Former FEC Colleague Has Emails Go Missing Too
The Federal Election Commission recycled the computer hard drive of April Sands — a former co-worker of Lois Lerner’s — hindering an investigation into Sands’ partisan political activities, according to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Sands resigned from the Federal Election Commission in April after she admitted to violating the Hatch Act, which bars executive branch employees from engaging in partisan political activities on federal time and at federal facilities.

The twist is that Sands also worked under Lois Lerner when the ex-IRS agent — who is currently embroiled in a scandal over the targeting of conservative political groups — worked at the FEC’s enforcement division....

Recycled Ploys: Lois Lerner's Former Co-Worker at the FEC Also Had Her Hard Drive Recycled During an Inquiry
"Mr. Bond, we have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."

Liberal billionaires ‘hijacking’ EPA: report
...According to the report, billionaire environmentalists funnel large amounts of money to environmental groups to lobby on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Up From Greenwich
WHEN Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, he did so in an unusual way for a Democrat: As the candidate of the rich. He raised more in large-dollar donations than any of his rivals and raked in more cash from Wall Street than John McCain. In November, he won the upper class’s votes: By 52 percent to 46 percent, according to exit polls, Americans making more than $200,000 cast their ballots for Obama....

Study: Hundreds of rules passed by Obama administration are technically illegal
...Under a 1996 statute, most federal rules are supposed to be reported to the House and Senate in paper form and to the Government Accountability Office electronically. But since the start of 2012, that hasn’t happened for many of the regulations put out by the Obama administration, either because of bureaucratic oversight or because they were considered too minor to be reported.

Failing to report many of the rules is a “technical violation” of the statute, “and the law says they can’t take effect,” according to Robert Cramer, the GAO’s managing associate general counsel.

But there’s another catch: Congress also barred such rules from judicial review. Two federal appeals courts and two district courts have upheld this principle even when the regulation in question was not submitted to Congress as required. Since Congress cannot pass a resolution of disapproval for a rule until it receives it, this means neither lawmakers nor the courts can step in and demand that agencies submit the required paperwork....

The ObamaCare/IRS Nexus: The supposedly independent agency harassed the administration’s political opponents and saved its health-care law.
..Emails viewed by congressional investigators nonetheless showed that Treasury and the IRS remained worried they were breaking the law. An email exchange between Treasury employees in the spring of 2011 expressed concern that they had no statutory authority to deem a federally run exchange the equivalent of a state-run exchange....

Eleanor Holmes Norton says 'you don't have a right to know' what's going on in government ..."You don't have a right to know everything in a separation-of-powers government, my friend. That is the difference between a parliamentary government and a separation-of-powers government," Norton said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing.

It was, to put mildly, a significant departure from the more traditional liberal stance that openness and transparency are must to prevent abuses of power by government officials. Instead the leading advocate for statehood for the District of Columbia literally argued that even the congressional committee charged with oversight shouldn't be asking questions in the first place.

She made the comments while protesting the committee's Republican majority for voting to ignore a claim by the White House that David Simas, director of it's Office of Political Strategy and Outreach, was immune to a congressional subpoena to testify. Republicans believe the office is being used a political campaign operation, a violation of federal election law....

New Zealand: Rape case shakeup on cards this election
...Both major parties claim the current system is not upholding justice for victims, and are looking at changes that would effectively make it easier for prosecutors to obtain convictions.

National wants to explore allowing a judge or jury to see an accused's refusal to give evidence in a negative light, while Labour wants to shift the burden of proof of consent from the alleged victim to the accused....

Meet The Man Who Apologized After Being Falsely Accused Of Rape
...I will continue to be a feminist and an advocate for women’s rights to the best of my capacity.

...You will not harass or threaten the woman making these claims. I am not looking for a mob of people carrying pitchforks on my behalf. If you harass her or go after her in any way, you are not a friend of mine, and you are not a friend of Cards Against Humanity....

Father freed after a decade in jail as daughter admits she lied about him raping her when she was 11 as she was 'disappointed in him'
A 23-year-old woman has told police she lied about her father raping her when she was 11 - accusations that put him behind bars for nine years.

But Cassandra Kennedy, from Longview, Washington, will not be charged as prosecutors fear it could stop others from reporting sexual assaults....

Survey Reveals Unhappy Person Profile: She's 42, Single, and Working
If you were thrown into a random group of white-collar workers and offered a million dollars if you could select the happiest person in that group, what kind of person would you pick? Would you select a man or a woman? Married or single? Children or no children?

Well, according to a new survey released this month, your odds of winning would be increased if you skipped over the 40-something, single, female doctor or lawyer and opted for the middle-aged, married senior manager with a child at home and a wife who works part-time. In its Office Pulse survey, Captivate Network, a media solutions company, says its uncovered "profiles of the happiest and unhappiest workers." And women don't fare so well....

6th Circuit Court: Ex-Judge Wade McCree's conduct 'reprehensible' but immune from lawsuit
Disgraced former Wayne County Circuit Judge Wade McCree, who had an affair with a woman while presiding over her child custody case, got some good news from a federal appeals court this week: He can’t be sued by the child’s father.

That’s what the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in a 24-page decision Monday, stating that while McCree’s actions were “often reprehensible,” he is immune from lawsuits under the long-held doctrine of judicial immunity....

...The courts, meanwhile, have long held that judges can’t be sued by litigants. Sklar said he hopes the U.S. Supreme Court reconsiders....

...Einhorn also applauded the 6th Circuit for upholding the judicial immunity doctrine on McCree’s behalf. ...

Misandry Hat

Have You Ever Beat Up A Boyfriend? Cause, Uh, We Have
...According to a study of relationships that engage in nonreciprocal violence, a whopping 70% are perpetrated by women. So basically that means that girls are beating up their BFs and husbands and the dudes aren't fighting back. With Amy Winehouse busting open a can of whupass on her husband last week, we decided to conduct an informal survey of the Jezebels to see who's gotten violent with their men. After reviewing the answers, let's just say that it'd be wise to never ever fuck with us....

Dear Feminists: This Is Why You Are In Trouble
...You've attacked male sexuality with bloodthirsty abandon, belittling the "male gaze" and objecting to "objectification" - without understanding that objectification is as important to male sexuality as emotional context is to female sexuality. Your relentless fight against "rape culture" has put you at odds with every heterosexual man in the country, as you rampage for the right to only be approached by attractive men, and demonize unattractive men by their "misogyny". Feminism has been responsible for more male sexual guilt that the Catholic Church. But you don't know that, because we stopped talking to you a long time ago....

...But like the 35 year old woman who is still trying to rock a miniskirt, you still think feminism is about equality. No, it is not about equality, and hasn't been for a long time. What you think feminism is and what it does in the real world are two entirely separate things, and your association with an ideology that is, in effect, anti-male, anti-marriage, and anti-freedom of thought is not doing yourselves any good...

The Stupidest Article About Guns You Will Ever Read
...The “types of guns most often recovered from crime scenes and/or used in murders”? Amazingly, they are exactly the same types of guns most often used in defense of one’s person, property, family or nation. Here is the Rolling Stone List of Death:
Pistols
Revolvers (also handguns)
Rifles
Shotguns and…
Derringers
In other words, all guns. Plus Derringers, just for good measure. ...

Teen who sued parents files domestic order against beau
MORRISTOWN, N.J. — Rachel Canning, the teenager who moved out of her parents' home and then sued them for support and college costs, has gotten a domestic violence temporary restraining order against her boyfriend — the man her parents had wanted her to stop seeing....

THE GREAT WAR: THE FIRST GLOBAL JIHAD?
...Christian theologians – of all denominations – appeared to regard the promotion of the war as their sacred duty. Their appeal for sacrifice and martyrdom was communicated in a language that makes some contemporary jihadists appear moderate by comparison. In 1915, Arthur F Winnington-Ingram, the Anglican bishop of London, declared that it was the nation’s duty to mobilise for ‘a holy war’. In one of his sermons he urged British soldiers to ‘kill Germans – do kill them; not for the sake of killing, but to save the world, to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends… As I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as a war for purity, I look upon everyone who died in it as a martyr.’...

You Can't Blame Fracking for Every Natural Disaster
I'm seeing a lot of stories about the link between injection wells and induced earthquakes in Oklahoma, but most of them make the same error. This study had nothing to do with fracking. The injection wells in Oklahoma causing the swarms of small-magnitude earthquakes are actually used for getting rid of wastewater....