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In an e-mail obtained by ABC News, a top staffer for the key Senate Appropriations subcommittee called for a meeting of lobbyists and interest groups that would be affected by expected cuts to the Labor and Heath and Human Services budget. The Jan. 24 meeting was attended by approximately 400 people, sources told ABC, and served as a “call to arms” for those determined to fight Republican budget cuts.

And there you have it.

“We obviously have to cut the budget deficit and address the debt problem, but are we going to do that on the backs of the poor, the unemployed, those without child care, et cetera? That’s the kind of thing that could halt the economic recovery in its tracks.”

Well, yeah, that’s the general idea….

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According to the Daily Mail Online, an immigration officer who worked for the UK Border Agency managed to get his wife out of his hair for three years by putting her name on the no-fly list while she was visiting the in-laws overseas. Officials confirmed on January 30 that the man had confessed to adding his wife’s name to the list after she left for Pakistan, with the result that she was not allowed to get on a plane to come home. Airline and immigration authorities refused to explain to her why she was not being allowed to travel, although I imagine she put two and two together after her immigration-officer husband stopped answering his phone.

Note that this was not a person ‘of British descent’, as they phrase things these days.

The minor lesson is not to employ foreigners from a different cultural tradition in government.

The major lesson is that people will inevitably abuse power, which is why their power needs to be limited to that which is absolutely necessary.

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I am not making this up.

The Advertising Standards Authority – in these benighted short-attention-span days, perhaps one of the most important guardians of the English language – has described the fields of “Natural Preservatives in toiletries” and “Essential Oils” as being “traditional scientific disciplines” and ruled that people qualified in these areas may fairly be described as “scientists”.

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The multinational Task Force 150, to which some 30 navies contribute on a rota basis, has done little to stop the pirates. At any one time there could be a dozen ships on patrol, but this is a vast area, their surveillance is random and even on those few occasions when they could intercept, they do little or nothing.

Our own Royal Navy has shown its muscle only once: in November 2008, a frigate returned fired on pirates who had fired at it, and two of the attackers were killed. But a Ministry of Defence directive since has forbidden RN captains to confront or arrest pirates “for fear of breaching their human rights”.

Perhaps Kenya’s navy has the answer. Its patrol craft covertly operate a shoot-to-kill, take-no-prisoners policy. The Tanzanians almost certainly do the same. The safest ships of all are flying the Russian flag: armed guards aboard them simply blow pirate boats out of the water and leave any survivors to drown. Attacks on Russian vessels have abruptly ceased.

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Arguably, the United States now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in almost any other country, which forces companies to devote enormous time and effort to finding loopholes. Yet the government raises less money in corporate taxes than it once did, because of all the loopholes that have been added in recent decades.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Companies that use loopholes to avoid taxes don’t mind the current system, of course, and they have more than a few lobbyists at their disposal.

And, of course, that wouldn’t matter if lobbyists weren’t so effective, i.e. able to funnel campaign contributions to Congressmen, who then repay the favor by sticking little favors in legislation when nobody who cares is looking.

The problem with the current system is that it distorts incentives. Decisions that would otherwise be inefficient for a company — and that are indeed inefficient for the larger economy — can make sense when they bring a big tax break. “Companies should be making investments based on their commercial potential,” as Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, says, “not for tax reasons.”

No shit. But the problem here is that often legislators are trying to ‘distort incentives’ deliberately, using the tax code for social engineering rather than just a neutral way to raise revenue. Henry Waxman of California, Chuck Schumer of New York, and the late unlamented Ted Kennedy represent poster children for this.

The true paradox of ‘corporate taxes’, of course, which by its nature a writer for the New York Times is not permitted to mention (or even think, I suspect), is that CORPORATIONS DO NOT PAY TAXES, THEIR CUSTOMERS DO. This is obvious to anybody who has an elementary grasp of business, which unfortunately nobody receiving a government (or media) paycheck has.

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Considering becoming a stalker or rapist? There’s an app for that.

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Well, just off the top of my head, I’d say: One who doesn’t want to be robbed, kidnapped, or murdered … all of which have happened recently to Americans in Pakistan.

That’s just a guess, you understand.

And for America, the case risks revealing many awkward truths. Who exactly is Raymond Davis, described by the US as a member of “technical and administrative staff”? What sort of “diplomat” carries a weapon? What was he doing driving alone through Lahore? Was he actually working for a private military contractor, Hyperion? Was he meeting an informer? Such is the panic, that last week the State Department spokesman denied his name was even “Raymond Davis”. Then this week, a spokeswoman for the embassy in Islamabad said Crowley had not denied the name was “Raymond Davis”.

The only awkward truth revealed here is that the American Foreign Service is staffed by an agglomeration of feckless retards, who work for a State Department run by dickless douchebags (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Hil). And anybody with a brain already knew that.

Megan McArdle runs up against government stupidity.

My husband is suffering from a pretty nasty cold.  Last night he had to duck out before dinner with my family to purchase some Sudafed, because he was miserably congested.  Alas, not being aware of the difference, he decided it wasn’t worth waiting in line to buy cold medicine from behind the counter, and instead bought the stuff on the shelf.  He took some, and then suffered through dinner until we could get home to my box of 24-hour Sudafed.  This morning he came down and said, “It’s amazing how much better you feel when you take medicine that actually does something.”  Then after a pause, he said, “So why do they sell you cold medicine that doesn’t do anything?”

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How can you get your own free pass from Obamacare? Maybe you can just donate $27 million to President Obama‘s campaign efforts. That’s what Andy Stern did as president of SEIU in 2008. He has been the most frequent guest at Mr. Obama‘s White House.

Backroom deals have become par for the course for proponents of Obamacare. Senators were greased with special favors, like Nebraska Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson and his Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary L. Landrieu and her Louisiana Purchase. Even the American Medical Association was brought in line under threat of losing its exclusive and lucrative medical coding contracts with the government.

The devil is in the details … grinning back at you as he helps himself to the contents of your wallet. The Obama mask is just his sense of humor.

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Guess Indiana just wasn’t big enough for him.

Don’t think of it as selling out … think of it as buying in.

Freeberg lays it out.

We humans in this day and age don’t have to do a whole lot to stay alive, and we have no natural predators. We’re starting to become idiots.

When I made a list of all the ways our thinking has started to suck green donkey balls, busted them out into their most simplistic elements and eliminated the duplicates, I found the resulting list had exactly thirty items. That seems like a good, round number. Let’s blog it.

Mencius Moldbug does what he does best.

Egypt a century ago, under the firm and inspired hand of Lord Cromer, was a boomtown, a miracle and a paradise. A multicultural paradise, even, with Frenchmen and Brits and Greeks and Jews and Turks and Armenians – all of whom the Century of Fear would later send fleeing with a single suitcase. But as late as the ’30s “Alex” was a city of the civilized world – a place where boho trustafarians, like Lawrence Durrell, would move as if to Prague, just because it was a fun cool cheap place to live. Architecture from this period can still be seen, chipped and obscured by smoke, behind the howling mobs and growling tanks in your YouTube clip.

There are many old Egypts. Stray bits of some survive. But somehow, now, Egypt has offended the gods. They have ordered her to pass through the fire – and slowly. In the last century she got a taste. In this she bids fair to endure the full ordeal. At full heat, even the pyramids will burn. There is nothing, nothing, that politics cannot reduce to ash.

For we have seen this movie before. When the student of history contemplates the “Jasmine Revolution,” applauded deliriously by the entire “international community,” by Americans right and left, Brahmins and rednecks, neocons and paleocons and progressives, post-Trotskyists, post-Maoists and post-Stalinists, not to mention every human being on Earth who has so much as heard of Egypt, all serenading pure chaos with gladiatorial bloodlust – CNN had become so boring lately – the student does not even need to set his time machine. The pattern is simply too familiar. The autopilot can see it. The pony knows his way back home.

But Hamlet can be played by pygmies, and history rhymes even as farce. Mubarak can play Nicholas II, Mohammed El-Baradei can appear in the role of Pavel Milyukov, Charles R. Crane can be performed by George Soros, and Hillary Clinton (who has as I write just knifed Mubarak in the back, a deed which can surprise no one over the age of three) does a marvelous Sir George Buchanan. All the details are different, of course; the thing is the same.

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I understand the impulse — I’ve often wanted to beat BBC employees — but I suspect they had different motives.

Ruh-roh.

In this article, I will show you several examples of where Google’s search is absolutely broken (and by broken, I mean that 10 out of 10 page one search results are entirely fraud). I will also show you exactly how these rankings are achieved and take a look at what the impact on consumer’s may very possibly be. Last but not least, I’ll try to help you recognize these kinds of websites so you can avoid them as they become increasingly difficult to identify.

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U.S. border authorities have arrested a controversial Muslim cleric who was deported from Canada to Tunisia three years ago and was caught earlier this month trying to sneak into California inside the trunk of a BMW, according to court documents.

Said Jaziri, the former Imam of a Muslim congregation in Montreal, was hidden inside a car driven by a San Diego-area man who was pulled over by U.S. Border Patrol agents near an Indian casino east of San Diego. Jaziri allegedly paid a Tijuana-based smuggling group $5,000 to get him across the border near Tecate, saying he wanted to be taken to a “safe place anywhere in the U.S.”

So much for the theory that only Mexicans sneak across the southern border.

Hey, perhaps we ought to bring some of those fine young men back from Afghanistan to guard our own border — and, maybe, you know, like, build a fence or something.

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A man died during a jousting re-enactment when a fragment from his lance flew through his visor and penetrated his eye, an inquest heard.

Very medieval. Henry II of France went much the same way.

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The Washington Post reports that “[President] Obama won’t endorse raising retirement age or reducing Social Security benefits,” scotching rumors that Obama would support the recommendations of his deficit commission to do both those things. Of course, ruling out those two options for Social Security reform means you only have one left: raising taxes, and by a lot.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The international community must hunt the dozen Somali clan chiefs who run the pirate attacks on international shipping in the Indian Ocean, a UN adviser told the Security Council on Tuesday.

Which means that nothing will ever get done, as happens with every such ‘U.N. call’.

The way to get this done is to call Erik Prince at Blackwater and say, ‘Here’s the list. $1,000,000 a head. You can send the body, too, but we’re paying for the head.’ Poof. No pirate problem within about three months.

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Even socialists can be bought — but they don’t come cheap.

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Thanks to some bad (and mostly Democratic) decision-making over in Washington state, major dishwasher detergent manufacturers had to drastically cut its phosphate content; which is why your dishwasher recently and suddenly stopped working properly.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Presumably they won’t be happy until everybody has a dog to lick the dishes clean for them. Hey, it’s organic.

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Hundreds of priests filed into Verizon Center in downtown Washington on Monday morning as contemporary praise music boomed from the speakers.

The arena was packed with thousands of swaying, praying teenagers, many wearing sweat shirts from the Catholic schools they attend or knit hats that said “We believe” or “March for Life.”

The message, of course, is that religion is some sort of huge rock concert; the subtext is that the Catholic Church needs young people more than young people need the Catholic Church.

I guess this accounts for the fact that Catholic congregations are shrinking and religious vocations are drying up. My advice to the kids is to hold out for top dollar.

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No surprises here. Used to be that women could depend on their husbands (however termed) to support them and their children during those periods when they were occupied with growing up. That doesn’t happen any more. Women in these degenerate modern times feel free to dispense their sexual favors without insisting on commitment, and so men feel free to dispense with commitment. “You’re pregnant? Hey, sucks to be you. See you around some time.” Hence the push for a husband-substitute, which in the modern age means the welfare state.

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I’ve spent the past month that I’ve been off from school downtown in the Financial District. I walk past Ground Zero daily, and there are – typically – a gaggle of tourists outside the 9/11 memorial and museum. I can’t say I’ve ever been in, but it looks like a pretty high tech preview of what will be built… eventually, I guess. Seeing as the actual site isn’t even remotely open yet, though, and just this small “museum” exists, you can imagine my surprise to find that “11 staffers at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum each pulled down more than $170,000 in total compensation in 2009, according to the most recent filings. Four execs took home more than $320,000.” Oh, and it gets worse, “[schoolchildren] thought their penny jars and bake-sale proceeds would go toward building a 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero — not the six-figure salaries of nonprofit execs.”

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

vThe NYT has maps showing demographic winners and losers in New York City between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses. By far, the biggest losers are American-born blacks, whose numbers are growing only on the remote peripheries of the city.

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I am not making this up.

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I can see an argument for tolerating abnormality but I can see no rationale for celebrating it.

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“Recently completed testing and data analysis show that E15 does not harm emissions control equipment in newer cars and light trucks,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in the announcement. “Wherever sound science and the law support steps to allow more home-grown fuels in America’s vehicles, this administration takes those steps.”

Especially when the ethanol lobbyists have showered this administration with cash.

Ethanol, while popular in corn-growing regions, faces much criticism from environmentalists, cattle ranchers, food companies and a broad coalition of other groups. Opponents argue that its increased use makes animal feed more expensive, raising prices at the grocery store and disrupting land.

Why should the Environmental Protection Agency care about what environmentalists think? Much less cattle ranchers, food companies, and, oh, people who drive.

The Other McCain nails it, as he so often does.

Liberal women are the active, driving force behind hatred of Sarah Palin, while liberal men’s behavior is passive and manipulative.

One of the necessary consequences of the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman Lifestyle is that it tends to limit women’s procreative capacity. It isn’t merely that feminism’s embrace of the Culture of Death elevates abortion to sacramental status. Rather, it is that feminist notions of Progress require that women foresake (or at least postpone) the love-marriage-motherhood model of happiness in pursuit of careerist equality. Even if a woman does not actually go all-out in following the anti-phallocratic ideology — “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice,” to quote Ti-Grace Atkinson — her pursuit of the career woman lifestyle inevitably restricts her reproductive opportunities.

By the time she finishes college and grad school and establishes herself firmly en route to an upper-middle-class socioeconomic future, the the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman is 30 or older. Even if she could meet Mister Right, she’s not going to abandon her career — for she has been taught to consider life meaningless without a professional career — in favor of domesticity. Ergo, even if she marries and decides she can afford a baby, she’ll have to hire someone to raise it for her while she returns to the job from which she derives her sense of purpose and identity.

Such women are, however, usually skilled enough at math to recognize that their boutique babies — usually just one, but never more than two — will be vastly outnumbered by the offspring of women who aren’t following the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman Lifestyle. Those other women, with their non-elite educations and their unruly broods of children, inevitably appear to the feminist career woman’s mind as The Problem.

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It’s disturbing to think of the federal government’s pressuring and jawboning a private business to reformulate perfectly lawful products, cut prices on some lines of goods, and so forth.

But, hey, that’s the way it is in the Obamanation.

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“To support our practice, we ask patients to pay a low annual membership fee of $199.” For this you can “schedule your appointments online,” “see your doctor on time,” and “email your doctor with questions.”

How many other professional service businesses are there where, on top of the whatever fee the customers pay for the service, the customer has to pay an extra annual fee for the privilege of e-mailing the professional or of having the professional show up on time for meetings? In most other fields, these are the sort of things that are basic courtesy and communication, not something you have to pay extra for. If a college professor asked students to pay him extra to guarantee that he showed up for class on time, or if a lawyer tried to charge extra for communicating with her by email rather than phone or in person, the students or clients would probably think there was something strange going on. But with health care, the baseline customer experience is often so poor that the alternative sounds attractive.

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Abortion is the third pillar of the three great American evils that the democratic party has supported. The first was Slavery, the second was Jim Crow and the third is Abortion (Ironically all three target blacks and/or minorities). The day will come when people shake their heads wondering what folks were thinking for abortion in the same way they do on the others.

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Banfield turned upside down the commonplace notion that wonks were politically neutral problem-solvers.  Rather, he wrote, wonks tend to contribute problems not solutions to the political process.  From their perches in academia and the upper echelons of government, social scientists and policy analysts identify “problems” in need of government  attention.  Regrettably, wonks’ solutions tend to be politically infeasible.  The presidency and the Congress are contentious political institutions that rarely translate wonk ideas into neat policy solutions.

Banfield viewed this situation as a recipe for the endless growth of government and public cynicism as “problems” were declared but never got solved. He encouraged a healthy skepticism toward the wonk-problem-government-solution complex. Government, he thought, needed fewer wonks and more statesmen who would “foster a public opinion that is reasonable about what can and cannot be done to make the society better.” He was right.

Whenever you hear on TV reference to the phrase ‘our X policy’, X refers to an issue into which the government ought not to stick its nose, but will nevertheless, at the prompting of some official who want to get re-elected and figures this is the horse that will carry him (or her) there.

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Thank you, HOV lanes.

Jerry Pournelle weighs in on several subjects.

Meanwhile, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has thrown a state dinner for the man who has imprisoned the winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Another previous Nobel Peace Prize winner was in attendance at this honor. Except for Rush Limbaugh I have heard no comments on this curious anomaly from the media. I suspect that when there is media attention it will be in denigration of Limbaugh for pointing it out. So it goes.

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Actually, we’re not hot on having him as Governor, either, but the alternative was worse.

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[S]tate bankruptcy could even permit a restructuring of the Cadillac pension benefits that states have promised to public employees. These are often “vested” under state law, and in some states, like California, are protected by the state constitution. Under state law, little can be done to adjust them to more reasonable amounts.

A central feature of these promises in many states and municipalities is the capture of both sides of the bargaining table by public employee unions.  It is a classic process described by public choice theory, through which the campaign contributions of a highly motivated subset of voters capture the political offices that negotiate economic terms with that same set of voters-as-employees.  I have sometimes wondered whether a legal theory — far fetched in court, of course, but not so very far from the situation in economic terms — of fraudulent conveyance could be raised against these kinds of negotiations, as a basis for being overturned in bankruptcy.

One of the problems with government is the propensity for corruption whereby those running the government pass laws favoring the politically powerful class, which then rewards those running the government by keeping them in power. In Britain, for example, this was as true for the upper class, when they were in charge of politics (look up the history of the Corn Laws and the Black Act, for example), as for the lower, when the trades unions ran the government in the period between Churchill and Thatcher.

Yet another argument for having government with strictly limited powers. Nobody’s going to bother buying politicians who can’t pay them back with taxpayer money.

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I rarely use ATMs. Here’s one reason why.

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Now, though, another gang of astro-turfing thugs has targeted (yes, targeted) the private home of a real estate developer for the audacity of building a WalMart that will employ up to 1200 DC-area residents.

With unemployment in Washington, DC at 10.2%, it is hard to imagine anyone not wanting to see jobs added. That is, unless that someone is a union that doesn’t like the fact that WalMart operates its U.S. stores union-free.

Look for … the union label….

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Here is the problem, which no one wants to discuss. If we are going to keep raising the debt ceiling, why have it at all? We’ve set ourselves up for an elaborate and cynical kabuki dance with a pre-ordained outcome and, ultimately, no incentive to cut spending.

In fact, it is the adults in the room — the ones who supposedly aren’t speaking enough — who have created the problem. I don’t want those people to speak. I want them to shut the heck up.

They’ve driven up debt. They’ve driven up spending. They’d drive up taxes if we let them. And they know, they absolutely know, that they can do it with impunity because high minded pundits will take to the pages of USA Today and call them adult, back them up, and insist on more debt so we can have more spending. Of course most will fail to mention the “more spending” problem.

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The family of late Polish president Lech Kaczynski who died with 95 others in an April 2010 air crash in western Russia said on Monday that Moscow may have plotted to assassinate him.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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A young Russian woman acclaimed as ‘Norwegian of the Year’ who wrote a book about life as an illegal immigrant in Norway, is being thrown out of the country.

Pretty cold.

Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian prime minister, has acknowledged that many people feel strongly about the girl’s case but said no exceptions can be made.

“We must handle individuals equally and not give them special treatment just because somebody receives a lot of attention,” he told Norwegian media. “If we bend the rules for one person, we will then get thousands of refugees lodging baseless applications for asylum. Nobody wants that.”

Boy, sounds like a tea-partier to me. Let’s get the Obamassiah on the case.

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Another fine day in the Obamanation.

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First off there are many more gadgets available for comparison than primary care doctors for many Americans. While you can hop online and start looking for gadgets at Amazon, Best Buy, eBay and a hundred other locations when you go looking for a new primary physician you need to find one within a reasonable distance from your home and one that is also covered by your health insurance plan which severely limits the scope.

Assuming you did want to do additional research for a healthcare provider, doing so online isn’t nearly as easy as looking up gadget reviews. Some doctors have included “gag orders” in new patient signup forms to prevent online reviews of the doctor. Thankfully we haven’t come across a new gadget license agreement that prohibits bad online reviews.

Further complicating the problem is the fact that most American consumers will gladly post their thoughts on the latest iPod anywhere, but when it comes to talking about medical information we are pretty quiet outside of our close circle of friends.

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Just another fine day in the Obamanation.

The tax increase affects any family that has an HSA or FSA.  Therefore, it is clear violation of President Obama’s oft-repeated promise not to raise “any form of taxes” on any family making less than $250,000 per year.

You mean the Obamassiah lied to us? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Oxymoron alert.

I remember thinking to myself, wow, the BBC makes NPR sound like Fox News.

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Increasing inequality in the United States has long been attributed to unstoppable market forces. In fact, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson show, it is the direct result of congressional policies that have consciously — and sometimes inadvertently — skewed the playing field toward the rich.