Happy New Year, Suckers!

Same Old Same Old  Dept

OregonMuse offers some political predictions :

My predictions for 2015:

1. The progressive agenda will be advanced, either by a little or by a lot
2. The GOP leadership will decide that the current progressive push is not the hill to die on and retreat
3. The GOP leadership will expend more energy and resources fighting conservatives than fighting Democrats.

Of course, these are my predictions every year, and every year I've batted 1000.

Wahoo.

Which just goes to show:  If you have no expectations, at least you’ll never be disappointed!

Related:

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 19:39:20 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Indiana Rube Self-Identifies

Breitbart:

Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) says that House GOP leadership... duped him into switching his vote on the procedural measure that set up the 1,774-page, $1.1 trillion cromnibus spending bill backed by House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama to pass.
...
Stutzman says he switched his vote on the floor because House GOP leadership... promised him that if the rule passed, the cromnibus would be replaced by a short-term spending measure...

...and a pony.  There has to have been a pony!

But no!

‘‘Earlier today, I supported the Rule because I was informed by Leadership that the CROmnibus was dead and a short term CR would take its place,’’ Stutzman said in the statement.   ‘‘I was very surprised and even more disappointed to see the CROmnibus back on the floor.  The American people deserve better.’’

Certainly, ‘‘the American people’’ do.  Too bad that what they’ve got is you.

All of this comes after Boehner and GOP leadership engaged in procedural chicanery to substantively alter a bill... that was supposed to be the cover vote against Obama's executive amnesty for Republicans last week. Instead, leadership inserted language that actually provides a legal justification for Obama's executive amnesty into the bill.

IOW, they’d already lied to you once.

Hellofajob, Marlin!

Elsewhere:
UPDATE (141214):  Chris Muir nails it.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 22:24:18 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Which is why we should keep reminding them, constantly

Daniel Hannan:

Leftists become incandescent when reminded of the socialist roots of Nazism

(Via:  Instapundit)

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 18:11:19 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Shooting Bambi

So the hunt will go ahead:

A city-sponsored deer hunt at Indianapolis’ Eagle Creek Park will proceed this weekend after a judge refused to block the first such hunt in the park’s history.

Marion Superior Judge Robert Altice Jr. denied a request for a preliminary injunction to stop the hunt that could cull as many as 350 deer...

Unfortunately...

The Indianapolis Parks Department teamed up with the Wounded Warriors Outdoors Program for the project.

The veterans, who suffered life-changing injuries while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, were called from across the country to help Eagle Creek reduce its deer population with the weekend-long hunt.

Not unfortunate for the Wounded Warriors (and good on ’em!), but wouldn’t it have been nice if any taxpaying residents with deer tickets could have been included?


Killing the King’s Deer  Dept

Then there’s this:

Because of the way the deer hunting season works, if the lawsuit [had interfered] with the Thanksgiving hunt, the Wounded Warriors would not be able to hunt this year, as the deadline is November 30...

Geez folks, those overpopulated feral deer are a destructive nuisance.  (The ones that hide in Marott Park keep sneaking through the back 40 to eat my hydrangeas.)  Why is there even a time limit?  (The state will let Parks use ‘‘professional hunters’’through the end of January, but wouldn’t some one-weekend special permits have made great Christmas gifts?  And they might have even brought in a little money to help pay for our perennially-indigent ‘‘professional’’.sports.teams (latest subsidy: $16 million).

Of course, changing the rules would require some creative thinking at the state legislature, so...

(And don’t get me started about our dreamer ‘‘migratory’’ Canada geese...)

Related:

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Progressives just can’t help themselves.

Brendan Bordelon:

As last month’s Ebola hysteria tightened its grip on the United States, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins publicly blamed a lack of congressional funding for the global health crisis.  "Frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”

and then, just as I predicted...

[On October 22nd] ...the NIH announced that it will grant $31 million to "enhance diversity in the medical research workforce.”
...
"The biomedical research enterprise must engage all sectors of the population...,” Collins said in a statement.

...because ‘‘engaging’’ all those ‘‘sectors’’ is just as important as maybe doing some genuine research, right?

Zero their g*dd*mn budget!

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 20:34:36 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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They’re called ‘‘fronts’’ for a reason

Glenn Reynolds:

When students go on about social justice, the proper response is to tell them you don’t care what they think, because they don’t know enough to have an intelligent opinion yet.  If universities were run on this principle, the 3% of students responsible for 98% of the idiocy would no longer have their destructive impact.

Unfortunately, that 3% is backed by 98% of the faculty.

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Plenty of opponents

‘‘AML’’ comments at Instapundit:

If I were going to run for President in 2016, my pitch would be to go through each government agency and excise everything that they do that is not ‘‘core’’ to the agency.  No more lesbian obesity work at CDC, no more gun control at NIH, no more global warming at DoD.  You effectively get to shrink government massively without appearing to be shrinking government -- who could be against getting CDC and DoD back on mission?

Okay, I’ll play:

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God knows, they wouldn’t want to work any overtime!

USA Today:

The drums [of ebola-contaminated household goods] needed to be driven to an incinerator 400 miles away, where they would be destroyed.  But getting the appropriate permits from the Department of Transportation took a few days, because the agency needed to draw up permits specifically for Ebola transport, McCallum said.  ‘‘There was no DoT permitting out there because this had never happened before in this country...’’

So much for all that ‘‘emergency preparedness.’’

Elsewhere:

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:03:49 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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That’s ‘‘FUNDAMENTAL Transformation’’ to you!

Politico:

...The Prevention and Public Health Fund, [is] a new series of annual mandatory appropriations created by Obamacare.  Over the past five years, the CDC has received just under $3 billion in transfers from the fund.  Yet only 6 percent—$180 million—of that $3 billion went toward building epidemiology and laboratory capacity...

Instead, the Obama administration has focused the CDC on other priorities.  While protecting Americans from infectious diseases received only $180 million from the Prevention Fund, the community transformation grant program received nearly three times as much money—$517.3 million over the same five-year period.

...cause who cares about disease when there’s transformation to be done! boodle to be passed out.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 15:22:29 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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‘‘Evil Republican funding cuts caused ebola– Oh, wait!’’

The Federalist:

President Obama Already Has An Ebola Czar. Where Is She?
...The federal government not ten years ago created and funded a brand new office in the Health and Human Services Department specifically to coordinate preparation for and response to public health threats like Ebola.  The woman who heads that office, and reports directly to the HHS secretary, has been mysteriously invisible from the public handling of this threat.  And she’s still on the job even though three years ago she was embroiled in a huge scandal of funneling a major stream of funding to a company with ties to a Democratic donor—and away from a company that was developing a treatment now being used on Ebola patients.

Oh, and by the way...

HHS’s 70,000 workers will spend a total of $958 billion this year, or about $7,789 for every U.S. household.

I’m old enough to recall all the posturing when the entire federal budget crossed $100 Billion.

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