Rick Santelli's Chicago Tea Party |
- Romney Tax Plan Adds $600 Billion to Deficit, Analysis Says
- White House proposes pay increase for federal workers
- Micromanagement Material: Electronic Sleeves Monitor Workers’ Efficiency
- Supreme Court to Decide if Cops Can Raid Homes Based on Drug-Sniffing Dog
- Monsanto spends whopping $2 million in third quarter 2011 lobbying federal government
- Rand Paul alludes to his own future presidential aspirations
- Santorum and the Tea Party crackup
| Romney Tax Plan Adds $600 Billion to Deficit, Analysis Says Posted: 07 Jan 2012 08:15 PM PST By Steven Sloan, The Washington Post Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is heading into the New Hampshire primary faced with a study that says his tax plan would add $600 billion to the federal deficit in 2015. A study released yesterday by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington compared the revenue that Romney's tax-code changes would generate with the revenue the U.S. is expected to collect under current law, which assumes that several income tax cuts will expire as scheduled at the end of 2012. Though the Tax Policy Center said Romney's tax plan would "reduce federal tax revenues substantially," the budget hit isn't as severe as some of his competitors. The same group previously said former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich's tax plan would increase the deficit by $1.3 trillion and that Texas Governor Rick Perry's proposal would boost the shortfall by $995 billion. Romney's proposal "does more changing around the edges than wholesale getting rid of things," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "He would, for instance, maintain the tax on capital income for high income folks, which brings in a lot of money." To read more, visit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/romney-tax-plan-adds-600-billion-to-deficit-analysis-says/2012/01/06/gIQAO0y5eP_story.html |
| White House proposes pay increase for federal workers Posted: 07 Jan 2012 08:09 PM PST
The White House will propose a 0.5 percent pay increase for civilian federal employees as part of its 2013 budget proposal, according to two senior administration officials familiar with the plans. The modest across-the-board pay jump would be the first increase for federal workers since before a two-year freeze began in late 2010. Raises for within-grade step increases and promotions have continued during the freeze. The proposal, which requires congressional approval, differs from Republican plans supported by lawmakers and presidential candidates that would freeze basic pay rates for one more year. Some of those plans also call for denying within-grade raises. In recent weeks, GOP lawmakers have called for extending the pay freeze as a way to pay for a payroll tax extension. But, "a permanent pay freeze is not an acceptable policy," one of the senior administration officials said Friday. "While modest, a 0.5 percent increase reflects the belt-tightening we must do in these difficult times." The officials were unauthorized to speak publicly on the matter, but said that the White House notified agency budget offices about the decision Friday morning so that agencies could complete their 2013 budget requests. To read more, visit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/white-house-proposes-05-percent-pay-increase-for-federal-workers/2012/01/06/gIQA18fyeP_blog.html?hpid=z1 |
| Micromanagement Material: Electronic Sleeves Monitor Workers’ Efficiency Posted: 07 Jan 2012 08:06 PM PST By Dave Mosher, Wired.com Computerized sleeves may soon allow manufacturing bosses to monitor and record workers' moves and mine them for efficiency data. The sleeves are just prototypes for now, but the devices are intended to replace stopwatch-wielding time lords hovering around employees to assess their efficiency. Motion-capture systems (such as those used to animate computer-generated movie characters) might allow Big Brother monitoring on par with the sleeves, but such systems require special computing, expensive video cameras and other impractical elements. So a pair of wearable, breathable electronic sleeves may become the ultimate micromanaging tool. "The present stopwatch method only allows a process organizer to time five individuals simultaneously, depending on the situation," said research manager Martin Woitag of the Fraunhofer Institute in a press release. "Our solution makes it possible to record time simultaneously, even at several workplaces, without requiring additional labor." Each sleeve has a matchbox-sized sensor in the hand, forearm and upper arm. As an industrial worker goes through the motions of assembling something like a circuit board, the sensors record body-part acceleration, angular velocities and positions, and send them to a computer. Special software then combines the data to assess common movements such as reaching forward and backward, grasping objects and releasing them. To read more, visit: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/electronic-sleeve-monitoring/ |
| Supreme Court to Decide if Cops Can Raid Homes Based on Drug-Sniffing Dog Posted: 07 Jan 2012 08:04 PM PST By David Kravets, Wired.com The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide for the first time whether judges may issue search warrants for private residences when a drug-sniffing dog outside the home reacts as if it smells drugs inside. The case, involving a suspected Florida drug dealer, tests the limits of government intrusion into the home. The justices and lower courts have routinely sanctioned search warrants based on drug-detecting dogs responding to packages like airport luggage or vehicles stopped during routine traffic stops. But a private residence is another story. The case pending before the court is made all the more important because the Obama administration already claims there is no privacy in one's public movements outside a private dwelling. The issue is being watched closely by at least 18 states that warned the Supreme Court that the Florida case "jeopardizes a widely used method of detecting illegal drugs" (.pdf). The case tests a decade-old Supreme Court precedent in which the justices have ruled that thermal-imaging devices used outside a house to detect marijuana-growing operations inside amounted to a search and therefore required a warrant. In that case, the high court ruled in 2001 that "rapidly advancing technology" threatens the core of the Fourth Amendment "right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion." To read more, visit: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/scotus-dog-sniffing-case/ |
| Monsanto spends whopping $2 million in third quarter 2011 lobbying federal government Posted: 07 Jan 2012 07:44 PM PST
If you have ever wondered how the biotechnology industry has been able to develop the cozy and unquestioning relationship with the federal government that it has today, you need not look much further than Big Biotech’s lobbying expenditures. According to a recent Bloomberg Businessweek report, biotech giant Monsanto spent a whopping $2 million just in the third quarter of 2011 lobbying the federal government to support its agenda. One of its loftiest lobbying seasons on record, Monsanto’s Q3 payoffs to our so-called public servants in Washington has kept the wheels greased, so to speak, for expanding its monopoly on patented agriculture. This multi-million dollar bribe from the world’s most evil company (http://www.naturalnews.com/030967_Monsanto_evil.html) will help ensure that genetically-modified (GM) alfalfa, for instance, avoids running into any more regulatory roadblocks, even though the crop is useless, and will only serve to contaminate the entire food supply (http://www.naturalnews.com/GM_alfalfa.html). According to a disclosure filed by Monsanto on Oct. 18, the company has been lobbying both Congress and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to weaken regulatory requirements for both GM sugar beets and alfalfa, which have been a primary focus for the company throughout the past year. Monsanto is also spending millions to ensure that its patents on various other GM crops remain in place for years to come. To read more, visit: http://www.naturalnews.com/034583_Monsanto_lobbying_Congress.html |
| Rand Paul alludes to his own future presidential aspirations Posted: 07 Jan 2012 07:31 PM PST By Alexis Levinson, Daily Caller CONCORD, N.H. – While campaigning for his father in New Hampshire, Sen. Rand Paul declined to directly address his own presidential aspirations, but suggested that a future run for national office could be in the cards. "I am interested in the national debate … I am interested in long range goals of changing the country…" the younger Paul said when asked about his presidential aspirations at a sit-down hosted by the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy. One of the ways to see those changes through, he said, was "running for national office." "You do that by appearing in the media, speaking to groups around the country, running for national office, or even serving in the Senate. I think it's a great honor to serve in the Senate, he said." To read more, visit: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/07/rand-paul-alludes-to-his-own-future-presidential-aspirations/ |
| Santorum and the Tea Party crackup Posted: 07 Jan 2012 07:14 PM PST By Michelle Goldberg, Reuters It's easy to read too much into Rick Santorum's stunning finish in the Iowa caucuses after months of dismal poll numbers. In some ways he won by default, emerging as the last conservative candidate standing because no one took him seriously enough to attack him. Nevertheless, by virtually tying with Mitt Romney, he has become the leading conservative alternative in the race. And that should put to rest the exhausted conventional wisdom that the American right is primarily motivated by a desire for small government. Because Rick Santorum sure isn't. Since the Tea Party burst onto the political scene in 2009, we have heard over and over again that the revolt against president Obama was driven by anxiety about government expansion. Because conservatives told pollsters they were most concerned about fiscal issues, conventional wisdom hyped the belief that the culture wars were passé. In Politico, for example, Ben Smith wrote that the Tea Party had "banished the social issues that are the focus of many evangelical Christians to the background." Certainly, Tea Party voters wanted to shrink government spending and lower taxes. That's perfectly in line with the ideology of the religious right, which holds that families and churches should provide the social safety net. According to Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition's main legislative goals in 1994 and 1995 were tax cuts for middle-class families with children and balancing the budget. And fifteen years later, polls showed that the Tea Party was largely the old Christian right in a new guise. A September Public Religion Research Institute survey found that three quarters of Tea Partiers describe themselves as Christian conservatives, while only a quarter identify as libertarians. The Tea Party-inspired House prioritized anti-abortion legislation even when it meant raising taxes, championing a bill that would have ended current tax breaks for individuals and small businesses buying health care plans that cover abortion, as the vast majority of plans now do. Nevertheless, the notion of the Tea Party as a libertarian force endured. Santorum's emergence as the anti-Romney, though, should make it impossible to ignore the fact that many on the right, including large numbers of self-described Tea Partiers, want more government control of our lives, not less. According to a CNN entrance poll, Santorum won a plurality of Iowa Tea Party sympathizers—64 percent of voters overall—with 29 percent, followed by 19 percent each for Romney and Ron Paul. He's getting at least some Tea Party support in New Hampshire, winning the endorsement of Jerry DeLemus, chairman of the Granite State Patriots Liberty PAC. This despite the fact that Santorum has often disparaged limited government. In 2005, for example, he told NPR that conservatives who have taken a "Goldwaterish libertarian point of view when it comes to the interaction of government in people's lives" have done so "to the determent of the country." To read more, visit: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/01/06/santorum-and-the-tea-party-crackup/ |
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