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My Cato friends Michael Tanner and Chris Edwards break-down the $956 billion Farm Bill for you. Don’t believe anything the media puts out saying this is a cut. Check-out the chart below. A 49% increase is not a cut. And while Republicans rant and rave about food stamps let’s not forget about the gigantic food lobby getting fat at the trough. As Tanner points out here:
After all, while no one would deny that farming can be a difficult and sometimes precarious way of life, farmers generally are not suffering. In 2013 the average farm household had an income of $104,525. In 2011, the most recent year a direct comparison is available, farm-household incomes were 25 percent higher than the average for all U.S. households, and this gap has only increased since. Moreover, much farm aid goes not to small family farms but to giant agri-business. Among the biggest recipients of farm subsidies are Tysons Food, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Riceland Foods, none of which are likely to be the subject of a Lifetime TV movie anytime soon. In fact, roughly a third of subsidies in the last farm bill went to the wealthiest 4 percent of farmers.
And about those cuts. Edwards writes:
However, the 2014 farm bill is not a cut at all when compared to the 2008 farm bill, which was projected to cost $640 billion over 10 years. That is a 49 percent spending increase.
Sure, the new bill shuffles the farm subsidy deck chairs, but the bill’s main budget attribute is that it ratifies the huge recent increase in food stamp spending. The House bill had proposed trimming a modest $39 billion (5 percent) from food stamps, but Republican leaders caved in and agreed to just a token 1 percent trim in the final bill.
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Dave Hammer is my oldest friend in the investment industry and an expert on many subjects, including shotguns. Our featured video Shotgun Joe Biden provides both humor and some truly scary advice from the vice president. Here Mr. Hammer provides some shotgun techniques that you can actually use.
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and lined up at a 45 degree angle to where you think the target will appear. No matter what your target, it is moving. So you have to be able to twist your body quickly. If you were to stand facing the target as in pistol shooting, you’ll end up flat on you back. Conversely, if your chest is 90 degrees to the target as in archery, you would have plenty of stability against the recoil but you couldn’t turn.
Don’t aim! Just point. Some shot guns have no sights, some have two and most just one at the muzzle end. Look along the top of the barrel as you point. Many shotguns have a ribbed ramp to assist in keeping the barrel straight at the target. Since you are able to look along the top of the barrel, the front end is at least 1/4 inch higher than the near end. So point low, just below where you want to hit. If your gun has two sights the size of small BB’s, point so that the front bead should appear sitting on the rear bead, and the center of the target sitting on the front bead. Think snowman.
Unlike still-target shooting, don’t be easy on the trigger. Fire as soon you’ve moved the gun slightly below and ahead of the target but don’t pause to shoot. Move through the target. When you make the turn, the gun should not change position relative to your shoulder and cheek. Keep the gun snug at those two places. Keeping your elbows out away from your body helps.
Keep both eyes open during pointing and firing and keep your weight on your front foot by leaning slightly forward and bending your front knee.
Don’t load until you’re ready to shoot and be sure to wear earplugs. Keep the breech open until you’re ready to fire.
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Last year the so called smart guys said bonds were dead. They must have forgotten that stocks don’t go up forever. In January the Dow dropped 5%, but Vanguard GNMA gained 2%–a spread or difference of 7%. Not a bad start to the year for Vanguard GNMA.
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TSA—the $60 Billion Union Monster
Since 2002, taxpayers have forked over more than $60 billion for TSA. With 65,000 employees, TSA is now larger than the combined forces at Departments of State, Labor, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development. Furthermore, air travelers are still obliged to go through the loathed full-body scanners, which, at $150,000 a pop, are “unable to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat.” Read here Charles C. W. Cooke’s take on the powerful, unionized TSA, whose actions are to “accomplish nothing” other than “to make the government look like it is on the job.”
The federal government has spent more than $60 billion on the TSA since 2002, a sum that has helped the outfit mushroom into the employer of some 65,000 people — more than the combined forces of the Departments of State, Labor, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development. A congressional report from 2012 aptly labeled the congregation “an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy,” mostly interested in “consolidating power,” and a few months later, as if to grimly prove the point, the agency secured for itself a union contract via the American Federation of Government Employees. The first order of business naturally was to establish that annual leave be calculated not on anything as prosaic as job performance but instead on good old-fashioned seniority, the patron saint of inefficiency and inertia.
One can rather understand why the TSA’s bumptious stiffs were so keen to break the link between the security of their positions and the security of the public: They are doing nothing, and they know it. Here, incompetence is a feature not a bug — the foreordained product of a vast and intricate confidence-laundering operation that would have made the Wizard of Oz blush. Vanity Fair’s Charles C. Mann explained candidly in 2011 that the TSA’s actions are explicitly set up to “accomplish nothing,” and “designed” instead “to make the government look like it is on the job.”
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 Here Al-Jazera America explains the deterioration in Iraq and the shocking fact that Iraq does not have a single fighter plane to defend its air space.
When President Barack Obama told Americans the United States was wrapping up its military footprint in Iraq after seven years of bloodshed, more than 4,000 U.S. troop deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars spent in a war he opposed, he made clear that “violence will not end with our combat mission,” and vowed that the U.S. would “provide support for the Iraqi people as both a friend and a partner.” To that end, the White House expected to leave behind a transitional force of around 50,000, but failure to reach agreement guaranteeing U.S. troops immunity from Iraqi prosecution resulted in a full withdrawal before the end of 2011. Two years later, both countries are struggling for a response to the surge of Al-Qaeda fighters from neighboring Syria into the western Iraqi province of Anbar, where they captured Ramadi and Fallujah.
For Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the images of insurgents firing into the air and flying Al-Qaeda’s black flags underscore the case he has made for years that his government needs more and better weaponry from the U.S. to counter extremists. “Hard as it is to believe, Iraq doesn’t have a single fighter jet to protect its airspace,” Maliki wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times last year, in which he also urged the U.S. to supply attack helicopters and higher-grade weapons.
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I am in print as against the Iraq war from day one. Former national security advisor Stephen Hadley makes the case that the Iraq war was indeed worth fighting. Here the Cato Institute’s Chris Preble outlines Mr. Hadley’s case, I did not buy the Bush/Cheney/Rice reasoning from the beginning. As Mr. Preble points out here, neither did most Americans.
Former Bush national security adviser Stephen Hadley took to the Wall Street Journal’s op ed pages last week to try to make the case that the Iraq war was worth fighting.
The particulars of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny are familiar:
two wars against his neighbors resulting in about a million deaths; brutalization of his own people killing tens if not hundreds of thousands; use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds; lifelong support for terrorism; open defiance of the U.N. Security Council….
Leaving Saddam in power would have badly undermined the credibility of the U.N. and the U.S. As Iran—Saddam’s mortal enemy—restarted its nuclear program after 2005, Saddam would have resuscitated his own, igniting a nuclear-arms race. Saddam would likely have intervened in the uprising against Syria’s Bashar Assad, fanning the sectarian conflict that now threatens much of the Middle East.
The removal of Saddam opened up a very different possibility: an Iraq in which Sunni, Shiites, Kurds, Christians and other minorities would work together to build a democratic and peaceful future…
Notably, Hadley does not repeat all of the claims made by others in the Bush administration in the run-up to the war.
For example, he does not allege that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda terrorists, including those individuals directly involved in the 9/11 attacks (recall Dick Cheney’s assertion that Mohamed Atta had met with “a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service” in Prague; Cheney subsequently denied making any such connections between Iraq and 9/11). Instead, Hadley explains that al Qaeda took advantage of the chaos that ensued in Iraq after the invasion and overthrow of Hussein.
Hadley does not contend that Hussein had a functioning nuclear weapons program (in contrast to Condoleezza Rice’s warning that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”; or Bush’s famous “sixteen words” about Iraqi yellowcake), and Hadley’s prediction that Hussein would have restarted one after 2005 is purely speculative, and ignores the possibility that Iran restarted its program in response to the U.S. invasion.
Hadley’s bottom line, however, is the same as Cheney, Rice, and Bush’s: the war was worth fighting.
Related video:
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It took snipers 19 minutes to knock out 17 transformers last year at PG&E Corp.’s Metcalf, California transmission substation. The attack is “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred,” said form Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman Jon Wellinghoff. He, along with FERC officials, the FBI and experts from the U.S. Navy’s Dahlgren Surface Warfare Center which trains with SEAls concluded it was a professional job. As reported in The WSJ by Rebecca Smith:
”This wasn’t an incident where Billy-Bob and Joe decided, after a few brewskis, to come in and shoot up a substation,” Mark Johnson, retired vice president of transmission for PG&E, told the utility security conference, according to a video of his presentation. “This was an event that was well thought out, well planned and they targeted certain components.” When reached, Mr. Johnson declined to comment further.
A spokesman for PG&E said the company takes all incidents seriously but declined to discuss the Metcalf event in detail for fear of giving information to potential copycats. “We won’t speculate about the motives” of the attackers, added the spokesman, Brian Swanson. He said PG&E has increased security measures.
Utility executives and federal energy officials have long worried that the electric grid is vulnerable to sabotage. That is in part because the grid, which is really three systems serving different areas of the U.S., has failed when small problems such as trees hitting transmission lines created cascading blackouts. One in 2003 knocked out power to 50 million people in the Eastern U.S. and Canada for days.
Many of the system’s most important components sit out in the open, often in remote locations, protected by little more than cameras and chain-link fences.
Transmission substations are critical links in the grid. They make it possible for electricity to move long distances, and serve as hubs for intersecting power lines.
Within a substation, transformers raise the voltage of electricity so it can travel hundreds of miles on high-voltage lines, or reduce voltages when electricity approaches its destination. The Metcalf substation functions as an off-ramp from power lines for electricity heading to homes and businesses in Silicon Valley.
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That was the message the great John Stossel delivered to a sold out Cato/Naples Ritz throng yesterday. The real people were in attendance in full force, and they are deadly focussed on ridding the country of the Obama plague that has brought America to such a desperate state. Our friend and Cato scholar Jim Harper told a horrified, packed ballroom how NSA is logging all of our phone call data and storing it for years. America’s #1 constitutional scholar, Roger Pilon, explained that the Obama administration has in place a staggering 300 executive branch agencies all focussed on progressive policies of income re- distribution and central government control and regulation. And if you have never seen John Stossel in person, you want to. What a great guy, surprisingly low key and warm. It is no surprise that John’s new book is such a success.
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At Cato/Naples, Debbie and I and a packed house of about 500 anti-big government citizens listened to Cato’s Pat Michaels explain the problems with bad science and the oversell of global warming. Here Pat lays out the shocking story: politics, bad science and a misled world.
“…the average man in the street, a sensible chap who by now can smell the signs of an oversold environmental campaign from miles away, is beginning to suspect that it is politics rather than science which is driving the issue.”
The scientific establishment has painted itself into a corner over global warming. Paltridge’s explanations for this are depressingly familiar to those who read these columns.
Science changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the reward structure in the profession began to revolve around the acquisition of massive amounts of taxpayer funding that was external to the normal budgets of the universities and federal laboratories. In climate science, this meant portraying the issue in dire terms, often in alliance with environmental advocacy organizations. Predictably, scientists (and their institutions) became addicted to the wealth, fame, and travel in the front of the airplane
Related video:
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