Tag: news

“Optimistic scenario: it’s $1 trillion in unfunded liabilities,”
says Adrian Moore,
vice president of policy at Reason
Foundation about public-sector pensions at the state, county,
and local levels. “More realistic scenario: You’re looking at $2
trillion to $4 trillion in unfunded liabilities. That’s a
huge debt.”

Over the past dozen or so years, Moore tells Reason TV’s Nick
Gillespie, state and local governments have allowed their payrolls
be taken over by pension obligations. Rising pension costs have
been a key factor in municipal bankruptcies across the country.

Click above to watch or click the link below for more
information and downloadable links.

View this article.

If you need any further
evidence of the stupidity of turning a right that you can exercise
at will into a privilege that requires official permission and
paperwork, cast your eyes on the case of Scott Lazurek and the
bureaucratic battle being waged over his gun permit. In a dispute
that a Connecticut prosecutor describes as a “nothing case,”
Lazurek was arrested because he apparently got sick of
papers-please hassles and declined to show his permit to openly
carry a gun to West Haven police. Now one Connecticut government
agency is
suing another, and Lazurek has become a cause celebre for gun
rights advocates, as well as a lightning rod for bureaucratic
idiocy.

It all started on June 2, 2013, when Lazurek, a security guard,
and another man walked along the West Haven boardwalk with
holstered guns on their hips. Two security guards from a competing
employer police officers stopped the men and demanded to see
their pistol permits. Lazurek refused, and was arrested. Among his
possessions the government employed security guards found his
pistol permit.

When the court dismissed the case a month later, prosecutor John
Barney himself
downplayed Lazurek’s alleged offense.

“It kind of was a nothing case. He had no record. He’s a
security guard. All it boiled down to was he had a valid permit to
carry. There were no issues; he wasn’t doing anything wrong with
it. When police officers approached him and said to show it, he was
just stubborn with letting them see it. So they arrested him on
interfering because he was giving them a hard time.”

The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, so it took the state
Board of Firearms
Permit Examiners until July of this year to hold a hearing on
the matter and until August 1 to give him back his permit.

Remember, Lazurek had threatened nobody. He was arrested only
for failing to produce a piece of paper which legally allowed him
to do as part of his job what the people arresting him were also
doing as part of their jobs—carrying a pistol openly.

So, a year-plus later, he got his permit back.

That pissed off the state Department of Emergency Services and
Public Protection. That agency objects that Lazurek is not a
“suitable person” to be allowed a pistol permit because “at the
hearing, Lazurek testified that gven the same set of circumstances
he would respond in the same fashion and would again refuse to
enable officers to ascertain whether he was legally carrying his
weapon.” Or so they say in the lawsuit
filed by the Department of Emergency Services and Public
Protection against the Board of Firearms Permit Examiners and
Lazurek.

Hey, Lazurek didn’t show due deference to competing security
guards, and he insisted that carrying a gun is a right—he’s
definitely not a Department of Emergency Services and Public
Protection kind of guy.

The Connecticut Citizens Defense League is raising money
to help Lazurek, who is a member. But watching two Connecticut
state agencies battle in court (with taxpayer money) would just be
good sport—if their tussle didn’t involve granting permission to
people to exercise their rights.

From declaring Ebola the “largest
epidemic in history” to promoting “shared interest and shared
ideals,”
Vice President Joe Biden was his old platitudinous,
gaffing self at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
yesterday. But he did—correctly—contradict
his boss, arguing that America faces “no existential threat”
from violent extremism.

The Hill
reports:

Imploring students to keep the threat posed by violent
extremists “in perspective,” Biden said that although the country
must remain vigilant, terrorists did not fundamentally challenge
“our way of life or our security.”

“Let me say it again: We face no existential threat—none—to our
way of life or our ultimate security,” Biden said. “You are twice
as likely to be struck by lightning as you around to be affected by
a terrorist event in the United States.”

And, incidentally, nine
times more likely to be killed by police than by
terrorists.

But Biden’s wellspring of perspicacity quickly ran dry, making
no mention that the greatest threats to the American way of life
can be found right here at home.  The Transportation Security
Administration routinely and
pointlessly violates basic tenets of human decency. The
National Security Administration nonchalantly tramples
on the privacy rights of everyone—including those of its
loudest supporters. Even attending an NFL game these days is an
exercise in intrusive
security theater. All in the name of protecting us from
admittedly unlikely threats. 

Biden also cited responses to past terrorist attacks as a
testimony to American perserverance: 

We didn’t crumble after 9/11. We didn’t falter after the Boston
Marathon. But we’re America. Americans will never, ever stand down.
We endure. We overcome. We own the finish line. 

Biden may not have crumbled or faltered, but civil liberties
certainly did.
While many people were busy cheerleading the militarized show of
force in Watertown, Massachusetts, after the Boston Marathon
bombing,
others were appalled at the wholesale abrogation of
constitutionally-protected rights at the hands of armored cops
astride armored vehicles. It took a Ferguson for people
to start questioning if we really need a
chicken in every pot and an
MRAP in every garage.

While ISIS itself might not be an “imminent
threat to every interest we have,” the threat of
ISIS and other chimerical terrorist groups is. Perhaps Biden will
evolve on that issue also. I’m not holding my breath.

We are living in what is
widely acknowledged as the Golden Age of television. What began as
a trickle of captivating, intelligent, and creatively challenging
series such as NYPD Blue and Oz became a
flood with The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The
Wire. Now we’re drowning in an ocean of Mad Men,
Game of Thrones, Orange Is the New Black, and
House of Cards. Every month it seems a new jolt of
inspiration appears from HBO, FX, AMC, Netflix, Amazon, and ever
more unexpected corners of the media universe.

How did we get here from the bad old days of the idiot box?
Television became truly great when it ceased being television,
writes Senior Editor Peter Suderman, thus escaping the rules,
regulations, conventions, and tastes that for decades kept the boob
tube boring, stupid, and safe.

View this article.

Does the news these days make you feel like
Winnie
the Pooh, stumbling toward the Apocalypse? You are not alone,
brother. Which is why tonight’s theme episode of The
Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT,
with re-airs three and five hours later) dives right into the Fear,
interrogates it, embraces it, and fights back with some hard-won
rationality.

“Apocalypse How?” stares into the abyss with the following tour
guides:

* R. James
Woolsey, Jr., the 16th director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, former under-secretary of the Navy, 1980s nukes negotiator,
and all-purpose alarm-sounder. Woolsey will assess (yet
again!) the threat of ballistic nukes from rogue states, and

scare the crap out of you about the looming EMP threat (sample
mongering: “within 12 months of a nationwide blackout, up to 90% of
the U.S. population could possibly perish from starvation, disease
and societal breakdown”).

* K.T.
McFarland, former Reagan-administration deputy defense
secretary, who will talk about the nexus between failed states and
nuclear weapons (in other words, Pakistan).

* Dr. Manny
Alvarez, resident Fox News doctor guy, who will describe how
Ebola can and cannot wipe out populations, and whatever nasty
viruses we should be skeered of.

* Harvard economist and occasional Reason
contributor Jeffrey
A. Miron, who will assess the possibilities of a U.S. debt
crisis, and the pros and cons of hoarding various metals.

* Ridiculously
over-accomplished scientist and backyard tinkerer Travis Taylor,
star of Rocket City
Rednecks, who will describe the human race’s vulnerability
to asteroids, super-volcanoes, and alien invasions.

* Beloved New York Times science writer John Tierney, who will coo
soothingly and tell us to relax already about looming
civilizational collapse.

You’ll learn, you’ll laugh, you’ll get a thousand dollars worth
of ones and fives ready, just in case….

Follow The Independents on Facebook at http://ift.tt/QYHXdB,
follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and
click on this page
for more video of past segments.

Is there anything more distasteful than the
obviously strategic use of babies by the rich and powerful to gild
their images—and the media’s feckless complicity in the spectacle?
Whether it’s the British royal family constantly pushing the
toddler Prince George toward the camera or breathless reports of
Hillary Clinton’s newfound “grandmother
glow,” can we just change its diaper, give it a pacifier, and
put it to sleep already?

Tough questions I dare to ask in a new
column at Time.

Hillary is missing no opportunity to publicly play at
grandmother, a role that can only soften and round out her image as
the presidential campaign season swings into high gear. “I
highly recommend it,” she told CBS News about becoming a
grandparent. At a
recent speech to a group of women real estate agents, a
member of the audience told Clinton that she looked “beautiful.” To
which Clinton responded, “I think it’s a grandmother’s glow.”

Or maybe it’s
the fire of political ambition lighting up her cheeks. As far back
as June, she was systematically linking her grandchild to world
events, telling People,
“I’m about to become a grandmother… I want to live in the moment.
At the same time I am concerned about what I see happening in the
country and in the world.”

OK, we get it. The kid is a prop in a political play. The baby
doesn’t just soften you up, Mrs. Clinton, it softens us up, too.
Which may actually be excellent public relations but is also deeply
disturbing.

Read
the whole thing.