I’m curious as to the origin of some ideas from politicians.  The latest from Hillary is that it should be free for anyone to attend a public university.

I have a problem with that – it will cost ~$350 billion dollars, which means we’ll see taxes go way, way up.

And the other problem is the blatant hypocrisy, which Hillary pulls off without shame over and over again.  She criticized “for-profit” universities. (Side note, since when did it become evil to make a profit? that’s how capitalism works HELLO!?)

But in criticizing “for-profit” universities, is she forgetting that she benefited financially from Bill receiving more than $16 million from 2010 to 2014 as honorary chancellor of Laureate Education, a for-profit education company.

I guess they’re not just all Clinton ideas; Bernie Sanders has them, too – make college free, make all entry level jobs pay at least $15/hour.  Why stop at that, give everyone free electric mopeds, free internet, free cable TV.  Profit is evil, we must find people making a profit and stop them (dripping with sarcasm).  Oh wait, hey, maybe we make it a requirement that ex-Presidents cannot be compensated for speeches. #freexpresidentspeeches

Really?! Commemorating the 1 year anniversary of the death of a criminal in Ferguson, MO – really?!?!

What the hell is wrong with our country?  A teen-ager steals cigars from a store, pushes the store owner, then attacks a police officer in his car, goes for the policeman’s gun, runs off, then turns back around and charges at the police officer.

Yes, his family and friends should get together and remember their son and friend on such a day.  But his friend shot at police – that’s how he “honored” his friend.

If someone can find the news of that day or around then, I watched Eric Holder at a press conference, and he said “all lives matter”.  But one week later people were villified for saying that.

I think that poverty of today isn’t like the poverty of the past – in America, our poor people are overweight from the availability of cheap, fast (unhealthy food), so they’re not like the thin, emaciated, starving people of Sudan.  In America, 98% of homes have a color TV, 78% of American teens have a cellphone.  I don’ t mean to make light of people living in poverty, but the quality of life for those living in poverty in America is vastly better than it was in the 1950’s.

Is it because of the expansion of government programs?  It could be.  But when I see that 31% of of the households receiving food stamps earned any income from a job that tells me there’s not enough incentive to work.  I know this firsthand.  When I was in between jobs and collecting unemployment, I had enough money to cover my bills plus a little extra.  Oh and my loving landlord didn’t charge me rent while I was unemployed, which helped a lot.  I thought I’d get the 99 weeks of Obama unemployment, but little did I know at the time, unemployment is state run.  The election of a Republican Governor in NC resulted in changes such that you only get 20 weeks unemployment in NC.  Well, what do you think happened?  When the unemployment ran out, I made getting a job a much higher priority and started a job 4 weeks later.

The moral to this story is when you pay people enough to not work, they’re going to …… wait for it…… drum roll……. not work.  When you give people incentive to work or disincentivize (possibly not a real word) the avoidance of work, they will work.

I saw this article by Charles Camosy, bioethics Professor at Fordham University and thought it was quite interesting.  Below is an excerpt and the link to the full article:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0730-camosy-cecil-the-lion-planned-parenthood-20150730-story.html#page=1

Consider the views of those who care deeply about animal rights. What drives them? Animals are helpless creatures, often subject to terrible violence, and they cannot speak for themselves. Their dignity and value are quite inconvenient for those who want to exploit them, and their needs are pushed to the margins of our culture. Indeed, we are rarely forced to confront the dignity of animals, especially animals we eat. This is what drives the passion of activists in their attempts to speak for voiceless animals. And in their zeal to bring us face to face with animal suffering, tellingly, they regularly use undercover videos. These videos have been quite successful in bringing some terrible realities to light – for example, the conditions of chickens in the worst factory farms.

Anti-abortion activists are driven in similar ways. Prenatal children are also helpless and often subject to terrible violence. They obviously cannot speak for themselves. Their dignity and value are inconvenient for those who want abortion to be broadly legal and who want to use fetal tissue for research. They too are largely invisible, though this is changing because of ultrasound imagery and smartphone applications that can listen to a baby’s heartbeat in the womb. Words like “fetus,” “tissue” and “products of conception” help keep the reality of abortion at bay. But as we have now seen with the Planned Parenthood story, anti-abortion activists have also been successful in using undercover videos in bringing terrible reality to light – what in one setting is called the “products of conception” in another is a “baby bump,” and the antiseptic “tissue” means functioning organs.

This is not to say the two issues are morally equivalent. They aren’t. But the moral dispositions and motivations of animal rights and anti-abortion activists are actually quite similar.

The reductive left-right battle positions assumed this week may not survive much longer, at least on these two issues.  One in five young people in Britain (ages 16 to 24) are on vegan or vegetarian diets, and 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. are disproportionately skeptical of medical research on animals. At the same time, millennials are more likely to be anti-abortion than their elders. According to National Journal, for instance, 52% of 18- to 29-year-olds support banning abortion beyond 20 weeks while only 44% of those over 50 support such a ban.

Instead of animal rights advocates and anti-abortion advocates snarkily dismissing each other, they might find that their similar values can start a sophisticated and useful moral debate. Everyone loses in the culture wars—especially the vulnerable and voiceless.

Charles Camosy teaches bioethics at Fordham University. He is author of For Love of Animals and Beyond the Abortion Wars. Twitter: @nohiddenmagenta

So the IRS, according to the Inspector General has broken the law by paying $18 million in contracts to companies who are delinquent in their tax payments.  What incompetence!

How hard is it to look at a list of delinquent tax paying companies before selecting that company to do business with?  It shouldn’t be hard at all for the IRS.

And we get to look forward to the IRS enforcing Obamacare.