Blazing Cat Fur uploaded this new video featuring free speech warriors Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn. It also has funny Canadian commercials!
They talk about Mark Steyn’s new book “After America”.
Tag Archives: Government
Child faces $535 fine and jail time for rescuing baby bird
I am a bird lover, and this story just makes me sick.
Excerpt:
Eleven-year-old aspiring veterinarian, Skylar Capo, sprang into action the second she learned that a baby woodpecker in her Dad’s backyard was about to be eaten by the family cat.
“I’ve just always loved animals,” said Skylar Capo. “I couldn’t stand to watch it be eaten.”
Skylar couldn’t find the woodpecker’s mother, so she brought it to her own mother, Alison Capo, who agreed to take it home.
“She was just going to take care of it for a day or two, make sure it was safe and uninjured, and then she was going to let it go,” said Capo.
But on the drive home, the Capo family stopped at a Lowes in Fredericksburg and they brought the bird inside because of the heat. That’s when they were confronted by a fellow shopper who said she worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“She was really nervous. She was shaking. Then she pulled out a badge,” said Capo.
The problem was that the woodpecker is a protected species under the Federal Migratory Bird Act. Therefore, it is illegal to take or transport a baby woodpecker. The Capo family says they had no idea.
“I was a little bit upset because I didn’t want my mom to get in trouble,” said Skylar.
So as soon as the Capo family returned home, they say they opened the cage, the bird flew away, and they reported it to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“They said that’s great, that’s exactly what we want to see,” said Capo. “We thought that we had done everything that we could possibly do.”
But roughly two weeks later, that same woman from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service showed up at Capo’s front door. This time, Capo says the woman was accompanied by a state trooper. Capo refused to accept a citation, but was later mailed a notice to appear in U.S. District Court for unlawfully taking a migratory bird. She’s also been slapped with a $535 fine.
Why are we paying the government to take away our liberty? Liberty is the power to do what you ought to do. The government subsidizes abortion providers, and then they turn around and fine and maybe even jail 11-year old children who rescue baby birds.
My previous post on bird rescues is here.
John Boehner stands up for spending cuts and job creation
Obama went on television last night to argue for more wasteful spending and higher taxes on job creators. I guess he thinks that 1.65 trillion dollar deficits and a 9.2% unemployment rate is acceptable for working families, as long as he isn’t personally affected by it.
The Wall Street Journal did not like Obama’s speech at all.
Excerpt:
The Obama Presidency has been unprecedented in many ways, and last night we saw another startling illustration: A President using a national TV address from the White House to call out his political opposition as unreasonable and radical and blame them as the sole reason for the “stalemate” over spending and the national debt.
We’ve watched dozens of these speeches over the years, and this was more like a DNC fund-raiser than an Oval Office address. Though President Obama referred to the need to compromise, his idea of compromise was to call on the public to overwhelm Republicans with demands to raise taxes. He demeaned the GOP for protecting, in his poll-tested language, “millionaires and billionaires,” for favoring “corporate jet owners and oil companies” over seniors on Medicare, and “hedge fund managers” over “their secretaries.” While he invoked Ronald Reagan, the Gipper would never have used such rhetoric about his opposition on an issue of national moment.
[…]Apart from shifting blame for any debt default, the speech was also an attempt to inoculate Mr. Obama in case the U.S. loses its AAA credit rating. He cleverly, if dishonestly, elided the credit-rating issue with the debt-ceiling debate. But he knows that Standard & Poor’s has said that it may cut the U.S. rating even if Congress moves on the debt ceiling. Mr. Obama wants to avoid any accountability for the spending blowout of the last three years that has raised the national debt held by the public—the kind we have to pay back—from 40% in 2008 to 72% next year, and rising. This will be the real cause of any downgrade.
Speaker John Boehner made clear in his speech that the GOP doesn’t want a default but wants more genuine cuts in spending. Mr. Obama is betting his rhetoric will cause the public to turn against the GOP, but we wonder if voters will be persuaded by a man whose concept of leadership is the politics of blame.
Thankfully, John Boehner isn’t going to let Obama get away with wrecking the economy any more.
Here’s Boehner’s response:
Obama’s Monday night speech was insulting, deceptive, vindictive and divisive. He doesn’t know how to solve a problem by getting people who are opposed to him to buy into a compromise plan. Instead, he just goes in front of cameras and insults the people he has to work with. That is not the right way to get people to work together. Imagine if a manager in a private company called a press conference to excoriate some people on a different team in that company. Is that any way to get people working together to solve a problem? To point fingers at your co-workers and poison the well? It’s juvenile. Where is his plan? How is he solving the problem?
The only people I see solving the problem are intelligent people like Paul Ryan, John Campbell, Tom Price, Tom McClintock, Mike Simpson, Ken Calvert and Tom Cole. People who work weekends developing solutions. People who understand how to write policies. People with degrees in economics, business and finance. People with private sector experience running businesses and creating jobs. Obama isn’t one of those people. Obama just reads a teleprompter. He doesn’t know how to create jobs – he never did it before becoming President. So why did we elect him?
WINTERY KNIGHT 