tvc184

Hmmm.....   Jefferson County Clerk Carolyn Guidry tells us that the ES&S Ivotronics voting machines used by the county have in some cases repeatedly lost calibration. Guidry says her office has received complaints that voters who tried to cast a "straight party" ballot have reviewed their selections to find that the machine has switched their votes to the other party. 

From USA Today (not exactly a Tea Party publication):   "New guidelines from the Obama administration would restrict the movement of people at high risk of Ebola................."   From Huffington Post (more like a GOP hate group:   "In his remarks, Mr. Obama defended the C.D.C. guidelines............"   And why not on all of these and others. After all, the CDC is part of HHS which is an administration cabinet level agency. In other words, the head of the HHS and CDC work directly for the president in his personally selected cabinet just as much as the Attorney General or the Secretary of Defense. 

Statistics can be played with according to how you present the argument while looking at exactly the same stats. 

  So the Obama administration is putting in rules for political purposes and it has nothing to do with sound medical practices.   I can accept that. 

Yet again the CDC has changed its Ebola stance saying that people should stay home if it high risk, even without symptoms and unknown if the virus is present in the person.    I thought they were never contagious even with a low grade fever until it passes some magical number like 103. Now with no symptoms they want people to stay home.   Therein lies the problem with their protocols and recommendations. The head agency that claims to be and is supposed to be on top of it all, is continually changing. 

Easy to love something when someone else is paying the bill.    I wonder if I can get a new car to replace my 9 year old Hyundai and have some else pay for it......... 

  I don't think most people are freaking out. They are asking for the correct procedures be put in place before there is a reason to freak out.   It is great to say that no one has died here that has caught it here. We have four hospitals in the entire country with limited space for such quarantines. What happens if it gets into the public for real? What happens if 5,000 people get it? We simply do not have beds nor the resources for $1 Million in treatment for 5,000 people and then quarantine the maybe 200,000 people they came into contact with.   I think what you claim is freak out is people asking for the government to get their act in order, ban the flights, quarantine or restrict movement of people returning, actually training the medical field and putting known protocols in place, etc. Look at almost every health professional commenting on these limited incidents and you will see almost every one of them say that the CDC guidelines are all over the map and keep changing. It sure doesn't look like they have their act together and that is what people are concerned over, not the three people that have caught it here and due to the extreme limited number, can have private care and be flown across the country on secure jets. 

  I have no problem with such a law as it pretty much fits the definitions under most criminal laws of reckless or with criminal negligence. To my knowledge no such laws exist however.    There are some laws on the books in some states I believe that say if you have a disease but I have no clue if any exist that say if you have possibly been exposed and may have it sometime in the future. 

  Does "merit" equal legal or constitutional?

  There would be a lot of disbarred attorneys then....   Maybe not a bad thing.    Actually it is a good question. If someone claims that you are exposed to a disease (any disease), what authority does the government have to force you to be locked up inside of your home for almost a month? It does not matter what you "should" do but what the law can "force" you to do. 

Assault? Sounds more like an aggravated robbery. Maybe robbery and assaults run in the family.

  It was smart politically because she went from a nobody to a national media darling.    Had you asked a year ago who Wendy Davis was, I doubt you would get 3% of the people having a clue who she was and that is inside of TX. Let there be no doubt that her run for governor is based directly off the publicity from that stunt.    Merely saying that 60% of the public was for the bill doesn't matter as almost any Democratic candidate would have to toe the same party line. The only difference is which face to plaster on the election posters and that move made it her face. 

The race card has a long way to go before it loses its luster. 

    Yes if it can be proven that they lied. Sometimes in investigations people are not really lying but looking at it from a different angle or get a glance and think they see something.    A couple of weekends ago I fish with a couple of Missouri state police homicide investigators (lead agency in the investigation) that are friends of mine. They ran down the incident to me. I can see where some people made claims that might have been completely correct but were taken out of context. Just for an example, let's say that a witness turns just in time to see the shots and see Brown with his arms in the air. That might be a fact. What is not known from that person's viewpoint is what does it mean. Were his hands in the air and he was begging for his life and surrendering or was he charging Wilson and reaching up to grad for his head or pistol or was he perhaps throwing his hands in the air like "what's up dude, are you going to shoot me?"?     That is the problem with eyewitness testimony as opposed to physical evidence. I have seen investigations where police officers were wrong but not intentionally. We had a fatal accident many years ago and an off duty officer from out of state (here on vacation fishing the coast) said the car that caused the accident came roaring out of a business driveway and caused the accident. He did not lie and he saw what actually happened with the car coming too fast out of the parking lot.... but he was wrong. What he saw did not fit the evidence we found at the scene but we had to look at his statement because there was no reason for him to lie and he was a trained observer. The problem is that he saw part of a sequence of events. The car that he saw throwing gravel in a parking lot was in fact there but it was not from reckless driving from that vehicle. Through another witness and the skid marks on the street we were able to piece it together. Another vehicle drove into the oncoming lane while trying to pass on a curve and almost hit the second vehicle head on. The driver of this second vehicle naturally swerved to keep from being killed and hit the gravel in the parking lot. That caused him to lose control and spin back into the road, causing the fatal accident.    The driver that the officer saw that appeared to be reckless driving (and what he saw indicated that) but he did not see it about three seconds earlier because if he had, he would have seen the at fault vehicle commit that act that caused someone to be killed by passing on a curve into oncoming traffic. Again, the officer did not lie and his story was entirely correct but from his one perspective he drew a conclusion that he saw with his own eyes.    That is why you need to look at the entire incident and not only eyewitnesses or a set of circumstances like one guy was unarmed. Taken alone it can render a conclusion that is completely false but are the people that see something telling a lie?    Maybe not. They are seeing a snapshot in time. 

Wendy Davis kind of reminds me of a community organizer running for office.    You look at her credentials and ask, what has she done? Oh, she was a city council member and a two term member of the TX legislature. Her big claim to fame in politics? She filibustered new rules on abortions that eventually passed. She is a political opportunist that sways with the wind.   In that same thinking, anyone that doesn't believe that her filibuster was nothing more than her opening campaign for governor is playing ostrich and putting their head in the sand and ignoring the obvious. It was a smart move as she was a nobody and got national attention for that stunt. But when you get down to it, what else is she other than a good looking woman that wanted to make a big splash? Her accomplishments are.... what? A filibuster?   Oh yeah, and she is a victim. When she lost her first run at the city council of Fort Worth, she sued three media entities including a newspaper because she didn't like their First Amendment right to say that they didn't endorse her. She didn't think it was fair that they sided with the other candidate. It was naturally thrown out of court but I am sure she loves the "victim" game.    Yep, sounds like a community organizer. 

  We have often said in politics that "both sides do it" (mudslinging, propaganda, false claims, swaying polls, etc.) and for the most part it is correct.   I have yet to see any mudslinging in this case from Abbott. 

Get ready for the next excuse to riot when the no bills come down shortly. 

  Because one of them "will" be the winner (whether the general election or primary) and you can sit on your hands and accept your fate or vote for the side you believe the most, mudslinging or not. 

I read the BISD website on budget from a couple of years ago and it was $1.7 million. I think it dropped to about $1.2 million last year.   The current off duty contract labor rate of hiring police officers in this area for off duty jobs/security is $35 in most cases ($50 for short notice jobs).    BISD had (I think) 24 police officers and that included usually non-working officers such as the chief and supervisors. I say non-working as they don't usually ride a district or have specific patrol assignments. Most districts hire off duty officers for their middle and high school campuses since that is where the fights and other disturbances are usually confined to. BISD has 9 such campuses.    9 campuses x 8 hours a day x $35 per hour comes to $2,520 per school day. TX requires students to be in school for 180 days a year.    By using contract labor from BPD, BISD can put an officer on all middle and high school campuses for the entire school day for every school day each year for $453,600. That is because BISD would only be paying for salary. There is no insurance provided to the officers, no vehicle expense, no vacations, no matching social security and medicare, no retirement or basically no other extra benefits. Not only is it a huge savings, they could actually cover way more campuses and not have officers rotating around to try and get coverage.    That is why most districts, if they want police protection, hire off duty city/county officers and not try to fund their own police department.    Of course if outside police officers are brought in that are not directly under the control of the school district, the district has almost no chance of controlling information (covering up) of what actually happens inside of the schools that they don't want the public to know about. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures. 

  I know a small business owner who hires about 40 employees. They are easy common labor type jobs and he they don't make a big salary because of that. One of their benefits however is insurance.  He said that to maintain their coverage at its current level it will cost him an additional $500,000 this year and will increase in the future. The last time I talked to him he was not sure if he was going to lay off employees or cut their insurance and just pay the penalty. Either way, a work force of almost all minorities are about to take a hit because of the mandates. 

In our last negotiations with the city, our payraise was directly related to Obamacare. The city was holding back more than $1 million to wait for the Supreme Court decision to see if the act would go through. When the Supreme Court allowed Obamacare to be put in for effect, it reduced the amount of money that the city had for pay raises. In effect my payraise was cut because of Obamacare. We are currently in negotiations for a new three-year deal at this time. One of the sticking points is healthcare coverage because the newly hired employees are facing severe cuts in what is offered for insurance. As part of our pay package and benefits all employees have always received free to the employee healthcare coverage and they have to pay an additional premium if they want to put any family members on it. The new employees that are hired now have to start paying partly for their own insurance that up until now was always part of their benefit package. Add to that their family deductible have now gone up to $15,000. There is no getting around the fact that Obamacare is costing us a lot of money in pay raises and benefits. I can't wait to see these massive cuts in our health care cost and insurance that Obamacare and Obama administration promised if the bill was passed. Does anyone truly believe that there will be any cuts to healthcare their insurance in the future?

    That is the claim. Anxiously awaiting the claimed results..... but not holding my breath. 

It is easy. You have the presidential leadership way to handle it and the Campaigner In Chief way to handle it. 

  I think that they recognized it before the ordinance was enacted and tried to rectify it so in my opinion, the people know that it is not right.