Volume 170 -- Halloween Hazards, Chapter 1
Volume 169 -- The Fed's plan to help mom and pop

Happy Tuesday, my good people.

U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel:

"The admitting-privileges provision of House Bill 2 does not bear a rational relationship to the legitimate right of the state in preserving and promoting fetal life or a woman's health and, in any event, places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus and is thus an undue burden to her,"

Yeakel's decision comes four months after Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis, now a candidate for governor, staged a dramatic 13-hour filibuster against the proposed restrictions, widely considered among the most stringent in the country.

It's funny/sad in Houston I used to live right by Planned Parenthood, where there was always protestors, yet maybe a mile down at the medical center, not a soul.  They have an special facility just for abortions, but the protesters would never venture over to an area of wealth, no one would put up with the stupidity there.

When I was having a bad day, I would drive by PP and honk, the idiots would all get excited, then I would flip them off.    

"These guys can't stand western culture or music, making Britney's hits perfect," Owens explained. "It's so effective the ship's security rarely needs to resort to firing guns."

Also testifying was NSA Director Keith Alexander who claimed that "the information that leads people to believe that NSA or US (apparently two different entities) collected that information is false, and it's false that it was collected on European citizens."

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Read the rest of the article here.

This is bad news for Dems.  And could really affect their chances in '14.  And it really blows a lot of the work they've done to tarnish the Republican brand.

Because not only does it show Republicans were right on this aspect of ACA. But the administration knew they were right, knew it would be a problem, so they lied about it.

Democrats Protest $5 Billion Food Stamp Cut They Voted For

WASHINGTON -- A group of nine Democratic members of the House of Representatives held a press conference outside the Capitol on Tuesday to demand Congress avert an automatic food stamp cut scheduled to take effect on Friday.

"The average family of four will see a $36 cut in their monthly benefits, bringing the average per-person benefit from $1.50 a meal to $1.40 a meal," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said. "Shame on this Congress for allowing this to happen."

But the cut, which will reduce monthly benefits for all 47 million Americans enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by roughly 7 percent, is happening thanks mainly to Democratic votes that hastened the demise of a benefit increase from the 2009 stimulus bill. Each of the representatives at Tuesday's presser voted with their party for a pair of 2010 spending bills that set the cuts in motion.

"WASHINGTON -- Violent crime in the United States rose for the second year in a row, a government report said Thursday, indicating that the nation's two-decade decline in crime has ended.

New York police and retailers Macy's Inc and Barneys New York Inc traded blame on Tuesday over complaints by black customers who were stopped by police after making luxury purchases, in a case that has roiled civil rights leaders.

[snip]

Following a meeting in Harlem with New York civil rights leader Al Sharpton, Barneys Chief Executive Officer Mark Lee likewise said his employees had no part in two incidents at his stores.

"We believe that no Barneys employees were involved in those incidents," Lee said. "No one from Barneys brought them to the attention of our internal security and no one from Barneys reached out to external authorities."

Likewise, a Macy's spokeswoman denied that store staff had any role in two incidents at the company's Herald Square flagship. In one of those incidents, actor Rob Brown of HBO's "Treme" in June was paraded through the store in handcuffs after purchasing a $1,350 gold Movado watch for his mother, according to the Daily News.

"This was an operation of the New York City Police Department," Macy's spokeswoman Elina Kazan said in a statement.

NYPD chief spokesman John McCarthy countered those claims, saying that in both Barneys' incidents and the case involving Brown at Macy's, officers were acting on information provided by store security.

"In both instances, the NYPD were conducting unrelated investigations" in the store, McCarthy said.

So...the stores say they weren't behind it, the cops were.  The cops say just the opposite.

Meanwhile, at least four people have experienced some combination of being stopped, surrounded, handcuffed and/or frog-marched through these stores because, what, they spent too much money?

Volume 171
Volume 170

My beautiful wife has been out of town for a week, but today she returns home. I am a happy man, indeed. Just not right when she's gone.

At campaign rallies and other recent appearances, both Clintons have called for soothing partisan tensions and have espoused a vision of governing by compromise. Barnstorming Virginia this week with longtime friend and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, Bill Clinton repeatedly assailed ideological politics on both sides of the aisle.

Oh goody. More compromise. Because we haven't had enough of that. How will she achieve this? She's going to be a different kind of change agent.

In the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton dismissed Obama's message of post-partisanship as woefully naive. But since stepping down as Obama's secretary of state earlier this year, she has adopted a similar theme, repeatedly berating lawmakers for choosing "scorched earth over common ground."

"We are careening from crisis to crisis instead of having a plan, bringing people to that plan, focusing on common-sense solutions and being relentless in driving toward them," Clinton said last week during at a Center for American Progress gala.

"Common-sense solutions." Wait...what? This is change? Same old, same old campaign sloganeering, as far as I can tell.

Must we endure the exact same bullsh!t every four years? Is there no Democrat worth voting for?