The heartening backlash against Target

It's encouraging to see that not everyone in post-America is on board with hatred for the way God designed the universe:

Target’s stock price and its favorability among shoppers are crashing as the public rebukes the retail giant for ignoring their vigorous protest against mixed-sex changing rooms and bathrooms. 

The company’s stock was two cents shy of $84 on August 19, when it revealed it would not allow shoppers to use single-sex bathrooms or changing rooms. Instead, all rooms were opened up to anyone claiming to be of either sex. As of 4.00 p.m. Friday, the stock had dropped almost $4.50, down to $79.50.

That’s a huge loss of 5 percent in stock value, costing shareholders roughly $2.5 billion in company value.

In between those two dates, more than one million people had signed a boycott petitionsponsored by the American Family Association. Public opinion also shifted strongly in favor of single-sex bathrooms.

The damage to Target’s favorability is also being tracked by YouGov’s BrandIndex service. 

By April 27, “The percentage of consumers who would consider buying items at Target the next time they want to go shopping at a department store dropped from 42% to 38% over the past two weeks,” YouGov reported April 29. That’s a 10 percent drop, likely fueled by social-media conversations via Facebook and various news sites.

Worse, YouGov showed that Target was hit by a 40 percent drop — from roughly 19 percent down to 11 percent — when consumers were indirectly asked if they planned to buy at Target. “When you are in the market next to purchase items in this particular category, from which of the following brands would you consider purchasing?” YouGov asked.
YouGov also reported customers were hearing bad news about the company. When asked, “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?” the positive “Buzz” score of 19 fell down to 11. The score fell by 10 points among men but 12 points among women, YouGov reported. 

 

In a nation that has myriad symptoms of total madness, this is wonderful to see.

The West acquiesces to its own conquest - today's edition

Heather MacDonald has a piece at City Journal on the pathetic lengths European feminists are going to in order to obscure the plain truth about who has been behind the massive statistical uptick in rapes and molestations:

 Silence was justified on the grounds that acknowledging the attacks would encourage opposition to the mass Muslim immigration that had engulfed Europe over the previous year. (German chancellor Angela Merkel accelerated that migration by declaring in August 2015 that her country would accept all Syrian asylum-seekers who made it in to her country.) Feminists were “finding it difficult to speak up about the event because of concerns it might be used to encourage aggression against refugees,” explained British journalist Jessica Abrahams. When feminists were cornered into addressing the violence, they tied themselves into knots trying to change the subject back to their favorite topic: Western white-male patriarchy. “The problem of sexualized violence has already existed here for some time and can’t simply be Ωdeported,≈ ” said German feminist Anne Wizorek to Der Spiegel. “It cannot be allowed to become the standard in gender debates that only male migrants are considered to be those responsible [for sexual violence].” In other words, the New Year’s assaults were continuous with the routine terror inflicted by German men on German women.

Actually, there was no precedent in Germany or the rest of Europe for mass peacetime sexual assaults, much less ones where the police merely look on. “I have never experienced such a thing in any German city,” a victim told the New York Times. But people who did name the attacks for what they were—a manifestation of Muslim misogyny and an alarm bell regarding mass immigration—were vilified as racists. An old-school German feminist, Alice Schwarzer, denounced the New Year’s assaults as a “gang bang” designed to terrorize women; she found herself condemned by other feminists and “antiracists.” Victims refused to give their names to reporters for fear of being pilloried on social media for xenophobia. Specious moral equivalencies poured forth: not only were the attacks a mere subset of everyday Western antifemale violence, but also ordinary citizens connecting those attacks to the out-of-control migrant situation were no different from the attackers themselves. Ralf Jäger, minister of the interior for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, announced: “What happens on right-wing platforms and in chat rooms is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women.”

The most dazzling eruption of moral blindness came from a British feminist currently on a fellowship at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The political and press silence after the New Year’s attacks was a product of Western sexism and indifference to rape, alleged Laurie Penny in The New Statesman. This was, of course, preposterous. Had thousands of white males committed the attacks, a worldwide furor would have immediately broken out. The effort to look the other way was patently the result of cringing political correctness. But Penny was equally critical of the “right-wing press” for condemning the mass violence, since it only did so out of “unbridled racism.” “It’d be great if we could take rape, sexual assault and structural misogyny as seriously every day as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators,” she wrote. Penny did not provide any examples of daily mass sexual assaults committed by Westerners. Then, in a paroxysm of hysteria induced by the conflicting pressures of feminism and multicultural relativism, Penny accused those “right-wing” critics of not just racism but sexual perversion: “I’ll be blunt. I think some people out there are very excited by their conception of ΩIslamic≈ violence against women. It allows them to enjoy the spectacle of women being brutalized and savaged whilst convincing themselves that it’s only foreign, savage men who do these things.” This is lunatic fantasy. Moreover, the “conception of ΩIslamic≈ violence against women” is not just some “right-wing” construct—it is a fact.

The feminist apologists did issue grudging, boilerplate repudiations of the violence but only en route to conflating it with Western patriarchy. In an understatement of colossal proportions, Penny acknowledged that the “experience of women in the West is [not] exactly the same as the experience of women in Middle Eastern dictatorships and war zones.” Let’s rephrase that, shall we? To live in a society where women’s magazines, pop culture, and advertising incessantly celebrate female sexuality and promiscuity, where every elite profession desperately seeks to hire and promote as many women as it can, and where women enjoy every freedom and right that men do, is not just “not exactly the same” as living in a culture where female rape victims are murdered to preserve their family’s honor and where women who don’t wear the veil or burka face public shaming or worse; there is no similarity whatsoever between those two experiences.

To acknowledge the abyss that separates the experience of Western women from those in Arab and North African countries, though, would risk walking down a slippery slope that might end up with the recognition that Western women do not, in fact, live in a “rape culture.” But even more dangerous than such a debunking of feminist propaganda would be the possibility of confronting the potential threat that large-scale Muslim and Third World immigration poses for Western liberalism and individualism. TheNew York Times provided a stunning example of the inevitable “defining sexism down” that will be necessary to accommodate such immigration. The problem on New Year’s Eve, it reported, was that migrants from war-torn countries were “unfamiliar with German culture.” Translation: the norm that you don’t jam your fingers up women’s vaginas in public is just a quaint German custom, akin to wearing lederhosen. This, from a paper that routinely covers phony college rape allegations with outraged alarm. Making matters worse in Cologne, according to the Times, the police were working from “outdated expectations.” Had the police been up to date, they would have planned for mass sexual assaults. “This was new terrain for all,” the Times concluded.

But it won’t be “new terrain” for long. A public pool in the Bavarian town of Bornheim posted cartoon warnings against the fondling of women’s bikini-clad bottoms, before banning male asylum seekers entirely in January 2016, due to the rash of harassment complaints. Women in Berlin report being called “slut” on the street. As for gay rights, try staging a gay pride parade in one of Europe’s Muslim enclaves, and see how far you get.

And don't expect the Muslim immigrants themselves to be forthcoming with information about jihadist machinations in their midst:

TWO thirds of British Muslims would not inform the police if they thought that somebody close to them had become involved with terrorist sympathisers, according to a poll. 

This alarming revelation suggests that more than 100,000 British Muslims could sympathise with suicide bombers and people who commit terrorist acts.

The investigation is further proof that the Government’s counter-terrorism programme, Prevent, is not providing intelligence to the police from Muslim groups. 

Former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, described this revelation as “astonishing” and “troubling”. 

I guess we should expect the head of a "human rights commission" to be "astonished" by this.

But it's what you get when there's no assimilation going on:

British Muslims are becoming a nation within a nation, the former equalities watchdog has warned.

Commenting on a ground-breaking survey, Trevor Phillips said on Monday that we are “in danger of sacrificing a generation of young British people to values that are antithetical to the beliefs of most of us, including many Muslims”.

Calling for a new, tougher approach to integration and the abandonment of “the failed policy of multiculturalism”, he points to the survey’s “one truly terrifying finding”, that “Muslims who have separatist views about how they want to live in Britainare far more likely to support terrorism than those who do not”.ritish Muslims are becoming a nation within a nation, the former equalities watchdog has warned.

Commenting on a ground-breaking survey, Trevor Phillips said on Monday that we are “in danger of sacrificing a generation of young British people to values that are antithetical to the beliefs of most of us, including many Muslims”.

This is what you get when you're ambivalent about the great civilization that spawned you.

 

The relentless march of the nature-distortion jackboots - today's edition

Spiritual sickness in the Sunshine State:

Students in a Tampa middle school were instructed to fill out a form designed to measure how much privilege they have.

The children were given a form in their Spanish class at Monroe Middle School by teacher Yoselis Ramos titled "How much privilege do you have?"

The different categories included, "Race", "Skin Color", "Religion", "Sex", "Gender", Sexual Orientation", and "Disability."

Parents were not happy about the assignment.

Regina Stiles has a daughter who revealed she had ADHD on the "privilege" form.

"She has ADHD and apparently the teacher said there are some kids in this class that have ADHD, and ADHD is a mental illness, and that's why she circled that. To me ADHD is not a mental disability. It's something she has," said Stiles.

Other questions on the survey broached controversial subjects for middle-schoolers. Children were asked to identify if they were "Cisgender," "Transgender" or "GenderQueer."

"She's 12. Some of these things should be taught at home," said Stiles.

Stiles along with other angry parents approached the school principal, who began an investigation. It turns out the "privilege" form was not part of any official curricula or authorized by the principal.
"This is not a district form, this is a teacher-generated form and it was without principal consent and at the district level we do not collect that information," said Hillsborough County School Spokesperson Tanya Arja. She also pointed out that students were not required to turn in the form.

According to Arja, the teacher said the goal was to teach the students about inequality through literature they had been reading. 

In Indiana, infantile tactics driven by over-inflated self-importance is keeping the Governor's phone ringing:

Last month, governor Mike Pence signed into law House Enrolled Act 1337, which added new provisions to Indiana’s existing abortion laws. Among other things, the new law prohibits abortions obtained on the basis of “race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, or diagnosis or potential diagnosis of the fetus having Down syndrome or any other disability”; it augments the “informed consent” provisions currently on the books by adding new information to that which a facility must provide to a woman seeking an abortion; and it adds a requirement that fetal remains from a miscarriage or abortion be cremated or interred.

It’s primarily that last measure that has prompted “Periods for Pence,” which is swamping the governor’s office with phone calls informing him about each caller’s reproductive cycle. The creator of the “Periods for Pence” Facebook page has been transcribing her calls: 

Me: “I need to get a message to the Governor that I am on day three of my period. My flow seems abnormally heavy, but my cramps are much better to–” 

Them: (seriously annoyed and trying to keep their voice down, but not quite succeeding) MA’AM, WHAT IS IT THAT I CAN HELP YOU WITH? 

Me: Oh, I don’t need your help, I just wanted to keep Governor Pence informed of my reproductive cycle, since he seems so concerned. 

The Facebook page explains that “fertilized eggs can be expelled during a woman’s period without a woman even knowing that she might have had the potential blastocyst in her. Therefore, any period could potentially be a miscarriage without knowledge.” Their solution is to give the governor’s office regular updates on their periods, to make sure they won’t be prosecuted. Another example: 

Me: “Good morning. I just wanted to inform the Governor that things seem to be drying up today. No babies seem to be up in there. Okay?” 

Them: (sounding strangely horrified and chipper at the same time) “Ma’am, can we have your name?” 

Me: “Sure. It’s Sue.” 

Them: “And your last name?” 

Me: “Magina. That’s M-A-G-I-N-A. It rhymes with–” 

Them: “I’ve got it.” 

The Facebook page has 40,000 “Likes.” Vox calls it an “epic trolling effort.” The New York Times did a write-up. Apparently, this is what passes for wit on the pro-abortion Left.

And The Boss engages in a gesture of solidarity with the badly confused:

Bruce Springsteen canceled a planned concert in North Carolina to protest the state’s recent passage of the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, also known as the LGBT “bathroom” law.

In a statement on his official website, the 66-year-old rocker and leader of the E Street Band said that the “fight against prejudice and bigotry” is more important than any rock concert on Friday.

HB 2, signed into law late last month, makes it illegal for transgender men who identify as women to use women’s restrooms in North Carolina. The bill further prevents local municipalities from enacting their own anti-discrimination statutes.

“Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden,” Springsteen wrote. “To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress.”

There's more out there, but if your stomach is like mine, that's about enough for now if you want to keep down your breakfast.

Leviathan and the subverted post-American family

Reason number gazillion and seventeen why letting the state get its paws on post-Americans before the age of five - let alone after that - is a bad idea.   Gives them a running start on amassing a file on the little tykes:

Bureaucrats from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will weigh and measure children in daycare as part of a study mandated by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act.

The agency published a notice in the Federal Register on Friday proposing data collection on what meals are served in professional and home daycare facilities and how much physical activity children perform.

Aside from assessing how healthy the food in daycare is, the USDA will also check the weight and height of roughly 3,000 children.

“Children will be asked to cooperate with study staff who will weigh and measure them for the Standing Height and Weight Form,” the notice said.

The study is required by section 223 of Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Mrs. Obama and passed in 2010. The main aspect of the law implemented new standards for school lunches.

A lesser-known requirement of the law is the “Study on Nutrition and Wellness Quality in Childcare Settings (SNAQCS),” which the USDA announced Friday. The public will have 60 days to comment.

The USDA said the data collection is important since more than 30 million kids are in daycare.

“Good nutrition is a key to proper childhood development, but not enough is known about the food children are eating in childcare and related programs,” the agency said. “In 2011, 32.7 million children were in a regular childcare arrangement while their parents worked or pursued other activities outside of the home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”

The study will collect data on the “nutritional quality of foods offered, physical activity, sedentary activity, and barriers to” healthy food and exercise in childcare.

We're seeing the same combination of jackboots and pointy-headed specialists that collaborate in every society that moves toward totalitarianism.

It's quite clear what the agenda is:  steer the cultural and economic levels of society toward an assumption that two-working-parent families are far more the norm than those in which one parent - generally the mom - stays home with young children.  Get the kids in an institutional setting as early as possible.  And then monitor, measure, record and study every little aspect of their beings, so as to better design developmental paths that prepare the cattle-masses for their roles in a brave new post-American society.

This is my main concern about Rand Paul

I wish I had more confidence that there were some daylight between his foreign-policy views and those of his father.  Rand's obsession with the NSA muddies the waters where real privacy issues, such as the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups, are a major concern.

I'm not going anywhere near the stinking thing

Not after the experts have confirmed what we already pretty much knew:

Cybersecurity researchers slammed HealthCare.gov's security during a House hearing on Thursday, saying the site is still riddled with problems that could put consumers' sensitive health details at risk.

“The reason we’re concluding that this is so shockingly bad is that the issues across the site are so varied,” David Kennedy, founder of the information security firm TrustedSec, told NBC News. “You don’t even have to hack into the system to see big issues – which means there are [major problems] underneath.”

Kennedy was the first of a group of so-called "white-hat hackers" who testified before the House of Representatives Science Committee on Thursday. He previously testified on November 19, when he said he was able to identify 18 major issues with the site – without even hacking into it.

“Nothing’s really changed since our November 19 testimony,” Kennedy said during the hearing. “In fact, it’s worse.”

No way they're getting my Social Security number, address or birth date.

And speaking of California and FHer-care . . .

. . . the state's health exchange is handing out personal information about enrollees - or applicants, or whatever - to insurance agents, even though they requested not to be contacted.

It wasn't even supposed to look like a coincidence; it was a message

How else do you explain this?

A couple of weeks back, cancer patient Bill Elliot, in a defiant appearance on Fox News, discussed the cancelation of his insurance and what he intended to do about it. He’s now being audited.

Insurance agent C Steven Tucker, who quaintly insists that the whimsies of the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy do not trump your legal rights, saw the interview and reached out to Mr Elliot to help him. And he’s now being audited.

As the Instapundit likes to remind us, Barack Obama has “joked” publicly about siccing the IRS on his enemies. With all this coincidence about, we should be grateful the President is not (yet) doing prison-rape gags.

What does it say about us, the American population, that this regime isn't even trying to do any cosmetics on its heavy-handed means of ruling anymore?

Post-America's version of the Stasi

Enroll America doesn't just sign up people for FHer-care.  It shares private information about some folks with political groups. 

Creepy and sinister.

The nexus of all-about-me-ism and you're-just-cattle-belonging-to-the-state-ism

It can be found in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2013 that just passed the Senate.  Stella Morabito at the Federalist makes the connection for us:

Gender identity is an ambiguous term that relates to people’s perceptions and feelings. By adding it to the list of categories in anti-discrimination law, ENDA combines threat of punishment with vague language that is wide open to interpretation. This is a classic recipe for tyranny.

Consider first ENDA’s definition of “gender identity”:

The term ‘gender identity’ means the gender-related identity, appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, with or without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.

The issue of definition here is significant. Let’s look separately at the terms “gender” and “gender identity.” Gender identity does not simply refer to male or female. It’s all about perceptions and behaviors and feelings and one’s “internal, personal sense” of being male or female, or, in some cases, “other.” It’s also reactive against any social or cultural norms that assume people are either one sex or the other.

The trend toward getting inside one's fellow citizen's head to parse attitudes and  feelings got underway with the whole notion of hate crimes.  That development saddled our society with the absurdity of punishing someone already sentenced to lifelong incarceration a few additional years for having offed his fellow citizen for prejudicial reasons.

Now we're expected to have a respect bordering on reverence for our fellow citizens' feelings about being male or female, including, perhaps especially, feeling of resentment toward the type of genitals with which Nature and Nature's God imbued him or her when the chromosomal blueprint was set at the moment of conception.

But what if a person's feelings about all this are vague, or fleeting, or have a record of going back and forth?

And then there are people obsessed with their feeling about other traits besides genitals and hormones - age or race, for instance.  Morabito points out the absurdity of their not being accorded the respect of inclusion in ENDA:

One could easily argue that “age identity” is a far more widespread concern. Some 60-year-olds no doubt identify as 40, no matter their age “designated at birth.” They could follow the ENDA logic to claim they suffer age discrimination in the workplace. Why aren’t schools guilty of discrimination keeping some 12-year-olds who identify as 18, or perhaps as 8, wasting away in middle school classrooms?

Lots of people don’t appreciate being stuck in one type of racial identity or national origin identification either. If one “feels” or “identifies” as Native American or African American, regardless of genetic make-up, why shouldn’t that person get full protection of anti-discrimination law according to ENDA’s logic?

But this legislation (nor any standing law) would not protect any other sense of identity or self-perception. Protecting these other “perceptions” should immediately strike us irrational. So maybe we should consider the idea that self-identities are neither legitimately protected by default nor punished by law.

Morabito then examines the "strict and ever-changing requirements of linguistic gymnastics" that this law imposes on any interaction with one's fellow citizens  in a workplace setting.  It's the next stop on the slippery slope after speech codes and sensitivity training.

I like her examination of the bill's phrase "sex designated at birth," as if the doctor or midwife is the one making the call.  ("Looks like a woo-woo to me. What do you think, Nurse Ratchet?")

Then she points up the totalitarian nature of legal codification of the concept of "appearance and mannerism."  No private organization will have any recourse against its being reduced to a freak show:

No distinctions appear to be allowed. Anything goes, really. It’s disingenuous to believe that employers will have any final say in their office decorum or dress codes once ENDA goes into effect. There’s a section in the legislation stating that matters of “grooming” that are “reasonable” are still up to the employer to decide. But in reality this law leaves it up to judges, bureaucrats, and trial lawyers to decide what is and what isn’t appropriate for any given employer’s business. A mannerism that requires someone’s gender identity to repeatedly say (respectfully, of course) “Yeah, baby!” or wear any manner of distracting apparel? Protected!

It’s naive to believe — at this stage of modern history — that protecting such behavior is beyond the scope of ENDA. The collection of bizarre legal outcomes that one can see resulting from this legislation, all guided by an ever expanding state, all counter-intuitive and counter-productive, should be a matter of concern to all of us.

Objecting to ENDA is not a “socially conservative” position. It is an existential position. Those who sign on to this bill ought to understand that it stands for the un-defining of sex/gender for every American, not just those with different perceptions of their own gender.

The dangers in this kind of legislation are not widely understood. Yet here we are on the precipice. In fact, the enactment of gender identity laws has been happening under the radar for many years, even outpacing same sex marriage legislation. They’ve already passed in 16 states, the District of Columbia, and 143 municipalities throughout the nation. The media is saturated with testimonials of transgender beauty queens, toddlers, and military service members. We likely wouldn’t have heard much from Chastity Bono if she never decided to identify as male and take the name Chaz. Consider one woman-to-man transgender underwent a double mastectomy and took hormones but kept her reproductive organs intact so she could have children. Oprah Winfrey introduced this mother as “the first pregnant man.”

The Freedom-Hater enterprise has perfected its insidious twisting of time-honored words - and here, I'm not thinking so much of "male" and "female" as I am "freedom" - to debase them with a superficiality that in any previous period of human history would have been dismissed as frivolity unworthy of consideration.

But that internal realm of "feelings" and self-referentiality is the only kind of sovereignty we're going to have left in post-America.  You can post all day long about your celebrations of being "liberated" from the constraints of what's between your legs, the pitch of your voice, and your amount of facial hair.  And anyone who points out to your face that you're being ridiculous - or who, in an employment interview, sizes you up as ridiculous and takes a pass on hiring you - will be subject to the some of the sternest disciplinary measures the leviathan state can mete out.

Only certain citizens' internal worlds will past muster.  Fluid feelings about gender will be fine to express, but if your internal world is based on an understanding of Divine Law and the universal need of individual redemption, you will need to keep your disruptive, hurtful mouth shut.

You'll be free to infantilize yourself, but not to actively seek that which is dignified, noble and ennobling.

People with a normal view of all this will say "the hell with it" and close up their productive enterprises.  The state will be at the ready, and the cattle-like masses will be corralled into the pen of dependency.

You will be free as the breeze in ways that matter not at all, and enslaved in the only way that does matter.

Do you see the connection?

An executive-branch agency announces that it will launch a totalitarian intrusion into the personal and economic lives of Americans.  Sadly, that's nothing new anymore.

In this case, the FDA is moving toward banning trans fats in our nation's food.  As I say, it's the kind of thing that's done all the time by our overlords.

But why is it more frequent, and destined to keep getting more frequent?

FHer-care.

In any interpersonal dynamic where money is involved, the party paying for whatever is in question gets to call the shots.   It's true for employment, for loans, and it's true for socialized areas of our economy. If government is destined to be paying for upkeep of our bodies (and, it looks like, our minds as well), it will want a lot of bang for its buck.  The masses must not clog their arteries or otherwise fall below regime standards for healthiness, thereby becoming high-maintenance and possibly a subject for discussion at IPAB death-panel meetings.

Never mind the fact that, when this was America, we used to set our own priorities, and even reserved the right to readjust them at will, as in the decision to eat some trans-fat onion rings precisely because they were bursting with that crunchy, greasy pub-food allure.  Alas, that was long ago, when we were each the sovereign masters of our own lives.

You have to wonder if she's not growing weary of trying to sell this monstrosity

During a Capitol Hill hearing today, Sibelius tells Senator John Cornyn that it's entirely possible that convicted felons could be working as FHer-care navigators and gaining access to sensitive information.

And this thing is going forward?  And she gets to keep her job?

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

HUD spending money seized from you at gunpoint to institute a new "neighborhood mapping" program to determine just how diverse every last neighborhood in America is.  Then comes a rating system.  Then comes distortion of the housing market a la the Community Reinvestment Act.

Another arm of the overlord leviathan state making a mockery of our privacy, addressing supposed problems on an impossible macro level, distorting the market and balkanizing society by demographic classification even as it drools about "diversity."

Even the name is creepy

How does a gummint body called the Federal Data Services Hub strike you?  Now consider that it's being cooked up by HHS.

"Navigators" who will "help" people with the FHer-care exchanges will be - ostensibly  - the main functionaries using it.

In the wake of the recent IRS, DoJ and NSA scandals, are you cool with that?

The wrong man in a job that shouldn't exist

The Senate is set to confirm Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a position he assumed with a recess appointment - at the same time the Most Equal Comrade was making those unconstitutional appointments to the NLRB.

The CFPB is of recent vintage, having been creating as part of the ghastly Dodd-Frank behemoth.  Since it got busy under Cordray's leadership, its potential to be a privacy-obliterator has been realized in  spades.

Hope there's plenty of vocal opposition in the world's greatest deliberative body.

Why the IRS needs to be dismantled pronto - today's edition

In addition to the deliberate repression it engages in, it f---s up in really unacceptable ways, such as inadvertently posting 100,000 Social Security numbers on one of its websites.

This regime owns this one

James Sensenbrenner, main author of the original Patriot Act, says that what the NSA is doing now - obtaining phone records en masse and now this PRISM program - is way beyond the scope of the law he crafted.

As if FHer-care didn't already have enough totalitarian aspects to it

Now we're going to put "navigators" out into "the communities."  They don't have to be proficient at math or knowledgeable about the way insurance works.  The main credential is demographic affinity with those they'll "serve."  And what they'll know about their "customers" will be exhaustive.