San Francisco Passes A Tough Recycling Law

Throwing orange peels, coffee grounds and grease-stained pizza boxes in the trash will be against the law in San Francisco, and could even lead to a fine.

The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 Tuesday to approve Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposal for the mandatory composting and recycling law.

The legislation calls for every residence and business in the city to have three separate color-coded bins for waste: blue for recycling, green for compost and black for trash.

Failing to properly sort your refuse could result in a fine after several warnings

Fines for most residential customers are initially capped at $100. Businesses that don’t have proper bins face escalating fines up to $500.

Some residents are upset over the possibility of the Trash Police checking their garbage.

Cities from Pittsburgh to San Diego have mandatory recycling. None, however, requires all food waste to be composted. Seattle passed a law in 2003 requiring people to have a compost bin but, unlike San Francisco, it did not mandate that all food waste go in there.

Comments from residents:

I live in San Francisco–helllooo, Gavin and Board of Supervisors!! Listen up. Stop passing laws that tell me what to do! Instead, if you want me to stop smoking, do something about all the smelly, dirty people sleeping in doorways, on sidewalks, and in parks. Then I won’t have to use my ciggies to block their stench. If you want me to start using Muni, make it run on time, crack down on fare-jumpers, and stop letting homeless people use Muni as a hotel. If you want me to walk more, crack down on all the selfish dog owners who make it impossible to walk more than 10 feet without stepping in dog crap. If you want me to spend $$$ at locally-owned businesses, stop artificially jacking up prices through utopian surcharges and stop passing laws which make it impossible for small business owners to survive.

Why must we continually be told what it is that will make us a better place and yet no one inside our beautiful city seems to agree with the POS, oops, I mean the BOS. Why don’t we start enforcing rules that are on the books already? What happened to catching fare-jumpers on muni? What happened to catching the red light runners on 19th Ave? Well I guess enforcement of said laws would be another can of worms known as the complacent SFPD. The only thing they protect and serve are themselves.

All of these “crackdowns” are just smoke being blown up all of our butts. Clean up the streets and for chrissakes stay in the city for more than two or three days at a time Newsom

Obama And Congress Pushing Through Bans On Guns And Gun Shows!

The Second Amendment is under assault as never before — and the “anti-gun” forces could win this time…

Unless You And I take action NOW to stop them!

Tell Congress To Reject All Bans On Guns And Gun Shows:
Call Your Senator and Congressman  Today and Send Your Letters, E-mails, and Faxes Now!

As a presidential candidate, Obama deliberately and repeatedly LIED to America’s 90 million gun owners across the country, when he insisted that he would NOT try to take away anyone’s firearms.

Now, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder is saying that Obama will seek to reinstate the ban on semi-automatic firearms — which means he KNEW he was lying to the nation, because his own website touted his plan to revive the gun ban and make it permanent!

Supporters of the Second Amendment warned America that Obama’s “support” for the Second Amendment was empty rhetoric — and now Holder’s disclosure has confirmed it. Obama was lying, and now gun rights may be dying.

Several times on the campaign trail, Obama told voters, “I’m not going to take your guns away.” He said it at rallies in Duryea, Pennsylvania, and in Boise, Idaho. He also told a news conference that “Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear… I think people can take me at my word.”

One thing is now obvious: We shouldn’t take Obama’s word, even if he says it rains a lot in Seattle. Apparently, law-abiding gun owners have nothing to fear… UNLESS they own sport-utility rifles, semiautomatic shotguns, handguns and any other firearm that Obama and his anti-gun Attorney General don’t like.

Thanks to Eric Holder — who has been far more honest than his boss about his anti-gun philosophy — it is now clear that Obama doesn’t support the Second Amendment at all. American gun owners should remind Democrats in Congress that the Second Amendment means what it says, especially when Obama doesn’t.

Tell Congress To Reject All Bans On Guns And Gun Shows:
Call Your Senator and Congressman  Today and Send Your Letters, E-mails, and Faxes Now!

It doesn’t stop there! Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Jack Reed (D-RI) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have joined Paul Helmke, President of the “Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence,” along with victims and family members of the Virginia Tech tragedy, to introduce legislation to ELIMINATE the private transfers of firearms and close the nation’s “gun show loophole.”

You read that right. Did you know that YOU are considered “irrational” if you support private gun sales? Sen. Lautenberg says so!

“There is no rational reason to oppose closing the loophole. The reason it’s still not closed is simple: the continuing power of the special interest gun lobby in Washington.”

BUT, not only are YOU irrational for supporting private gun sales — they also must think you’re an IDIOT because, with NO supporting evidence, Lautenberg fell back to the disproven old “90% Obama Mexican Gun” Lie:

“Thirty percent of the guns that go to Mexico are bought at gun shows. We don’t know whether they’re bought from unlicensed dealers, but logic would say let’s have some idea who it is that bought those guns and what their intentions might be.”

Independence Institute researcher David Kopel has written about the so-called “gun show loophole,” concluding that it is a myth:

“Despite what some media commentators have claimed, if a dealer sells a gun from a storefront, from a room in his home or from a table at a gun show, the rules are exactly the same: he can get authorization from the FBI for the sale only after the FBI runs its ‘instant’ background check.”

Even the Bureau of Justice Statistics report entitled “Firearms Use by Offenders” found that less than one percent — 0.7%, to be exact — of guns used in crimes originated at gun shows.

None of this matters to the Gun Grabbers — New York’s Democrat Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand have now proposed that computerized background checks be retained, creating a de facto gun registration system; and Lautenberg’s bill proposes private transactions be added to this registration system!

This is an Outrageous violation of the Second Amendment!

Tell Congress To Reject All Bans On Guns And Gun Shows:
Call Your Senator and Congressman  Today and Send Your Letters, E-mails, and Faxes Now!

Why are Obama, Lautenberg, and other liberals in Congress doing this?

Motives for eliminating gun shows are twofold:

First, gun shows are a powerful tool in defeating gun control legislation. Grassroots activism burns like a brushfire when Second Amendment supporters gather in one place!

Second, If you can eradicate the gun show, you are a HUGE step closer to eradicating the pro-gun culture altogether.

Lautenberg and the Gun Grabbers in the Senate are also lying about the Virginia Tech gunman who had a background check at a legal gun store, just so they can try to justify themselves. There were abundant warning signs that he posed a serious threat to the campus. Yet he was running loose because the gun check system failed.

It’s obvious that the Anti-Gun Coalitions are trying to use tragic events to destroy gun shows and the right of all Americans to keep and bear arms to protect themselves under the law. They are attacking and hiding behind an “Anti-Terrorist” Agenda while getting political and financial support from:

• George Soros, a Hungarian-born billionaire who is bank rolling efforts with his checkbook and spending more that $100 million to destroy the Constitution.
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein (CA), who admitted that “guns would be banned and confiscated” if she could have her way.
• The United Nations, which actively pushes globalism seeking to disarm all Americans.

We must Stop the Anti-Gun Coalition and get ready for the biggest gun control fight of the year from coast to coast. We can not do that without your support.

Tell Congress To Reject All Bans On Guns And Gun Shows:
Call Your Senator and Congressman  Today and Send Your Letters, E-mails, and Faxes Now!

All that seems to be on the minds of the Anti-Gun Senators and at the offices of gun control extremists is figuring out how to exploit tragedy to erode and eventually destroy the right, and the means, of self-defense.

Like all other threats against our freedoms, we must rise and defeat these attempts by Obama and his followers — we must slap these bills down hard.

Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Charles Schumer (D-NY), John Kerry (D-MA), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Carl Levin (D-MI), Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) cosponsor the current Senate legislation. And Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is working to make sure that all of the anti-gun legislation passes over on the House of Representatives side.

In order to stop Schumer, Kerry and Kennedy and their fellow gun-grabbers, we need to let Congress know with tens of thousands of letters, e-mails and faxes telling them to leave guns alone.

We need Americans like YOU who understand what our Founding Fathers envisioned for our nation… and who are willing to fight to defend our Constitution and for what it stands.

So please, help defeat those who wish to gut and trash the United States Constitution.

Help flood the U.S. Congress with a sea of Letters, E-mails and Faxes big enough to drown each and every Congressman willing to vote away the Second Amendment.

Below you will find the information you need to contact the leaders of Your America:

To find your Senator, click here.
To find your Representative, click here.

Or call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
Email: sf.nancy@mail.house.gov
Phone: 202-225-4965

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
Email: senator_reid@reid.senate.gov
Phone: 202-224-3542

President Barack Obama
To Email President Obama, click here.
Phone: 202-456-1111

Do Not Be Silenced – Make Your Voice Heard!

We need Tens Of Thousands of letters, e-mails, faxes and phone calls delivered to ALL Senators right away!

Tell Congress To Reject All Bans On Guns And Gun Shows:
Call Your Senator and Congressman  Today and Send Your Letters, E-mails, and Faxes Now!

Bernanke Freaks Out About Obama’s Spending and Debt Plans

Ben Bernanke’s language yesterday on the future of the economy and the risks of our ballooning debt was startlingly frank coming from a Fed Chairman.

Specifically, Bernanke warned that the recovery is likely to be weak and that Obama and Congress need to get spending under control or the interest payments will start to destroy us.

He agreed that the size of the deficit is contributing to rising interest rates (very startling point, especially in light of Treasury’s happy chirps that rates are rising because the economy is recovering.) He also cast doubt on the effectiveness of the stimulus programs.

Most importantly, Bernanke also raised concern about our impending debt-to-GDP ratio of 70%, which is well below the Obama administration’s (probably optimistic) forecast of 100% for the next decade.

As a consequence of this elevated level of borrowing, the ratio of federal debt held by the public to nominal GDP is likely to move up from about 40 percent before the onset of the financial crisis to about 70 percent in 2011. These developments would leave the debt-to-GDP ratio at its highest level since the early 1950s, the years following the massive debt buildup during World War II.

To read the entire article and view a graph go to http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/yftt_259145/Bernanke-Freaks-Out-About-Obama’s-Spending-and-Debt-Plans?tickers=xlf,dia,spy

Treasury Secretary’s Secret Talking Points Reveal That Banks Were Forced to Surrender Ownership Stakes to Government

Last October, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ordered nine banks that the Treasury Department described as “healthy” financial institutions to surrender ownership interests to the government or else face regulatory action that would force them to surrender ownership interests to the government, according to an internal Treasury Department document.

Paulson’s extraordinary threat culminated in one of the most sweeping government intrusions into the free-enterprise system in the history of the United States.

Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the internal Treasury Department “talking points” that were prepared for Paulson to use at his Oct. 13, 2008 meeting with the chief executive officers (CEOs) of the nine banks.

At the meeting–to which the bankers were called at short notice–Paulson made a conspicuous display of potential government regulatory power.

Paulson was flanked by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke; current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (who was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York); Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Chairman Sheila Bair and Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan.

While none of these regulators have responded to inquiries by CNSNews.com, the talking points mention each by first name.

The Fed, the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency all regulate various elements of the U.S. banking industry.

“Ben, Sheila, John, Tim and I have asked you here this afternoon because we are of the view that the United States needs to take strong and decisive action to arrest the stress in the financial system,” Paulson’s talking points directed him to tell the assembled bankers.

The talking points indicate that Paulson then told the nine bank CEOs that the government was going to use $250 billion of the $700 billion approved by Congress to shore up the financial industry through the “Troubled Asset Relief Program” (TARP) to buy stock in banks all across the country and that the nine banks these CEOs represented had no choice but to allow the government to buy their stock–or else.

Paulson assured the CEOs that the government would inform the public that the banks were “healthy institutions, participating in order to support the U.S. economy.”

In other words, according to the treasury secretary’s confidential talking points, the nine banks were not failing financial institutions that had come to the federal government in desperate need of a bailout from the taxpayers to stay in business.

Instead, they were healthy institutions that were being compelled to surrender ownership stakes to the government in order to help the government carry out a government policy.

To read the rest of this article go to http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49004

Judgment Day: Broke California Faces Shutdown At Schwarzenegger’s Hand

California is the classic example of liberalism at work. Look at Hollywood, the crime and drug problem, and now their economy. Welcome To Reality!

The state of California is in crisis and time has almost run out. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor, has spent this week haggling with state legislators to agree cuts to basic services in one of the world’s largest economies.

The state’s top finance officials warned that unless an emergency austerity plan is agreed by Monday — and there is little chance that it will be — they will not be able to borrow the billions of dollars needed to keep the current government functioning. If California was a company, it would have gone bust months ago.

The breadth and depth of Mr Schwarzenegger’s cuts are unprecedented and no one in the state, not even its dozens of billionaires, will be unaffected. His more radical proposals include wiping billions of dollars from the education budget, with the school year shortened and larger classes.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of police and firemen will be laid off, and state employees who keep their jobs face pay cuts of at least 10 per cent.

Parks will close, shutting access to thousands of square miles of beaches, redwood forest and other attractions that draw 80 million visitors a year. Thousands of prisoners will be released early and the notorious St Quentin penitentiary will be among state buildings put up for sale.

All financial aid for university students, affecting 200,000 people from low-income families, will end.

Local governments will no longer have to provide absentee ballots in elections, nor run programs to help infants exposed to drugs. Even stray animals will no longer be kept alive for the statutory three days.

Mr Schwarzenegger, whose popularity has plunged to levels that George W. Bush would recognize, told lawmakers in Sacramento, the state capital: “California’s day of reckoning is here. Our wallet is empty. Our bank is closed. Our credit is dried up.”

For the self-styled Governator and former Hollywood action hero used to getting his way, the issue has become humiliating. His proposals last month to raise taxes and boost borrowing to help to cover the deficit were rejected. Now he has embarked on a “day of reckoning” strategy, asking voters to recognize that Californians must “live within our means”.

The crisis represents a dramatic fall not only for Mr Schwarzenegger but for America’s Golden State. It faces a $24 billion (£14 billion) deficit in the fiscal year starting on July 1 — nearly $700 per head of population.

Were it an independent country, California would be among the ten biggest economies in the world, but its finances have been crippled by the recession. Unemployment already stands at 11 per cent, the fifth-highest in the nation, and another 63,700 jobs were lost last month. Now it will almost certainly need federal guarantees from Washington to borrow money from the financial markets.

Shocked welfare organizations are scrambling to protest at the savagery of the social cuts. Jean Ross, the executive director of the California Budget Project, a public policy research group, wrote in the San Diego Tribune: “These proposals target children and the young, California’s very future.”

Indeed, they would send a state that prides itself on its youthful image, its innovations, its tradition of reaching the future first, reeling backward in time into what one advocate called “an era of Dickens”.The Governor says that he “sees the faces behind those dollars” but he and other Republicans in the legislature will not raise taxes again after agreeing to $12.8 billion in sales, personal income and vehicle tax rises earlier this year.

Last year overall personal income declined for the first time since 1938. The land of Hollywood’s dream factory has turned into a fiscal nightmare.

Fed Would Be Shut Down If It Were Audited, Expert Says

The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is so out of whack that the central bank would be shut down if subjected to a conventional audit, Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, told CNBC.

With $45 billion in capital and $2.1 trillion in assets, the central bank would not withstand the scrutiny normally afforded other institutions, Grant said in a live interview.

“If the Fed examiners were set upon the Fed’s own documents-unlabeled documents-to pass judgment on the Fed’s capacity to survive the difficulties it faces in credit, it would shut this institution down,” he said. “The Fed is undercapitalized in a way that Citicorp is undercapitalized.”

Grant said he would support legislation currently making its way through Congress calling for an audit of the Fed.

Moreover, he criticized the way the Fed has managed the financial crisis, saying the central bank’s target rate should not be around zero.

“I think zero is the wrong rate for almost any economy,” Grant said, adding the Fed has “embarked on a vast experiment in moral hazard. Interest rates are the traffic signals in a market economy, and everything’s green. … You have to wonder whether these interest rates are the right clearing rate or rather they are the imposition of a central bank.”

Amid a disparity between analysts predicting there will be no rate hikes soon and the fed funds futures indicating tightening by the end of the year, Grant said he thinks the Fed indeed will begin raising rates as inflation creeps into the picture.

Fed funds futures have fully priced in as much as a half-point rise in the target rate from its current range of zero to 0.25 percent.

“If the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when there’s too much unanimity of opinion, then one begins to worry about this,” he said. “The Fed proverbially has been late.”

Fighting to Secede

From Texas to Hawaii, these groups are fighting to secede.

American secessionist groups today range from small startups with a few laptop computers to organized movements with meetings of delegates from several states.

The Middlebury Institute, a group that studies and supports the general cause of separatism and secessionism in the U.S., has held three Secession Congresses since its founding in 2004.

At the most recent gathering, held in New Hampshire last November, one discussion focused on creating a new federation potentially to be called “Novacadia,” consisting of present-day New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. An article highlighted on the group’s Web site describes Denmark as a role-model for the potential country. In the months following the convention, the idea “did not actually evolve into very much,” says Kirkpatrick Sale, the institute’s director.

Below the Mason-Dixon Line, groups like the League of the South and Southern National Congress hold meetings of delegates. They discuss secession as a way of accomplishing goals like protecting the right to bear arms and tighter immigration policies. The Texas Nationalist Movement claims that over 250,000 Texans have signed a form affirming the organization’s goal of a Texas nation.

A religious group, Christian Exodus, formed in 2003 with the purpose of transforming what is today South Carolina into a sovereign, Christian-run state. According to a statement on its Web site, the group still supports the idea, but has learned that “the chains of our slavery and dependence on Godless government have more of a hold on us than can be broken by simply moving to another state.”

On the West Coast, elected officials representing greater San Diego County, Imperial County and Northern Baja, Mexico, have proposed creating a “mega-region” of the three areas called “Cali Baja, a Bi-National Mega-Region.”

Hawaii is home to numerous groups that work toward the goal of sovereignty, including Nation of Hawaii. The group argues that native Hawaiians were colonized and forced into statehood against their will and without fair process, and therefore have the right to decide how to govern themselves today. In Alaska, the Alaska Independence Party advocates for the state’s independence.

There is also a Web site for a group called North Star Republic, with a mission to establish a socialist republic in what today is Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

A group of American Indians led by activist Russell Means is working to establish the Republic of Lakotah, which would cover parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska. In 2007, the Republic presented the U.S. State Department with a notice of withdrawal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204482304574219813708759806.html

Made in Montana Gun Law Challenges Federal Powers

One Man’s Thoughts Has Moved To

http://www.patriotthoughts.com

You can read this article at:

http://www.patriotthoughts.com/2009/06/18/made-in-montana-gun-law-challenges-federal-powers/

Thank You, Vytautas

Obamanomics: How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

Pretty stupid.

Watching Fox News Sunday, I caught a panel on which Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee conceded that the administration had previously predicted unemployment would top out at around 8%, that it was now up to 9.4%, and that double-digit unemployment was a distinct possibility in the near future. Goolsbee didn’t resort to the administration’s blather about “saving or creating jobs,” but he did repeat its fustian about how last month’s loss of 345,000 jobs (resulting in a half percentage point jump in the jobless rate) is somehow good news because it beat predictions (I don’t recall him saying whose) of even more dire loss numbers. It made me wonder why, if those predictions either existed or were serious, the Obama administration would have previously predicted that unemployment would top out at 8%?

Goolsbee then laughably intimated that the steep jump in the jobless rate could be attributable to hopeful signs that the economy is improving. Huh? See if you can follow this: He says flashes of hope that we are on the verge of a revival have purportedly caused previously uncounted jobless people to seek (but not find) work — that is, they waited out prosperous times, deciding to leap into the job hunt only when hundreds of thousands of heretofore gainfully employed people got pink-slipped and began competing for a declining pool of jobs. Of course, why shouldn’t Goolsbee think he can get away with these fables when the Obamedia has taken to repeating them verbatim? Witness the headline on page one of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: “Slower Job Losses Lift Hopes” — I’m sure that’s exactly the headline Bush would have gotten after a half-point jump in an already sky-rocketing jobless rate.

If that weren’t enough to make your head spin, Goolsbee also blamed Obama’s handling (i.e., nationalizing) of the auto industry on . . . President Bush. Obama, you see, was saddled with this mess because Bush — over the objections of his own party — decided back in December to raid billions in public money intended for bailing out the financial sector in order to bail out the automakers.

Again, how stupid does he think we are? Bush’s move came after then President-elect Obama implored him to take action to stave off the collapse of the auto-industry. This was one of the major topics of their meeting in the White House on November 11, covered hereby the Wall Street Journal. Back then, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid were already urging Bush to study whether — regardless of how Democrat sponsored auto bail-out legislation fared — the president already had the authority to divert financial sector bail-out funds for Detroit. So it was that when Republicans defeated the auto bail-out bill December, Bush, at the urging of Obama and the Democrats, made one of the worst gaffes of his presidency by extending over $17B in government “loans” to GM and Chysler. For the Obama/Democrat line to now be that Bush foisted this mess on the new administration, and that Bush is to blame for Obama’s geometric exacerbation of the problem, is breathtaking.

Finally, Goolsbee explained that it was unfair to accuse President Obama of a flip-flop just because he is now amenable to taxing employer-provided health benefits despite arguing during the campaign that it was shameful for Senator McCain to suggest taxing employer-provided health benefits. After all, Goolsbee elaborated, the initiative to tax the benefits is not Obama’s idea; it is an idea of top Democrats (with whom the White House closely coordinates) to which Obama is listening because he’s just that kinda open-minded guy. Uh-huh.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODc2OWI4NzhkZjRkODRjMTJmYjY5NDQxMTZiM2RiMjQ=

Geithner to DeMint: Bailouts May Never End, No Exit Plans

SEN. DEMINT: So your understanding of what we did is that the Treasury now has $700 billion that it can use permanently, rotating in and out of the capital markets as you see fit?

SEC. GEITHNER: Well, I’m not quite sure permanent, but you’re right.