P J Media’s Zombie offers a blog post well worth the time for anyone who may think any Occupy effort has a clue. This may be the most ridiculous and pointless Occupation ever and almost as stupid as a regional EPA official comparing enforcement to crucifixions.  Yes, he was talking oil and gas company killings.

The pictures from Occupy the Farm are almost as strange as the Leftists arguments justifying the effort.

Last week, on Earth Day, the Occupy movement illegally took over an entire farm and transformed it into…a farm!
 
So proud are they of this revolutionary act that they showed off the farm to the media yesterday, so naturally I had to check it out.

The farm they seized was not a working farm per se, but rather a “research farm” for the University of California, near its Berkeley campus. The only difference between the way the farm used to be (prior to a week ago) and the way it is now is that the Occupiers have transformed what was essentially a well-maintained and important open-air laboratory into a disheveled and ultimately purposeless pretend-farm for trustafarian dropouts.

Click here to read the full report with photos and some excellent comments following the post. 

Those from Oklahoma might notice this Occupy the Farm banner – see how they just love the oil and gas business that provides the energy that built America.   So let all the oil companies advertise how "green" they are and hope to be in the future – it will not matter as Occupy wants to "compost" all.  That is almost as good as Obama’s EPA official, Al Armendariz comparing EPA enforcement to Roman crucifixions – kill the first five you meet and the rest follow along.  So are you happy to follow along to a future where your industry, your life and family becomes compost? 

Click here to see Armendariz make the EPA position on fossil fuels perfectly clear (YouTube).

Of course U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) did not like the administrator’s comments and he is launching an investigation.  Click here for Senator Inhofe’s speech on the subject. 

Reuters is reporting an excellent background summary of George Zimmerman and it does not follow the media hysteria.  Tracking his background up to the encounter with Trayvon Martin, the story is well worth a careful read.  Is this the pattern of a racist? 

A pit bull named Big Boi began menacing George and Shellie Zimmerman in the fall of 2009.
 
The first time the dog ran free and cornered Shellie in their gated community in Sanford, Florida, George called the owner to complain. The second time, Big Boi frightened his mother-in-law’s dog. Zimmerman called Seminole County Animal Services and bought pepper spray. The third time he saw the dog on the loose, he called again. An officer came to the house, county records show.

"Don’t use pepper spray," he told the Zimmermans, according to a friend. "It’ll take two or three seconds to take effect, but a quarter second for the dog to jump you," he said.

"Get a gun."

That November, the Zimmermans completed firearms training at a local lodge and received concealed-weapons gun permits. In early December, another source close to them told Reuters, the couple bought a pair of guns. George picked a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm handgun, a popular, lightweight weapon.

By June 2011, Zimmerman’s attention had shifted from a loose pit bull to a wave of robberies that rattled the community, called the Retreat at Twin Lakes. The homeowners association asked him to launch a neighborhood watch, and Zimmerman would begin to carry the Kel-Tec on his regular, dog-walking patrol – a violation of neighborhood watch guidelines but not a crime.

Few of his closest neighbors knew he carried a gun – until two months ago.

On February 26, George Zimmerman shot and killed unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in what Zimmerman says was self-defense. The furor that ensued has consumed the country and prompted a re-examination of guns, race and self-defense laws enacted in nearly half the United States.

During the time Zimmerman was in hiding, his detractors defined him as a vigilante who had decided Martin was suspicious merely because he was black. After Zimmerman was finally arrested on a charge of second-degree murder more than six weeks after the shooting, prosecutors portrayed him as a violent and angry man who disregarded authority by pursuing the 17-year-old.

But a more nuanced portrait of Zimmerman has emerged from a Reuters investigation into Zimmerman’s past and a series of incidents in the community in the months preceding the Martin shooting.

Based on extensive interviews with relatives, friends, neighbors, schoolmates and co-workers of Zimmerman in two states, law enforcement officials, and reviews of court documents and police reports, the story sheds new light on the man at the center of one of the most controversial homicide cases in America.

The 28-year-old insurance-fraud investigator comes from a deeply Catholic background and was taught in his early years to do right by those less fortunate. He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather – the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.

A criminal justice student who aspired to become a judge, Zimmerman also concerned himself with the safety of his neighbors after a series of break-ins committed by young African-American men.

Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.

"Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?" the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. "There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood," she said. "That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin."

"MIXED" HOUSEHOLD

George Michael Zimmerman was born in 1983 to Robert and Gladys Zimmerman, the third of four children. Robert Zimmerman Sr. was a U.S. Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1970, and was stationed at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, in 1975 with Gladys Mesa’s brother George. Zimmerman Sr. also served two tours in Korea, and spent the final 10 years of his 22-year military career in the Pentagon, working for the Department of Defense, a family member said.

In his final years in Virginia before retiring to Florida, Robert Zimmerman served as a magistrate in Fairfax County’s 19th Judicial District.

Robert and Gladys met in January 1975, when George Mesa brought along his army buddy to his sister’s birthday party. She was visiting from Peru, on vacation from her job there as a physical education teacher. Robert was a Baptist, Gladys was Catholic. They soon married, in a Catholic ceremony in Alexandria, and moved to nearby Manassas.

Gladys came to lead a small but growing Catholic Hispanic enclave within the All Saints Catholic Church parish in the late 1970s, where she was involved in the church’s outreach programs. Gladys would bring young George along with her on "home visits" to poor families, said a family friend, Teresa Post.

"It was part of their upbringing to know that there are people in need, people more in need than themselves," said Post, a Peruvian immigrant who lived with the Zimmermans for a time.

Post recalls evening prayers before dinner in the ethnically diverse Zimmerman household, which included siblings Robert Jr., Grace, and Dawn. "It wasn’t only white or only Hispanic or only black – it was mixed," she said.

Click here to read more from Reuters.

TISHOMINGO – Republican congressional candidate Dustin Rowe announced today that he will fight federal regulation that threatens thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in economic activity in the area surrounding Lake Texoma.

“As I have campaigned in Eastern Oklahoma over the past 10 months, the number one complaint I hear is about federal regulation’s negative impact at the local level,” said Rowe, a Republican candidate for the Second Congressional District seat. “Proposed federal regulation to measure blue-green algae would devastate Eastern Oklahoma tourism when there are more sensible ways to deal with the problem that won’t destroy the economy.”

The recreation and tourism business created by Lake Texoma has become a major economic driver in the region, benefiting sales, profits, jobs, tax revenue and income in the area. Lake Texoma generates an estimated 2,767 jobs, including 1,245 in Oklahoma. Those job figures are comparable to the impact of the General Motors plant in Arlington Texas.

“General Motors spent $500 million on a single plant to create roughly the same number of jobs as Lake Texoma,” Rowe said. “That shows how incredibly difficult it would be to replace the economic impact of Lake Texoma if federal regulations needlessly drive people away from this beautiful natural resource.”

Blue green algae blooms can create hypoxic zones in water sources, effectively depleting oxygen concentrations. While there is a clear need to address the problem, Rowe said local officials should be in charge of that regulation.

“I support efforts to allow the Corps of Engineers to apply state regulations to measure blue-green algae, not federal regulations based on World Health Organization guidelines,” Rowe said. “If the federal WHO-based regulations are imposed, our lakes could effectively shut down in late May. Clearly, state-level regulation based on legitimate science and administered by local experts who live in the area would be far more effective and far less destructive.”

Rowe recently met with Bill Bailey, owner of Little Glasses Marina on Lake Texoma to discuss the federal government’s response to the algae issue.

Overall, Rowe noted that hunters and anglers support an estimated 20,000 jobs in Oklahoma, spend more than $1 billion annually, and (at an estimated 602,000) actually outnumber the combined populations of Tulsa, Norman and Lawton, according to figures from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other groups.

“For rural Eastern Oklahoma, tourism has became a cornerstone of the economy, and now federal regulators are poised to shatter that foundation and leave the area economy in shambles,” Rowe said. “As your congressman, I will fight federal overreach and work to allow state-level solutions to environmental challenges. These decisions are best made by local officials who are familiar with the challenges of local communities, not some far-off bureaucrat on the East Coast or paper pusher at a foreign-dominated organization like the World Health Organization.” 

Tomorrow the Senate is expected to vote on the Coburn amendment (#2606) limiting spending on government conferences.  Summary and background here.  

Dr. Coburn believes the problem with conference spending is Congress, not the GSA or any other agency.  Congress has fostered a spring-break mentality at agencies by looking the other way.  Too often members would rather grow government than shrink government, particularly if a  parochial interest is at stake.   This amendment will send a long-overdue signal that Congress is listening to the American people and taking its oversight responsibilities seriously.

Dr. Coburn’s efforts to address conference spending:

•    “For the Farmers or For the Fun?” – 2008 USDA report: USDA tripled conference expenditures since 2000, to $19.4 million in 2006. USDA saw a 191 percent increase in conference spending since 2000.  

•    2008 report on HIV/AIDS conference cost taxpayers half a million dollars ($473,095), to send federal employees to Mexico.

Summary of the Coburn amendment:

Provides a first step in comprehensive conference spending and transparency reform by scaling back overall conference spending, establishing attendance limitations to protect from excessive and unnecessary travel, and require full online transparency of all conference spending. These reforms could save more than $65 million every year.

Establishes a basic set of requirements for conference spending, including the following:
•    Reduces the amount an agency can spend on conferences to 80 percent of the amount spent in 2010.
•    Caps amount that can be spent on a single conference at $500,000 (unless the agency is the primary sponsor).
•    Allows non-federal foundations and sources to provide financial support for a conference, but requires a listing of such sponsors and a certification that there is no conflict of interest resulting from support received from each.
•    Prohibits sponsoring more than one conference per year per organization.
•    Limits to 50 the number of employees from a single agency traveling to an international conference.

Requires a quarterly summary posted on the agency’s website of each conference supported or attended by an agency in the preceding 3 months, including:
•    An explanation how the conference advanced the mission of the agency;
•    Total cost of attendance and support for the conference;
•    Primary sponsor of the conference;
•    Location of the conference;
•    A justification of the location including cost efficiency of the location;
•    The dates; and
•    The number and a listing by title of agency and non-federal employees whose attendance at the conference was paid for by the agency.

New York Post writers call it President Obama’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President — a political slush fund at the Health and Human Services Department.  Only this isn’t some little fund from shadowy private sources; this is taxpayer money, redirected to help Obama win another term. A massive amount of it, too — $8.3 billion. Yes, that’s billion, with a B.

Here is how it works.

The most oppressive aspects of the ObamaCare law don’t kick in until after the 2012 election, when the president will no longer be answerable to voters. More “flexibility,” he recently explained to the Russians.

But certain voters would surely notice one highly painful part of the law before then — namely, the way it guts the popular Medicare Advantage program.

For years, 12 million seniors have relied on these policies, a more market-oriented alternative to traditional Medicare, without the aggravating gaps in coverage.

But as part of its hundreds of billions in Medicare cuts, the Obama one-size-fits-all plan slashes reimbursement rates for Medicare Advantage starting next year — herding many seniors back into the government-run program.

Under federal “open-enrollment” guidelines, seniors must pick their Medicare coverage program for next year by the end of this year — which means they should be finding out before Election Day.

Nothing is more politically volatile than monkeying with the health insurance of seniors, who aren’t too keen on confusing upheavals in their health care and are the most diligent voters in the land. This could make the Tea Party look like a tea party.

Making matters even more politically dangerous for Obama is that open enrollment begins Oct. 15, less than three weeks before voters go to the polls.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election.

This political ticking time bomb could become the biggest “October Surprise” in US political history.

But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

Click here for more from the New York Post.