The United States has ended it's space program. The first video is a report of the take off from Kennedy Space Center and the second is a report of the landing in Washington, D.C. - Reggie
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Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Monday, April 16, 2012
Obama v. the Court
President Obama was once a lecturer on constitutional law, but he appears to be a little rusty. Most of what he has said recently about the Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of the health-care law he signed has been ill-informed.
Asked about the matter at a press conference on April 2, he responded that he was confident the Court would uphold the law: “And the reason is because, in accordance with precedent out there, it’s constitutional.” Actually, there isn’t any precedent for the Court to examine on the question of whether the federal government can order Americans to buy health insurance. There are plenty of cases, from the New Deal onward, in which the Court has said the federal government has broad leeway in regulating commerce among the states. Wickard v. Filburn, for example, is a canonical 1942 case in which the Court held that Congress may regulate even intrastate economic activity because of its interstate effects. But the oral argument did not dwell much on such cases, because they do not offer much guidance for the Court in the Obamacare case.
A few sentences later, Obama added, “Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” As many commentators pointed out, this was doubly wrong. The Court has often overturned laws passed by large majorities of Congress, and Obamacare passed narrowly.
Finally, Obama came to his most cutting remark. “And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step.” Now this comment, too, is clearly mistaken. Conservatives have never maintained that it is always wrong for unelected justices to “overturn a duly constituted and passed law,” and to suggest that this purported view of ours might be sensible is to cast doubt on the legitimacy of a core judicial function.
Obama drew enough criticism for these remarks that he retreated the next day to his false claim about “well-established precedents.” If the Court does strike down Obamacare in part or in full, we will hear more about those precedents — and about how the Court has threatened the post–New Deal welfare state — as well as about conservative hypocrisy on judicial activism.
So it’s worth restating a few points about judicial conservatism, especially since people as ostensibly well informed about constitutional controversies as the president seem unfamiliar with the basics. The first is that the accusation of judicial activism presupposes a baseline of what constitutes constitutional fidelity. In the paradigmatic case of the term’s usage, a judge is accused of departing from this baseline in order to strike down a law that is compatible with the Constitution but that the judge opposes because it offends his sense of justice or sound public policy.
Test of Fire: Election 2012
First I want to say that I am not a Catholic but I am a Christian and if Catholics lose their freedom of religion, all Americans will. We must stand together for religious liberty for all or there will be religious liberty for none.
I'm also including a Hillsdale College lecture that explains "ObamaCare's Assault on Religious Liberty." We must fight for our Constitutional rights or we will continue to lose them. - Reggie
Test of Fire YouTube description: Will you vote the values that will stand the test of fire? Some things are more important than high gas prices or a faltering economy. They are life, marriage and freedom. This November, Catholics must stand up and protect their sacred rights and duties.
Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal
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| Katie Pavlich |
Operation Fast and Furious is the deadliest and most sinister scandal in American history. A scandal so big, it’s worse than Iran-Contra and makes Watergate look like a high school prank gone wrong.
In the early days of the Obama Administration, President Obama claimed his goal was to stop the trafficking of guns from the United States into the hands of violent Mexican drug cartels. He claimed gun dealers in the United States were responsible for sending guns to Mexico. Both of his claims were lies.
In order to push his lies and policies built around them, with a goal of implementing harsher gun control laws and reinstating the assault weapons ban, President Obama packed his administration full of anti-Second Amendment zealots. After all, personnel is policy.
In my new book, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Coverup, I document the conspiracy of senior Obama officials to subvert the Second Amendment, which led directly to the murders of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, I.C.E. Agent Jaime Zapata and countless, faceless lives in Mexico. It debunks the Obama administration’s lies, denials and excuses. This administration was willing to use humans as collateral damage to push a political agenda, and had no shame in doing so. Now, the administration has no shame in covering up their reckless actions.
Since just moments after Brian Terry was killed in the Arizona desert on December 15, 2010 by Mexican cartel thugs, carrying AK-47s provided to them by the Obama Justice Department through Operation Fast and Furious, the FBI, Homeland Security, ATF, Justice Department and the White House have been engaged in a full scale cover-up. These are simply names of government agencies, but who are the people behind the cover-up?
Constitution 101 - "The Progressive Rejection of the Founding"
This is the 9th lecture in a 10 part series by Hillsdale College on the Constitution of the United States. I haven't posted any of the lectures up to this point for several reasons but I believe this is one of the most relevant ones for us today due to the re-birth and rise of the Progressives in our nation. We must learn their history to not only stop them but reverse the 100 years of damage they have rained upon us and upon our Constitution. - Reggie
How The MSM Covered Up Fast and Furious
In Katie Pavlich’s devastating new expose of the Eric Holder Justice Department-approved Fast and Furious operation, Pavlich doesn’t just expose the Obama administration. She exposes the mainstream media for what they are: tools of the Democratic Party, and of the White House.
As Pavlich recounts, the first mainstream media outlet to report on Fast and Furious was CBS Evening News, which aired a report by Sharyl Attkinson. She stated that the scandal itself was so awful that “some insiders say it surpasses the shoot-out at Ruby Ridge and the deadly siege at Waco.” She pointed out that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been pushing through the sale of guns to Mexican drug cartels, and that gun shops had even tried “to stop the questionable sales, but ATF encouraged them to continue.”
When the Obama administration saw Attkinson’s report, they reacted with utter fury. Officials from the administration screamed at her; as Pavlich reports, Justice Department communications director Tracy Schmaler called her up to yell at her. White House spokesman Eric Schultz “reportedly directed a barrage of expletives toward her.” Attkinson said that the White House and Justice Department labeled her “not reasonable” – as opposed to other press outlets.
From their perspective, that was correct – Attkinson wasn’t reasonable because she wasn’t parroting the party line. The rest of the media, however, was only too happy to do so. As Pavlich writes, “The New York Times and Washington Post weren’t just ‘reasonable,’ they seemed to act as press officers for the Obama administration.”
NRA Celebration of American Values Leadership Forum - John Bolton
YouTube description: Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton delivers a speech at the 2012 NRA Celebration of American Values Leadership Forum - NRA News - April 13, 2012 - http://www.NRANews.com
Neutral Objective Facts
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| Robert S. McCain |
Why have the major media become more liberal than ever?
Suppose that you picked up your paper this morning and the top story on the front page began something like this:
Timothy Geithner proved himself as incompetent at political spin as he is at tax evasion, attempting Sunday to convince Americans that President Obama's economic policies "were incredibly effective."
In a series of televised interviews on all three major broadcast networks, the bumbling and dishonest Treasury Secretary lamely attempted to defend the failed policies of the incumbent Democrat, while dismissing as "ridiculous" and "misleading" recent comments by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate who hopes to replace the administration's wrongheaded statist policies with a growth-oriented program of tax reduction and deregulation.
You won't find such an article on the front page of today's papers. This is not how the story will be reported by the Washington Post, the New York Times or USA Today, nor will you see this kind of blatant tendentiousness in whatever accounts the Associated Press or other syndicates provide for the major metro dailies. Nevertheless, this story as reported by "mainstream" news organizations will not be entirely free of a perceptible slant, and conservatives have asserted for decades that the media are guilty of a liberal bias, providing ostensibly "objective" reporting that in fact clearly favors Democrats.
Conservative efforts to counterbalance such bias have taken many forms over the years, including the publication of journals such as The American Spectator and the formation of such organization as the Media Research Center. Talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham have flourished as part of the conservative pushback against media bias, as have websites like Hot Air, daily papers like the Washington Times and, perhaps most famously, the Fox News Channel. It is interesting to observe, however, that this concerted pushback has had a mixed record of success. The "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy," as Hillary Clinton dubbed it in 1998, was incapable of persuading a majority of Americans that Mrs. Clinton's husband should be drummed out of office for his "high crimes and misdemeanors." Similarly, conservative alternative media could not prevent Democrats from winning control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, nor prevent Obama's 2008 election. And, although Republicans took back Congress in a historic 2010 midterm landslide, the prospects for defeating Obama's re-election bid and unseating Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader are uncertain at best, despite what most conservatives would view as the demonstrable failures of Democratic Party policies. Thus the question arises: "What are conservatives doing wrong in their efforts to expose, correct and offset liberal media bias?"
One answer to that question is to consider the obverse of the problem: What have liberals been doing right? Despite all the changes in the journalistic ecology in recent years, one fact has remained constant: Liberals dominate the "mainstream" media, both in absolute numbers and in terms of power and prestige. Consider the fact that Obama's White House spokesman, Jay Carney, is a former Time magazine reporter whose wife, Claire Shipman, is employed as a reporter by ABC News. The same network employs, both as anchor of Good Morning America and as host of its Sunday program This Week, veteran Democratic Party operative George Stephanopoulos. From this simple handful of facts, we may conclude that if ABC News should ever be accused of fairness toward Republicans in its political coverage, we would have to classify this as an inexplicable accident or perhaps even a miracle.
Will the Supreme Court Let the Death Panel Stand?
Unless Obamacare is struck down in its entirety, IPAB will remain.
With the possible exception of the individual mandate, the most pernicious contrivance of Obamacare is the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the fifteen-member committee whose purpose is to ration health care to seniors by manipulating Medicare payment rates. Before the advent of Obamacare, only Congress had the power to make changes to Medicare's reimbursement scheme. Now, unless the Supreme Court strikes down the "reform" law in its entirety, that power will be transferred to the unaccountable political appointees of IPAB. The members of this death panel, as it has been appropriately dubbed, will be able to meddle with the fiscal machinery of Medicare without having to worry about the ire of the pesky electorate. IPAB is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to repeal.
As Clint Bolick of the Hoover Institution writes, "Under the statute, any bill to repeal IPAB must be introduced within the one-month period between January 1 and February 1, 2017. If introduced, it must be enacted by a three-fifths super-majority no later than August 15, 2017." These bizarre limits were obviously put in place by the Democrats to prevent any future Republican-controlled Congress from getting rid of IPAB. Thus, the fate of the death panel depends on how the Court rules on the constitutionality of Obamacare's individual mandate and whether the justices believe it is severable from the rest of the law. If the Court decides to invalidate the mandate and also rules that it is inseverable from the remaining provisions, IPAB will be struck down with the rest of Obamacare.
It is, however, by no means a given that the justices will issue such a ruling. During last month's hearings before the Supreme Court the states challenging Obamacare argued for just such a decision, claiming that the mandate is unconstitutional and cannot be severed from the remainder of the statute. The Department of Justice (DOJ) argued that the individual mandate is constitutional, of course, but admitted that it isn't severable from two other provisions -- guaranteed issue and community rating. In other words, only these two provisions would also have to be struck down if the Court rules the mandate unconstitutional. If the Court does indeed rule the mandate invalid, but accepts the Justice Department's narrow view of severability, IPAB will emerge unscathed.
That will not good be news for seniors. No matter how many whoppers we're told by the White House and its accomplices in Congress, the purpose of IPAB is to ration care to the elderly. If the Supreme Court shrinks from striking down Obamacare in its entirety, Americans will soon become the unfortunate subjects of news stories like this one about a man in Great Britain who was denied cancer care merely because he was 78 years old. Britain's socialized medical system routinely denies care to seniors because its bureaucrats have determined that it isn't cost effective to treat the elderly: "According to shocking new research by Macmillan Cancer Support, every year many thousands of older people are routinely denied life-saving NHS treatments because their doctors write them off as too old to treat."
Israeli TV Report Shows Air Force Gearing up for Iran Attack
This is a fascinating and stunning story. Why would Prime Minister Netanyahu allow the Israeli press access to this sensitive information? Have they actually told the world the details of their plan to attack Iran's nuclear installations? Are they deliberately giving false information in order to confuse Iran? I don't pretend to know the answer but I do know that Israel is one of the most effective and closed mouthed countries when it comes to stealth, covert operations. The airing of this story was not a mistake. Perhaps, they are attempting to deposit great fear in the hearts of the maniacal Iranians. Time will tell. - Reggie
A major Israel TV station on Sunday night broadcast a detailed report on how Israel will go about attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities in the event that diplomacy and sanctions fail and Israel decides to carry out a military strike.
The report, screened on the main evening news of Channel 10, was remarkable both in terms of the access granted to the reporter, who said he had spent weeks with the pilots and other personnel he interviewed, and in the fact that his assessments on a strike were cleared by the military censor.
No order to strike is likely to be given before the P5+1 talks with Iran resume in May, the reporter, Alon Ben-David, said. “But the coming summer will not only be hot but tense.”
In the event that negotiations fail and the order is given for Israel to carry out an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, “dozens if not more planes” will take part in the mission: attack and escort jets, tankers for mid-air refueling, electronic warfare planes and rescue helicopters, the report said.
Ben-David said the Israel Air Force “does not have the capacity to destroy the entire Iranian program.” There will be no replication of the decisive strikes on Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 or on Syria in 2007, he said. “The result won’t be definitive.” But, a pilot quoted in the report said, the IAF will have to ensure that it emerges with the necessary result, with “a short and professional” assault.
Ben-David said that if negotiations break down, and Iran moves key parts of its nuclear program underground to its Qom facility, the IAF “is likely to get the order and to set out on the long journey to Iran.”
“Years of preparations are likely to come to realization,” he said, adding that “the moment of truth is near.”
Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world". "I am more worried than I have been in the past," he said. "It's scary."
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
The 38-year-old billionaire, whose family fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union, was widely regarded as having been the driving force behind Google's partial pullout from China in 2010 over concerns about censorship and cyber-attacks. He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. "I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle," he said.
He said he was most concerned by the efforts of countries such as China, Saudi Arabia and Iran to censor and restrict use of the internet, but warned that the rise of Facebook and Apple, which have their own proprietary platforms and control access to their users, risked stifling innovation and balkanising the web.
"There's a lot to be lost," he said. "For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."
Brin's criticism of Facebook is likely to be controversial, with the social network approaching an estimated $100bn (£64bn) flotation. Google's upstart rival has seen explosive growth: it has signed up half of Americans with computer access and more than 800 million members worldwide.
Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Holder Meets Sharpton
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| Andrew McCarthy |
The attorney general heaps praise on an infamous huckster.
Eric Holder rode in on the stench of Marc Rich and will ride out on the stench of Al Sharpton. He’s spent the three-plus years in between branding Americans as “cowards” on race matters; investigating the CIA; coddling CAIR and the New Black Panthers; green-lighting voter fraud; swaddling Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the Bill of Rights; and converting the Justice Department into a full-employment program for the Lawyer Left and its Gitmo boutique. But now he’s hit the big time.
This week, our esteemed attorney general canoodled with Reverend Al at the annual convention of the “National Action Network,” home base for the infamous huckster (that would be Sharpton, not Holder — sorry for any confusion). It is difficult to imagine another attorney general in American history sucking up to such a race-mongering charlatan. The Sharpton record was succinctly catalogued on the Corner by Victor Davis Hanson: inciting murderous riots; slandering Jews, Mormons, and homosexuals; libeling a state prosecutor in the course of championing Tawana Brawley’s fabrication of a racial “hate crime.” Yet there was Holder, ladling cringe-making praise on Sharpton for “your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve and the promises we must fulfill.”
Holder is currently in “partnership” with his fast friend on the highly charged Trayvon Martin case. In the days before the nation’s chief federal law-enforcement official lionized the CEO of the nation’s racial-grievance industry, Sharpton had been in Florida, threatening that his “action network” — as in “direct action,” the community-organizer’s stock-in-trade — would “move to the next level” if authorities in Sanford, Fla., failed to arrest George Zimmerman, the man (or, if you prefer the New York Times Agitator’s Glossary, the “white Hispanic”) who shot Mr. Martin, a black 17-year-old.
With such notches on his belt as Crown Heights and Freddie’s Fashion Mart, there’s not a lot of mystery involved when the Reverend Al starts conjuring “the next level” of “action.” Still, never what you’d call a master of subtlety, Sharpton — between inciting mobs with demands to “arrest Zimmerman now!” — expressly threatened to “occupy” the city of Sanford.
The nation’s chief federal law enforcer reacted to these threats of lawlessness with paeans to Sharpton’s besotted history. Beyond that, Holder has been doing plenty of agitating on his own. He bragged to Sharpton’s crowd that he’d ordered his Justice Department to open an investigation into the Martin shooting three weeks ago. He stood ready, he vowed, to file “civil rights” charges if warranted by “the facts and the law.”
Just one problem: Nothing about the known facts comes close to triggering federal jurisdiction. Holder’s “civil rights” hooey is based on fiction: a tale manufactured by NBC News, the flimflam artists who doctored the audiotape of Zimmerman’s call to the police, stoking public outrage with a report that Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin.
The case at hand involves the excruciating loss of a 17-year-old’s life. We do not know exactly what happened. We do know, however, that there is virtually no chance Martin’s race was the cause of his killing. Quite apart from Zimmerman’s lineage — which the Times would be reporting as “Hispanic,” not the newfangled “white Hispanic,” if he had been on the receiving end of fired shots — Zimmerman is of a mixed-race family. Not only does he have black relatives, he has reportedly donated his time to tutor black children. He seems to have used tragically poor judgment in the chain of events that led to Martin’s death, but there is no indication that he is a racist or that his overeager actions were motivated by racial bias. In the context of the case, Martin’s race is sheer happenstance. Its principal relevance is the divisive opening it presents for opportunistic racialists such as Sharpton and Holder.
Race is a dubious constitutional basis for federal intrusion into state law enforcement. The framers saw policing as a state matter– that’s why there was no U.S. Justice Department for the first 83 years of constitutional governance. One needn’t be blind to slavery and structural racism to understand that 21st-century Florida has moved beyond these blights on the nation’s history. There is zero reason to believe that, without Eric Holder hovering, Florida’s police, prosecutors, and citizens could not be trusted to do justice.
What’s Your Plan?
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| Mark Steyn |
The “Buffett Rule” is just another pathetic sleight of hand.
In the end, free societies get the governments they deserve. So, if the American people wish to choose their chief executive on the basis of the “war on women,” the Republican theocrats’ confiscation of your contraceptives, or whatever other mangy and emaciated rabbit the Great Magician produces from his threadbare topper, they are free to do so, and they will live with the consequences. This week’s bit of ham-handed misdirection was “the Buffett Rule,” a not-so-disguised capital-gains-tax hike designed to ensure that Warren Buffett pays as much tax as his secretary. If the alleged Sage of Omaha is as exercised about this as his public effusions would suggest, I’d be in favor of repealing the prohibition on Bills of Attainder, and the old boy could sleep easy at night. But instead every other American “millionaire” will be subject to the new rule — because, as President Obama said this week, it “will help us close our deficit.”
Wow! Who knew it was that easy?
A-hem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (the same nonpartisan bean-counters who project that on Obama’s current spending proposals the entire U.S. economy will cease to exist in 2027) Obama’s Buffett Rule will raise — stand well back — $3.2 billion per year. Or what the United States government currently borrows every 17 hours. So in 514 years it will have raised enough additional revenue to pay off the 2011 federal budget deficit. If you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years is the year 2526. There’s a sporting chance Joe Biden will have retired from public life by then, but other than that I’m not making any bets.
Let’s go back to that presidential sound bite:
“It will help us close our deficit.”
I’m beginning to suspect that the Oval Office teleprompter may be malfunctioning, or that perhaps that NBC News producer who “accidentally” edited George Zimmerman into sounding like a racist has now edited the smartest president of all time into sounding like an idiot. Either way, it appears the last seven words fell off the end of the sentence. What the president meant to say was:
“It will help us close our deficit . . . for 2011 . . . within a mere half millennium!” [Pause for deafening cheers and standing ovation.]
Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama’s current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path. The current federal debt burden works out at about $140,000 per federal taxpayer, and President Obama is proposing to increase both debt and taxes. Are you one of those taxpayers? How much more do you want added to your $140,000 debt burden? As the Great Magician would say, pick a number, any number. Sorry, you’re wrong. Whatever you’re willing to bear, he’s got more lined up for you.
Even if you’re absolved from federal income tax, you too require enough people willing to keep the racket going, and America is already pushing forward into territory the rest of the developed world is steering well clear of. On April Fools’ Day, Japan and the United Kingdom both cut their corporate-tax rates, leaving the United States even more of an outlier, with the highest corporate-tax rate in the developed world: The top rate of federal corporate tax in the U.S. is 35 percent. It’s 15 percent in Canada. Which is next door.
Well, who cares about corporations? Only out of touch dilettante playboys like Mitt Romney who — hmm, let’s see what I can produce from the bottom of the top hat — put his dog on the roof of his car as recently as 1984! That’s where your gran’ma will be under the Republicans’ plan, while your contraceptiveless teenage daughter is giving birth on the hood. “Corporations are people, my friend,” said Mitt, in what’s generally regarded as a damaging sound bite by all the smart people who think Obama’s plan to use the Buffett Rule to “close the deficit” this side of the fourth millennium is a stroke of genius.
Candidates Speak at 2012 NRA Annual Meeting
The National Rifle Association held their annual meeting this week where Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney both spoke on April 13th. The videos are posted in the order the men spoke. - Reggie
China's Ghost Cities and Malls
This is absolutely fascinating and eerie. The Chinese are building beautiful cities (about 10 per year) and malls that remain empty. There have been several reports about these ghost cities on The Blaze.
Click here to see them. - Reggie
YouTube description: Documentary by SBS Dateline (Australian TV) about the Chinese real estate market.
And there is this...
NOTE: These stories are a year or two old, for the most part, but they are worth reading. It is amazing that a nation is building entire cities and malls that no one will ever inhabit.
Allen West says 'about 78 to 81' House Democrats in Communist Party
Allen West made this claim at a townhall meeting a few days ago and the left has been having a fit about it. For what it's worth, I believe Congressman West is right about Democrats being Communists. As we watch the things they are fighting for, such as socialized medicine, it is so clear they are not Capitalists. - Reggie
Florida's Allen West's claim echoed Joe McCarthy's unsubstantiated 1950s charges that communists had infiltrated the top ranks of the U.S. government.
WASHINGTON -- Republican Rep. Allen West said he believes 75-plus House Democrats are members of the Communist Party, a claim that echoed Joe McCarthy's unsubstantiated 1950s charges that communists had infiltrated the top ranks of the U.S. government.
Addressing a town-hall meeting Tuesday in Florida, the freshman lawmaker was asked how many members of the American legislature are "card-carrying Marxists." West said "there's about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party." He did not provide names.
West's office said Wednesday that the congressman stood by the comments and was referring to the 76 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest group within the House Democratic caucus.
"The Communist Party has publicly referred to the Progressive Caucus as its allies," said Angela Melvin, a spokeswoman for West. "The Progressive Caucus speaks for itself. These individuals certainly aren't proponents of free markets or individual economic freedom."
Nazis Get Their Own Lobbyist
So Rep. Allen West thinks the Democratic Party is full of communists? Wait until he gets a load of the new Nazi lobbyist. No, seriously.
On Tuesday, the same day that West was fantasizing about 80 members of Congress being card-carrying members of the Communist Party, the actual American Nazi Party was making its move onto the Hill. One John Bowles registered with the Clerk of the House that day as a lobbyist for for the white supremacist group (hat tip LegiStorm). Bowles was the National Socialist Movement's presidential nominee in 2008.
What could the Nazis want to lobby the Congress about? "Political Rights and ballot access laws," according to the registration form, which also lists lists accounting, agriculture, clean air and water, civil rights, health issues, the Constitution, immigration, manufacturing, and retirement as "general lobbying issue areas." Who knew the Nazis had strong views on agriculture?
Tea Party Launches Group to Combat IRS
Saying President Barack Obama is “targeting the Tea Party” and using the “IRS as a weapon,” Tea Party activists Wednesday launched a coalition to combat the federal government agency’s burdensome and onerous interrogation of conservative groups to determine if they should receive tax exempt status.
Speaking at the National Press Club, two Tea Party group leaders announced the formation of the Liberty Defense Foundation, which will assist grassroots organizations in fending off long questionnaires from the IRS when filing for 501 (c) (4) non-profit status.
“I really wish I didn’t have to be here,” said Eric Wilson, director of the Kentucky 9/12 Project. “I don’t mind coming to D.C. to visit but I don’t want to be doing a press conference for the reasons I’m having to do it, because the truth is, Obama’s IRS is targeting local Tea Party, liberty groups and ordinary citizens. And that’s the reason we have to fight back.”
Wilson said his organization and hundreds of others have received letters from the IRS requesting thousands of pages of information about their activities, with a two-week deadline to respond.
“They’re trying to bury us in time, trying to bury us in paperwork, and they are making us use up resources we don’t have, especially small local organizations and small groups,” he said, referring to an IRS questionnaire with 88 inquiries. “And they’re doing this during a critical election year. This is not by accident. This is coordinated and this is targeted.”
Friday, April 13, 2012
Santorum: 'I have absolutely no regrets'
from last night
Sarah Palin: We Will be Silent no More
There has been a great outcry from conservatives after Hilary Rosen, an Obama devotee, made some derogatory comments about Ann Romney having "never worked a day in her life." To get more background on this, read the transcript from Rush Limbaugh's radio show yesterday. I've also added a video of Greta van Susteren debating Karl Rove about the remarks made by Hilary Rosen. Sarah Palin was on Hannity last night and talked about this among other things. - Reggie
The ‘Tyranny’ of the ‘Lying Law’
h/t The Blaze
What Was Life Really Like Under a Communist Regime?
Glenn Beck talked to survivors of Communist regimes on GBTV tonight. Below are two clips from that show. America is headed in this direction and there is not much time left for us.
Read the full story at The Blaze. - Reggie
Read the full story at The Blaze. - Reggie
Charles Murray on Coming Apart
YouTube description: This week on Uncommon Knowledge, longtime American Enterprise Institute fellow Charles Murray discusses his controversial new book, Coming Apart, about what American was, is, and will become. He also reveals his personal score on his now famous "bubble quiz." Take the quiz here.
And there is this...
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
The Real Obama: Radical Inner Circle
Why Obama Hates Paul Ryan
A left-wing extremist can't compete intellectually with a voice of reason.
Barack Obama's address on April 3 at the Associated Press luncheon in Washington D.C. demonstrated why our politics and our country today are seriously dysfunctional, and only the American people can fix it at the ballot box. Find the transcript online and print it out as I did.
I will show below why it reveals that the President, in fact, does not understand the major issues facing the country, indeed, he actually can't even discuss them intelligently. Moreover, he is hopelessly, abusively dishonest about what he does understand. Thirdly, what he is demanding as policy is irreconcilable left-wing extremism.
Fourthly, what the speech shows is that Barack Obama is very angry. He is angry because he has been completely shown up by Paul Ryan, who stepped up in his budget and provided the leadership that Obama promised America in 2008, and America so badly needs, but that Obama has not only failed to deliver, but refused to deliver. In fact, he has delivered just the opposite. What the speech says to me is that Obama has internal polls showing him getting creamed in public opinion by Paul Ryan. Republicans may have those same internal polls, explaining the surge of interest in Ryan for VP.
What Ryan did most of all that has Obama actually feeling embarrassed if not humiliated is propose in his budget both pro-growth tax reform with bipartisan support, and fundamental entitlement reform that enjoys bipartisan support as well.
Obama Makes It Up
Hence Obama's shameful, transparently dishonest attack on Ryan's budget in the speech, which has only further backfired on Obama. Obama said that under Ryan's budget:
The year after next, nearly 10 million college students would see their financial aid cut by an average of more than $1,000 each. There would be 1,600 fewer medical grants. Research grants for things like Alzheimer's and cancer and AIDS. There would be 4,000 fewer scientific research grants, eliminating support for 48,000 researchers, students and teachers.
Investments in clean energy technology that are helping us reduce our dependence on foreign oil would be cut by nearly a fifth. [O]ver 200,000 children would lose their chance to get an early education in the Head Start program. Two million mothers and young children would be cut from a program that gives them access to healthy food.
There would be 4,500 fewer federal grants at the Department of Justice and the FBI to combat violent crime, financial crime, and secure our borders. Hundreds of national parks would be forced to close for part or all of the year. We wouldn't have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food that we eat.
Cuts to the FAA would likely result in more flight cancellations, delays and the complete elimination of air traffic control services in parts of the country. Over time, our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn't be able to afford to launch new satellites and that means governors and mayors would have to wait longer to order evacuations in the event of a hurricane.
But the speech itself reveals where Obama got these fairy tales, because he didn't get them from Ryan's budget. The above litany of woe is preceded in the speech by this line: "I want to actually go through what it would mean for our country if these cuts were to be spread out evenly," and this caveat: "If this budget becomes law, and the cuts were evenly applied starting in 2014…"
In other words, Obama's speech itself tells us this is all made up. Obama's minions calculated the percentage of total spending cuts in Ryan's budget, and then applied that same percentage to every politically sensitive line item in the budget. But as Ryan has said publicly, that is not what his budget does. The long overdue spending cuts are outlined in hundreds of pages on the House Budget Committee website.
What Ryan's budget does is just return federal spending to its long--term, historical, postwar average at 20 percent of GDP, which prevailed for 60 years before President Obama and his runaway spending. With that manageable federal spending, America prospered as the richest and mightiest nation in the history of the planet.
But President Obama hysterically and falsely claims just doing that will lead to all of the above disastrous results, and further that "by the middle of the next century funding for the kinds of things I just mentioned would have to be cut by 95%," which is another fabrication. Just returning to that long term, historical, postwar average of federal spending as a percent of GDP, Obama claims, is "really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country… thinly veiled social Darwinism… antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility." This from the long-time radical who ran on fundamentally transforming America, not restoring our history. Obama's wild, false rhetoric is not even an honest, intelligent discussion of the budget issues.
What this means is Obama adamantly opposes restoring traditional, long-term control over federal spending, and won't do that if reelected. Instead, on our current course under Obama and the Democrats, according to CBO, federal spending soars to 30 percent of GDP by 2027, 40 percent by 2040, 50 percent by 2060, and 80 percent by 2080. Actually, it would be higher than that, as GDP would collapse under that burden. Add in another 15 percent of GDP for state and local spending, and we are at full-blown communism.
This is the choice facing the American people in the 2012 elections. Restoring traditional American prosperity and federal spending to their long term, postwar trends, with Ryan's budget, or go backwards to Obama's outdated Marxist socialism, or worse.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Health-Care Law will add $340 Billion to Deficit, New Study Finds
President Obama’s landmark health-care initiative, long touted as a means to control costs, will actually add more than $340 billion to the nation’s budget woes over the next decade, according to a new study by a Republican member of the board that oversees Medicare financing.
The study is set to be released Tuesday by Charles Blahous, a conservative policy analyst whom Obama approved in 2010 as the GOP trustee for Medicare and Social Security. His analysis challenges the conventional wisdom that the health-care law, which calls for an expensive expansion of coverage for the uninsured beginning in 2014, will nonetheless reduce deficits by raising taxes and cutting payments to Medicare providers.
The 2010 law does generate both savings and revenue. But much of that money will flow into the Medicare hospitalization trust fund — and, under law, the money must be used to pay years of additional benefits to those who are already insured. That means those savings would not be available to pay for expanding coverage for the uninsured.
“Does the health-care act worsen the deficit? The answer, I think, is clearly that it does,” Blahous, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, said in an interview. “If one asserts that this law extends the solvency of Medicare, then one is affirming that this law adds to the deficit. Because the expansion of the Medicare trust fund and the creation of the new subsidies together create more spending than existed under prior law.”
Administration officials dismissed the study, arguing that it departs from bipartisan budget rules used to measure every major deficit-reduction effort for the past four decades — including the blueprint offered last month by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
“Opponents of reform are using ‘new math’ while they attempt to refight the political battles of the past,” a White House budget official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report was not publicly available. “The fact of the matter is, the Congressional Budget Office and independent experts concluded that the health-reform law will reduce the deficit. That was true the day the bill was signed into law, and it’s true today.”
No, Mr. Carville, the Supreme Defeat of ObamaCare will Hurt Democrats
What a difference a Supreme Court hearing makes. Before the recent hearing, the Left told the world that ObamaCare was most certainly constitutional. They even mused that Justice Scalia would uphold the law.
The hearings, however, sent an arrow through their balloon and the spinmeisters into full action. James Carville went so far as to suggest that ObamaCare’s demise would be the greatest thing ever to happen to the Democrat Party. Carville couldn’t be more wrong.
ObamaCare, keep in mind, is Obama’s self-proclaimed signature achievement. More than the Stimulus plan or Cap & Trade, it was to be Obama’s mark on the American system. Its demise, however, will be celebrated, not missed.
The only comparable striking down of a signature Presidential program by the Supreme Court related to FDR’s first New Deal. In a series of cases decided in 1935 and 1936, key aspects of the first New Deal were declared unconstitutional. During that process, FDR was every bit as arrogant about his efforts as Obama.
After his legal losses, FDR attempted to pack the Supreme Court to get around, “the nine old men,” and declared that “we cannot seriously be alarmed when they cry ‘unconstitutional’ at every effort to better the condition of our people.” FDR asserted that “We will no longer be permitted to sacrifice each generation in turn while the law catches up with life.”
Such language can be found in the arrogance of unchecked power.
Largesse for Losers
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| Thomas Sowell |
Translating the Left’s rhetoric, and other random thoughts.
How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
Why should being in a professional sport exempt anyone from prosecution for advocating deliberate violence? Recent revelations of such advocacy of violence by an NFL coach should lead to his banishment for life by the NFL, and criminal prosecution by the authorities. If you are serious about reducing violence, you have to be serious about punishing those who advocate it.
Have you noticed that what modest economic improvements we have seen occurred during the much-lamented “gridlock” in Washington? Nor is this unusual. If you check back through history, doing nothing has a far better track record than politicians’ intervening in the economy.
With all the talk about people paying their “fair share” of income taxes, why do nearly half the people in this country pay no income taxes at all? Is that their “fair share”? Or is creating more recipients of government handouts, at no cost to themselves, simply a strategy to gain more votes?
Some people are puzzled by the fact that so much that is said and done by politicians seems remote from reality. But reality is not what gets politicians elected. Appearances, rhetoric, and emotions are what get them elected. Reality is what the voters and taxpayers are left to deal with as a result of electing them.
Instead of following the tired old formula of having politicians and bureaucrats give college commencement speeches, in which they say how superior a career as a politician or bureaucrat — “public service” — is to other careers, why not invite someone like John Stossel to tell the graduates how much better it is to go into the private sector, where they can supply what people want, instead of imposing the government’s will on them?
$494 Billion Tax Increase to Hit in 2013
It will be up to Washington to save the country from what the Washington Post has dubbed “Taxmageddon” — the looming tax increase set to hit Americans on Jan. 1.
Curtis Dubay, a senior analyst in Tax Policy at the Heritage Foundation, has chronicled the taxes set to hit if Congress and the administration do not make adjustments.
According to Dubay, Americans will see a $494 billion tax increase at the beginning of 2013.
“[The tax increase] is hitting because of expiring tax policies and the beginning of five taxes in Obamacare,” Dubay told The Daily Caller.
Dubay’s study of the looming $494 billion tax increase highlights the policies set to expire. These include the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cut, the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) patch, the tax cuts in the 2009 stimulus, tax extenders, the estate tax adjustment, and 100 percent business investment expensing.
Additionally, Durbay points out, that five of the eighteen tax increases in Obamacare will begin next year.
“Seventy percent of the tax hike falls directly on middle and low income families,” Dubay said. “That might surprise some people because you’ve heard for the last 12 years that the Bush tax cuts were just tax cuts for the rich, which is simply not true.”
Congressman Paul Ryan vs. President Obama
from this morning
YouTube description: Chairman of the House Budget Committee Congressman Paul Ryan on what the GOP needs to focus on in the 2012 presidential election to win back the White House. From his keynote address at the George W. Bush Presidential Center's Tax Policies for 4% Growth conference at the New-York Historical Society.
George W. Bush: Tax Policies For 4% Growth
from this morning
YouTube description: President George W. Bush gives his opening remarks about tax policy and economic growth for the "Tax Policies For 4% Growth" Conference at the New York Historical Society.
Huckabee Show Opens With Staged Caller
I have never liked Mike Huckabee and this makes me like him even less. - Reggie
What did Huckabee know about planted call from Cumulus VP that attacked Rush Limbaugh?
Wow.
As we often say here: you just can't make it up.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee took his first phone call of his new talk radio call-in show yesterday. From "Mike in San Francisco." Remember: the show is being positioned by the Cumulus Media Network as the conservative show with "more conversation, less confrontation." Or, as it is certainly being pushed in the anti-Rush Limbaugh media, the show for moderate Republicans that will Take Rush Out. RINO Radio, as we noted here last week.
But there seemed to be something slightly out of whack.
That something?
The very first phone call, arriving some fifty minutes into the show. To anyone with an ear for talk radio it had a startling quality.
Why?
No one seemed to remember to give the call-in number to the audience until the very last few seconds of those first fifty minutes. But yet… presto!... within seconds, Mike Huckabee did in fact have a caller on the line! Without ever questioning how that caller could have gotten on that line in less time than it takes Obama to blame Bush for anything!
The caller…"Mike from San Francisco"… was in fact not just your average Mike.
Huckabee began this way:
"Alright, we're going to go to the phone lines and we've got a call from Mike in San Francisco. Welcome to the Mike Huckabee Show, Mike."
What did "Mike" have on his mind? He started this way:
"Well Governor, let me start by saying it's great to have a different opinion and a different person on the radio and I'm very, very happy that you're doing this radio show. One of the reasons why I want to listen to your program every day is because you ran for office and you've been a politician, you have a different perspective I think."
Catch that? "Mike from San Francisco" begins by saying in supposedly unprompted fashion that (bold emphasis mine) "… it's great to have a different opinion and a different person on the radio…"
Different opinion? Different person? Different from whom? Why, Rush Limbaugh, of course.
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