YouTube description: After being declared the winner in the Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island primaries, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told supporters in Manchester, N. H. -- where he announced his presidential candidacy less than a year ago -- to gear up for the general election.
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Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Mitt Romney Gives Primary Victory Speech
Romney swept the five Republican primaries tonight in Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New York. Well, all I can say is, "At least he's not a Commy!" - Reggie
YouTube description: After being declared the winner in the Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island primaries, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told supporters in Manchester, N. H. -- where he announced his presidential candidacy less than a year ago -- to gear up for the general election.
YouTube description: After being declared the winner in the Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island primaries, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told supporters in Manchester, N. H. -- where he announced his presidential candidacy less than a year ago -- to gear up for the general election.
Activists, Law Enforcement Face Off on Eve of 'American Spring'
It’s been an extraordinarily busy few months for the FBI and cyber-related task forces. The arrests of several prominent hackers associated with Anonymous have had the hacker collective pointing fingers at suspected “snitches” on the inside and lowering their profiles in recent months. But as Occupy gears up for its American Spring, Anons are trying to gain footing again and mobilize for the cause.
Still, the collective will be doing so without several of its champions.
You’ll recall that on March 6, 2012, an unsealed indictment revealed that “Sabu” – a key member of the Anonymous offshoot LulzSec – had become an FBI informant, sending much of the hacktivist universe into a tailspin.
Sabu, whose real name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, was arrested on June 7, 2011. As part of a confidential plea deal, divulged only to a judge and several other officials in a secret bail hearing on August 5, 2011, Sabu worked with government agents for nearly a year to expose several of his fellow LulzSec cohorts.
While many individual arrests of Anonymous hackers have taken place, one begins to see the bigger picture when recent events are viewed collectively.
And there is this...
Anonymous: Revolution 2012
Obama's Latest Plan to Snooker Seniors
GAO outs $8 billion Medicare Advantage "demonstration project"
as an election year scam.
For years, the President and his congressional accomplices have been telling us that the Medicare Advantage (MA) program is too costly. As Obama claimed during a 2009 interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage.… And if we eliminate that and other programs, we can potentially save $200 billion…" This canard was the pretext for the massive slashes in MA funding he authorized when he signed Obamacare into law. As the election year approached, however, the President's reelection team evidently noticed a potential problem -- the seniors most likely to be affected by these MA cuts were due to find out about them just a few weeks before the November election.
As Benjamin E. Sasse and Charles Hurt report, open enrollment for MA begins 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." And it is no exaggeration to say that MA is "beloved." Nearly 25 percent of all Medicare enrollees are on MA, and the vast majority of these seniors chose the program because of its low co-pays and comprehensive benefits. It is no coincidence that well over three-fifths of MA beneficiaries have annual incomes of less than $30,000 and that the percentage of minorities enrolled in the program is much higher than is the case for traditional Medicare.
The electoral significance of these facts would hardly have been lost on the President's political advisors when they learned that Obamacare's MA cuts would be unveiled to the nation's most reliable voters just before the November election. The resultant vision of surly seniors lining up in their millions at the polls to pull the lever for Mitt Romney presumably produced urgent emails and frantic phone calls, followed by a terse directive from the White House to Obama's creatures at CMS to come up with plan to put off the cuts until after the election. In due course, an $8.3 billion "demonstration project" materialized that would "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."
Monday, April 23, 2012
Stop Pointing Fingers
http://www.BankruptingAmerica.org
YouTube description: Congress last passed a budget on April 29, 2009, almost three years ago. Since then, Members of Congress from both parties have failed to work together to perform one of the federal government's most basic functions.
Bankrupting America is starting a campaign to say 'Enough is Enough' and get Congress to do their jobs and pass a budget. Call your Senator at 1-888-760-7997 and tell them to pass a budget.
Also check out our fact sheet on the issue.
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org/fact-sheet/the-budget-games/
YouTube description: Congress last passed a budget on April 29, 2009, almost three years ago. Since then, Members of Congress from both parties have failed to work together to perform one of the federal government's most basic functions.
Bankrupting America is starting a campaign to say 'Enough is Enough' and get Congress to do their jobs and pass a budget. Call your Senator at 1-888-760-7997 and tell them to pass a budget.
Also check out our fact sheet on the issue.
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org/fact-sheet/the-budget-games/
'Occupy Unmasked' Previews to BlogCon Standing Ovation
Read more at Breitbart: Steve Bannon's 'Occupy Unmasked' Previews to BlogCon Standing Ovation
CONTENT WARNING: Graphic audio and video - not for children!
Constitution 101 - "The Recovery of the Constitution"
This is the 10th lecture in a 10 part series by Hillsdale College on the Constitution of the United States.
Shift on Executive Power Lets Obama Bypass Rivals
Yes, America, we have a king, a dictator, a tyrant in the Oval Office and he must not be given a second term! - Reggie
WASHINGTON — One Saturday last fall, President Obama interrupted a White House strategy meeting to raise an issue not on the agenda. He declared, aides recalled, that the administration needed to more aggressively use executive power to govern in the face of Congressional obstructionism.
“We had been attempting to highlight the inability of Congress to do anything,” recalled William M. Daley, who was the White House chief of staff at the time. “The president expressed frustration, saying we have got to scour everything and push the envelope in finding things we can do on our own.”
For Mr. Obama, that meeting was a turning point. As a senator and presidential candidate, he had criticized George W. Bush for flouting the role of Congress. And during his first two years in the White House, when Democrats controlled Congress, Mr. Obama largely worked through the legislative process to achieve his domestic policy goals.
But increasingly in recent months, the administration has been seeking ways to act without Congress. Branding its unilateral efforts “We Can’t Wait,” a slogan that aides said Mr. Obama coined at that strategy meeting, the White House has rolled out dozens of new policies — on creating jobs for veterans, preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy standards, curbing domestic violence and more.
Each time, Mr. Obama has emphasized the fact that he is bypassing lawmakers. When he announced a cut in refinancing fees for federally insured mortgages last month, for example, he said: “If Congress refuses to act, I’ve said that I’ll continue to do everything in my power to act without them.”
Aides say many more such moves are coming. Not just a short-term shift in governing style and a re-election strategy, Mr. Obama’s increasingly assertive use of executive action could foreshadow pitched battles over the separation of powers in his second term, should he win and Republicans consolidate their power in Congress.
Catholic Bishops Take on Obama
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken a bold stand for religious freedom. In a recent statement, titled “Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” the bishops call for repeal of contraception coverage mandated by the Department of Health and Human Services. The clarified position sets up a dramatic confrontation with the Obama administration—and would, if the bishops prevail, help preserve the religious liberty of all Americans.
The HHS mandate requires employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception and sterilization services. It is, according to the bishops, an “unjust law.” They write: “It cannot be obeyed and therefore one does not seek relief from it, but rather its repeal.”
The statement is a rebuke of President Obama and the so-called accommodation his administration proposed in February. It also raises the stakes between the president and the leaders of America’s Catholic Church.
The bishops call on Catholics in America, “in solidarity with our fellow citizens,” not to obey the law. They implicitly compare the HHS regulation to a segregation-era statute, and even cite Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In a not-so-subtle manner, the bishops tell the Obama administration that they are willing to go to prison rather than comply with the mandate’s provisions.
In doing so, the bishops are ruling out the possibility of a compromise that might preserve the mandate by expanding possible conscience exemptions from it. Most discussion had been over how far the religious liberty exemption should extend—but with the bishops calling for repeal, that all could change.
Investigate IRS Harassment of Tea Party Groups
A defining aspect of the American tradition is that groups of citizens band together for a wide variety of civic purposes. They recruit volunteers, raise funds and spend those funds to promote whatever project or cause brings them together.
For more than a century, our tax laws have recognized that such voluntary associations – non-profits, we call them today – should not be taxed, because their proceeds are devoted entirely to improve our communities through education, advocacy, and civic action. Section 501 of the Internal Revenue code recognizes them today, and civic groups like Move.org, the League of Conservation Voters, the ACLU, the National Rifle Association and various taxpayer groups have always been included in this definition.
We don’t apply a political test to these civic groups – we recognize the fundamental right of Americans to organize and to pool their resources to promote whatever causes they believe in – left or right. Indeed, whatever their political persuasion, these civic groups perform an absolutely indispensible role in our democracy by raising public awareness, defining issues, educating voters, promoting reforms, holding officials accountable and petitioning their government to redress grievances. Abolition, Women’s Suffrage, the Civil Rights movement – all would have been impossible without them.
In order to be recognized as non-profit groups, these organizations must register with the IRS – a purely ministerial function that has, in the past, been applied evenly and without regard to their political views.
At least until now.
It seems that Tea Party groups are now being treated very differently than their counterparts on the political Left. For the last two years, many have been stone-walled by the IRS when they have sought to register as non-profits and most recently, they have been barraged with increasingly aggressive and threatening demands vastly outside the legal authority of the IRS. Indeed, the only conceivable purpose of some of these demands could be to intimidate and harass.
"If I Wanted America to Fail"
This is a very powerful and truthful video. We have allowed the leftist, Socialist, Marxist, Communist Progressives to slowly destroy our country. Sad. - Reggie
YouTube description: The environmental agenda has been infected by extremism—it's become an economic suicide pact. And we're
here to challenge it. On Earth Day, visit www.freemarketamerica.org.
h/t The Right Scoop
Government auditors call for end to $8 billion Medicare bonus program
WASHINGTON – In a rebuke to the Obama administration, government auditors are calling for the cancellation of an $8 billion Medicare program that congressional Republicans have criticized as a political ploy.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office says in a report to be released Monday that the $8.3 billion the administration has earmarked for quality bonuses to Medicare Advantage insurance plans
would postpone the pain of cuts to the plans under the new health care law. Most of the money would go to plans rated merely average.
The administration is defending the program, saying that without the bonuses many plans wouldn't have an incentive to improve quality.
But Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, says the GAO report suggests that the administration abused its authority, pumping money to the plans to avoid more criticism over unpopular cuts.
Medicare Advantage is a popular private insurance alternative to the traditional health care program for seniors. More than 3,000 private plans serve nearly 12 million beneficiaries, about one-fourth of Medicare recipients. They offer lower out-of-pocket costs, usually in exchange for some limitations on choice.
President Barack Obama's health care law trimmed Medicare Advantage to compensate for prior years of overpayments that had allowed the plans to offer attractive benefits -- and pocket healthy profits.
Republicans fiercely attacked those cuts during their successful campaign to take control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections. Seniors, a key constituency of swing voters, responded by backing GOP candidates.
After the election, the administration announced what it called a "demonstration program" to test whether a generous bonus program would lead to faster, broader improvements in quality. (The health care overhaul law had already provided a smaller bonus program only for top-rated plans.)
GAO, the investigative agency of Congress, did not address GOP allegations that the bonuses are politically motivated. But, its report found the program highly unusual. It "dwarfs" all other Medicare pilots undertaken in nearly 20 years, the GAO said.
And there is this...
Absolute Power
An instant classic from Mark Levin on Post-Constitutional America.
Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America
By Mark R. Levin
(Threshold Editions, 288 Pages, $26.99)
It's here. A century in the making, insidiously installed in piece-by-piece fashion courtesy of the American progressive movement, the absolute power of Post-Constitutional America has arrived.
Not unlike snorting just a bit of crack cocaine here and a little more there and just enough the next day, all while confidently proclaiming self-control and superb physical and mental health, America has now awakened to the statist nightmare that can only be induced snorting the political drug of progressivism. Mark Levin accurately calls the appalling results "Post-Constitutional America."
Clearly, Levin has hit a sensitive chord in the Age of Obama. A mere two days after his new book's release, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America shot to Number One on the Amazon list of 100 bestsellers. This follows Levin's earlier best-selling analysis of statism and the Constitution, Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto.
Having now spent serious time examining the roots of utopianism, Levin has written a classic. The companion piece to Liberty and Tyranny. This is a book that directly connects the dots between today's America and the earliest and most prominent expressions of societies based on the endlessly bogus and pernicious idea of human perfection.
Divided into three parts, Ameritopia takes a close look at various expressions of utopia appearing as far back as Plato (The Republic) and moving forward to Thomas More (Utopia), Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), and that infamous utopian bard of class struggle, Karl Marx—of the ultimately murderous Communist Manifesto.
Levin notes a myriad of cautions from prominent thinkers about what is transpiring today, one from Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story anticipating the problem in 1829. Said Story, presciently:
[G]overnments are not always overthrown by direct and open assaults. They are not always battered down by the arms of conquerors, or the successful daring of usurpers. There is often concealed the dry rot, which eats into the vitals, when all is fair and stately on the outside. And to republics this has been the more common fatal disease. The continual drippings of corruption may wear away the solid rock, when the tempest has failed to overturn it.
The "solid rock" of America, of course, has been the Constitution. A Constitution carefully and knowledgeably crafted based on the Founding Fathers' acute understanding, both intellectually and from experience, of what the English philosopher John Locke had a century earlier enlightened as man's nature. The Founders next translated the understanding of that nature into a written Constitution by using the French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu's principles of government based on a separation of powers.
Detailing the utopian thinking that first surfaced thousands of years ago, Levin guides the reader step-by-step from Plato's "ideal city" run by "Guardians" to the acid-like drippings that have both corroded the Constitution while manifesting in its place the absolute power that is the massive presence of the federal government in every area of your life today—beginning with your own home.
Dividing the book into thirds, Levin dissects utopianism, then Americanism, and finally the combination of utopianism in America that has created the Post-Constitutional "Ameritopia" in which we all reside. Ameritopia—a place where the careful understanding of man's nature and the Constitution painstakingly constructed to reflect that understanding has been exchanged for a Post-Constitutional America. An America now teetering precariously as the result of an addiction to an unending series of utopian fantasies. Utopian fantasies destined always to eventually crash and burn on the hard rock of reality that is human imperfection.
Focusing sharply on how an America carefully constructed on John Locke's keenly observant treatises of man's nature and the resulting civil society, Levin examines a land where the government now runs amok in an endless—and necessarily fruitless—busy-bodying quest for human perfection. A Post-Constitutional government regulating everything from your dishwasher to the brakes in your car while, just as an aside, creating two massive entitlements designed to prevent the impossible: the inevitable trials of old age and the declining health that invariably accompanies it. In the process running both Social Security and Medicare—not to mention the nation's fiscal and economic health—over a financial cliff into a Grand Canyon of unsustainable debt.
"It bears emphasizing," writes Levin, "—the utopian seeks control over the individual. The individual is to be governed. Not represented." In other words, the utopian goal is absolute power. A precise description of the premise behind everything from Obamacare to campaign finance laws to the creations of LBJ's Great Society and FDR's New Deal before that.
In making his case Levin moves effortlessly from the utopian ancients to a discussion of precisely who in American history has taken the country to such a point that the phrase "Post-Constitutional America" could strike such a deep chord with so many.
The most prominent of these American "utopian masterminds" is without doubt Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was not simply the nation's 28th president. He was, unique among his presidential peers, the lone academic to serve in the office. As both scholar and progressive, Wilson had used his pre-presidential time at institutions like Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Wesleyan, Bryn Mawr, New York Law School, and finally as president of Princeton to work out a treatise that effectively became a kind of counter to Locke, Montesquieu, and the Founders. The blueprint for a Post-Constitutional America is doubtless Wilson's Constitutional Government in the United States.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Discovery’s Final Flight
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| Charles Krauthammer |
Is there a better symbol of willed American decline?
As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.
The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.
Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit, and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.
Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)
China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025. They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.
Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige, or inspiring the young — legacies of NASA — when we are in economic distress? Okay. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation — what President Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to last” — why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?
We lament the decline of American manufacturing, yet we stop production of the most complex machine ever made by man — and cancel the successor meant to return us to orbit. The result? Abolition of thousands of the most highly advanced aerospace jobs anywhere — its workforce abruptly unemployed and drifting away from space flight, never to be reconstituted.
Well, you say, we can’t afford all that in a time of massive deficits.
There are always excuses for putting off strenuous national endeavors: deficits, joblessness, poverty, whatever. But they shall always be with us. We’ve had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea’s is today.
Obama’s Funny Money
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| John Fund |
In 2008, the president’s campaign-finance operation was highly suspect.
The media lionized Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for running as smoothly (and stylishly) as a Swiss watch. “We love things that are smart,” explained Time’s Mark Halperin, later the co-author of a best-selling book about the 2008 race, Game Change. At least Halperin had the courage also to deplore the pro-Obama tilt of the media during the campaign. At a post-election Politico/University of Southern California conference in 2008, he called it “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq War. It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama bias.”
Well, only now are we learning that things weren’t quite as “smart” as we were led to believe. Yesterday, it was reported the Federal Election Commission unanimously found that the 2008 Obama campaign had failed to properly report some $2 million in last-minute contributions. The campaign could still have to pay fines or face other penalties. (The audit for the 2008 John McCain campaign hasn’t yet been completed.)
Politico reports that the Obama campaign failed to respond to FEC inquires about whether its failure to report the donations was due to problems with its data-processing systems. Indeed, Team Obama has often been reticent in response to questions about its donor-identification procedures. In 2008, John McCain’s campaign publicly disclosed the identities of its entire donor base, including those contributing under $200, whose names are not legally required to be disclosed. But it was different over in Obamaworld. “We asked both campaigns for more information on small donors,” Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the liberal Center for Responsive Politics, told Newsmax. “The Obama campaign never responded.”
Because of its large number of small donations, the Obama campaign wound up not disclosing the donor names for about half of the $800 million it raised in 2008. Indeed, the Washington Post reported that it went so far as to turn off the Address Verification System (a credit-card verification protocol) on its website. That program would have prevented the campaign from accepting contributions by citizens of foreign countries — accepting such donations is a violation of federal law. The decision to abandon filters had consequences — an FEC inquiry forced the campaign to refund $31,110 to two Palestinian brothers in the Gaza Strip who had bought T-shirts from the campaign’s online store in small quantities. The Obama campaign said it had been unaware of any problems and always corrected errors when they were brought to its attention.
They said much the same thing after it was revealed in late 2008 that FEC analysts had written more than a dozen letters to the campaign flagging the names of hundreds of contributors for whom the Obama campaign either hadn’t supplied sufficient information or whose donations exceeded legal limits.
An even more disturbing issue arose when the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported in August 2008 that Obama’s campaign had paid $832,000 to Citizens Services Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, the infamous liberal advocacy group known for voter-registration fraud, which, in the 1990s, employed Barack Obama as a trainer and as its lawyer in a key voting case. ACORN declared bankruptcy in 2010 after a video sting operation showed some of its employees offering career advice to a couple posing as a prostitute and her pimp.
No More ‘Mr. Obama Is a Nice Guy’
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| Michelle Malkin |
Republicans have to acknowledge the nastiness of their opponent.
There is a reflexive desire among a certain
species of moderate Republicans to be perceived as “civil” by liberal
opponents who believe that the mere existence of free-market, limited-government conservatism is an indecent affront to humankind. All aboard the USS Lost Cause.
This disastrous, bend-over bipartisanship is a hard habit to break. In 2008, Arizona senator John McCain rode the “Barack Obama is a nice guy, but vote for me” wave to crashing defeat. In 2012, McCain’s endorsee, Mitt Romney, has made “Barack Obama is a nice guy but in over his head” a standard stump-speech talking point.
Conservatives of good will who’ve watched President Obama brutalize his enemies have one question for the nice-guy niceties: Why, GOP, why?
Romney’s smarter-than-thou strategists explain that he can’t scare off independents and Democrats with straight talk about Obama’s thuggery. But he’s turning off the conservative base, on whom his hold is tenuous. More important, Romney’s McCain Lite impersonation is also writing off independents and Democrats who’ve come to realize what the myriad targets of White House bullying have learned the hard way over the past four years: Barack Obama is not a “nice guy.”
Ask Gerald Walpin, the former AmeriCorps inspector general who was pushed out of his job by the Obamas after exposing fraud and corruption perpetrated by Democratic mayor of Sacramento and Obama friend Kevin Johnson. Walpin was unceremoniously fired and smeared by Team Obama. The White House baselessly questioned the veteran watchdog’s mental health and never apologized for slandering him.
Ask the family, friends, and co-workers of murdered Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. They have been forced to sue the Obama administration to combat the Operation Fast and Furious cover-up of deadly policy decisions that led to their hero’s death. “I think they are liars, and I would tell them that,” Terry’s father, Kent, said of Obama’s henchmen.
As Townhall editor Katie Pavlich makes clear in her devastating new book, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up, the president, his corrupt attorney general, Eric Holder, and their minions weren’t “in over their heads.” They knew exactly what they were doing and have obstructed investigations into the bloody consequences of their policies ever since.
That’s not “nice.” It’s rotten to the core.
Nice? Ask those who have felt the wrath of Obama: tea-party members, bitterly clinging gun owners, and voters of faith; budget-reform leaders, such as Wisconsin’s GOP congressman Paul Ryan and governor Scott Walker; Chrysler creditors and dealers and Delphi auto-parts workers strong-armed and cut out of the White House auto-bailout negotiations with United Auto Workers; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, and their donors; Fox News; conservative talk-radio giant Rush Limbaugh; the Congressional Budget Office; and the Supreme Court.
Van Jones Thinks You Should Sit Down and Shut Up
Perhaps you’ve noticed, Van Jones has been all over the media the past
couple of weeks hitching his wagon to the occupy movement in a shameless
attempt to promote his new book, ‘Rebuild the Dream’. I suspect the
vision of America which Jones dreams about is more focused on wealth
redistribution than shared prosperity, but I’m borrowing a copy of his
book and will perhaps offer up a more thorough critique next week. In
the meantime enjoy the latest series of invectives from a man who made
his opinion of conservatives crystal clear years ago. From an interview last week with Rick Perlstein at Rolling Stone (emphasis added):
What does “love” of country mean to you?
It means I love Americans—the people who actually live here, who look all kind of different ways, who pray all kind of different ways, who love all kinds of people. And I challenge the people who are the opponents of my values to explain how they get to be patriots. As I say in the book, they seem to distrust the American government. They seem to dislike most of the American people. They seem to resent most of America’s achievements over the last century, including unions and public education and environmental protection and so many of the things that made the American century the American century. So I don’t get why we don’t just tell them to sit down and shut up. They can complain if they like, but we have another century to win. We have another century to win!
I’m not even sure where to start with this. While conservatives have no
exclusive claim to patriotism or love for America, Jones has
transitioned from a dream-state to sheer hallucination if he really
believes that labor unions, public education, and protection of the
environment represent America’s greatest achievements in the last
century. Really? I think there are just a few other items which
most Americans would rank above public kindergarten, Jimmy Hoffa, and
the EPA. You know, insignificant things such as the invention of human
flight, defeat of the forces of oppression in two World Wars (and one
Cold War), landing a man on the moon, and medical and other technology
advances which have added immeasurably to the quality of human life on
this planet.
Seriously, this must be one of the most asinine statements ever to go unchallenged in print. Utterly ludicrous.
Now as to his assertion that conservatives ‘dislike most of the American
people’, again, what planet is Jones living on? Conservatives are
most of the American people, and probably always have been. Van, see
that dark green line in the graph below? That’s us. That light green
line down at the bottom – that’s you. And if Gallup polled for one-time,
self-identified communists now billing themselves as ‘progressives’,
well I doubt very much that number would exceed more than 1%.
Orrin Hatch Falls Short
Here's hoping Dan Liljenquist wins the primary. We need new conservatives in the Senate and I believe Hatch's six terms is more than enough time in "public service." - Reggie
SANDY, Utah — Sen. Orrin Hatch failed to clinch his party’s nomination at the state GOP convention
Saturday, ensuring a June primary against state Sen. Dan Liljenquist.
The six-term Republican incumbent fell just short of the 60 percent
threshold necessary to skirt a June 26 face-off. On the second ballot,
Hatch notched 59 percent of the vote to Liljenquist’s 41 percent.
While Hatch avoided the fate of former Sen. Bob Bennett — who was denied the renomination in dramatic fashion at this convention two years ago — he now enters a two-month campaign that he would have liked to avoid. In the end, Hatch fell short by fewer than 50 votes from avoiding a fight into the summer.
Surrounded by disappointed supporters in his campaign suite after the vote, Hatch attempted to put the best face on the outcome, saying he didn’t even expect to reach the 60 percent bar.
“A lot of people were predicting my demise here. Just a couple months ago, people didn’t give me much of a chance. I think I’ve proven I’m a tough old bird and I’m not an easy one,” he said, going on to predict a primary win in June.
In an adjoining suite, a perspiring and jubilant Liljenquist acknowledged he wasn’t sure he had the delegate support to force a primary fight.
“You know, it really didn’t matter. We did everything we could do. We had 108 different events. We went all over the state and almost no sleep and I’m still on my feet. But one by one, we changed people. And even this morning, as I came around our booth, that may have just made the difference,” he said. “We’re outspent 30-to-1 in this race already, but that doesn’t scare us. Because at the end of the day, the people of this state deserve a choice.”
Hatch made his relationship with Mitt Romney and the opportunity to serve as chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee the two central tenets of his campaign, a theme he reiterated in his convention speech.
“We’re going to lead with a Republican majority. And we’re going to work hand-in-hand with President Mitt Romney,” he said. “I’m going to be chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Believe me when I say that a strong and experienced chairman can make all the difference in the world.”
And there is this...
US Professors Attend an Occupy Wall Street Conference in Tehran
It is quite obvious that the Socialists, Marxists, Communists, etc. have fully embedded themselves in our society and I often wonder if there is any hope of defeating them. They constantly plot against the United States of America. Why have we allowed this infiltration and indoctrination to spread throughout the land? - Reggie
video is from February 22, 2012
h/t MEMRI TV
Media Matters' Anti-Christian Agenda Exposed
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Now, CBN News has obtained a document showing that the very foundation of the group known as Media Matters for America is built on anti-Christian bias.
Faith Groups in Crosshairs
Media Matters is a non-profit liberal watchdog group that has the ear of not only the mainstream media, but also the Obama administration.
As part of its strategy, Media Matters frequently targets Christian organizations in an effort to counter what it views as pro-Christian "bias in news reporting and analysis by the American media."
"It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to overly promote...a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology," the group said in its application for non-profit status with the IRS.
Vince Coglianese, a reporter with The Dailer Caller, has investigated the Media Matters' attacks on Christian organizations.
"Media Matters, in its application to the IRS--outright, in the very first paragraph--declares it's going to be an anti-Christian organization," he said.
"Interestingly, though, in their public mission statement Media Matters makes no mention of the fact that it intends to target the Christian ideology," Coglianese noted.
Media Matters did not respond to CBN News' requests for comment on this story or the document.
David Brog, executive director of Christians United for Israel, believes the Media Matters' targeting of Christians is connected to its anti-Israel views.
"They want to take on what they see as a Christian-influenced media and Christian-influenced policy, and no better place to start than with the issue of Israel and with attacking U.S. support of Israel," Brog told CBN News.
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President Obama's Economic Programs Have Failed
America has long been a country where almost everyone, including the poor and unskilled, could get a job. Given the will to do a reasonable day's work, a job was a passport to economic and social well-being; it was the fount of self-esteem and the foundation of family life. Indeed, work was Life.
More than 15 million Americans no longer have that passport to Life. Think of it as roughly the entire population of the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma, all standing idle—every man, woman, and child. The traditional breadwinners, namely men between the ages of 25 and 54, are among those hardest hit. According to an Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll, some 25 percent of households include someone who is unemployed and looking for work. As well as laying waste to work, to the equivalent of losing every job created in the last decade, the Great Recession has visited us with reduced incomes, declining home equity, and a growing contraction in credit.
For the 80 percent of Americans born after World War II, this is their Depression. They have 5.5 million fewer jobs than at the recession's start in 2008, despite the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in our history. Employment has been below the pre-recession peak for over 50 months. It's the longest time since the Great Depression that payrolls have not made a new high. The 120,000 new jobs for March make no dent (and adjusted for the peculiarity of warm weather, the number of real net jobs created was 76,000); we need at least 125,000 jobs each month just to provide for new entrants in a rising population.
Discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force make the unemployment rate look fractionally better, but the 8.2 percent headline masks the misery. It is a reflection of the U-3 statistic, which counts only people who have applied for a job in the last four weeks. Among the jobless army, a staggering 42 percent of them are long-term unemployed, without jobs for six months or longer. Look instead at the more relevant U-6 statistic, which counts the number of people who have applied over the last six months. U-6 also includes those who are involuntarily working on a part-time basis. That U-6 unemployment is now in the range of 15 percent. Since 2008, some 3 million people have dropped out of the job market. If they hadn't, the unemployment rate would be about 10.8 percent. In March, the unemployment rate seemed to fall a tenth of 1 percent, yet the number of people who are actually employed dropped by 31,000. Why? Because the number of people who looked for a job dropped by 164,000 and they are not considered unemployed. Not to mention that half the new jobs are in temporary help agencies.
America's great job creation machine is sputtering badly. It is now estimated that structural unemployment has risen from 5 percent before the crisis to close to 7 percent today. This means that one third of the rise in American joblessness may be impervious to the business cycle; it represents lost jobs that cannot be restored by boosting demand.
The problem now is not that people are being laid off by the millions. When an economy has reached bottom, as it did, it has already shed much of its labor, and layoffs slow. But the anemic recovery has not yielded job vacancies. Hiring today is at about 70 percent of the 2006 level. Given the increase in unemployed totals, job seekers are only about one third as likely to find work as in 2006.
Compare that to the fabled Great Depression of the 1930s. In the three years after 1933, the economy rebounded with growth rates of 11 percent, 9 percent, and 13 percent. But in 2010, months into our recovery, growth was about 3 percent, followed by 1.7 percent growth in 2011. The rate for 2012 could be about 2 percent—below the 3.4 percent throughout the postwar period.
What has happened? The process of making stuff fosters innovation, leading to new products. When companies go from prototype to mass production, they scale up, figure out where they can build factories affordably, and hire people by the thousands. But many enterprises in America have discovered they cannot compete in engineering or manufacturing with their Chinese or Indian counterparts, which are equally, if not more, productive with workers willing to accept significantly lower wages. In turn, they gain the skills, knowledge, and experience to innovate. Hence our loss of 6 million blue-collar manufacturing jobs.
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The Third Gun
New book claims FBI cover up of third gun in murder of border patrol agent
The Department of Justice is using the liberal “watchdog” group Media
Matters for America to deflect questions about the Fast and Furious
scandal, including those regarding a gun that might have been used in
the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
A new book raises questions as to whether the FBI hid the existence
of a weapon recovered at the scene of murdered U.S. Border Patrol agent
Brian Terry. Conservative commentator and author Katie Pavlich lays out
evidence she says points to a FBI cover-up to protect a confidential
informant in her recently released book, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-up,
In response to an inquiry from the Free Beacon, a Justice
Department spokeswoman said in an email that she “was told to direct
your questions to the FBI, and also to provide you with a link to this
story: http://mediamatters.org/research/201204190011”
The link was to a story
at the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America supposedly
refuting many of Pavlich’s claims. Media Matters is a partisan
organization whose founder, David Brock, is also running a pro-Obama
super PAC.
In Operation Fast and Furious, federal agents allowed more than 2,000
weapons to be smuggled across the U.S.-Mexican border and into the hand
of violent drug cartels, with the intent of tracking them to learn more
about the cartels.
Two weapons connected to Fast and Furious were discovered at the
murder scene of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was gunned
down in the Southern Arizona desert in 2010 by five criminals armed with
AK-47s.
However, Pavlich asserts there was a third gun. The book details three
separate pieces of evidence that point to a third weapon being recovered
and then covered up by the FBI and the Justice Department.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
When Administrations Implode
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| Victor Davis Hanson |
Obama should learn from the reelection problems of his predecessors.
Administration meltdowns are hardly novel. In almost every presidency there comes a moment when sheer chaos, whether self-induced or the result of an outside crisis, takes hold.
Vietnam had effectively destroyed Lyndon Johnson by 1967. Watergate unraveled the Richard Nixon administration, as the disgraced president resigned in the face of certain impeachment.Gerald Ford could not whip inflation and was not reelected. One-termer Jimmy Carter was undone by the Iranian hostage crisis and skyrocketing oil prices.
For a time, it seemed that Ronald Reagan’s second term might not survive the Iran-Contra scandal. George H. W. Bush could not be reelected after he broke his promise not to raise taxes and Ross Perot entered the 1992 race. The popular Bill Clinton was impeached over the Monica Lewinsky affair and limped out of office tainted. The insurgency in Iraq and the fallout from Hurricane Katrina crashed for good the once-high poll ratings of George W. Bush.
The Obama administration over the last month has seemed on the verge of one of these presidential meltdowns.
An open mike caught the president promising Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he would be more flexible after the election — as if Obama might grant concessions that would be unpalatable if known to the general public before November. That embarrassment followed an open-mike putdown of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.
The president also unwisely attacked the Supreme Court as it deliberated the constitutionality of Obamacare. He needlessly referred to the justices as “unelected,” and wrongly claimed that they had little precedent to overturn laws that dealt with commerce. The gaffe about the Court and its history was doubly embarrassing because Obama has often reminded the public that he used to teach constitutional law.
Democrats unwisely went after the Catholic Church and religious conservatives on the grounds that they did not support federal subsidies for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs. Another gratuitous scrap soon escalated into an unnecessary fight with the Catholic bishops. To widen the controversy further, Vice President Joe Biden and Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz alleged that the contraceptive fight was part of a wider Republican “war on women.”
But that new psychodrama also blew up in the administration’s face when a zealous Democratic consultant, Hilary Rosen, claimed that Ann Romney, the wife of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, had “never worked a day in her life.” In fact, the affable Mrs. Romney had raised five children and had survived both multiple sclerosis and breast cancer.
GBTV: David Barton on Thomas Jefferson
Why Democrats Won't Vote on a Budget
Households make budgets. So do businesses and nonprofits. There was also a time when Congress made them, but those days are long gone -- 1,086 days gone, to be precise. That's the last time Democrats, who have controlled one or both houses of Congress this whole time, passed a budget resolution through either the House or the Senate.
On April 15, 2010, both houses failed to meet the statutory deadline for passing a budget for the first time ever. Although the Senate Budget Committee would later pass a plan out of committee, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., blocked it from the floor, going so far as to prevent even a debate about the budget.
Asked to explain this bicameral failure in the face of trillion-dollar deficits, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, "It's difficult to pass budgets in election years." Turns out, it is also difficult to get re-elected when you don't pass budgets. Later that same year, House Democrats lost 63 seats.
Senate Democrats lost six seats in 2010 but managed to retain control of the upper chamber. Surely, in the nonelection year of 2011 they would bring a budget to the floor, right? Wrong. Reid told reporters at the time, "There's no need to have a Democratic budget," adding, "It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage." In July 2011, Reid's assistant leader, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., went so far as to claim on national television that Republican filibusters prevented a budget from passing. He must have known he was fibbing -- under Senate rules, budget resolutions can pass with a simple majority.
In fact, Democrats just wanted to focus on attacking the "Path to Prosperity" budget proposed by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said, "To put other budgets out there is not the point." As Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would later say, "We don't have a definitive solution ... We just don't like yours."
Senator Jeff Sessions Talks about the Budget and U.S. Debt
YouTube description: WASHINGTON, April 18 — Sen. Sessions delivered closing remarks today at what he called a "faux mark-up"—a Budget Committee meeting at which Senators were not allowed to offer amendments or hold any votes on any aspect of a budget plan.
YouTube description: WASHINGTON, April 19 - Last night, Sen. Sessions appeared on "On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteren" to discuss the Democrat Senate leadership's last-minute cancellation of a budget mark-up yesterday.
YouTube description: WASHINGTON, April 19 — In remarks on the Senate floor today today, Sen. Sessions addressed the Democrat-led Senate's failure to put forward a budget for the past three years. Sessions argued that no elected official should call for higher taxes until they're willing to stand behind a budget plan that lays out taxing and spending priorities for working Americans' tax dollars.
Paul Ryan Responds to WH Ultimatum in Budget Battle
Republican congressman on threat on spending bills that break debt deal
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
The $5 Trillion Man: Obama Has Increased Debt $5,027,761,476,484.56
(CNSNews.com)- In the 39 months since Barack Obama took the oath of office as president of the United States, the federal government’s debt has increased by $5,027,761,476,484.56.
Although he has served less than a term, Obama is now the first American president to see the federal government's debt increase by more than $5 trillion during his time in office.
During the full eight years that George W. Bush served as president, the federal government's debt increased by $4,899,100,310,608.44. (Rising from $5,727,776,738,304.64 to $10,626,877,048,913.08.)
The $5,027,761,476,484.56 that the debt has increased during Obama's presidency equals $16,043.39 for every one of the 313,385,295 people the Census Bureau now estimates live in the United States.
At Least Mitt Romney Didn't Eat his Dog! UPDATE: Pray for Bo!
Twitter has been lit up about the fact that President Obama ate dog meat as a child and yet Democrats will not let go of the story from years ago when Mitt Romney had his dog on the car roof as the family traveled. Rush joined in the fun today. - Reggie
And Michelle's new website gathered the best tweets for all to enjoy...
UPDATE: There is a new campaign to help Barack Obama's dog, Bo...
How do Buffett and Nelson benefit from the killing of the Keystone pipeline?
Who benefits if the Keystone Pipeline is not built? None other than Obama's good friend Warren Buffett.
Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson and his shady connections to Buffett and the pipeline
Ted Nugent on Controversy
Glenn Beck description: Ted Nugent made some comments at the NRA convention that have sent the left into a tizzy. What does he have to say? Plus, how did he get disinvited to a NAVY SEAL's funeral?
from this morning...
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