* 4/4/11--President Barack Obama launched his reelection campaign with a web video. While at first blush the timing of the announcement may be puzzling because the optics imply that Obama is more focused on politicking instead of being serious about the budget and Libya, I think his announcement this week is a brilliant piece of political strategy. Obama has been getting some unfavorable coverage from the mainstream media, so now that he has officially announced his candidacy for reelection, the mainstream media and the White House press corps will surely put on their Obama jerseys again and give him favorable coverage. MSM men will get tingles up their legs and women will get all hot and tingly over the Big O’s speeches and optics. With this bias and tilted playing field in mind, it is more imperative for prospective GOP presidential candidates to be effective messengers.--humanevents.com
* 4/5/11--It took 500 days, but President Obama yesterday abandoned his ill-conceived effort to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian courtroom. Attorney General Eric Holder was none too gracious about it, however. It was back in November 2009 that Obama and Holder docketed KSM and four confederates for trial in New York. An uproar ensued -- understandably -- and Congress promptly outlawed the movement of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the US. There the matter stood for some 15 months -- until yesterday, when Holder announced that the deadly quintet will now return to military commissions at Gitmo, right where they started, and right where they belong. The AG, however, felt compelled to wag his middle finger at Congress, the CIA and the American people: "Members of Congress simply do not have access to the evidence" to determine where the trials should be held. Asked by reporters whether Congress reflected the will and wisdom of its 300 million constituents, Holder smoldered: "Do I know better than them? Yes." He next accused critics of using the trials to "scor[e] political points." (Politics? He should know. Yesterday's announcement came on the very day that Team Obama kicked off its 2012 reelection bid -- and getting KSM & Co. off the radar screen won't hurt that effort.) Then Holder sullied the CIA: "There is no other tool that has demonstrated the ability to both incapacitate terrorists and collect intelligence from them . . . as our justice system." That's a breathtaking claim, without a shred of evidence to support it, as far as foreign terrorists are concerned. And it's also an astonishing slap at the intelligence agents who captured, interrogated and collected intelligence from KSM -- and who have moved mountains to protect this nation from harm. That is, Holder scoffed at the very people who delivered KSM for prosecution. For sheer arrogance, few public officials could surpass the attorney general. For sheer incompetence, too. Trying KSM in civilian courts could have been a disaster, given their strict rules of evidence. During Obama's first civilian trial of a Gitmo detainee last year, key evidence was barred and the country was treated to an ugly spectacle. A terrorist responsible for the 1998 US embassy bombing in Tanzania was acquitted on 280 counts. Holder's team got him on a single, lesser charge -- meaning they went about 1 for 280. That was an unacceptable outcome then -- and, given the stakes, a far more terrifying prospect in KSM's trial. Make no mistake: Restoring the 9/11 trials to the military system was the right choice -- the only choice. The victims and families afflicted on 9/11 deserve far better than the administration's performance to date. America deserves far better. But today everybody can be thankful the trial is no longer in Eric Holder's shaky hands.--NY Post Editorial
* 4/5/11--WASHINGTON -- House Republicans on Tuesday proposed a budget for the next fiscal year that would spend $3.53 trillion -- $179 billion less than President Barack Obama's plan -- and aims to bring the budget into balance, excluding interest payments, by 2015. The Republicans' budget for 2012, crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, would mark a reversal of a years-long trend of growing deficits. Ryan said that after three years of deficits exceeding $1 trillion, the plan would bring the deficit down to $995 billion in 2012, with deficits declining steadily thereafter. The budget proposal stands little chance of becoming law, since it would have to be approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate and signed by Obama, and, among other things, it would repeal Obama's signature health care law. It would make fundamental changes to Medicare and Medicaid and reduce spending on the government health insurance programs. Democrats, based on early reports of the budget's contents, portrayed it as an extreme document, dedicated to dismantling the protections government has provided the lower and middle classes for decades, while declining to make businesses pay their fair share. While government spending is about 24 percent of gross domestic product, Ryan said his budget would bring that to 22.5 percent next year and to less than 20 percent by 2018. By 2021, the deficit would be reduced to $385 billion. In all, the Republican proposal says it would cut spending by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years and spend $6.2 trillion less than Obama has advocated over the same period. Non-defense, non-security discretionary spending would be cut by $79 billion next year and by $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years. This category includes the traditional domestic spending that Congress approves each year for programs such as environmental protection and scientific research. Such cuts would likely be politically difficult. Congress is on the verge of triggering a partial government shutdown due to a stalemate over a House Republican plan to cut a smaller amount -- $61 billion -- in discretionary spending in the current fiscal year. Democrats say the cuts are too deep and are offering $33 billion in cuts, some of them from non-discretionary programs. In the Ryan proposal, some of the biggest changes would occur in Medicare, the health program for the elderly and disabled, and Medicaid, the health program for the poor. Medicare in 2022 would be converted into a "premium support" system, meaning beneficiaries would choose from an array of private insurance plans, with government helping pay the premium. The GOP budget would also overhaul the tax code, setting the top individual and corporate rates at 25 percent rather than 35 percent. The changes would be revenue-neutral, since the budget would eliminate a series of tax breaks. But even some Republicans say it is unrealistic to try to balance the budget without some increases in revenue.--NY Post
* 4/5/11--NANCY PELOSI: "In one of the bills before us, six million seniors are deprived of meals -- homebound seniors are deprived of meals. People ask us to find our common ground, the middle ground. Is middle ground three million seniors not receiving meals? I don't think so. We've got to take this conversation from a debate about numbers and dollar figures and finding middle ground there to the higher ground of national values. I don't think the American people want any one of those six million people to lose their meals or the children who are being thrown off of Head Start and the rest of it."
* 4/5/11--Maybe liberals do understand that this nation has prosperity-crushing government spending as well as a fragile economy that’s teetering on disaster. Perhaps they understand that Americans are overtaxed, working 102 days per year just to pay off the burdens of taxation. Are they finally willing to have an adult conversation about our insolvent entitlement programs? Ha. Fat chance. The likelihood that liberals had an ounce—just an ounce—of sincerity about solving this nation’s unfathomable fiscal crisis before we careen off a cliff went up in the same smoke that billowed from Cheech and Chong’s bong. Before they even had an opportunity to digest what is in Rep. Paul Ryan’s much-anticipated 2012 budget proposal, the Left descended to their rote talking points and demagoguery. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne carped that “Americans are about to learn how much is at stake in our larger budget fight, how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots." Another Washington Post hack, Ezra Klein, groused that “what Ryan has here isn’t so much a plan to control spending as a plan to cut spending, whatever the consequences.” What happens if we remain on the current trajectory where our nation’s debt continues to balloon uncontrollably? What about those consequences, Ezra? Let’s give him some time to think about it. Lefty rag Talking Points Memo took to scaring seniors and poor folks, as if we haven’t seen that card played before. “Low-income Medicaid beneficiaries will lose their guaranteed benefits altogether,” TPM griped, adding more mischaracterization by arguing that the “GOP budget will propose to overhaul the tax code in a way that reduces the burden on the wealthy and increases it on the poor and middle classes." Oh, and a Princeton professor called the GOP budget plan "radical," the kind of radical that the ivies despise: freedom, limited government, and choice. Liberals, of course, are going bananas over the Republican budget because it seeks to restrict government activism into the private sector and thus erodes the Left from exerting undue influence over how Americans live their lives. As Human Events reported, the budget would cut more than $5 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, cap government spending to a percentage of the gross domestic product, reform the way Medicaid and Medicare are administered, and lower the corporate and individual tax rates. The Democrats’ plan to solve America’s woes? Billions more in boondoggle spending projects financed by … you--humanevents.com
* 4/6/11--A fiery President Obama insisted Tuesday that if he and congressional leaders couldn’t reach a deal to avert a government shutdown, “I want a meeting again tomorrow here at the White House." “I will invite the same folks that we invited today,” he added. “And if that doesn’t work, we’ll invite them again the day after that. And I will have my entire team available to work through the details of getting a deal done." Obama’s team may not include the president himself. Despite the impasse in Washington over federal spending, the president as of early Wednesday was scheduled to give two speeches outside of Washington: one on energy in the Philadelphia suburbs, then another Wednesday evening to a group of black political activists in New York. If the schedule remains intact, it will be the president’s first trip outside the capital since he officially declared Monday he will seek a second term. And while Obama (D) and his aides have repeatedly said he will not focus on his campaign in the next few months, his schedule may contradict those words.--Washington Post
* 4/6/11--HAVANA — Cuba on Tuesday announced plans to drill five deepwater oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico beginning this summer, expressing confidence that its efforts will be rewarded with major new energy finds. "We're about to move to the drilling phase," said Manuel Marrero, an official with the government authority tasked with overseeing Cuba's oil sector. "We're all really hopeful that we will be able to discover large reserves of oil and gas," said Marrero, who added that the ventures would be undertaken with the help of unspecified foreign companies.--AFP
* 4/6/11--WASHINGTON -- No deal. A defiant House Speaker John Boehner emerged from a face-to-face showdown with President Obama yesterday and declared there was still no agreement on the budget. Boehner (R-Ohio) had told Obama that he wouldn't let Republicans be "put in a box" -- forced to choose between a government shutdown or the Democrats' bad spending bill, the speaker's office said. But the president said it was "inexcusable" for Congress not to strike a deal. He outright rejected the House GOP plan for another stopgap spending bill that would cut $12 billion and keep the government open one more week while negotiations continue. The stalemate increased the odds for a government shutdown Friday. Senate Democrats are pushing a bill that reduces spending $33 billion, but Republicans want to slash $61 billion for the rest of the budget year that ends on Sept. 30.--NY Post
* 4/7/11--Perhaps the most surreal moment in the budget crisis came when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, concerning Republican efforts to pass another temporary measure, “they’ll say it’s short-term but what that really means is it’s a short-cut around doing our jobs. Instead of solving problems, they’re stalling. They’re procrastinating. That’s not just bad policy, it’s a fantasy.” Reid, of course, belongs to the party that couldn’t produce a budget despite years of total control in both houses of Congress. Is he out of his mind to suggest the Republicans are somehow “procrastinating” because they haven’t corrected his party’s dereliction of duty yet? It’s a remarkably insipid talking point, but Reid isn’t crazy. He’s just assuming the Democrats still have a power they no longer possess: the power to control public memory. But they’ve lost the total media control necessary to shape history. Fox News, conservative radio hosts, and conservative bloggers have acted repeatedly to keep the Left from closing the book on history they desperately need voters to forget about. We’ll do it again during the rest of the 2011 budget battle. This outfit is called Human Events because we remember events from more than a year ago. Harry Reid will look less foolish when he finally understands that history is open-source now.--humanevents.com
* 4/8/11--The House voted 255-172 to nullify the EPA's greenhouse gas regulations. Nineteen Democrats voted with every Republican to do so. However, a companion bill in the Senate failed Wednesday, garnering only 50 votes and needing 60 for passage. Predictably, the White House threatened a veto.--Patriot Post Digest
* 4/8/11--Over at Big Government, Mike Flynn has a fascinating post on what Barack Obama is doing to our soldiers. In the past, American soldiers were classified as essential personnel. Therefore, should the government shut down our soldiers would keep getting paid. But Barack Obama has decided to hold our American soldiers hostage to a government shutdown. The Commander-in-Chief has, via the Secretary of the Department of Defense, proposed classifying our men and women in harm’s way as “non-essential.” That means, should the government shut down, they will not be paid. As Mike Flynn notes, during the previous two government shutdowns during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations, soldiers were treated as essential. Barack Obama is not following suit. It is important to note that the “non-essential” classification is a draft recommendation, but it is a huge departure from prior shutdowns and comes directly from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Why would Barack Obama and the Democrats do this? The answer is simple. They need to change the message because right now they are losing. And they are willing to use our soldiers as hostages to get that message changed. Let me tell you why. Democrats are getting pasted in the budget debate generally. They can’t beat the GOP on the argument that cuts are needed. The Democrats have no plan for cutting the deficit, and even liberals are calling Paul Ryan ‘courageous.’ They can’t win, because they simply can’t engage on cutting entitlements. So the GOP was winning on budget cutting, winning on the FY 2012 budget, and likely to win on the debt ceiling vote. The Democrats need a way to change the debate. Remember, the only reason we are on the verge of a government shutdown is because for the first time since the budget act was passed in the mid-seventies, a Congress — controlled by Democrats last year — failed to pass a budget. That’s right. We are where we are because the Democrats last year failed to pass a budget and now are refusing to go along with cuts as the GOP sorts out the mess the Democrats made. The only way the White House can do that is to get a shutdown. They want to put the blame on the GOP, but even more than that, they want a shutdown. So the argument will be that spending bills start in the House, and the House still hasn’t passed anything that can get 60 votes in the Senate. And until they do, the fault for the shutdown lies with the GOP. And, in the meantime, our soldiers are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya and cannot get paid. With a media all too willing to push the anti-GOP position, we can bet the first photo in the newspapers the day after the shutdown will be of a boy scout locked out of the Smithsonian and the second picture will be of a flag draped coffin of a soldier with the headline “Because of the GOP, He Died Without Pay”. The Democrats will get their shutdown, and the debate will change to how to get the government open again. And when there is an agreement, Obama will take the credit for bringing the sides together. And he will be the hero. Meanwhile, our troops fighting a non-essential non-war in Libya are reclassified just like the non-war.--redstate.com
* 4/8/11--House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called the requested removal of Planned Parenthood abortion funds "a war on women." Pelosi also decried GOP spending bills, saying, "In one of the bills before us, six million seniors are deprived of meals -- homebound seniors are deprived of meals. People ask us to find our common ground, the middle ground. Is middle ground three million seniors not receiving meals? I don't think so. We've got to take this conversation from a debate about numbers and dollar figures and finding middle ground there to the higher ground of national values. I don't think the American people want any one of those six million people to lose their meals or the children who are being thrown off of Head Start and the rest of it." According to the Department of Health and Human Services, however, only 2.6 million seniors receive these meals. In fact, Pelosi's lie was so bad, even The Washington Post called her on it. Meanwhile, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) fumed, "We are absolutely outraged. This is the functional equivalent of bombing innocent civilians. It's time that the District of Columbia told the Congress to go straight to hell." She continued, "If these Republicans insist that, if they don't get the whole pie they'll take the whole country down with them," she continued, "then we have got to make them pay the price." ...Barack Obama says he wants "to have an adult dialogue on the budget," but apparently congressional Democrats aren't quite there yet. Then again, neither is Obama. Though he said everyone should "quit playing games and realize it is not 'my way or the highway,'" he called the House bill a "distraction" and has promised a veto if funding for Planned Parenthood is cut. Sounds like his way or the highway to us because that veto would cause (part of) the government to shut down. In effect, what Obama is saying is, "Pay the ransom (allow us to continue massive government spending) or we stop paying the military, we won't mail tax refunds, we will close national parks and the DC Cherry Blossom Festival will be ruined!" Both parties will be happy to blame the other if shutdown actually happens, but neither side is winning the confidence of the American people.--Patriot Post Digest
* 4/8/11--It’s on. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin fired back at his Democratic critics over their hysterical reactions to the budget proposal he released earlier this week. “They [the Democrats] are so fundamentally unserious about this [fiscal crisis],” he told HUMAN EVENTS in an exclusive, that “they are in political attack mode. This is hardly the adult conversation we were hoping to achieve by putting out ideas.” Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, added: “These people [Democrats] have been in Congress a long time. Clearly they see the fiscal problems. Clearly they know the road ahead is a debt crisis. They must be complicit with it if they’re willing to use this type of demagoguery and rhetoric. I find it really quite amazing. It’s politics. I don’t know what else to conclude.” The day Ryan released his much-anticipated 2012 budget, Nancy Pelosi took to Twitter to call it a “path to poverty for America’s seniors and children and a road to riches for Big Oil.” Not to be outdone by Pelosi, a long list of Democrats lined up to inject their own overblown responses to the GOP’s 73-page “Path to Prosperity” document. “Waging war on American workers,” said Rep. Xavier Becerra (D.-Calif.). The new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, described it a “death trap for seniors.” “Pulling the rug out from under seniors,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D.-Mich.). “The Tea Party has hijacked the Republican caucus,” said House Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen (D.-Md.) Ryan’s aim is “government so small you can drown it in a bathtub,” said Rep. John Larson (D.-Conn.), before adding that the reforms open “a second front: a war on seniors.” A flabbergasted Ryan argued that if liberal lawmakers really wanted to preserve a social safety net for the most vulnerable among us, they would bear-hug his commitment to restructure a system that every economist warns is severely bankrupt. “The path we are on is the worst path for the elderly and the poor because it’s a path of empty promises,” Ryan told HUMAN EVENTS. “The government is making trillions of dollars of empty promises to these people who are believing in these programs.” Under Ryan’s plan, both Medicare and Medicaid spending would increase, albeit not at the same unsustainable levels that it would if nothing is done, which is the case with the President’s 2012 budget proposal. It would grant flexibility to the states to zero-in on the truly needed while eliminating the perverse financial incentives that encourage them to expand their welfare rolls. On Medicare specifically, a House GOP official told HUMAN EVENTS that the “Democrats have made a conscious effort in the President’s budget to not protect Medicare, therefore, letting it go bankrupt by 2029,” while adding that under its current trajectory, benefits would have to be slashed by 15% and Medicare payroll taxes would need to increase by 23%. Entitlement spending altogether is set to gobble all of America’s tax revenue if no reforms are enacted. As Ryan’s budget underscores, “Absent action, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will soon grow to consume every dollar of revenue that the government raises in taxes. At that point, policy makers would be left with no good options. Making do without any federal government departments, including the military, is not really an option and neither is raising taxes to a level that no free and prosperous economy could sustain. The Congressional Budget Office’s early analysis of Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” concluded that there would be “much less uncertainty about future federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid” than “exists under current law.” Ryan’s sharp words were reserved for Obama as well, calling into question the President’s ability to lead. Quoth Ryan: “The week we’re trying to engage on cutting spending and having an adult conversation on the budget, his [Obama’s] party leaders use demagoguery, and he launches his reelection campaign. He’s a very good politician, but what we need right now is a really good leader, and I don’t see any leadership.” In the end, Ryan’s confident that the Americans won’t get suckered by overheated Washington rhetoric. “The great comfort I get out of this [hysteria] is that the American people have figured it out. They are way ahead of the political class in Washington, D.C. That kind of over-the-top rhetoric, it’s just demeaning to the country.”--redstate.com
* 4/9/11--What a way to run a superpower. Washington was creeping toward a government shutdown last night in a bare-knuckle battle over crumbs in the federal budget. At issue: whether to shave a scant 0.2 percent of the $3.5 trillion 2011 budget. A budget, by the way, that should have been passed last October -- back when Democrats controlled the government. "It was a political hot potato," says Rep. Charlie Rangel. It's not going to get any easier. But as the Beltway bickers over loose change, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan is looking ahead. The Wisconsin Republican unveiled this week a budget proposal for 2012 that would cut spending by $6.2 trillion over the next decade. This is the fight the GOP should be waging. Ryan offered, among other things:
* Giving future Medicare enrollees a yearly $15,000 subsidy to choose the best private health plans for themselves.
* Block-granting Medicaid payments to the states so they can tailor programs to best meet the needs of their own citizens.
* Fixing the tax code to close loopholes and lower the top rate to 25 percent.
The proposal won't fly in the Senate or with the White House -- but, as Ryan said Tuesday, he feels a "moral obligation" to offer a choice: endless debt or a fresh start. That's a statement of faith in the American people, who are "ready to be spoken to like adults," he argued. But Democrats, predictably, responded with slander. Sure, Obama warned that future shortfalls mean "everybody's got to take a haircut." But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted that the Ryan budget is "a path to poverty for America's seniors & children." And Rep. Steve Israel (D-LI) said it would force seniors to "clip coupons if they need to see a doctor." That's nonsense on stilts. But it's no surprise: Their gilded rice bowls depend on such pathetic pandering. Whatever comes of the fight over the current budget, Paul Ryan's proposal is the real show. Stay focused.--NY Post Editorial
* 4/11/11--Last week I had mentioned that President Obama was a genius for officially announcing that he would run for reelection because the mainstream media would put their Obama jerseys on. Democrats failed to pass a budget while they were in control of Congress, failed to offer a budget of their own during this cycle, and failed to give up funding an organization primarily known for killing the unborn in Planned Parenthood (to think Planned Parenthood primarily exists for other reasons and services is akin to believing that brothels exist to give men ample opportunities to engage in conversation). The mainstream media told you none of this. Instead, the MSM painted Republicans as extreme on social issues. And they painted Obama as a leader who brought Democrats and Republicans together. The implication was that Obama was neither a Democrat or a Republican and instead a leader. They even praised Obama’s detachment and somehow made the connection that detachment equaled leadership. And they did not call him out for using a government shutdown that could have prevented our men and women in the military from being paid for his own political gain by making speeches from the White House with the Washington Monument in the background and making a trip to greet tourists at the Lincoln Memorial. Now that Obama is in campaign mode, so will the fanboys and fangirls in the mainstream media. Quite frankly, you can say it’s “Obama-able.”--Tony Lee, humanevents.com
* 4/12/11--A Seattle public school has decided that Easter eggs are super offensive and not politically correct. They’ve renamed them Spring Spheres (even though eggs are not spheres. This is our public education system at work, people): “At the end of the week I had an idea to fill little plastic eggs with treats and jelly beans and other candy, but I was kind of unsure how the teacher would feel about that,” Jessica said. She was concerned how the teacher might react to the eggs after of a meeting earlier in the week where she learned about “their abstract behavior rules.” “I went to the teacher to get her approval and she wanted to ask the administration to see if it was okay,” Jessica explained. “She said that I could do it as long as I called this treat ‘spring spheres.’ I couldn’t call them Easter eggs.” Rather than question the decision, Jessica opted to “roll with it.” But the third graders had other ideas. “When I took them out of the bag, the teacher said, ‘Oh look, spring spheres’ and all the kids were like ‘Wow, Easter eggs.’ So they knew,” Jessica said.
Of course they knew. Because they were Easter eggs. Oh, it’s Seattle, one might say. Of course such things happen there. Hippies! Well, a similar thing occurred in my old hometown in New Jersey. The town Easter egg hunt was changed to “Spring Celebration. With Bunny.” For real. They have since changed it again. One of the dreaded “E” words is no longer forbidden. No, no… not Easter. That would be going too far! They only allow the word “egg” again.--redstate.com
* 4/13/11--"President Obama has dedicated his time in office to soaking up applause and shifting blame. Last year, when Democrats owned the White House, the House and the Senate, Congress didn't even bother passing a budget. Obama didn't seem to mind. But when Republicans put together a stopgap measure to fund the military and prevent a government shutdown, Obama promised to veto it. Obama called the measure 'a distraction from the real work that would bring us closer to a reasonable compromise for funding the remainder of fiscal year 2011.' There must have been a lot of distractions last year." --columnist Debra Saunders (From Patriot Post Chronicle)
*4/13/11--In a critical report published by the Center for Public Integrity regarding the White House visitor log, one of the more peculiar items noted was the amount of visits that AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka has made to the White House. While the Center’s criticism centers around the lack of (or missing) data provided by the White House, the records did reflect that Trumka has visited the White House an astonishing four dozen times: AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka has been logged in at least four dozen times, often with other labor bigwigs, but the records tell why he was there in only 12 of those cases, and those are mostly ceremonial events or busy social functions. Twice last year, Trumka met privately with Obama and once with Vice President Joseph Biden, the records show, but no details are in the logs. The AFL-CIO had no comment. In February, as suspicion was being raised about Democrats coordinating with protesters in Wisconsin, Trumka raised eyebrows when he boasted talking to the White House “every day.”Back when SEIU boss Andy Stern was still running back and forth to the White House, it was suggested that Stern was the hand inside Barack Obama's puppet. It appears, now that Stern has resigned his role as puppet master, Trumka’s hand has slipped right in.--redstate.com
* 4/14/11--Liberal millionaires are literally begging to have their taxes raised. Speaking at a rally against Florida governor Rick Scott last month, super-wealthy horror writer Stephen King asked, “As a rich person I pay 28% tax. What I want to ask you is, why am I not paying fifty?” Recently, a group calling itself the “Patriotic Millionaires” wrote an open letter to the White House and Congressional leaders, pleading with them to raise taxes on all income over a million dollars. The letter declared, “Our country has been good to us. It provided a foundation through which we could succeed. Now, we want to do our part to keep that foundation strong so that others can succeed as we have.” President Obama cultivated this kind of thinking in his budget speech yesterday, explaining that we should all be salivating at the prospect of giving him more tax money to “invest” in our future, because without the noble work of Big Government, prosperity is impossible. The intellectual justification for all this is the idea Obama expressed in his budget speech: the State makes our prosperity possible, and therefore owns it. You wouldn’t have anything good in your life without the government, so you are obligated to pay whatever taxes the government thinks it needs. No one can get rich without using public resources, so the State is everyone’s silent partner. This turns true American patriotism on its head. Our Founding Fathers made it clear that citizens are the masters of the State, not the other way around. The State must fulfill its duties with the resources we choose to give it. We’re not obliged to pay anything that wasn’t legally on the books the last time we paid our taxes. To say that any American owes more today, because he was successful yesterday, is to make us all indentured servants of a government that owns the past, present, and future.--John Hayward, humanevents.com
* 4/14/11--New claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week, bouncing back above the key 400,000 level, while core producer prices climbed faster than expected in March, government reports showed on Thursday. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 27,000 to a seasonally adjusted 412,000, the Labor Department said. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims slipping to 380,000.--cnbc.com
* 4/15/11--Forget the oft used analogies of the "Stupid Party" and "Evil Party." While the Republicans may still be stupid and the Democrats evil, it is increasingly clear that the Republicans are a bunch of wimps. In the past week, Democrats have said the Republicans want women to die and old people to starve. They've accused the GOP of hurting kids. Barack Obama himself has entered the fray. He says the GOP would turn the nation into a third world state. He says the Republicans want to hurt the elderly with their Medicare reforms. Nevermind that he is the champion of death panels. All the while, the Republicans keep talking about wanting to reach across the aisle. They are perfectly willing to go along with the Democrats in raising the debt ceiling. They are perfectly willing to help the Democrats cut only $353 billion from this year's deficit. They are perfectly willing to let Obama keep lobbing bombs at Tripoli for no apparent reason. The Republicans have gotten it in their head that if they just play nice and look leaderly, the nation will embrace them. Instead, the GOP is getting defined by the Democrats. They are getting pinned down by a media willing to push the Democrat talking points and their polling is correspondingly going down hill. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell don't seem to understand that we need fighters not lovers right now. The Republican Party has turned into the Party of Wimps. If they don't start throwing punches soon, they'll be undone and so will the nation.--humanevents.com
* 4/15/11--Since Democrats took over Congress in 2007, the annual federal budget deficit has quadrupled. Democrats continue to talk about fiscal austerity, but if left to them, these gargantuan deficits would continue for years to come. In February 2010, Barack Obama made a farce of creating a bipartisan debt commission and tasking it to make recommendations for reining in federal spending. The commission did so in December ... and he promptly ignored them, introducing a 2012 budget that included none of its recommendations and continues to drive spending through the roof. Then came Wednesday's speech at George Washington University, a presidential do-over in response to his $3.73 trillion FY 2012 budget having been laughed out of town two months earlier. In the speech, Obama suddenly remembered his commission and promised budget cuts. In doing so, he read this laugh line from his teleprompter: "We have to live within our means." This from the guy who continues to propose that we borrow 40 cents for every dollar spent. Right from the start, Obama sounded as if he were on the campaign trail rather than making a serious policy speech. He invited Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, to take a front-row seat for the event, then promptly savaged Ryan's proposal to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion in 10 years. "Those are both worthy goals for us to achieve," Obama offered, "but the way this plan achieves those goals would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we've known throughout most of our history." Actually, it would derail Obama's agenda to "fundamentally transform the United States of America" to match his socialist preferences. Obama's speech then devolved into a class warfare screed. "Worst of all," he said, "this is a vision that says even though America can't afford to invest in education or clean energy; even though we can't afford to care for seniors and poor children, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy." He asked sarcastically, "That's who needs to pay less taxes?" First of all, it's not Obama's money. Second, the "rich" already pay most of the taxes -- the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of income taxes, and the top 10 percent pay 70 percent. Third, these top-bracket taxpayers are also the nation's job-creating business owners, the ones who thereby fuel our investment in education, clean energy and the like. In Obama's America, however, "we would not be a great country without" entitlements that redistribute wealth from one small subgroup to a much larger subgroup. Leftists have always found it easy to be compassionate with other people's money, pat themselves on the back for it, and then recoil in horror if anyone suggests it's not really compassion. Just in time for Income Redistribution Day, Obama proposed raising taxes by $1 trillion on the top two brackets over the next 12 years -- and not just directly raising rates, but eliminating deductions, too. "I believe that most wealthy Americans would agree with me," he said. "They want to give back to the country that's done so much for them. Washington just hasn't asked them to." As far as we know, Uncle Sam is always willing to take an extra check if one's conscience is so burdened. The bottom line is that Obama isn't serious about addressing the deficit -- unless "serious" is defined as seriously increasing it. As long as his plan for confronting our crushing fiscal issues is simply raising taxes to pay for more spending, the nation will continue sinking, just as the Titanic did 99 years ago.
--"Under [Republicans'] vision, we can't invest in roads and bridges and broadband and high-speed rail. I mean, we would be a nation of potholes, and our airports would be worse than places that we thought -- that we used to call the Third World." --Barack Obama in another budget speech Thursday--Patriot Post Digest
* 4/15/11--From the most transparent administration in history comes this new revelation: The visitor logs at the White House "are missing the names of thousands of ... visitors to the White House, including lobbyists, government employees, campaign donors, policy experts and friends of the first family," Politico reports. "The White House website proudly boasts of making available 'over 1,000,000 records of everyone who's come through the doors of the White House' via a searchable database. Yet ... the logs routinely omit or cloud key details about the identity of visitors, whom they met with and the nature of their visits. The logs even include the names of people who never showed up." Recently we noted that the administration accepted an award for transparency from advocates of open government ... in secret. Now we're wondering if those visitors are in the logs. --Patriot Post Digest
* 4/18/11--(CNSNews.com) - The national debt has passed another historical milestone, topping $14.3 trillion for the first time ever, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury late Monday afternoon. When the Treasury opened for business on Friday, April 15, according to the Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt, the national debt stood at $14.27 trillion ($14,270,792,119,184.89). By the close of business Friday, the debt had climbed to $14.31 trillion ($14,305,336,580,992.11), an increase of $34.54 billion ($34,544,461,807.22). Friday’s $34.54-billion jump in the national debt almost equaled the $38.5 billion the Republican House leadership said would be cut from spending for the remainder of this fiscal year by the continuing resolution that the Congress passed on Thursday and President Obama signed Friday. The federal government is now perilously close to hitting its legal limit on debt.
* 4/19/11--WASHINGTON -- Standard & Poor's startling move yesterday to downgrade the US credit outlook intensified pressure on President Obama to accept Republican demands for deep budget cuts before raising the debt limit, political experts said. "It definitely makes it more unpleasant for the White House," said James Gimpel, a political-science professor at the University of Maryland College Park. "That puts more pressure on the White House," he said, noting the S&P's authoritative stature. "It's something to heed." S&P warned that the US government risks losing its AAA bond rating, downgrading the outlook for US debt from "stable" to "negative." The New York-based ratings service said it had unprecedented doubts that Washington can strike a deal to corral runaway debt by 2013, when it predicted a loss of the AAA rating. The White House brushed off the dramatic warning. "The bond rating remained the same," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney cautioned. "We simply believe that the prospects are better [for a deal]. We think that the political process will outperform S&P expectations." The GOP has vowed to block Obama's request to raise the government debt limit above the current $14.3 trillion ceiling without deep budget cuts and fundamental spending reforms, risking a US credit default if it can't borrow any more. The S&P announcement emboldened Republicans. They said the bad news underscored the need for fast action against the deficit. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the S&P downgrade "sent a wake-up call to those in Washington asking Congress to blindly increase the debt limit." "As S&P made clear, getting spending and our deficit under control can no longer be put off for another day," he said.--NY Post
* 4/19/11--If you have been away for the past twenty-four hours, you missed that for the first time since its founding in 1941, Standards and Poor downgraded our nation’s credit outlook. S&P believes there is a 33% change it will downgrade the nation’s AAA credit rating in the next two years. For the past year, Democrats have spent freely arguing that their free spending ways did not matter. In fact, Barack Obama’s proposed budget for 2012 increases the national debt to 116% of gross domestic product, even while adding $2 trillion in tax increases. It is not that budget proposal that became the straw to break the camel’s back. It was not even his trillion dollar stimulus plan or his multi-trillion dollar stimulus plan than became the straw to break the camel’s back. In fact, it was Barack Obama’s disastrous speech last week that broke the camel’s back. As James Pethokoukis noted, Obama’s muddled plan to solve the crisis was “fastened together by the chewing gum and sticky tape of rosy economic assumptions and fiscal opacity.” But more so, it was Barack Obama’s angry words and denunciation of Paul Ryan’s own plan that drove S&P to its conclusion. S&P said:
We view President Obama’s and Congressman Ryan’s proposals as the starting point of a process aimed at broader engagement, which could result in substantial and lasting U.S. government fiscal consolidation. That said, we see the path to agreement as challenging because the gap between the parties remains wide. We believe there is a significant risk that Congressional negotiations could result in no agreement on a medium-term fiscal strategy until after the fall 2012 Congressional and Presidential elections. If so, the first budget proposal that could include related measures would be Budget 2014 (for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2013), and we believe a delay beyond that time is possible.
Remember, up until the President’s attack, even Democrats on the Deficit Commission were praising Paul Ryan’s willingness to engage the issue “at an adult level.” Everyone expects congressional partisans to take pot shots, but for the President of the United States to have a temper tantrum over it akin to a three year old denied a lollipop? That’s unheard of. The President’s open hostility to an adult plan while offering no substantive plan of his own was the straw that broke the camel’s back. And because Mr. Obama still cannot deal with the issue as an adult, we will keep heading down this treacherous road.--redstate.com
* 4/19/11--The nail biter Supreme Court race in Wisconsin is finally over, with incumbent Justice David Prosser keeping his seat on the bench by a margin of 7316 votes, beating challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg who had claimed victory early on in the vote count saying: "We did win, and we’re confident the margin will hold.” If Prosser lost, the union battle in Wisconsin would have been a waste considering Kloppenburg would have overturned Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to close the $3 billion budget deficit by removing the ability to collectively bargain from union workers during a Supreme Court hearing. Prosser is expected to uphold Walker’s efforts.--townhall.com
* 4/21/11--Gas prices have more than doubled since Barack Obama took office. His deficit spending makes George Bush look like a rank amateur. 78% of Americans recognize inflation is on the rise. One dollar bill buys less and less. We’re a little bit more pregnant in Libya, but just barely. Our foreign policy is rudderless and often against our best interests. Today comes news that for the first time since the Great Depression, more Americans get government money than give the government money. Americans are dependent on Washington for their livelihoods. Also out late yesterday, CNS News reports that we will hit the legal limit on the national debt in less than a week. This is surprising news to pretty much everyone. But the data comes from the Treasury Department itself. This is no way to enter a re-election campaign. Barack Obama cannot run on hope or change. Instead, he is going to run on fear. It is abundantly apparent and confirmed to me by several Democrats who’d know. Barack Obama’s re-election strategy will be a scorched earth campaign. Over the next few months, Barack Obama will seek to define the Republicans as willing to kill the old and young, pass radical legislation, and send us into the league of the third world. “But wait,” you say. “Barack Obama has already done that." In essence, yes. So Obama is not going to run on defending his record. He’s going to run on saying that Republicans will be even worse than him and, oh by the way, none of it is his fault. Barack Obama has largely gotten a pass his whole life. He’s never been in a real executive role. By his own admission in his book he was largely a failed community organizer. And now he is failed President. The only way to hang on to his job is to peddle fear and intimidation of those who’d stand in his way. This is also one reason so many Republicans are waiting to announce their runs. They all know the moment they come out swinging, Obama’s union goons and money will savage them. At the same time, the GOP has yet to mount a successful attack on Obama to make him own high gas, high inflation, declining dollars, and our declining standing in the world. If they don’t get out there soon, the hill they have to climb will be even higher.--redstate.com
* 4/21/11--Reuters has a report today that says “Moammar Qaddafi has consolidated his position in central and western Libya enough to maintain an indefinite standoff with rebels trying to end his four-decade rule,” according to U.S. and European security officials. “Qaddafi’s people are feeling quite confident,” a European official added. Rest assured that President Obama will get right on top of that… as soon as he knocks out six political fundraisers over the next two days. This presidency has gone through three stages. The first was a desperate power grab to “transform America, climaxing with the passage of ObamaCare. Phase Two was a time of stunned confusion for Obama. Look at everything that has occurred from the run-up to the midterms until now, and you’ll see a portrait of a man who has no idea what to do. He’s been consistently flummoxed by the demands and duties of his office, now that he’s exhausted all the opportunities. Phase Three began with Obama’s budget speech at George Washington University, and it will last until November 2012. It’s all campaign, all the time, from here on out. The debt ceiling approaches. Irresponsible spending and mounting debt threaten the credit rating of the United States, a fiscal disaster that would drop hundreds of billions in new debt service costs on our bankrupt government. Obama’s war in Libya is falling apart. And yet, he’s off to raise funds and test out campaign speeches. We don’t have a President any more. The 2012 election is a race for an open seat.--humanevents.com
* 4/25/11--Just when I thought the current team running the White House might have used up all its allotted mistakes comes word that President Obama failed to issue either an Easter or a Good Friday greeting to the nation. Now, let’s forget for a moment that these greetings, which presidents issue on many holidays and commemorations of events, are largely perfunctory and symbolic gestures that nobody cares about. Until there’s a problem with them. Fox News first caught the blunder and put it into context that makes the omission insulting to Christians. The mistake is odd enough to call into question just what Obama’s priorities are. By comparison, the White House has released statements recognizing the observance of major Muslim holidays and released statements in 2010 on Ramadan, Eid-ul-Fitr, Hajj, and Eid-ul-Adha. The White House . . . did release an eight-paragraph statement heralding Earth Day. Likewise, the president’s weekend address mentioned neither Good Friday or Easter. Obama, Fox notes, did head out to church yesterday and held an Easter prayer breakfast at the White House last week. Obama is on a roll for religious holiday greeting screw ups. Fox News writes:
In 2010, Obama was criticized for releasing an all-inclusive Easter greeting. He reached out to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and people of no faith at all in a statement about a holiday that is uniquely Christian.
And as I noted last week, the president released a Passover greeting this month that compared the ancient Jewish exodus from Egypt to the Arab political awakening this year, which would be a beautiful thing if most Arabs didn’t seek Israel’s destruction. The president is, of course, hosting the Easter Egg Roll at the White House today. But Easter isn’t really about rolling eggs on a manicured lawn, now is it? UPDATE: Asked during this afternoon’s briefing about the issue, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney suggested Obama’s “high profile” visit to a church Sunday should suffice. “I’m not sure if we put out a statement or not, but he obviously personally celebrated Easter with his family,” Carney said, adding "the president took his family out to church in a very high-profile way." Carney added that Obama is a "devoted Christian."--whitehousedossier.com
* 4/25/11--It may sound a little callous and abrasive to even be suspicious of Obama's choice of churches for Easter Sunday 2011, but given the climate of the media bias so overwhelmingly in favor of casting Obama in the best light possible, the regular media professionals can't be trusted to actually do some basic reporting. The one and only detail reported about Shiloh Baptist Church was that it was founded by freed slaves during the Civil War. There was no mention that this was the first Presidential visit to Shiloh, nor any mention that this inaugural visit could be more than a coincidence. Was there no mention that this is a predominately black church because the media didn't want the American people to know that our President chooses his church based on race? I'm reticent to openly guess at the media's intentions, but when flattering facts are reported and unflattering facts are omitted, we have no choice but to fill in the blanks. It's understandable that the President hasn't been to eager to jump back into church life given that the one and only church our President has ever joined in his life is one of the biggest political sandbags he carried through the 2008 campaign. One has to dig into the blog notes from various reporters to piece together the content from the sermon. Aside from the First Couple being honored guests, Pastor Wallace Charles Smith also announces that his 4 week old grandson is attending church for the first time, and a pool reporter noted an interesting perspective on the infant:
"[Pastor Smith] talked about how his baby grandson's gurgling is actually "talking" because he is saying 'I am here ... they tried to write me off as 3/5 a person in the Constitution, but I am here right now ... and is saying I am not going to let anybody from stopping me from being what God wants me to be.'"
The pastor hears American institutional racism in a baby's gurgle? Do most people with infants hear Constitutional bigotry in their baby's gibberish? Did any mention of the 3/5 clause or racism in general make it into the Easter service you attended? Is this pastor's amazing leap from a baby bark to white oppression another coincidence to add to the list, or has he established a pattern of race baiting and white bashing in the past? No great research team was needed to uncover what comes next. The fact that a YouTube search immediately grants the answer only underscores how astronomically inept/lazy/biased the media can be. This is in fact another pastor who sees racism around every corner, preaches white hatred, and equates talk radio with the Klan, specifically mentioning Rush. While this pastor is a little less flamboyant than Jeremiah Wright in both tone and wardrobe, the evidence is in: Obama prefers and actively seeks out these churches, race is our President's primary motivation on a variety of decisions, and the media will actively provide cover for minority racists as long as it fits their narrative.--wrno.com
* 4/25/11--The average price for a gallon of unleaded gasoline hit $3.86 on April 25, more than $1-a-gallon higher than a year earlier and less than 25 cents away from the record high price of gasoline set in July 2008. In fact, per gallon prices are more than $2 higher than when Obama took office Jan. 20, 2009. Yet the president has been nearly exempt from criticism on the issue of rising prices, despite a six-month drilling moratorium and more regulatory hurdles for industry. The Business & Media Institute found that out of the 280 oil price stories the network evening shows have aired since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, only 1 percent (3 stories) mentioned Obama’s drilling ban or other anti-oil actions in connection with gasoline prices. Instead of asking whether Obama's anti-oil policies could be increasing the cost of gas, the networks blamed other factors such as Mideast turmoil or the "money game" played by speculators. Certainly, the turmoil in Libya, Egypt and surrounding nations has increased worries about oil production and can influence the price. But the networks also should have looked for explanations much closer to home, like Obama’s many regulatory actions taken against the oil industry. First there was the drilling ban, which was later overturned by federal courts as illegal. Seahawk Drilling, a Texas-based shallow-water drilling company cited that moratorium as the cause of its bankruptcy filing saying, they "have been adversely affected by the dramatic slowdown in the issuing of shallow-water permits in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico following the Macondo well blowout." According to The Heritage Foundation, the Obama administration moved on to a de facto moratorium after the ban was overturned. Add to that the EPA’s desire to regulate the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions and new environmental regulatory hurdles for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport crude from Canada to the U.S. and create many American jobs. Despite all of these actions on the part of the Obama administration, ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows have barely mentioned them in stories about rising gas prices.--Newsbusters.org
* 4/25/11--A ruling by the Environmental Appeals Board of the EPA has scuttled Shell OIl Company's plan to drill its initial exploratory test in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. This is at least the second time drilling has been deferred or delayed due to environmental concerns. But this time, the reason proffered by EPA seems to be “Because we can." The EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell had not taken into consideration emissions from an ice-breaking vessel when calculating overall greenhouse gas emissions from the project. Environmental groups were thrilled by the ruling. We have handed radical environmentalists veto power over domestic development. It matters little whether the pretext is (as in this case) ship exhaust 70 miles distant from the nearest human settlement, "burning water" or a 3-inch lizard in West Texas, environmental extremists are hell-bent on shutting down any and all development of conventional fuels in the United States. EPA offers them all the tools they need. Let’s stipulate for the time being that a reasonable development time frame for a large-scale, remote oil development in the Arctic offshore is at least ten years. Some of the larger fields in the Gulf of Mexico have taken that long; compared to the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska’s northwest coast, the Gulf of Mexico is a bathtub. Ten years spans two and a half Presidential terms, five Congresses and at least one election cycle for each Senator. All the EPA’s anti-industry careerists need do is wait patiently for the opportunity to stop any large-scale development dead in its tracks. Shell bought the Chukchi Sea leases from a willing Federal government in 2008 at a cost of $2 billion. They have spent another $2 billion on the pre-drill exploratory phase. When you’re a capitalist with a large investment on the line, time is not your friend. Since the weather window for Arctic operations is limited to the summer, a delay of a couple of months effectively kills a year. (Which raises an interesting question: Since Shell bought its leases in good faith and the stroke of an administrative pen took its rights away, shouldn’t the US be willing to refund Shell’s $2 billion?)
[Shell's VP Pete Slaiby is] especially frustrated over the appeal board’s suggestion that the Arctic drill would somehow be hazardous for the people who live in the area. “We think the issues were really not major,” Slaiby said, “and clearly not impactful for the communities we work in.”
The closest village to where Shell proposed to drill is Kaktovik, Alaska. It is one of the most remote places in the United States. According to the latest census, the population is 245 and nearly all of the residents are Alaska natives. The village, which is one square mile, sits right along the shores of the Beaufort Sea, 70 miles away from the proposed off-shore drill site. We can go through this perverse kabuki dance that Shell’s air permit was with held up for the indigenous people, for the children, for the polar bear, all of the above, but the real motivation, the real prize, is the Trans Alaska Pipeline System. The design throughput of the pipe is in excess of 2 million barrels of oil per day; recent throughput is around 600,000 barrels per day. At some limiting rate (I’ve heard 200,000 barrels per day), the cost to operate the line will exceed the value of operating it, and it will be shut down. Pipeline shut-down is the ultimate goal of the environmental movement. Not just ANWR, but any new development must be stopped so that TAPS dies an early and unnatural death. According to the US Geological Survey, the Arctic regions of the world hold 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas resources. (This is a scientific guess, because the region is so lightly drilled.) Only recently, Statoil announced a large discovery in the Barents Sea, north of Norway. Russia also has active plans to develop its extensive Arctic resources. And while it’s not in the Arctic, Canada has produced several large fields offshore Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, an area known for hostile sea conditions with the threat of icebergs. We as Americans have done nothing to curtail our demand for petroleum, but we have allowed the supposed protectors of our environment to block development at almost every turn. When we go, hat in hand, to OPEC or foreign regimes seeking access to oil, they ask a legitimate question: “Why are you asking us to do things that you refuse to do for yourselves?”--redstate.com
* 4/25/11--The anti-war movement was all over the news before President Obama was elected. But apparently they weren’t really anti-war ... they were just anti-President Bush. Two college professors just released a study of national protests between 2007 and 2009. What did they find?
… After January 2007, the attendance at antiwar rallies [measured in] roughly the tens of thousands, or thousands, through the end of 2008.
… After the election of Barack Obama as president, the order of magnitude of antiwar protests dropped [...] Organizers were hard pressed to stage a rally with participation in the thousands, or even in the hundreds. For example, we counted exactly 107 participants at a Chicago rally on October 7, 2009.
Amazing. Especially because the war in Afghanistan ramped up after Obama was elected. American fatalities shot up in 2009 and 2010. The protesters have remained silent over Libya. And I’m struck by the hypocrisy of the supposedly “anti-war” politicians who voted against Iraq, like Nancy Pelosi. Since Obama was elected, she has voted to continue the war in Afghanistan … and supported the attack on Libya. --John Stossel, Foxbusinessnews.com
* 4/26/11--President Obama took part in another round of golf over the weekend, bringing the total of golf games played by the president to over 60 rounds since he took office. The golf game came after Obama spent time in California schmoozing with big name actors and raising money for his re-election campaign. The golf game also came just after tornados ripped through the south, killing over 50 people and devastating properties and homes. A brutal crackdown in Syria where government forces slaughtered hundreds was also happening while Obama was out on the green practicing his swing.--townhall.com
* 4/26/11--With billionaire and possible GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump ratcheting interest in Barack Obama's Hawaiian birth documentation to its highest level ever, the State of Hawaii is suddenly enforcing a policy that no one – not even the president of the United States – can obtain a copy of his own birth certificate from the state's Department of Health. Although the policy of denying the public access to copies of long-form original hospital birth certificates was announced in 2001, it wasn't enforced for years. But with Trump's recent pointed questioning of the circumstances of Obama's birth – and whether he was even born in America – Hawaii officials have apparently determined that the long-overlooked state procedure now requires enforcement. On March 17 the wealthy real estate entrepreneur told ABC's "Good Morning America" Obama's refusal to provide what is routine information about his life was "very strange." Since then, Trump has been on a talk show tour suggesting he might run for president in 2012 and saying if Obama is not eligible, it's one of the biggest hoaxes ever. He even suggested the 44th president's tenure in the White House could be "illegal." The controversy points directly back to the state of Hawaii, where officials previously have maintained they have viewed Obama's birth "records," but have steadfastly refused to disclose what they say or even in what form those records exist. Nor has Obama been willing to seek the information and release it himself; in fact, he's dispatched both private and tax-paid attorneys to fend off dozens of court cases across the country to make certain his records are kept secret. In 2001, the Hawaii Department of Health's chief at the time, Bruce Anderson, announced, "The Department of Health will henceforth issue and provide only computer-generated abstracts of birth and marriage records and cease to produce photocopies of actual records…" The president's supporters repeatedly have cited that policy as the reason why no other records of Obama's birth can be released but a computer-generated "Certification of Live Birth" document that was posted on the Internet during the 2008 campaign. State officials also have cited the policy change as the reason they cannot release Obama's original long-form birth documentation, even though their own law specifies that the "department of health shall, upon request, furnish to any applicant a certified copy of any certificate, or the contents of any certificate, or any part thereof." The Post & Email blog suggests the policy, on its face, violates the state law. In any case, it was not followed for years, as confirmed by the testimony of many individuals who obtained their own original birth certificate records from the department. One of those long-form documents was obtained from Hawaii as recently as March 15, 2011, by a Hawaii native who was willing to have a redacted version revealed for this report. That was just two days before Trump's statements were reported widely: It confirms that the birth occurred at Tripler Medical Center, includes a clerk's signature, the attendant's name as well as critical information about the mother and father, including their names and their own birth locations. The document is date-stamped March 15, 2011. --wnd.com
* 4/27/11--"Pump prices keep climbing, so what do those mainly responsible for the run-up do? Try to pin it on someone else, of course. In his radio address last Saturday, President Obama bragged that his attorney general had just two days earlier 'launched a task force with just one job: rooting out cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, including any illegal activity by traders and speculators. We're going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain.' Last month, the president promised that his administration was 'taking various measures to deal with oil prices, and (is) watching out for price-gouging.' This is the sort of rhetoric that beleaguered consumers, aching from soaring fuel prices, are vulnerable to. Obama is giving them a straw man on which they can vent their frustrations. But their focus should be on the presidential candidate who said while campaigning in 2008 that under his environmentalist regime, 'electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.' On the day Obama took office, gasoline was $1.83 a gallon. On Tuesday, according to the American Automobile Association's Daily Fuel Gauge Report, the national average was $3.87. While electricity prices haven't yet necessarily skyrocketed, gasoline prices sure have. Obama could have prevented this. But he's done nothing to push crude supplies up and thereby bring gasoline prices down. In fact, it appears that his goal is to reduce domestic supply. ... Despite its denials, the administration has also increased gasoline prices through its promotion of a weak dollar. Because oil is traded in U.S. dollars, those who sell it on the open market demand more dollars for the same amount of crude because those dollars are worth less. This administration includes an energy secretary who has pined for European -- meaning $8-a-gallon -- gas prices. But the White House would rather the public remain ignorant of its role in driving prices higher. So it cynically kicks off probes of investors and oil industry executives that will turn up absolutely nothing."--Investor's Business Daily (From Patriot Post Chronicle)
* 4/27/11--President Obama has finally released his fabled long-form birth certificate, a document that has long been sought after by the President’s most energetic critics. Dan Pfeiffer, communications director for the White House, said the President decided to release this document “in response to mounting questions about the President’s birth.” No one has been mounting those questions with greater enthusiasm than Donald Trump, who has made concealment of the birth certificate a cornerstone of his assault on President Obama’s character and qualifications. President Obama took the extraordinary step of calling a press conference to accompany the release of the birth certificate – something he waited a week to do after launching a military attack on Libya. At the conference, he said he has watched the birth certificate debate “with amusement” and has been “puzzled by the degree to which this thing just kept on going.” He added that America would not be able to “solve its problems if we are distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers." With a smile, the President said he expects that “no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.” He then quickly departed the press conference without taking any questions.
As for Trump, he is claiming victory, saying “I am very proud of myself. I am really proud, I am really honored. I’m taking great credit.” He also expressed relief that he would no longer be pestered about the birth certificate during media interviews, and can now move on to discussing the really important issues during his nascent presidential campaign. Trump wondered why Obama did not release his long-form birth certificate “a long time ago.” He said he wants to “look at it” himself, and that “we have to see ‘is it real?’ Is it proper? What’s on it?"--humanevents.com
* 4/28/11--President Obama yesterday removed all doubt about his eligibility to be president. Left unresolved was his stunning lack of enthusiasm for actually doing the job. First the White House posted a copy of his so-called long-form birth certificate -- and then the president went on television to announce: "I was born in Hawaii, Aug. 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital." So far, so good. "Now, normally I would not comment on something like this, because . . . we do not have time for this kind of silliness," he said. "I've got better stuff to do." Whereupon he:
* Hopped Air Force One to Chicago.
* Taped the Oprah Winfrey show.
* Jumped back on the jet.
* And headlined three top-dollar political fund-raisers here in New York.
And yet he wonders why some people are so ready to believe that there is something fishy about where he was born. Fact is, virtually everything Barack Obama has declared, promised or predicted since rising to national prominence three years ago has turned out to be specious, delusory or flat-out false. Whether the subject is Gitmo, foreign wars, health care or fiscal responsibility, the president has long since surrendered the benefit of the doubt. Small wonder, then, that Donald Trump and the rest of the gaggle that Obama yesterday termed "carnival barkers" have been gaining traction on the issue. Ironically, the notion that Obama wasn't born in the United States -- and therefore isn't eligible for the presidency -- first popped up on pro-Hillary-Clinton Web sites during the 2008 Democratic primaries. The notion is fever-swamp stuff, of course. But it plays right into the paranoid-fantasy strain in American politics. Remember, 51 percent of Democrats polled in 2006 believed or suspected that George W. Bush was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Yes, Trump and his fellow sideshow geeks -- give Obama credit for getting that one right at least -- have helped lay a libel to rest. But now they need to let it go. There are many, many reasons to question Barack Obama's fitness to be president of the United States -- but his birth circumstances have no place on the list.--NY Post Editorial
* 4/28/11--U.S. economic growth slowed more than expected in the first quarter as higher food and gasoline prices dampened consumer spending, and sent a broad measure of inflation rising at its fastest pace in 2-1/2 years. But the pull back in output, which was also the result of harsh winter weather, a widening trade gap as well as weak government spending, will probably be fleeting given a firming labor market. Growth in U.S. gross domestic product—a measure of all goods and services produced within U.S. borders—braked to a 1.8 percent annual rate after a 3.1 percent fourth quarter pace, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. Economists had expected a 2 percent growth pace.--cnbc.com
* 4/28/11--Conservatives who complain about the liberal media's habit of treating similar incidents differently for political reasons have an a fortiori case with the Kill Team, the rogue US soldiers who in 2010 murdered Afghan civilians, mutilated the bodies and took photos. Now, the Abu Graib scandal of 2004, terrible as it was, involved enemy combatants in custody, who were abused but not killed. It inspired months of front-page coverage, op-eds, art exhibits, plays, novels, conferences--along with demands for resignations and impeachments. You'd have expected the Kill Team to cause an even stronger reaction, but after it broke in late March, it was a modest one-day story in most media outlets; The New York Times gave it 700 words on Page A4 and then let the matter drop. Whatever could explain the difference?--The Editors of National Review, in the magazine's May 2 Issue, (From NY Post)
* 4/29/11--The Obama administration, fearful of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling in favor of free speech, is looking to change the rules of the campaign game for 2012. The administration is demanding that potential federal contractors make known any political donations over $5,000 made by the contracting company or its executives. Government contractors are already required to disclose political contributions to candidates, but this order will expand that to include independent groups, a category in which conservatives outspent liberals in the last election cycle. The implications are obvious: If a company wants to win a federal contract while Obama is in the White House, it had better have a campaign donation record that reflects greater support for Democrats. Leftists attempted to rig the corporate donation game in 2010 with the Disclose Act, but it failed to pass. Now the White House is again extra-constitutionally taking matters into its own hands with the same intent -- reduce the overall dollar amount received in donations by independent conservative groups. Federal labor unions don't have to worry, though. The SEIU, AFL-CIO and other groups that brought Obama some $200 million worth of support in 2008 are conveniently exempted from the new disclosure rules in the executive order. Perhaps they slipped the president's mind. --Patriot Post Digest
* 4/29/11--We all recall the result of the 2000 election, in which George W. Bush won despite receiving fewer popular votes than opponent Al Gore. In its wake, a compact was formed where some states agreed to cast their Electoral College votes based upon the winner of the nationwide popular vote, regardless of state results. Vermont has now become the eighth state to join the compact, joining the District of Columbia, Hawaii, New Jersey, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington. Supporters claim it will become effective once the plateau of states representing 270 electoral votes (a majority) is reached. This could also be called the "sore losers law." Since these eight states are reliable Democrat strongholds, we can't help but wonder what would happen if a Republican candidate these states didn't support was the winner of the popular vote. In theory, such a candidate could be rendered a loser if the states allowed the Democrat electors who won their state to vote in the Electoral College. How quickly would the compact be broken should these blue states' own ox be, er, Gored? While backers claim that National Popular Vote (NPV) makes "every vote equal," we all know that candidates will still focus their efforts on large population centers -- states in "flyover country" would still be ignored. Why campaign throughout the entire state of Wyoming when nearby Denver has just as many voters in a concentrated area? If anything, NPV would enhance the power of urban areas -- which, not coincidentally, tend to be Democrat strongholds. The next target for NPV is California, where it's on the fast track to passage and would place the measure into effect in states representing nearly 150 electoral votes.--Patriot Post Digest
* 4/29/11--You know the federal government is overreaching when The New York Times has a problem with it. In its never-ending push to end the free market society which we are supposed to be living in, the Obama administration -- via the National Labor Relations Board -- is now trying to dictate where private companies do business. This week, Obama appointee Lafe Solomon filed a complaint on the NLRB's behalf, seeking to force the Boeing Company to build its new plant in Washington State. As bad as this complaint appears on its face, the underlying reasons for it are even worse. Boeing originally planned to build its new plant near Washington's Puget Sound, but after tangling with the International Association of Machinists, the company gave up. Indeed, this union had already cost the company nearly $2 billion in revenues due to its penchant for striking. Boeing instead moved to South Carolina, a right-to-work state not in the grip of organized labor. It then set to work constructing the plant and hiring over 1,000 locals.
Solomon alleges that, in avoiding the union's reach, the company is infringing on the worker's "fundamental right to strike." It doesn't matter to Solomon, the NLRB, or Obama that the Supreme Court has ruled that businesses can take union shenanigans into account when making decisions; it doesn't matter that this move will cripple business and hurt the American worker; and it doesn't matter that it undermines our right to self-determination. It doesn't even matter that Boeing increased employment in Washington by 2,000 workers. We certainly hope these things will matter, however, to the administrative law judge who will hear the case on June 14.--Patriot Post Digest
No comments:
Post a Comment