Billionaire George Soros gave advice and direction on how President Obama should allocate so-called “stimulus” money in a series of regular private meetings and consultations with White House senior advisers even as Soros was making investments in areas affected by the stimulus program.
It’s just one more revelation featured in the blockbuster new book that continues to rock Washington,Throw Them All Out, authored by Breitbart News editor Peter Schweizer.
Mr. Soros met with Mr. Obama’s top economist on February 25, 2009 and twice more with senior officials in the Old Executive Office Building on March 24th and 25th as the stimulus plan was being crafted. Later, Mr. Soros also participated in discussions on financial reform.
Then, in the first quarter of 2009, Mr. Soros went on a stock buying spree in companies that ultimately benefited from the federal stimulus.
Soros doubled his holdings in medical manufacturer Hologic, a company that benefited from stimulus spending on medical systems
Soros tripled his holdings in fiber channel and software maker Emulus, a company that wound up scoring a large amount of federal funds going to infrastructure spending
Soros bought 210,000 shares in Cisco Systems, which came up big in the stimulus lottery
Soros also bought Extreme Networks, which, months later, said it was expanding broadband to rural America “as part of President Obama’s broadband strategy”
Soros bought 1.5 million shares in American Electric Power, a company Mr. Obama gave $1 billion to in June 2009
Soros bought shares in utility company Ameren, which bagged a $540 million Department of Energy loan
Soros bought 250,000 shares of Public Service Enterprise Group, 500,000 shares of NRG Energy, and almost a million shares of Entergy—all companies that came up winners in the Department of Energy taxpayer giveaway that produced the Solyndra debacle
Soros bought into BioFuel Energy, a company that benefitted when the EPA announced a regulation on ethanol
Soros bought Powerspan in April 2009. Just weeks later, the clean-energy company landed $100 million from the Department of Energy
In the second quarter of 2009, Soros bought education technology giant Blackboard, which became a big recipient of education stimulus money
Soros also bought Burlington Northern Santa Fe and CSX, both beneficiaries of Mr. Obama’s plans for revitalizing the railroads
Soros bought Cognizant Technology Solutions, which scored stimulus funds in education and health care technology
Soros also bought 300,000 shares of Constellation Energy Group and 4.6 million shares of Covanta, both of which landed taxpayers’ money through the stimulus, the former of which bagged $200 million
In Throw Them All Out, Schweizer catalogs several more of Mr. Soros’s trades and says that, while “it is not necessarily the case that Soros had specific insider tips about any government grants,” nevertheless, Soros’s “investment decisions aligned remarkably closely with government grants and transfers.”
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Former Polish president and anti-communist leader Lech Walesa unveiled a statue of Ronald Reagan on an elegant Warsaw street on Monday, honoring the late U.S. president for inspiring Poland’s toppling of communism.
Though Reagan’s legacy is mixed in the U.S., across much of central and eastern Europe he is considered the greatest American leader in recent history for challenging the Soviet Union.
The moniker he gave it — the “evil empire” — resonated with Poles, who suffered greatly under Moscow-imposed rule.
“I wonder whether today’s Poland, Europe and world could look the same without president Reagan,” Walesa said. “As a participant in those events, I must say that it’s inconceivable.”
The 3.5-meter (11.5-foot) bronze statue depicts a smiling Reagan in a historic moment — as he stood at a podium at Berlin’s Brandenburg gate in 1987 and said the famous words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
It sits across from the U.S. Embassy on Aleje Ujazdowskie, a street lined with embassies and manicured parks in the heart of the capital.
“Reagan gave us hope,” said Janusz Dorosiewicz, the president of the board of the Ronald Reagan Foundation in Poland. He conceived of the monument and struggled for six years with bureaucracy to secure the prized location for the statue.
Several statues of Reagan have gone up this year, the centennial of Reagan’s birth. Most notably, monuments to him have been erected in London and in Budapest, Hungary, and yet another is to be unveiled later this week in the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
Remember this story? Well it appears justice has been done and the winners are parents, teachers and the kids who were exposed to this radicalized school administrator.
This wen site, but especially my old college blog (2) has countless stories of administrators gone wild. Civil rights groups such as FIRE and ADF list thousands of such cases on their web sites. The problem of radicalized overzealous school administrators (without a residue of good judgment and common sense) is nearly epidemic.
GASTONIA, N.C. (CBS Charlotte/AP) — The principal of a Gaston County school where a 9-year-old boy was suspended for sexual harassment submitted his resignation Tuesday, saying he wasn’t given a chance to apologize.
Jerry Bostic told The Gaston Gazette he could understand being written up for the suspension and having someone follow up during the school year, but he added that he was disappointed because this is how his 44 years in education ended.
“To me it’s a really sad final note to a career that I have found very satisfying and enjoy working with kids,” Bostic said. “I really don’t believe I was treated fairly.”
School officials offered an apology to Emanyea Lockett and his mother, Chiquita Lockett, after the boy was accused of calling a teacher “cute.” A statement from the system said it was determined that the fourth grader at Brookside Elementary School didn’t engage in sexual harassment. The school system said the suspension won’t count against the student, and there will be additional instructional assistance provided to the student for the classroom time missed.
“This is something that everyone needed to see, just to see what’s happening within our school systems,” Lockett told WSOC-TV.
Gaston County Schools Superintendent Reeves McGlohon would only say that Bostic submitted his resignation. McGlohon had no further comment.
“He (McGlohon) told me he had made the decision he was going to terminate me or drop me into an assistant principal position,” Bostic said. “I admit I made some errors in what I did, but to fire me or to demote me with 44 years in it, it just doesn’t make sense. To me he was a very heartless man, and he did it because of politics.”
In 44 years of experience he still had such a complete lack of judgment, common sense, and restraint to not see what is perfectly obvious to anyone who is not radicalized by Marxist radical feminism. The real problem is that it took 44 years for this pinhead to get escorted to the door.
James O’Keefe strikes again with another video exposing a great wrong in our democratic institutions. Some states have I.D. laws that require you to show ID to vote. New Hampshire has no such law. Democrats say that such laws are racist. Democrats say that black people are too dumb to get a drivers licence or state I.D.. So who is racist?
This video shows the real reason Democrats oppose voter I.D. laws:
Why is it that Mitt won’t talk about the whole story on RomneyCare. Keep in mind that this is the policy he refuses to walk away from… price controls and all…..
Now that Mitt Romney has shown himself politically vulnerable after Iowa, more people are taking a closer look at his claims about the “RomneyCare” health care plan he helped create as Massachusetts governor. In this interview from April 2010 which recently recirculated last month, Romney attempts to draw some distinctions (as well as acknowledge similarities) between his RomneyCare plan and the national ObamaCare plan. One of the alleged virtues of RomneyCare over ObamaCare is that Romney’s plan does not contain “price controls,” whereas ObamaCare does. But how does this stack up against reality?
Romney’s claim may have been technically true at the time the plan was enacted. But according to the New York Times, this was a deliberate choice on the part of Romney and the Massachusetts lawmakers when they passed the law in 2006. They aimed for “universal coverage” first, and decided to worry about controlling costs later. In other words, they knew that costs would be a problem but chose to kick the can down the road. It’s like borrowing money from a loan shark then saying, “At least I don’t owe him any money right now!”
But even before Romney’s 2010 claims, the state had already implemented some price controls. As Michael Tennant notes, “Requiring insurers to cover those with pre-existing conditions at the same rates as healthy individuals – another feature of the Massachusetts law that Romney praises — surely qualifies as a price control.”
Similarly, requiring insurance companies to provide numerous mandatory benefits (including lay midwives, orthotics, and drug-abuse treatment) and then denying insurers’ requests for rate increases to cover their increased costs is another form of price control.
Yet another price control considered (but ultimately not implemented) was a proposal to compel doctors to accept patients covered by the state’s “Affordable Health Plans” at government-set payment rates or else lose their state medical licenses.
Translation – the parts of the GOP base that want/need/demand policy results don’t trust Mitt Romney to deliver. As Romney supporters Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham said; the more that Romney is pressured and the closer he gets to the general election the more to the left he will go.
To this point, though, the Tea Party movement has wanted nothing to do with Romney. Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, endorsed Newt Gingrich. The Tea Party Fund created a website – NotMittRomney.com – to inform voter’s of his liberal positions on key issues. And, Karen Martin, South Carolina Tea Party organizer said on National Public Radio recently that “no Tea Partier that I talk to in the state or nationally would want to promote Romney.”
In the Iowa caucuses, Romney finished tied for fourth among strong supporters of the Tea Party movement, 14 points back of Rick Santorum. In New Hampshire, although he won a plurality of the vote among Republicans who strongly back the movement, he received noticeably less support than he did from Republicans who were less supportive of the movement.
Low Income Men Can’t Relate to Him
Low income, white men have long been an important part of the Republican base. Romney, though, has alienated many of them with comments during the campaign that were perceived as being insensitive. At a debate last month in Iowa, he tried to make a $10,000 wager with Rick Perry over how his health care plan was characterized in his book. This past week, he commented that he liked to “fire people” that provide services to him.
These gaffes are showing their impact at the polls. In the past two contests, Romney has done poorly among low income, white men. In the Iowa caucuses, he received less than 15 percent of their support. In the supposedly friendly confines of New Hampshire he did not fare much better. He received only 27 percent of the vote from low income, white men in New Hampshire, trailing Ron Paul by 11 points.
Independents Don’t Support Him
Self-identified independents are a key swing group in presidential elections. Winning their support doesn’t ensure electoral success, but losing it by a wide margin almost guarantees defeat. In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain among independents 52 percent to 44 percent on his way to winning the presidency.
Despite all his success in the nomination campaign, Romney has been unable to attract much support from independents. In Iowa, Paul crushed Romney among self-identified independents, besting him 43 percent to 19 percent. Things improved in New Hampshire, but on a night, in which Romney won most demographic groups, he managed to lose independents again. Paul beat Romney 32 percent to 29 percent.
Romney’s weakness among independents appears to stem from views about how to solve the federal budget deficit, likely to be a major issue in the fall campaign. Among independent voters in the New Hampshire GOP primary who thought the deficit was the most important issue, they supported Paul over Romney by a whopping 48 percent to 23 percent margin.
Romney assured Massachusetts voters when he was running for the Senate in 1994 that he did not want to go back to Reaganomics. He said during that campaign, “I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”
Romney was also one of the few Republicans in 1994 to refuse to sign on to Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. He said during that campaign, “In my view, it is not a good idea to go into a contract, like what was organized by the Republican Party in Washington, laying out a whole series of things that the party says ‘these are the things we are going to do.’ I think that’s a mistake.” That mistake led to an historic Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. But Romney was one of the few Republicans to lose that year.
True to form, even today Romney is effectively promising not to take America back to pro-growth Reaganomics. Cowed by President Obama’s class warfare rhetoric, Romney promises to eliminate taxes on capital gains, interest, and dividends, but only for middle income Americans. He says he would do that because they, not the wealthy, were the ones most hurt by the recession.
But effective tax policy does not distribute tax cuts based on who “needs” a tax cut the most. That is Obama neo-socialist class rhetoric. Effective tax policy enacts tax cuts that will do the most to promote economic growth and prosperity.
That is what Reagan did in cutting tax rates across the board for everybody, including the wealthy who have the most resources to invest. That is what the middle class and working people actually need most, cutting tax rates that will promote their jobs, higher wages, and personal prosperity.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., speaking in New Hampshire this morning, reminded her audience of the tragic Tucson shooting last year — and also insinuated that the Tea Party, which she said regards political opponents as “the enemy,” has enhanced divisiveness in Congress and had something to do with the shooting, at least indirectly.
“We need to make sure that we tone things down, particularly in light of the Tucson tragedy from a year ago, where my very good friend, Gabby Giffords — who is doing really well, by the way, — [was shot],” Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chair said during a “Politics and Eggs” forum this morning. “The discourse in America, the discourse in Congress in particular . . . has really changed, I’ll tell you. I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement.”
Having brought up the Giffords attack as a political cudgel, Wasserman Schultz doubled down on that attack. “You had town hall meetings that they tried to take over, and you saw some their conduct at those tea party meetings,” Wasserman Schultz said today. “When they come and disagree with you, you’re not just wrong, you’re the enemy.”
Warming to that theme, she added that “when they disagree with you on an issue, you’re not just wrong, you’re a liar.”
The problem is Debbie, that you most certainly ARE a liar.
This is the Same Debbie Wasserman that routinely calls Republicans every name in the book such as – racists that want the USA to return to Jim Crow, hate children, want old people to die, want to poison school children etc.
Of course what Wasserman leaves out is that the shooter was a dedicated leftist, an avowed Bush hater who proudly displayed his affection for John Kerry, and was a part of an honors academic program for leftist students similar to IB [All of which is detailed HERE].
The shooter, Jared Loughner, was also an untreated paranoid schizophrenic who had multiple run ins with the sheriff’s department and other police. The sheriff, a partisan Democrat who at first blamed Rush Limbaugh for the shooting, knew about Loughner’s . The shooter’s mother works for the County and had used that position to help keep Loughner out of serious police trouble.
Of course, since the shooter was so incredibly mentally ill, not even Giffords herself blames Loughner or anyone else for the shooting, except for the scores of people who knew how sick he was and made sure that he went untreaded.
TEA Party events have been peaceful in spite of constant elite media lies about them. In fact not one TEA Party participant has ever been arrested at an event and that included the large D.C. events where well over a million people gathered. On the other hand, the OWS protests sponsored by Democrats and other leftists have been more cases of violence, vandalism, rapes, sexual assaults, battery and theft than can be counted. Even though the OWS protests have been small by TEA Party standards, the number of arrests of OWS protesters is measured in many thousands.
This study from the Beacon Hill (Economics) Institute at Suffolk University illuminates the disastrous results of the failed experiment known as RomneyCare and yet presidential candidate Mitt Romney continues to stand by the program.
Here are the key findings from the Beacon Hill study:
The High Price of Massachusetts Health Care Reform
• State health care expenditures have risen by $414 million over the period;
• Private health insurance costs have risen by $4.311 billion over the period;
• The federal government has spent an additional $2.418 billion on Medicaid for Massachusetts.
• Over this period, Medicare expenditures increased by $1.426 billion;
• For a total cumulative cost of $8.569 billion over the period; and
• The state has been able to shift the majority of the costs to the federal government.
The federal government continues to absorb a significant cost of health care reform through enhanced Medicaid payments and the Medicare program. Health care reform has also increased the rate for Medicare Advantage plans in Massachusetts, which has contributed to an increase in Medicare health care expenditures through prices for medical service delivery.
This is not defendable.
It gets worse. The Beacon Hill Institute did a fraud study to determine how the RomneyCare system is being “gamed”:
Massachusetts Health Care Reform Mandates: The Gaming Gamble
The law requires that individuals with sufficient means purchase health insurance and that businesses with more than ten employees make a “fair and reasonable” contribution toward their employees’ health insurance. Under the law, health insurance companies cannot refuse to cover individuals with preexisting conditions. Individuals and businesses face fines if they fail to comply with the mandates.
Because the fines imposed by the law cost are often less than the cost of insurance, the law is vulnerable to the problem of moral hazard.
Individuals can game the mandate by buying insurance only upon being diagnosed as needing a non‐emergency procedure such as a hip replacement and then canceling their insurance after receiving the treatment or procedure. Businesses can likewise game the mandate by canceling their health insurance plans and shifting their employees to newly subsidized state plans. Massachusetts taxpayers and health insurance policyholders pick up the tab for these “jumpers and dumpers.”
The Beacon Hill Institute (BHI) has estimated the prevalence and cost of gaming the mandates. We find that:
• In tax year 2008 (the latest data available) 26,000 individuals paid a total of $16 million in fines, while 758 businesses paid $7.1 million.
• In 2009, between 2,089 and 2,659 individuals gamed the individual mandate at an estimated cost to insurance carriers of between $29.3 million and $37.3 million.
• Between June 2006 and June 2010 enrollment in state subsidized insurance plans increased by 319,000, while the private group (employer) market was flat and the individual market increased by 83,000.
In essence, the incentives in RomneyCare, just as in ObamaCare, are backwards. They encourage people to behave in ways that maximize costs and inefficiency. This is what economists refer to as an “Adverse Selection Spiral”. Eventually the system collapses under the weight of its own costs and inefficiency.
UPDATE – Thomas Zaleski adds:
Wouldn’t it be great if you could purchase AUTO insurance AFTER you had an accident? That is PRECISELY what Romney care is. Break a leg, BUY insurance the SAME day!
Just as I told fellow Political Arena writer and CEO Thomas Zaleski yesterday, Bill Daley had to go because he was not “down with the struggle” enough for Valerie Jerritt and the other Saul Alinsky inspired radicals in the top White House staff. Daley was seen as too pro-business, too willing to work with Republicans in Congress (instead of viewing them as the enemy in a class war), and too Irish Catholic, which offended Michelle Obama.
This should speak volumes about just how leftist, neo-marxist, or pick your favorite description of how radical and out of touch this White House is.
”The bigger truth is that Bill Daley left the White House because he lost to Valerie Jarrett and to the president’s wife in the battle for the philosophical direction of the Obama White House. Daley was only ineffective because his boss would not let him be effective.”
“He is a pro-business Democrat, an increasingly rare breed these days in Washington. Obama is not a pro-business Democrat. Obama has made the fateful decision that he will govern as a left-wing political populist.”
“That is why he has embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement, why he keeps using class-warfare rhetoric, why he has given up on deal-cutting, why he has decided to run against Congress rather than on his accomplishments.”
The Democrats, working together with ACORN, were filling out and sending in absentee ballots of people who do not vote, to make them look as if they had voted.
Sarah Palin’s husband is endorsing Newt Gingrich for president, Todd Palin told ABC News today.
But Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and John McCain’s 2008 Republican running mate, has yet to decide “who is best able to go up against Barack Obama,” Todd Palin said.
Palin said he has not spoken to Gingrich or anyone from the former House speaker’s campaign. But he said he respects Gingrich for what he went through in the 1990s and compared that scrutiny in public life to what Sarah Palin went through during her run for the vice presidency.
Todd Palin said he believes that being in the political trenches and experiencing the highs and lows help prepare a candidate for the future and the job of president.
He did not criticize any of the other candidates and said his “hat is off to everyone” in the Republican race.
But Todd Palin did point to last summer, when a large portion of Gingrich’s staff resigned and the candidate was left, largely by himself, to run the campaign.
Gingrich’s ability to overcome the obstacle and still move up in the polls showed his ability to campaign and survive, according to Todd Palin, who said Gingrich is not one of the typical “beltway types” and that his campaign has “burst out of the political arena and touched many Americans.”
When debt reaches 100% of GDP it is usually a point of no return. Only one country in the history of the world has survived that much debt. What happens is that spending and interest spiral up to the point where those making the loans realize that the debtor is incapable of paying it back. The currency starts to fall apart fast at 120-130% of GDP, which isn’t far away. We are already seeing the inflationary effects of so much debt.
WASHINGTON – The soaring national debt has reached a symbolic tipping point: It’s now as big as the entire U.S. economy.
The amount of money the federal government owes to its creditors, combined with IOUs to government retirement and other programs, now tops $15.23 trillion.
That’s roughly equal to the value of all goods and services the U.S. economy produces in one year: $15.17 trillion as of September, the latest estimate. Private projections show the economy likely grew to about $15.3 trillion by December — a level the debt is likely to surpass this month.
“The 100% mark means that your entire debt is as big as everything you’re producing in your country,” says Steve Bell of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has proposed cutting nearly $6 trillion in red ink over 10 years. “Clearly, that can’t continue.”
Long-term projections suggest the debt will continue to grow faster than the economy, which would have to expand by at least 6% a year to keep pace.
Some ads are good and some are bad, some do their best to be at least directionally accurate in one minute or less, this one hits the nail on the head….
As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts.
…
Bruce Schneier’s exasperation is informed by his job-related need to spend a lot of time in Airportland. He has 10 million frequent-flier miles and takes about 170 flights a year; his average speed, he has calculated, is 32 miles and hour. “The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”
Remember the fake boarding pass that was in Schneier’s hand? Actually, it was mine. I had flown to meet Schneier at Reagan National Airport because I wanted to view the security there through his eyes. He landed on a Delta flight in the next terminal over. To reach him, I would have to pass through security. The day before, I had downloaded an image of a boarding pass from the Delta Web site, copied and pasted the letters with Photoshop, and printed the results with a laser printer. I am not a photo-doctoring expert, so the work took me nearly an hour. The T.S.A. agent waved me through without a word. A few minutes later, Schneier deplaned, compact and lithe, in a purple shirt and with a floppy cap drooping over a graying ponytail.
The boarding-pass problem is hardly the only problem with the checkpoints. Taking off your shoes is next to useless. “It’s like saying, Last time the terrorists wore red shirts, so now we’re going to ban red shirts,” Schneier says. If the T.S.A. focuses on shoes, terrorists will put their explosives elsewhere. “Focusing on specific threats like shoe bombs or snow-globe bombs simply induces the bad guys to do something else. You end up spending a lot on the screening and you haven’t reduced the total threat.”
As I waited at security with my fake boarding pass, a T.S.A. agent had darted out and swabbed my hands with a damp, chemically impregnated cloth: a test for explosives. Schneier said, “Apparently the idea is that al-Qaeda has never heard of latex gloves and wiping down with alcohol.” The uselessness of the swab, in his view, exemplifies why Americans should dismiss the T.S.A.’s frequent claim that it relies on “multiple levels” of security. For the extra levels of protection to be useful, each would have to test some factor that is independent of the others. But anyone with the intelligence and savvy to use a laser printer to forge a boarding pass can also pick up a stash of latex gloves to wear while making a bomb. From the standpoint of security, Schneier said, examining boarding passes and swabbing hands are tantamount to performing the same test twice because the person you miss with one test is the same person you’ll miss with the other.
After a public outcry, T.S.A. officers began waving through medical supplies that happen to be liquid, including bottles of saline solution. “You fill one of them up with liquid explosive,” Schneier said, “then get a shrink-wrap gun and seal it. The T.S.A. doesn’t open shrink-wrapped packages.” I asked Schneier if he thought terrorists would in fact try this approach. Not really, he said. Quite likely, they wouldn’t go through the checkpoint at all. The security bottlenecks are regularly bypassed by large numbers of people—airport workers, concession-stand employees, airline personnel, and T.S.A. agents themselves (though in 2008 the T.S.A. launched an employee-screening pilot study at seven airports). “Almost all of those jobs are crappy, low-paid jobs,” Schneier says. “They have high turnover. If you’re a serious plotter, don’t you think you could get one of those jobs?”
Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel B. Poneman is working on a major Obama administration initiative that would renew scientist exchanges between U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and Chinese nuclear facilities.
The idea is aimed at promoting openness and transparency by China’s military about its secret, large-scale buildup of nuclear weapons, according to U.S. officials.
Critics say the plan is similar to an exchange program in the 1990s that sent U.S. nuclear scientists to China and produced one of the worst cases of nuclear espionage. Secrets about every deployed warhead in the U.S. arsenal were compromised, including the W-88 small nuclear warhead deployed on submarine-launched missiles.
“We’ve seen this movie before, and it has a bad ending,” one official said.
Officials familiar with the plan told Inside the Ring that the initiative was discussed during a recent policy committee meeting of senior national security officials at the White House.
Requiring people to have health insurance is “conservative,” GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney told MSNBC on Wednesday, but only if states do it.
The argument aims to improve Romney’s appeal to Republican voters concerned about the healthcare reform plan he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts in 2006. The Massachusetts law contains an individual mandate similar to the one in President Obama’s healthcare law, which conservatives despise.
“Personal responsibility,” Romney said, “is more conservative in my view than something being given out for free by government.”
I know the difference between personal responsibility and a government mandate and I imagine our fine readers do too….
I give you Joey McMensa – the poster boy for Democrat smarts. And I know this is nothing new to y’all…but he still makes me cringe. Every single time the dude talks, he sounds exponentially more moronic. I mean, how in the holy hizzell did this dude become the Vice President of the United States?
When asked about Afghanistan, he had this to say about the Taliban:
“Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.”
Am I the only one shaking my head, asking W…T…F?
Meanwhile, back in People-with-Actual-Brains-land, a bill just passed Congress that states that “any form of support to the Taliban would effectively make anyone a terrorist stripped of their civilian rights and detained indefinitely under military jurisdiction.”
UPDATE – New Hampshire Speaker Bill O’Brien endorses Newt:
Former New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith Endorses Newt Gingrich
The New Hampshire Union Leadereditorializes in today’s paper that Newt Gingrich is the only candidate with a track record of changing Washington. Romney will merely manage the status quo:
Of the candidates who have legitimate claims on the conservative name, this newspaper has endorsed Newt Gingrich. We were alone for awhile, but others have since taken Gingrich’s side. (They include economists Thomas Sowell and Art Laffer, the father of supply side economics, by the way.) The case for Gingrich is not that he is the best debater. Simply put, he is the only candidate in this primary who could both beat President Obama and bring real, conservative change to Washington.
…
Gingrich can win in November. What would happen if he did? He would immediately work to build broad support for cutting federal spending, reforming entitlements, undoing Obamacare, balancing the budget, slashing the regulatory burden, instituting strongly pro-growth tax cuts, and reinvigorating the American military.
A President Romney would competently manage Washington’s status quo. A President Gingrich would strive in his first term to upend the status quo and replace it with a government that works for and with the people, not against them.
That’s conservative. And it’s needed — this year, not in four years. Voters who want to change Washington the right way have only one choice this year: Newt Gingrich.
President Reagan’s National Security Advisor Endorses Newt Gingrich:
[This is worth watching all the way through – Editor]
At a veterans townhall meeting in Wolfeboro, NH, Bud McFarlane, National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, explains why Newt has the right experience and knowledge to be the Commander in Chief.
“He also brings to the presidency a knowledge of how to move the U.S. Congress, how to have the courage to go against conventional wisdom, how to balance a budget, and at home and abroad show the kind of leadership that President Reagan did only 25 years ago.
Nobody else in this race has those qualities of knowledge and experience. I’m here because I believe in Newt Gingrich. He can do this. He’s the only one who can do this.” — Bud McFarlane
According to the FBI, over 1.5 million background checks on customers were requested by gun dealers to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System in December. Nearly 500,000 of those were in the six days before Christmas.
It was the highest number ever in a single month, surpassing the previous record set in November.
On Dec 23 alone there were 102,222 background checks, making it the second busiest single day for buying guns in history.
The actual number of guns bought may have been even higher if individual customers took home more than one each.
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — Columbia University will offer a new course for upperclassmen and grad students next semester. An Occupy Wall Street class will send students into the field and will be taught by Dr. Hannah Appel, a veteran of the Occupy movement.
The course begins next semester and will be divided between class work at Columbia’sMorningside Heights campus and fieldwork that will require students to become involved with the Occupy movement outside of the classroom.
The course will be called “Occupy the Field: Global Finance, Inequality, Social Movement” it will be run by the anthropology department.
This is a double edged sword. Romney cannot exactly ding President Obama for his incredible lack of transparency, especially after he promised repeatedly to be the mots transparent president in history, when Romney will not be transparent himself.
On the other hand, if Romney releases the tax returns every point in it will be spun and lied about, 1% nonsense etc. It would give Obama something to run against.
Mitt Romney, who is one of the wealthiest men ever to seek the presidency, said on Wednesday that he had no intention of releasing his tax returns if he became the Republican presidential nominee, breaking with a long tradition in both parties.
Mr. Romney made the statement in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, but the network did not show that part of the interview. Mr. Romney, a multimillionaire who made his fortune running a private equity firm, was asked whether he planned to release his tax return.
“I doubt it,” Mr. Romney said, according to a transcript of the interview provided by NBC News. “I will provide all the financial info, which is an extraordinary pile of documents which show investments and so forth.”
“But you won’t do the tax returns?” asked Chuck Todd, host of “The Daily Rundown.”
“I don’t intend to release the tax returns. I don’t,” Mr. Romney responded.
A spokesman for President Obama‘s re-election campaign blasted Mr. Romney and questioned whether he had something to hide in his finances.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 