CNN has been at the bottom of the ratings heap for some time. Maybe their new angle is to actually do good journalism and that would be a welcome change. Will it last? I wouldn’t bet on it, but I hope I am wrong.
Of course the majority of the $250K+ who pay the top marginal tax rate are not “people” at all, they are small to medium sized S-Corps (small businesses).
Now why would Obama be so opposed to soldiers getting a purple heart who were shot by home grown jihadists such as those at Fort Hood by Major Hassan? This speaks volumes about the radicalized mindset of this president. Remember how Obama wanted to define the Hassan shootings as “workplace violence” instead of what it really was?
This spring, the Obama administration threatened to veto the 2013 Defense Authorization Act. Of all the reasons given for the threat, the objection to granting the Purple Heart to Pvt. Andy Long stands out as strange. That is, unless you know the story.
On June 1, 2009, Pvt. Long was killed outside an Army recruiting office in Little Rock by Carlos Bledsoe, who had become Abdul Hakim Mohammed after converting to Islam. Since then, we, the fathers of Carlos and Andy, have been trying to tell our story so that other parents do not experience our tragedy.
Carlos grew up in a loving, church-going family. There’s a picture of Carlos at his high school graduation with a huge smile on his face, ready to go off to Tennessee State University for college. He looked forward to becoming a businessman and joining the family owned tour company in Memphis.
Switch to Islamism
But he did not get the education everyone expected. Instead, he became interested in Islamic extremism. At TSU, preachers from a radical Nashville mosque led courses in Islam. Eventually, Carlos began frequenting this mosque, converted, and took the name of the mosque’s imam. This imam taught worshipers that America “is the worst country on earth,” that the Christian faith is “the greatest lie ever told,” that this worldly life “is trash,” and that Muslims must seek death and the afterlife.
Carlos began to change his behavior: He abandoned his dog in the woods because he was told Muslims shouldn’t have dogs. He took Martin Luther King‘s picture off his bedroom wall. He was sent by another Nashville imam to a school in Yemen, which turned out to be an al-Qaeda front. Carlos then returned to America and planned his own jihad.
Andy grew up in a military family and decided to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He found out he was good at it; he enjoyed it. Before being deployed to South Korea, he volunteered to work as a recruiter in Little Rock near our home. His mother, Janet, went to visit him there on June 1, 2009.
Fateful day
That was the day Carlos decided to kill a soldier. He had already firebombed a rabbi’s house in Nashville and shot up another rabbi’s house in Little Rock. That morning, he fired three bullets at Andy. Quinton Ezeagwula, another soldier, was also shot but survived. Carlos eventually pleaded guilty to killing Andy, and was sentenced to life in prison without chance for parole.
Since that tragic day, we have been speaking out about the dangers of homegrown terrorists. We testified to Congress, with mixed results. Some congressmen dismissed us for not being experts. Nevertheless, following our testimony, Congress passed a provision, as part of the defense bill, to give the Purple Heart to Andy and the victims of a similar 2009 attack at Fort Hood, Texas. Now the administration is threatening to deny it.
The president, we believe, doesn’t want to admit the first successful al-Qaeda murder on U.S. soil since 9/11 happened on his watch or to acknowledge the problem of homegrown Islamic radicalization. This indirectly provides cover to extremists at the expense of moderate Muslims. To withhold the Purple Heart from U.S. soldiers for political reasons is to dishonor those who risk everything to protect us all.
We have pledged to our families and to ourselves that we will not be silent until America knows what happened to our sons. On June 1, 2009, it happened to Andy and Carlos. Tomorrow, it could be your children.
Melvin Bledsoe is the father of Carlos, who fatally shot Pvt. Andy Long, son of Daris Long. They have cooperated in producing a documentary that can be viewed at losingoursons.com.
I am sure that some of you are wondering; why are we reporting on Rihanna’s problems when our do not come to Political Arena to get “pop culture” news. There is a very important lesson about the law that is demonstrated in this finely written article by Andrew Lu at Findlaw.com courtesy via Reuters.
Some people may believe that “a contract is a contract is a contract”, you signed on the dotted line so now you must take your medicine. In many cases this is NOT the case. Insurance contracts are an exception in most states as the Department of Insurance can step in to protect the consumer because most insurance contracts are deliberately written so that they are very difficult to understand. Another exception is when you hire people who are experts in certain fields to act on your behalf.
There is something that the laws in most state laws recognize called GAPP – Generally Accepted Practices and Procedures. When people who are ethically bound to act in your best interests don’t they are in violation of GAPP and legal action can result.
Berdon served as Rihanna’s accountants for several years as the young star rose. In her lawsuit, Rihanna says that Berdon abused their position of trust and fleeced her for tens of millions of dollars, reports Entertainment Weekly.
Rihanna says she signed with Berdon when she was16 and had just come to this country from Barbados. Being young, foreign and rich, Rihanna claims that she was easily taken advantage of by the accounting firm. The singer is seeking unspecified damages, but says she lost “tens of millions of dollars” to the firm.
In one example, Rihanna says that Berdon negotiated a deal with her where the accounting firm would get paid a percentage of the total gross proceeds from a concert tour. Stunningly, the firm made off with 22% of the total revenues from the tour. Rihanna’s cut was only 6%, reports Entertainment Weekly. In her lawsuit, Rihanna makes note that this billing method by her accountants is far from standard practice.
Generally, when you hire an accountant, you are hiring someone to act in your best interest. The accountant is considered your fiduciary, and should not have a payment method or other incentive that conflicts with your best interests. In Rihanna’s case, she claims that her accountants had such a conflict. They wanted to profit as much as possible off of her, to the obvious detriment of their client.
Many young stars are taken advantage of by trusted advisors. By filing the lawsuit, Rihanna shows that she spotted the possible wrongdoing at an early age and is taking steps to recover her losses.
“I don’t care about my critics, I understand that my country is at a very perilous situation and I’m going to use the type of words that are necessary to get the attention of the American people.”
“I want to make sure that the United States of America, that has been around for 236 years as the beacon of liberty, freedom and democracy, continues on for our subsequent generations. Our children and grandchildren. And I really don’t care about critics. I really don’t care about the liberal media”.
This is the kind of race bating sleaze the leftists in the elite media are pushing. Wait until you see below who is behind this sleaze campaign. Remember when the left tried to make like they were the civility police? And some people wonder why the public does not trust the elite media….
In advance of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s speech Wednesday to the NAACP, a liberal group headed by a former New York Times reporter and ex-Media Matters executive have produced a video “satire” that claims blacks don’t like Romney, who they dub so white he makes “Wonder Bread look like pumpernickel.”
The YouTube from “The Message,” an online “media hub,” is described as a satirical video of Romney getting advice on what to say to the civil rights group. Or, as they said in a release, the video “lacerates Romney and his advisors as they prepare for his speech to NAACP in Houston on Wednesday.”
The lead “advisor” in the video is described as the brainchild of the 1988 Willie Horton ads and the 2004 swift boat campaign. He states bluntly that “blacks don’t like us and we’re about to give a speech to a whole lot of them.”
He also says to the candidate, “you are so white, you are extremely white, you make Wonder Bread look like pumpernickel,” before advising the Romney actor never fully seen to “go on out there and get all Mormon, Martin Luther King on them, you’re going to be great.”
Now pay close attention:
The group is directed by Razor & Tie co-founder Cliff Chenfeld, former Media Matters for America president Eric Burns, former AOL chief creative officer and co-founder of theknot.com Michael Wolfson, and former New York Times journalist Andrew Zipern.
So much for objective credibility. These are the kinds of loons that get hired in elite media news rooms. If you don’t tow the line they get rid of you.
Of course there is nothing wrong or illegal about having a Swiss bank account or overseas investments. With the state of American banks and this government I would keep cash in solid foreign banks as well. The hypocrisy in this story is just overwhelming and the Democrats are pulling every desperate card to play on the ignorance of people who aren’t familiar with such financial tools.
Disclosure forms reveal that Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a member of Congress from Florida, previously held funds with investments in Swiss banks, foreign drug companies, and the state bank of India. This revelation comes mere days after the Democratic chair attacked presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for holding money in Swiss bank accounts in the past.
“Americans need to ask themselves, why does an American businessman need a Swiss bank account and secretive investments like that?” the DNC chair, a chief surrogate for President Obama’s reelection team, said on Fox News Sunday two days ago. “Just something, a thought, that I’d like to leave folks with.”
It’s been a consistent theme of Obama’s reelection strategy: Attack Romney for foreign investments he held, especially in Swiss bank accounts, “to try to promote his wealthy, out-of-touch businessman persona.”
But disclosure forms reveal that in 2010, Wasserman Schultz invested between $1,001-$15,000 in a 401k retirement fund run by Davis Financial Fund. As the fund discloses, it is invested in the Julius Baer Group Ltd. and the State Bank of India GDR Ltd., as well as other financial, insurance, bank institutions.
Arizona’s “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” (SB 1070) was signed into law by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer in April 2010. The U.S. Justice Department is challenging Arizona to try to stop the law, as are other groups. A federal judge of the Ninth District issued a temporary injunction against four parts (out of 10) of the law in July 2010, and the case has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
At a press conference on Tuesday on Capitol Hill, former State Senator Russell Pearce said that the law has achieved several of its goals, including the voluntary departure of thousands of illegal aliens from Arizona, a reduction in crime and prison population, and a shrinking number of students in Mesa Public Schools that led to the closure of 13 elementary schools.
MORE:
Pearce said that statistics from the Department of Homeland Security and other groups show that between 100,000 and 200,000 illegal aliens have voluntarily left the state since most of it went into effect in 2010.
“We have a violent crime rate drop by three times that of the national average,” Pearce said. “My school district – Mesa – the largest school in the state, can close 13 elementary schools because of the declining population in K-12, out of neighborhoods known for high concentrations of illegals.”
“Our prison population’s on the decline for the first time in the history of the state of Arizona,” Pearce said, adding that there are about 2,500 fewer inmates in Arizona prisons today than there were before the law went into effect.
New jobs numbers for June released Friday show that Americans 18-29 years old continue to suffer under the Obama administration with a 12.8% unemployment rate.
The jobs report shows that there are now 1.735 million young Americans who are no longer counted as “employed” because they have given up looking for a job and have left the labor force all together.
Generation Opportunity — a conservative non-profit focused on young Americans — notes that if “the labor force participation rate were factored into the overall 18-29 youth unemployment calculation, the actual 18-29-unemployment rate would rise to 16.8 percent.”
We scored all 50 states on 43 measures of competitiveness developed with input from business groups including the National Association of Manufacturers and the Council on Competitiveness. States received points based on their rankings in each metric. Then, we separated those metrics into ten broad categories, weighting the categories based on how frequently they are cited in state economic development marketing materials. That way, our study ranks the states based on the criteria they use to sell themselves.
The study, by the anti-tax group Change Maryland, says that a net 31,000 residents left the state between 2007 and 2010, the tenure of a “millionaire’s tax” pushed through by Gov. Martin O’Malley. The tax, which expired in 2010, in imposed a rate of 6.25 percent on incomes of more than $1 million a year.
The Change Maryland study found that the tax cost Maryland $1.7 billion in lost tax revenues. A county-by-county analysis by Change Maryland also found that the state’s wealthiest counties also had some of the largest population outflows.
In total, Maryland has added 24 new taxes or fees in recent years, Change Maryland says. Florida, which has no income-tax, has been a large recipient of Maryland’s exiled wealthy.
“Maryland has reached the point of diminishing returns. We’re taxing people too much and people are voting with their feet,” said Change Maryland Chairman Larry Hogan. “Until we change our focus from tax increases to increasing the tax base, more people are simply going to leave, leading to a downward spiral of raising revenues on fewer citizens.”
The finding adds to the renewed debate over raising taxes on the wealthy. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie recently vetoed a millionaire’s tax passed by his legislature, while California and other state governments are also considering higher taxes on high earners to fix budget problems. President Obama on Monday asked Congress to extend tax cuts for those making $250,000 or less – effectively increasing taxes for the higher earners.
Many contend that higher taxes drive out the highly mobile rich, who can simply move to a lower-tax state or even lower-tax country. Recent data shows that a record 1,800 Americans renounces their citizenship last year.
A leading U.S. demographer and ‘Truman Democrat’ talks about what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State.
‘California is God’s best moment,” says Joel Kotkin. “It’s the best place in the world to live.” Or at least it used to be.
Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation’s premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for hipsters who had grown up listening to the Mamas & the Papas’ iconic “California Dreamin'” and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” But it also attracted young, ambitious people “who had a lot of dreams, wanted to build big companies.” Think Intel, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.
Now, however, the Golden State’s fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn’t Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.
The scruffy-looking urban studies professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has been studying and writing on demographic and geographic trends for 30 years. Part of California’s dysfunction, he says, stems from state and local government restrictions on development. These policies have artificially limited housing supply and put a premium on real estate in coastal regions.
“Basically, if you don’t own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven’t robbed a bank and don’t have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak,” says Mr. Kotkin.
While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don’t have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there’s no income tax.
And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their “smart growth” plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. “What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s,” Mr. Kotkin declares.
Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving the profession over President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law – and 63 percent have called for repealing all or part of it, according to a survey by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.
The results from the non-partisan association of doctors and patients, founded last fall and headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is based on a national survey of 699 physicians, the Daily Caller reports.
By 2020, the U.S. is expected to face a shortage of at least 90,000 doctors. Because the new healthcare law expands insurance coverage, it will increase physician demand.“Hands down, doctors blame government involvement for the current problems in medicine, and are not shy to say they want it out,” the association says in a report on the survey findings.“The reasons cited range from the deluge of regulatory compliance that siphons time away from patient care, to de facto rationing achieved through complex payment schemes, to cushy relationships that favor corporations and special interests in medicine.”
The organization found that many doctors don’t believe the legislation will give more Americans quality care, association co-founder Kathryn Serkes said.
“Doctors clearly understand what Washington does not — that a piece of paper that says you are ‘covered’ by insurance or ‘enrolled’ in Medicare or Medicaid does not translate to actual medical care when doctors can’t afford to see patients at the lowball payments, and patients have to jump through government and insurance company bureaucratic hoops,” she said
As for Obamacare specifically, the association said: “Doctors say that a key government provision in the Affordable Care Act, the huge expansion of Medicaid enrollees, is likely to backfire, as 49 percent say they will stop accepting Medicaid payments.”
Attacking the few companies that Bain Capital invested in that had to do some outsourcing to survive is the Obama Administration’s attack plan against Mitt Romney. But after setting up a jobs program for illegal aliens you would think that the hypocrisy from the Obama Campaign could not get much thicker; we thought that too and we were wrong.
Related – White House Connected GE Pays No Tax on $14 Billion ….Again! – LINK
Economic Collapse Blog has the details with multiple sources and links for your viewing pleasure:
Jeffery Immelt – General Electric CEO, Head of Obama’s “Jobs Council”.
Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s highly touted “Jobs Council”, is moving even more GE infrastructure to China. GE makes more medical-imaging machines than anyone else in the world, and now GE has announced that it “is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing“. Apparently, this is all part of a “plan to invest about $2 billion across China” over the next few years. But moving core pieces of its business overseas is nothing new for GE. Under Immelt, GE has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States. Perhaps GE should change its slogan to “Imagination At Work (In China)”. If the very people that have been entrusted with solving the unemployment crisis are shipping jobs out of the country, what hope is there that things are going to turn around any time soon?
As the administration struggles to prod businesses to create jobs at home, GE has been busy sending them abroad. Since Immelt took over in 2001, GE has shed 34,000 jobs in the U.S., according to its most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But it’s added 25,000 jobs overseas.
At the end of 2009, GE employed 36,000 more people abroad than it did in the U.S. In 2000, it was nearly the opposite.
GE is supposed to be creating the “jobs of tomorrow”, but it seems that most of the “jobs of tomorrow” will not be located inside the United States.
The last GE factory in the U.S. that made light bulbs closed last September. The transition to the new CFL light bulbs was supposed to create a whole bunch of those “green jobs” that Barack Obama keeps talking about, but as an article in the Washington Post noted, that simply is not happening….
Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.
But GE is far from alone in shipping jobs and economic infrastructure out of the United States. For example, big automakers such as Ford are being very aggressive in China. Ford is currently “building three factories in Chongqing as part of $1.6 billion investment that also includes another plant in Nanchang”.
Today, China accounts for approximately one out of every four vehicles sold worldwide. The big automakers consider the future to be in China.
Just a few decades ago, China was an economic joke and the U.S. economy was absolutely unparalleled.
Our friend John Hawkins made this fun, but important post on something that many of us take for granted. This reminder of what a Republican should not be is always timely. Everyone should print this one out and keep it in their wallets 🙂
The mainstream media is awash with criticism of Republicans, but it always denounces the wrong people. If you listen to the media, you’d think the GOP is being wrecked by people like Jim DeMint, Allen West, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party. In other words, the real problem with the Republican Party is supposed to be the responsible conservatives who put their country first, want to keep us from going broke, and actually represent the people who elected them. Wrong answer, buddy. You want to know the types of Republicans that are hurting the GOP?
1) The Sell Outs: Liberals love pundits who claim to be conservatives, but tell them what they want to hear about the Republican Party. So, if you have no integrity, like say David Frum, David Brooks, Meghan McCain, Joe Scarborough, or Kathleen Parker, you call yourself a Republican, but spend most of your time criticizing your “own side.” Nothing on the Left ever seems to get you as agitated as the things the people “on your side” do. Liberals get a pass for the same sort of comments that infuriate you when it comes out of the mouth of a conservative. That’s because when you’re a performing seal for the Left, you have to be tame and balance a ball on your nose just the way the Lefties like or they might stop giving you fish.
2) The Purists: Of course, you can go too far in the other direction, too, like the members of the “I’m more conservative than you” club. These are the people who tell you there’s no difference between the Republican Party and the Democrats. They take their ball, go home, and don’t vote in the general election when the candidate they support doesn’t win a primary. Issues like electability, the chances of actually passing legislation, and what the general public wants are never taken into consideration. This is how you end up with people who think we can do better than Scott Brown (71% ACU rating) in Massachusetts or that we can just decide to never raise the debt limit again, even though we’ve already spent all of the money. If you want to have it your way, go to Burger King because you’re not ever going to get everything you want in politics.
3) The Appropriators: If there’s one defining difference that separates Republicans from Democrats, it’s spending. Republicans want less of it, Democrats want more — well, at least that’s how it should be. Yet, there are big government Republicans. There are Republicans who love earmarks. There are Republicans who think it’s fine to fritter taxpayer money away, but they just want to waste a little less than the Democrats. These people are not just killing the Republican brand; they’re helping to ruin the country.
4) The Bubbleheads: One of the idiosyncrasies of D.C. Republicans is that many of them are smart people, they’re well informed, they have inside info, and they consider themselves to be conservative — yet they have no idea how out of touch they are with the base and the rest of the country. This is how you end up with Republicans supporting Bridges to Nowhere, increased National Endowment of the Arts funding, or pushing comprehensive immigration reform and Harriet Miers. The average talk radio listener or blog reader has a better read on politics in some areas than senators and congressmen because they’re not mired in that D.C. bubble with aides, consultants, pollsters, and lobbyists all pushing the same monolithic way of thinking. If you’re a Republican in D.C. who doesn’t get that, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.
5) The Compromise Fetishists: There’s nothing wrong with compromise per se. Republicans should be willing to compromise with Democrats — if it’s on a bill that will make the country significantly better overall. How many bills are there fitting that description that have been passed in the last decade or so? Certainly no more than a handful — and none have been passed during the Obama Administration. That’s because “compromise” in D.C. usually starts with the idea that Democrats get 90% of what they want and then Republicans negotiate to see how badly they’re going to lose. Yet, we hear some Republicans lauding compromise like it’s a worthwhile goal in and of itself. A compromise on a bad bill isn’t a win. Did Republicans make a mistake by refusing to work with the Democrats on the stimulus or Obamacare? Should they have worked with Obama to raise taxes, pass comprehensive immigration reform, or to do another stimulus? Of course not! Half of stupid is still pretty stupid, stupid.
The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 and was supposed to keep pollution out of America’s lakes through EPA monitoring.
But 40 years later, nothing has changed, according to a study by V. Kerry Smith and Carlos Valcarcel Wolloh at Arizona State University.
According to the study:
With data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Water Information System (NWIS) we find average water quality in U.S. lakes is at about the same level in 2011 as it was in 1975 with over eighty percent of the lakes in the NWIS database consistent with fishable conditions based on measures of the levels of dissolved oxygen present in them. Thus, for freshwater lakes one could conclude nothing has changed.
The ineffectiveness calls into question why the federal government has spent billions of dollars enforcing the Clean Water Act with the EPA.
Of course one could argue that without the legislation water pollution would have gotten worse.
Smith and Wolloh say that the government needs to find a better way:
Our water quality indexes are far from ideal. Nonetheless they provide a vehicle for raising two important issues. First, new rules intended to improve some aspect of environmental quality should build into the implementation process a specific strategy for evaluating whether they do what is intended. At present they do not!
The reason for this is clear, to pressure families of those considering running as Republicans to decide against it. What the elite media did to Sarah Palin and her children is the main reason why Indiana Governor Mitch Daniel’s family forbade him from running for higher office.
While most serious campaigns on both sides use campaign trackers — staffers whose job is to record on video every public appearance and statement by an opponent — House Democrats are taking it to another level. They’re now recording video of the homes of GOP congressmen and candidates and posting the raw footage on the Internet for all to see.
That ratcheting up of the video surveillance game is unnerving Republicans who insist that even by political standards, it’s a gross invasion of privacy. Worse, they say, it creates a safety risk for members of Congress and their families at a time when they are already on edge after a deranged gunman shot former Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords 18 months ago.
Wisconsin GOP Rep. Reid Ribble, who said he’s also been followed by a cameraman when shopping for groceries, said the home videos cross a line.
“I feel it’s totally inappropriate,” said Ribble, a freshman facing a competitive race for reelection. “It was disturbing to me that they would put that online. I don’t understand any political benefit that can be achieved with that.”
In Ribble’s case, a clip of his northeastern Wisconsin home appeared online June 18. The soundless video — which lasts 38 seconds — is taken from a car sitting just outside the house. The shot pans across the large home, showing it from several different angles.
DeaNa Ribble, the congressman’s wife, said it is deeply unsettling.
“I’m more creeped out about this than Reid is, just because I’m home more,” she said. “If they so much as put a foot on private property, I will be the first person to call the police.”
Contrary to the portrayal in the video I believe, along with most Americans, that believing in Angels is a strength; but the rest of this makes an important point. Of course many of the countries he names have “freedom”, but much less than we have, but we are moving in their direction at a frightening pace.
In light of the fact that five pinheads on the Supreme Court has said that government can compel you to do or buy virtually anything and call it a tax and government is now shutting down kid’s lemonade stands and church picnics for not having “proper food licensing”; this picture hits close to home.
This will probably have to go to the US Supreme Court. The First Amendment is clear on this and so is federal case law. One of the problems with State Judges is that many of them are appointed because they made contributions and thus they are political hacks, not legal minds. The 14th Amendment binds the Bill of Rights to the states. Every lawyer knows this, but so far these judges in New Mexico just don’t care.
This is an outstanding piece of journalism form Chris Moody at Yahoo News. I love it when the reporter isn’t lazy and actually does the homework. Nice work Chris. (Another reason why I use Yahoo and try to avoid Google.)
When the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the nation’s latest national employment figures Friday, the Obama administration stressed that people should not “read too much” into the data.
Mitt Romney’s campaign pounced, and flagged the fact that the White House has repeated that same line nearly every month since November 2009.
See below for the roundup of articles from WhiteHouse.gov that Romney’s campaign posted on its site. In many of the posts, the authors for the administration do acknowledge that they repeat themselves:
June 2012: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/07/06/employment-situation-june)
February 2012: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/03/09/employment-situation-february)
January 2012: “Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report; nevertheless, the trend in job market indicators over recent months is an encouraging sign.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/03/employment-situation-january)
October 2011: “The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. There is no better example than August’s jobs figure, which was initially reported at zero and in the latest revision increased to 104,000. This illustrates why the Administration always stresses it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/04/employment-situation-october)
July 2010: “Therefore, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative. It is essential that we continue our efforts to move in the right direction and replace job losses with robust job gains.” (LINK: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/06/employment-situation-july)
Two-thirds of likely voters say President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority.
A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.
The results signal broad voter unease with the direction the nation has taken under Obama’s leadership and present a major challenge for the incumbent Democrat as he seeks reelection this fall.
Conducted for The Hill by Pulse Opinion Research, the poll comes in the wake of last month’s Supreme Court decision that upheld the primary elements of Obama’s signature healthcare legislation.
It found 68 percent of likely voters — regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of Obama — believe the president has substantially transformed the country since his 2009 inauguration.
President Obama’s former Communications Director Anita Dunn said that Mao (the largest communist mass murderer in world history) was the philosopher she looked to most. Former Green jobs Czar Van Jones is a self admitted communist revolutionary and the list goes on…
China’s attempt at a high-speed rail network is fraught with corrupt officials, impossible costs, and deadly safety failures. But U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wishes America would follow it as a model.
The Chinese are more successful [in building infrastructure] because in their country, only three people make the decision. In our country, 3,000 people do, 3 million. In a country where only three people make the decision, they can decide where to put their rail line, get the money, and do it. We don’t do it that way in America.
His comments are stunning. Yes, that’s how Communists do it: A few people make decisions for the country and control the money, land, resources, and workers. And how has that worked out?
“Rather than demonstrating the advantages of centrally planned long-term investment, as its foreign admirers sometimes suggested, China’s bullet-train experience shows what can go wrong when an unelected elite, influenced by corrupt opportunists, gives orders that all must follow — without the robust public discussion we would have in the states.” That sounds like a direct rebuttal to LaHood, but Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane wrote that back in April 2011.
The bottom line is that high-speed rail is like pouring money down a hole. China’s official institutions aren’t known for transparency, but according to the Voice of America, “Even the [Chinese] national research institution, the Academy of Science, reported last year that at current investment and estimated passenger numbers, the trains will never collect enough in fares to repay construction loans.”
LaHood—and President Obama—advocate high-speed rail in America by evoking the image of thousands of workers on the project. It’s part of their stimulus-funded plan to get America back to work. But once again, China’s experience demonstrates that government spending on infrastructure has not helped the Chinese economy.
A group of students leaving the annual conference of the National Association of the Deaf in Louisville had a rather awful experience courtesy of the Transportation Security Administration in that city’s airport. One of the travelers wrote about it on his blog:
It was a very public week-long event downtown, make no bones about it. As such, the shirt very clearly identified me as deaf.
While I was going through the TSA, some of them started laughing in my direction. I thought it might’ve been someone behind me, but I found out otherwise.
They went through my bag (for no reason), and found a couple bags of candy I brought. I was told I wasn’t allowed to fly with that (wtf? I’ve flown with food before — these were even sealed still because I brought them right in the airport). I was then asked if I would like to donate the candy “To the USO”. Since I know the airport there has an Air National Guard base, and I figured it would go to the soldiers, I (annoyed) said sure, why not?
The guards, as I was getting scanned, started eating the candy they just told me was for the soldiers. In front of me, still laughing at me (very clearly now). One of them asked why they were laughing, and one of them came up to me, pointed at my shirt, laughed at me and said, “Fucking deafie”. The Louisville TSA called me a “fucking deafie” and laughed at me because I was deaf, and they expected wouldn’t say anything back (or wouldn’t hear them). Make no bones about it — she was facing me and I read her lips. There was no mistake. I would later find out that they had called at least 4 other individuals the same thing.
To my young friends who were born after The Wall came down, this is a huge part of our culture that you missed. No auto tune, no computerized help with their voices, just raw, awesome talent; either you had it or you didn’t.
If you didn’t vote for Rick Perry you may wish you had after reading his awesome letter to ObamaCare Chief Bureaucrat Kathleen Sebelius. Get ready to start cheering and enjoy the letter below!
In 2010, influenced by the Tea Party and its focus on fiscal issues, 17 states elected Republican governors. And, according to an Examiner.com analysis, every one of those states saw a drop in their unemployment rates since January of 2011. Furthermore, the average drop in the unemployment rate in these states was 1.35%, compared to the national decline of .9%, which means, according to the analysis, that the job market in these Republican states is improving 50% faster than the national rate.
Since January of 2011, here is how much the unemployment rate declined in each of the 17 states that elected Republican governors in 2010, according to the Examiner:
Kansas – 6.9% to 6.1% = a decline of 0.8%
Maine – 8.0% to 7.4% = a decline of 0.6%
Michigan – 10.9% to 8.5% = a decline of 2.4%
New Mexico – 7.7% to 6.7% = a decline of 1.0%
Oklahoma – 6.2% to 4.8% = a decline of 1.4%
Pennsylvania – 8.0% to 7.4% = a decline of 0.6%
Tennessee – 9.5% to 7.9% = a decline of 1.6%
Wisconsin – 7.7% to 6.8% = a decline of 0.9%
Wyoming – 6.3% to 5.2% = a decline of 1.1%
Alabama – 9.3% to 7.4% = a decline of 1.9%
Georgia – 10.1% to 8.9% = a decline of 1.2%
South Carolina – 10.6% to 9.1% = a decline of 1.5%
South Dakota – 5.0% to 4.3% = a decline of 0.7%
Florida – 10.9% to 8.6% = a decline of 2.3%
Nevada – 13.8% to 11.6% = a decline of 2.2%
Iowa – 6.1% to 5.1% = a decline of 1.0%
Ohio – 9.0% to 7.3% = a decline of 1.7%
On the other hand, the unemployment rate in states that elected Democrats in 2010 dropped, on average, as much as the national rate decline and, in some states such as New York, the unemployment rate has risen since January of 2011.
“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
Rihanna is suing something called Berdon LLP.
Political Arena 