President Obama’s Food and Drug Administration has caused “a public health crisis” — a prescription drug shortage over the past two years — by increasing the number of threats issued to raid and close drug manufacturing plants, according to House investigators.
“This shortage appears to be a direct result of over-aggressive and excessive regulatory action,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement. “These drugs can save lives and keep people who need them living healthy lives. The FDA is failing to ensure the availability of quality products.”
President Obama signed an executive order last year to help the FDA anticipate drug shortages while knocking Congress for failing to pass his preferred legislation on the issue. “Congress has been trying since February to do something about this,” Obama said in November. “It has not yet been able to get it done . . . we can’t wait.”
The committee report concluded that a significant portion of the drug shortage is a problem of the Obama administration’s making. “Among shuttered manufacturing lines that occurred over the previous two years, the committee’s review did not find any instances where the shutdown was associated with reports of drugs harming customers,” the report says, noting a 30 percent drop in the manufacture of certain prescription drugs at the largest manufacturers in the country.
Instead, the drug shortage crisis began in 2010 after the FDA began sending letters to companies found to be in violation of a given rule, in which the company was warned that “failure to promptly correct these violations may result in legal action without further notice including, without limitation, seizure and injunction.”
The FDA sent just 474 such letters in 2009, but that number spiked to 1720 in 2011. “A common sense approach to regulations must be restored at the FDA,” the committee report advised, calling for more targeted measures to induce company compliance with regulations. “Agency protocols should be revised so that the agency is required to consider the implications of its actions on the nation’s supply of critical drugs.”
In an effort to punish Arizona for winning the core of the battle in the Supreme Court against the Obama Administration the administration is now going to punish Arizona, Chicago style.
The Obama administration said Monday it is suspending existing agreements with Arizona police over enforcement of federal immigration laws, and said it has issued a directive telling federal authorities to decline many of the calls reporting illegal immigrants that the Homeland Security Department may get from Arizona police.
Administration officials, speaking on condition they not be named, told reporters they expect to see an increase in the number of calls they get from Arizona police — but that won’t change President Obama’s decision to limit whom the government actually tries to detain and deport.
“We will not be issuing detainers on individuals unless they clearly meet our defined priorities,” one official said in a telephone briefing.
The official said that despite the increased number of calls, which presumably means more illegal immigrants being reported, the Homeland Security Department is unlikely to detain a significantly higher number of people and won’t be boosting personnel to handle the new calls.
#6. “When Mitt Romney was governor, Massachusetts was No. 1 in state debt. $18 billion in debt. More debt per person than any other state in the country.” — from an attack ad titled “Number One” that was posted June 12, 2012 on the Obama campaign’s official YouTube page
While this statement is factually accurate, it leaves out a big part of the picture.
Massachusetts owed a notoriously large state debt for a long time, certainly before Romney ever set foot in the governor’s office. Part of the reason the Bay State’s debt is so high, as PolitiFact points out, is because many projects that in other states would be funded by counties are funded by the state in Massachusetts.
Secondly, as anyone who’s ever lived in Massachusetts will tell you, “the Big Dig” — a highway and tunnel construction project that was started in the 1980s and has cost over $20 billion — has been a budgetary nightmare for decades. The Boston Globe estimates the project won’t be paid off until 2038 at the earliest. No matter who’s governor of Massachusetts, the Big Dig is still an incredibly expensive project, with the interest alone costing the state billions….
#3. “[Under Romney] Massachusetts plunged to 47th in job creation.” — David Axelrod, Obama campaign senior advisor, on CBS’s ‘Face The Nation,’ June 3, 2012
Romney’s been pummeled with this statistic, first during the Republican primaries and now by the Obama campaign (see here, here and here). Factually, it’s accurate to say that Massachusetts was 47th out of 50 states for job growth from December 2002 through December 2006 — PolitiFact verified the statement using Bureau of Labor Statistics. But there are different ways of looking at the numbers, and, as noted above, Romney inherited a state that was already in deep economic trouble.
While the rate of job growth in Massachusetts was lower than the rate for the country as a whole during that time, the number of jobs in the state did increase under Romney’s tenure.
#2. “Our businesses have created almost 4.3 million new jobs over the last 27 months.” — Obama during a presidential address in Golden Valley, Minn. (June 2, 2012)
Obama has made this claim many times recently (see here, here and here, and see Sarah Jessica Parker say it here), but again, he isn’t giving the whole picture. We called Josh Bivens, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, to see what the missing context was. Bivens told us that Obama neglected to mention the 500,000 jobs that were lost in the public sector over the same time period.
Critical UPDATE – ObamaCare Panel Targeting Women’s Health Screenings…Again – LINK
Critical UPDATE – Megyn Kelly calls out Obama: Your lawyer called it a tax in court and now your campaign people are lying about it (video) – LINK
Critical UPDATE – ObamaCare promises access to “coverage” for those with existing conditions, but over time limits health care access… – LINK
Critical UPDATE – Are Your Dollars Going to Doctors or Paper Pushers? – LINK
Critical UPDATE – Dr. Jill Vecchio: ObamaCare forces doctors to violate the Hippocratic Oath (video) – LINK
Critical UPDATE – Do You Qualify for the New ObamaCare Tax/Penalty? – LINK
Critical UPDATE – CBO: ObamaCare Will Leave 30 Million Uninsured – LINK
Only in America does “health care reform” start with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents, who will decide whether or not your insurance policy merits a fine – Barry L. Camp
UPDATE – Political Arena Analysis: Why Roberts is full of it – LINK
UPDATE II – After the Supreme Court Ruling on ObamaCare What is Next? – LINK
UPDATE III– Internet On Fire Over Roberts’ ObamaCare Ruling – LINK
UPDATE IV – Curt Levey: Top 10 Lessons from the Roberts ObamaCare Ruling – LINK
UPDATE V – Libs on Twitter call Justice Thomas “N-Word” After Ruling; Call Sarah Palin Slut and Attack Her Kids – LINK
UPDATE VI– The Truth About Pre-Existing Conditions Will Surprise You – LINK
UPDATE VII – Why Are Health Insurance Premiums Increasing Faster After ObamaCare Passed? – LINK
UPDATE VIII – At least 7 new ObamaCare taxes directly impact the poor, middle class, and the disabled – LINK
UPDATE IX – WSJ Chief Economist: 75% of all ObamaCare taxes impact those who make less than $120,000 a year (video) – LINK
UPDATE X – IBD: 21 ObamaCare Taxes Already Causing Job Losses – LINK
UPDATE XI– British Socialized Health Service Kills Off 130,000 Elderly Every Year – LINK
UPDATE XII – “The Lemon” – Why Canada Is Now Reforming Their Socialized Health Care System (video) – LINK
UPDATE XIII – Forbes: ObamaCare Responsible for Health Insurance Premium Increases that Tripled in 2011 – LINK
UPDATE XIV – Obama Denies Waiver for Innovative Cost Saving Indiana Medicaid Program – LINK
UPDATE XV – Flashback 2008: Obama Trashed Hillary for Proposing Health Care “Penalty” (video) – LINK
UPDATE XVI – Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly on the Supreme Court: There is no silver lining (video) – LINK
UPDATE XVII – Five major ObamaCare taxes that will impact you in 2013 – LINK
UPDATE XVIII – Explanation of the ObamaCare Ruling for the Non-lawyer – LINK
UPDATE XIX – Mark Steyn: A lie makes Obamacare legal – LINK
UPDATE XX – Prof. Paul Moreno: A Short History of Congress’s Power to Tax – LINK
UPDATE XXI – Allen West on new outrageous federal regulations and the Roberts’ ruling (video) – LINK
UPDATE XXII – MUST SEE: ObamaCare’s Impact on YOU (video) & Even Russia Today Shreds the Roberts Ruling – LINK
UPDATE XXIII – ObamaCare creates 13,000 pages of new regulations and they aren’t done yet… – LINK
UPDATE XXIV – 83% of American physicians have considered leaving the profession over ObamaCare – LINK
UPDATE XXV – 46,159 had to flee Canada to get health care in 2011 – LINK
UPDATE XXVI – Broken Promises in ObamaCare. More New Taxes. – LINK
UPDATE XXVII – Survey: Nearly one in 10 employers to drop health coverage… – LINK– LINK
UPDATE XXVIII – CBO: Employers to be hit with $4 billion more in ObamaCare taxes than expected – LINK
UPDATE XXIX – Must See: ObamaCare and Health Insurance Expert C. Steven Tucker in Extended Interview (video) – LINK
UPDATE XXX – Dr. Jill Vecchio Explains ObamaCare in Detail (video) – LINK
Justice Roberts joined the leftists in the court saying that the ObamaCare mandate is just a tax and is constitutional on those grounds. This of course is silly on its face because those who wrote the taxing and commerce clauses are the same ones who rebelled against the Stamp Act and a 2% tea tax. Literally, according to five Justices the government can force you to buy anything or pay a fine in the form of a tax. The ruling takes the entire idea of “limited government” and tosses it out the window. Aside from repealing the ACA after the election, it is time for a Constitutional Amendment limiting the taxing power and defines the limits of the Commerce Clause.
Dissenting – Scalia, Thomas, KENNEDY, Alito – This Act “exceeds federal power”
Obama now has to run on passing the largest tax increase in history after promising not to raise taxes on those who make under $200,000. This election just became about ObamaCare.
A tax for THEE and not for ME – Democrats will now have to explain how they can pass a tax and a mandate on you but it doesn’t apply to members of Congress or their staff.
Democratic National Committee tweets:
IT’S CONSTITUTIONAL BITCHES!
DNC DELETED TWEET: ‘TAKE THAT MOTHER******S!’
Sen. McConnell:
The Supreme Court has spoken: this law is a tax. The bill sold to the American people was a deception.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp:
When they look back on the American system of once-limited government, June 28, 2012 will stand as a definitive date in the advance of government tyranny. Today, a slim majority of the Supreme Court turned our Constitution on its head, and ruled that the federal government, in effect, can force upon the American people anything it damn well pleases – as long as it is called a tax. Unlimited federal power, combined with judicial activism, has crafted a new regime that has destroyed our Founders’ vision.
Not only are individual liberties destroyed as a result of ObamaCare, but taxpayers are on the hook for a non-workable, ineffective, and outrageously expensive health care program. ObamaCare will drive America into bankruptcy, as the law is already radically exceeding original cost estimates. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that millions of Americans will likely lose their health insurance plan as employers are driven out of business or are unable to meet massive new mandates and costs of Washington.
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli:
This decision goes against the very principle that America has a federal government of limited powers; a principle that the Founding Fathers clearly wrote into the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The Constitution was meant to restrict the power of government precisely for the purpose of protecting your liberty and mine from the overreaching hand of the federal government. This unprecedented decision says that Congress has the authority to force citizens to buy private goods or face fines – a power it has never had in American history, and a power King George III and Parliament didn’t have over us when we were mere subjects of Great Britain. Since the federal government itself could never articulate to the court a constitutional limit to this power, Congress has gained an unlimited power to force citizens to buy anything.
Senator Rand Paul:
Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional. While the court may have erroneously come to the conclusion that the law is allowable, it certainly does nothing to make this mandate or government takeover of our health care right. ObamaCare is wrong for Americans. It will destroy our health care system. This now means we fight every hour, every day until November to elect a new President and a new Senate to repeal ObamaCare.
Sen. Marco Rubio:
If you don’t buy government approved insurance the IRS will be on your back.
Ann Coulter:
I was right about Roberts. Thank God we at least got Alito on the Court, instead of Bush’s secretary. Only the very rich will survive this decision. Healthcare the new Gulfstream jet. Opin: We will call mandate a “penalty” to survive anti-injunction act, but a “tax” for the power to tax.
Carrie Ann Towne:
Only an idiot thinks this somehow helps the poor. The government is essentially saying that if poor people cannot afford to buy insurance, which is outrageously expensive in part due to state and federal taxation of hospital beds, etc., and regulation, then they must pay a penalty for being too poor to pay for a service the cost of which the government has artificially inflated.
Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton:
They can tax you on the CO2 that you exhale. They can make me buy cranberries. I hate cranberries.
Roberts says it is not a mandate it is just a small tax if you don’t comply…”. How nice, and yes it isn’t 100% bad, but since the power to tax is the power to destroy, it is a mandate because the amount of the tax can be changed at the stroke of a pen. Also the Sec HHS is given wide power way beyond the (limited) commerce clause to rewrite regulations at her pleasure…. and that is way more than just taxing. The dissenters are correct and obviously so IMO.
The recent recession wiped out nearly two decades of Americans’ wealth, according to government data released Monday, with middle-class families bearing the brunt of the decline.
The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992.
The data represent one of the most detailed looks at how the economic downturn altered the landscape of family finance. Over a span of three years, Americans watched progress that took almost a generation to accumulate evaporate. The promise of retirement built on the inevitable rise of the stock market proved illusory for most. Home-ownership, once heralded as a pathway to wealth, became an albatross.
The findings underscore the depth of the wounds of the financial crisis and how far many families remain from healing. If the recession set Americans back 20 years, economists say, the road forward is sure to be a long one. And so far, the country has seen only a halting recovery.
“It’s hard to overstate how serious the collapse in the economy was,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “We were in free fall.”
The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class. Only roughly half of middle-class Americans remained on the same economic rung during the downturn, the Fed found. Their median net worth — the value of assets such as homes, automobiles and stocks minus any debt — suffered the biggest drops.
Florida had lots of illegals and dead people on it’s voter rolls so the state did an audit to remove the ineligible listings. Of course Obama’s Department of Social Justice ran by Eric Holder, who also isn’t enforcing federal vote fraud laws, tried to stop Florida from trying to maintain accurate voter records.
The latest nonsense from the Democrat leadership is that the Fast & Furious investigation is just retaliation for this, but the Fast & Furious investigation started a year before the vote cleanup effort.
Today a federal judge rejected a Department of Justice request to issue a temporary restraining order blocking Florida from removing non-citizens from the voter rolls and rejected DOJ’s argument that the National Voter Registration Act prohibits removal of non-citizens from the voter rolls. The court also said that permitting known non-citizens to vote would result in “irreparable harm” to eligible voters.
Florida Governor Rick Scott was pleased with the decision, which is consistent with his position that Florida has an obligation to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.
“The court made a common-sense decision consistent with what I’ve been saying all along: that irreparable harm will result if non-citizens are allowed to vote. Today’s ruling puts the burden on the federal government to provide Florida with access to the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship database. We know from just a small sample that an alarming number of non-citizens are on the voter rolls and many of them have illegally voted in past elections. The federal government has the power to prevent such irreparable harm from continuing, and Florida once again implores them to grant access to the SAVE database.”
Nearly a year ago, the state requested access to a citizenship database, maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, that would allow Florida to more accurately identify non-citizens who are registered to vote. To date, the federal government continues to block access, thereby preventing Florida’s efforts to ensure fair elections.
Forget executive privilege, contempt of Congress, “fast and furious,” how many documents the government has produced and who said what to whom on which date.
The Obama administration has almost certainly engaged in the most shockingly vile corruption scandal in the history of the country, not counting the results of Season Eight on “American Idol.”
Administration officials intentionally put guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, so that when the guns taken from Mexican crime scenes turned out to be American guns, Democrats would have a reason to crack down on gun sellers in the United States.
Democrats will never stop trying to take our guns away. They see something more lethal than a salad shooter and wet themselves.
But since their party was thrown out of Congress for the first time in nearly half a century as a result of passing the 1994 “assault weapons ban,” even liberals know they were going to need a really good argument to pass any limitation on guns ever again.
So it’s curious that Democrats all started telling the same lie about guns as soon as Obama became president. In March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced to reporters on a trip to Mexico: “Since we know that the vast majority, 90 percent of that weaponry (used by Mexican drug cartels), comes from our country, we are going to try to stop it from getting there in the first place.”
As she sentimentally elaborated on Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren show: “The guns sold in the United States, which are illegal in Mexico, get smuggled and shipped across our border and arm these terrible drug-dealing criminals so that they can outgun these poor police officers along the border and elsewhere in Mexico.”
Suddenly that 90 percent statistic was everywhere. It was like the statistic on women beaten by their husbands on Super Bowl Sunday.
CBS’ Bob Schieffer asked Obama on “Face the Nation”: “It’s my understanding that 90 percent of the guns that they’re getting down in Mexico are coming from the United States. We don’t seem to be doing a very good job of cutting off the gun flow. Do you need any kind of legislative help on that front? Have you, for example, thought about asking Congress to reinstate the ban on assault weapons?”
At a Senate hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said: “It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors … come from the United States.”
And then, thanks to Fox News — the first network to report it — we found out the 90 percent figure was complete bunkum. It was a fabrication told by William Hoover, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF), and then spread like wildfire by Democrats and the media.
Mexican law enforcement authorities send only a fraction of the guns they recover from criminals back to the U.S. for tracing. Which guns do they send? The guns that have U.S. serial numbers on them. It would be like asking a library to produce all their Mark Twain books and then concluding that 90 percent of the books in that library are by Mark Twain.
You begin to see why the left hates Fox News so much.
Obama backed away from the preposterous 90 percent claim. His National Security Council spokesman explained to Fox News that by “recovered,” they meant “guns traceable to the United States.” So, in other words, Democrats were frantically citing the amazing fact that almost all the guns traceable to the U.S. were … traceable to the U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters that even if the percentage is inaccurate, the “vast majority” of guns seized in crimes in Mexico come from the United States. (And he should know, because it turns out he was sending them there!)
This was absurd. Most of the guns used by drug cartels are automatic weapons — not to mention shoulder-fired rockets — that can’t be sold to most Americans. They are acquired from places like Russia, China and Guatemala.
Right about the time the 90 percent lie was unraveling, the Obama administration decided to directly hand thousands of American guns over to Mexican criminals. Apart from the fact that tracking thousands of guns into Mexico is not feasible or rational, the dumped guns didn’t have GPS tracing devices on them, anyway. There is no conceivable law enforcement objective to such a program.
This is what we know:
(1) Liberals thought it would be a great argument for gun control if American guns were ending up in the hands of Mexican criminals;
(2) They wanted that to be true so badly, Democrats lied about it;
(3) After they were busted on their lie, the Obama administration began dumping thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican criminals.
We also know that hundreds of people were murdered with these U.S.-government-supplied guns, including at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
But let’s look on the bright side. The BATF was originally going to ship warheads to Iran until realizing the explosions might disable the tracking devices.
(Contrary to more Democrat lies, there was no program to dump thousands of guns in Mexico under George W. Bush. The Bush administration did have a program that put GPS trackers on about 100 guns in order to actually trace them. That operation was ended almost as soon as it began because of the lack of cooperation from Mexican officials. You may as well say Holder’s program was “started” by the first cop who ever put tracer dye on contraband.)
No one has explained what putting 2,500 untraceable guns in the hands of Mexican drug dealers was supposed to accomplish.
But you know what that might have accomplished? It would make the Democrats’ lie retroactively true — allowing them to push for the same gun restrictions they were planning when they first concocted it. A majority of guns recovered from Mexican criminals would, at last, be American guns, because Eric Holder had put them there.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, some brave whistleblower inside the government leaked details of this monstrous scheme. As soon as Congress and the public demanded answers, Holder clammed up. He just says “oops” — and accuses Republicans of racism.
Organized protesters set out to counter the issue of money in politics while marching over a mile through Washington DC last week. The heat index was a blistering 90 degrees, which seemed to add to the marchers’ aggression for their target, former Bush Administration Senior Adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. While Rove has been out of the White House for over five years, he has remained active in fundraising for and promotion of conservative causes, particularly through his non-profit, Crossroads GPS.
Many of the protesters took issue with the success of Rove’s 501c4, stating it should be “illegal” even though they were themselves proud representatives of 501c4s. This conflation begs the question: Do these organized protesters even know why they are marching? Or do they even know who they are marching against?
The Blaze set out to uncover this mystery by asking the proud marchers one simple question: “Who is Karl Rove?” You may or not be shocked by their answers.
Minorities, this is what the “enlightened academic left” thinks of you. And this is not just a few radicalized pinheads in Minnesota, this type of senseless race bating, victimology, and stereotyping is typical of “black studies” and other neo-Marxist grievance studies programs in public school and universities in almost every state.
The left needs racial division and must pit one group against another for people to buy their ideology. This goes double for leftist academics who get millions of dollars spent of grievance studies programs, various grievance studies centers, publications etc.
Remember the Un-Fair Campaign, that august collection of enlightened and thoroughly non-racist individuals who believe that whites have an irrevocable privilege that gives them an advantage in society (and that, by extensions minorities will always need special favors to get a leg up)? Well, if you don’t, for the purposes of this story, it may be advisable to rewatch this ad of theirs:
As you can see, the Un-Fair Campaign is aptly named. Their perspective on race is deeply unfair. Fortunately, at least one group has set out to make a video that rebuts the above, and shows how the perspective involved is unfair not just to whites, but to minorities as well. The resulting effort may cause you to spontaneously break out into applause:
What with the refusal of the University of Minnesota-Duluth, one of the Un-Fair Campaign’s biggest institutional sponsors, to defund the organization, this variety of outraged mockery is perhaps the best response.
My friend Scott Ott and his friends at Trifecta had the most thoughtful response to this issue we have yet seen:
Our friends at iowntheworld.com have a delicious post with (full disclosure) my good friend Steven Tucker affording the most awesome schooling to a rather surprisingly open minded young leftist on ObamaCare.
Tucker is one of America’s foremost experts on health insurance law and this poor bloke just happened to run across him with a camera in his hand in Chicago. [Full disclosure: this very writer went to insurance school and passed the state exam for a state Life & Health insurance license. I have written dozens of articles on ObamaCare and Tucker knows it even better than I do.]
In this video, Touré, the one-named host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, attempts to humiliate Alex Schriver for being Republican. He suggests that something happened to him that has forced him into being Republican before Schriver confidently fires back against the MSNBC host for his ignorant and degrading comments.
The 23-year-old Schriver not only speaks intelligently beyond his years, but politely makes MadonnaSealPrince Touré look silly and unknowledgeable about the state of politics.
Schriver, a native of Tennessee and a graduate of Auburn University, is the National Chairman for the College Republican National Committee. Click on the link to check out their great organization that works to promote conservative ideals to college age Americans.
It is probably true. It is no secret that doing business in the United States is very expensive and more risky because of government meddling. There are lots of companies that in order to survive had to leave and that is not Mitt’s fault.
Remember how many Heinz plants the Kerry’s moved overseas?
The only way to fix this problem is with a new, simpler, flatter tax code, regulatory reform and the size of government cut a lot, much like the Deficit Commission said. Without doubt, if we had those reforms companies would keep more jobs at home, yet what party always stands in the way of these common sense reforms?
Of course when companies get driven out of the country or shut down by onerous government or just flat out abuse such as what the Obama Administration did to Gibson Guitar the elite media doesn’t have much to say about that do they?
Remember the stimulus money that went to an electric car company in Finland, and subsidized loans to Brazil to drill in deep water when he was preventing our people from drilling, or how General Electric, whose CEO Jeff Immelt sent jobs overseas shortly after he was appointed Jobs Czar by President Obama?
Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.
During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Remember that President Obama helped oust the pro-American Egyptian government and called it “The Arab Spring”. Well now it is done and as predicted by myself, Dr. Niall Ferguson and so many others as far back as February of last year.
Watch this video from February of 2011 and look and see how this disastrous chain of events has come about just as conservatives feared. Notice what Ferguson said about a Muslim Brotherhood regime that would be aggressive towards Israel in order to unite radicalized masses under the banner of external aggression.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the grandfather of Al-Qaeda and they are involved in raising money for jihadists here in the United States. The motto for the Muslim Brotherhood is:
‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
See our other Egypt coverage HERE for more details.
For a host of reasons this writer believes that this a part of a deliberate plan by the Obama Administration to undermine Israel’s security and ability to defend itself. Why?
1 – Polls of the Egyptian Street showed that almost 70% wanted Sharia Law and war with Israel. The administration denied these polls. The election results showed that these polls were accurate.
2 – The administration has radicalized antisemites such as Samantha Power and Robert Malley in prominent positions in the State Department.
4 – Any student of global security full well knows that the previous pro-American government in Egypt that Obama helped to remove from power was the lynch pin for Middle-East peace. Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel that was signed by the previous government. The Muslim Brotherhood has made it clear that the treaty is shredded.
5 – President Obama’s attitude and other acts of disrespect have shown that there is a hostility towards Israel. So much so that even as far back in 2009 only 6% if Israelis saw President Obama and “pro-Israel”. See details HERE.
The Heritage Foundation has a piece out that explains just a sampling of the blatant violation of Separation of Powers committed by the Obama Administration.
Even though the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected the President’s cap-and-trade plan, his Environmental Protection Agency classified carbon dioxide, the compound that sustains vegetative life, as a pollutant so that it could regulate it under the Clean Air Act.
After the Employee Free Choice Act—designed to bolster labor unions’ dwindling membership rolls—was defeated by Congress, the National Labor Relations Board announced a rule that would implement “snap elections” for union representation, limiting employers’ abilities to make their case to workers and virtually guaranteeing a higher rate of unionization at the expense of workplace democracy.
After an Internet regulation proposal failed to make it through Congress, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would regulate the Web anyway, even despite a federal court’s ruling that it had no authority to do so.
Although Congress consistently has barred the Department of Education from getting involved in curriculum matters, the Administration has offered waivers for the No Child Left Behind law in exchange for states adopting national education standards, all without congressional authorization.
Likewise, the Administration has often simply refused to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress:
Since it objects to existing federal immigration laws, the Administration has decided to apply those laws selectively and actively prevent the state (like Arizona) from enforcing those laws themselves.
Rather than push Congress to repeal federal laws against marijuana use, the Department of Justice (DOJ) simply decided it would no longer enforce those laws.
DOJ also has announced that it would stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act or defending it from legal challenge rather than seeking legislative recourse.
On Tuesday, the President invoked executive privilege to avoid handing over some 1,300 documents in an ongoing Congressional investigation. The Supreme Court has held that executive privilege cannot be invoked to shield wrongdoing. Is that what’s happening in this case? “Congress needs to get to the bottom of that question to prevent an illegal invocation of executive privilege and further abuses of power. That will require an index of the withheld documents and an explanation of why each of them is covered by executive privilege—and more,” Heritage legal scholar Todd Gaziano writes.
Earlier this year the President crossed the threshold of constitutionality when he gave “recess appointments” to four officials who were subject to Senate confirmation, even though the Senate wasn’t in recess. Gaziano wrote at the time that such appointments “would render the Senate’s advice and consent role to normal appointments almost meaningless. It is a grave constitutional wrong.”
There is no telling where such disregard may go next, but the trend is clear, and it leads further and further away from the constitutional rule of law.
Lie No. 1: Obama has repeatedly claimed his white grandfather, Stanley Dunham, “fought in Patton’s army,” when he was a clerk with no combat in WWII.
Lie No. 2: Obama claimed Dunham, a communist sympathizer, signed up for duty “the day after Pearl Harbor,” when in fact he waited six months.
Lie No. 3: Obama claimed his father “fought when he got back to Kenya against tribalism and nepotism, but ultimately was blackballed from the government,” when in fact he fought against capitalism and lost his job when he advocated communism.
Lie No. 4: Obama has claimed his late mother’s health insurer refused “to pay for her treatment” for cancer while citing a “pre-existing condition,” when Cigna paid all her hospital bills and never denied payment.
Lie No. 5: Obama claimed he and a black high school friend named “Ray” were ostracized in Honolulu, when in fact the friend, Keith Kakugawa, was half-Japanese, and neither of them experienced discrimination.
Lie No. 6: Obama claimed the father of his Indonesian stepfather was killed by Dutch soldiers while fighting for Indonesian independence, when in fact the story turns out to be “a concocted myth in almost all respects,” Maraniss found.
Lie No. 7: Obama claimed his parents decided to marry in the excitement of the Selma civil-rights march of 1965 — and that he personally has “a claim on Selma” — when in fact they were married several years earlier.
Lie No. 8: Obama claimed his father got to study in the U.S. thanks to JFK’s efforts to bring “young Africans over to America,” when in fact the Kenyan airlift his father participated in occurred in 1959 under Ike.
Lie No. 9: Obama submitted a phony bio to his book publicist claiming he was “born in Kenya.”
Lie No. 10: Obama denied being a member of the socialist New Party, when a member roster of the Chicago chapter of the party lists him joining on Jan. 11, 1996.
Lie No. 11: Obama claimed he had only a passing acquaintance with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, when in fact they held a fundraiser for their Hyde Park neighbor in their living room, and years later, while Obama served in the U.S. Senate, hosted a barbecue for him in their backyard.
Lie No. 12: Obama claimed he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright spew anti-American invectives while sitting in his pews for 20 years, when in fact Obama was moved to tears hearing Wright condemn “white folks” and the U.S. for bombing other countries and even named his second book after the sermon.
Lie No. 13: Obama claimed he got in a “big fight” with old white flame Genevieve Cook, who after seeing a black play asked “why black people were so angry all the time,” when in fact she never saw the play nor made the remark.
Niall Ferguson is an award winning historian and economic historian who’s work is recognized around the world. This very web site contains several pieces of his work.
The economic historian, who is affiliated to Oxford and Harvard Universities, says wise young voters should insist politicians pay off debts as soon as possible for the benefit and security of their own financial interests.
Speaking at the Reith Lectures on Tuesday, Professor Ferguson will argue the “young should welcome austerity,” adding they “find it quite hard to compute their own long-term economic interests.”
In his first lecture, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, Prof Ferguson will insist the current public debt “allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.”
“It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees,” he says in an article ahead of the lecture.
He adds: “If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.”
Professor Ferguson argues the true size of government debt in Western democracies is many times larger than “deeply misleading” figures issued in the form of bonds because they do not record unfunded liabilities of social security and health care schemes.
“The last corporation to publish financial statements this misleading was Enron,” he wrote.
“These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure,” he said.
He argues one of the ways out of the current economic “mess” would be for “a heroic effort of leadership” to persuade all generations to “vote for a more responsible fiscal policy.”
John Holdren and Cass Sunstien believe that your organs belong to the state and that the government should engage in forced population control. Van Jones is a self admitted communist revolutionary and “911 Truther”, Anita Dunn says that Mao, the largest communist mass murderer in history, “is the philosopher she turns to most”, Steven Chu says that gas needs to be $8.00 a gallon; and what do these people all have in common? They were all invited to the White House to work in the Obama Administration and work close with the President.
This time the Obama’s invited “leftist radical gay activists” to come to the White House for a dinner and reception. They decided to take pictures. Well here they are:
How mature and dignified.
These are the type of barely showered low class “occupy types” that this administration feels at home with. One might say trailer park class but that would be an insult to trailer parks. I also regret that these losers were “gay activists” because while they say all day long that they represent the gay community, they don’t.
Today, we have Andrea Mitchell’s spectacularly lame followup to “criticism of the Romney clip edit” — which amounted to Ms. Mitchell saying, with a sigh and a frown, “Oh, bother. Fine. Here’s what we left out.” She failed to acknowledge what the “criticism” entailed; she neglected to point out how the editing misrepresented the event being covered; and she offered nothing resembling an apology or an admission of responsibility for something that was, as a matter of fact, irresponsible.
I’m tired. Truly. I’ve grown weary of trying to defend the indefensible and explain the inexplicable. For years, people have stomped their feet and pounded their fists and snorted “Liberal media bias!” and I’ve always tut-tutted and shooshed them and said, “No, no. Calm down. They meant well. It was just a misunderstanding. A mistake. These things happen.” I spent over 25 years working in the oft-reviled Mainstream Media and I saw up close and personal how the sausage was made. I knew the people who wielded the knives and wore the aprons, and could vouch (most of the time, anyway) for their good intentions.
But now?
Forget it. I’m done. You deserve what they’re saying about you. It’s earned. You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you. You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more. You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.
The White House tried to blunt Wednesday’s contempt of Congress vote against Attorney General Eric Holder with claims that Republicans were trying to focus on something other than the economy and jobs.
“At the beginning of this year, Republicans announced that one of their chief legislative and strategic priorities was to investigate the administration and damage the president politically,” press secretary Jay Carney told reporters today. “We are nine days away from the expiration of federal transportation funding which guarantees jobs for almost a million construction workers because Congress has not passed a transportation bill. We are 10 days away from student loan rates doubling, potentially impacting over 7.4 million borrowers.”
And that’s what President Obama focused on today as he notched yet another speech on student-loan rates into the schedule.
But the Carney spin came on the same day that the House passed the Domestic Energy and Jobs Act, a package of seven bills focused on spurring job growth and lowering energy costs while embracing the country’s energy resources.
That legislation passed 284-163 despite a veto threat two days ago from Obama.
The publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention can no longer use military logos on its Bibles for service members.
According to Lifeway Christian Resources spokesman Marty King, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have revoked their authorization to use official service emblems on the Scriptures.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation threatened to sue, claiming that allowing the logos to be placed on Bibles violates the Constitution.
Special Bibles for military members will now bear a generic logo.
King added that the military Bibles “continue to sell well and provide spiritual guidance and comfort to those who serve.”
Go to the mall at 4pm on a weekday and subject yourself to the product of our public schools… we have all seen this. It is one of those things that everyone knows and few talk about.
I recently finished a new degree and I was shocked at how ignorant and miseducated the public schoolers were. So are many professors.
PRINCETON, NJ — Americans’ confidence in public schools is down five percentage points from last year, with 29% expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them. That establishes a new low in public school confidence from the 33% measured in Gallup’s 2007 and 2008 Confidence in Institutions polls. The high was 58% the first time Gallup included public schools, in 1973.
In addition to public schools, this year’s Confidence in Institutions survey finds record lows, all by one percentage point, in Americans’ confidence in the church or organized religion (44%), banks (21%), and television news (21%).
Gallup has asked Americans to say how much confidence they have in a variety of U.S. institutions since 1973, including annually since 1993.
None of this comes at a surprise, even the low numbers on organized religion as the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has taken a very heavy toll the Vatican’s credibility.
After almost a dozen solar companies who got large sums of taxpayer dollars have gone bankrupt after the CEO donors paid themselves and donated back to the party news of this program came as no surprise, but still manages to turn stomachs.
The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs — annual operation and maintenance positions — meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.
At the same time, those green energy projects also created, in the end, about 4,600 “indirect” jobs – positions indirectly supported by the annual operation and maintenance jobs — which means they cost about $1.9 million each ($9 billion divided by 4,600).
Combined (910 + 4,600 = 5,510), the direct and indirect jobs cost, on average, about $1.63 million each to produce.
As explained in a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“economic stimulus”) of 2009 included Section 1603, a grant program run through the Treasury Department.
The 1603 program offered “renewable energy project developers a one-time cash payment” to reduce the need for green energy companies “to secure tax equity partners” and also help them to achieve “ ‘the near term goal of creating and retaining jobs’ in the renewable energy sector.”
A version of this article appeared June 18, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why I No Longer Support the Health Insurance Mandate. Mr. Williams is a former chairman and CEO of Aetna.
Notice what Williams says in the section in bold below. This is exactly what I said on my college blog in early 2010 when ObamaCare was being debated. Those who read the bill knew, those who wrote the bill set up a system that is guaranteed to blow up the private healthcare system. I am glad that Mr. Williams finally got around to actually reading what is in there.
Soon the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. I am not a lawyer, or an expert on the Constitution. But as the chairman and CEO of a major health plan, I had a ringside seat to the entire health-care reform process. After much reflection, I have concluded that the federal individual mandate, which requires all Americans to purchase health insurance starting in 2014, will not be upheld.
I don’t say this lightly, as I have long been a vocal advocate of getting and keeping every American covered. As a society, we have a moral obligation to ensure everyone has access to affordable health care. We must find a way to cover those who are no longer healthy but need care.
A workable solution used by many states is a high-risk insurance pool funded by broad-based taxes. But Congress and the president chose to require health-insurance companies to guarantee issue—that is, to insure anyone at anytime.
This approach encourages people to only purchase insurance when care is needed. Insurance does not work if you only pay two months of premiums and receive hundreds of thousands of dollars of health care. This is the equivalent of getting a free ride. Under such a system, consumers would end up paying more to offset the added costs of free riders. Insurance would soon become unaffordable.
DeWitt, Mich. — The protesters popping up at Mitt Romney’s rallies throughout Michigan Tuesday look like run-of-the-mill grassroots liberals — they wave signs about “the 99 percent,” they chant about the Republican’s greed, and they describe themselves as a loosely organized coalition of “concerned citizens.”
They’re also getting paid, two of the protesters and an Obama campaign official told BuzzFeed.
At the candidate’s afternoon stop outside a bakery in DeWitt, a group of about 15 protesters stood behind a police barricade, a few of them chanting in support of Obama. Asked why he was protesting, a man dressed in a grim reaper costume pointed a reporter to a pair of “designated representatives” standing in the shade.
“I can’t talk, you gotta get one of those people over there to talk to y’all,” he said. “They’re the ones who can talk to reporters.”
Neither of the representatives agreed to give their names, but two protesters said they were getting paid to stand outside of the rally, though their wage is unclear: one said she was getting $7.25 per hour, while another man said they were being paid $17 per hour.
Meanwhile, about 50 feet away, another protest had been organized by local Democrats in conjunction with the Obama campaign. A campaign official told BuzzFeed they had nothing to do with the other group — which he said he believed they had been sent by the labor-backed “Good Jobs Now” — and confirmed that they were being paid.
This editor and communications consultant has no tolerance for this type of nonsense. I would advice all GOP communications directors to cut off Tom LoBianco immediately to all communication and invite him to no events whatsoever. While many elite media reporters are in the tank for the left, few are so nakedly open about it.
In fact, in a moment of weakness <GRIN> I sent him a few choice words on Twitter as well.
This is a great piece from Newsbusters and Tom Blumer deserves kudos for doing some great homework and tackling this in a light-hearted way.
Perhaps if LoBianco weren’t so obsessed with finding naysayers, he might have noticed this embarrassing sequence in the dispatch he co-authored with reporter Tom Coyne (note the repetition in the first and fourth paragraphs presented at the AP’s home site):
Okay, guys, we get it. There’s a “perception.” You and Margaret Ferguson seem to be the only ones who have it.
The loathsome LoBianco and Coyne burned an awful lot of bandwidth questioning Daniels’s supposed lack of academic credentials. Hmm — the three Democratic Party examples I’ll name predate the Twitter era, but I wonder if AP reporters tried as hard to get negative feedback about Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey when he became President of the New School in 2001, former HHS Secretary Donna Shalala when she took over at the University of Miami in Florida that same year, or former Senator David Boren when he got the CEO role at Oklahoma University in 1994?
Does anyone think there was similar skepticism about Boren’s, Shalala’s, or Kerrey’s academic cred? Don’t be silly. For Boren and Shalala (I was unable to find a Kerrey-related item quickly), the respective answers are: puff piece and puff piece.
“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 