I am all for taking on a reporter when they blow it but Mitt’s behavior with Bret Beier was uncalled for.
Don’t lie to reporters….
Category Archives: Lies
Medal of Honor Winner Sues Defense Contractor for Smears After He Objected to High-Tech Sales to Pakistan
Update: Company settles the lawsuit with Dakota Meyer – LINK
In September, President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s most prestigious military award, to Sgt. Dakota Meyer, the marine who saved 36 of his comrades during an ambush in Afghanistan.
Obama called Meyer one of the most “down-to-earth guys that you will ever meet.”
But today Meyer, 23, is having trouble getting a job because of allegations by defense contractor BAE Systems that he has a drinking problem and is mentally unstable. Meyer filed legal papers Monday claiming the allegations were in retaliation for objections he raised about BAE’s alleged decision to sell high-tech sniper scopes to the Pakistani military.
After leaving active duty in May 2010, Meyer worked at Ausgar Technologies, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business in California, until April 2011.
“He exhibited a maturity for his age and an insightful capability to get the job done and provide recommendations to improve on what we are doing. I was very impressed while he was working for us. He was an outstanding employee,” Tom Grant, a retired military naval officer and a senior program manager at Ausgar Technologies, told ABC News.
When asked about the allegations of mental instability and a drinking problem, Grant said, “While Meyer was working for me, I never saw evidence of either of those issues.”
Family that raised Sgt. Meyer say that he doesn’t drink.
BAE Systems has been in big trouble before
BAE Systems plc (BAES) pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia to conspiring to defraud the United States by impairing and impeding its lawful functions, to make false statements about its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) compliance program, and to violate the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), announced Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary G. Grindler.
BAES was sentenced today by U.S. District Court Judge John D. Bates to pay a $400 million criminal fine, one of the largest criminal fines in the history of DOJ’s ongoing effort to combat overseas corruption in international business and enforce U.S. export control laws.
“Today, BAE Systems pleaded guilty to knowingly and willfully making false statements to U.S. government agencies. The actions of BAE Systems impeded U.S. efforts to ensure international trade is free of corruption and to maintain control over sensitive U.S. technology,” said Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary G. Grindler.
BAE Systems has agreed to pay about $16 million in penalties in response to federal charges involving bribes paid by Jacksonville-based Armor Holdings to secure international business.
BAE bought the company in 2007, after the incidents took place, but still operates a facility at the Jacksonville International Tradeport, employing about 350 people manufacturing body armor and forensics-related products.
The fines include $10.3 million to the U.S. Department of Justice and $5.7 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
BAE accepted responsibility for an Armor Holdings payment of more than $200,000 to a sales agent who it knew would pass a portion on to a United Nations official. In return, Armor received $7.1 million worth of contracts for a profit of $1.6 million, according to the SEC.
The company also admitted that $4.4 million in bribes were kept off its books.
In two separate announcements, BAE was fined £256million by the U.S. department of justice after pleading guilty to conspiring to make false statements to its government.
This fine relates to a claim that payments were made to a Saudi official in a £40billion contract to supply military equipment, including Tornado fighter jets, to Saudi Arabia.
The Americans were furious because the cash had been funnelled through U.S. banks.
They also wanted to make it clear to BAE that such tactics are not acceptable in the U.S. – where it is now a major player.
In Britain, BAE must fork out £30million. It reached an agreement with the Serious Fraud Office that it will plead guilty to a lesser offence under the Companies Act 1985 of failing to keep reasonably accurate accounting records for its activities in Tanzania.
This relates to an £88million contract in 1999 to supply a radar system to the country, which had no real use for such a state of the art system. A former marketing adviser in Tanzania is said to have pocketed payments of almost £8million.
BAE Systems has agreed to pay fines of up to $79m (£48.7m) to the US government for breaking military export rules, drawing a line under corruption investigations into the British company on both sides of the Atlantic.
Europe’s biggest defence company and a major supplier to the US military said on Tuesday that the latest penalties formed part of a civil settlement with the US state department. The decision comes after BAE, which makes around half of its revenues in the US, last year admitted making false statements over the sale of fighter planes to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The latest penalty comes on top of $450m in fines from the US and Britain revealed by BAE last year, following long-running corruption investigations into defence deals in Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
Incredible Music Video: We Won’t Let America Die
[youtube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=z6hvmWDYiCY]
ABC News promoted militant Islamist as a “Peaceful representative of Islam”
Just a little reminder of how transparently corrupt the elite media has become.
Via Answering Muslims:
ABC News recently did a 20/20 special titled “Islam: Questions and Answers,” with Diane Sawyer, Bill Weir, and Lama Hasan. The program drew attention to moderate Muslims who will serve as America’s “first line of defense” against terrorism. Unfortunately, one of the moderate Muslims presented by ABC isn’t so moderate.
Elite media hit job on Herman Cain backfires – UPDATED
[Editor’s Note: Remember that Newsweek knew about Monica Lewinski and decided to try to kill the story so it was leaked to Matt Drudge. In the case of John Edwards many in the elite media knew about the affair, but all of them decided to cover it up until the National Inquirer broke the story.
Remember, the quality of the propaganda (read bullshit) is MUCH higher this election season. That is because it used to be aimed at Independents who started counting yard signs two weeks before an election. New attitude change propaganda is aimed at people sympathetic to the TEA Party which is most Independents. TEA/Independents are more politically informed so the new propaganda is smarter and designed to target conservative sensibilities as well as people’s cynicism about government, so the lies from the hired political communications guns are based on variations of truths you have heard before. It is very effective.]
The video below is a textbook example of how to do an interview and deal with a false accusation. Cain’s reaction over the weekend was to challenge the elite media to name names, who are these anonymous sources?
Notice the elite media’s reaction to an accusation by anonymous sources, buy a known bogus hit piece writer from Politico (Vogel), compared to how they reacted to multiple women who spoke out against Bill Clinton including credible claims of rape (Juanita Brodderick) and sexual harassment/assault (Paula Jones, Dolly Kyle Browning, Kathleen Willey, Elizabeth Ward Gracen and the list goes on) and not to mention multiple affairs (Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinski). In the case of Bill Clinton they circled the wagons and attacked the women. The Democrats and the elite media even very personally attacked Linda Tripp who was simply a witness who told the truth about the evidence she had.
After the Clarence Thomas attack there was a surge of bogus sexual harassment suits in the 90’s. Anyone who was a CEO would/could be a target of one. It is called a harassment suit.
Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rick Perry, Herman Cain. Notice that the attacks came out when each one of these people was at their peak.
Yesterday was Herman Cain’s best fundraising day ever.
UPDATE –
Now the Elite Media is crying “cover up”. The Cain Campiagn are staffed by political noobs whose messaging was muttered for the first daywhile they were trying to figure out from who and where this anonymous allegation came from.
The Cain Campaign has always done this when faced with a new issue or critique. It takes them a few days to get their footing just as it did on his Israel comments, abortion comments, answer to Homosexuality questions, the comments about not having Muslims in his administration etc. No one should be surprised that it was the same way with this curve ball.
The elite media doesn’t want to talk about the allegation because their story is a joke and from an anonymous source. So the elite media watching the story become about the Politico reporters who havce posted made up quotes in hit pieces before about SAarah Palin and others, have decided to move the goal post and interpret Cains messaging problems on a “cover up”.
According to witnesses in the incident Cain is aware of all he did was tell someone that they where about as tall as his wife and brought his hand to his chin, so she filed a harassment suit saying that Cain made a gesture that made her think of oral sex. Some official at the NRA paid her a small sum of money to go away. Harassment suits happen a lot. But here is the rub, since it is an anonymous source with few details Cain can not be sure if this is the incident or not.
Nice catch 22 isn’t it? If it is about this incident than there was no sexual behavior at all and this means nothing, if it is not this incident it is from an anonymous source with next to no details so it still means nothing, in both cases there is nothing to cover up. Like we said, this is just the elite media moving the goal post because if they talk about the allegation the story becomes about the liberal reporter who has a history.
The Media Research Center varifies our memory:
Networks Hype Vague Cain Charges, Ignored Sexual Harassment Claims Against Clinton
The three networks have aggressively covered vague charges of sexual harassment against Herman Cain, but brushed aside far more serious and specific claims against Bill Clinton.Since the Herman Cain sexual harassment story broke late Sunday night, the broadcast networks have covered it extensively: full stories on Monday’s morning news shows (ABC’s Good Morning America led off their broadcast); full stories on Monday’s evening news shows (the CBS Evening News made it their top item) and ABC’s Nightline; and the top story on all three Tuesday morning shows.
Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos on Monday hyped the story as a “bombshell blast” and on Tuesday he derided Cain’s “bizarre series of interviews” on the subject. On Tuesday’s Early Show, Jan Crawford highlighted how Cain has been “trying to shoot down these allegations.” NBC’s Matt Lauer gloated that the Republican was “finding out the hard way about the attention that goes along with being a front-runner.”
Cain’s accusers are still anonymous. Three women publicly accused Bill Clinton of far more serious instances of sexual harassment in the 1990s, but the networks all but ignored them. The coverage that did exist was often skeptical, insulting and hostile, an astonishing double standard.
– Paula Jones, who accused Bill Clinton of exposing himself to her in a hotel room when she was a state employee in Arkansas, held a public press conference in February 1994, CBS and NBC ignored those charges, while ABC devoted just 16 seconds to Jones’ press conference.
As a January 29, 1998 Media Reality Check pointed out, “The rest of the media waited three months, until Jones filed suit, and the networks then did just 21 stories in that month.”
Appearing on the late Tim Russert’s CNBC program, then-Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw dismissed, “It didn’t seem to most people, entirely relevant to what was going on at the time. These are the kind of charges raised about the President before.”
In the Jones case, the networks were openly disdainful of covering her accusations. “It’s a little tough to figure out who’s being harassed,” NBC Today host Bryant Gumbel smugly asserted (May 10, 1994).
After ABC’s Sam Donaldson interviewed Jones for Prime Time Live in June 1994, anchor Charles Gibson wanted to know: “Why does anyone care what this woman has to say?”
Gibson continued to pile on, adding, “Bottom line, Sam: Is she not trying to capitalize on this, in effect to profit from impugning the President?”
Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, who sometimes appears on the networks to offer analysis, derided Jones as “some sleazy woman with big hair.” (This was on the May 7, 1994 Inside Washington.)
– In the case of Kathleen Willey, who said Bill Clinton groped her in the Oval Office while President, the networks gave minimal coverage to that story when it was broke by Newsweek magazine in late July 1997.
On July 30, 1997, the CBS Evening News aired a story, but managed not to mention Willey by name. Reporter Bill Plante warned, “But unless and until this case is settled, this is only the beginning of attempts by attorneys on both sides to damage the reputations and credibility of everyone involved.”
– In the case of Juanita Broaddrick, who publicly came forward to say Bill Clinton raped her while he was the Arkansas Attorney General and a candidate for Governor, the networks offered weekend coverage in March 1998, when the charge surfaced in a court filing by Paula Jones’ attorneys. NBC interviewed Broaddrick for a Dateline special in January 1999, but the airing was delayed until February 24, 1999, after the end of Clinton’s impeachment trial.
The March 1999 Media Watchpointed out the disparity of coverage of Broaddrick versus Anita Hill:
In the first five days of Hill’s charges (October 6-10,1991), the network evening shows (on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and PBS’s NewsHour) aired 67 stories. (If a count began with Jones’ February press conference, the networks supplied just a single 16-second anchor brief; if the count began with her sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton in May, the number was 15.)
But in the first five days after Juanita Broaddrick has charged the President with rape in The Wall Street Journal (February 19-23), the number of evening news stories was two. That’s a ratio of 67 to 2.
Is it any coincidence that each conservative candidiate from the last several elections was attacked when they peaked in the polls? Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and now Herman Cain (remember how Sarah Palin was attacked?).
When you look at the history of minorities who ran as Republicans such as Michael Steele, Allen West, etc the Democrats in every case use the worst personal smear tactics against them, including releasing their social security numbers and personal credit information.
Remember Miguel Estrada who was picked by President Bush to be on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals? Democrats said in their leaked Judiciary Committee memo’s that they must smear and defeat him “because he’s Latino“.
And surprise surprise, the attorney for said un-named source is Joel Bennet. Most people do not have any idea Joel Bennet is. He was the head of the DC bar, and a co-chair of the National bar Association. Bennet is a big time power lawyer in DC and was even featured in Super Lawyers magazine. So who do you suppose is bankrolling this guy? You can be sure that it is not a former staffer at the National Restaurant Association.
Lesson for Journalism Students: Donald Rumsfeld and Andrea Mitchell Spar Over Iraq
Please examine this video of Andrea Mitchell more or less trying to interrogate Donald Rumsfeld.
This is a fantastic example of many of the worst aspects of journalism. In this interview Andrea Mitchell displays the most common forms of bias that undermine journalistic ethics and standards. It is rare to find a single clip with so many clear examples of exactly how the ethical and professional journalist should not conduct themselves.
The biggest form of media bias is not a partisan slant to the left, it is the slant everything towards conflict, the more personal and/or salacious the better. As you examine the video you will notice that Mitchell takes every observation and even the slightest critique as an indication of dramatic personal conflict the likes of which one would only see in an epidode of “The West Wing”. In order to create this dramatic and combative narrative in her own mind Mitchell relies on statements and sources from people who were not “in the room” and were three or four levels down.
A journalist must always keep in mind that too many bureaucrats/consultants/staffers wish to see his or her name in the paper or in a book. Others wish to be a ‘secret source”. As is so often the case when stories or rumors come from officials three or four times removed from the President the story gets embellished, sometimes for dramatic effect and sometimes just to fill in the blanks. Through each stage the truth becomes less and less directionally accurate and this is much more so for the “source” that wants to see his name in a book or be “Deep Throat” as they have to keep feeding the journalist in order to keep them coming back for more.
Combine the biases of conflict creation, dramatic theatre, fill in the blanks, and attention whoring with Mitchells clear partisan slant and you can see that she ends up with a narrative in her own mind that she is certain is true, but does not resemble objective reality. Mitchell becomes incredulous while Rumsfeld simply explains to her that she just doesn’t know what she is talking about.
The concentration on conflict and the dramatic at the expense of the historical record is the biggest factor that marginalizes elite media journalism in the eyes of the public. Partisan bias is a significant second.
Journalism students, if you want to be truly respected and trusted the example Andrea Mitchell gave in her “performance” is perhaps the quintessential example of how journalism should not be done.
Reminder of What to Expect from the Elite Media this Election Season: O’Reilly Blasts Washington Post’s Dana Milbank for Openly Lying About Coverage 7 Million People Watched
This is the kind of press coverage we can expect from the Washington Post and the rest of the crew of profoundly snarky pundits sometimes called the elite media or as some others have called it the “Democrat Media Complex”.
[Flashback November 2010]
You would think that if you are going to lie about someone or an event, perhaps it should be an event that wasn’t witnessed by 7 million people. This is exactly the same nonsense that Media Matters does on a regular basis.
Our pal JohnnyDollar, who has been on a roll lately with his vigilance, captured the video:
Washington Post & Accuracy in Media Slam Sean Penn Movie as “Full of Lies”
Since this film has recently been released on DVD it seemed like a good time to revisit this issue from last December
I wrote about the Plame non-scandal scandal at length in The Preface (an IU student paper) and in a term paper on “attitude change propaganda”. I am gratified that the Washington Post editors did the right thing in their recent editorial, but the Washington Post was as guilty as anyone else in reporting the lies about this issue and The Post repeated them regularly.
At first, The Post (along with the rest of the elite media) would just report the usual lies; that Plame was outed by the White House, that she was undercover and that she lost her career as a secret agent as a result of her exposure. All of this and more was debunked by the official investigations.
But as it became more clear that it was Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame who were liars, the Washington Post did something very interesting which made them the focus of my paper on propaganda. On page one and two the Post would report the usual lies about this story as if they were true, and often on the very same day they would write an editorial that was buried in the paper telling the truth about the matter. This happened repeatedly. Do the editors at the Washington Post actually edit and check the accuracy of their reporters and/or the wire stores they feature prominently, or do they just write a daily column and call it an editorial?
The largest misconception is that Valerie Plame was a secret agent at or near the time the events unfolded. The truth is that Plame was outed many years before by secret documents that were leaked which rendered her a desk jockey at the CIA’s WMD Division at Langley. If anyone doubts that may I remind you that when this unfolded Plame had young twins at home, so unless the CIA is in the habit of sending pregnant moms to be with twins overseas undercover you are just going to have to accept that she was put on desk duty.
Plame was listed in Joe Wilson’s Who’s Who entry. Plame made contributions to Democrats listing a known CIA front business as her place of employment. Her neighbors knew she worked for the CIA (as one intrepid reporter went knocking on doors). She was not anything close to 007 by any objective measure.
The Washington Post continued their peculiar behavior recently as Accuracy in Media points out:
While the paper said [in its editorial] it hoped that George W. Bush’s version of events would be vindicated by historians, the Post’s “Reliable Sources” gossip column had run a big article about the public relations blitz for the movie and its various premiers in Washington, D.C. Plame “is more than happy with ‘Fair Game,’ the movie based on her memoir,” the article said. No kidding.
So the “troubling trend” was in evidence at the Post itself, albeit in a different section of the paper.
Indeed Washington Post, where was the reporters fact check in the story linked? The fact that the film was made from Plame’s memoir and that she is happy with it shows that Plame is not just a proven liar, which the evidence has demonstrated and even the Washington Post admits, but rather she is a continuous and flaming one [not the language we like to use here but unfortunately reality demands it – Editor].
To read both of the excellent pieces from Accuracy in Media you can access them HERE and HERE.
Hollywood myth-making on Valerie Plame controversy
WE’RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film “Fair Game” – which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq – deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame’s exposure as a CIA agent. “It’s accurate,” Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember that period.”
We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post’s Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification. [Translation – she made it up – Editor]
The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee [The bi-partisan committee was unanimous in its findings – Editor] found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter [In fact Wilson’s report to the CIA bolstered the case that Saddam was trying to obtain more uranium according to that very same Senate Intelligence Committee Report – Editor] , and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.
“Fair Game” also resells the couple’s story that Ms. Plame’s exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy – but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative. [Think about it, you lie to the newspapers while telling them that the President is a liar; and you expect that the Washington press core won’t track down the fact that it was your wife, Valerie Plame, who sent a memo to her boss recommending that Wilson be sent to Niger? The Senate Intelligence Committee investigators confirmed that as well. Our question still remains, why was Wilson not required to sign a non-disclosure contract? Could it be that the infamous Wilson letter was the goal of the entire affair? – Editor]
Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; “Fair Game” is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored. Mr. Wilson claimed that he had proved that Mr. Bush deliberately twisted the truth about Iraq, and he was eagerly embraced by those who insist the former president lied the country into a war. Though it was long ago established that Mr. Wilson himself was not telling the truth – not about his mission to Niger and not about his wife – the myth endures. We’ll join the former president in hoping that future historians get it right.
Flashback: Democrats Yearly Deficit Spending 6.5 Times Higher than Republicans. Democrats Pork Spending 50 Times Higher
An important reminder about the budget numbers from 2010.
CNS News reported:
When Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) gave her inaugural address as speaker of the House in 2007, she vowed there would be “no new deficit spending.” Since that day, the national debt has increased by $5 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
“After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go, no new deficit spending,” Pelosi said in her speech from the speaker’s podium. “Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.”
Pelosi has served as speaker in the 110th and 111th Congresses.
So much for that promise.
Byron York of the Washington Examiner:
Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.It’s not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act. In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House, Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether — while Democrats roll on.
The watchdog groups — Taxpayers for Common Sense, WashingtonWatch.com, and Taxpayers Against Earmarks — counted total earmark requests in the 2011 budget. Those requests were made by lawmakers earlier this year, but Democratic leaders, afraid that their party’s spending priorities might cost them at the polls, decided not to pass a budget before the Nov. 2 elections. This week, they distilled those earmark requests — threw some out, combined others — into the omnibus bill that was under consideration in the Senate until Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it Thursday night. While that bill was loaded with spending, looking back at the original earmark requests tells us a lot about the spending inclinations of both parties.
In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested 18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion, while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1 billion.
Where did those GOP earmark requests come from? Just four Republican lawmakers: South Carolina Rep. Henry Brown, who did not run for re-election this year; Louisiana Rep. Joseph Cao, who lost his bid for re-election; maverick Texas Rep. Ron Paul; and spending king Rep. Don Young of Alaska. The other Republican members of the House — 174 of them — requested a total of zero earmarks.
Talk to Republicans, and they’ll say it would be nice if there were no earmark requests at all, but party leaders can’t control everybody. “Brown’s retiring, Cao’s defeated, Paul is Paul and Young is Young,” one GOP aide shrugs. Still, the bottom line is that the House GOP’s nearly perfect renunciation of earmarks is striking. “For a voluntary moratorium, it was impressive that there were only four scofflaws,” says Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The Senate is a different story. But even though some Republicans are still seeking earmarks, Democrats are by far the bigger spenders. The watchdog groups found that Democrats requested 15,133 earmarks for 2011, for a total of $54.9 billion, while Republicans requested 5,352 earmarks, for a total of $22 billion.
If you look at the top 10 Senate earmarkers as measured by the total dollar value of earmarks requested, there are seven Democrats and three Republicans. (The leader of the pack is Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, who requested $4.4 billion in earmarks.) The three Republicans are Sens. Roger Wicker, Sam Brownback and Thad Cochran. One of them, Brownback, is leaving the Senate, while the other two are from Mississippi, which is apparently earmark heaven.
Commentary:
Isn’t it interesting that the only time you hear about “deficits” from the Democrats and the elite media is when they want to raise tyour taxes? Then the Democrats drop a 1.1 trillion dollar spending bill in the hopper near the end of a lame duck session and what do we hear? The ….chirp….chirp….chirp… of crickets in the silence.
As the Deficit Commission has rightly pointed out tax rates need to be lowered for most individuals and businesses because the higher the rate the less the compliance, the higher the rate the more wealth goes overseas, the higher the rate the fewer will take risk, the higher the rate the less small businesses can hire. The simple truth is that the wealthy and upper middle class can take money and park it in a tax free growth account and leave it there. They have the option of not moving their money thus it cannot be taxed. It is for these reasons it is economic growth that generates real revenue, not high tax rates.
You heard the rhetoric all over the elite media and from the Democrat leadership, “If we don’t raise taxes on the “rich” the government will lose half a trillion dollars a year in revenue”. That entire narrative is a canard for the following reasons.
There are very few wage earners who make $250,000 a year.
The way the tax code is set up the majority of people who pay the top marginal tax rate and not individuals at all, but are Sub-S small businesses with 5 – 200 employees.
The half a trillion dollar number is generated from a series of formula’s that make up what is known as the “static Keynesian model”. These models not only are not accurate, but usually are not even clos,e as they do not account for changes in behavior that result from people changing the rules. For example: the government taxes every cheese burger 100 dollars. Since America consumes a billion cheese burgers a year the government estimates that the tax revenue will be $100 billion dollars.
Of course this leaves out the obvious, who would buy a cheeseburger of the government taxed each one $100? So along comes a Republican who proposes to lower the tax to $50 per cheese burger; along comes the media and the Democrats to cry that the tax cuts are costing the government $50 billion a year! Quite dishonest isn’t it?
Lowering tax rates resulted in increased revenue under Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton (second term tax cuts), and Bush II.
Video: How Tax Cuts Work & Why Tax Increases Achieve the Exact Opposite of the Stated Intent
Lee Doren of “How The World Works” explains how tax cuts and increases work in a progressive income tax system like we have here in the United States.
Let us examine some charts that help to illustrate this further.
Here is the tax burden by taxable income that came out at the middle of the Bush Presidency:
You see when tax rates are cut and the economy grows the upper and top parts of the PRODUCER CLASS (notice I did not say rich as many of the super rich are NOT producers) pay the lions share of federal income taxes. Those who produce actually produce more, invest more, take more risk and hire more people when the economy grows. So as they pay a lower tax rate they actually pay more in real dollars because they are punished less by moving their money and takling risk.
Now let us look at the tax burden as it is today. According to the Tax Foundation:
Incomes reported by tax returns at the high end of the income spectrum plummeted from 2007 to 2008, as did their share of the nation’s income and income taxes paid.
In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 20.0 percent of adjusted gross income, compared to 2007 when those figures were 40.4 percent and 22.8 percent, respectively. Both of those figures—share of income and share of taxes paid—were their lowest since 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI) and paid 36.9 percent of federal individual income taxes.
Each year from 2005 to 2007, the top 1 percent’s constantly growing share of income earned and taxes paid set a record. That trend reversed in 2008. In fact, the income share for the top 1 percent of tax returns was lower in 2008 than in 2000, largely due to differences in capital gains.
Another indicator of this reversal in the income and tax shares of the top 1 percent is that during 2007, the top 1 percent had actually paid more in federal income tax than the bottom 95 percent, a comparison that was much remarked on a year ago. But the diminished income of the top 1 percent in 2008 means that the comparison no longer holds. During 2008, the bottom 95 percent (AGI under $159,619) paid 41.3 percent of the total collected, a larger share than the 38.0 percent paid by the top 1 percent (AGI over $380,354).
The top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $159,619), however, still paid far more than the bottom 95 percent. The top 5 percent earned 34.7 percent of the nation’s adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes.
So why did the percentage of the tax burden of “the rich” during most of the Bush presidency go UP year after year till 2007, even after the so called “tax cuts to the rich”?
And why in 2008 did a huge portion of the tax burden get shifted to the working middle class and poor?
It is just as we said, if the incentive is there to produce, if the taxes are low and if the risk is measurable those wealthier Americans and producers will take more risk and be more economically active. If you remove the incentive by threatening them with taxes, cap & trade, ObamaCare, tons of regulations, bureaucrats and the corruption that always follows such policies it creates uncertainty investors and producers can no longer make a measured risk. This is when they bottle their money up or invest it in China, who is smart enough not to punish investors and producers for taking risk.
This shows that the tax rate that the producers or “the rich” pay is secondary to certainty, confidence, and economic growth as to how much tax they pay in real dollars.
It is ironic that the left, who claims to pass this stuff in the name of the middle class and “soaking the rich”, in real dollars accomplish exactly the opposite of their stated intent. It ends up that it is the producing middle class who gets soaked with more tax burden and more inflation.
The way to crush the middle class is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. – Vladimir Lenin
White House: Stimulus Goals Have Been Met …
Denial? Is there any regard for reality in D.C. ?
Watch the video at Real Clear Politics. – LINK.
Stimulus over two years later:
Arab League criticizes allied airstrikes on Libya, AFTER asking UN and the West to impose a no fly zone.
[Flashback February 2011. Since our Egypt and Libya policy are ending in disaster with the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in both countries, with Christians being slaughtered and in the case of Egypt, being attacked by government armored vehicles, and the Obama administration selling tanks, choppers, small arms, and missiles to Egypt and other countries in the Islamic world, we thought a second look at the editor’s previous coverage of this category is in order. The category list is on the lower right hand pane of the page. – Editor]
A new fly zone doesn’t just mean making sure nothing flies, it also means taking out all air defenses so those imposing the no fly zone are at the smallest risk.
AP:
CAIRO (AP) — The head of the Arab League has criticized international strikes on Libya, saying they caused civilian deaths.
The Arab League’s support for a no-fly zone last week helped overcome reluctance in the West for action in Libya. The U.N. authorized not only a no-fly zone but also “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.
Amr Moussa says the military operations have gone beyond what the Arab League backed.
Moussa has told reporters Sunday that “what happened differs from the no-fly zone objectives.” He says “what we want is civilians’ protection not shelling more civilians.”
U.S. and European strikes overnight targeted mainly air defenses, the U.S. military said. Libya says 48 people were killed, including civilians.
Enforce a no fly zone and take out certain armored elements, do all of that without scratching the paint. OK Arab league, how about we pull out and YOU show us how it’s done.
They are doing this to please radicalized elements of the Arab street who were angered by their governments asking for help.
Video: A liberal on the difference between Libya and Iraq…
[Flashback February 2011. Since our Egypt and Libya policy are ending in disaster with the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in both countries, with Christians being slaughtered and in the case of Egypt, being attacked by government armored vehicles, and the Obama administration selling tanks, choppers, small arms, and missiles to Egypt and other countries in the Islamic world, we thought a second look at the editor’s previous coverage of this category is in order. The category list is on the lower right hand pane of the page. – Editor]
“So Obama is killing civilians in a preemptive, unfunded, undeclared war for oil promoted by the dictators of the Arab League and the UN in support of some unidentified rebels he has never met with, and you are fine with that?”
Hypocrisy on display –
Talking Points Memo Lies About Tea Party Arrests
Many of us have seen this photo which has gone viral on the net:
The far left, which is not happy about this photo for obvious reasons, is touting a piece from “Talking Points Memo” claiming that nine or ten TEA Party protesters were arrested on Capital Hill.
Talking Points Memo is a radical left smear site that is designed with a custom WordPress theme complete with ads to make it look “legit”. Even the elite media does not consider TPM to be a reliable source. TPM is associated with writers at the Huffington Post. Readers might remember that this was before most of the Huffington Post staff walked out after Arianna Huffington refused to pay them after she had gotten her multimillion dollar windfall from AOL.
TPM likely edited this piece after the fact to make it look like people at a TEA Party protest were being mass arrested. So how is it that we discovered that TPM knew that those taken into custody were a part of a pro-life group that often gets arrested and not TEA Party participants? Google Cache doesn’t lie:
Well look at that, Google shows that TPM did report that those arrested were a part of a pro-life group at the time. This has been scrubbed from the TPM web site. Anti-abortion protesters somehow got converted to TEA Party members. TPM was not careful to edit the entire piece though as at the bottom of the piece they left this update intact:
Friday update: Evan is running down the story of these arrests, Randall Terry’s group was involved. Also, the man who was on the curb appears to be Norman Weslin, and we dug up some video showing him using similar tactics as he was arrested at a Notre Dame protest when President Obama spoke during graduation.
Randall Terry’s group has made it a point to get themselves arrested for doing “sit ins” for decades. TPM either forgot to scrub this as well or assumed that most readers would not know about Randall Terry’s group. Randall Terry is so famous for getting arrested that most anyone who has taken even a moderate interest in politics knows about his group. Hardly the “storming of offices” and other violent imagery that TPM used.
[Editor’s Note – I took screen shots of all of the pages involved in case our friends at TPM or HuffPo decide that they wish to engage in any further creative editing.]
Remember how we mentioned that TPM was affiliated with people at the Huffington Post? It would seem that they pulled the same trick at Huffington Post, but were more careless:
Notice how they claim Politico.com as a source and even include a quote? But when one follows the link to the Politico.com piece there is no mention of any TEA Party activists being arrested.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. ABC News reports that on the same day nine leftists demanding health care to be nationalized were arrested for “occupying” the office of Senator Joe Lieberman. Through some miracle this escaped reporting at the Huffington Post and at Talking Points Memo, unless Huffington Post would dare consider trying to attribute the arrests of these nine leftists to the TEA Party.
TPM still has videos online attributing the arrests to TEA Party activists.
Media Research Center: How the Elite Media Worked to Distort, Dismantle and Destroy Reagan’s Legacy
Via the Media Research Center:
Special Report. “Rewriting Ronald Reagan: How the Media Have Worked to Distort, Dismantle and Destroy His Legacy”
Below is the Executive Summary for a special report posted today on the MRC’s Web site, “Rewriting Ronald Reagan: How the Media Have Worked to Distort, Dismantle and Destroy His Legacy,” posted with 103 quotes enhanced by 22 videos clips with accompanying audio.
This week the celebrations begin for the “Reagan Centennial.” This report, compiled by Rich Noyes with video rendering help from Kyle Drennen and fresh quotes text and quotes added by Tim Graham, is a reminder about the disdain, disgust and disrespect the news media displayed toward Ronald Reagan in office and in the years since.
For the Executive Summary online: http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/2011/RewritingReagan/ExecSumm.aspx
The text below includes links to the seven specific sections:
“Reagan the Man,” “The Reaganomics Recovery,” “Reagan and National Defense,” “Reagan and Race,” “The Reagan Legacy” and “Reagan, Slammed by Celebrities.”For the PDF sans video clips, but in a great format for printing and with a colorful cover created by the MRC’s Melanie Selmer:
http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/uploads/Reagan2011.pdfNow the Executive Summary for the January 31 report:
Rewriting Ronald Reagan
How the Media Have Worked to Distort, Dismantle and Destroy His LegacyAs the nation prepares to pay tribute to former President Ronald Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth, it is amazing to consider that his success at turning the U.S. away from 1960s-style liberalism was accomplished in the face of a daily wave of news media hostility. The media’s first draft of history was more myth than reality: that Reagan only brought the nation poverty, ignorance, bankruptcy, and a dangerously imbalanced foreign and defense policy.
The Media Research Center has assembled a report documenting the “objective” national media’s most biased takes on President Reagan, his record and his times, including 22 video clips and matching MP3 audio:
I. Reagan the Man: Reporters often agonized over why the American public liked Reagan, that they couldn’t see through the White House spell and see Reagan in the contemptuous light that the media did. Go to: http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/2011/RewritingReagan/Man.aspx
II. The Reaganomics Recovery: Reagan’s policies caused a dramatic economic turn-around from high inflation and unemployment to steady growth, but the good news was obscured by bad news of trade deficits, greedy excesses of the rich, and supposedly booming homelessness. See:
http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/2011/RewritingReagan/Reaganomics.aspx
III. Reagan and National Defense: Ronald Reagan may have won the Cold War, but to the media, the Reagan defense buildup seemed like a plot designed to deny government aid to the poor and hungry, and was somehow the only spending responsible for “bankrupting” the country. Check:
http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/2011/RewritingReagan/Defense.aspx
IV. Reagan and Race: Using their definition of “civil rights” — anything which adds government-mandated advantages for racial minorities is “civil rights” progress — liberal journalists suggested that somehow Ronald Reagan was against liberty for minorities. Go to:
http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/2011/RewritingReagan/Race.aspxV. The Reagan Legacy: The media painted the Reagan era as a horrific time of low ethics, class warfare on the poor, and crushing government debt. Examples:
http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/2011/RewritingReagan/ReaganLegacy.aspxEXTRA: Reagan, Slammed by Celebrities. Ronald Reagan’s long Hollywood career earned him no credit among celebrities, who ridiculed him and even inserted anti-Reagan jokes into everyday entertainment programming. Check:
http://www.mrc.org/specialreports/2011/RewritingReagan/Celebrities.aspx
PBS’ Tavis Smiley Tells Ayaan Hirsi Ali that Christians in America Blow Up People Every Day…
Ayaan Hirsi Ali lives under a death mark. She needs security 24/7 and likely will for the rest of her life. She made a film with Theo van Gogh about the status of women is Islamic countries. Van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight by a militant Islamist. The knife driven through his chest had a note addressed to Ali essentially saying that she was next. Radicalized Muslim communities that function as a state within a state are popping up around Europe and the Western European governments do not have the will to stand up to it.
Ali escaped a life of forced marriage and virtual slavery from her Islamic family. She escaped, got educated, and became a Member of the Dutch Parliament. When it became clear that her security needs could not be met she came to the United States.
She writes about her experiences and how the West should stand up to preserve our freedom and our culture. Reflexively the progressive secular left in the elite media, which has been taught in American Universities that Western Culture is “the oppressor” and that Christianity is evil, often attacks her and throws the most outrageous false premises at her in an effort to embarrass her. They end up just embarrassing themselves. Watch the following exchange between PBS Tavis Smiley and Ali.
[gigya src=”http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/eyeblast.swf?v=XdqGZu2Guz” width=”518″ height=”419″ quality=”high” wmode=”transparent” allowFullScreen=”true” ]How can anyone be this deranged and foolish? I saw this level of idiocy frequently among the campus left. Smiley and his close fron Cornell Belcher ‘West’ are icons among far left academics. From 2008-2010 162 Muslims have been arrested in the United States for plotting against America. How many Christians have been? It happens every day according to Smiley so how about he produce just 50? Anyone care to take that challenge?
With that said, Smiley’s outrageous statements can be debunked by anyone with access to an internet search engine. Post offices are not blown up every day. In fact, using Google to search only two threats of blowing up post offices in the US appear; one from a homeless man who wanted money and another from a man who was likely mentally disturbed as he false reported about an alleged bomb threat to a post office.
No one was called the N word in front of the Capitol Building. The event was being recorded from many angles by a sea of new media recording devices that captured every moment of the event which demonstrated that nothing of the kind happened. A $100,000 reward for evidence of it happening was offered by Andrew Breitbart with no takers. Of the two Democrat politicians who made the false claim, one back-pedaled and the other is the same politician who compared John McCain to Democrat Governor George Wallace in October 2008.
The only known acts of violence at Tea Party events have been carried out by far left extremists and paid union thugs who showed up to physically attack the participants. All of this has been reported in detail on this site (see the violence category on my old college blog as I have every incident detailed with evidence).
So what do you think? Is Smiley mentally challenged, delusional, as ignorant as the day is long, or just a liar? In any case he has won the coveted title of “Pinhead of the Year”.
“It’s always the same with these bogus equivalences: They start by pretending loftily to find no difference between aggressor and victim, and they end up by saying that it’s the victim of violence who is ‘really’ inciting it” – Christopher Hitchens writing about how the elite media, in its reflexive defense of Islamic extremism, uses the most outrageously bogus moral equivalences to try to discredit Ayann Hirsi Ali.
Related:
Liberal Talker Alan Colmes: Muslims aren’t the terror problem, white males are…..
Heritage: Anti-Drilling Policies Costing Federal Government Billions in Lost Revenue
Related:
Obama arbitrarily revoking coal mining permits, putting people out of work, raising energy costs.
Gas prices up 55% under Obama
Press Grilled Bush When Gas Hit $3.00 – Nada for Obama… UPDATED!
API: Recent Studies Show Obama Drilling Moratorium Will Cost 50,000 Jobs; 160,000 by 2032.
CPI: Big Polluters Freed from Environmental Oversight by Stimulus (government picking winners and losers)
Little Truth in President’s Oil Spill Comments
SCANDAL – Administration lies about conclusion by expert panel to ban off shore drilling. “We never said that” expert panelists say. Obama still refusing skimmer ships from foreign countries….
Another Lie: Obama now fully reversed on offshore drilling.
Billions of dollars in potential oil revenue that could help close the federal deficit is being lost as a result of President Obama’s anti-drilling agenda.
Production in the Gulf of Mexico — which normally accounts for about 30 percent of all U.S. production — is expected to drop this year by 220,000 barrels per day, according to projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
With oil currently at $90 a barrel and the royalty rate at 18.75 percent, that equals $3.7 million in lost revenue each day.
If the agency projections hold over the course of the year, the federal government would lose more than $1.35 billion from Gulf royalty payments this year.
The number grows even larger when coupled with a lack of Gulf lease sales and fewer rental payments. Those three components — royalties, leases and rent — make up a sizeable amount of government revenue.
The looming shortfall is raising red flags on Capitol Hill. Sen. David Vitter, R-LA, an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s drilling moratorium and the subsequent slowdown in permitting, first called attention to it in September.
“It’s not only about job loss along the Gulf Coast — the federal government is losing revenue as a result of the administration’s misguided moratorium,” Vitter explained.
“I’ve been attacking the moratorium from multiple angles and will continue to do so until drilling can fully resume.”Interior Secretary Ken Salazar canceled a Gulf lease sale last October. He postponed another in the central Gulf of Mexico, originally scheduled for March, until 2012. One planned for October 2011 in the western Gulf also could be delayed until 2012. That would make 2011 the first year since 1965 that the federal government has failed to hold a lease sale in the Gulf.
Bonus bids from lease sales averaged about $1 billion in 2009 and 2010, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE).
The lack of lease sales ultimately means the government will collect less in rent payments by lease holders. Offshore rents currently generate more than $200 million per year.
The Gulf revenue decline comes as Obama’s oil spill commission is recommending new fees for oil companies – a scenario that could be avoided if the government removed barriers to exploration and production.
“Over the years, offshore production royalties have provided billions of dollars to the U.S. government,” saidNational Ocean Industries Association President Randall Luthi, former director of the Minerals Management Service, which predated BOEMRE. “Now, at a time when Congress is looking to maximize efficiency without raising taxes, there sits millions of dollars per day uncollected,” he said.
The Obama administration has dismissed the financial impact. The revenue loss would be “negligible,” Rebecca Blank, under secretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce, told a Senate committee in the fall.
“It is difficult to speculate now on the specific impact the moratorium would have over the five- or 10-year budget window, but one would expect the impact on the deficit to be negligible,” Blank wrote to the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship in September.
“Revenues may be higher or they may be lower depending on future years’ oil prices and the time profile of production,” Blank said.
Energy experts said the administration’s policies are certain to have long-term consequences for the industry.
“You continually need new discoveries and new production coming online to replace what’s being depleted,” said Andy Radford, senior policy adviser at the American Petroleum Institute. “These wells taper off over time — the ones that are producing now — so without a continual flow of new discoveries and new production, the number will continue to decrease.”
A report from the economic forecasting firm IHS Global Insight estimated that federal, state and local taxes related to the Gulf, combined with royalty payments, totaled $19 billion in 2009.
Royalties, bonus and rent payments made up more than $6 billion of that number. That pot of money could go a long way toward deficit reduction. And that’s from the Gulf alone.
Significant additional revenues would be generated if the federal government opened access to exploration and production in areas currently closed to development such as the eastern Gulf of Mexico, portions of the Rocky Mountains, ANWR, and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
A recent study conducted by Wood Mackenzie for the American Petroleum Institute estimated that increased access to those areas would bring $150 billion into federal coffers by 2025.
Why leave so much money uncollected, especially in a time of rising deficits?
Originally published by the Washington Examiner.
FLASHBACK: Obama vs. Obama on War Justification
Photo caption via Bob Schneider.
Remember this:
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
Or this:
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
More at Verum Serum.
UPDATE – Human Events has some fun:
UPDATE II – Mona Charen Blasts Obama’s Hypocrisy
In the Democratic primary campaign of 2008, candidate Barack Obama scored points because he, unlike many Democrats, had opposed the Iraq War from the start. Though a state senator at the time of the 2002 congressional vote authorizing military action, Obama had delivered a speech to an anti-war rally in Chicago.
He said, “I don’t oppose all wars … What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”
Regarding the justifications for war with Iraq, state Sen. Obama was unpersuaded: “I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted U.N. inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity … But … Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors …”
As American forces join the war against Moammar Gadhafi, the nation is entitled to an explanation. How is the case for war against Gadhafi smarter (remember, Obama is only against “dumb” wars) or less “ideological” or more prudent than that for war against Saddam Hussein?
Certainly, with an army of only 50,000, Gadhafi represents far less of a threat to his neighbors or to us than did Saddam, who commanded an army estimated at 350,000. As for humanitarian concerns, what Gadhafi is doing to the rebels in Libya is exactly what Saddam did to his domestic enemies, but on a reduced scale. As Obama himself said, Saddam was “a ruthless man … who butchers his own people to secure his power.” Yet that didn’t justify a war, state Sen. Obama told us.
Sen. Obama did not believe that Saddam posed a danger to the United States or to his neighbors — though he had attacked or invaded three of his neighbors: Iran, Kuwait, and Israel. Yet Gadhafi has hardly ranged beyond his own borders.
m
Leftist conference of unions, students, legislators and leftist community groups: How we will disrupt capital and create economic uncertainty. How we can create a new financial crisis, bring down the stock market….
Editor’s Note – This was a post from just a few months ago and is a little reminder that the “Occupy” protest going on in New York right now was planned in a galaxy not so far away by the same usual suspects.
UPDATE – ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Organizer Is Marketing Analyst Whose LinkedIn Lists Work For Investment Bankers – LINK
Occupy Wall Street ‘Stands In Solidarity’ With Obama Front Group Funded by the Wealthy Financiers and Bankers They are Protesting – LINK
[Editor’s Note – and if these partially misguided protesters get their way the Democrats will pass a tax increase law that will not benefit the students, it will benefit the super rich because, as is the case with all of these “soak the rich” efforts, they either chase wealth out of the country and/or exceptions for those who are politically connected get included in the tax code and it will not be the GE’s and Google’s who pay, it will be the small and medium-sized competition who will get soaked.]
UPDATE – Steven Lerner, the man in the video overtly plotting a new economic crisis, has visited the White House four times as well as the Treasury Department.
Watch this video:
Longer tape of this conversation:
Transcript and full article at Business Insider:
CAUGHT ON TAPE: Former SEIU Official Reveals Secret Plan To Destroy JP Morgan, Crash The Stock Market, And Redistribute Wealth In America
A former official of one of the country’s most-powerful unions, SEIU, has a secret plan to “destabilize” the country.
The plan is designed to destroy JP Morgan, nuke the stock market, and weaken Wall Street’s grip on power, thus creating the conditions necessary for a redistribution of wealth and a change in government.
The former SEIU official, Stephen Lerner, spoke in a closed session at a Pace University forum last weekend.
UPDATE I – Glenn Beck: This is a clear case of economic terrorism – LINK.
UPDATE II – SEIU sued under RICO statute (Via The Blaze):
Cockroaches, bugs, mold, and flies. These are just some of the props and rumors allegedly employed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) against the American unit of French catering company Sodexo. And the company’s had enough.
Fed up with tactics that include intimidation, extortion, and yes, sabotage that apparently includes plastic cockroaches, Sodexo filed a lawsuit against the SEIU last week under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
“We work constructively with unions every day but the SEIU has crossed the line by breaking the law,” Robert Stern, general counsel for Sodexo USA, said in a statement. “We will not tolerate the SEIU’s tactics any longer.”
SEIU has been fighting to represent 80,000 hourly Sodexo employees, which is above and beyond the 180,000 hourly employees who are already union members. The union regularly stages protests against the company to make its point, like this one last fall on the campus of George Mason University. The video alleges SEIU bused in protesters, who can be heard chanting, among other things, “As long as it takes, whatever it takes, we’ll be in your face!”
Sodexo’s complaint, filed in federal court in Alexandria, VA, alleges acts of SEIU blackmail, vandalism, trespass, harassment, and lobbying law violations designed to steer business away from, and harm, the company.
And just what exactly might those acts look like? Sodexo gives the details:
The complaint alleges that the SEIU, in face to face meetings, threatened Sodexo USA’s executives that it would harm Sodexo USA’s business unless they gave in to the union, and then carried out its threats through egregious behavior, including:
- throwing plastic roaches onto food being served by Sodexo USA at a high profile event;
- scaring hospital patients by insinuating that Sodexo USA food contained bugs, rat droppings, mold and flies;
- lying to interfere with Sodexo USA business and sneaking into elementary schools to avoid security;
- violating lobbying laws to steer business away from Sodexo USA, even at the risk of costing Sodexo USA employees their jobs; and
- harassing Sodexo USA employees by threatening to accuse them of wrongdoing.
The complaint, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, seeks an injunction against the SEIU and its locals and executives, as well as monetary damages to be determined by the court.
UPDATE III – Member of Congress to Attorney General Eric Holder – LINK.
EPA Using Tax Dollars for Partisan Advertising
Welcome to Chicago style corruption, just what we warned you about before the election. Just what you on the left denied would happen, is happening.
Via some great reporting at Big Government.com:
Your tax dollars at work…
The EPA is now paying the American Lung Association to attack Republicans:
[Editor’s Note – This is a billboard just a few miles north of where I live attacking Fred Upton. In a crazy ruling by the court, they handed the EPA the power to regulate CO2 as if it were a pollutant. The Constitution says that all lawmaking power rests with the Congress. It is with this “authority” under color of law (fake law) that Obama has instructed the EPA to create a Cap & Trade scheme against the will of Congress and the American people. This is profoundly and expressly unconstitutional and a complete violation of Separation of Powers.
So the Republicans are moving to take this power away. This billboard is Obama’s response. The dishonest narrative is “Republicans want to poison the air and kill this child “. CO2 is what we breath out and what trees and plants breath in, without it we would all starve. Almost any economic activity creates some CO2 so this is an “excuse” to regulate anything and everything by using unelected bureaucrats and ignoring Congress altogether.
This is abuse of power on its face, Democrats know this but just don’t care, and some Republicans are afraid of being accused of wanting to poison the girl on the billboard. The only way to put an end to this is to vote for bold conservative candidates overwhelmingly.]
The ALA put up four billboards like this one near Rep. Fred Upton’s office in Michigan. Upton is the House Energy and Commerce Chairman. (PlowShareGroup)
The Environmental Protection Agency is paying the American Lung Association to run attack ads against Republican members of Congress.
JunkScience.com reported:
“The American Lung Association has targeted House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton for his efforts to stop U.S. EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions by placing billboards within sight of his district offices linking climate change with increased childhood asthma,” reports E&E News PM.
But as we reported last week in “EPA owns the American Lung Association,” the EPA has paid the American Lung Association over $20 million in the last ten years, and has paid the ALA many more millions in a symbiotic relationship going back to at least 1990.
The EPA-ALA relationship works something like this: EPA pays the ALA and, in return, the ALA agitates for more stringent EPA air quality regulation, including by lawsuit. Now it’s billboards.
In addition to defunding National Public Radio, the House GOP should look at the EPA’s funding of American Lung Association.
It doesn’t matter that the EPA policies will cause your electricity rates to necessarily skyrocket. It’s all about fundamentally changing America.
Obama refuses Congressional request on Obama meetings with lobbyists, mega corporations, interest groups and drug companies
Remember when Dick Cheney met with those oil guys in the Energy Task Force before they proposed legislation to drill that would have moved us closer to independence and lower gas prices. The left created all of these conspiracy theories about the meeting, demanded transcripts etc etc.
Well now the shoe is on the other foot and the left and the elite media are like this:
So much for transparency…
Obama tells GOP: Nice try on health care records
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama once promised that negotiations over his health care overhaul would be carried out openly, in front of TV cameras and microphones. Tell that to the White House now.
Republican congressional investigators got the brush-off this past week after pressing for details of meetings between White House officials and interest groups, including drug companies and hospitals that provided critical backing for Obama’s health insurance expansion.
Complying with the records request from the House Energy and Commerce Committee “would constitute a vast and expensive undertaking” and could “implicate longstanding executive branch confidentiality interests,” White House lawyer Robert Bauer wrote the committee. Translation: Nice try.
It’s one more roadblock for Republicans who tapped into widespread anxiety about the scope and costs of the new health care law to regain control of the House in last fall’s elections.
So far, they’ve been unable to repeal the landmark legislation they dismiss as “Obamacare.” GOP efforts to deny administration agencies the money to carry out the law are running into unintended consequences, not to mention the sheer difficulty of tracking those dollars. Now it looks like oversight isn’t going to be easy either.
“We are both concerned and disappointed by your response,” the committee chairman, Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., wrote back to Bauer. “The American public deserves the information we have requested. The secret meetings conducted by (White House officials) are a perfect example of why transparency in government is so important.”
This is the most transparent White House in history as Obama promised so many times in the campaign.
About the debt increase deal…
Remember that debt increase deal? Just remember come election time to remember the following…
As far as the budget deal we thought we have a few comments.
1 – We were never in danger of a default. The government brings in almost 200 billion a month in tax dollars which is more than enough to service the debt. Anyone who said that the August 2nd date would result in default is just lying straight up. Judging by how the elite media has been repeating this it furthers my personal observation that journalists are lazy and are, as a collective, the most uninformed people I have ever encountered.
2 – These polls that you here about in the news saying that the people want “republicans to compromise” are polls like the CBS News poll that had a sample which included only 25% Republicans, so the sample was rigged. Notice how the Democrats are not asked to compromise in the press? When the people were stone against Obama Care by a 60% margin where was the press pounding the polls than? Where was the compromise when the Democrats would not allow the GOP into the room and would only see the bill a few hours before a vote?
3 – “Reagan increased the debt limit”… Reagan did not have a House controlled by his own party. During that time we had the 24/7 nuclear triangle operating at the pinnacle of the Cold War and a government shut down at such a time would have undermined our efforts to posture and beat the Soviets.
4 – “We need to raise taxes on the rich”. First of all we have been “raising taxes on the rich” for decades now so why is it that John Kerry paid 12.34% on $5,072,000 worth of income? The dirty little secret is that the tax rate that the Democrats are talking about is the wage earner rate which is paid by high-end wage earners such as doctors and engineers, but it is also the rate paid by most small businesses that have employees. Most of the income that the “rich” bring is defined by the tax code as “unearned income”, so you could raise this tax rate to the moon and the multimillionaires and billionaires will laugh as it will not be they who pay it. For more details on why this is follow this LINK.
Using static models as the CBO likes to use the Democrats proposed tax increase would pay for all of 10 days of deficit spending. Of course since people do not operate in a static universe the result would be an impact on job creators and even less revenue growth to the government. Can anyone name a mainstream economic theorist who said to raise taxes during what appears to be a double dip recession?
4 – As far as spending cuts in the “deal”, we must remember base line budgeting. If we froze spending at current levels Washington would consider that to be a $9.5 trillion dollar “cut”, so all we are talking about here is a small reduction in the typical increases in spending. As far as spending cuts are concerned this is not a serious plan as spending under this deal will continue to skyrocket. Democrats and some leftist journalists are calling these “draconian cuts” and are simply engaging in the most dishonest demagoguery imaginable.
5 – But here is the rub, when we lose our AAA credit rating, which now appears unavoidable as both Moodys and S&P have said that neither the Boehner plan nor the Reid plan are serious about getting spending under control, it will cost us more than $100 billion a year in interest alone; when that is factored in there are no reductions even in the increases in spending. It gets worse. When you add the damage to the economy that loss of AAA will bring it makes all of this worse.
The loss of AAA will impact most unsecured credit, it will impact the value of the dollar (inflation), it will impact those who use short-term credit such as farmers who use seasonal loans and import/export businesses. It is going to damage the economy in such a way that most people will feel it. We did not lose AAA even during the great depression. The “deal” which passed is also easy to demagogue because the left will say that this deal IS the “Boehner Plan” (which is largely isn’t any more do to an almost total cave on spending cuts) and HIS plan caused us to lose AAA.
[Note: The first plans that were introduced by the Tea Party/GOP were much more serious and had a real chance of preventing the loss of AAA. While this is indeed a failure of government, is there any doubt that the Democratic Party is intent on blowing up our credit rating? The first proposals from the House had a chance of preserving AAA and the media/Democrats had a conniption fit calling called it extreme. Think about this folks, preserving AAA is now an extreme position according to much of the elite media and a political party. The Constitution does have limits and the GOP cannot run the government from the House. This is why elections matter.]
6 – The deal also includes a vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment to send it to the states. If this amendment resolution passes the Democrat controlled Senate and gets to the states it will be a great tool to begin to get this spending problem under control. If it looks like it will pass the Senate I expect the Democrat leadership will pull some stunt prevent the vote or prevent its passage. Government has a structural institutional incentive to spend more and more, so the only way to curb that is to make a structural change. Aside from a vote on this Amendment, which I will stress has not happened yet, this was not a tough deal or a Herculean compromise by any stretch.
This is a must see exchange between Marco Rubio and John Kerry on the debt limit debate. Be sure to watch every second as this is invaluable.
Kerry will think twice before trying to posture Marco Rubio again. Notice also, even though Rubio did not join the TEA Party Caucus he defends their position, which is to offer a plan that fixes the problem. Rubio uses a most interesting analogy to show why this is so important.
UPDATE – The latest version of the deal includes $2.1 Trillion in cuts over 10 years with half planned now and the other half planned by a “budget cut committee later”. Keep in mind that cuts in “Washington Speak” are not cuts, but rather a decrease in the increase in spending. So instead of a planned increase in spending over 10 years of $9.5 Trillion they will plan to increase spending by $7.4 trillion. The president gets his debt increase limit extended to well passed the campaign, deficit spending shoots up, no entitlement reform, no plan to balance the budget over the next eight years. There are some actual small cuts in discretionary spending, but entitlement spending that is on autopilot. Of course even this is a fraction of the increase in discretionary spending that has gone up since 2008.
UPDATE –
LARGEST DEBT HIKE IN HISTORY…
$32.4 billion per page?
Borrowing to surge…
FLASHBACK: Democrats taped on phone acting in bad faith, plotting a government shutdown
Remember when we said that the Democrats are pushing for a government shut down, which is why they keep moving the goal posts in trying to boost deficit spending? Well here is the proof. It is called acting in bad faith folks.
How could anyone who wants fiscal responsibility ever vote for any of these people again. You heard me. If you take exception to that comment please try to justify what we have just seen in the comments below.
UPDATE: Rand Paul: What Schumer is doing to the country is extreme
Michelle Bachmann responds as well:
Mike Pence: If the Democrats want a shutdown so bad, do it and see what happens…
Boehner/Bachmann: Democrats rooting for a shutdown
Its true too. Every time the Republicans make a compromise the Democrats move the goal post. First it was move spending back to 2008 levels; then it was cut by $100 billion; then it was $61 billion’ then it was, 10.5 or 33 billion dollars depending on what Democrat you were talking to. How anyone, and I mean anyone who tells you that they are for fiscal responsibility and want to vote Democrat in 2012 is either duped or just lying to you.
Dana Perino: Interesting How Obama Says Things That Are So Quickly Proven False
Obama takes credit for global oil production going up, but this is in spite of him not because of him. domestic Oil production is down 13% since he was elected, he has instituted an illegal offshore drilling ban which he is in contempt of court for. Thousands have lost their jobs. But look at what Obama says below.
Obama knows he can tell the fattest whoppers imaginable and the elite media will cover for him. Luckily we have blogs, talk radio and a Fox News willing to tell both sides.
Via Gateway Pundit:
President Obama told the American public on Friday:
So any notion that my administration has shut down oil production might make for a good political sound bite, but it doesn’t match up with reality. We are encouraging offshore exploration and production.
It was a horrible lie.
The American Petroleum Institute responded to the president:
The Obama administration continues to delay or defer action on developing our domestic resources of oil and natural gas at every turn.
“The trend is alarming. The administration has postponed lease sales in offshore areas. It has cancelled lease sales in onshore federal lands. It has extended permitting timelines for current leases and added unnecessary regulatory burdens. It has chosen inaction on essential energy projects that would create jobs, drive economic growth, and boost federal revenues.
“The administration is well on its way toward creating higher gasoline prices for Americans.
“To get more oil and gas, we need more access. Placing more government lands and waters off-limits and forcing companies to focus on areas that may show little promise even if already under lease will not solve our energy challenges.
Dana Perino is right.
It is frightening that the Obama Administration is so willing to openly lie to the American public.
Obama Administration Hiding Meetings with Lobbyists
Flashback February 2011
Editor’s Note – It is tenacity and vigilance like this that has kept Michelle Malkin the queen of conservative internet news since the invention of the medium. The respect she enjoys is well deserved.
Via the queen of the blogosphere Michelle Malkin:
In Culture of Corruption, I exposed Team Obama’s big lie about its commitment to public disclosure and openness in government.
Liberals balked. “How can you possibly make such a judgment so early on in the presidency?” they squawked.
After the book was published, the White House’s selective transparency and subversion of disclosure rules and regs continued apace.
Democrats played hide-and-seek on the Hill.
President Obama cut endless backroom deals and cut C-SPAN out.
The White House carved out a Coffee House loophole to keep lobbyist meetings off the books.
And, finally, the White House press corps started complaining about lack of access.
Now, this today from Politico:
Caught between their boss’s anti-lobbyist rhetoric and the reality of governing, President Barack Obama’s aides often steer meetings with lobbyists to a complex just off the White House grounds – and several of the lobbyists involved say they believe the choice of venue is no accident.
It allows the Obama administration to keep these lobbyist meetings shielded from public view — and out of Secret Service logs collected on visitors to the White House and later released to the public.
…Obama’s administration has touted its release of White House visitors logs as a breakthrough in transparency, as the first White House team ever to reveal the comings and goings around the West Wing and the Old Executive Office Building.
The Jackson Place townhouses are a different story.
There are no records of meetings at the row houses just off Lafayette Square that house the White House Conference Center and the Council on Environmental Quality, home to two of the busiest meeting spaces. The White House can’t say who attended meetings there, or how often. The Secret Service doesn’t log in visitors or require a background check the way it does at the main gates of the White House.
…It’s not only Jackson Place. Another favorite off-campus meeting spot is a nearby Caribou Coffee, which, according to the New York Times, has hosted hundreds of meetings among lobbyists and White House staffers since Obama took office.
And administration officials recently asked some lobbyists and others who met with them to sign confidentiality agreements barring them from disclosing what was discussed at meetings with administration officials, in that case a rental policy working group.
Obama lied, transparency died, Part 989.
See, I told you so.
So much for transparency.
The latest lie from the left: Two-thirds of oil and gas leases in Gulf inactive
The talking point: What do you mean drill for more oil, the oil companies do not want to drill for more oil, they bought the leases and just let them sit there so we will pay Brazil to look for oil there. [Oh by the way who has a money stake in Petro-Brazil? Obama money man and buddy George Soros – Editor]
That entire narrative is a complete scam as you will soon see.
AP:
WASHINGTON – An Interior Department report to be released Tuesday says more than two-thirds of offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico are sitting idle.
According to the report, obtained by The Associated Press, those inactive swaths of the Gulf could potentially hold more than 11 billion barrels of oil and 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The report also shows that 45 percent of all onshore oil and gas leases are inactive.
President Barack Obama ordered the Interior Department review earlier this month amid pressure to curb rising gas prices. The White House says Obama will address his plans for the country’s energy security during a speech in Washington Wednesday.
The first problem is that the permitting process to actually get the permits to drill on the lease take years.The government puts years worth of roadblocks in the permitting process, this complicated by the fact that in each stage of the permitting process that gets approved by the federal government, eco-extremist groups sue to stop it.
Obama instituted an offshore drilling ban as was widely reported. The ban was illegal and a federal judge ordered him to stop. Obama ignored the court order. Then look at what Obama did to the regulations to have a de facto ban anyways. The film below explains how they did it. It will infuriate you.
So here is the situation, the government charges money for the lease and then works with anti-capitalist and eco-extremist groups to prevent that lease from ever getting the permits.
Related:
Obama Administration Held in Contempt for Violating Court Order
API: Recent Studies Show Obama Drilling Moratorium Will Cost 50,000 Jobs; 160,000 by 2032.
Heritage: Anti-Drilling Policies Costing Federal Government Billions in Lost Revenue
If You Ever Needed Proof that Democrats Want Higher Gas Prices…
UPDATE –
Sarah Palin (from April 2011): What We Were Saying One Year Ago About Obama’s Failed Energy Policy
UPDATE II – Dick Morris:Obama has zeroed out new drilling permits. The few that are starting now are left over from permits that were approved from the Bush Administration
Andrew Klavan: Lies! Deceit! Treachery! You Too Can Be a Mainstream Media Reporter!
Just how corrupt is the elite media?
Andrew Klavan: The Extremists are Coming!
More on elite media corruption and how they try to manipulate the Overton Window.
Andrew Klavan: How the elite media lied to us about the economy, the war and engaged in the grossest double standards imaginable
Andrew Klavan: Leaving Al Gore
Andrew Klavan: The New York Times Answer Man
Examining Black Loyalty to Democrats
Alfonzo Rachel:
Andrew Klavan: Michele Bachmann Makes a Gaffe
If you ask the elite media only Republicans make occasional verbal gaffs…
Political Arena 