The House passed the Farm Bill two weeks ago, it is Democrats in the Senate who have not acted on the Bill. This is an example of the kind of whopping lies we will see in this campaign.
In an ABC News/Washington Post poll, 28 percent of seniors viewed Ryan favorably while 28 percent viewed him unfavorably before Romney selected him to be his running mate. After his selection, 46% of those seniors now view him favorably while 28 percent still view him unfavorably. In just one weekend, Ryan has increased his favorability numbers among seniors by 14 percentage points, even as Democrats spent the weekend trying to demonize Ryan and his budget.
Public Policy Polling (PPP), the left-leaning outfit that does polling for the liberal website, Daily Kos, polled voters in Ohio over the weekend, tweeted that Ryan’s numbers in Ohio are actually best among seniors, with 38 percent of seniors viewing Ryan favorability as opposed to 29 percent who see him unfavorably. The full PPP poll will be released on Tuesday, but the tweet can be seen below.
This should not be a surprise to the mainstream media. In 2011, a Gallup poll found that seniors preferredRyan’s budget over Obama’s, despite what the mainstream media tried to lead Americans to believe. This is probably why CBS edited out the portion of its interview with Ryan and Romney on Sunday’s “60 Minutes” in which Ryan talked about how his mother was a Florida resident who was on Medicare. That portion of the interview was only available on CBS’s website and was cut from the national television broadcast.
The elite media, especially ABC, used the same tactic against Sarah Palin repeatedly. They edited out the substantive portions of her answers to make her look vapid.
A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report says that under the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, 30 million non-elderly Americans will remain without health insurance in 2022.
One of the main arguments the Obama administration made for passing the Affordable Care Act was that it would provide coverage for the uninsured.
Currently, according to CBO, there are 53 million uninsured persons in the United States, including uninsured illegal aliens. The CBO estimates that in 2022–8 years after the Affordable Care Act has been fully implemented–30 million people will remain uninsured.
Moreover, under Obamacare, 8 percent of legal U.S. residents will remain without health insurance in 2022, according to CBO.
The report was done to assess the fiscal impact of the Supreme Court June Obamacare decision.
“CBO and JCT [Joint Committee on Taxation] now estimate that the ACA, in comparison with prior law before the enactment of the ACA, will reduce the number of nonelderly people without health insurance coverage by 14 million in 2014 and by 29 million or 30 million in the latter part of the coming decade, leaving 30 million nonelderly residents uninsured by the end of the period,” the report said.
“Before the Supreme Court’s decision, the latter number had been 27 million,” states the report.
We saw the first part of this video of Jay Carney as it went viral on the net, but stay tuned and watch what comes next from the State Department in the form of Spokesman Victoria Nuland on March 29, 2012. We apologize for totally missing this when it happened. It got very little coverage.
Judge for yourself. When Obama goes off teleprompter he gets that tear and hesitation in his voice that we have gotten to know so well.
Governor Romney makes a good point here – “The Context Is Worse Than The Quote”
The “You didn’t build that/you don’t deserve to keep most of your profits” theme is nothing new among radicalized anti-capitalist academia. I heard it when I was in college from Marxist professors. In the video below Massachusetts Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren, the professor who lied about being a native American to get her job at university, says the same thing (listen to the hostility in her voice).
Of course, if your health insurance plan is “too good” you run into the “Cadillac Health Plan Tax”. The tax is not indexed for inflation so eventually you are taxed to hell if you do and taxed to hell if you don’t.
Beginning January 1, 2014 the P.P.A.C.A. (a.k.a. ‘Obamacare’) legislation levies a brand new tax – the “Roberts Tax”. A tax aptly named after U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts who created this new tax all by himself. It is neither an excise tax, nor a capital gains tax or any other kind of defined tax. It is instead a new tax, a tax for doing nothing and it will be levied on nearly all Americans including small and large business owners whether they do offer health insurance to their employees or they do not.
The best way to describe this new tax is to imagine walking into a grocery store and the clerk asks if you would like to purchase a pack of gum. You politely decline the offer and are then forced by a new tax law – as defined by John Roberts – to give that clerk a tax for refusing to purchase that pack of gum. This, my fellow Americans, is how unmoored from our Constitution that our Federal Government has become.
This is not something I often talk about, nor am I one who buys into most conspiracy theories, but every once in a while such a theory has merit because the evidence is just too strong. In the interests of full disclosure this writer is an expert on the subject of airborne munitions. I have loaded and unloaded them, assembled and disassembled them, armed and disarmed them, repaired armament systems on military aircraft etc.
The government said that the plane was too high to be intercepted by a mobile ground to air missile – a lie.
The government said that a heat seeking missile would have gone after the engine – again another lie. In fact heat seeking missiles are designed to fly next to a specific temperature range as they intercept the target such as the heat from it going over the body of the aircraft so it can explode next to it and let the shrapnel weaken the airframe so that the stress of flight will cause the aircraft to break apart. Going after such a hot object as jet exhaust would allow the missile to be too easily fooled by countermeasures. I also saw a photo pf the aircraft that was put back together as best as possible by the recovery team and the damage to the plane is consistent with the shrapnel pattern of such a heat seeking missile.
President Clinton revoked the Whistle-blower Act for the military recovery team working the crash site. Boeing insists to this day that TWA 800 was shot down.
I am reposting this article from Jack Cashill here mainly to help preserve it.
I got involved in one of the two great media scandals of our time — the Obama ascendancy being the other — fully by happenstance.
In the year 2000, investigative reporter James Sanders came to Kansas City to talk about his research into the fate of TWA flight 800, the plane that crashed into the waters off Long Island on July 17, 1996, sixteen years ago today.
Sanders chose Kansas City because the town had historically been the headquarters for TWA. As a result, many pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants still lived there. The audience was filled with them. Almost to a person, they believed what he was saying — the plane had been shot out of the sky.
Afterwards, I went out to dinner with James and his wife, Elizabeth, and a dozen other people. I sat next to Elizabeth, a sweet, unassuming former TWA flight attendant and trainer of Philippine descent. She told me in painful detail how at one of the many memorials she attended after the crash — 53 TWA employees were among the 230 killed — she ran into an old friend, Captain Terrell Stacey.
Stacey had flown the 747 that would become TWA Flight 800 from Paris to New York the night before it was destroyed. In fact, he was in charge of all TWA 747 pilot activity within the airline. So it was logical that he would be among the first TWA employees assigned to the crash investigation.
Elizabeth thought of Stacey as “a straight arrow, go-by-the-rules kind of guy” and respected him for it. After a phone introduction arranged by Elizabeth, James Sanders and Terrell Stacey agreed to meet. “What he told me over those first hours,” Sanders would later tell me, “was one thing: ‘I know there’s a cover-up in progress.'”
As a result of that one introduction, the FBI arrested Elizabeth and oversaw her conviction on federal conspiracy charges. James and Stacey had been arrested, too. The crime? Stacey had sent Sanders a tiny piece of foam rubber to have tested. The Sanderses were still on probation when I met them. When I heard this story from Elizabeth, I thought maybe there was something there worth pursuing.
As a video producer, I talked to the Sanders about creating a documentary, but, as I explained, I had no interest unless they could prove to me beyond a doubt that the plane was shot down. They could, and they did. The result was a documentary called Silenced, which has been inexplicably removed from YouTube. It is still available, however, through my website. To explain how I know the plane was shot down would take a book, which James Sanders and I proceeded to write. The result, First Strike, is available through Amazon, including on the Kindle.
In the way of summary, on the night of July 17, 1996, and into the early morning hours of the 18th, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger huddled fretfully in the family quarters of the White House.
The election they thought was in the bag no longer was.
The air-traffic controllers had already reported in. The radar data told a story of an unknown object striking the plane seconds before it exploded. And now, eyewitness reports were flooding in.
The explosion had taken place right at sunset, just 10 miles off the coast, on a perfect night, with thousands of people looking out over the sea from Long Island’s popular south shore. FBI witness No. 73, an aviation buff, watched a “red streak” with a “light gray smoke trail” move up toward the airliner, and then go “past the right side and above the aircraft before arcking [sic] back down toward the aircrafts [sic] right wing.” She even reported the actual breakup sequence before the authorities figured it out on their own.
High-school principal Joseph Delgado told the FBI that he had seen an object like “a firework” ascend “fairly quick,” then “slow” and “wiggle,” then “speed up” and get “lost.” Then he saw a second object that “glimmered” in the sky, higher than the first, then a red dot move up to that object, then a puff of smoke, then another puff, then a “firebox.” He drew a precise image of the same.
Mike Wire, a no-nonsense millwright and U.S. Army vet, watched events unfold from the Beach Lane Bridge in Westhampton on Long Island. Wire had seen a white light traveling skyward from the ground at approximately a 40-degree angle, sparkling and zigzagging before culminating in a massive fireball.
To control the information flow, the White House hit upon a strategy that dazzled in its simplicity and in its sheer nerve. The Clintons’ trusted point person, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, took the investigation away from the professionals in the National Transportation Safety Board and gave it to the amateurs of the FBI. There was one reason why. The FBI reported to Gorelick. The NTSB did not.
This was illegal, of course, but the media had a president to re-elect soon enough, and they were not about to scruple over details. The second part of the strategy was as simple as the first. The FBI would talk only to The New York Times. This essentially made the Times Gorelick’s Ministry of Truth.
Of the 270 eyewitnesses who told the FBI they saw what looked like a missile strike on TWA Flight 800, the Times would interview exactly none. Fearing perhaps the loss of their privileged status and trusting the FBI more than they should have, the Times people followed the FBI lead. The other media, some grudgingly, followed the Times.
Four weeks after the disaster, the Times would report, “Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane.” Likely under White House pressure, and without any new evidence, the FBI immediately shifted its storyline away from a missile to a bomb, and a month later, from a bomb to a center fuel tank explosion.
As each week passed, the Clintons had to be stunned that so obvious a truth remained so thoroughly ignored. To sustain the lie, however, insiders had to tell more lies still.
The FBI would fabricate a second interview with Witness No. 73 that never took place. The CIA — the CIA? — would fabricate a second interview with Mike Wire that also never took place. NTSB insiders would lie outright about what Joseph Delgado saw, but the election came and went without anyone even knowing who these people were.
Gorelick could not have slept easily through all of this, but the lotto was around the corner, and she knew she had the winning ticket. In May 1997, the White House called her number. The Fannie Mae Board picked her, a lawyer with no relevant experience, to be its new vice chair. Gorelick would earn more than $4 million a year for the next six years, and no one in the media asked why.
They did not even ask why when she stepped down. Always the patriot, Gorelick resigned to take one of five Democratic seats on the Sept. 11 Commission. Who knew where talk of aviation terrorism might lead? Someone had to keep talk of TWA Flight 800 off the table, just as someone had kept it off from 1996 to 2001.
And lest some messy scraps of information find their way to the committee’s Republicans, the Clintons dispatched their most trusted adviser to do a little cleanup work. Alas, Sandy Berger got caught stuffing evidence in his underwear, but this proved much easier to bury than TWA 800. Democrat staffers in the Bush Justice Department arranged for a wrist slap on a Friday, the day after Terry Schiavo died and the day before Pope John Paul II did.
The media did not want to know anyhow, and sixteen years later, they still do not want to know. Not one mainstream journalist has ever bothered to ask why the CIA was recruited to make the preposterous video that would seemingly discredit all of the eyewitness testimony. This is a shame, especially for the family members who have been left only with their grief and their unanswered questions.
Those questions, alas, will likely never be answered for the simple reason that they have never been asked.
This is what bothers me about these two candidates. While Obama’s attacks are far less honest today, Mitt Romney is not innocent either and in the primary Romney’s attacks on the other GOP candidates were often sickeningly dishonest.
Interesting how the Democrat brings up the Swiftboat Vets Ads from when John Kerry ran for President as an example of a distraction. But he leaves out a fundamental truth – John Kerry made the three months he spent in Vietnam in the Navy a cornerstone of his campaign. At the convention Kerry had it military themed and he was saluting and the whole nine yards. The problem is that John Kerry misrepresented his service in his campaign and the people he served with and other veterans took issue with it. John Kerry, in a most unpatriotic way in the view of many war heroes, took the side of Jane Fonda when he came back and the North Vietnamese used John Kerry’s actions for great propaganda value.
With that said, the economy at the end of President Bush’s first term was doing rather well and national security and military policy was front and center which is another reason why the Swiftboat ads were no mere attempt at distraction. The economy today is a disaster and the Obama campaign wants to talk about anything but. And why the Obama Administration is declaring executive privilege to delay the release of documents relation to huge scandals such as “Fast & Furious” and is still hiding all sorts of documents form his past, all they want to talk about is how Mitt Romney had not released his tax returns from ten years ago? THAT is a distraction.
The simple truth is that most people are outraged at what Obama and the Democrats have done with our money and are not overly concerned with what Mitt Romney did with his own money ten years ago.
Also see – Obama invested heavily with outsourcers, after accusing Romney of doing the same… – LINK
President Obama accused Mitt Romney of being responsible for shutting down this American Steel plant, saddling it with debt, and screwing the employees out of their pensions, but Mitt Romney left Bain Capital two years before this happened to run the Olympics. So who was in charge of Bain Capital when this happened? You guess it, Obama’s top campaign money bundler John Levine. Does it get any better than this?
Our friends Chuck Slowe and Jim Hoft have a great report on this. Be sure add their websites to your daily reading:
The Obama campaign blamed Governor Mitt Romney for the demise of GST Steel company in a video they released in May. The plant closed in 2001. Mitt left Bain in 1999.
[Political Arena Editor’s Note – I ripped this video to my hard drive just in case it vanishes from Obama’sYoutube Channel]
For some reason the Obama camp forgot to mention this…
Obama’s top bundler Jonathan Lavine was in charge of Bain during the BST layoffs.
Blaming Governor Romney for any issues surrounding the failure of GST is wrong and it is a blatant lie. Mitt Romney had been long gone when the company started to fail and subsequently closed it doors. When are the President and his campaign hacks going to get the story correct? When are they going to get back to their economy and its dreadful condition? Mr. President, you can run but you cannot hide.
It turns out that Jonathan Lavine, current Obama bundler, was actually in charge, at Bain, during that period, when the layoffs occurred. Oops, that isn’t right, is it? Yes, that story is the one that needs to be reported on. Sorry Mr. President, your lies are just getting to be more than many of us are able to handle.
And, Jonathan Lavine is not your average Obama Bain donor. Lavine is one of Barack Obama’s top bundlers. ABC reported:
While Democrats assail presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital business practices, Republicans note that President Obama has not been bashful about accepting cash from Bain executives or other high-profile figures in the corporate buyout business…
…One of Obama’s top campaign financiers – Jonathan Lavine – is also managing director at Bain, bundling between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions for the 2012 Obama Victory Fund, according to estimates released by the Obama campaign. The president has also relied on other leading figures in the private equity sector as hosts for high-dollar fundraisers and as members of his Jobs Council.
Maybe someday the liberal media will report on this.
Yesterday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) almost called Obamacare’s individual mandate a tax, stopping mid-word to call it a “penalty”. White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew and other spokespersons echoed this talking point. This is in spite of last week’s Supreme Court ruling that deemed the mandate unconstitutional under both the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, but ruled that it could stand as part of Congress’s authority to “lay and collect taxes.”
Dubbing the individual mandate a tax saved the President’s health care law, but it’s a concept that President Obama himself has strongly denied. In a 2009 interview, President Obama argued that his individual mandate was not a tax increase, stating, “I absolutely reject that notion.”
But after last week, President Obama must now admit it’s a tax or admit the mandate is unconstitutional. It’s can only be one or the other.
The mandate is in fact a tax, and it’s just one of many new taxes that hit the middle class in Obamacare. Lo and behold, another broken promise. President Obama claims that the mandate is holding people responsible, keeping with that spirit, here’s a reminder of the other promises the President and his health care law are responsible for breaking:
Reality: The individual mandate is far from alone on Heritage’s lengthy list of Obamacare’s new taxes and penalties, many of which will heavily impact the middle class. Altogether, Obamacare’s taxes and penalties will accumulate an additional $500 billion in new revenue over a 10-year period. Yesterday, a senior economist for The Wall Street Journal revealed that 75 percent of Obamacare’s new taxes will be paid for by American families making under $120,000 a year. Among the taxes that will hit the middle class are the individual mandate, a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices, a 10 percent excise tax on indoor tanning, and an increase of the floor on medical deductions from 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income to 10 percent.
Reality: Research continues to show that as many as 30 percent of employers will dump their employees from their existing health care coverage. The Administration itself has admitted that “as a practical matter, a majority of group health plans will lose their grandfather status by 2013.”
Reality: As Heritage analysts explain, “A close examination of what [the Congressional Budget Office] said, as well as other evidence, makes it clear that the deficit reduction associated with [Obamacare] is based on budget gimmicks, sleights of hand, accounting tricks, and completely implausible assumptions. A more honest accounting reveals the new law as a trillion-dollar budget buster.”
Reality:A Heritage Factsheet shows the various ways Obamacare ends Medicare as we know it, including severe physician reimbursement cuts that threaten seniors’ access to care and putting an unelected board of bureaucrats in charge of meeting Medicare’s new spending cap.
Reality: Obamacare does not accomplish universal coverage; it leaves 26 million Americans without insurance. Moreover, Heritage research outlines 12 ways that Obamacare will increase premiums instead of reducing health care costs. Requirements that plans allow young adults to stay on their parents’ coverage and offer preventive services with no cost sharing are already leading to higher growth in premiums.
When polled, 70 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of the individual mandate. It’s doubtful that calling it a “tax” will dramatically change their opinion. Now that Obamacare and its broken promises remain the law of the land, it’s up to the American people to see to it that the law is ultimately repealed by Congress. Then, they can move forward with real reform that puts patients’ needs first.
Quick Hits:
CBS News reports Chief Justice John Roberts “initially sided with the Supreme Court’s four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama’s health care reform law.”
Washington, D.C. area residents may suffer power outages for days, after crews try clean up after this weekend’s deadly storms. Local power companies are facing severe backlash from angry customers. More storms are expected this week.
Three months ago, I quoted George Jonas on the 30th anniversary of Canada’s ghastly “Charter of Rights and Freedoms”: “There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself,” wrote Jonas. “It’s as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them.”
For longer than one might have expected, the U.S. Constitution was a happy exception to that general rule – until, that is, the contortions required to reconcile a republic of limited government with the ambitions of statism rendered U.S. constitutionalism increasingly absurd. As I also wrote three months ago (yes, yes, don’t worry, there’s a couple of sentences of new material in amongst all the I-told-you-so stuff), “The United States is the only Western nation in which our rulers invoke the Constitution for the purpose of overriding it – or, at any rate, torturing its language beyond repair.”
Thus, the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision. No one could seriously argue that the Framers’ vision of the Constitution intended to provide philosophical license for a national government (“federal” hardly seems le mot juste) whose treasury could fine you for declining to make provision for a chest infection that meets the approval of the Commissar of Ailments. Yet on Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts did just that. And conservatives are supposed to be encouraged that he did so by appeal to the Constitution’s taxing authority rather than by a massive expansion of the Commerce Clause. Indeed, several respected commentators portrayed the Chief Justice’s majority vote as a finely calibrated act of constitutional seemliness.
Great. That and $4.95 will get you a decaf macchiato in the Supreme Court snack bar. There’s nothing constitutionally seemly about a court decision that says this law is only legal because the people’s representatives flat-out lied to the people when they passed it. Throughout the Obamacare debates, Democrats explicitly denied it was a massive tax hike: “You reject that it’s a tax increase?” George Stephanopoulos demanded to know on ABC. “I absolutely reject that notion,” replied the President. Yet “that notion” is the only one that would fly at the Supreme Court. The jurists found the individual mandate constitutional by declining to recognize it as a mandate at all. For Roberts’ defenders on the right, this is apparently a daring rout of Big Government: Like Nelson contemplating the Danish fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen, the Chief Justice held the telescope to his blind eye and declared, “I see no ships.”
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but a handful of judges rule that it’s a rare breed of elk, then all’s well. The Chief Justice, on the other hand, looks, quacks and walks like the Queen in Alice In Wonderland: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” The Obama administration sentences you to a $695 fine, and a couple of years later the queens of the Supreme Court explain what it is you’re guilty of. A. V. Dicey’s famous antipathy to written constitutions and preference for what he called (in a then-largely unfamiliar coinage) the “rule of law” has never looked better.
Instead, constitutionalists argue that Chief Justice Roberts has won a Nelson-like victory over the ever-expanding Commerce Clause. Big deal – for is his new, approved, enhanced taxing power not equally expandable? And, in attempting to pass off a confiscatory penalty as a legitimate tax, Roberts inflicts damage on the most basic legal principles.
Bingo on that last line. To read the rest of Mark Steyn’s excellent column click HERE.
Obama and the Democrat Party leadership after saying it was not a tax, directed their lawyers in court to argue that it is a legal tax and now the Obama campaign is saying that they never said it was a tax and that the SDupreme Court got it wrong when they agreed wih the argument form Obama’s own lawyer.
[Actually there are 21 new taxes in ObamaCare several of which target the chronically ill and disabled – LINK – LINK – LINK – Editor]
#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.
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.
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.
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.
UPDATE – Liberal talker Bill Press piles on Ann Romney as well – VIDEO LINK
MSNBC says that horse back riding as a treatment for MS does not appear in any medical journal and that it is just an excuse to use the horse as a tax deduction because the Romney’s are evil rich (see the MSNBC video HERE).
Of course there is one problem with their coverage; what they said is dead wrong any one who even bothers to internet search can find multiple medical journals and web sites that say it is true, including THIS LINK from the National Institute of Health.
In fact, the same day that MSNBC trashed Ann Romney for using the horse riding treatment their sister network NBC aired a piece on the Today Show about the benefits of horse back riding for MS patients including Ozzy Osborne’s son (see the NBC video HERE).
After NBC has been caught editing video to make fake news AGAIN now we have this.
Neil Cavuto, who also suffers from MS, had enough:
President Barack Obama’s re-election turns on his ability to convince voters that
1) Obama inherited a “Great Recession,”
2) every “independent” economist supported the “stimulus,”
3) “bipartisan” economists agree that Obama’s stimulus worked,
4) as actor Morgan Freeman puts it, racist Republicans say, “Screw the country … we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here” — nothing to do with deeply held policy differences.
(1) Take this “Great Recession” business.
Remember the “misery index”? The term, popularized by former President Jimmy Carter, used to mean inflation plus unemployment. Unfortunately for John Kerry, by the time he ran for president in 2004, the misery index stood at 7.4 midway into the election year, the same as when George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000. What to do? Change the definition. Kerry invented a new misery index, one that included only high-rising costs like college tuition, health care and gas prices.
Similarly, “bad economic times” used to mean, above all, high unemployment. Within a year of Obama’s presidency, unemployment climbed to 10.2 percent. Within three years of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment reached 10.8 percent. Under Obama, inflation has been — at least so far — rather modest. Early in Reagan’s presidency, inflation reached 13.5 percent. Rather than describe this era as the “Great-Recession-turned-around-by-Reagan’s-pro-growth-policies,” many pundits and scribes dismiss this period of extraordinary growth as the “me decade” or the “decade of greed.”
[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton comments: Excuse me Larry, but under Clinton the Consumer Price Index was changed so that government would never have to face the misery index and a proper measure of inflation again. They removed “Food & Fuel” from the index, you know, because nobody ever buys that stuff anyways, and they weighted the formula towards housing….. that’s right folks, housing.
When the economy turns south or hits a bump new housing starts talk and housing prices fall, thus showing negative inflation. So when the economy is in trouble and inflation is going up, the government reads it as zero inflation. If we still measured inflation like we used to it would be about 9.3% every year for three years. Of course, every shopper knows this as they see the prices for themselves.]
(2) “There is no disagreement,” said then-President-elect Barack Obama, “that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy.”
What?! More than 200 economists, including several Nobel laureates, signed on to a full-page ad placed in major newspapers by the libertarian Cato Institute. Eventually, over 130 more economists became signatories to the ad.
It read: “With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true. Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.
“More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today.
“To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”
(3) Obama surrogate Steve Rattner recently said that Obama’s stimulus worked — as confirmed by “bipartisan” economists. As proof, Rattner offered the findings of “bipartisan economists Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder,” who “agree that … we would have had unemployment substantially higher than what we’ve had over the last two years.”
“Bipartisan”?
Blinder, a Democrat, served as a member of the Clinton administration and later advised presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry. As for Zandi, he did serve as a presidential campaign advisor to John McCain. Like Blinder, Zandi is a self-described Democrat.
As to the alleged unanimous expert opinion on the effectiveness of Obama’s stimulus, Stanford economist John Taylor debated this on NPR with Zandi. Taylor’s analysis, shared by many other economists: “I just don’t think there’s any evidence. When you look at the numbers, when you see what happened, when people reacted to the stimulus, it did very little good.”
(4) Democrats never tire of trotting out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said his “single most important political goal” was to make Obama “a one-term president.” Horrors! Why, doesn’t this just make McConnell the very personification of sinister! Republican opposition for the sole purpose of bringing down Obama, the first black president, yada, blah, etc.
Apparently, it is outside the brain capacity of people like Morgan Freeman to understand something: One way to defeat bad, leftist Democrats’ policies is to defeat bad, leftist Democrats, who seek to implement those bad, leftist policies. It’s not complicated.
Nothing personal.
[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton comments: On September 11th, 2001 famed Democrat Strategist James Carville said that he hopes President Bush fails.]
Though the Obama campaign has repeatedly attacked Mitt Romney for his career at Bain Capital, President Obama still accepted $7,500 in campaign contributions from two Bain executives. His campaign press secretary, Ben LaBolt told The Politicker the president has no intention of giving the money back.
“No one aside from Mitt Romney is running for President highlighting their tenure as a corporate buyout specialist as one of job creation, when in fact, his goal was profit maximization,” said Mr. LaBolt. ”The President has support from business leaders across industries who have seen him pull the economy back from the brink of another depression, manufacturing and the auto industry revived, and support his agenda to build an economy that lasts where America outinnovates and outeducates the rest of the world and economic security for the middle class is restored.”
On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden defended the attacks on Mr. Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. Though he insisted he wasn’t “criticizing private equity firms,” Mr. Biden said there were many examples of Mr. Romney and his Bain colleagues causing tremendous harm.
“You hear all these stories about his partners buying companies … where they load up with a tremendous amount of debt. The companies go under, everybody loses their job, the community is devastated, but they make money,” said Mr. Biden. “They make money even when a company goes bankrupt, when workers lose their jobs.”
HIP Programs are a Republican Party brainchild designed to help those normally uninsurable or at high risk to get affordable insurance. HIP programs provide incentives for healthy living and reward good shopping behavior that help keep costs down. As ObamaCare gets phased in many states will be forced to give up HIP programs.
A Des Moines woman who publicly thanked President Barack Obama on Tuesday for helping her obtain health insurance actually is receiving her coverage through a long-standing state program.
CeCe Ibson was asked to share her story as an introduction to a Michelle Obama speech Tuesday in Windsor Heights. She talked about losing her health insurance when she lost her job as a lawyer two years ago. She bought private coverage for her two children, she said, but could not find it for herself.
“No one would insure me because of my pre-existing conditions. No one. Until President Obama stood up for me and millions of Americans like me across Iowa and across the country,” she said.
In fact, Ibson’s current coverage is provided by HIP Iowa, a state program for people whose health problems make them ineligible for most commercial insurance. HIP Iowa was created in 1987, during Republican Terry Branstad’s first stint as governor. Most of the program’s subsidies come from fees paid by commercial insurers.
There is a cavernous disconnect between liberal journalists (who don’t even recognize their own biases) and the plight of gun owners. Here are the top eight things anti-gun journalists don’t seem to understand about us.
1. ‘Shootings Are Caused by Guns’
One aspect of Lepore’s story revolves around a high school shooting. Both parents of the shooter have been in and out of jail for violent crimes, including
against each other. The mother is a volatile alcoholic. The father was convicted of kidnapping and assaulting another woman. Reminds you of your home, right?
Then one day their son steals his uncle’s gun, takes it to school and commits an atrocity. It’s a sad story. It would perhaps bring some resolution if a preventative measure could be found. Lepore tries to find a tenable link between gun owners and mass shootings, but her reasoning is dubious at best.
Journalists always want to point the finger at gun owners after such tragedies, as if there’s some way to legislate away the actions of a madman intent on mayhem without expunging the freedoms of law-abiding Americans. They ignore the failures of liberal social programs and instead want to create “
gun free zones,” forgetting that this is in fact where most mass shootings occur (even in highly firearm-restrictive European countries). And, perhaps most frustrating of all, they deny that an average armed citizen can halt a mass shooting. It’s happened, notably at a church in Colorado, a high school in Mississippi, at the Appalachian State law school and elsewhere.
2. That Is Not an AK-47
3. There Is No ‘Gun Show Loophole’If journalists want us to take them seriously, they should at least learn a little about the firearms they so irrationally fear. When we read about an “AK-47” used in a crime that turns out to have been a regular old bolt-action, or when journalists use such terms as “.12-caliber shotgun”, “automatic revolver” or “spray fire assault rifle,” he reveals his ignorance. He entirely discredits himself. And that’s one of the reasons why so many of us tend toward media skepticism even when it comes to non-gun issues.
You can’t just single out a freedom you don’t like and call it a “loophole.” In the United States, we have the right to own firearms. We have the right to sell firearms. If I want to walk across the street and sell my 1911 to a neighbor right now, I have that freedom, as long as he’s legally able to buy a gun and I’m a legal seller. These same transactions occur at gun shows between private sellers. To require a background check between such individuals would essentially end all private transactions—and that is of course the goal of those who push such legislation. So please, journalists, quit griping about gun shows and we won’t touch your “Free Speech Loophole.”
4. The Collective Rights Argument Is Over
Lepore’s article once again drags out the old argument that, unlike every other freedom guaranteed under the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers intended the Second Amendment to be a collective right. Last time I checked, the Supreme Court looked into this issue and ruled that the U.S. Constitution guarantees an individual right to gun ownership. Can we move on?
5. We’re Winning Because Shooting Is Fun
Gun rights and pride in gun ownership hit a marked decline in the early to mid-1990’s, but since then things have changed. Gun owners have adjusted their strategy. We’re back on offense, and journalists don’t seem to understand what happened.
Personally, I believe we almost began apologizing for guns during the Clinton Administration. However, at some point we decided to get back to being honest: Shooting guns is an important freedom, we aren’t sorry about it and shooting them is good wholesome entertainment. That’s a message that resonates with the public, if not anti-gun journalists. The media establishment seems baffled by the Brady Campaign’s financial woes. And poll after poll that indicates growing support for gun ownership.
Namely we win because shooting is fun. If you take a rookie shooter to the range, their smile upon that first shot is practically blinding. Despite what they may have read about guns in the media, they just learned how much fun it is to send a round downrange. And there’s nothing a New York City journalist can do to convince them otherwise.
6. Gun Ownership Is Not Declining
Firearms and ammo manufacturers make up practically the only industry that’s actually doing well during this tough recession. Gun buyers are so active that Ruger had to quit taking orders for certain guns. We’ve set sales and NICS check records. And yet journalists buy into the strategy of anti-gunners to portray gun owners as a fringe group. A dying breed.
Lepore makes this argument in her New Yorker piece, but given that she did not cite the source of her information, I’m not sure how she drew that conclusion. Gun ownership is up and, perhaps not coincidentally, the violent crime rate is down.
7. Guns Save Lives
Lazy journalists love to drag out the old saying, “You’re more likely to shoot a family member than an intruder.” Find some new facts—that one’s been discredited. It counted illegally possessed guns and gang members right along with the legitimate homes. And it only took into account incidents in which shots were fired.
According to a study by Florida State criminologist Gary Kleck, guns are used in lawful self-defense 2.5 million times per year. However, most times the mere presence of a firearm is enough to frighten away the miscreant without shots being fired. Bad guy kicks the door down. Little old lady points a .22 at him. Bad guy runs away. The incident may not even be reported to police. You see, journalists, unlike the way you insist on portraying us, we don’t really want to shoot anybody. But, if we have to, we’d rather be prepared to protect ourselves than wait for the police and hope for the best.
8. The Brady Campaign Is Full of Lies
Note to the media: Quit citing hugely inflated Brady Campaign statistics to undermine our gun rights. The Brady Bunch is not some credible non-profit just out there seeking the truth, but an extreme anti-gun group with a complete willingness to lie to meet objectives. At the very least, please admit that the Brady’s anti-gun bias is as great as the NRA or NSSF’s pro-gun views. Instead, you act as if Sarah Brady preaches the gospel, then you bury a few facts from NRA deep in the story, hinting that they must be taken with a grain of salt, or you’ll ignore the pro-gun side altogether. That’s lazy journalism, and we notice.
Thanks to Kyle Wintersteen and Guns & Ammo for writing this article!
“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
Yesterday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) almost called Obamacare’s individual mandate a tax, stopping mid-word to call it a “penalty”. White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew and other spokespersons echoed this talking point. This is in spite of last week’s Supreme Court ruling that deemed the mandate unconstitutional under both the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, but ruled that it could stand as part of Congress’s authority to “lay and collect taxes.”
Three months ago, I quoted George Jonas on the 30th anniversary of Canada’s ghastly “Charter of Rights and Freedoms”: “There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself,” wrote Jonas. “It’s as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them.”
One aspect of Lepore’s story revolves around a high school shooting. Both parents of the shooter have been in and out of jail for violent crimes, including
Political Arena 