Forget executive privilege, contempt of Congress, “fast and furious,” how many documents the government has produced and who said what to whom on which date.
The Obama administration has almost certainly engaged in the most shockingly vile corruption scandal in the history of the country, not counting the results of Season Eight on “American Idol.”
Administration officials intentionally put guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels, so that when the guns taken from Mexican crime scenes turned out to be American guns, Democrats would have a reason to crack down on gun sellers in the United States.
Democrats will never stop trying to take our guns away. They see something more lethal than a salad shooter and wet themselves.
But since their party was thrown out of Congress for the first time in nearly half a century as a result of passing the 1994 “assault weapons ban,” even liberals know they were going to need a really good argument to pass any limitation on guns ever again.
So it’s curious that Democrats all started telling the same lie about guns as soon as Obama became president. In March 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced to reporters on a trip to Mexico: “Since we know that the vast majority, 90 percent of that weaponry (used by Mexican drug cartels), comes from our country, we are going to try to stop it from getting there in the first place.”
As she sentimentally elaborated on Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren show: “The guns sold in the United States, which are illegal in Mexico, get smuggled and shipped across our border and arm these terrible drug-dealing criminals so that they can outgun these poor police officers along the border and elsewhere in Mexico.”
Suddenly that 90 percent statistic was everywhere. It was like the statistic on women beaten by their husbands on Super Bowl Sunday.
CBS’ Bob Schieffer asked Obama on “Face the Nation”: “It’s my understanding that 90 percent of the guns that they’re getting down in Mexico are coming from the United States. We don’t seem to be doing a very good job of cutting off the gun flow. Do you need any kind of legislative help on that front? Have you, for example, thought about asking Congress to reinstate the ban on assault weapons?”
At a Senate hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said: “It is unacceptable to have 90 percent of the guns that are picked up in Mexico and used to shoot judges, police officers and mayors … come from the United States.”
And then, thanks to Fox News — the first network to report it — we found out the 90 percent figure was complete bunkum. It was a fabrication told by William Hoover, of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF), and then spread like wildfire by Democrats and the media.
Mexican law enforcement authorities send only a fraction of the guns they recover from criminals back to the U.S. for tracing. Which guns do they send? The guns that have U.S. serial numbers on them. It would be like asking a library to produce all their Mark Twain books and then concluding that 90 percent of the books in that library are by Mark Twain.
You begin to see why the left hates Fox News so much.
Obama backed away from the preposterous 90 percent claim. His National Security Council spokesman explained to Fox News that by “recovered,” they meant “guns traceable to the United States.” So, in other words, Democrats were frantically citing the amazing fact that almost all the guns traceable to the U.S. were … traceable to the U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters that even if the percentage is inaccurate, the “vast majority” of guns seized in crimes in Mexico come from the United States. (And he should know, because it turns out he was sending them there!)
This was absurd. Most of the guns used by drug cartels are automatic weapons — not to mention shoulder-fired rockets — that can’t be sold to most Americans. They are acquired from places like Russia, China and Guatemala.
Right about the time the 90 percent lie was unraveling, the Obama administration decided to directly hand thousands of American guns over to Mexican criminals. Apart from the fact that tracking thousands of guns into Mexico is not feasible or rational, the dumped guns didn’t have GPS tracing devices on them, anyway. There is no conceivable law enforcement objective to such a program.
This is what we know:
(1) Liberals thought it would be a great argument for gun control if American guns were ending up in the hands of Mexican criminals;
(2) They wanted that to be true so badly, Democrats lied about it;
(3) After they were busted on their lie, the Obama administration began dumping thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican criminals.
We also know that hundreds of people were murdered with these U.S.-government-supplied guns, including at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
But let’s look on the bright side. The BATF was originally going to ship warheads to Iran until realizing the explosions might disable the tracking devices.
(Contrary to more Democrat lies, there was no program to dump thousands of guns in Mexico under George W. Bush. The Bush administration did have a program that put GPS trackers on about 100 guns in order to actually trace them. That operation was ended almost as soon as it began because of the lack of cooperation from Mexican officials. You may as well say Holder’s program was “started” by the first cop who ever put tracer dye on contraband.)
No one has explained what putting 2,500 untraceable guns in the hands of Mexican drug dealers was supposed to accomplish.
But you know what that might have accomplished? It would make the Democrats’ lie retroactively true — allowing them to push for the same gun restrictions they were planning when they first concocted it. A majority of guns recovered from Mexican criminals would, at last, be American guns, because Eric Holder had put them there.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, some brave whistleblower inside the government leaked details of this monstrous scheme. As soon as Congress and the public demanded answers, Holder clammed up. He just says “oops” — and accuses Republicans of racism.
Organized protesters set out to counter the issue of money in politics while marching over a mile through Washington DC last week. The heat index was a blistering 90 degrees, which seemed to add to the marchers’ aggression for their target, former Bush Administration Senior Adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. While Rove has been out of the White House for over five years, he has remained active in fundraising for and promotion of conservative causes, particularly through his non-profit, Crossroads GPS.
Many of the protesters took issue with the success of Rove’s 501c4, stating it should be “illegal” even though they were themselves proud representatives of 501c4s. This conflation begs the question: Do these organized protesters even know why they are marching? Or do they even know who they are marching against?
The Blaze set out to uncover this mystery by asking the proud marchers one simple question: “Who is Karl Rove?” You may or not be shocked by their answers.
Our friends at iowntheworld.com have a delicious post with (full disclosure) my good friend Steven Tucker affording the most awesome schooling to a rather surprisingly open minded young leftist on ObamaCare.
Tucker is one of America’s foremost experts on health insurance law and this poor bloke just happened to run across him with a camera in his hand in Chicago. [Full disclosure: this very writer went to insurance school and passed the state exam for a state Life & Health insurance license. I have written dozens of articles on ObamaCare and Tucker knows it even better than I do.]
Remember that President Obama helped oust the pro-American Egyptian government and called it “The Arab Spring”. Well now it is done and as predicted by myself, Dr. Niall Ferguson and so many others as far back as February of last year.
Watch this video from February of 2011 and look and see how this disastrous chain of events has come about just as conservatives feared. Notice what Ferguson said about a Muslim Brotherhood regime that would be aggressive towards Israel in order to unite radicalized masses under the banner of external aggression.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the grandfather of Al-Qaeda and they are involved in raising money for jihadists here in the United States. The motto for the Muslim Brotherhood is:
‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
See our other Egypt coverage HERE for more details.
For a host of reasons this writer believes that this a part of a deliberate plan by the Obama Administration to undermine Israel’s security and ability to defend itself. Why?
1 – Polls of the Egyptian Street showed that almost 70% wanted Sharia Law and war with Israel. The administration denied these polls. The election results showed that these polls were accurate.
2 – The administration has radicalized antisemites such as Samantha Power and Robert Malley in prominent positions in the State Department.
4 – Any student of global security full well knows that the previous pro-American government in Egypt that Obama helped to remove from power was the lynch pin for Middle-East peace. Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel that was signed by the previous government. The Muslim Brotherhood has made it clear that the treaty is shredded.
5 – President Obama’s attitude and other acts of disrespect have shown that there is a hostility towards Israel. So much so that even as far back in 2009 only 6% if Israelis saw President Obama and “pro-Israel”. See details HERE.
The Heritage Foundation has a piece out that explains just a sampling of the blatant violation of Separation of Powers committed by the Obama Administration.
Even though the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected the President’s cap-and-trade plan, his Environmental Protection Agency classified carbon dioxide, the compound that sustains vegetative life, as a pollutant so that it could regulate it under the Clean Air Act.
After the Employee Free Choice Act—designed to bolster labor unions’ dwindling membership rolls—was defeated by Congress, the National Labor Relations Board announced a rule that would implement “snap elections” for union representation, limiting employers’ abilities to make their case to workers and virtually guaranteeing a higher rate of unionization at the expense of workplace democracy.
After an Internet regulation proposal failed to make it through Congress, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would regulate the Web anyway, even despite a federal court’s ruling that it had no authority to do so.
Although Congress consistently has barred the Department of Education from getting involved in curriculum matters, the Administration has offered waivers for the No Child Left Behind law in exchange for states adopting national education standards, all without congressional authorization.
Likewise, the Administration has often simply refused to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress:
Since it objects to existing federal immigration laws, the Administration has decided to apply those laws selectively and actively prevent the state (like Arizona) from enforcing those laws themselves.
Rather than push Congress to repeal federal laws against marijuana use, the Department of Justice (DOJ) simply decided it would no longer enforce those laws.
DOJ also has announced that it would stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act or defending it from legal challenge rather than seeking legislative recourse.
On Tuesday, the President invoked executive privilege to avoid handing over some 1,300 documents in an ongoing Congressional investigation. The Supreme Court has held that executive privilege cannot be invoked to shield wrongdoing. Is that what’s happening in this case? “Congress needs to get to the bottom of that question to prevent an illegal invocation of executive privilege and further abuses of power. That will require an index of the withheld documents and an explanation of why each of them is covered by executive privilege—and more,” Heritage legal scholar Todd Gaziano writes.
Earlier this year the President crossed the threshold of constitutionality when he gave “recess appointments” to four officials who were subject to Senate confirmation, even though the Senate wasn’t in recess. Gaziano wrote at the time that such appointments “would render the Senate’s advice and consent role to normal appointments almost meaningless. It is a grave constitutional wrong.”
There is no telling where such disregard may go next, but the trend is clear, and it leads further and further away from the constitutional rule of law.
Lie No. 1: Obama has repeatedly claimed his white grandfather, Stanley Dunham, “fought in Patton’s army,” when he was a clerk with no combat in WWII.
Lie No. 2: Obama claimed Dunham, a communist sympathizer, signed up for duty “the day after Pearl Harbor,” when in fact he waited six months.
Lie No. 3: Obama claimed his father “fought when he got back to Kenya against tribalism and nepotism, but ultimately was blackballed from the government,” when in fact he fought against capitalism and lost his job when he advocated communism.
Lie No. 4: Obama has claimed his late mother’s health insurer refused “to pay for her treatment” for cancer while citing a “pre-existing condition,” when Cigna paid all her hospital bills and never denied payment.
Lie No. 5: Obama claimed he and a black high school friend named “Ray” were ostracized in Honolulu, when in fact the friend, Keith Kakugawa, was half-Japanese, and neither of them experienced discrimination.
Lie No. 6: Obama claimed the father of his Indonesian stepfather was killed by Dutch soldiers while fighting for Indonesian independence, when in fact the story turns out to be “a concocted myth in almost all respects,” Maraniss found.
Lie No. 7: Obama claimed his parents decided to marry in the excitement of the Selma civil-rights march of 1965 — and that he personally has “a claim on Selma” — when in fact they were married several years earlier.
Lie No. 8: Obama claimed his father got to study in the U.S. thanks to JFK’s efforts to bring “young Africans over to America,” when in fact the Kenyan airlift his father participated in occurred in 1959 under Ike.
Lie No. 9: Obama submitted a phony bio to his book publicist claiming he was “born in Kenya.”
Lie No. 10: Obama denied being a member of the socialist New Party, when a member roster of the Chicago chapter of the party lists him joining on Jan. 11, 1996.
Lie No. 11: Obama claimed he had only a passing acquaintance with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, when in fact they held a fundraiser for their Hyde Park neighbor in their living room, and years later, while Obama served in the U.S. Senate, hosted a barbecue for him in their backyard.
Lie No. 12: Obama claimed he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright spew anti-American invectives while sitting in his pews for 20 years, when in fact Obama was moved to tears hearing Wright condemn “white folks” and the U.S. for bombing other countries and even named his second book after the sermon.
Lie No. 13: Obama claimed he got in a “big fight” with old white flame Genevieve Cook, who after seeing a black play asked “why black people were so angry all the time,” when in fact she never saw the play nor made the remark.
John Holdren and Cass Sunstien believe that your organs belong to the state and that the government should engage in forced population control. Van Jones is a self admitted communist revolutionary and “911 Truther”, Anita Dunn says that Mao, the largest communist mass murderer in history, “is the philosopher she turns to most”, Steven Chu says that gas needs to be $8.00 a gallon; and what do these people all have in common? They were all invited to the White House to work in the Obama Administration and work close with the President.
This time the Obama’s invited “leftist radical gay activists” to come to the White House for a dinner and reception. They decided to take pictures. Well here they are:
How mature and dignified.
These are the type of barely showered low class “occupy types” that this administration feels at home with. One might say trailer park class but that would be an insult to trailer parks. I also regret that these losers were “gay activists” because while they say all day long that they represent the gay community, they don’t.
Today, we have Andrea Mitchell’s spectacularly lame followup to “criticism of the Romney clip edit” — which amounted to Ms. Mitchell saying, with a sigh and a frown, “Oh, bother. Fine. Here’s what we left out.” She failed to acknowledge what the “criticism” entailed; she neglected to point out how the editing misrepresented the event being covered; and she offered nothing resembling an apology or an admission of responsibility for something that was, as a matter of fact, irresponsible.
I’m tired. Truly. I’ve grown weary of trying to defend the indefensible and explain the inexplicable. For years, people have stomped their feet and pounded their fists and snorted “Liberal media bias!” and I’ve always tut-tutted and shooshed them and said, “No, no. Calm down. They meant well. It was just a misunderstanding. A mistake. These things happen.” I spent over 25 years working in the oft-reviled Mainstream Media and I saw up close and personal how the sausage was made. I knew the people who wielded the knives and wore the aprons, and could vouch (most of the time, anyway) for their good intentions.
But now?
Forget it. I’m done. You deserve what they’re saying about you. It’s earned. You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you. You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more. You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.
The White House tried to blunt Wednesday’s contempt of Congress vote against Attorney General Eric Holder with claims that Republicans were trying to focus on something other than the economy and jobs.
“At the beginning of this year, Republicans announced that one of their chief legislative and strategic priorities was to investigate the administration and damage the president politically,” press secretary Jay Carney told reporters today. “We are nine days away from the expiration of federal transportation funding which guarantees jobs for almost a million construction workers because Congress has not passed a transportation bill. We are 10 days away from student loan rates doubling, potentially impacting over 7.4 million borrowers.”
And that’s what President Obama focused on today as he notched yet another speech on student-loan rates into the schedule.
But the Carney spin came on the same day that the House passed the Domestic Energy and Jobs Act, a package of seven bills focused on spurring job growth and lowering energy costs while embracing the country’s energy resources.
That legislation passed 284-163 despite a veto threat two days ago from Obama.
The publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention can no longer use military logos on its Bibles for service members.
According to Lifeway Christian Resources spokesman Marty King, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have revoked their authorization to use official service emblems on the Scriptures.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation threatened to sue, claiming that allowing the logos to be placed on Bibles violates the Constitution.
Special Bibles for military members will now bear a generic logo.
King added that the military Bibles “continue to sell well and provide spiritual guidance and comfort to those who serve.”
After almost a dozen solar companies who got large sums of taxpayer dollars have gone bankrupt after the CEO donors paid themselves and donated back to the party news of this program came as no surprise, but still manages to turn stomachs.
The Obama administration distributed $9 billion in economic “stimulus” funds to solar and wind projects in 2009-11 that created, as the end result, 910 “direct” jobs — annual operation and maintenance positions — meaning that it cost about $9.8 million to establish each of those long-term jobs.
At the same time, those green energy projects also created, in the end, about 4,600 “indirect” jobs – positions indirectly supported by the annual operation and maintenance jobs — which means they cost about $1.9 million each ($9 billion divided by 4,600).
Combined (910 + 4,600 = 5,510), the direct and indirect jobs cost, on average, about $1.63 million each to produce.
As explained in a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“economic stimulus”) of 2009 included Section 1603, a grant program run through the Treasury Department.
The 1603 program offered “renewable energy project developers a one-time cash payment” to reduce the need for green energy companies “to secure tax equity partners” and also help them to achieve “ ‘the near term goal of creating and retaining jobs’ in the renewable energy sector.”
A version of this article appeared June 18, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why I No Longer Support the Health Insurance Mandate. Mr. Williams is a former chairman and CEO of Aetna.
Notice what Williams says in the section in bold below. This is exactly what I said on my college blog in early 2010 when ObamaCare was being debated. Those who read the bill knew, those who wrote the bill set up a system that is guaranteed to blow up the private healthcare system. I am glad that Mr. Williams finally got around to actually reading what is in there.
Soon the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. I am not a lawyer, or an expert on the Constitution. But as the chairman and CEO of a major health plan, I had a ringside seat to the entire health-care reform process. After much reflection, I have concluded that the federal individual mandate, which requires all Americans to purchase health insurance starting in 2014, will not be upheld.
I don’t say this lightly, as I have long been a vocal advocate of getting and keeping every American covered. As a society, we have a moral obligation to ensure everyone has access to affordable health care. We must find a way to cover those who are no longer healthy but need care.
A workable solution used by many states is a high-risk insurance pool funded by broad-based taxes. But Congress and the president chose to require health-insurance companies to guarantee issue—that is, to insure anyone at anytime.
This approach encourages people to only purchase insurance when care is needed. Insurance does not work if you only pay two months of premiums and receive hundreds of thousands of dollars of health care. This is the equivalent of getting a free ride. Under such a system, consumers would end up paying more to offset the added costs of free riders. Insurance would soon become unaffordable.
DeWitt, Mich. — The protesters popping up at Mitt Romney’s rallies throughout Michigan Tuesday look like run-of-the-mill grassroots liberals — they wave signs about “the 99 percent,” they chant about the Republican’s greed, and they describe themselves as a loosely organized coalition of “concerned citizens.”
They’re also getting paid, two of the protesters and an Obama campaign official told BuzzFeed.
At the candidate’s afternoon stop outside a bakery in DeWitt, a group of about 15 protesters stood behind a police barricade, a few of them chanting in support of Obama. Asked why he was protesting, a man dressed in a grim reaper costume pointed a reporter to a pair of “designated representatives” standing in the shade.
“I can’t talk, you gotta get one of those people over there to talk to y’all,” he said. “They’re the ones who can talk to reporters.”
Neither of the representatives agreed to give their names, but two protesters said they were getting paid to stand outside of the rally, though their wage is unclear: one said she was getting $7.25 per hour, while another man said they were being paid $17 per hour.
Meanwhile, about 50 feet away, another protest had been organized by local Democrats in conjunction with the Obama campaign. A campaign official told BuzzFeed they had nothing to do with the other group — which he said he believed they had been sent by the labor-backed “Good Jobs Now” — and confirmed that they were being paid.
This is just a few small excerpts from the speech which can be seen in it’s entirety HERE. Most people who are not engaged in such battles have no idea how almost universal the left’s contempt for free speech is from the Whit House all the way to college campuses and classrooms.
On campus the left moves to silence conservatives, libertarians, Christians and Jews every day. Many groups are set up to help put an end to such censorship such as the Student Press Law Center, The ACLJ, the Rutherford Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Alliance Defense Fund, Campus Watch, Campus Reform, Students for Academic Freedom etc. All of them have one thing in common; more cases and complaints than they have the resources to deal with.
Senator McConnell (excerpts):
You’ve all heard about the Idaho businessman who’s become a personal target of the President for speaking out on behalf of candidates and causes the President opposes. Shortly after being publicly singled out by the President’s campaign, people were digging through his divorce records, cable television hosts were going after him on air, and bloggers were harassing his kids.
Charles and David Koch have become household names, not for the tens of thousands of people they employ, not for their generosity to charity, and not for building up one of the most successful private corporations on the planet; but because of their forceful and unapologetic promotion and defense of capitalism.
In return for their decades of work, one of the President’s top aides exposed them to public scrutiny by insinuating that they’d done something shady on their taxes. And earlier this year, the President’s own campaign manager sent a mass email to the campaign’s supporters, notifying them of a Koch-backed event, presumably to incite just the kind of mob that showed up.
The results have been predictable. The Koch brothers, along with Koch employees, have had their lives threatened, received hundreds of obscenity-laced hate messages, and been harassed by left-wing groups. One e-mail carried a typical message. It read: “Choose your expiration date.”
If the President of the United States opposed these kinds of tactics, all he’d have to do is condemn them. Instead, he’s joined the effort.
President Obama has publicly accused the Kochs of being part of a, quote, “corporate takeover of our Democracy,” whatever that means. And not only did his campaign publish a list of eight private citizens it regards as enemies — an actual old-school enemies list — it recently doubled down on the effort when some began to call these thuggish tactics into question.
None of this should be surprising for a former community organizer who told a radio audience shortly before the 2010 mid-term election that Latino voters should vote with the idea of punishing their enemies and rewarding their friends. But all of it should be surprising to a former community organizer who happens to be President.
What’s more, the tactics I’m describing extend well beyond the campaign headquarters in Chicago. To an extent not seen since the Nixon administration, they extend deep into the administration itself.
News reports suggest that top White House officials have long participated in a weekly conference call with a left-wing organization in Washington whose stated purpose is to track conservative media voices, seize on potentially offensive content, and then use it to mount corporate intimidation campaigns aimed at driving these voices clear out of the public square.
Earlier this year, dozens of Tea Party-affiliated groups across the country learned what it was like to draw the attention of the speech police when they received a lengthy questionnaire from the IRS demanding attendance lists, meeting transcripts, and donor information. One of the group’s leaders described the situation this way: “[groups like ours] either drown … in unnecessary paper work … or you survive, and give them everything they want, only to be hung.”
~
Among others examples, Justice Thomas cites the case of a Los Angeles woman who was forced to resign from a job she’d held for 26 years managing a family-owned restaurant because protesters kept showing up at the restaurant shouting “shame on you” at customers. According to press reports, the police had to show up in riot gear one night just to quell the mob.
The woman’s supposed crime: writing a $100 check in support of California’s Prop 8.
~
Over at the White House, the President’s lawyers recently circulated a draft executive order that would have required anyone bidding for a government contract to disclose political donations, including those of affiliates and subsidiaries, officers and directors in excess of $5,000. The message of the order was clear: if you want a government contract, you better support our causes, or at least keep your mouth shut when it comes to the causes we oppose.
~
It should go without saying that the political Left has always faced an uphill climb in a country in which there are two self-identified conservatives for every self-identified liberal. America is not Western Europe. In order to succeed in this environment, liberals have generally resorted to one of the three tactics I’ve already identified: obscuring their true intent, pursuing through regulation and the courts what they can’t through legislation, or muzzling their critics.
Under the Bush Administration this program was called “Wide Receiver”, but in that program the guns were stopped at the border and the “straw man” gun runners were arrested. Under the Obama Administration the guns were allowed to go into Mexico so that the administration could say we needed new gun laws to stop it.
Hillary Clinton early on tried to make an issue out of American guns going to drug cartels, but when the media and others investigated only a small percentage of American guns were being smuggled to the cartels; the vast majority of guns that cartels use are from the Mexican military, Colombian FARC communist rebels, etc.
So, according to whistle blowers in the ATF and recovered documents the administration sought to make the issue about American guns and the result was over 200 Mexicans killed and an American border agent gunned down.
TheRightScoop.com gets credit for keeping this piece of video archived.
The elite media will often report news like this on their web site so they can say they reported it, but don’t expect it to be highlighted in the evening broadcast…
(CBS News) The National Debt has now increased more during President Obama’s three years and two months in office than it did during 8 years of the George W. Bush presidency.
The Debt rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It has now gone up $4.939 trillion since President Obama took office.
The latest posting from the Bureau of Public Debt at the Treasury Department shows the National Debt now stands at $15.566 trillion. It was $10.626 trillion on President Bush’s last day in office, which coincided with President Obama’s first day.
The National Debt also now exceeds 100% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, the total value of goods and services.
Mr. Obama has been quick to blame his predecessor for the soaring Debt, saying Mr. Bush paid for two wars and a Medicare prescription drug program with borrowed funds.
The federal budget sent to Congress last month by Mr. Obama, projects the National Debt will continue to rise as far as the eye can see. The budget shows the Debt hitting $16.3 trillion in 2012, $17.5 trillion in 2013 and $25.9 trillion in 2022.
Federal budget records show the National Debt once topped 121% of GDP at the end of World War II. The Debt that year, 1946, was, by today’s standards, a mere $270 billion dollars.
Mr. Obama doesn’t mention the National Debt much, though he does want to be seen trying to reduce the annual budget deficit, though it’s topped a trillion dollars for four years now.
As part of his “Win the Future” program, Mr. Obama called for “taking responsibility for our deficits, by cutting wasteful, excessive spending wherever we find it.”
His latest budget projects a $1.3 trillion deficit this year declining to $901 billion in 2012, and then annual deficits in the range of $500 billion to $700 billion in the 10 years to come.
[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton Comments: The FY2007 Budget which was the last one mostly controlled by the Republicans had a yearly deficit of less than $200 billion.]
If Mr. Obama wins re-election, and his budget projections prove accurate, the National Debt will top $20 trillion in 2016, the final year of his second term. That would mean the Debt increased by 87 percent, or $9.34 trillion, during his two terms.
Currently, as the chart shows, debt per American is at (or around) $50,000. Just four years ago, in 2008, the year President Obama was first elected, debt per person was at $35,000.
In 2037, if things stay relatively the same, debt per American will be at $147,000.
In that year, according to Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee, “the federal government will spend $2.7 trillion per year in interest payments alone, representing more than a quarter of our entire budget that year and greater than the total federal budget in 2003.”
Per American family, on average, debt will stand at $382,000 in 2037, only 25 years from now. That figure constitutes an increase of $287,000 per family.
The CBO’s numbers were released yesterday as part of its “long-term outlook.” The non-partisan governmental organization warns, “waiting to address the long-term budgetary imbalance and allowing debt to mount in the meantime would be detrimental to future generations.”
And this is just debt and obligations that are on the books. With of budget trickery and the fact that the CBO uses static models with assumptions that are handed to it by politicians the actual figure is worse.
The Obama Administration has given a former director at the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) nearly half a billion dollars to offer “struggling” Illinois homeowners mortgage assistance, a Judicial Watch investigation has found.
It means the ACORN official (Joe McGavin) will go from operating a corrupt leftist community group that’s banned by Congress from receiving federal funding to controlling over $445 million in U.S. taxpayer funds. The money is part of a $7.6 billion Treasury Department program to help the “unemployed or substantially underemployed” make their mortgage payments.
In this case, JW found that a subcomponent of the state-run Illinois Housing Development Authority, known as the Illinois Hardest Hit Program, has just received a generous $445,603,557Treasury infusion. The Obama Administration established Hardest Hit in 2010 to provide targeted aid to families in states hit hardest by the economic and housing market downturn, according to its website.
In early 2011 McGavin was appointed as director of Hardest Hit. Before that he was director of counseling for ACORN Housing in Chicago and operations manager for a Chicago ACORN offshoot called Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA). His strong ties to ACORN make him a suspect candidate to handle such a huge amount of taxpayer dollars.
The Obama-tied community organization supposedly shut down after a series of exposés about its illegal activities, including fraudulent voter registration drives and involvement in the housing market meltdown. Read all about it in Judicial Watch’s special report, “The Rebranding of ACORN.” The legal scandals led Congress to pass a 2009 lawbanning federal funding for ACORN, which for years enjoyed a huge flow of taxpayer dollars to promote its various leftwing causes.
The Obama Administration has violated the congressional ACORN funding ban, however. Last summer Judicial Watch uncovered recordsthat show ACORN got tens of thousands of dollars in grants to “combat housing and lending discrimination.” The money came via Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which awarded a $79,819 grant to AHCOA.
In addition to violating the ACORN funding ban, the grant was astounding because federal investigators had previously exposed fraud by the same Florida-based ACORN/AHCOA affiliate. HUD’s inspector general found that the group “inappropriately” spent more than $3.2 million in grants that were supposed to be used to eliminate lead poisoning in its housing program.
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.]
To those of us who have been paying attention to the antics of the EPA under this administration this is no surprise. By the rational currently being used by the EPA they could ban all cars and justify it by saying that if cars put just one life at risk they must be strictly regulated or banned. The same can be said of anything. Of course, just like health care and other regs, Obama donors get a waiver.
For the last three years, the Environmental Protection Agency has justified new air quality regulations — unprecedented in stringency and cost — on the assumption that even trace levels of particulate matter can cause early death.
A recent EPA report states that by 2020, the EPA’s rules “will prevent 230,000 early deaths.” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has gone so far as to testify before Congress that the new regulations would provide health benefits as valuable as a cure for cancer. If true, this is compelling. Unfortunately, such rhetoric is built on implausible assumptions, biased models, statistical manipulations and two cherry-picked studies.
Unwinding this tangled web is tedious but necessary to prevent the EPA from becoming a national economic planning agency that transforms our economy and undermines our form of democratic government, in which elected representatives — not federal technocrats — have the authority to make the country’s major policy decisions.
On Wednesday, a U.S. House subcommittee will conduct a hearing to examine the real costs and benefits of the EPA’s environmental regulations, with invited testimony from one of my former colleagues at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
As I noted in my latest report for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “EPA’s Pretense of Science,” the EPA now justifies almost every major new air quality rule on the basis of models indicating implausibly exaggerated health risks from fine particulate matter, rarely considered a killer by physicians or toxicologists.
Extrapolating from assumptions, the EPA in 2009 decided that no risk is too low, improbable or uncertain that it is not worth responding to with regulation. With a straight face, the EPA’s leadership now maintains that there is no safe level of ambient fine particulate matter — however near to zero — at which risk of “early” death ceases. Statisticians call this analytic approach a “no threshold linear regression to zero.”
The Clean Air Act requires that national air quality standards be set at levels adequate to protect human health with a margin of safety and regardless of cost. That’s a very cautious rubric. But through the no-safe-threshold assumption, the current EPA goes further: to zero risk. This methodological change leads the EPA to the implausible finding that mortal risks increase to the extent that ambient levels of fine particulates exceed natural background levels of 1 microgram per cubic meter. The current federal standard is 15 micrograms per cubic meter.
Wow, an honest ad from Mitt Romney. I was beginning to wonder if they were capable of it. This ad is spot on accurate.
“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
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