This is what government is all about. Forget roads, mass murder through warfare, or locking people up for their consumption choices: it’s making sure that no one gives out water without a permit.
This is from last week but I believe un-noted here: ABC-TV 15 from Phoenix reports that local Christian proselytizer Dana Crow-Smith was ordered by a “Neighborhood Preservation Inspector” to stop giving out free bottled water last month because she lacked a vending permit, though she was not vending.
She is threatening to sue the city with help from the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group with a focus on religious liberties, if the city doesn’t apologize and swear to train its enforcement officers to not make the same mistake again.
The Institute’s letter of complaint to the city.
Category Archives: Stuck on Stupid
2,362 Millionaires Received Unemployment Benefits
When “government” is the answer all to often it was a stupid question. Case in point this idiotic federal mandate:
There were 2,362 people who earned a million dollars or more in taxable income in 2009 and who also received federal unemployment benefits that year, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.
In fact, these millionaires collectively raked in more than $20 million in unemployment benefits.
The Congressional Research Service report–Receipt of Unemployment Insurance by Higher-Income Unemployed Workers (“Millionaires”)—was published on Aug. 2 and was based on the most recent data available from the Internal Revenue Service.
“Among tax filers with AGI [Adjusted Gross Income] of $1 million or more, 2,840 reported receipt of unemployment benefit income in 2008 and 2,362 tax filers reported receipt of unemployment benefit income in 2009,” the CRS reported.
The CRS reported that millionaires received $20.8 million in federal unemployment benefits in 2009, up from $18.6 million in 2008. That averages out to $8,806 in unemployment benefits per millionaire.
Unemployment insurance is a joint federal-state program and is funded by a payroll tax assessed against all workers. In the four years preceding 2012, according to the Tax Foundation, the unemployment insurance system was in the red. “Between 2008 and 2011, $174 billion was paid in unemployment taxes while $450 billion was paid out in benefits, a gap of $276 billion,” the Tax Foundation said.
Department of Labor regulations require that unemployment benefits must be paid to all unemployed workers regardless of their income.
“This requirement is based upon a 1964 U.S. Department of Laobr (DOL) decision that precludes states from means-testing to determine UC [unemployment compensation] eligibility,” the CRS said in its report.
Immigration Officials Describe Border Chaos Resulting From Obama Admin’s Amnesty Policy (video)
Detroit becomes dumping ground for the dead
Detroit has been run by Democrats for decades. Their wealth destroying policies oversaw Detroit’s decline from the highest per capita income in the country to next to 67th.
Related:
Progressivism Unrestrained: 1 in 3 residences abandoned in Detroit.
Profiles in Unrestrained Progressivism: Detroit
Detroit Public Schools Graduation Rate 26%
Democrat Conyers Pleads Guilty to Feds for Taking Bribes.
Progressivism Unrestrained: Detroit building “train to nowhere”
Democrats Loot Detroit for Half a Billion, Elite Media Doesn’t Care…
From the street, the two decomposing bodies were nearly invisible, concealed in an overgrown lot alongside worn-out car tires and a moldy sofa. The teenagers had been shot, stripped to their underwear and left on a deserted block.
They were just the latest victims of foul play whose remains went undiscovered for days after being hidden deep inside Detroit’s vast urban wilderness — a crumbling wasteland rarely visited by outsiders and infrequently patrolled by police.
Abandoned and neglected parts of the city are quickly becoming dumping grounds for the dead — at least a dozen bodies in 12 months’ time. And authorities acknowledge there’s little they can do.
“You can shoot a person, dump a body and it may just go unsolved” because of the time it may take for the corpse to be found, officer John Garner said.
The bodies have been purposely hidden or discarded in alleys, fields, vacant houses, abandoned garages and even a canal. Seven of the victims are believed to have been slain outside Detroit and then dumped within the city.
It’s a pattern made possible by more than four decades of urban decay and suburban flight. White residents started moving to burgeoning suburbs in the 1950s, then stepped up their exodus after a deadly 1967 race riot. Detroit’s black middle class followed over the next two decades, leaving block after block of empty homes.
Over time, tens of thousands of houses deteriorated. Some collapsed, others were demolished. Empty lots gave way to block-long fields.
Jacob Kudla and Jourdan Bobbish were found July 27 in a field off Lyford Street, a lonely road that borders an industrial area and a small municipal airport. The teens from suburban Westland, 18 and 17, respectively, had been visiting Kudla’s uncle in Detroit when they disappeared July 22.
Their corpses were found by someone walking along the desolate block. The closest house, about 100 yards (91.4 meters) away, belongs to 74-year-old Ella Dunn.
Over the last 24 years, she has watched nearly all her neighbors move out. Now she constantly hears people dumping tires, furniture and trash.
“They drive down and push stuff out,” she said.
A nearby parking lot resembles a small landfill for junk — a coloring book based on Bible characters, a yellow toilet, furniture, shoes and five boats.
“Detroit is a dumping ground for a lot of stuff,” said Margaret Dewar, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. “There is no one to watch. There is no capacity to enforce laws about dumping. There is a perception you can dump and no one will report it.”
Labor Dept. Waives 60-Day Jobs Notice To Help Obama Get Good Press…
That’s right…. SCREW THOSE DEFENSE WORKERS! They probably voted for McCain anyways…..
This is cruel.
Politics: An administration that doesn’t want layoff notices required by law going out days before the November election is telling defense contractors they don’t have to send them for the cuts required by sequestration.
As the heads of major defense contractors Lockheed Martin, EADS North America, Pratt & Whitney and Williams-Pyro testified recently before the House Armed Services Committee, they are bound by law to give employees 60 days’ notice if their jobs are going to be terminated as a result of sequestration cuts scheduled for Jan. 2.
Federal law under the WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice) Act required employers to give workers a minimum of 60 days notice before potential mass layoffs.
That means layoff warning notices could go out to hundreds of thousands of workers just days before the presidential election, a prospect President Obama and his administration do not relish.
Some $500 billion in defense-spending reductions are scheduled to kick in beginning Jan. 2.
These cuts come on top of $487 billion in Defense Department cuts recently approved and threaten to not only to put our national security in jeopardy but also gut the skilled workforce in the aerospace industry.
Robert Stevens, chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, told lawmakers that his company alone is looking at laying off roughly 10,000 employees from its 120,000 workforce.
The layoffs would be the result of cuts to its largest programs, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Littoral Combat Ship.
To avoid the electoral consequences of these cuts, the Department of Labor (DOL) is informing defense contractors that since sequestration hasn’t actually happened yet, and some in Congress are trying to find ways around it, it might be nice if they didn’t obey federal law and send out the pink slips just this once.
Otherwise, outraged voters might give President Obama a pink slip a few days later.
86% of Romney Elite Media Coverage Negative; Obama Coverage “Gushing” With Approval…
Their coverage of McCain/Palin was not even this negative.
Lets talk about Sarah Palin for just a moment. People now realize that Sarah Palin has been correct on issue after issue. She was right about ObamaCare, she was right about how radical the Obama Administration would be, she was also right when she predicted the rise of food prices very early on. Even the Wall Street Journal trashed Palin for the food prediction, but time after time she has been shown correct. The result is that more and more people doubt the elite media and truly understand just how vicious a partisan attack machine it has become.
Media bias has gone from bad to ridiculous.
During Mitt Romney’s overseas visit earlier this week, 86 percent of the coverage on ABC, CBS and NBC “emphasized Romney’s perceived gaffes,” according to a content analysis of 21 major news stories by the Media Research Center, which also compared Mr. Romney’s trip to a similar excursion made by President Obama in 2008.
The results: The broadcast networks committed 53 minutes of almost entirely negative coverage to Mr. Romney, and 92 minutes of “gushing” to Mr. Obama.
“The near unanimous negativity of their coverage is as outrageous as it is transparent,” observes the center’s founder Brent Bozell. “It’s impossible to look at the fawning coverage of Obama’s trip in 2008 compared to the sliming Romney has taken in 2012 and not see a clear agenda on the part of the liberal media.”
mmm
Bill Whittle: California Going Out of Business! (video)
Why California is going out of business.
Hey Obama! I’m not sure who built this but….
My latest creation for our Political Arena visitors!
Report: FBI Didn’t Probe Ft. Hood Shooter Over ‘Political Correctness’
People in government do not behave this way because they fear Republicans….
Newsmax:
The FBI was too concerned about political correctness and did not launch an investigation into a man who was later charged with killing 13 people in a 2009 attack at the Fort Hood military installation in Texas, despite significant warning signs that he was an Islamic extremist bent on killing civilians, according to a lawmaker briefed on a new report about the terrorist attack.
In emails to a known terrorist, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan expressed his support for suicide bombings and killing civilians, while the terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, encouraged Hasan to stay in touch, Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, told The Associated Press on Wednesday after he was briefed on the findings of a new review of the attack.
The review was done by former FBI Director William Webster and was more than two years in the making. FBI Director Robert Mueller asked that Webster conduct an independent review, and the bureau is expected to release an unclassified version this week.
Much was already known about the series of oversights and missteps the government made leading to the terror attack at the Fort Hood Army post.
Soon after the attack, it was revealed that members of two FBI anti-terrorism task forces saw emails between the Army psychiatrist and al-Awlaki beginning in December 2008. Those task forces reviewed the communications and decided they were in keeping with Hasan’s research at the time, and as a result, no formal investigation of Hasan was opened. Hasan was writing a research paper about the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But McCaul said Webster’s report offers some new details that show the FBI was concerned about investigating an American Muslim in the military, and that is why an investigation was not pursued.
Read more on Newsmax.com: Report: FBI Didn’t Probe Ft. Hood Shooter Over ‘Political Correctness’
Mia Love: Obama is throwing working people under the bus (video)
Mia Love also comments on Obama: You didn’t build that!
Sen. Rubio: Obama ignoring his jobs council because he doesn’t like their recommendations (video)
Senator Rubio: Obama was just saying what he really believed when he said that small business owners didn’t build their businesses.
Obama’s Press Secretary says that Obama hasn’t met with his Jobs Council in over six months because “He has a lot on his plate”. Indeed, like 106 fund raisers and if memory serves about two dozen golf outings.
TSA Let 25 Illegal Aliens Attend Flight School Owned by Illegal Alien
After this happened at 9/11 you would think they would learn…
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved flight training for 25 illegal aliens at a Boston-area flight school that was owned by yet another illegal alien, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The illegal-alien flight-school attendees included eight who had entered the country illegally and 17 who had overstayed their allowed period of admission into the United States, according to an audit by the GAO.
Six of the illegal aliens were actually able to get pilot’s licenses.
Discovery of the trouble at the flight school began when local police–not federal authorities–pulled over the owner of the school on a traffic violation and were able to determine that he was an illegal alien.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved flight training for 25 illegal aliens at a Boston-area flight school that was owned by yet another illegal alien, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The illegal-alien flight-school attendees included eight who had entered the country illegally and 17 who had overstayed their allowed period of admission into the United States, according to an audit by the GAO.
Six of the illegal aliens were actually able to get pilot’s licenses.
Discovery of the trouble at the flight school began when local police–not federal authorities–pulled over the owner of the school on a traffic violation and were able to determine that he was an illegal alien.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R.-Ala.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security, said he found the GAO’s findings “amazing.”
“We have cancer patients, Iraq War veterans and Nobel Prize winners all forced to undergo rigorous security checks before getting on an airplane,” said Rogers, “and at the same time, ten years after 9/11, there are foreign nationals in the United States trained to fly just like Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers did, and not all of them are necessarily getting a security background check.”
Stephen Lord, who is the GAO’s director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues, testified about the matter Wednesday in Rogers’ subcommittee. Rogers asked him: “Isn’t it true that, based on your report, the Transportation Security Administration cannot assure the American people that foreign terrorists are not in this country learning how to fly airplanes, yes or no?”
Lord responded: “At this time, no.”
Devastating New Romney Add: These Hands (video)
According to Obama and far left Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (the one who was caught lying about her heritage) people who own businesses and such are not entitled to the fruits of their labor because we had roads; therefore they didn’t do anything to deserve any profit form their work.
Candidate Joe Kennedy III Calls for End To “Cheap Oil”….
There is out of touch and then there is OMGWTF out of touch. Just when you thought it was bad enough when Obama’s Energy Secretary testified to Congress that gas should be $8.00 a gallon….
The Daily Caller:
As gas prices continue to soar around the country, Joe Kennedy III, the Democratic candidate for Rep. Barney Frank’s seat, wrote an online letter to supporters calling for an end to “cheap oil.”
“Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama — they’ve all talked about the same thing: the need to wean ourselves off our debilitating dependence on foreign oil,” Kennedy wrote.
“The cycle that allows cheap oil to trump tough choices has to stop,” he continued. “Forty years is enough.”
In the week before Kennedy posted, AAA Southern New England reported that the price of gas in Massachusetts had risen a further two cents. The Worchester Business Journal reported that at an average of $3.899 a gallon for regular unleaded gas, the price is currently 24 cents higher than it was one year before.
Kennedy is running against Sean Bielat, a former Marine who lost to 16-term Rep. Barney Frank by 10 points in the 2010 election.
“It’s kind of stunning that he’s so out of touch that he would say it that way,” Bielat Communications Director Sarah Rumpf told The Daily Caller. “Democrats, Republicans and independents — everybody is paying for higher gas right now.”
Though Kennedy has said that he is not running on his name — which represents a liberal political dynasty — critics have attacked him for not putting forth policy positions. His campaign website does not have an issues section.
Obama invested heavily with outsourcers, after accusing Romney of doing the same…
See our other coverage on General Electric, Obama and Outsourcing. Also see – Obama’s Top Money Man Was In Charge of Bain Capital During GST Steel Layoffs – LINK.
Here we have an outstanding piece of journalism from Phil Klein at the Washington Examiner:
President Obama has accused Mitt Romney of raking in profits from investing in companies that ship American jobs overseas, but according to his most recent financial disclosure, he and First Lady Michelle Obama have hundreds of thousands of dollars in a mutual fund that has large holdings in corporations that outsource jobs.
“(Romney) invested in companies that have been called ‘pioneers’ of outsourcing,” Obama said at a Saturday campaign event in Glen Allen, Va. “I don’t want a pioneer in outsourcing. I want some insourcing.”
But Obama’s own portfolio shows a willingness to invest in American corporations that have shifted employment overseas.
In his most recent financial disclosure from 2011, Obama and his wife reported having between $200,000 and $450,000 in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which invests in the largest U.S. corporations. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as of Sept. 30, 2011, the fund’s biggest holding was 8,272,039 shares of Apple Inc., then valued at $3.2 billion.
The New York Times reported in January:
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas….
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.
“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
The mutual fund that the Obamas have invested in also held 94,582,281 million shares of General Electric, valued at $1.4 billion, as of the SEC filing. The multinational conglomorate has a long history of outsourcing – according to a new book cited by the New York Times, in 1989, “G.E. became the first U.S. company to outsource software work to India.” Obama also has close ties to GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, who was appointed as chairman of his outside panel of economic advisers last year.
In addition to Apple and GE, the Obamas’ fund listed 10,655,961 shares of International Business Machines, valued at $1.9 billion. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2009, “The technology giant has been steadily building its work force in India and other locations while reducing the number of workers based in the U.S. Foreign workers accounted for 71% of Big Blue’s nearly 400,000 employees at the start of the year, up from about 65% in 2006.”
The point in this is not to say outsourcing is wrong. Corporations are supposed to maximize profits for shareholders. But Obama’s own portfolio shows that despite his heated rhetoric, he makes investment decisions without regard to whether companies are outsourcing.
You can look at a full list of the fund’s holdings as of Sept. 30, 2011, here.
Chevy Volt Costs Tax Payers $250,000 Per Car, Low Sales, Huge Losses; Elite Media Silent
But when there was a tiny uptick in Chevy Volt sales in June the elite media was ecstatic.
The President is running in large part on the bailout’s $30+ billion loss, uber-failed “success.” And the Press is acting as his stenographers. An epitome of this bailout nightmare mess is the electric absurdity that is the Chevrolet Volt. The Press is at every turn covering up – rather than covering – the serial failures of President Obama’s signature vehicle.
The Press has failed to mention at least five Volt fires, myopically focusing on the one the Obama Administration hand-selected for attention.
The Press has failed to mention that the Volt fire problem remains unsolved. Is it the battery? Is it the charging station? Is it the charging cable? All of the above?
GM and the Administration don’t know. And the Press ain’t breaking their necks trying to find out.
In more recent news, the Press has almost as one hailed the June Volt sales increase.
Surprising June Sales for Volt
Chevy Volt Leads US Plug-In Car Sales
Volt Records Second-Best Sales Month
The Press has for the most part failed to mention how pathetic this “second-best sales month” actually is. And even when one Dinosaur does, the unwarranted enthusiasm is palpable.
GM sells 1760 Volts in June, double from 2011
Wow. Huge number.
The Press also fails to put this pathetic tally in perspective.
The Chevy Cruze is basically a Volt without the dead-weight, flammable 400-lb. electric battery. Which makes it $17,000, rather than the Volt’s $41,000.
Chevy in June sold 18,983 Cruzes – more than ten times the number of Volts. And that’s down 1/3 from last June’s 24,648.
But that feeble Volt tally has the Press all revved up.
And speaking of the Volt’s ridiculous $41,000 sticker price:
According to multiple GM executives there is little or no profit being made on each Volt built at a present cost of around $40,000. Furthermore, the $700 million of development that went into the car has to be recouped.
Get that? GM makes “little or no profit” on the Volt.
So it makes perfect sense that GM would spend millions of dollars advertising it, does it not? No ideological or campaign intent there, eh President Obama?
Look, I get it, it’s fun. I just spent $1 million – of your money – advertising free air. On which my profit margin is just as good as GM’s is on the Volt.
Only my ads didn’t have a song, or a dance. We just aren’t as cool as the Volt.
I mean, it’s so cool – it can travel back in time to inspire the production of cars before it even existed.
I mean, it’s so cool – it can travel back in time to offer the exact same technology as a car from 1991. And the exact same electric battery range as a car from 1897.
We’re talking retro-grade cool.
But wait – there’s so much more.
(A)dd $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volt’s Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for “retooling” its plants, and you’ve got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.
Speaking of those “tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives” – as of November of last year that tally all by itself was $250,000 per Volt sold.
And that excruciating pain is ongoing. Again, a Volt sold makes GM no money – but costs We the Taxpayers a $7,500 bribe – I mean “incentive.” Oh – and President Obama wants to jack that bribe to $10,000 per.
I guess it’s good news after all that Volt sales remain so anemic.
And with GM’s new 60-day return policy, it looks like you can buy a Volt and cash the $7,500 bribe check. Then return the Volt – and keep the $7,500 bribe cash. How’s that for Taxpayer coin stewardship?
More information on Obama stimulus outsourcing…
Go to this website for some good information on the jobs the Obama Administration outsourced with billions of your stimulus money.
http://www.obamanomicsoutsourced.com/
Related:
Gov. Sununu destroys Andrea Mitchell while she struggles to defend Obama’s stimulus outsourcing (video) – LINK
ABC’s Jake Tapper Blasts Obama’s Double Standard on Jobs and Outsourcing – LINK
Book: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture and Ushered In the Obamacrats
Prolific author David Gelernter has covered subjects ranging from technology to Judaism, but America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats) is his first unabashedly political book.
Gelernter opposes Barack Obama primarily because Obama is one of the “Airheads” produced by the U.S. educational system.
“Obama is an Airhead and no ordinary ideologue,” writes Gelernter in America-Lite, “but he is certainly a left-liberal; he repeats the doctrine he learned from left-liberal intellectuals.”
Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, said his teaching experience has contributed enormously to his pessimistic assessment of American culture. “Every year I see a new class of smart kids, motivated kids, who are just ignorant,” said Gelernter.
“We educators have a responsibility,” said Gelernter, “and we’re failing.”
America-Lite shows “how we lost control of our own culture,” and how the “sullen, seething contempt for Western culture” that characterizes many educators is producing generations of ignorant citizens (dubbed “Airheads” by Gelernter) who accept liberal ideology because it is all they’ve ever known.
Gelernter called out conservatives, saying Republicans are focusing on secondary issues and avoiding the “deeper problems” in American culture.
“Conservatives are letting the country down,” said Gelernter.
From the book description:
America-Lite (where we all live) is just like America, only turned into an amusement park or a video game or a supersized Pinkberry, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big NOW. How did we come to expect no virtue and so much cynicism from our culture, our leaders—and each other?
In this refreshingly judgmental book, David Gelernter connects the historical dots to reveal a stealth revolution carried out by post-religious globalist intellectuals who, by and large, “can’t run their own universities or scholarly fields, but are very sure they can run you.” These imperial academics have deployed their students into the top echelon of professions once monopolized by staid and steady WASPs. In this simple way, they have installed themselves as the new designated drivers of American culture.
Imperial academics live in a world of theory; they preach disdain for mere facts and for old-fashioned fact-based judgments like true or false. Schoolchildren are routinely taught theories about history instead of actual history—they learn, for example, that all nations are equally nice except for America, which is nearly always nasty.
With academic experts to do our thinking for us, we’ve politely shut up and let second-raters take the wheel. In fact, we have handed the keys to the star pupil and teacher’s pet of the post-religious globalist intellectuals, whose election to the presidency of the United States constituted the ultimate global group hug.
How do we finally face the truth and get back into the driver’s seat? America-Lite ends with a one-point plan.
Obama Administration: Murdering 1,000 Christians Is Not Terrorism
You just can’t make this stuff up folks…
Via Godfather Blog and Jewish World Review:
In the past three years, over 1,000 Christians in Nigeria have been brutally murdered by an extremist Islamic group known as Boko Haram and the United States has refused to classify the group as being a terrorist organization.
Nigeria’s Christian leaders had asked the United States government to place Boko Haram on the list of terrorist organizations. The radical Islamic group has vowed to eradicate all Christians from Nigerian soil and will continue to murder men, women and children in the process unless something is done to stop them.
Instead of declaring Boko Haram a terrorist organization, the U.S. government only placed three of the group’s leaders on a terrorist blacklist and then said that it was more important to address social inequalities in the country first. Christian leaders in Nigeria said the actions or perhaps lack of action by the United States has only served to make the group bolder and more aggressive in their pursuit to exterminate the remaining Christians.
Appearing before House Foreign Affairs Committee, Christian Association of Nigeria President Ayo Oritsejafor said the decision was:
“The equivalent of designating (Osama) bin Laden a terrorist but failing to designate Al-Qaeda a terrorist organization.”
“By refusing to designate Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization, the United States is sending a very clear message, not just to the federal government of Nigeria, but to the world that the murder of innocent Christians and Muslims who reject Islamism — and I make a clear distinction here between Islam and Islamism — are acceptable losses.”
“It is hypocritical for the United States and the international community to say that they believe in freedom and equality when their actions do not support those who are being persecuted.”
An example of how TEA Party people should NOT behave (VIDEO)
The Congressman is right. Listen to what he said – he said that you have to have a plan to get back to it (constitutional limited government) and you just can’t say “I stand for the Constitution” and expect to win. He never said or implied, to set the Constitution aside like he was accused. Immediately the TEA Party activists took what he said and converted it into something he never came close to saying in the video.
The Congressman is right when he said half the people do not believe in the Constitution – largely because they are clueless to what it says. Just the other day I had to sit down and talk with a 59 year old women who was furious and decided that she would never vote again. Why? Because she had just heard about the Electoral College and so she thought that no ones vote counted any more.
I LOVE TEA Party people, but the kind of knee jerk over reaction to what he said, without actually LISTENING to what he said, is the kind of stupidity that will render them irrelevant. No one wants to talk to you when talking to you is like talking to a Klingon. Knee-jerk over reaction rampage is not how to win people to your side.
With that said there is a lot of truth to what the TEA Party activist at the end said about the erosion of the Bill of Rights.
No one is going to win an election by campaigning on going back to 1787 overnight. Campaigning on going back to 1787 is not electorally possible when half the people are more familiar with Justin Bieber’s love life than they are with Separation of Powers.
Much like the abortion battle, we are winning more and more people to the pro-life cause and there are fewer and fewer abortions because we are educating people and winning hearts and minds. This is why pro-life people did a whole lot more than block the doors to abortion mills.
The Founders repeatedly and ad nauseum went to King George and appealed to him and others and yes they even offered compromises, and while it did not influence the king it did influence others and brought allies to our cause when shots were fired.
If in 1743 When Sam Adams started bring people onto his “radical” cause had gone around saying “War with England tomorrow if we do not get all of our demands tonight” he would have gotten no where. It is the journey to get there that brought him allies that he could never had gotten if he tried to go from 1743 to 1787 overnight.
I am not saying that we should sell out, what I am saying is that getting back to limited government is a path that will take time, it is not just something one can do overnight.
I would like to remind our TEA Party friends of my initial point: the group of activists in that video basically applied a point of view to the Congressman that he never said or advocated in the video. They took what he said, converted it to something MUCH worse, and applied that to him. Those are the tactics of Saul Alinsky.
Liberals; how dumb are they?
Democrat Party Chair Debbie Schultz Trashed Romney for Having a Swiss Bank Account – She Has One Too!
Of course there is nothing wrong or illegal about having a Swiss bank account or overseas investments. With the state of American banks and this government I would keep cash in solid foreign banks as well. The hypocrisy in this story is just overwhelming and the Democrats are pulling every desperate card to play on the ignorance of people who aren’t familiar with such financial tools.
The Weekly Standard:
Disclosure forms reveal that Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a member of Congress from Florida, previously held funds with investments in Swiss banks, foreign drug companies, and the state bank of India. This revelation comes mere days after the Democratic chair attacked presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for holding money in Swiss bank accounts in the past.
“Americans need to ask themselves, why does an American businessman need a Swiss bank account and secretive investments like that?” the DNC chair, a chief surrogate for President Obama’s reelection team, said on Fox News Sunday two days ago. “Just something, a thought, that I’d like to leave folks with.”
It’s been a consistent theme of Obama’s reelection strategy: Attack Romney for foreign investments he held, especially in Swiss bank accounts, “to try to promote his wealthy, out-of-touch businessman persona.”
But disclosure forms reveal that in 2010, Wasserman Schultz invested between $1,001-$15,000 in a 401k retirement fund run by Davis Financial Fund. As the fund discloses, it is invested in the Julius Baer Group Ltd. and the State Bank of India GDR Ltd., as well as other financial, insurance, bank institutions.
Obama Denies Waiver for Innovative Cost Saving Indiana Medicaid Program
I mean, we cant have incentives that are deigned to help people make smart health care choices and actually save money, not when we are trying to bankrupt the country…
I first reported on this story on my old college blog when our friend Amity Shleas wrote an article about Obama moving to kill the popular and budget saving program called HIP. Why? Well Mitch Daniels is our governor and the Obama Administration did not want such a successful program written by a popular Republican governor to get any publicity.
Indiana once again tried to save HIP by asking for a waiver and Obama once again is determined to kill the program.
Obama Administration Denies Waiver for Indiana’s Popular Medicaid Program
In 2007, under Gov. Mitch Daniels (R.), Indiana enacted the Healthy Indiana Plan, an expansion of Medicaid that used consumer-driven health plans to encourage low-income beneficiaries to take a more active role in their own care. Today, Healthy Indiana is the most innovative and successful reform of Medicaid in the history of the program. Today, we learn that the Obama Administration has rejected the state’s request to extend its federal waiver, which means that over 45,000 Indianans who get their insurance through the program are out of luck.
Medicaid, of course, is the nation’s government-run health insurance program for the poor. In theory, it’s jointly run by the federal government and the states, but in reality, any time a state wants to make the tiniest changes in its Medicaid program, it has to go hat-in-hand to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with a formal request for a waiver, and these waivers are usually denied.
Indiana succeeded in gaining a waiver in 2007 because it was seeking to expand Medicaid to a group of people who weren’t then eligible for the program, and because the state’s effort required no additional outlays from the federal government (the Medicaid expansion was paid for with a 44-cent increase in the state’s cigarette tax.)
Structure of Indiana’s consumer-driven Medicaid plan
Beneficiaries get a high-deductible health plan and a health savings account, called a POWER account, to which individuals must make a mandatory monthly contribution between 2 to 5 percent of income, up to $92 per month. Participants lose their coverage if they don’t make their contributions within 60 days of their due date. After making this contribution, beneficiaries have no other cost-sharing requirements (co-pays, deductibles, etc.) except for non-urgent use of emergency rooms. The state chips in $1,100, which corresponds to the size of the would-be deductible.
Those who have money remaining in their POWER accounts at the end of the year can apply the balance to the following year’s contribution requirements, if they have obtained a specified amount of preventive care: annual physical exams, pap smears and mammograms for women, cholesterol tests, flu shots, blood glucose screens, and tetanus-diphtheria screens.
“We did a lot of reading on criticism of health savings accounts,” says Seema Verma, who was the architect of the Indiana program. “One of the criticisms was that people didn’t have enough money to pay for preventive care. So we took preventive care out, made that first-dollar coverage. Also, people said that people didn’t have enough for the deductible, so we fully funded it. Then, you have to make your contribution every month, with a 60-day grace period. If you don’t make the contribution, you’re out of the program for 12 months. It’s a strong personal responsibility mechanism.”
Indiana’s Medicaid successes
The program has been, by many measures, a smashing success. “What we’re finding out is that, first of all, low-income people are just as capable as anybody else of making wise decisions when it’s their own money that they’re spending,” Mitch Daniels explains in a Heritage Foundation video. “And they’re also acting more like good consumers. They’re visiting emergency rooms less, they’re using more generic drugs, they’re asking for second opinions. And some real money is starting to accumulate in their [health savings] accounts.”
The program has been overwhelmingly popular in Indiana. There’s a large waiting list—in the tens of thousands—to enroll in Healthy Indiana; enrollment was capped in order to ensure that the program’s costs remain predictable. 90 percent of enrollees are making their required monthly contributions. “The program’s level of satisfaction is at an unheard-of 98 percent approval rating,” Verma told Kenneth Artz. Employers didn’t dump their workers onto the program, crowding others out, because you needed to be uninsured for six months in order to be eligible for it.
A 2010 study by Mathematica Policy Research found that the program dramatically increased the percentage of beneficiaries who obtained preventive care, from 39 percent in the first six months of enrollment to 59 percent after one year. Of the members who had money left in the POWER accounts at the end of the year, 71 percent met the preventive care requirement and were able to roll the balances over to the following year. (The remaining 29 percent could roll over their personal contributions, but not the state contributions to their POWER accounts.)
This is an astounding achievement, given that the biggest problem with Medicaid is the way that it ghettoizes its participants, preventing them from gaining access to routine medical and dental care. This lack of physician access is the biggest reason why health outcomes for Medicaid patients lag far behind those of individuals with private insurance, and even behind those with no insurance at all. Healthy Indiana has completely reversed this trend, achieving preventive care participation rates that are higher than the privately-insured population.
Obama’s EPA Power Grab to Regulate Ditches and Gullies on Private Property
So this is why you voted for Obama?
Lawmakers are working to block an unprecedented power grab by the Environmental Protection Agency to use the Clean Water Act (CWA) and control land alongside ditches, gullies and other ephemeral spots by claiming the sources are part of navigable waterways.
These temporary water sources are often created by rain or snowmelt, and would make it harder for private property owners to build in their own backyards, grow crops, raise livestock and conduct other activities on their own land, lawmakers say.
“Never in the history of the CWA has federal regulation defined ditches and other upland features as ‘waters of the United States,’” said Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), the ranking committee member, and Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio), chairman of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.
“This is without a doubt an expansion of federal jurisdiction,” the lawmakers said in a May 31 letter to House colleagues.
The unusual alliance of the powerful House Republicans and Democrat to jointly sponsor legislation to overturn the new guidelines signals a willingness on Capitol Hill to rein in the formidable agency.
“The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to increase costs and regulatory burdens for American businesses, farmers and individual property owners,” Mica said in a statement to Human Events. “This federal jurisdiction grab has been opposed by Congress for years, and now the administration and its agencies are ignoring law and rulemaking procedures in order to tighten their regulatory grip over every water body in the country.”
“But this administration needs to realize it is not above the law,” Mica said.
The House measure carries 64 Republican and Democratic cosponsors and was passed in committee last week. A companion piece of legislation is already gathering steam in the Senate and is cosponsored by 26 Republicans.
“President Obama’s EPA continues to act as if it is above the law. It is using this overreaching guidance to pre-empt state and local governments, farmers and ranchers, small business owners and homeowners from making local land and water use decisions,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in announcing their measure in March. “Our bill will stop this unprecedented Washington power grab and restore Americans’ property rights.”
“It’s time to get EPA lawyers out of Americans’ backyards,” Barrasso said.
Mom given bill to clean street after son killed by illegal immigrant driving drunk…
You just can’t make this stuff up folks. Government is too often so incompetent. Is this who you want running healthcare?
GREENVILLE, SC – A grieving mother told a South Carolina court she was slapped with several bills, including one to clean the street after her son was killed by a drunken driver last year.
Loretta Robinson spoke on June 19 of the emotional and financial toll her son Justin Walker’s death had on her as the driver Anna Gonzales, who is an illegal immigrant, pleaded guilty in the case.
Robinson told the judge she has been unable to work due to the emotional impact of her son’s death, and can’t pay the bills she keeps receiving from the accident even though her son was not at fault, WYFF reports.
“I had to pay to have the vehicle towed,” she said according to WYFF. “I had to pay for the vehicle removed and to clean up the street from Justin’s blood on the ground.”
Robinson said the $50 bill to clean the street stung the most.
Read more HERE.
Obama Invites Radical Activists to White House; Look How They Behaved…
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.
TRIFECTA on the Madonna Breast Tour: GRANDMA NO! (video)
Hilarious and brilliant. A must see.
Neil Cavuto blasts Larry O’Donnell and MSNBC for trashing Ann Romney’s MS treatment (video)
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:
Obama Campaign Spokesman: Obama’s plan for next four years is more of the same policy as the last four years (video)
Obama Campaign Spokesman David Plouffe. You can’t make this stuff up folks…
DESPICABLE: President Obama Shuns Hero Lech Walesa
Obama orders that the bust of Winston Churchill in the White House be removed and now this.
This is revolting. While young people may not know, Lech Walesa was THE resistance leader behind the Iron Curtain. People think of Ronald Reagan ending the Cold War, but Reagan was safe in DC. Lech Walesa was our ally behind The Wall. Walesa is a hero in every sense of the word. Walesa was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet System.
If a president were to bow to any man, this is the man to bow to. To be given this treatment is simply unforgivable.
Rory Cooper writes in National Review:
Lech Walesa, a hero in every sense of the word.
Lech Walesa was once a trade-union activist. He was often arrested for speaking his mind against Communist oppression behind the Iron Curtain in Poland and for defying the Soviet Union. He was an electrician who, with no higher education, led one of the most profound freedom movements of the 20th century — Solidarity. He became president of Poland and swept in reforms, pushing the Soviet Union out of his homeland and moving the country toward a free-market economy and individual liberty. And President Obama doesn’t want him to set foot in the White House.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Polish officials requested that Walesa accept the Medal of Freedom on behalf of Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who was being honored posthumously this week. The request makes sense. Walesa and Karski shared a burning desire to rid Poland of tyrannical subjugation. But President Obama said no.
Administration officials told the Journal that Walesa is too “political.” A man who was arrested by Soviet officials for dissenting against the government for being “political” is being shunned by the United States of America for the same reason 30 years later.
Meanwhile, one of the recipients of the Medal was Dolores Huerta, the honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. So socialist politics are acceptable, but not the politics of a man who stood up and fought socialism.
This revelation follows an eruption of outrage in Poland after President Obama referred in his remarks at the Medal of Freedom ceremony to “Polish death camps,” a phrase that Poles have battled since the end of the Cold War. The phrase suggests that Poles were complicit in Nazi concentration camps, which of course is not the case. In fact, Poles were exterminated in the camps.
The White House’s flippant response to the uproar caused the Polish president and prime minister to demand more thoughtful and personal reactions. But White HousePress Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that the president has no plans to reach out to his Polish counterparts and has shrugged off the outrage in Poland.
Ironically, Lech Walesa shares a distinction with President Obama: They both won Nobel Peace Prizes. Walesa earned his in 1983 after years of fighting for peace and freedom, and being monitored, harassed, and jailed for it. President Obama received his award in 2009. Some may think that this would be enough of a bond for President Obama to set aside political differences for the greater good. But instead, President Obama treated Walesa the same way he treated the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who was ushered out the White House kitchen past piles of garbage in 2010.
Political Arena 