Since FDR’s court packing threat the Commerce Clause interpretation has gone off the deep end. Everyone who has studied law seriously knows that the “modern” expansionist view of the commerce clause started to become interpreted that way not because the court had a legal epiphany, but rather they feared the Democratic Party would pack the court with 18 or so new justices all of whom would be political hacks. These new interpretations that were done under duress took the entire notion of limited government and tossed it out the window. I am glad to see Justice Scalia come to this point of view.
With a Supreme Court decision on the fate of President Obama’s health care law expected in the next two weeks, every wisp of a hint about the justices’ thinking is getting the scrutiny usually reserved for CAT scans.
Justice Antonin Scalia picked the right moment, then, to deliver more than 500 pages of hints, in a book to be published next week. He wrote it with Bryan A. Garner, and it is an overview and summation of the justice’s approach to making sense of statutes and the Constitution.
It is also studded with telling asides and intimations about past and future decisions.
Justice Scalia writes, for instance, that he has little use for a central precedent the Obama administration has cited to justify the health care law under the Constitution’s commerce clause, Wickard v. Filburn.
In that 1942 decision, Justice Scalia writes, the Supreme Court “expanded the Commerce Clause beyond all reason” by ruling that “a farmer’s cultivation of wheat for his own consumption affected interstate commerce and thus could be regulated under the Commerce Clause.”
That position is good evidence, particularly when coupled with Justice Scalia’s skeptical questioning at the arguments in the health care case in March, that the administration will not capture his vote.
Justice Scalia’s treatment of the Wickard case had been far more respectful in his judicial writings. In the book’s preface, he explains (referring to himself in the third person) that he “knows that there are some, and fears that there may be many, opinions that he has joined or written over the past 30 years that contradict what is written here.” Some inconsistencies can be explained by respect for precedent, he writes, others “because wisdom has come late.”
“Worse still,” he writes, he “does not swear that the opinions that he joins or writes in the future will comply with what is written here,” for the first two reasons “or because a judge must remain open to persuasion by counsel.”
Mr. Garner, a prominent lexicographer and authority on usage, also collaborated with Justice Scalia on an earlier book, “Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.” He said the timing of the new one was happenstance.
When I was in college finishing my latest degree I wrote a series of articles on the mortgage crisis (mid 2008). This is a good summary of this section of the scandal and what led to the collapse. This is by no means the whole story but as I said, a good summary of this layer of what gave us this mess.
The Obama Record: The Obama camp’s running a new ad reminding African-Americans of all he’s done for them as they weather an economic crisis he “inherited.” Left out is his own role in their predicament.
The press has never questioned the president about his involvement. But his fingerprints are there.
Before the crisis, Obama pushed thousands of credit-poor blacks into homes they couldn’t afford. As a civil-rights attorney, he sued banks to rubberstamp mortgages for urban residents.
Many are now in foreclosure. In fact, the lead client in one of his class-action suits has since lost her home and filed bankruptcy.
First some background: Obama focused on “housing rights” when he worked as a lawyer-activist and community organizer in South Side Chicago. His mentor — the man who placed him in his first job there — was the father of the anti-redlining movement: John McKnight. He coined the term “redlining” to describe the mapping off of minority neighborhoods from home loans.
McKnight wrote a letter for Obama that helped him get into Harvard. After he graduated, he worked for a Chicago civil-rights law firm that worked closely with McKnight’s radical Gamaliel Foundation and National People’s Action, as well as Acorn, to solicit lending-discrimination cases.
At the time, NPA and Acorn were lobbying the Clinton administration to tighten enforcement of anti-redlining laws.
They also dispatched bus loads of goons trained by Obama to the doorsteps of bankers to demand more home loans for minorities. Acorn even crashed the lobby of Citibank’s headquarters in New York and accused it of discriminating against blacks.
The pressure worked. In 1994, Clinton’s top bank regulators signed a landmark anti-redlining policy that declared traditional mortgage underwriting standards racist and mandated banks apply easier lending rules for minorities.
Also that year, Attorney General Janet Reno and her aide Eric Holder filed a mortgage discrimination case against a Washington-area bank that forced it to target minority neighborhoods for subprime loans.
Reno and Holder also encouraged civil-rights lawyers like Obama to file local lending-bias cases against banks.
The next year, Obama led a class-action suit against Citibank on behalf of several Chicago minorities who claimed they were rejected for home loans because of the color of their skin. It was one of 11 such suits filed against the financial giant in Chicago and New York in the 1990s.
As first reported in Paul Sperry’s “The Great American Bank Robbery,” the plaintiffs’ claim lacked merit. Factors other than race figured in the bank’s decision to turn them down for loans.
One of Obama’s clients had “inadequate collateral” and “an incomplete application,” while another had “delinquent credit obligations and other adverse credit history.”
Obama argued such facts miss the point: that Citibank’s neutral underwriting criteria may have adversely impacted his clients as a class of people. He demanded it turn over loan files from the entire Chicago metro area to prove it regularly engaged in a pattern of discrimination.
The court didn’t award him the files. But Citibank eventually settled, despite the weak case. Under the 1998 settlement, Citibank vowed to pay the alleged victims $1.4 million and launch a program to boost home lending to poor blacks in the metro area.
In the run-up to the crisis, Citibank underwrote thousands of shaky subprime mortgages to satisfy the court in Obama’s case. Defaults were common. When home prices collapsed, most of the loans went bust.
His lead African-American client, Selma Buycks-Roberson, who was denied a loan due to bad credit and low income, got her mortgage only to default on it years later.
She got a foreclosure notice in 2008, according to The Daily Caller website, along with many of her Chicago neighbors.
By putting them on the hook for loans they couldn’t pay, Obama did them no favors. Blacks have been hit hardest by foreclosures. But what does Obama care? The Caller reports he pocketed at least $23,000 from the Citibank case.
Today, he blames the devastating wealth drain in black communities on subprime mortgages. He says “greedy,” “predatory” lenders tricked poor minorities into paying higher fees and interest rates.
But Obama was for subprime loans before he was against them. “Subprime loans started off as a good idea,” he said as those loans began to sour in 2007.
His closest economic advisers also promoted subprime lending. Several months earlier, Chicago pal Austan Goolsbee, who later became his top economist, sang the praises of subprime loans in a New York Times column. He argued they allowed poor blacks “access to mortgages.”
One of Obama’s top bank regulators, Gary Gensler, once bragged that thanks to subprime mortgages, banks made home loans to minorities at “twice the rate” they made to other borrowers, according to “Bank Robbery.” “A subprime loan is a good option when the alternative is no access to credit,” he said years before the crisis.
Obama hasn’t learned from his mistakes.
Far from it, IBD has learned the mammoth credit watchdog agency he created (with input from NPA radicals) will dust off Clinton’s 1994 minority lending guidelines to crack down on stingy lenders. And he’s ordered Holder, now acting as his attorney general, to prosecute banks that don’t open branches in blighted urban areas.
Not only has Obama scapegoated banks for the crisis he helped cause, he’s exploited minority suffering to continue reckless policies that hurt those he claims to champion.
The recent recession wiped out nearly two decades of Americans’ wealth, according to government data released Monday, with middle-class families bearing the brunt of the decline.
The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992.
The data represent one of the most detailed looks at how the economic downturn altered the landscape of family finance. Over a span of three years, Americans watched progress that took almost a generation to accumulate evaporate. The promise of retirement built on the inevitable rise of the stock market proved illusory for most. Home-ownership, once heralded as a pathway to wealth, became an albatross.
The findings underscore the depth of the wounds of the financial crisis and how far many families remain from healing. If the recession set Americans back 20 years, economists say, the road forward is sure to be a long one. And so far, the country has seen only a halting recovery.
“It’s hard to overstate how serious the collapse in the economy was,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “We were in free fall.”
The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class. Only roughly half of middle-class Americans remained on the same economic rung during the downturn, the Fed found. Their median net worth — the value of assets such as homes, automobiles and stocks minus any debt — suffered the biggest drops.
Florida had lots of illegals and dead people on it’s voter rolls so the state did an audit to remove the ineligible listings. Of course Obama’s Department of Social Justice ran by Eric Holder, who also isn’t enforcing federal vote fraud laws, tried to stop Florida from trying to maintain accurate voter records.
The latest nonsense from the Democrat leadership is that the Fast & Furious investigation is just retaliation for this, but the Fast & Furious investigation started a year before the vote cleanup effort.
Today a federal judge rejected a Department of Justice request to issue a temporary restraining order blocking Florida from removing non-citizens from the voter rolls and rejected DOJ’s argument that the National Voter Registration Act prohibits removal of non-citizens from the voter rolls. The court also said that permitting known non-citizens to vote would result in “irreparable harm” to eligible voters.
Florida Governor Rick Scott was pleased with the decision, which is consistent with his position that Florida has an obligation to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.
“The court made a common-sense decision consistent with what I’ve been saying all along: that irreparable harm will result if non-citizens are allowed to vote. Today’s ruling puts the burden on the federal government to provide Florida with access to the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship database. We know from just a small sample that an alarming number of non-citizens are on the voter rolls and many of them have illegally voted in past elections. The federal government has the power to prevent such irreparable harm from continuing, and Florida once again implores them to grant access to the SAVE database.”
Nearly a year ago, the state requested access to a citizenship database, maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, that would allow Florida to more accurately identify non-citizens who are registered to vote. To date, the federal government continues to block access, thereby preventing Florida’s efforts to ensure fair elections.
A 14-year-old Phoenix boy shot an intruder who broke into his home while brandishing a gun as the teenager watched his three younger siblings, police said.
The teen and his brothers and sisters were at home alone at their residence at 55th Avenue and Baseline when a woman rang the doorbell Friday. The teen didn’t open the door because he didn’t recognize her, Police Officer James Holmes said Saturday.
Soon after, the teen heard a bang on the door, rushed his siblings upstairs and got a handgun from his parent’s bedroom. When he got to the top of the stairs, he saw a man breaking through the front door and point a gun at him.
The boy shot the 37-year-old man, who is in critical condition but expected to survive and be booked into jail.
Holmes said the suspect did not get a shot off. He declined to release his name until he is booked into jail.
The woman who rang the home’s doorbell got away.
Holmes hailed the teen’s actions and his parents for teaching the kids to never open the door to strangers.
“The police and indeed our community does not ever want to see a situation where a teenager of that age has to take a weapon to protect his family … but this young man did exactly what he should have done,” he said.
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.
Who is morally superior, the women who is stoned to death for violating Sharia Law by being raped, or a woman with a smoking gun in her hand and a dead Islamist radical at her feet?
Minorities, this is what the “enlightened academic left” thinks of you. And this is not just a few radicalized pinheads in Minnesota, this type of senseless race bating, victimology, and stereotyping is typical of “black studies” and other neo-Marxist grievance studies programs in public school and universities in almost every state.
The left needs racial division and must pit one group against another for people to buy their ideology. This goes double for leftist academics who get millions of dollars spent of grievance studies programs, various grievance studies centers, publications etc.
Remember the Un-Fair Campaign, that august collection of enlightened and thoroughly non-racist individuals who believe that whites have an irrevocable privilege that gives them an advantage in society (and that, by extensions minorities will always need special favors to get a leg up)? Well, if you don’t, for the purposes of this story, it may be advisable to rewatch this ad of theirs:
As you can see, the Un-Fair Campaign is aptly named. Their perspective on race is deeply unfair. Fortunately, at least one group has set out to make a video that rebuts the above, and shows how the perspective involved is unfair not just to whites, but to minorities as well. The resulting effort may cause you to spontaneously break out into applause:
What with the refusal of the University of Minnesota-Duluth, one of the Un-Fair Campaign’s biggest institutional sponsors, to defund the organization, this variety of outraged mockery is perhaps the best response.
My friend Scott Ott and his friends at Trifecta had the most thoughtful response to this issue we have yet seen:
Our friends at iowntheworld.com have a delicious post with (full disclosure) my good friend Steven Tucker affording the most awesome schooling to a rather surprisingly open minded young leftist on ObamaCare.
Tucker is one of America’s foremost experts on health insurance law and this poor bloke just happened to run across him with a camera in his hand in Chicago. [Full disclosure: this very writer went to insurance school and passed the state exam for a state Life & Health insurance license. I have written dozens of articles on ObamaCare and Tucker knows it even better than I do.]
In this video, Touré, the one-named host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, attempts to humiliate Alex Schriver for being Republican. He suggests that something happened to him that has forced him into being Republican before Schriver confidently fires back against the MSNBC host for his ignorant and degrading comments.
The 23-year-old Schriver not only speaks intelligently beyond his years, but politely makes MadonnaSealPrince Touré look silly and unknowledgeable about the state of politics.
Schriver, a native of Tennessee and a graduate of Auburn University, is the National Chairman for the College Republican National Committee. Click on the link to check out their great organization that works to promote conservative ideals to college age Americans.
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.
It is probably true. It is no secret that doing business in the United States is very expensive and more risky because of government meddling. There are lots of companies that in order to survive had to leave and that is not Mitt’s fault.
Remember how many Heinz plants the Kerry’s moved overseas?
The only way to fix this problem is with a new, simpler, flatter tax code, regulatory reform and the size of government cut a lot, much like the Deficit Commission said. Without doubt, if we had those reforms companies would keep more jobs at home, yet what party always stands in the way of these common sense reforms?
Of course when companies get driven out of the country or shut down by onerous government or just flat out abuse such as what the Obama Administration did to Gibson Guitar the elite media doesn’t have much to say about that do they?
Remember the stimulus money that went to an electric car company in Finland, and subsidized loans to Brazil to drill in deep water when he was preventing our people from drilling, or how General Electric, whose CEO Jeff Immelt sent jobs overseas shortly after he was appointed Jobs Czar by President Obama?
Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.
During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Remember that President Obama helped oust the pro-American Egyptian government and called it “The Arab Spring”. Well now it is done and as predicted by myself, Dr. Niall Ferguson and so many others as far back as February of last year.
Watch this video from February of 2011 and look and see how this disastrous chain of events has come about just as conservatives feared. Notice what Ferguson said about a Muslim Brotherhood regime that would be aggressive towards Israel in order to unite radicalized masses under the banner of external aggression.
The Muslim Brotherhood is the grandfather of Al-Qaeda and they are involved in raising money for jihadists here in the United States. The motto for the Muslim Brotherhood is:
‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
See our other Egypt coverage HERE for more details.
For a host of reasons this writer believes that this a part of a deliberate plan by the Obama Administration to undermine Israel’s security and ability to defend itself. Why?
1 – Polls of the Egyptian Street showed that almost 70% wanted Sharia Law and war with Israel. The administration denied these polls. The election results showed that these polls were accurate.
2 – The administration has radicalized antisemites such as Samantha Power and Robert Malley in prominent positions in the State Department.
4 – Any student of global security full well knows that the previous pro-American government in Egypt that Obama helped to remove from power was the lynch pin for Middle-East peace. Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel that was signed by the previous government. The Muslim Brotherhood has made it clear that the treaty is shredded.
5 – President Obama’s attitude and other acts of disrespect have shown that there is a hostility towards Israel. So much so that even as far back in 2009 only 6% if Israelis saw President Obama and “pro-Israel”. See details HERE.
The law and the case law on this issue is as clear as clear can be. Student groups at public universities may not be discriminated against on the basis of viewpoint.
There are no exceptions to this rule within the law, yet over and over censor happy leftists at public universities break the law and do just that. They discriminate against Christian clubs, Jewish clubs, conservative and libertarian clubs. They often get away with it because either the students involved do not know their rights, or they are unwilling to take the fight to the courts.
But make no mistake, plenty of these cases go to the courts even when the university knows it has no chance of victory. The administrators are spending taxpayer dollars and will spend taxpayer dollars when they lose. It is no skin off their shoes. YOU pay.
Such is the case at Texas A&M University. Universities and clubs on campus bring in leftist speakers to talk to the students every year, and when a club attempts to bring in a conservative speaker the university administrators dig in their heals to try and stop or censor the event.
The Texas Aggie Conservatives needed $6,800 to host a February speaking engagement featuring black social conservative Star Parker. The group’s leaders requested $2,500 from Student Organization Funding to offset the cost. Officially recognized student organizations have access to the account for special events and general budget funding.
But according to Texas Aggie Conservatives and their attorneys, the school limits access to the money based on indefensible restrictions. All recognized organizations are eligible for the funds as long as they’re not formed for religious, social or political purposes. Sports clubs and groups tied to the student center and health science center also are barred from requesting funds.
David Hacker, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which represents the Texas Aggie Conservatives, questioned the limitations of the funding, saying the school “has to provide those funds on a viewpoint-natural basis.”
The ADF filed a lawsuit June 19 against Texas A & M University (TAMU), challenging the funding restrictions as a violation of the students’ First Amendment rights.
TAMU spokesman Lane Stevenson could not discuss the issue, saying only that the university refrains from commenting on pending legal matters. Texas Aggie Conservative leaders referred all questions to their attorney.
Hacker said the university’s policy was not only unconstitutional but inconsistently applied. Other student organizations, including the NAACP, the Muslim Student Association, the Black Student Alliance, and TAMU V-Day, which hosts “The Vagina Monologues,” a racy stage play, all received money from the fund.
Hacker said the students with Texas Aggie Conservatives discovered the discrepancies. They also discovered the school had denied funding to Christian fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi.
The Heritage Foundation has a piece out that explains just a sampling of the blatant violation of Separation of Powers committed by the Obama Administration.
Even though the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected the President’s cap-and-trade plan, his Environmental Protection Agency classified carbon dioxide, the compound that sustains vegetative life, as a pollutant so that it could regulate it under the Clean Air Act.
After the Employee Free Choice Act—designed to bolster labor unions’ dwindling membership rolls—was defeated by Congress, the National Labor Relations Board announced a rule that would implement “snap elections” for union representation, limiting employers’ abilities to make their case to workers and virtually guaranteeing a higher rate of unionization at the expense of workplace democracy.
After an Internet regulation proposal failed to make it through Congress, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would regulate the Web anyway, even despite a federal court’s ruling that it had no authority to do so.
Although Congress consistently has barred the Department of Education from getting involved in curriculum matters, the Administration has offered waivers for the No Child Left Behind law in exchange for states adopting national education standards, all without congressional authorization.
Likewise, the Administration has often simply refused to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress:
Since it objects to existing federal immigration laws, the Administration has decided to apply those laws selectively and actively prevent the state (like Arizona) from enforcing those laws themselves.
Rather than push Congress to repeal federal laws against marijuana use, the Department of Justice (DOJ) simply decided it would no longer enforce those laws.
DOJ also has announced that it would stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act or defending it from legal challenge rather than seeking legislative recourse.
On Tuesday, the President invoked executive privilege to avoid handing over some 1,300 documents in an ongoing Congressional investigation. The Supreme Court has held that executive privilege cannot be invoked to shield wrongdoing. Is that what’s happening in this case? “Congress needs to get to the bottom of that question to prevent an illegal invocation of executive privilege and further abuses of power. That will require an index of the withheld documents and an explanation of why each of them is covered by executive privilege—and more,” Heritage legal scholar Todd Gaziano writes.
Earlier this year the President crossed the threshold of constitutionality when he gave “recess appointments” to four officials who were subject to Senate confirmation, even though the Senate wasn’t in recess. Gaziano wrote at the time that such appointments “would render the Senate’s advice and consent role to normal appointments almost meaningless. It is a grave constitutional wrong.”
There is no telling where such disregard may go next, but the trend is clear, and it leads further and further away from the constitutional rule of law.
Lie No. 1: Obama has repeatedly claimed his white grandfather, Stanley Dunham, “fought in Patton’s army,” when he was a clerk with no combat in WWII.
Lie No. 2: Obama claimed Dunham, a communist sympathizer, signed up for duty “the day after Pearl Harbor,” when in fact he waited six months.
Lie No. 3: Obama claimed his father “fought when he got back to Kenya against tribalism and nepotism, but ultimately was blackballed from the government,” when in fact he fought against capitalism and lost his job when he advocated communism.
Lie No. 4: Obama has claimed his late mother’s health insurer refused “to pay for her treatment” for cancer while citing a “pre-existing condition,” when Cigna paid all her hospital bills and never denied payment.
Lie No. 5: Obama claimed he and a black high school friend named “Ray” were ostracized in Honolulu, when in fact the friend, Keith Kakugawa, was half-Japanese, and neither of them experienced discrimination.
Lie No. 6: Obama claimed the father of his Indonesian stepfather was killed by Dutch soldiers while fighting for Indonesian independence, when in fact the story turns out to be “a concocted myth in almost all respects,” Maraniss found.
Lie No. 7: Obama claimed his parents decided to marry in the excitement of the Selma civil-rights march of 1965 — and that he personally has “a claim on Selma” — when in fact they were married several years earlier.
Lie No. 8: Obama claimed his father got to study in the U.S. thanks to JFK’s efforts to bring “young Africans over to America,” when in fact the Kenyan airlift his father participated in occurred in 1959 under Ike.
Lie No. 9: Obama submitted a phony bio to his book publicist claiming he was “born in Kenya.”
Lie No. 10: Obama denied being a member of the socialist New Party, when a member roster of the Chicago chapter of the party lists him joining on Jan. 11, 1996.
Lie No. 11: Obama claimed he had only a passing acquaintance with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, when in fact they held a fundraiser for their Hyde Park neighbor in their living room, and years later, while Obama served in the U.S. Senate, hosted a barbecue for him in their backyard.
Lie No. 12: Obama claimed he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright spew anti-American invectives while sitting in his pews for 20 years, when in fact Obama was moved to tears hearing Wright condemn “white folks” and the U.S. for bombing other countries and even named his second book after the sermon.
Lie No. 13: Obama claimed he got in a “big fight” with old white flame Genevieve Cook, who after seeing a black play asked “why black people were so angry all the time,” when in fact she never saw the play nor made the remark.
Niall Ferguson is an award winning historian and economic historian who’s work is recognized around the world. This very web site contains several pieces of his work.
The economic historian, who is affiliated to Oxford and Harvard Universities, says wise young voters should insist politicians pay off debts as soon as possible for the benefit and security of their own financial interests.
Speaking at the Reith Lectures on Tuesday, Professor Ferguson will argue the “young should welcome austerity,” adding they “find it quite hard to compute their own long-term economic interests.”
In his first lecture, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, Prof Ferguson will insist the current public debt “allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.”
“It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees,” he says in an article ahead of the lecture.
He adds: “If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.”
Professor Ferguson argues the true size of government debt in Western democracies is many times larger than “deeply misleading” figures issued in the form of bonds because they do not record unfunded liabilities of social security and health care schemes.
“The last corporation to publish financial statements this misleading was Enron,” he wrote.
“These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure,” he said.
He argues one of the ways out of the current economic “mess” would be for “a heroic effort of leadership” to persuade all generations to “vote for a more responsible fiscal policy.”
John Holdren and Cass Sunstien believe that your organs belong to the state and that the government should engage in forced population control. Van Jones is a self admitted communist revolutionary and “911 Truther”, Anita Dunn says that Mao, the largest communist mass murderer in history, “is the philosopher she turns to most”, Steven Chu says that gas needs to be $8.00 a gallon; and what do these people all have in common? They were all invited to the White House to work in the Obama Administration and work close with the President.
This time the Obama’s invited “leftist radical gay activists” to come to the White House for a dinner and reception. They decided to take pictures. Well here they are:
How mature and dignified.
These are the type of barely showered low class “occupy types” that this administration feels at home with. One might say trailer park class but that would be an insult to trailer parks. I also regret that these losers were “gay activists” because while they say all day long that they represent the gay community, they don’t.
Today, we have Andrea Mitchell’s spectacularly lame followup to “criticism of the Romney clip edit” — which amounted to Ms. Mitchell saying, with a sigh and a frown, “Oh, bother. Fine. Here’s what we left out.” She failed to acknowledge what the “criticism” entailed; she neglected to point out how the editing misrepresented the event being covered; and she offered nothing resembling an apology or an admission of responsibility for something that was, as a matter of fact, irresponsible.
I’m tired. Truly. I’ve grown weary of trying to defend the indefensible and explain the inexplicable. For years, people have stomped their feet and pounded their fists and snorted “Liberal media bias!” and I’ve always tut-tutted and shooshed them and said, “No, no. Calm down. They meant well. It was just a misunderstanding. A mistake. These things happen.” I spent over 25 years working in the oft-reviled Mainstream Media and I saw up close and personal how the sausage was made. I knew the people who wielded the knives and wore the aprons, and could vouch (most of the time, anyway) for their good intentions.
But now?
Forget it. I’m done. You deserve what they’re saying about you. It’s earned. You have worked long and hard to merit the suspicion, acrimony, mistrust and revulsion that the media-buying public increasingly heaps upon you. You have successfully eroded any confidence, dispelled any trust, and driven your audience into the arms of the Internet and the blogosphere, where biases are affirmed and like-minded people can tell each other what they hold to be true, since nobody believes in objective reality any more. You have done a superlative job of diminishing what was once a great profession and undermining one of the vital underpinnings of democracy, a free press.
The White House tried to blunt Wednesday’s contempt of Congress vote against Attorney General Eric Holder with claims that Republicans were trying to focus on something other than the economy and jobs.
“At the beginning of this year, Republicans announced that one of their chief legislative and strategic priorities was to investigate the administration and damage the president politically,” press secretary Jay Carney told reporters today. “We are nine days away from the expiration of federal transportation funding which guarantees jobs for almost a million construction workers because Congress has not passed a transportation bill. We are 10 days away from student loan rates doubling, potentially impacting over 7.4 million borrowers.”
And that’s what President Obama focused on today as he notched yet another speech on student-loan rates into the schedule.
But the Carney spin came on the same day that the House passed the Domestic Energy and Jobs Act, a package of seven bills focused on spurring job growth and lowering energy costs while embracing the country’s energy resources.
That legislation passed 284-163 despite a veto threat two days ago from Obama.
Another case in point is Hartford Seminary (HS) in Connecticut (alluded to in Palmer’s letter). HS boasts the oldest Islamic Studies program in America. Several of its faculty members endorse and promote Islamist views, most notably Ingrid Mattson, former president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
A year ago HS accepted a $1-million gift from the IIIT. The money will be deployed in strengthening an Islamic Studies program that is deeply at odds with classical liberal principles of untrammeled academic inquiry and the free exchange of ideas. The troubling nature of the courses is well fleshed out in the published narrative of Andrew Bieszad, a Catholic HS graduate with a master’s degree in Islamic Studies. Bieszad’s thoughtful chronicle of his 2007-2010 sojourn in HS’ allegedly mainstream program reveals a harrowing portrait of Islamic privilege run amok.
Here, for instance, is Bieszad’s account of what transpired during a class in “interfaith dialogue”:
I had done interfaith dialogue before, so this was not a new experience for me. We were separated into groups for the dialogue, and when I was permitted to speak, I said, ‘I am Catholic, and I do not believe in Islam.’ Following me, one of the Muslim students spoke. She said that she was Muslim, and then she addressed me directly. In a soft, Arabic accented voice, she told me, ‘You are an infidel because you do not accept Islam’ and that ‘according to Islam you do not deserve to live.’ A second Muslim student heartily agreed, and after repeating the first student’s comments, she added that ‘in Islam, the Koran and the tradition of the prophet are very clear about this’ and that ‘you deserve to die.’
This was one of several publicly-made threatening statements and insults that I would receive from Muslim seminary classmates for my open disagreement with Islam.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 