Industry spokesmen displayed their concern in an article titled “Even the Insurance Industry is Against the Latest GOP Health Care Plan”:
Despite the general view that health insurance companies would benefit from a free and open market, two of the biggest trade groups for insurers — Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and America’s Health Insurance Plans — announced their first opposition to the Republicans’ latest plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Both the Blue Cross and the AHIP came out against the so-called Graham-Cassidy bill Wednesday, arguing that the legislation would lead to an unstable market that would harm both insurers and patients.
“The bill contains provisions that would allow states to waive key consumer protections, as well as undermine safeguards for those with pre-existing medical conditions,’’ the Blue Cross association said in a statement. “The legislation reduces funding for many states significantly and would increase uncertainty in the marketplace, making coverage more expensive and jeopardizing Americans’ choice of health plans.”
The AHIP doubled down on those sentiments, writing that the bill “would have real consequences on consumers and patients by further destabilizing the individual market” and could “potentially allowing government-controlled, single payer health care to grow,” in a letter to Senate majority and minority leaders Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
The insurance trade associations’ resistance joins a number of health care groups already speaking out against the proposed bill, including the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association and the American Association of Retired Persons.
The Graham-Cassidy bill, named after two of its drafters, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), has a voting deadline of Sept. 30. The Senate is expected to vote on the legislation next week after several previously unsuccessful attempts earlier this year.
President Donald Trump talked up the bill Wednesday, saying that it has “a very good chance” of passing in the Senate.
Those in the know think that pretty much kills the bill. And that would make two health bill kills for McCain.
Damn, should have drawn that on the fuselage.
URL of the original posting site: http://comicallyincorrect.com/2017/07/19/feeling-heavy/#ZTRstsK3Itmjo0B8.99
Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2017.
More A.F. Branco cartoons at Constitution.com here.
A.F.Branco Coffee Table Book <—- Order Here!
URL of the original posting site: http://comicallyincorrect.com/2017/06/14/white-liberal-privilege/#369BpwM50Ov9v0gu.99
Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2017.
Full Steam AheadURL of the original posting site: http://comicallyincorrect.com/2017/03/17/who-dealt-it/#EttDgcsdsz7Pawqj.99
Trump vs Obama Economy / Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2017.
Authored By: Logan Albright | February 11, 2017
Speaking on Fox News Sunday in 2015, Trump said, “I may cut the Department of Education,” and in his book “Crippled America,” released the same year, he wrote “A lot of people believe the Department of Education should just be eliminated. Get rid of it. If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach. Education has to be run locally.” So there is opportunity if only Republicans in Congress are brave enough to seize it.
To help push them in the right direction, here are five reasons why the Department of Education should be eliminated.
The word “education” never occurs in the U.S. Constitution. Already, this should mean that the federal government has no business interfering with education policy, since the Constitution is a list of enumerated powers. In other words, the Constitution is a comprehensive list of things the federal government is allowed to do, and anything not included is de facto forbidden.
To make this doubly clear, the 10th Amendment in the Bill of Rights is explicit: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” There you have it. The power to set education policy is reserved to the states or the people. The federal government is not authorized to meddle.
The Department of Education comprises more than 80 subagencies, employs more than 4,000 people, and has an annual budget of nearly $70 billion. When you include other federal spending like Head Start and the School Lunch Program, that number swells to more than $100 billion.
With a national debt rapidly hurtling toward $20 trillion, this may be a drop in the bucket, but as a wise man once said, a few billion here and there eventually adds up to real money. It’s insane to think we couldn’t find better, more productive uses for $100 billion a year. Just off the top of my head, how about giving it back to the taxpayers?
Of course, maybe the federal government could justify this expense if it produced positive results.
Unfortunately …
The Department of Education has been around since 1979, and in that time, with the huge amounts of money that have poured into it, a reasonable person would expect to see massive improvements in educational performance.
In fact, we’ve seen no such thing. The more money we spend, the less students benefit. The department itself recently admitted that education spending isn’t producing any measurable results — a finding, which conforms with previous analyses of programs like Head Start and the department in general.
It may seem like an obvious question, but why are we continuing a program which has proven, time and time again, not to work?
Perhaps the most infamous of Department of Education initiatives was Common Core, foisted upon the states through a complex system of incentives and penalties with the goal of imposing standardization of testing and, to a certain extent, curricula across the whole country.
These wildly unpopular standards have been the source of outrage and confusion among parents and students alike, who found the math problems impossible, the history textbooks revisionist, and the constant testing oppressive.
But Common Core is far from the only soul-crushing program leveled at local schools from on high. The Department of Education also brought us the spectacular failures of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Head Start, and most recently the Every Student Succeeds Act. All of these share the goal of making schools everywhere the same, in spite of the fact that different states, different cities, and different children have diverse education requirements that cannot be met by a single top-down structure. It may come as a surprise to education bureaucrats, but many parents are not comfortable with their children being ‘tracked’ by the federal government.
Like every other market, the market for education thrives only when innovation, competition, and experimentation are allowed to flourish. The Department of Education has devoted itself to stamping out all of that.
Like so many other pseudoscientific pursuits, the Department of Education has been moving increasingly toward data
collection and analysis in what it claims is an effort to improve student performance. Barack Obama’s Education secretary, Arne Duncan, made the following statement about his ambitions:
It may come as a surprise to education bureaucrats, but many parents are not comfortable with their children being “tracked” by the federal government. In many cases, parents have no idea what type of data is being collected on their children, and it is not easy to find out even if you are aware of the practice and want to know.
Nor are we just talking about test scores. A surprisingly candid 2013 report from the Department of Education provides a wish list of data collection, including the desire to monitor students’ facial expressions and eye movements during class, and then using the data to diagnosis learning disabilities or other problems.
In fact, schools may already be doing this; they are notoriously tight-lipped about data collection. The idea that a computer algorithm might diagnose one’s child with mental illness because he made the wrong expression in class is chilling, and we can be sure that it’s only the beginning of where the department would like to go in the future.
Logan Albright is a researcher for Conservative Review and Director of Research for Free the People. You can follow him on Twitter @loganalbright73.
United States Department of Education
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the earlier incarnation with the same name, established in 1867, see Office of Education.
The United States Department of Education (ED or DoED), also referred to as the ED for (the) Education Department, is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government. Recreated by the Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88) and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on October 17, 1979, it began operating on May 4, 1980.[3]
The Department of Education Organization Act divided the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. The Department of Education is administered by the United States Secretary of Education. It has approximately 4,400 employees and an annual budget of $68 billion (2016).[1]
Authored by Jerry Broussard
Of WhatDidYouSay.org
The Constitution of the United States of America does not give the President the responsibilities of creating jobs. I am uncertain of this origin, but it created the mammoth government we have today. The pressure on each President’s Administration caused them to created Federal jobs, which means Federal agencies, which means the functions that belong to the States, was taken over by a Federal bureaucracy. Thank you President Jimmy Carter and the Socialist Left.
The original design of the Founders was as follows;
By taking education into Federal control, the monies set aside for education exploded into the billions of dollars to pay for all the jobs created by a bloated bureaucracy just so President Carter the Socialist Left could claim they created jobs. All the increase in taxes went to pay for the bureaucracy, NOT FOR THE CHILDREN.
Then the Socialist Left cried that they needed more monies for education, but whatever they took from tax payers went into the bureaucracy, NOT THE SCHOOLROOM. The Dems love to talk as if they are the ones who care most about children and their education, yet very little of the billions they collect ever get to teachers income, and the needs of the teachers to do their jobs. Now we have teachers spending their own monies to buy supplies for their classroom, as the Federal bureaucracy, State Department of Education bureaucracy and the Local School District bureaucracy line their pockets with the monies needed for the children.
Enter the Union. The Teachers Union is one of the most powerful union in the nation. They get to choice what your child gets taught, even if it’s mostly propaganda. History is rewritten to push their Liberal-Socialist agenda. They also hold our children hostage whenever they want more taxpayer money. Again, very little of those increases ever get to the classroom.
By eliminating the Federal Department of Education bureaucracy, as well as the States Department of Education bureaucracy, all those monies would now go to the Districts bureaucracy, ending up with the monies needed by the teachers to do their jobs (and perhaps get those much needed raises.)
This brings us to School Voucher Programs. When there is competition, there is always better services. Despite the lies the Teachers Union puts out about Voucher Programs, they work. When School Districts start losing funding to better school systems, they will be forced to get as good as the private schools, or face extinction. Children win.
Authored By Dave Jolly 
For one thing, one of the key signs of a good economy is a GDP of at least 3.0%, yet Obama is the only White House occupant of recent times that has failed to reach a GDP of 3.0% or higher. He’s had nearly eight years to accomplish this and never has. If you listen to Hillary, she wants to continue many of Obama’s economic policies plus she just made it known that she’ll raise over $1 trillion in taxes by raising the estate tax on the wealthy to 65%.
This estate tax increase may sound great to most Americans but stop and think who owns most of the businesses that employs millions of Americans. It’s the wealthy and their families. Yet, if a wealthy business owner dies and his family is forced to pay 65% of the estate to the federal government in estate taxes, where do you think most of the money will come from? In the majority of cases, it will come from selling off large portions of their businesses or closing the doors and putting millions of Americans out of work. Once that starts to happen, another major recession or even a depression could sweep across America which will also affect most of the rest of the world.
Back to today’s not so rosy economic outlook, several recent reports are indicating that many Americans are struggling to pay their mortgages and turning to alternate solutions.
“The number of New Yorkers applying for emergency grants to stay in their homes is
skyrocketing — as the number of people staying in homeless shelters reached an all-time high last weekend, records show.”
“There were 82,306 applications for one-time emergency grants to prevent evictions in fiscal 2016, up 26 percent from 65,138 requests the previous year, according to the Mayor’s Management Report.”
At the same time, the number of people staying in New York homeless shelters have reached an all-time high.
The economic trend is also forcing many Americans to move from their homes to their vehicles. An increasing number of them are living in their cars, trucks, vans, buses and RVs. Some are living in campgrounds and using whatever public facility they have access to for showering, etc.
Circa.com recently reported on the growing number of Americans who have opted or been forced to live in their vehicles because of today’s economy. One man was Stephen Hutchins, a recent graduate from the USC. He is living in his van which cost him $120 at auction. He pays $60 a month for insurance and $60 a month for a storage unit. In comparison, the average rent for a 1-bedroom studio apartment in Los Angeles run around $2,300 a month. By moving into his van, Hutchins says he has cut his cost of living by $800 a month.
Zander Kingsley of Santa Monica, is the owner and founder of Kowasa Clothing Company. He is currently living in an old school bus that he is fixing.
In the Los Angeles general area, at least 4,600 cars, vans, buses, trucks or RVs were used as homes while at the same time there was a 3.1% vacancy rate in the same area. It seems that this is a growing trend throughout the nation as more and more people are being forced into difficult financial decisions.
Obama still has a few more months to further destroy America’s economy. If he doesn’t succeed, a Hillary Clinton presidency definitely will. More Americans will be living in their vehicles or in homeless shelters. The middle class will continue to shrink until there are only two economic classes, the lower class or poverty level and the few ultra-wealthy. Then America will be a true socialist state with the government owning or controlling many of the businesses that the families of wealthy business owners are forced to sell in order to pay Hillary’s exorbitant estate taxes.
R.L. David Jolly holds a B.S. in Wildlife Biology and an M.S. in Biology – Population Genetics. He has worked in a number of fields, giving him a broad perspective on life, business, economics and politics. He is a very conservative Christian, husband, father and grandfather who cares deeply for his Savior, family and the future of our troubled nation.
BY: June 14, 2016URL of the original posting site: http://freebeacon.com/issues/eight-state-economies-shrank-4th-quarter/
A helicopter lands near a test drilling site for the Pebble Mine in Southwest, Alaska / AP
Real gross domestic product is the bureau’s most comprehensive measure of U.S. economic activity and is an inflation-adjusted measure of each state’s prices for the goods and services produced for all industries within that state.
Four of these states, Alaska, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, had significant declines in their mining sector, which includes oil and gas production. The other four, Kansas, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska, had significant declines in agricultural output.
“It looks like some of the negative Q4 growth can be explained by the relatively volatile energy and farm sectors,” explained Mark Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The low prices for oil and natural gas last year could have impacted both energy production (which has been declining for oil) and the market price of the energy production as it is calculated for state GDP.”
“The farming sector is very cyclical and has been declining in states like Iowa,” he added. “In fact, farm income nationally is expected to fall. The USDA released a new forecast this week predicting that U.S. farm income will fall to about $55 billion this year, which would be the lowest level since 2002.”
In both quarters, Alaska had negative GDP growth, putting its economy into a recession.
More than half of states in the United States saw their GDP growth decline from the third quarter of 2015 to the fourth quarter.
The states that saw the largest declines from the previous quarter were Oklahoma, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Montana.
“Today’s weak GDP numbers out of the states are yet another sign of a persistently sluggish economy that is leaving many Americans behind,” said Alfredo Ortiz, president and CEO of the Job Creators Network.
Posted by Aleister Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Mental Recession reports:
Beloved Upstate Restaurant Closes, Cites Minimum Wage Hike As Major Reason
An Albany area fish fry restaurant is closing its doors after nearly 70 years in business, and the owner is pointing to New York’s $15 minimum wage as a major reason for his establishment’s downfall.
Bob and Ron’s Fish Fry, described by New York Upstate as an “Albany institution” featuring “the best fish fry in the Capital Region,” announced they’d be closing their doors in less than two weeks.
The owners took to social media over the weekend to make the announcement.
A message on Facebook reads:
“It is with great sadness that we regret to inform you that Bob and Ron’s Fish Fry will be closing its Latham location effective 4/30/2016. We thank all of you for your patronage and will miss you all.”
Responding to fan’s of the beloved restaurant, the owners posted their reason for having to shut down Bob and Ron’s.
“To be honest there is no way we could pay the high minimum wage that is coming,” they wrote.
Owner Dan Zonca was featured in a TWC News report when Governor Cuomo first unveiled his plans to enact a $15 minimum wage throughout the state, a plan that recently came to fruition.
Zonca warned that the unilateral minimum wage hike would put him out of business.
“There’s absolutely no way I could take a 52 percent jump in my payroll,” Zonca said, accounting for the basic benefits he provides his employees.
He added, “Cuomo and (Vice-President) Biden are out of their minds!”
CBS News in Albany did a report back in August of last year when the fight over the minimum wage began and profiled Bob & Ron’s. They predicted this would happen: (IF video does not play go to https://youtu.be/blCxJPBq3PU)
Minimum wage activists celebrate their victories as more states adopt the higher wage but they’re rarely around to help pick up the pieces when a small business owner loses his or her livelihood. Your heart also breaks for the people who lose jobs and the community which loses a favorite business.
Hat tip to Rusty Weiss:
Drawn and Posted by Glenn Foden / @GlennFo / February 05, 2016URL of the original posting site: http://dailysignal.com/2016/02/05/cartoon-land-of-the-free
Heritage Foundation expert Anthony Kim wrote earlier this week about the 2016 Index of Economic Freedom.
Millions of people around the world are emerging from poverty thanks to rising economic freedom. But by sharp contrast, America’s economic freedom has been on a declining path over the past decade.
According to the 2016 Index of Economic Freedom, an annual publication by The Heritage Foundation, America’s economic freedom has tumbled. With losses of economic freedom in eight of the past nine years, the U.S. has tied its worst score ever, wiping out a decade of progress.
The U.S. has fallen from the 6th freest economy in the world, when President Barack Obama took office, to 11th place in 2016. America’s declining score in the index is closely related to rapidly rising government spending, subsidies, and bailouts.
Since early 2009:
- Government spending has exploded, amounting to $29,867 per household in 2015.
- The national debt has risen to $125,000 for every tax-filing household in America—a total over $18 trillion.
- The government takeover of health care is raising prices and disrupting markets.
- Bailouts and new government regulations have increased uncertainty, stifling investment and job creation.
This is not something to take lightly. Economic freedom is the foundation of U.S. economic strength, and economic strength is the foundation of America’s high living standards, military power, and status as a world leader. The perils of losing economic freedom are not fictional. It is painfully clear that our economy has been performing far below its potential, with individuals, families, and entrepreneurs being squeezed by the proliferation of big-government bureaucracy and regulations.
As documented by the index, and by other scholars, America’s economic freedom has been declining at an alarming pace. Indeed, as The Wall Street Journal recently summed it up succinctly, Obama is “a champion when it comes to limiting economic freedom, and American workers have the slow growth in jobs and wages to prove it.”
Not surprisingly, our economic dynamism and innovative capacity have been measurably reduced. Self-inflicted wounds include:
- The U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. This has driven new jobs to other, more competitive nations and has meant fewer jobs and lower wages for Americans.
- The overall annual cost of meeting regulatory requirements has increased by over $80 billion since 2009, with more than 180 new regulations in place. In terms of ease of starting a new business, analyzed by a recently published World Bank report, the U.S. is ranked shockingly low at 49th, trailing countries such as Canada, Georgia, Ireland, Lithuania, and Malaysia.
No wonder the labor force participation rate has remained at near record lows after more than five years of steady decline. Worse, vibrant entrepreneurial growth has been stymied by greater policy uncertainty and mounting debt. And a disturbing trend toward cronyism has gravely eroded the rule of law and distorted our free-market system.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, keynote speaker of the official release of the 2016 Index, recently stated:
“It’s been almost seven years since the Obama “recovery” began, and our economy is barely out of neutral. Why does America have to settle for this?”
Restoring economic freedom is prerequisite to revitalizing and brightening America’s future. 2016 is the year to reaffirm the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and rule of law so that we can reconstitute an America where freedom, opportunity, and prosperity flourish.
The time to act is now.
Published on February 6, 2016URL of the original posting site: http://clashdaily.com/2016/02/heres-the-best-description-of-a-liberal-that-youll-ever-read-viral
Liberals will HATE this…but it perfectly describes them.
Drawn and Posted by Glenn Foden / @GlennFo / February 05, 2016
about the 2016 Index of Economic Freedom.Millions of people around the world are emerging from poverty thanks to rising economic freedom. But by sharp contrast, America’s economic freedom has been on a declining path over the past decade.
According to the 2016 Index of Economic Freedom, an annual publication by The Heritage Foundation, America’s economic freedom has tumbled. With losses of economic freedom in eight of the past nine years, the U.S. has tied its worst score ever, wiping out a decade of progress.
The U.S. has fallen from the 6th freest economy in the world, when President Barack Obama took office, to 11th place in 2016. America’s declining score in the index is closely related to rapidly rising government spending, subsidies, and bailouts.
Since early 2009:
- Government spending has exploded, amounting to $29,867 per household in 2015.
- The national debt has risen to $125,000 for every tax-filing household in America—a total over $18 trillion.
- The government takeover of health care is raising prices and disrupting markets.
- Bailouts and new government regulations have increased uncertainty, stifling investment and job creation.
This is not something to take lightly. Economic freedom is the foundation of U.S. economic strength, and economic strength is the foundation of America’s high living standards, military power, and status as a world leader. The perils of losing economic freedom are not fictional.
It is painfully clear that our economy has been performing far below its potential, with individuals, families, and entrepreneurs being squeezed by the proliferation of big-government bureaucracy and regulations.
As documented by the index, and by other scholars,
America’s economic freedom has been declining at an alarming pace. Indeed, as The Wall Street Journal recently summed it up succinctly, Obama is “a champion when it comes to limiting economic freedom, and American workers have the slow growth in jobs and wages to prove it.”
Not surprisingly, our economic dynamism and innovative capacity have been measurably reduced. Self-inflicted wounds include:
- The U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. This has driven
new jobs to other, more competitive nations and has meant fewer jobs and lower wages for Americans.
- The overall annual cost of meeting regulatory requirements has increased by over $80 billion since 2009, with more than 180 new regulations in place. In terms of ease of starting a new business, analyzed by a recently published World Bank report, the U.S. is ranked shockingly low at 49th, trailing countries such as Canada, Georgia, Ireland, Lithuania, and Malaysia.
No wonder the labor force participation rate has remained at near record lows after more than five years of steady decline.
Worse, vibrant entrepreneurial growth has been stymied by greater policy uncertainty and mounting debt. And a disturbing trend toward cronyism has gravely eroded the rule of law and distorted our free-market system.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, keynote speaker of the official release of the 2016 Index, recently stated:
“It’s been almost seven years since the Obama “recovery” began, and our economy is barely out of neutral. Why does America have to settle for this?”
Restoring economic freedom is prerequisite to revitalizing and brightening America’s future. 2016 is the year to reaffirm the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and rule of law so that we can reconstitute an America where freedom, opportunity, and prosperity flourish. The time to act is now.
A friend sent this link to me. It is extremely thought provoking and educational. It is also very scary how like America is today, what Argentina already went through. Please watch, and SHARE.
By Susan Jones | June 18, 2015
“I don’t think right now that debt 20, 30 years from now is the thing that’s holding our economy back,” Lew told the hearing focusing on the annual report of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC).
Lew chairs the FSOC, a body formed in 2010 to respond to emerging risks to the U.S. financial system. “I think if you look at the risks to our economy from federal spending and debt, we are in a much better position now than we were six and a half years ago,” Lew told Luetkemeyer. Lew later noted that “debt as a percentage of GDP has stabilized for this period of time. We have made enormous progress, it was climbing, and it has stabilized.”
Luetkemeyer pointed to a June 16 Congressional Budget Office report that warns: “If current laws remained generally unchanged, federal debt held by the public would exceed 100 percent of GDP by 2040 and continue on an upward path relative to the size of the economy — a trend that could not be sustained indefinitely.”
But Lew said that CBO report “makes clear that over the next ten years, we’re in a pretty stable place.”
The report projects that under current law, federal debt held by the public would decline slightly relative to GDP over the next few years…After that, however, growing budget deficits — caused mainly by the aging of the population and rising health care costs — would push debt back to, and then above, its current high level. The deficit would grow from less than 3 percent of GDP this year to more than 6 percent in 2040. At that point, 25 years from now, federal debt held by the public would exceed 100 percent of GDP.”
Lew told Congress, “I think the thing in that report that people are concerned about is the long-term. And obviously there are still long-term issues.” … “I think if you look at where we were, where we were in 2008, 2009, we were careening towards a very treacherous place. We’ve stabilized it and it’s improving. We still have long-term challenges and–“
Luetkemeer interrupted, telling Lew, “The point I’m trying to make is, CBO points out the debt is a problem for our economy, and yet your report does nothing, says nothing about it, and you are supposed to be an agency that points out these problems. Why is — my question is, why did you not point out that debt is a problem for our economy?”
“I — our report appropriately looks at the threats to financial stability,” Lew responded.
“So you don’t consider it a threat?” the congressman asked.
“I think that if you look at what we have — where we are today versus six years ago, the federal deficit has been brought under control for the next decade. We are in…a period where we need to get the economy growing. I totally agree with you, our conversation should be about what can we do to grow the economy,” Lew continued. “And we know there are things we could do. We could have an infrastructure program in place. We could have immigration reform. There’s lots of things we could do to grow our economy. I don’t think right now that debt 20, 30 years from now is the thing that’s holding our economy back.”
Luetkemeyer said he thinks Lew has “missed the boat…We’ve dropped the ball on this.”
Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-N.C.) asked Lew several times if he sees the debt as a threat: “Is it a vital concern to you today?”
“I don’t think it is the most pressing concern today because we have controlled the rate of growth,” Lew replied.
“So $18 trillion, that’s not a concern?” Pittenger followed up.
“As a percentage of GDP, we’ve stabilized the deficit and the growth of the debt,” Lew said. “In the next ten years, we have a stable debt and deficit situtation.”
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, noted that the national debt is $18 trillion and counting. He called it “perhaps one of the greatest existential threats that we face,” and he noted that more debt has been incurred under President Obama than in the nation’s first 200 years.
“This is beyond negligent, it is beyond egregious. It is dangerous and, frankly, it is offensive,” Hensarling said.
A new study shows that the number of immigrants in the United States jumped 3 percent in three years — to a record 41.3 million in 2013 — and that the nearly 300,000 who came from Muslim countries pose a major national security threat, the report’s co-author told Newsmax on Thursday.
“All of that does raise national security concerns, and I don’t think there has been any consideration of that,” said Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies. The Washington-based nonprofit organization released the study on Thursday. It is based on an analysis of Census data from 2010 to last year. Camarota conducted the study and co-authored it with CIS demographer Karen Zeigler.
“The primary threat from a group like ISIS to the homeland is through our immigration system,” Camarota said, referring to the Islamic State terrorist group that has beheaded three Westerners in recent weeks.
“No one’s suggesting that they’re going to launch a missile and hit New York, but rather they’re going to board an airliner and blow it up,” he added. “They’re going to park a car in a public place, they’re going to go on a shooting spree, or any one of those things. Our immigration system is a vital part of national security. Everybody doesn’t seem to recognize that,” Camarota said. “The question is, what are the implications of our rapidly growing Middle Eastern population? The numbers certainly raise it.”
The CIS report shows that the United States was home to a record 41.3 million legal and illegal immigrants last year. That was up nearly 1.4 million from the 39.9 million in 2010, while the number was 31.1 million in 2000.
By comparison, the U.S. immigrant population stood at 9.6 million in 1970. About 16 percent of the U.S. population last year was foreign-born, whether in the country legally or illegally, according to the data. That’s about one in eight residents, or one of every six adults. “Those numbers reflect two basic facts: an extremely high level of legal immigration, a very permissive legal immigration system — and they also reflect a failure to control illegal immigration,” Camarota said.
“Somewhere between a fourth and a third of those immigrants are here illegally.”
The largest number of immigrants in the United States are Mexicans, with more than 11.5 million living here illegally and legally last year. The number of Mexican immigrants fell by 126,126 — or 1 percent — over the period because of some dying and others leaving the country, Camarota said.
According to the study, the Middle Eastern population grew by 207,758 in the period, or 13 percent, to more than 1.8 million last year. That compared with 1.6 million in 2010 and 1.1 million in 2000. Leading the growth from that region was Saudi Arabia, with 43,878 immigrants — nearly double the number who were in the U.S. in 2010. The analysis shows that 88,894 Saudis lived in this country last year. Iraq was next, with about 41,094 immigrants, for a 26 percent increase to a total of 200, 894. But the total number of immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries totaled 295,743 in the period, according to the CIS study. That was up by 13.5 percent.
The total number of immigrants from primarily Muslim countries in the U.S. was more than 2.4 million last year, compared with 2.1 million in 2010 and 1.5 million in 2000. Camarota attributed the rise in Mideast immigration to myriad U.S. policies, whether they granted asylum or refugee status to people from the region or involved the nation’s defense forces.
“Once there is a presence, the possibility of going to the United States becomes a much more realistic possibility,” he said. “The presence of the United States in a country in a big way, whether it’s Afghanistan or Iraq, tends to spur immigration.” Overall, however, the Middle East is only fourth among regions of the world from where people emigrate to the U.S.
The leader is south Asia, which was up 372,546, or 16 percent, to 2.7 million; east Asia, up 364,909, or 5 percent, to 7.8 million; and the Caribbean, up 223,011, or 6 percent, to more than 3.9 million immigrants. China is No. 1 in east Asia, with 217,305 people coming from that country in the period, or 10 percent, for a total of 2.3 million last year. India is the leader in south Asia, with 254,355, or 14 percent, to more than 2 million. More people came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic than any other Caribbean country, with 111,859, or 13 percent, to a total of 991,046 last year. From Central America — the nexus of the border crisis that has led to hundreds of thousands of illegals, especially minors traveling alone, crossing the Rio Grande into south Texas in recent months — the number of immigrants jumped by 113,744, or 3.7 percent, over the three years.
The number of immigrants from the region in the U.S. surpassed 3.1 million last year. The biggest number, 71,469, came from Guatemala. That marked an 8.6 percent surge, for a total of 902,293. Next was El Salvador, up 3.1 percent, or 38,018; and then Honduras, up 2.1 percent, or 11,017, to a total of 533,598.
“It just reminds us of how enormous the immigrant population is and what a large share of the population it is,” Camarota told Newsmax.
The data added yet another dimension to the immigration debate as President Barack Obama considers what executive actions he will announce after the November congressional elections.
After a high-profile Rose Garden ceremony in May in which he vowed to act unilaterally on immigration because of the continued stalemate in Congress, Obama did an about-face earlier this month and said he would postpone any action until after the elections out of fears that his moves could cause Democrats to lose the Senate.
“What he is still considering after the election is not just the legalization of illegal immigrants on his own, but substantial increases in legal immigration on his own,” Camarota said. “He’s going to reinterpret the law that, for the last 20 years, everyone has thought imposed some caps on green cards and other measures. He’s going to say those caps don’t exist, which would make those numbers higher. To accelerate these numbers even further, that’s something there should be a long national debate about,” Camarota continued. “It’s something that’s very hard to argue that the president should just be able to do on his own.”
A senior Republican aide also highlighted the national security concerns posed by the CIS study.
“This report confronts Congress with important national security and community safety questions,” the aide told Newsmax. “We can’t let our immigration system, like that of the U.K.’s, be used as a vehicle for jihadism and growing pockets of radicalism spreading in our own towns.” 
By WhatDidYouSay.org
Daniel Doherty | Nov 14, 2014
As expected, the US House of Representatives voted on and passed legislation today approving the Keystone XL Pipeline. This is the ninth time they have done so:
The House on Friday voted 252 to 161 to approve a bill that would direct the federal government to move forward on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, ahead of a vote scheduled for Tuesday in the Senate that could send the measure to President Obama’s desk.There is little chance that the votes will clear the way to construction of the long-fought, long-delayed pipeline, which would carry petroleum from the Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries. In the Senate, where Democrats have a majority until the Republicans take over in January, it is unlikely, though not impossible, that the bill would attract 60 votes, enough to avoid a filibuster. But even if the bill does clear the Senate, Mr. Obama has signaled that he will probably veto it.
In other words, the bill is probably going nowhere — at least not right now. Today’s vote was largely agreed upon by both parties for political reasons. Nevertheless, the Senate will debate and vote on the House-passed legislation next Tuesday. (Republicans reportedly already have “58 of the 60 votes they would need” to assure passage). Will they get there?
Maybe, but it might not matter in the end; the president isn’t ready to act just yet:
At a press conference in Myanmar on Friday, Obama reaffirmed his argument that the Keystone XL decision should be made only after the State Department has completed its review. “I’ve been clear in the past,” said Obama, according to The Hill. “My position hasn’t changed, that this is a process that is supposed to be followed.”
Obama said that part of that process will include determining “whether or not [the pipeline] accelerates climate change,” and also seemed to express frustration about having to “constantly push back against this idea that somehow the Keystone pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States or is somehow lowering gas prices.”
That ruling will be handed down sometime in January, thus the safe bet is that the lame duck Congress will not resolve this issue.
I’ll leave you with this press release. It was issued by Speaker John Boehner’s office after the bill cleared the House:
Thousands more Americans would be working today if President Obama had put their priorities ahead of his political interests and approved the Keystone pipeline. Instead, he continues to block the project, and the new jobs, lower costs, and increased energy security it would provide. The House has voted numerous times to end the Obama administration’s needless delays, only to see those bills blocked by the outgoing Democratic majority in the Senate. The president doesn’t have any more elections to win, and he has no other excuse for standing in the way. It’s time he start listening to the vast majority of Americans who support Keystone and help get more people back to work.”
By WhatDidYouSay.org
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) warned Thursday that any attempt by President Barack Obama to ease U.S. immigration rules on his own would poison his 
relationship with Congress, which is already suffering from a severe lack of trust in the White House.
Boehner said the midterm elections show that voters don’t want Obama to act unilaterally, as he’s promised to do, and warned that such a move would be like playing with matches.
House Speaker John Boehner warned President Barack Obama Thursday that going it alone on immigration would be like playing with matches. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
“When you play with matches, you take the risk of burning yourself,” Boehner warned. “And he’s gonna burn himself if he continues to go down this path. The American people made it clear on election day: they want to get things done, and they don’t want the president acting on a unilateral basis.”
On Wednesday, Obama seemed to ignore the huge GOP win on election day, and said he would move forward with some kind of executive action on immigration by the end of the year. The White House is thought to be considering changes that would let it expand the number of green cards available to immigrants and their families.
Obama also said he has already been patient long enough waiting for Congress to act.
“I think it’s fair to say that I’ve shown a lot of patience and have tried to work on a bipartisan basis as much as possible, and I’m going to keep on doing so,” he said.
Boehner said Obama’s comments showed that he hasn’t yet decided to work with Congress on the critical issue of immigration.
“Yesterday, we heard him say that he may double-down on his go-it-alone approach,” Boehner said. “I’ve told the president before that he needs to put politics aside and rebuild trust.”
“Finding common ground can be hard work. But it’ll be even harder if the president isn’t willing to work with us,” he added.
Outside of immigration, Boehner said it is likely that the House will again pass a bill next year to repeal Obamacare, and see if the new GOP-led Senate can pass it. But he also said Republicans would try to pass smaller bills to repeal objectionable parts of the law.
Those parts include killing the medical device tax, ending the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and eliminating the individual mandate to buy health insurance. Boehner said there are bipartisan majorities in both chambers for passing those bills.
“We need to put them on the president’s desk that let him choose,” he said.
He also rejected the idea that Republicans would be poisoning their relationship with Obama by passing Obamacare bills, and said repeal measures are needed because the law is clearly hurting the economy.
Boehner and soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have outlined several issues they want to address next year. Boehner told reporters that Republicans want to fix the tax code, address the national debt, reform the legal system, make the government more accountable, and give parents more choices on education.
Carousel image via AP Photo/Cliff Owen
By WhatDidYouSay.org
“This is not the same industry we had 15 years ago,” Natural Gas Supply Association VP Jennifer Fordham said recently. That’s an understatement. The oil, petrochemical and manufacturing industries are also far different from those of 15 years ago. Together, they’ve created hundreds of thousands of new jobs and generated countless billions of dollars in economic activity. No thanks to the Obama Administration.
From EPA to Interior and even the Energy Department, the Administration continues to display a strong animosity toward fossil fuels. Its war on coal has hounded mines, power plants, jobs and communities. Its opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has thwarted the creation of tens of thousands of construction jobs. Its bans on leasing, drilling and hydraulic fracturing on federal onshore and offshore lands have caused a 6% drop in oil production from those lands and a 28% plunge in natural gas output – costing thousands of jobs and tens of billions in bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenues to the U.S. Treasury.
Nevertheless, you’d think Obama regulators and policy makers would support natural gas pipelines. Even the Sierra Club promoted this fuel as a “clean alternative to coal” just a couple years ago. But no.
The fracking revolution on America’s state and private lands has unleashed a gusher of mammoth proportions. In just six years, 2008-2014, it has generated a 58% increase in oil production (from 5 million to 8 million barrels per day) – and a 21% rise in natural gas production. By the end of this year, U.S. crude oil production is projected to reach 9 million bpd. In the Marcellus Shale region, gas production is expected to reach 16 billion cubic feet a day, twice the volume of only two years ago.
However, this miraculous cornucopia is overwhelming the nation’s existing delivery systems and, far from striving to eliminate the bottleneck, the Obama Administration is creating new ones.
Not having the Keystone pipeline to transport Upper Midwest crude to refineries has forced oil companies to move that oil by train. Rail accidents have caused spills and deaths, but the regulatory focus has been on stronger tanker cars, with insufficient attention paid to track maintenance and safety – or pipelines.
Insufficient natural gas pipelines mean producers cannot deliver this vital fuel to homes, hospitals, factories and electricity generating plants, or to petrochemical plants that use it as a feed stock for literally thousands of products. Pipeline companies are clamoring for construction permits.
With supplies rising, prices for oil and natural gas are declining. Global crude oil prices have fallen more than $20 a barrel and are cheaper in the United States than in Europe. Natural gas prices in the Marcellus area have been about half the U.S. benchmark price, which is below $4 per thousand cubic feet (mcf), compared to prices as high as $9 or even $20 per mcf (or Btu) in Europe and Asia. As a result, despite a clear need for gas, some drillers are re-examining their Marcellus plans, and an estimated 1,750 Pennsylvania natural gas wells are not currently producing because pipeline connections are not available.
Natural gas pipelines also ensure energy conservation and reduce air pollution. A North Dakota pipeline would collect gas produced with crude oil, eliminating the need to “flare” the gas. But permit delays, largely by federal agencies, mean enough gas to heat 160,000 homes goes up in smoke every month.
Why are pipelines lagging behind production? First, pipeline companies build new capacity only when there is a 
demonstrated need. Second, and most important, pipeline permit approvals are being delayed.
A 2013 INGAA Foundation study found that the number of interstate natural gas pipeline authorizations issued more than 90 days after federal environmental assessments were completed climbed from 8% to 28% since Congress passed the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Rather than streamlining permits, as Congress had intended, the law had the opposite effect. It removed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s ability to keep project reviews on a strict schedule, allowed both state and federal agencies to drag their heels on pipeline permitting, and opened the door to more objections by environmental pressure groups.
Authorization delays were caused by conflicts among federal agencies, as well as inadequate or under-trained agency staff, applicant changes to projects requiring additional or revised environmental review (often in response to environmentalist or other third-party protests and demands), site-access problems, and FERC and other agency reviews of requirements for mitigating asserted environmental impacts, INGAA concluded. Increased partisanship at FERC has also increased delays.
The Obama Army Corps of Engineers slowed pipeline permits by citing the Clean Water Act. Its Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) cited the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to justify slow-walking permits. Its Environmental Protection Agency wants to control all “waters of the United States” (WOTUS), so as to exert regulatory authority over activities on federal, state and private lands – including drilling, frackingand pipelines – in the name of sustainability, climate change prevention and other eco-mantras.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management unveiled a sweeping plan that would revise longstanding resource management plans, to install buffer zones around “sensitive” Gunnison sage grouse habitats, impose seasonal restrictions on oil and gas drilling and livestock grazing, and close roads and trails wherever grouse are present. But in the midst of this effort, BLM and various state governments are also working to streamline “eco-friendly” solar, wind, geothermal and transmission line projects that they claim will reduce “dangerous” carbon dioxide emissions. Natural gas would do that, too, of course.
Natural gas is clean, affordable and reliable – if it can reach consumers through pipelines, which are the safest form of energy transportation. Unfortunately, the Obama principle seems to be: If it requires subsidies, raises energy prices, costs jobs, impacts thousands of acres, and butchers birds and bats – expedite approval. If it generates royalty and tax revenues, produces reliable, affordable energy, creates jobs, and has minimal impacts on endangered and migratory species – delay or ban it. Talk about crazy.
The administration’s fixation on ideological environmentalism is not helping the environment, the economy, or consumers. It is a political ploy designed to garner liberal votes and rake in more money from campaign donors like Tom Steyer, the billionaire hedge fund manager who got his money from coal.
A poll released last week had some pretty bad news for congressional Democrats heading into the midterm elections. But buried in the poll numbers was a figure that just might constitute an even more important turning point.
Respondents were asked: “On balance, do you feel that Obama’s presidency so far has been more of a success or more of a failure?” More than half, 52%, said “failure.” Only 42% said “success.” And it gets worse. Only 22% were “strongly” convinced Obama is a success, while 39% are strongly convinced he’s a failure. And the American people have pretty much made up their minds on this; only 6% of respondents had no clear opinion.
Other evidence backs up this turn in public opinion. How bad has it gotten? The last president who was widely written off by the American people as a failure, George W. Bush, now enjoys higher net approval ratings than Obama, while Mitt Romney has been going on an I-told-you-so tour.
At this point, the American people are pretty much feeling like this kid. We are so over with being impressed by this president.
On behalf of long-time critics of Obama, let me say to the American people: welcome to our world. As a public service, to help you solidify your sense that he just isn’t up to the job, let me count down the ways that President Obama has failed to live up to his promises and to the responsibilities of his office. The list is pretty comprehensive.
The first thing people expected of Obama, the whole reason his presidency was already hailed as “historic” on Inauguration Day 2009, before he had taken a single official act, is because voters thought that the first black president would help America put the ugly history of racially divisive politics behind us.
But from his earliest stumbling efforts—anyone remember the “Beer Summit“?—Obama has proven alternately uninterested and ham-handed in dealing with this signature issue. What he has mostly contributed has been to rush in and pre-judge racially charged cases, like the shooting of Trayvon Martin or the questionable police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, before the defendants get their day in court. When you pre-judge someone on the basis of race, isn’t there a word for that?
So as the recent race riots in Ferguson confirm, Obama has not served as some kind of magical bridge who would promote mutual understanding between whites and blacks. Instead, he has done more to inflame the tensions in these cases than to defuse them.
Our expectations of Obama were overblown from the beginning, but he worked pretty hard to overblow them. Certainly, when voters chose him, they were hoping for the opposite of an unscrupulous race-hustler like Al Sharpton. There was even a joke about Obama sending Sharpton and Jesse Jackson on missions to non-existent countries just to get them as far away from his campaign as possible. Now, Sharpton is being described as Obama’s “go-to man on race,” with a White House source gushing to The Politico that “There’s a trust factor with The Rev from the Oval Office on down.”
For those of us who remember Obama’s previous go-to man on that subject—the Reverend Jeremiah Wright—it’s not surprising. But it’s not what most people thought they were voting for.
President Obama was elected in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and his first big act in office was to sign a gargantuan package of “stimulus” spending—financed entirely with debt—that was supposed to jump-start the economy. Congress voted for hundreds of billion of dollars for “shovel-ready projects” which Obama later discovered don’t exist, and the money disappeared without a trace.
How many “recovery summers” have there been in which growth and employment was finally supposed to take off—only to peter out again? (Hint: the first one was in 2010.)
In how many other recoveries has labor force participation—the percentage of people actually working—declined? In what other recovery have poor people emerged deeper in debt than they were at the beginning?
Yes, the economy was in crisis when President Obama took office. But he has presided over the slowest, weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression—and by a good margin.
But surely, Obama saw to it that we would never repeat the problems that led to the financial crisis and the recession in the first place, right? Except that the Dodd-Frank financial reforms didn’t really reform anything. They created a couple thousand pages of new legislation and many, many more new executive-branch regulations, which have helped to muddle the rules rather than clarify them. But these regulations have never really resolved any of the pre-crisis problems.
The old system in which a handful of giant financial institutions were considered “too big to fail” and thus could depend on the rest of us to bail them out? That system is alive and well.
The disastrous launch of ObamaCare was a reminder of everything that’s wrong with big government. It turns out that when we warned health insurance would be run as well as the Department of Motor Vehicles, we were too optimistic. And no one was ever held accountable for that fiasco.
When ObamaCare was passed, we were assured that it would provide insurance for 32 million people who didn’t have any coverage. Four years later, it looks like ObamaCare has covered far fewer new people, between 10% and 20% of what was promised, and about half of those were through an expansion of Medicaid—a burden that will eventually bankrupt the states—rather than through ObamaCare’s insurance exchanges.
Most of the people buying insurance through the exchanges are those who were kicked out of their previous health insurance plans by new regulations. It turns out that if we liked our health insurance, we couldn’t keep it. For some of us, this will be bad. For others, it’s much worse.
You’re still going to hear a lot of commentators on the left arguing that the law is a great success—if you agree to move the goalposts and ignore all the broken promises. But the American people aren’t buying it.
He spent all of his political capital, and then some, on the failed stimulus and the ObamaCare boondoggle, leaving nothing for immigration reform. Having failed to get anything through Congress, he floated a dubious plan to enact amnesty through a unilateral executive authority that he doesn’t have. Then he dropped the idea.
Instead, he has simply failed to enforce the immigration laws, contributing to a crisis on our southern border.
The result: he has managed to enrage the right, the left, and the middle. He hasn’t cracked down on illegal immigration, he hasn’t legalized it, and he hasn’t forged any kind of compromise or consensus on the issue. Nobody is happy and nothing has been accomplished.
Obama was so eager to not be George W. Bush that he pulled all of our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, then totally ignored the country, even as a terrorist threat re-established itself there. For most of this year, he foolishly downplayed the rise of the Islamic State. Even as Kurds and the Iraqi government issued increasingly panicked warnings, and the Islamic State took over more and more territory, he let the problem get worse for months without bothering to interrupt his golf schedule.
A few weeks ago, he admitted to having no strategy for dealing with the Islamic State. Last week, he hastily assembled one, but it’s looking like it might be unrealistic and lacks international support.
Bush went into Iraq with multiple UN resolutions, congressional approval, a broad “coalition of the willing,” and (as it turned out) the resolve to use whatever means were necessary to prevent a terrorist state from establishing itself there. Obama is going back into Iraq with none of that. So I guess he really isn’t anything like George W. Bush.
Who could have guessed that he would be the one to suffer by that comparison?
When a series of uprisings overthrew dictators across the Middle East, Obama failed to adopt any meaningful policy or to turn the situation to our advantage. He dithered for so long on Egypt that all of the factions there hate him, and most of Egypt’s liberals concluded that he was secretly backing the Muslim Brotherhood. The result is that Egypt went right back to where it was before, except this time the military dictatorship regards America as a useless and irrelevant ally.
Meanwhile, the two places where we could have taken advantage of the Arab Spring to get rid of truly nasty dictators who have been hostile to our interests for decades—Libya and Syria—ended in disaster. In Libya, the killing of our ambassador in Benghazi was just the beginning of a slow collapse into chaos and civil war. In Syria, three years of administration dithering allowed the rise of ISIS, which then spilled over into Iraq.
And let’s not forget about 2009, when Iranians poured out onto the street to oppose their own brutal, theocratic, terror-sponsoring regime—and Obama sat back passively because he preferred to cut a diplomatic deal with the ayatollahs.
During a debate with Mitt Romney in 2012, Obama dismissed Romney’s suggestion that Russia might be a threat to American interests, sneering, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” Now it’s looking more like the 1970s are calling, with an aggressive Russian dictatorship invading its neighbors, leaving our European allies feeling exposed and unsure whether they can really count on support from the US and NATO. Poland’s foreign minister has been overheard complaining about—how shall I put this politely?—his country’s unrequited love for America.
The president’s response to Russian aggression has been to impose a few more sanctions, make a speech in Estonia, and otherwise ignore the crisis and hope it goes away.
9. He didn’t shut down Guantanamo, keep the NSA from spying, or rein in the drones.
Daniel Fried Guantanamo Closure Czar
I know people who sincerely believe that all of these are good policies and who will defend them vigorously if asked. Barack Obama is not one of those people. Yet all of these policies have been pursued during his presidency, on his authority.
President Obama came into office having loudly condemned many of the Bush administration’s measures against terrorism. Then he continued them. You can call this hypocrisy or you can call it subversion. But President Obama has achieved a unique combination: managing to morally discredit America’s anti-terrorism policies without actually ending them.
You will notice that most of Obama’s failures result, not from taking a bold stand, but from taking no stand and just letting events drift. Certainly, in a lot of these cases, Obama has given speeches or press conference to announce his enlightened intentions—then done nothing to plan for how to actually achieve his goals.
But if he is irrelevant, that makes America irrelevant. We can look at the Arab Spring, at Ukraine, and at Iraq, but let’s add one more example. For most of his presidency, Obama has declared his intention to “pivot to Asia,” extricating himself from the Middle East and focusing on bolstering our Pacific allies to peacefully manage the rise of China. It’s pretty widely acknowledged that he never managed to do it, letting the Asia pivot die of neglect.
This may fit with the quasi-isolationist mood that has taken hold in America in recent years, but it is yet another case where Obama promised something very different. He campaigned on the promise that America would be more respected in the world after the Bush years—not that we would be considered a useless ally and an ineffectual opponent.
I don’t know if you could come up with a more comprehensive list of presidential failures, encompassing foreign policy and domestic policy, economics, race, and immigration. And I’m sure I left a lot of things off this list, not least of which is the targeting of Obama’s political opponents by a corrupt IRS, which continues to announce the oh-so-mysterious loss of potentially incriminating data by its employees.
Combine all of this with his frequent vacations and golf outings and his fascination with the trappings of pop-culture celebrity, and you get the impression that Obama has checked out of the presidency and lost interest in the responsibility he is neither willing nor able to shoulder.
Obama was originally elected on the basis of celebrity, on vague slogans about “hope and change,” on a sense of self-congratulatory smugness about how progressive and enlightened we would all be if we voted for him. He was re-elected on all of that, plus the smearing of his political opposition as racists and mean rich white guys.
If the result is an utter failure of leadership, maybe there are a few lessons we ought to learn for the next presidential election.
Democrats like to accuse Republicans of waging “war” on women and on “immigrants” and anybody else they need to lie to in order to solidify their base. They get away with it only because the major media are nearly 100% in the tank for Democrats. In the real world, it is actually Democrats who are waging war, and the war they’re waging is on the same base they lie to with a regularity that would put X-Lax out of business.
The Democratic party has been waging a war on workers, especially lower income workers, for decades. They’ve gotten away with it because nobody – Republicans are you listening – has had the courage to point it out to those workers. The tide may be changing on that, but that doesn’t mean the war is won, it just means the Democrats are doubling down.
There are two major issues that are at the forefront of the Democrats’ War on Workers. So-called immigration reform and forced unionization of public employees.
With respect to “immigration reform,” which is in fact amnesty for 15 million plus illegal aliens currently in the US and another 30 to 40 million who will come in due to the chain immigration rules Democrats and Republican amnesty sell-outs like John McCain insist on, will depress wages at the low end of the scale because this flood of illegal aliens is made up almost entirely of uneducated, unskilled workers whose command of the English language is marginal at best. The highest rates of unemployment are already low income workers and adding 15 to 45 million more potential low income job seekers will do nothing but depress wages.
The Reason Foundation cites twelve reasons why amnesty will hurt the most vulnerable among us. The highlights include:
According to The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector, the cost for amnesty is at least $6.3 trillion. Most of this cost is absorbed in Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, education, welfare benefits, and social services like police…
The majority of the 33 million new immigrants that would benefit from amnesty would be low-skilled labor. The Congressional Budget Office stated that wages would decrease over ten years. Mass immigration is already hurting many low-skilled laborers, The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights stated that both legal and illegal immigration accounts for forty percent of the 18-point percent decline for African American employment levels.
The addition of 33 million new permanent job seekers would increase the already strained native work force. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “the native-born population increased by 16.4 million from 2000 to 2013, yet the number of natives actually holding a job was 1.3 million lower in 2013 than 2000.”
Get the idea? Please follow the link to The Reason Foundation, it’s an eye opener.
With respect to forced unionization, Democrats around the country have spent decades building the strength of public employee unions. The reason is simple. Employees are required to join the union, required to pay dues which are automatically deducted from their wages, and the unions are the number one funding source for the Democratic Party.
We’ve seen some dramatic reversals on that score over the past few years. Both Michigan and Wisconsin, states with a long history of labor union activism, have both become right-to-work states and unions have lost the majority of their members in both states. Secondly, the recent Supreme Court decision – Harris v. Quinn – from Illinois that struck down the requirement that low paid home healthcare workers be union members has put a huge dent in union membership. California, of course, is moving to counter the effect of that decision and continue to prop up unions at the expense of low wage workers.
Two years ago, however, the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown began to merge IHSS [In-Home Supportive Services caregivers] with other social services and shift the negotiation of union contracts for aides – who are selected by care recipients and usually family members – to a new statewide “authority.”
As that county-by-county shift occurs, IHSS will become, in effect, a state program with nearly 400,000 employees. While IHSS unions like the shift to state bargaining, it’s creating a new and semi-adversarial relationship between them and the state.
The just-concluded legislative session provided some clues to that evolving relationship.
When, for example, President Barack Obama’s administration declared that IHSS workers were entitled to overtime pay, Brown attempted to limit them to 40-hour weeks to limit costs, but eventually settled for a lesser restriction.
When the Legislature was passing a so-called “domestic worker bill of rights,” laying out working conditions for housekeepers, babysitters and other home helpers, it exempted IHSS workers from its protections – a kind of do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do attitude.
[…]The bill, ostensibly a budget cleanup measure, contains a curious provision giving union representatives the right – at public expense – to talk to new workers about union membership for “up to 30 minutes.”
Why?
Well, it may have had something to do with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in an Illinois case that IHSS workers cannot be compelled to pay union “agency shop” dues because they are not truly public workers, since they are chosen by their clients.
IHSS workers are paid, in most cases, only slightly more than minimum wages, so union dues can be a major bite and many might opt out of paying them under the Supreme Court’s decree.
Republican governors in both Michigan and Wisconsin fought the unions and won major victories for the workers in their states as well as state taxpayers. Both governors inherited huge deficits from outgoing Democrats. Both Michigan and Wisconsin now have budget surpluses just four years later and, in large part, the reason for those surpluses is moving to being right-to-work states.
It’s long past time for states to stand up for their most vulnerable workers and the best way to do this is to fight amnesty and fight for the right-to-work. Where do your Representatives and Senators stand? Where do your State representatives and candidates for statewide office stand? It’s time to hold the politicians accountable.
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May’s Jobs Report: Lowest Percentage of Americans Working in Decades
Newspaper classifieds (Photo: Ian Lamont/Flickr)
There was good news and bad news in today’s jobs report, and both came from what the report did not show. They did not show either the warning or hopeful signs that many economists anticipated.
The good news: Despite the U.S. economy shrinking in the first quarter–its first quarterly contraction in three years–job growth remained healthy.
Taken together, the labor market shows no signs of heading into a recession. This makes it more likely the Q1 GDP report represented an aberration, not a harbinger of worse to come.
The bad news:
Many economists thought this represented statistical noise and participation would bounce back in May. If this had occurred, unemployment might have increased, since only those looking for work count as unemployed, and may have indicated a strengthening labor market since more people were looking for jobs. But that too did not happen. The headline unemployment rate has fallen primarily because millions of Americans have stopped looking for work.
The May jobs report shows a Goldilocks’ economy: not that cold but not that hot. Adding 200,000 jobs a month would be good news if unemployment and labor force participation stood at normal levels. Unfortunately they do not.
All told, the U.S. economy does not appear headed for another recession, but is not healing quickly either.
Vice President Joe Biden reportedly attacked the Clinton administration’s record on economic inequality during a closed-door Democratic fundraiser in South Carolina on Friday, prompting renewed speculation that the former Democratic senator will run against Hillary Clinton for the presidency in 2016.
CNN’s Peter Hamby was told by three separate sources at the fundraiser that Biden explained how rising inequality — now a frequent trope among Democratic politicians — in fact began during the later years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
“The fraying of middle-class economic security did not begin during President George W. Bush’s terms,” Hamby wrote, paraphrasing Biden’s pitch, “but earlier, in the ‘later years of the Clinton administration.’”
On Monday, CNN’s John King broke down the news along with The Atlantic’s Molly Ball and The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin. “So a criticism of Bill Clinton,” King mused. “Is that also an implicit criticism of Hillary Clinton, who might be his rival?”
“It’s funny,” Ball replied, “because this is a case that then-Senator Barack Obama made against Hillary Clinton back in ’08. You had the case, you know, ‘We all remember the ’90s as peace and prosperity. They actually weren’t so great. This sort of economic unraveling began.’”
“Biden, in public settings, makes the same sort of argument for the blue collar, economic-populist strain,” Ball continued. “But it does give him a potential opening, as he sees it, I think.”
But going after Clinton’s old record won’t be easy
, particularly when the vice president has a record of his own. “The problem for him is that it’s a hard case to make when he’s been part of the Obama administration,” Ball noted. “And that’s the economic record that he’s going to have to cite.”
Watch Discussion on Cable News;
The following statistics come from various surveys and opinion polls that have been conducted recently. Without a doubt, these numbers show that Americans are angrier and more frustrated than ever…
#1 65 percent of Americans are dissatisfied “with the U.S. system of government and its effectiveness”. That is the highest level of dissatisfaction that Gallup has ever recorded.
#2 66 percent of Americans are dissatisfied “with the size and power of federal government”.
#3 70 percent of Americans do not have confidence that the government will “make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2014.”
#4 Only 8 percent of Americans believe that Congress is doing a “good” or “excellent” job.
#5 Only 4 percent of Americans believe that it would “change Congress for the worse” if every member was voted out during the next election.
#6 60 percent of Americans report feeling “angry or irritable”. Two years ago that number was at 50 percent.
#7 53 percent of Americans believe that the Obama administration is “not competent in running the government”.
#8 An all-time low 31 percent of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.
#9 An all-time low 25 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans.
#10 An all-time high 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as Independents.
#11 Barack Obama’s daily job approval numbers have dipped down into the high thirties several times lately.
#12 Only 38 percent of Americans approve of the way that Obama is handling the economy.
#13 60 percent of Americans believe that the “economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy”.
#14 70 percent of Americans do not “feel engaged or inspired at their jobs”.
#15 Two-thirds of U.S. teens “admit to having anger attacks involving the destruction of property, threats of violence, or engaging in violence”.
#16 36 percent of Americans admit that they have yelled at customer service agents during the past year.
#17 73 percent of Americans believe that Obama’s efforts to “reform” the NSA “won’t make much difference in protecting people’s privacy”.
#18 77 percent of Americans believe that the state of the economy is either “not so good” or “poor”.
#19 65 percent of Americans are either “somewhat dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the direction of the country.
Are you starting to get the picture?
We have never seen anything like this in the United States during the post-World War II era. People are fundamentally unhappy, and that has tremendous implications for the future of our society.
So what is causing all of this anger and frustration?
Well, of course the economic struggles that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing on a daily basis play a huge role. The following is an excerpt from a recent local Fox News report…
Some are describing this as “America’s anger epidemic.” And there are a few reasons: uncertainty in the job market and the economy, working long hours — on average about one month more now than they did in the 1970s and with less vacation.
So if it seems like Americans are angrier these days it’s because we are.
And it is easy to understand why people are becoming increasingly frustrated with the incompetence and rampant corruption in Washington D.C.…
Grim findings have been coming thick and fast. Most Americans no longer see President Barack Obama as honest. Half think that he “knowingly lied” to pass his Obamacare health law. Fewer than one in five trust the government in Washington to do what is right all or most of the time. Confidence in Congress has fallen to record lows: in America, as in Italy and Greece, just one in ten voters expresses trust or confidence in the national parliament. Frankly straining credulity, a mammoth, 107-country poll by Transparency International, a corruption monitor, this summer found Americans more likely than Italians to say that they feel that the police, business and the media are all “corrupt or extremely corrupt”.
Americans are also turning on one another. Since 1972 the Chicago-based General Social Survey (GSS) has been asking whether most people can be trusted, or whether “you can’t be too careful” in daily life. Four decades ago Americans were evenly split. Now almost two-thirds say others cannot be trusted, a record high.
In addition, there are certainly other reasons why people are so angry these days as well…
The “Knockout Game” grows more popular. Athletes throw tantrums that would embarrass most 3-year-olds. Race relations simmer at a constant near-boil, while our leaders engage in enough posturing and name-calling to look more like a modern version of “West Side Story” than the servant-citizens who should inspire peace and mutual respect.
Published: 21 hours ago
Dr. Benjamin Carson, the retired neurosurgeon whom many are urging to run for president in 2016, gave a remarkable interview to WND columnist and radio talker Bob Just recently, who was filling in as guest-host on the top-rated “Sean Hannity Show.”
Just interviewed Carson during the second hour of the Dec. 27 program. (During the third hour, Just interviewed WND Managing Editor David Kupelian and historian Ron Rychlak about the influential new book, “Disinformation.”)
With more than 500 affiliates nationwide, Hannity’s radio show, second only to that of Rush Limbaugh, is heard by roughly 13.5 million loyal listeners each week.
Carson, who retired recently as director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, became a household name for “speaking truth to power” when he delivered the keynote speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last February and, with President Obama sitting a few feet away, proceeded to brilliantly critique the Obama administration’s deficit spending, health-care takeover and more.
In October, Carson told The Hill, “[Running for president] is not something I have any desire to do whatsoever,” adding “but I certainly listen.”
He continued, “If the circumstances were to evolve in such a way that that seemed to be what God was calling me to do, I would certainly do it. And I would never turn my back on my fellow citizens, if there was a hue and cry for such.”
But on the Hannity show, Just turned aside from all the usual political questions Carson is asked, to get the famed surgeon and possible presidential contender to talk about the person who put him on the path to success – his desperately poor mother.
“She was one of 24 children and got married when she was 13 in a desperate attempt to escape the horrible environment in rural Tennessee,” said Carson. “And she and my father moved to Detroit. He was a factory worker and then she discovered some years later he was a bigamist. So there she was by herself again, trying to raise two young sons in the inner city.”
However, as Carson explained, his mother had one saving grace:
“But the interesting thing about her was, she was never a victim. She never felt sorry for herself, she never made excuses, and that was a good thing.
“The problem was, she didn’t accept excuses from us either (laughter), and that was a problem for us! So we had to learn pretty early on, just forget about making excuses cause it’s just not gonna work. …
“More importantly, we were both poor students, and she was observant, and she noticed in the homes that she cleaned – these were wealthy people – that they didn’t sit around watching TV all day. They did a lot of reading, studying and figuring things out. So she determined that that’s the life we were going to have.
“We were extremely unhappy … but it didn’t matter, we had to do it.
“Interestingly enough, after a while, as I began to read those books, particularly about people of accomplishment, I began to notice something. And that is that the person who has the most to do with what happens to you in life is you. Nobody else gets to determine that except you. And that was an incredible revelation for me and for my brother both. And we realized our terrible situation did not have to continue. We had the power to change it.”
But wait, asked Just: “She had a tough childhood. … How did she overcome that? Where did she find her authority to love you and discipline you the way she did, as a struggling single mom?”
Said Carson: “She found it in God. She became a believer, and a very strong believer …”
And that’s just the beginning. To find out more about how Dr. Ben Carson got started on the path to a remarkable life, listen to Bob Just’s entire interview here:
Carson, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and founder of the Carson Scholar’s Fund, is the author of five bestselling books, including “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story,” “Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose and Live With Acceptable Risk,” and his latest, “America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made the Nation Great.”
Bob Just, in addition to being a veteran radio talker and WND columnist is founder and president of several organizations, including Concerned Fathers Against Crime, Concerned Mothers Alliance for Children, and Concerned Youth. He worked with Sean Hannity on the research and development of Hannity’s New York Times bestselling book, “Deliver us from Evil.” His television appearances include Fox News’ “Hannity,” ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” “Hannity & Colmes,” “Fox & Friends” and “The Coral Ridge Hour.”
’I don’t want to offend anyone’
At the National Prayer Breakfast last February, broadcast live on C-SPAN2, Carson said at the outset that he didn’t want to “offend” anyone. Yet his words nonetheless made at least one distinguished guest in attendance – President Barack Obama – squirm in his seat.
For instance, taking on class-warfare economics by advocating for a 10 percent flat tax, Carson said a person who earns $10 billion should pay $1 billion in tax, while one earning $10 will pay $1 in tax.
“Some people say, ‘Well, that’s not fair because it doesn’t hurt the guy who made $10 billion as much as the guy who made 10,’” Carson said. “[But] where does it say you have to hurt the guy? He just put a billion dollars in the pot!
“We don’t need to hurt him,” Carson continued. “It’s that kind of thinking that has resulted in 602 banks in the Cayman Islands. That money needs to be back here, building our infrastructure and creating jobs.”
Carson further took aim at the swelling national debt, increasing bureaucracy and political correctness, which he called “dangerous” because it “muzzles” people and “keeps people from discussing important issues while the fabric of their society is being changed.”
But it was Carson’s proposal for health-care reform – an approach completely antithetical to the president’s massive and disastrous health-care overhaul program – that likely rankled Obama the most.
“Here’s my solution,” Dr. Carson said of America’s health-care woes. “When a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record and a health savings account [or HSA] to which money can be contributed – pretax – from the time you’re born ’til the time you die. When you die, you can pass it on to your family members, so that when you’re 85 years old and you got six diseases, you’re not trying to spend up everything. You’re happy to pass it on, and there’s nobody talking about death panels.
“And also, for the people who were indigent who don’t have any money,” Carson continued, “we can make contributions to their HSA each month, because we already have this huge pot of money. Instead of sending it to some bureaucracy, let’s put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care.”
“Dr. Carson said the one thing that Obama and the Democrats do not want to hear,” Rush Limbaugh later commented. “In this case, we have an ideal replacement for Obamacare that is much better, that promotes the health-care industry, that promotes cost savings, that promotes competition and it gets everybody covered.”
Video of Dr. Carson’s entire National Prayer Breakfast speech can be seen below:
By Linda McKinney / http://girlsjustwannahaveguns.com/2013/07/on-the-road-to-execution/#sthash.ZiC58JD7.dpuf
“Execution, says the Communist code, is the highest measure of social protection. What man can call himself a Communist who has not accepted the fact that Terror is an instrument of policy, right if the vision is right, justified by history, enjoined by the balance of forces in the social wars of this century?” — Whitaker Chambers, Witness
It started simply enough. Four airplanes were hijacked and used as bombs against America; killing innocents as well as their executioners. It went downhill from there.
George W. Bush took it upon himself to try to ensure America’s safety. In order to do so he implemented one of the biggest sweeping changes in American government’s history. The birth of “Homeland Security” was done with good intentions, acknowledged. Too bad good intentions often go astray. The current administration took the start of the path to perdition and put it on full speed ahead: the Titanic captain had nothing on this admin!
Suddenly, we have this:
“[The President] has emulated Lenin in striving to increase state control over such ‘commanding heights’ of our economy as energy, health care, finance, and education, with smaller forays into food, transportation and undoubtedly some areas I am overlooking.”
Of course, it could be that he’s not actually a Communist, but is a Socialist instead:
“Contrary to claims made in 2008 by [the president], his staff, and supporters, he was a member of the socialist New Party in Chicago.”
It’s not just his membership in the Socialist Party that makes him a Socialist, it’s his actions as well. Whatever he is, he isn’t following the precepts of our Founding Fathers and no one can successfully argue that statement.
The president has taken America very quickly away from the Founding Fathers’ vision of America. By hook or by crook, he’ll get what he wants:
“Just look at how this administration is trying to do an end run around the people by having the Environmental Protection Agency impose stringent regulations when it couldn’t even get the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to pass the socialist cap-and-trade bill.”
The question that becomes the issue: Is he taking us toward Communism or toward Socialism? In the long run, it doesn’t matter. Socialism (which we know via his membership card) is something that we know he believes in. With this president though, it looks like his Socialism leads to our Communism.
To clarify,
“Socialism manages the economy through planned collective social control, while communism tend to manage both the society and the economy by making sure that the properties are owned by the centralized organization to gain classlessness and statelessness. Both communism and socialism tend to prevent the effects of capitalism.”
So if Communism’s defining moments come when the economy is under control of the government, what do you call the long list of economic impacts the president has had while doling out taxpayer dollars to whomever he likes? Add the 20% of the economy that his health care plan will control (until it buckles under its own weight). Just last month the president released his Climate Action Plan:
“It is this war on coal that would prove the most costly, with hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and $1.47 trillion of lost national income by 2030. [my bolding]“
Taxes and his tax plan may round out the list, but it does not finish it. There are things not yet mentioned, but I must keep the article a readable length. The fact that his tax plan impacts us in that,
“The most serious consequence would be slower economic growth, less job creation, and less wage growth. Secondarily, the smaller income gains would reflect back on federal revenues, offsetting much of the revenue growth the president hopes to achieve with the tax increases. State and local budgets would be adversely affected as well.”
Established: The president was a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party as a younger man (for all we know, may still be).
Established: The president has manipulated the economy and has had a drastic impact upon it.
Established: The difference between a Socialist and a Communist is whether the government is in control of the economy, as well as the social arena.
Established: The president is in control of the economy.
Therefore: The president is a Communist.
We also know he’s allowing more drones to take to the air to keep an eye on us. We know he’s not above suing states to keep them from enforcing their own laws. We know he tries to stifle the votes of those whom he believes will vote against him. We know he’s hiding his background from us. We know he lies to us constantly.
We also know he willingly allowed four Americans to die in Benghazi and did nothing to help them: “Stand down!” He did not seek out and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law those responsible for Brian Terry’s death. We know there are questions surrounding other deaths related to the president (Jamie Zapata and Judge John Roll among others).
“The daughter of a former German diplomat in Moscow was trying to explain to me why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had become an implacable anti-Communist. It was hard for her because, as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed her. “He was immensely pro-Soviet,” she said, “and then — you will laugh at me — but you must not laugh at my father — and then — one night — in Moscow — he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.” — Whitaker Chambers, Witness
Democrat Senator, Chuck Schumer of New York, has over 30 years of sleazy experience in the art of political espionage. Schumer has a well documented history of voting to weaken immigration laws and contributing to the explosion of illegal immigration and drug trafficking crime plaguing America today. Yet once again, he wants Americans, and his naïve Senate colleagues, to take him at his word that this time he is going to get it right and honor his commitments.
Let us take a gander at Senator Schumer’s honorable record on U.S. Immigration and Border enforcement policies and his new “immigrant prevailing wage” agenda.
In 1986, then Congressmen Chuck Schumer, a protégé of liberal Senate lion, Ted Kennedy, voted in support of the Democrat praised Reagan era “Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)”. The 1986 IRCA made historic changes to existing U.S. immigration law and granted citizenship to an underestimated 3 million illegal aliens. This amnesty, offered as an attempt to curb illegal immigration, allowed illegal aliens living and working in the US to apply for lawful permanent residency if they filed 3 years of back tax returns and paid their back taxes. In turn, our government, Republicans and Democrats, promised to work to secure the U.S. southern border with Mexico, and pursue legal penalties against American businesses who continued to employee undocumented alien workers.
Almost immediately after voting for the IRCA, Schumer went to work betraying his word to his colleagues, and more importantly the American people through his attempts to have the IRCA’s illegal alien tax filing obligations undone in another historic piece of legislation, the “Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA)”. Although Schumer was unsuccessful in forcing amendments to the TRA to abate the IRCA’s immigrant tax filing/paying requirements, Schumer eventually voted in support for the passage of the legislation.
Shortly after passage of the TRA, Schumer began pressuring the U.S. Treasury to issue an independent regulation, exempting illegal alien citizen candidates from the tax filing provisions of the IRCA reconfirmed in the 1986 “Tax Reform Act” Schumer supported. In a letter to the Treasury, Schumer argued that Congress “did not intend” to subject amnestied aliens to the tax disclosure and payment requirements he voted for 2 weeks earlier. According to Schumer : “Obviously, we could not have a successful legalization program if by submitting an application an alien became vulnerable to an enforcement action by the IRS.”
The IRS never issued the regulation requested by Schumer, however, in 1988 Congress issued 499 pages of new tax legislation entitled the “Technical and Miscellaneous Revenue Act of 1988“. Buried deep inside this piece of legislation was one sentence absolving illegal aliens of their past tax filing and debt obligations. So much for “shared responsibility.”
Fast forward to 2006, when President Bush signed the token border security law we know as the “Secure Fence Act (SFA),” The SFA’s goal was to secure the U.S. southern border with Mexico to decrease illegal entry, drug trafficking, and security threats, by building 700 miles of fence and authorizing funds for more vehicles barriers, checkpoints, lighting and an increase in the use of advanced technologies like cameras, satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles to reinforce infrastructure at the border. Senator Schumer tried to filibuster the 2006 Secure Fences Act and has also opposed all border security infrastructure spending, choosing instead to support the liberal position that building border fences is not an effective deterrent to illegal border traffic.
Opponents of the SFA claimed border fences have the potential to damage U.S./Mexico relations, disrupt the environment, and inhibit natural animal migration patterns. Further, liberals claim that border fences increased the risk to illegal workers, who used to return home after pursuing seasonal work and fences might force them to bring their families with them and remain permanently in the United States. I’m not making this up.
Chuck Schumer has vigorously opposed every single piece of legislation designed to commit resources to improving US border security and slowing the growth of illegal immigration. During a recent trip to the Arizona/Mexican border, Schumer was heard to express his reservations about the federal government’s ability to secure our southern border given the ineffectiveness of currently available technology. Would this be the very same technology that he has consistently opposed funding for over two decades? Or is this the technology he lavishly praises for improving border security under the stewardship of the Obama Administration? That is, before he actually visited the border, and then recently condemned it? Oh brother.
Now we hear that Senator Schumer has brokered a backroom deal between Richard Trumpka’s AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to establish as part of proposed Immigration Reform legislation, an immigrant “prevailing wage” plan. I won’t bore you with the details, since the specifics of this new Democrat idea—much like the details of bio-metric worker I.D. cards—have yet to be made public. However, it is in your best interest to read up on this garbage, because you’ll be paying for it.
Funny, I don’t remember electing Richard Trumpka or the US Chamber of Commerce to anything, so why are they involved in government efforts to curb illegal immigration, reduce immigrant entitlement dependency, and control the growth of Mexican gang violence and drug trafficking in America? More importantly what does an “immigrant prevailing wage” have to do with border security and decreasing illegal immigration? I guess it must be that old campaign contribution thing popping up AGAIN. Either way, there goes all that cheap illegal immigrant labor right into the ranks of the Obama loyal SEIU.
Chuck Schumer wants nothing more than to increase the size of his loyal Democrat voting entitlement dependent constituency. The only thing you can trust about Senator Schumer, is his history of going back on his word, and his use of political sleight of hand and outright criminal deception to get what he wants. If Mr. Schumer, and his gang bangers of 8, are working on legitimate and trustworthy immigration reform efforts, why is it that everything must be done in secret, behind politically expedient closed doors?
http://girlsjustwannahaveguns.com/2013/03/are-we-moving-towards-a-post-u-s-world/
The U.S. government has made all the wrong moves. The temporary economic boon coupled with weak employment numbers should be the first signal to Americans that something is seriously wrong. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is still printing money despite dramatic improvements in the market. Why? The answer is simple. It cannot stop now. Ben Bernanke’s currency manipulation has improved the appearance of the stock market by weakening the dollar. Wall Street is making record profits, but the value of American money is slipping into oblivion.
This central planning method is not new. These were the same tactics tried in Germany’s Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1923. That horror story ended with the price of a loaf of bread rising from 1 mark to 100 billion marks. Since we have three more years to try out the most failed system in U.S. history, you might want to trade in your wallet for a wheelbarrow. Thank you, Mr. President.
While the Federal Reserve, President Obama, and Rachel Maddow remain clueless on what is happening to the U.S. economy, China seems fully aware. The unending episodes of quantitative easing (the practice of printing money that can cause short-term stimulus but weakens the dollar in the long run) combined with massive amounts of debt have destroyed the credibility of the dollar and the world is taking notice.
In an attempt to shield itself from the risks of trading with the U.S. dollar, the Chinese government is now trading in its own currency. Last week, an unprecedented 30 billion dollar trade deal with Brazil signified the world’s growing insecurity over the dollar. China and Brazil are members of BRICS (a partnership of nations including Brazil, Russian, India, China and South Africa). The BRICS nations announced their own development bank this week, another attempt to circumvent western influence from the World Bank.
The U.S. government is weakening the dollar with its policies while completely ignoring these developments and another phenomenon overtaking the markets, the China gold rush. Even Bernanke seems unconcerned that China is hoping to move to a gold backed currency soon. He sees the gold standard as an “awful waste of resources.”
This is definitely not the Chinese attitude. Former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Jintao, called the current international currency system a “product of the past.” China’s game is not all talk and Americans should be concerned. Chinese foreign currency reserves have shot up 700% since 2004 and currently stand large enough to buy all of the world’s gold bullion…twice.
While gold was down this week, the Chinese and Russian buying frenzy continued. It is expected that China will reveal by 2014 that they have acquired more than 4000 tons of gold in just the past few years. This will see China at the same gold-to-GDP ratio as the United States and potentially triple gold prices by 2015.
If the weakening dollar doesn’t concern you, the military situation might. While the U.S. is neglecting its military advancements, China is quickly catching up. The old argument was, China has the numbers, but they don’t have the technology to be a dominant force against the U.S. This is far less true than it was a few decades ago. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently admitted China is modernizing its military at an alarming pace:
“They clearly have the potential to put some of our capabilities at risk. And we have to pay attention to them, we have to respond appropriately with our own programs,” Gates said on a 2011 visit to Beijing. “My hope is that, through the strategic dialogue that I’m talking about, that maybe the need for some of these capabilities is reduced.”
Essentially, Gates is relying on a strategy of friendship with the Chinese government in hopes that they will continue to let us dominate the western pacific. This continues a foreign policy methodology of complete ignorance. The new general secretary, Xi Jinping, has begun to promote a message called, “the China Dream” which advocates Chinese military superiority over the United States. This does not sound like a message of friendship, it sounds adversarial.
The weakening of the dollar by the Federal Reserve, the whimsical hippie foreign policy of the White House, and the degradation of our culture at the hands of the progressive movement, all add up to one question: Is this a post U.S. world? Time will tell, but unfortunately we won’t have to wait long to find the answer.
You can’t say we haven’t been warned. Despite the high debt price tag resulting from the government intervention and arbitrary price controls designed to “spur the economy” during the American Great Depression, modern politicians on both sides of the aisle are more than willing to repeat the same mistakes. Interestingly, just as Herbert Hoover is blamed by leftist historians (but I repeat myself) for leading us into the Depression with his so-called free-market policies, so is George W. Bush blamed for his “capitalistic” tendencies. This is nonsense of course, both Hoover and Bush implemented interventionist economic policies that were exactly the antithesis of free-market capitalism. And both were succeeded by men who took their economic strategies (i.e. political compromises) and opened them up to full-throttle. What Hoover and Bush began, FDR and Obama have respectively finished.
In his book, America’s Great Depression, Murray Rothbard sets the record on Hoover in proper perspective:
Hoover’s role as founder of a revolutionary program of government planning to combat depression has been unjustly neglected by historians. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in large part, merely elaborated the policies laid down by his predecessor. To scoff at Hoover’s tragic failure to cure the depression as a typical example of laissez-faire [meaning “allow to act,” or free-enterprise] is drastically to misread the historical record. The Hoover rout must be set down as a failure of government planning and not of the free market.
In similar fashion, George W. Bush receives much of the media scorn for the current recession (read: government subsidized depression) due to his “lack” of enacting interventionist tactics—what one investor refers to as the “unregulated shadow banking system”—which is pure lunacy. Bush’s government spending makes Bill Clinton look like a miser, but it took Obama little more than a year to outspend Bush. As far as the economy is concerned, Clinton was far more Republican than either Bush or Hoover. In other words, both Hoover and Bush should receive a fair share of the blame for their contributions to a weak economy, but it shouldn’t be because of their loyalty to free-market principles—just the opposite in fact.
A 67-year-old warning from an authoritative source should be heard and heeded all across America. After World War II, Hermann Goering, one of Adolf Hitler’s right-hand men, told an American war correspondent:
Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control peoples’ wages and prices—peoples’ work. If you do that you must control peoples’ lives. And no country can do that part way. I tried and it failed. Nor can any country do it all the way either. I tried that too and it failed. You are no better planners than we. I should think your economists would read what happened here.
Goering came to understand—too late—that any form of economic intervention by the government is ultimately destined for failure, regardless if it is “part way” or “all the way.” Goering came to realize that controlling people’s work is the same as controlling their lives, and this type of control is illusory and temporary. In the 67 years that have taken place between Goering’s warning and today, the American government is still holding onto this illusion, convinced that it can somehow beat the odds of Goering’s prediction. It can’t and it won’t. Hermann Goering was not warning of what might happen, but of what was already happening in 1946. He could see it because he had lived it and actually helped to implement it. And both Presidents Hoover and Bush would (now) agree.
“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln[1]
This is the first time I’ve seen Lincoln’s reference to national suicide. I’m more familiar with James Burnham’s book Suicide of the West that was published in 1964. The Cold War with Communism was in high gear in the 1960s. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a front-page nail biter.
Burnham’s book issued a stark warning to America that went beyond failed ideology of Communism as W.J. Rayment points out:
“Burnham’s thesis . . . was the growth of liberalism and its complete blindness to death, cruelty and injustice perpetrated by leftist regimes.
“In 1964, as today, it is very easy to see how a thinking person might see the intellectual drift to the left as a move toward societal suicide. For liberalism is a cry for the supremacy of general good intentions over the practical application of common sense. Burnham said that liberals are often driven by ‘profound non-rational, often anti-rational sentiments and impulses.’ Ideas like the welfare state and leniency on criminals to facilitate rehabilitation may have sounded good coming out of the mouth of a liberal, but they were disastrous in practice.
“Burnham’s book . . . was in effect a warning that leftward drift would ultimately destroy all affluence and freedom in the world.”
Lincoln indirectly blamed slavery for lawlessness in the United States. While we’ve abolished chattel slavery, we’ve substituted it with a new type of slavery. There are no longer chains, overseers with whips, and restrictive plantations.
In most cases the outward indicators that people are slaves are hidden, and that’s the way our government wants it. Most of the debilitating effects of the new State slavery can be seen in cities like Detroit and certain parts of Memphis, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. These cities committed suicide a long time ago, and their elected officials led them to the ledge.
Today’s political slavery is more insidious because the people enslaved don’t know they’re slaves. It’s not the so-called welfare queens and those who live in Section 8 housing who are the only ones enslaved. Young people who go to college on government grants and loans are also slaves to the State. That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised when they they vote for their slave masters because they’ve been really good to them.
The same can be said of the more than 90 percent of parents who send their children to government schools to be indoctrinated by the State. A majority invariably vote for the perpetuation and growth of government at the expense of others.
They, too, are slaves. Dependency is slavery.
No amount of fact-spreading and resultant consequences of their choices to put their faith in government will deter them ultimately from turning to government for security when a crisis comes. H. L. Mencken said it well:
“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
What Lincoln and Burnham did not see was a downgrading of personal morality of the worst kind and its legitimization by the State. A softening of morals results in the softening of the mind and the ability to think straight.
The use of the phrase national suicide is more than a metaphor. Liberalism kills, whether it’s with economic issues (slavery to the state) or social issues (homosexual marriage, abortion, divorce, single parents, out of wedlock births). “Who will follow the Jews, the gypsies, the handicapped and the aborted unborn who have died by the millions already?”[2].
by Philip Hodges Published by https://www.politicaloutcast.com
Every time Obama speaks, Chris Matthews “gets a thrill up his leg.” So we can only imagine what Matthews is experiencing now that Obama has created such an “amazing economy.”
When government officials say the economy is bad, liberals blame Bush. When government officials say the economy is good, liberals give Obama the credit. But this is Obama’s 2nd term. They’ve got to skew the data to make it look as good as possible and then give Obama all the credit. That’s what Chris Matthews is doing:
“[W]hen is President Obama going to get some credit—and this is like Rodney Dangerfield—when’s he going to get some credit for this amazing economy that’s coming back? It definitely is coming back, maybe not like gangbusters, but the unemployment rate really dropped again today, and there really are a quarter-million new jobs out there. It really is amazing… It seems to me when I look at the stock market breaking all records, when I look at 236,000 new jobs and I keep thinking when are the Republicans going to do what Rodney Dangerfield asked for all those years, ‘show a little respect.’ And what does this all mean? Don’t they secretly say ‘damn it, things are getting better!’ I mean what are they saying when they read this stuff?”
Well, one thing that we’re saying is that that the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t include everyone who is unemployed. Howard Portnoy over at Hot Air made this observation:
“While 236,000 Americans found jobs in February, 296,000 stopped looking. Once an unemployed person has run through 99 weeks of unemployment compensation, moreover, he no longer exists in the eyes of the Labor Department’s statisticians, and is thus no longer counted as unemployed.”
A record 89.3 million Americans are no longer counted as unemployed. That includes people who have retired, but it also includes people who have simply given up looking for work. Millions of people are in this category. When millions have given up looking for employment because not many businesses are hiring anymore, that indicates that the economy is not doing well at all, and that in reality, the unemployment rate is higher.
Matthews asks when Obama is going to get the credit. I give Obama much deserved credit for this failing economy. And I understand it’s not just Obama. It’s his entire team, including the media and even many on the Republican team.
Centralized economic planning doesn’t work. Well, it works to centralize power over the economy in the hands of a dictator, but it doesn’t work to make the economy thrive. The government can’t ever be a catalyst for economic growth, because all it does is interfere in the economy by taxing and regulating businesses out of existence and granting monopolies to the big corporations which write laws benefiting themselves. Of course, that’s what liberals like Matthews call “leveling the playing field.”
I have no trouble at all giving Obama credit for this economy. But we don’t have an amazing economy unless you live in the White House or work for MSNBC. As for Americans, many are struggling to make ends meet, many are underemployed and many more have given up looking for work. Those things are natural consequences under socialism. When’s Chris Matthews going to give Obama credit for those things?
Let me get this straight;
Can anyone explain to me the psychology of a person who inspired the idea, backed the idea, promoted the idea, got the idea accepted and put into the law, and now blames those that oppose him as the culprits behind it all? Please help me understand.
President Obama has put the extension of the tax cuts for most Americans at the top of his domestic agenda, a remarkable turnaround for Democrats, who had staunchly opposed the tax breaks when they were written into law about a decade ago.
R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School and an architect of the Bush tax cuts, said it is “deeply ironic” for Democrats to favor extending most of them, given what he called their “visceral” opposition a decade ago. Keeping the lower rates even for income under $250,000 “would enshrine the vast bulk of the Bush tax cuts,” he said.
Democrats say they have reconsidered their opposition to the Bush tax cuts for several reasons. The cuts were written into law from 2001 to 2003 after a decade in which most Americans saw robust income growth. Over the past decade, by contrast, median wages have declined, after adjusting for inflation, amid a weak economy. Allowing tax cuts for the middle class to expire would further reduce take-home pay.
“We’ve had these tax cuts in place since 2001. The world changes, and the economy is where it is,” said Steven Elmendorf, who was chief of staff to former House minority leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), a primary opponent of the Bush tax cuts. “With people’s economic status, we should not be raising taxes on people earning under $250,000.”
What’s more, income inequality has been growing. Sparing the middle class higher taxes while requiring the wealthy to pay more would tip the scales slightly in the other direction.
“The reason there’s been this movement toward broad consensus on renewing the tax cut for working- and middle-class families is that will give us a sharper progressivity in the tax system that is very much desired by Democrats and progressives who’ve seen an income distribution more and more distorted toward the wealthy,” said Betsey Stevenson, former chief economist in Obama’s Labor Department and a professor at the University of Michigan, who added that taxes may have to rise even more than currently contemplated to meet the country’s needs.
Once again the Left is promoting the same trap that has devastated the United States and conservatives. I am absolutely stunned that any conservative would fall for it again, but appears the Republicans are on the way down. The Left will have more ammunition to hurl at the Right, continue to march toward bankruptcy, so the Left can claim Marshall law, throw out the Constitution and install a Marxist/Collectivism/Socialist government.
What am I referring too; The deal the Left is proposing again to raise taxes now with the promise to lower spending later on next year.
History: During Reagan’s second term the Left came to him with the same proposal. It went public with the proposal. He went ahead and signed the tax increase, WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT HAD THE PROMISE FROM THE LEFT TO REDUCE SPENDING IN THE NEXT CONGRESSIONAL SESSION. REALITY? THE SPENDING CUTS NEVER HAPPENED AND TO THIS DAY THE LEFT USES THAT AS A WEAPON AGAINST THE RIGHT BE SAYING, “Well remember, President Reagan raised taxes.
The DELIBERATE deception was used again with he next Republican President, George H.W. Bush. After his pledge to not raise taxes (“Read my lips, no new taxes“), in a deliberate move to discredit the President and to overcome his immense popularity over the Gulf War success, the Left presented the same proposal; Sign this bill to raise taxes and we will give you a bill in the next Congressional session to cut spending. President H.W. Bush fell for it and it cost him reelection and gave us President Bill Clinton.
Now they are going for it again. Why aren’t the Republicans screaming this over every microphone shoved in their face? Why aren’t they exposing the deliberate, calculated deception of the Left? Why are they being so nice about this? I am disgusted with them all. None of them are truly interested in representing the WORKING people of the United States.
Our recourse? Nothing really other than to continue to speak out and write letters. We do have the mid terms coming up and if the Republicans cave in again, we can kiss the Congress goodbye and then the Left will have unfettered power to rush us into a Constitutional Convention where what we have enjoyed for over 200 years will go away, and that without firing a single shot.
How about you? Will you keep up the fight? Are the freedoms granted by the Constitution worth fighting for? Well?
The aftermath of Sandy defies description.
I have prayed, and I hope you have been too, for the victims of this historic storm. Such devastation boggles the mind and the cost of recovery will be staggering, especially because we’re broke as a nation.
However, Americans have always rallied behind our fellow citizens who are suffering and in need. We will respond again. Already all the forces of good and caring are at work meeting needs and bring comfort. No, I am not including the government.
I have no doubt that needs will be met, rebuilding will happen and “normal” will one day be reestablished. However, I am extremely concerned about a disaster no one is talking about, and “normal” may never be realized again has a result of that disaster. I am referring to the Presidential Election coming up next Tuesday. The storm has opened wider that opportunity for Leftist voting shenanigans.
With all the arguments over Voter Registration, Voter I.D. and Voter Fraud, this natural disaster has provided and added opportunity to make the corrupt more powerful. Consider the national debate;
For conservatives in California elections are becoming a farce. For over 50 years the Left files lawsuits if measures don’t go their way. The courts are so corrupt and Left, that most of the time the Left wins. More and more I hear people say, “Why vote when the Democrats go to court and get the election overturned.” And here the Left is the one always screaming about voter repression. California leads the nation in voter repression because the Left always wins in court when we do not vote their way.
For my house and me, we will vote. We refuse to give up. The drums of revolutionary war are getting louder every day. Will we see a revolution in our day? I’m not sure anymore. I am not armed, and that worries me.
Hopefully God is hearing our prayers asking Him to forgive our sins and heal our land. However, our nation has reached levels of inequity that dwarfs Biblical Israel. They were rightly judged for their turn from God. America deserves the same. Is there a remnant of believers big enough for God to withhold His hand? I don’t know. I am praying He heals instead of punishes. What are you praying for?
What Did You Say? 
At the very moment of Betsy DeVos’ confirmation as secretary of Education, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. (A, 94%) pointedly introduced a bill calling for the elimination of the Department of Education. This has been a long-held goal of conservative Republicans, and now that they control all three branches of government, there may never be a better opportunity to finally end the thing. One of the few policy areas in which President Trump has been consistent is his support for school choice and scorn for federal education policy.