Interior proposal would limit commercial oil shale development on federal lands

The Interior Department on Friday issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West originally slated for oil shale development.

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/267095-interior-proposes-shielding-federal-lands-in-west-from-drilling

Officials Want Military to Take Over Power Restoration on Long Island

Two congressmen from Long Island are asking the White House to send federal employees to Long Island to take the lead role in restoring power to a region where tens of thousands of people remain in the dark 12 days after Superstorm Sandy.

U.S. Reps. Peter King and Steve Israel said they were sending a letter Friday requesting that personnel from the Army Corps of Engineers and Energy Department assume work of the Long Island Power Authority, whose work after the storm the congressmen called "abysmal." They echoed the criticism expressed earlier by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

"When the lights went off in Baghdad and the lights went off in Kabul, it was the Army Corps of Engineers that went into Baghdad and Kabul to turn the lights back on," said Israel, a Democrat. "We don't need to turn the lights back on in Kabul and Baghdad. We need to turn the lights back on in Plainview and Great Neck and the south shore."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and some Army Corps personnel have been on Long Island for more than a week, but King, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he wants additional resources sent in.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Sandy-LIPA-Outages-Power-Long-Island-Defense-Military-178115341.html

PK's Note: because they don't have the infrastructure to deal with it which is typical of a liberal state. And so it begins, the takeover.

Record 70.4 Million Enrolled in Medicaid in 2011: 1 Out of Every 5 Americans

A record 70.4 million people were enrolled in the Medicaid health care program for the poor in fiscal year 2011, according to government figures provided to CNSNews.com.
That figure equals about 22 percent of the population, which means there was one person on Medicaid for every 5 Americans in 2011.

Medicaid is the joint federal-state health care program for the poor that allows states to extend coverage beyond those who are in poverty. Recently, the ObamaCare health reform law expanded Medicaid eligibility to those living on 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

That expansion does not go into effect until 2014, however, and therefore does not affect the continued growth trend. Nor does it contribute to the record 70.4 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/record-704-million-enrolled-medicaid-2011-1-out-every-5-americans

Don't Call Me In a Year Or Two and Say You Didn't Know

Jay Haug
One of the most powerful cultural metaphors we possess is the image of the frog in the kettle. But there is one problem with the metaphor. We know when the frog entered the kettle, he was still alive.

We also know that when the water rose to a boil the frog was dead. The problem is this: the moment of death is difficult to determine. Unless a competent coroner - and boy are they expensive - continuously examines the frog, the moment of death remains a mystery. The further problem is that this fact of uncertainty gives false hope that the frog will somehow find it in his strength to jump out.

Many Americans are standing squarely on this false hope today. As disappointed as they may be in "hope and change," as foolishly committed as they are to standing by watching the most extraordinary country in human history be "fundamentally transformed," many Americans still believe the Obama administration is "not all that bad."

They may not want to "change horses in mid-stream" or they may not be thrilled with Mitt Romney, so maybe they will just sit this one out. The problem is that America will continue its death march under a second Obama administration, one that will continue to undermine our freedoms and remove our leadership position in the world. Lech Walesa's cry, "Where is American leadership?," will go unanswered.

Remember, Barack Obama told us what he would do and now he has set about doing it. The result is an increasingly unrecognizable country and a federal takeover of more and more of our daily lives. (Did you see that under Obamacare you will now be required to submit a yearly health status form to the federal government?)

What many do not realize is that it is going to get a lot worse under an Obama second term, for several reasons. First, many of the more painful changes of Obamacare were timed to start after the president is re-elected, if that happens. Funny how that works. Did you notice that the more benign aspects of it like pre-existing conditions and children up to age 26 being covered under their parents' plan kicked in first? Why did President Obama inadvertently disclose his "greater flexibility after the election" to President Medvedev? Because he will not have to face the electorate ever again. This should shake every American to the core. The beginnings of change will yield to the heavy hand of implementation. Reversing this decline will be nearly impossible.

Please remember. We have before us the least vetted president in American history. The media has never exposed him for who he really is. Today in the Benghazi killings, we have one of the worst presidential scandals since Watergate. And we leave it to Jay Leno to talk about it? An accountable presidency has been replaced by personality cult, driven home by messages equating fornication with voting for him. But there is more. Once President Obama is re-elected or defeated, all the things we never knew about him are going to come out. If I mentioned them, you would think they were lies; so conditioned we have become by the mainstream media to look away from the man behind the curtain.

Many of those people who voted for him will wring their hands and say "If I had only known!" But you see, that is the way the president's handlers have set things up. You will not know until it doesn't matter anymore. By the time you want to free the frog, he is already dead.

What we don't realize is that we can only know the frog is dead after the fact. The truth is our country had a fighting chance in 2008. By 2016, much that was alive will be irreversibly dead. The only way we can reverse it is to reach in and remove the frog now before it is too late. Don't call me a year or two from now and say you didn't know. Things are about to get a lot worse, unless you act to stop it.

What you do with that knowledge is up to you. But don't call me down the road and tell me you didn't know.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/dont_call_me_in_a_year_or_two_and_say_you_didnt_know.html#ixzz2Bq5CmCPn

Early Education or Early Indoctrination?

By Jamie A. Hope
The United Nations is creeping into our educational system and not only changing the way our youngest learn academic basics, but challenging family beliefs on American sovereignty, parental rights, and freedom of religion. According to a White House press release dated March 10, 2009, "President Obama is committed to helping states develop seamless, comprehensive, and coordinated 'Zero to Five' systems to improve developmental outcomes and early learning for all children."
The problem with the Common Core Standards is not that they promote reading, writing, and arithmetic; it is the added dangerous ideologies they would like to teach our children -- their agenda of teaching social justice, abortion rights, population control, environmentalism, and gay marriage. The easiest way to implant their ideologies into the unsuspecting minds of our youngest is not only to educate America's children in grades K-12, but to mandate compulsory education for children ages 0-5 in a program known as early education.

Educational elites support the president. "These new partnerships must also inspire students to take a bigger and deeper view of their civic obligations -- not only to their countries of origin but to the betterment of the global community."

Since there are credible conflicting studies on early education programs and a possible detriment to the emotional well-being of children in these programs, why are the federal and state governments continuing to pour billions into these possibly ineffective United Nations-created Common Core agendas and pushing for children to be required to go to school at birth?

This is not the first time early education and a call to hand over babies to the government has been attempted. The First Congress of Bolshevik Workers said in 1918 that "we must remove children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over, and to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of children's nurseries and schools."

The Bolsheviks understood that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/early_education_or_early_indoctrination.html#ixzz2Bq2EMCGk

Now, It’s Us and Them
by Tiffany Gabbay

"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir Lenin

As expected, the days following a U.S. presidential election are filled with Monday-morning quarterbacking, when pundits and strategists alike opine what went wrong for the losing team. Often, it’s simply that the other side had a winning formula: The correct strategy. The Left has it. The Right doesn’t.

Democrats have become masters of duplicity, perfecting the divisive art of segregating Americans into polarized minority blocs, then coalescing them into a new majority that has the power to effect change through the ballot box. And while Obama stood before his loyal minions to deliver a victory speech based on the unity of these United States, the irony is that he conquered specifically through division.

He won by dividing the country according to race, gender, sexual orientation and above all, income bracket.

He won by spending nearly six years fomenting hatred — literal hatred — among countrymen for their wealthier counterparts. And guess who was most loathsome of all?

Sadly, Obama and his ilk successfully managed to convince enough voters that Mitt Romney was not simply out of touch, but that he was someone to actually be reviled. Nevermind that he created employment for tens of thousands over his years in the private sector. Nevermind his charitable contributions. The total sum of a man and his life’s work was reduced to nothing more than the weight of his wallet.

Now tell me: Who, exactly, is money-obsessed here?

In 2008, just prior to Obama’s first coronation, a gift from the heavens was bestowed upon him. On the heels of the market crash, executives at Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae and AIG became embroiled in a very public outing for their abuse of power and in helping to spur an economic disaster from which the nation has yet to recover.

They were men who, by hook or crook, achieved the pinnacle of financial success and when the bottom gave out, benefited from golden parachutes while their employees, shareholders and the American tax-payer took the fall. They served as obvious poster children for the catch-phrase “corporate greed” and were the linchpin of Obama’s crusade to “cut taxes on 95 percent of Americans,” by way of increasing it on the “other five.”

When an entire demographic is painted only as the privileged few – the bourgeois – faceless aside from a handful of its few disgraced members, it is not so difficult to see how the rhetoric of class warfare gains a foothold in our nation’s dialogue and creeps into the collective psyche. Then spreads like cancer.

While many associate the Obama campaign with slogans like “hope” and “change,” his most effective mantra of all hinged on the concept of “fair share.” Tax the wealthy and demand they give more. More than what? Is giving away over half of your hard-earned income to inept bureaucrats who will only put a match to it, still not enough?

The weight of the nation is carried on the backs of those who produce and contribute, and those of us fortunate enough to be gainfully employed in this dismal economic climate still have our paychecks signed each and every month by such evildoers.

Is it “fair” to bite the hand that feeds you? Obama taught Americans that it is.

The “wealthy,” who by Barack Obama’s standards are individuals, including small business owners earning $250,000 a year or more, already contribute the most in taxes. It is conveniently never mentioned that 50 percent of the population pay no income tax at all and that the top five percent of society bears well over half of the overall tax burden.

Liberals claim these “fat cats” could not exist without the working and middle class. But could the working and middle class exist without the upper? After all, it is the entrepreneurs who invent, the investors who fund the development, the scientists who shape and perfect, the doctors who contribute not just in tax dollars but in truly humanitarian ways. Both small and large business owners employ everyday Americans to market and sell the goods and services we need, enjoy, and take for granted each and every day, yet the producers who move our economy forward are considered the villains.

The United States is the single most generous nation on earth in terms of individual giving, yet the Left paints its country as the greedy, capitalist pig that kicks its poor to the curb. But nowhere else on earth do those at the poverty-line own their own flatscreen televisions, cars, microwaves ovens, refrigerators, stereos, and have heating and cooling units for their homes. That is not to say there aren’t people struggling. That is not to say there isn’t inequity. There is and there always will be, but that plight is not unique to the United States and those less fortunate are still better off here than anywhere else.

Despite their heavy tax-burden, by and large, the independently wealthy of this country contribute the most to the economy, to the job market, and through philanthropy. They donate more to charity and causes than entire nations do. The “evil rich” build educational facilities, libraries, hospitals, shelters, museums, community centers, treatment centers for every ailment and addiction in the book – they contribute to veterans’ causes, humanitarian causes, disease research, disaster relief. The list goes on.

Why would we ever wish to penalize them? What would happen if they moved overseas? Or, worse, evaporated into the ether? Who would replace them? A member of Occupy Wall Street?

The Left perceives the other five percent only as caricatures like those depicted in Oliver Stone’s famed movie, “Wall Street,” and not as most of them truly are: The pioneers and wealth-producers of an entire world. And in classic all-heart-no-head fashion, the Left petitions to take what was earned by others and give it those who won’t (not can’t) give it to themselves.

The re-election of Barack Obama beatified the welfare state and solidified the collective belief that the world owes each and every person, irrespective of their worthiness, a living. His re-election elevated hand-outs over self-reliance, pity over dignity, mediocrity over meritocracy.

Jealousy and resentment are the easiest weaknesses to exploit and prey upon, and in that, the Obama campaign found its winning strategy. It is the bedrock of Socialism. It’s called class warfare. And apparently, it works.

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/now-its-us-and-them/