Report: Obama Spent Twice as Much Time on Vacation/Golf as Economy
President Barack Obama has spent 3.6% of his total work time throughout his presidency in economic meetings of any kind
According to a new report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI), President Barack Obama has spent over twice as many hours on vacation and golf (976 hours) as he has in economic meetings of any kind (474.4 hours).The report, “Presidential Calendar: A Time-Based Analysis,” used the official White House calendar, Politico’s comprehensive presidential calendar, and media reports through March 31, 2013 to calculate its results.
GAI’s findings may actually understate Obama’s recreational hours. Last year, Obama told CBS News that playing golf is “the only time that for six hours, I'm outside." But instead of six hours, GAI counted a round of golf as taking just four hours. Likewise, for presidential vacation hours, researchers attributed just six hours of any day of vacation to leisure activity.
“Like most people, presidents still do work while on vacation,” said GAI President Peter Schweizer. “So we really went out of our way to fairly and accurately reflect how the president spends his time.”
The study applied a similarly generous assessment to Obama’s time spent in economic meetings by counting anything on the official White House calendar even remotely related to the economy as an economic meeting. For example, “Obama meets with Cabinet secretaries” and “Obama has lunch with four CEOs” counted as economic meetings.
GAI’s new report dovetails with its presidential calendar analysis last July that found Obama devotes little time to economic meetings.
Asked whether the latest numbers paint a negative portrait of presidential economic leadership, Schweizer says that is for others to decide. “People understand that presidents have the most stressful job in the world and need a break from time to time,” said Schweizer. “There will be some who will be encouraged by the numbers and some who will wish the president spent more time in economic meetings. As a government watchdog group, we just tabulate the numbers and let others decide how to interpret them.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/28/REPORT-Obama-Spent-Twice-As-Much-Time-On-Vacation-Golf-As-On-Economy
Local VA Councilwoman Interrupts Class Presentation of Community Quilt to Lecture Students on Using…Black Stick Figure
It was supposed to be a proud moment. It ended up being a controversial one. And all over a seemingly innocent quilt.
A group of high school juniors from
Piedmont Governor’s School in Martinsville, VA, were presenting a quilt
to the local city council they made as part of a class project. Students
were in the midst of explaining the individual squares they had made in
a fairly non-controversial way. That is until one student started
describing an enlightening experience.
The full quilt (Source: WDBJ-TV screen shot)
“We got to walk across the Philpott Dam
and the small black person represents us before we learned all the
information and then the bigger gold person is how he feels after he’s
been enriched with all the different knowledge,” a female student
explained.
She was abruptly interrupted.
“Excuse me. Um, why is the small black person the negative image?” Councilwoman Sharon Brooks-Hodge said.
The student was taken aback and tried to explain: “It’s not negative. It’s just showing how much we increased.”
Brooks-Hodge wasn’t buying it: “I take offense to that.”
“I didn’t mean to make it offensive,” another student tried to explain.
But Brooks-Hodge wasn’t done, setting
her sights on not only the students but the teachers: “Whoever reviewed
that to make a small black person the before and the gold which you are
afterwards, considering you only talked to 10 percent of black people in
a city that’s 45 percent African-American, I take offense to that and I
hope that you do not display that.”
Sharon Brooks-Hodge (Source: WDBJ-TV screen shot)
WDBJ-TV reports that one student started crying as a teacher explained it had nothing to do with race.
Councilman Danny Turner, who was at
the meeting, has visited the school to apologize. But the incident isn’t
over. The local chapter of the NAACP has piled on, saying “This young
man had not received training on how offensive depictions like this were
to people of color. If he had, this incident could have been avoided.”
And the council has not decided if the
quilt will hang at the local municipal building. Even if it does, WDBJ
reports it will include a disclaimer.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/29/local-va-councilwoman-interrupts-class-presentation-of-community-quilt-to-lecture-students-on-using-black-stick-figure/
Boy Suspended for Bringing Swiss Army Knife on School Camping Trip
A 10-year-old California boy was suspended and threatened with expulsion after he brought a Swiss Army Knife on a week-long school school camping trip.Tony Bandermann told Fox News that his son Braden was on a science camping trip with his class at Garden Gate Elementary School in Cupertino, Calif.
Bandermann, who was out-of-town on a business trip, said he received a telephone call from the school’s principal informing him that his son had violated the school’s weapons policy. The punishment, she told him, must be immediate and severe.
“She threatened to expel him,” he said. “She kept telling me, ‘you can’t bring a weapon to school.’ A Swiss Army Knife is a tool not a weapon.”
Since he was unable to pick up his son, the principal put the boy in 24-hour isolation at the camp – held in a teacher’s lounge where he was forced to eat and sleep in solitude. “It was horrible in every way,” the father said. “The punishment was ridiculous.”
Neither the school nor the Cupertino Union School District returned telephone calls seeking comment.
Bandermann said it’s unreal to think that a boy on a hiking and camping trip could get in trouble for having a Swiss Army Knife.
“I felt as though I want to pull him out of the public education system and homeschool him,” he said. “I felt as though the public education system is becoming the bottom of the barrel. I felt sorry for today’s kids.”
Braden is back in school now – but his father is still fuming. He accused the school district of overreacting.
“They’re not teaching critical thinking,” he said. “That’s what she’s teaching these kids – to react on your emotions instead of gathering information.”
http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/boy-suspended-for-bringing-swiss-army-knife-on-school-camping-trip.html
$384,848 Federal grant for studying… duck genitals
There’s no point in beating around the bush on this one, if you’ll pardon the pun. We should probably get right to the bottom of this fowl story.
WASHINGTON: Patricia Brennan received $384,949 from the U.S. government to study duck genitalia.
Last month, that made her a national joke. Now, it’s made her a little bit of a folk hero…
The federal grant that started this controversy is tiny, at least among the big numbers of the federal budget. The National Science Foundation, which gave her the grant in 2009, got $5.9 billion for all its research this year.
But these debates are about choices embedded in the federal budget. As in: If nobody else will provide funding to study the secrets of duck genitals, does the government have a moral obligation to do it?
The NSF says yes. A civilized culture needs people studying things that might never make anybody any money. One of Brennan’s collaborators, for instance, studies why bluebirds are blue. What he has found could change the way paint is made.As amusing as it might be to talk about Dr. Brennan getting nearly half a million of your dollars to study the naughty bits of ducks, there’s more which can be learned from this story. (As an aside, I’m sure there are advances to be made in the cutting edge field of making paint, but … studying why bluebirds are blue?) Every time an election rolls around we hear politicians talking about the running joke of “waste, fraud and abuse” in the government. This is a joke, not because it’s not a very real problem, but rather because they all know that they’re not going to do anything about it. We hear them talking about “taking a fine tooth comb to the budget.”
Apparently there are no combs for sale in Washington these days.
But while $385K isn’t even a rounding error in the federal budget – nor even the entire NSF budget of nearly $6B for that matter – these types of examples are only a few among a field of thousands, if not tens of thousands. If there actually were somebody going through the budget line by line and bringing the details to the attention of the public, surely we could find a gold mine of potential savings which voters would gladly see trimmed.
“Thanks to your generous donation to the federal government, you helped bankroll a Yale University study on the evolution of duck genitalia,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said this month. “The price tag for taxpayers — over $384,000.”
Brennan says science needs this money. So does she. Brennan plans to apply for another grant to continue her duck research. “Absolutely. Otherwise I would not be able to do any more research,” Brennan said. “Who’s going to give me money to do basic science, if not the government?”
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/28/too-good-to-check-federal-grant-for-studying-duck-genitals/
Congress finds it hard to let Federal Helium Program run out of gas
President Ronald Reagan tried to get rid of it. So did President Bill Clinton. This October, their wish is finally set to come true.The Federal Helium Program — left over from the age of zeppelins and an infamous symbol of Washington’s inability to cut what it no longer needs — will be terminated.
“Many people don’t believe that the federal government should be in the helium business. And I would agree,” Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said on the House floor Thursday.
But at that very moment, Hastings was urging his colleagues to keep the government in the helium business a little while longer. “We must recognize the realities of our current situation,” he said.
The problem is that the private sector has not done what some politicians predicted it would — step into a role that government was giving up. The Federal Helium Program sells vast amounts of the gas to U.S. companies that use it in everything from party balloons to MRI machines.
If the government stops, no one else is ready. There are fears of shortages. So Congress faces an awkward task. In a time of austerity, it may reach back into the past and undo a rare victory for downsizing government.
“If we cannot at this point dispense with the helium reserve — the purpose of which is no longer valid — then we cannot undo anything,” then-Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said back in 1996, when Congress thought it finally killed the program.
Today, the program is another reminder that, in the world of the federal budget, the dead are never really gone. Even when programs are cut, their constituencies remain, pushing for a revival.
Two other programs axed in Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” effort — aid to beekeepers and federal payments for wool — returned, zombielike, a few years later. Now the helium program may skip the middle step and be revived without dying first.
“This sort of feels like the longest-running battle since the Trojan War,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Wyden has written a Senate bill, similar to the one Hastings wrote in the House, to extend the helium program beyond October and then eventually shut it down.
This time, the shutdown would happen, Wyden said. “I intend to watchdog this very carefully,” he added.
The program at the center of this debate has its origins after World War I, in a kind of arms race that sounds ridiculous now. In Europe, countries such as Germany were building sturdy, if slow, inflatable airships. The U.S. military was worried about a blimp gap.
So Congress ordered a stockpile of helium to help American dirigibles catch up. It was assumed to be a temporary arrangement.
“As soon as private companies produce [helium], the government will, perhaps, withdraw?” asked Rep. Don Colton (R-Utah) during the House debate.
“That is correct,” said Rep. Fritz Lanham (D-Tex.).
That was in 1925.
Eighty-eight years later, the zeppelin threat is over. Private companies have learned to produce helium. But the U.S. government still has its own reserve: a giant porous rock formation under the Texas Panhandle, whose crannies hold enough helium to fill 33 billion party balloons. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.): 'Imagine a world without balloons'
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-helium-program-how-temporary-becomes-forever/2013/04/26/80ef1148-adb8-11e2-98ef-d1072ed3cc27_story.html
People Making Over $100K Received Unemployment Benefits in 2011, Media Mum
With all the media panic about sequestration, one would think a study finding billions of dollars of fraud in a government program would be national news.Apparently not, for with few exceptions, a report published by the St. Louis Federal Reserve last week finding $3.3 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims in 2011 got almost no attention:
The unemployment insurance program in the U.S. offers benefits to workers if they lose their jobs through no fault of their own. In 2011, this program cost $108 billion, of which nearly $3.3 billion was spent on overpayments due to fraud.
Unemployment insurance fraud occurs when an ineligible individual collects benefits after intentionally misreporting his or her eligibility. Recent headlines have brought attention to extreme forms of fraud, such as the collection of unemployment benefits by prisoners. The dominant form of unemployment insurance fraud, however, is what's called concealed earnings fraud. This fraud occurs when individuals collect unemployment benefits while they are employed and are earning wages. The overpayments due to concealed earnings accounted for almost $2.2 billion in 2011, two-thirds of the total overpayments due to all categories of fraud. [...]
Among those committing concealed earnings fraud, 18,000 (roughly 20 percent) earned less than $300 per week, and 12,000 (14 percent) earned more than $900 per week.
$900 a week is almost $47,000 per year. That's roughly the same as median household income in 2011.
And, according to the study, fraud by folks making more than $900 a week accounted for 22 percent of the overpayments in 2011.
Scarier still, there were people in this country making in excess of $100,000 a year that received unemployment benefits in 2011.
Considering the media's panic over $85 billion in supposed sequestration cuts, you would think they'd be interested in this.
Not so, for with the exception of a Wall Street Journal piece on this Friday and a Huffington Post article Sunday, I found no other major news outlet coverage on this issue.
I guess the media don't care how the government spends our money as long as it keeps getting more of it to spend.
Backlash grows against state education standards
Lawmakers in Michigan are taking the lead in the fight to stop Common Core as a backlash against the state-driven education system continues to grow.The Michigan House on Wednesday passed a bill that prohibits any funding for Common Core, a set of math and English standards voluntarily adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. The Michigan measure is the latest blow to the system, now under fire from Republicans across the nation and others who fear it represents the surrender of local control over schools.
“Giving our authority to control what is taught in schools to any national entity is wrong. I am glad the House is taking up the debate of whether this is appropriate,” said state Rep. Tom McMillin, Rochester Republican. The bill also must be passed by the Senate and signed by Gov. Rick Snyder to become law, though it’s unclear whether it will move beyond the House.
Regardless of the bill’s fate, Mr. McMillin’s words are indicative of a larger attitude. Fear of national control over education is what drove the Republican National Committee earlier this month to adopt a resolution strongly condemning Common Core.
The RNC took that step even though many Republican governors, including Tennessee’s Bill Haslam and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, strongly support the system, as do former governors and education-reform champions such as Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels.
To Mr. McMillin’s point, two national groups — the National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers — developed the standards and continue to be the loudest promoters of them.
But it’s another supporter that is fueling much of the backlash: the Obama administration.
While the White House didn’t write the standards, it strongly supports them and has urged states to join in the movement. The federal Education Department has offered money and other perks to states that implement Common Core.
A growing number of Republicans are now painting the anti-Common Core movement as a struggle between big government and concerned parents in small towns all across the country, though there’s hardly unity in the party.
In Alabama, for example, the GOP remains deeply divided.
The state’s Senate leader, Republican Del Marsh, said this week that “anything with Common Core, as far as I’m concerned, is off the table,” doubling down on his support for the standards and telling other lawmakers that attempts to defund the system will fail.
His announcement came after 300 educators and businessmen gathered in Montgomery to support them.
State Sen. Scott Beason, a Republican and Common Core critic, told The Associated Press that his “disappointment is off the charts” that efforts to stop the system have failed.
Such clashes are likely to increase as Common Core implementation nears for the 45 states and the District that have adopted it. The system is scheduled to go into effect in most states in the next year.
“This is meant to be state-led. If states have second thoughts about it, they can pull out,” said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the conservative education think tank the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a supporter of the standards.
Just a friendly reminder about Al Jazeera…
Iraq has just suspended the networking licenses of Al Jazeera for “promoting violence and sectarianism.”
This is same network former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has praised for being a source for “real news”:
“You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.”
This network ,”promoting violence and sectarianism,” is the same network President Obama has praised for promoting democracy:
“The emir of Qatar come by the Oval Office today, and he owns Al-Jazeera basically,” Obama said in remarks recorded by CBS News’s Mark Knoller. “Pretty influential guy. He is a big booster, big promoter of democracy all throughout the Middle East. Reform, reform, reform. You’re seeing it on Al-Jazeera.”
This is the same network from which former VP Al Gore just banked $100 million. You know, because it’s “high-quality, honest-to-goodness news.”
But it seems like Iraq (IRAQ!) is taking a stand against Al Jazeera similar to the George W. Bush administration.
In 2004, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Al Jazeera’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”
In 2003, two of Al Jazeera’s financial correspondents were kicked off the trading floor of NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. “In
light of Al-Jazeera’s recent conduct during the war, in which they have
broadcast footage of US POWs in alleged violation of the Geneva
Convention, they are not welcome to broadcast from our facility at this
time,” said NASDAQ’s spokesperson.
http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/04/29/just-a-friendly-reminder-about-al-jazeera/
Reports of the Obama Presidency's Death Are Exaggerated
.....
If,
during the 2008 campaign, Obama and his mouthpieces had stood up and
said, without reserve or qualification, that the primary intentions and
ultimate achievements of his presidency would be: (a) taking America's
definitive step off the cliff into the world of socialized medicine; (b)
creating vast new regulatory bureaucracies to curtail what was left of
the free market; (c) moving through back channels and white papers
towards the nationalization of local police; (d) creating new national
academic standards and pre-school programs designed to make non-public
school options virtually impossible, setting the stage for an eventual
outright ban on private child-rearing, as is the norm in Europe; (e)
crashing the U.S. economy with runaway federal debt and unrestrained
money-printing; (f) reorienting U.S. foreign policy towards open support
of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of Islamist government in general; and
(g) the humdrum-ization of every wacky campus leftist agenda item
(transgender rights, pot party rights, Gaia rights, consequence-free
promiscuity rights) -- if these intentions and others like them had been
stated directly during the 2008 campaign, would Obama have been
embraced as the redeemer, or dismissed as a well-dressed kook?
And
yet all of these agenda items are well on their way to completion,
often with bipartisan support, as in the case of the Common Core
curriculum, which has suckered many so-called conservatives with its
(provisional) inclusion of a few good titles for literature class. In
fact, this example perfectly illustrates the problem with fantasizing
that the demythologizing of Obama the Man will precipitate the undoing
of Obama the Agenda. The premise that government, at whatever level,
ought to be in the business of educating children, and even that such
education ought to be compulsory, is so deeply embedded in the
contemporary consciousness that anyone who questions it is regarded as
some kind of nut by a large swath of mankind, including most
self-described conservatives. (Trust me.) And yet it was not so long ago that universal compulsory government schooling was just a twinkle in the eye of a few progressive power-mongers who understood that controlling what goes in gives one control over what comes out.
Having
achieved such absolute cultural submission on the ownership of your
soul, it was only a matter of time before the progressives moved to
complete the transfer of ownership by claiming sole proprietorship of
your body. ObamaCare will face
numerous challenges on its details and internal mechanisms in the coming
years, but its underlying principle -- that government ought to have
central decision-making authority in what is euphemistically called "healthcare,"
but is more properly named "self-preservation" -- will be far more
difficult to challenge. A large bureaucratic apparatus and funding
mechanisms are already in place, new rules are already insinuating
themselves into the economy, and a major constitutional hurdle to the
law's practical implementation has already been cleared, thanks to a
Republican-appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
And
this leads us to the Republican Party, which is daily bringing new
meaning to the old parliamentary term, "the loyal opposition."
Immediately after Obama's re-election, Speaker Boehner conceded defeat
on ObamaCare, declaring it "the law of the land." Not that his
declaration indicated a substantial change in the GOP's real position --
as opposed to base-baiting rhetoric -- on the subject. After all, the
GOP establishment took great pains to ensure that their presidential
nominee would be the only candidate among the final eight primary contenders whose own position on government-run healthcare
was so compromised that the entire party would be effectively muzzled
during the presidential campaign regarding the single most winnable
issue on the table.
Now the "healthcare"
issue is essentially lost, and with it America's last pretenses of
being a free nation -- and many conservatives have not even noticed this
yet. America has quickly fallen into the policy wonk abyss on healthcare that has long since swallowed up the rest of the Western world. Repeal, as so many honest Republicans have admitted, is no longer even an option. Government-controlled healthcare,
in just a few short years, has "progressed" from taboo topic to
accepted norm; the only questions now are about bureaucratic waste,
practical confusion, and the economic ramifications of some of the law's
more arcane subsections.
Some
conservatives trick themselves into optimism by noting that the
practical results of this legislation will be disappointing to the
public from the point of view of real medical outcomes. But of course
they will be disappointing -- they were never intended to be satisfying.
The purpose of this legislation as passed -- made all but explicit by
Democrats at the time -- was simply to establish government control of
the medical establishment. For progressives know what the conservative
optimists would also know, were they not drunk on the elixir I noted
above: in the modern world of Tocqueville's soft despotism, a government
encroachment, once achieved, is almost impossible to rescind.
The
progressive mechanism has been amply demonstrated throughout the
civilized world over the past century: there is no problem caused by
state control that progressives cannot promise to repair -- with more
comprehensive state control. And the past century also proves that
there is no regulatory assault on liberty that most people will not
swallow -- until they have had to live with its fallout for a while.
Snap these two modern realities together, and you have the perfect
ratchet of civilizational decay: Government promises to fix a problem
they created with further regulation; the public assents, on the grounds
that "we have to do something"; new regulations exacerbate or
perpetuate the initial problem, while diminishing freedom; the public
gets restless for change, as the problem worsens; the government
promises to fix the problem with yet more regulation; the public
assents, once again on the grounds that "we have to do something"; and
so on, tyrannidem ad infinitum.
Public
education is a catastrophe. The solution: more comprehensive public
education, with fewer loopholes for alternative methods which might have
spared a few souls the forced retardation and collectivist
indoctrination of public schools.
Crony
capitalism has distorted the free market into an oligarchy presiding
over an illusion of liberty. The solution: reorder this system as an oligarchy presiding over an illusion of socialist redistribution.
Government
regulation of healthcare has made a corporate monster of private
medicine. Solution: turn a corrupted and over-priced system into a
treasury-sucking monster of bureaucratic ineptitude, government-mandated
malpractice, and cost-cutting mass murder.
America
has slowly emulated the progressive drift of the rest of the West for
several generations. The task of the Obama administration is to
accelerate America's decline in those areas where she has been lagging
behind the Western arc. Rather than basking in the meager lamplight of
the administration's few failures, freedom-lovers ought to be facing up
to the startling truth of just how much has already been accomplished by
the most brazenly anti-American anti-liberty administration in history.
As
for the sheen wearing off Obama's brass, that was inevitable. But you
do not judge a battering ram by the dents it incurs through extensive
use. You judge it by whether it successfully got you through the enemy
gates. American progressives will happily change Obama for a shiny new
battering ram later; for now, they must be exceedingly satisfied with
how thoroughly they have breached America's final protective gates using
the one they have. They are busy at work looting America's treasure,
literally and figuratively, and enslaving the peasants. (That would be
you.)
This
administration has substantially shifted the ground on many issues of
profound relevance to the survival of a free society: the right to
self-preservation; the right to secure the means to one's self-defense;
freedom of speech (consider the treatment of critics of Islam); respect for the elderly;
the institutions of marriage and family; and even basic respect for
individual self-reliance and achievement vs. collective grievance and
entitlement. They have taken significant steps towards even greater
federal control of education, from nursery school
through university. They made the sexual proclivities of young women
and homosexuals a central theme of a presidential election, bringing
mainstream American political discourse to depths not even plumbed
during the Clinton era. On foreign policy, they have gotten away with
murder -- almost literally, in the case of Benghazi -- without stirring general outrage, thanks to carefully manufactured public cynicism
and crisis-weariness. And America re-elected -- thanks in large part
to the non-voting passivity of a plurality of adults -- a drug-damaged
serial liar with long-standing, well-publicized communist affiliations
and a list of pre-presidential accomplishments as long as Bill Ayers'
pinky finger.
That
Obama will not be as popular at the end of his presidency as he was at
the beginning almost goes without saying. That this constitutes a
victory against progressivism is simply false. The bland-ification of
Obama is a natural result of the mainstream-ization of his agenda.
Trust those of us who have seen this before.
****
Likewise,
American progressives will eventually seek a new mask for their
authoritarian agenda. But their next wave will begin from a start line
much further from the U.S. founding than the line Obama inherited. Much
more than wishful thinking and high electoral hopes will be required to
turn back the results of the Obama presidency. America, whether she
fully realizes it yet or not, is fighting a whole new war now, on what
is, for her, uncharted territory. Until Americans come to terms with
this new terrain, all talk of moving beyond Obama is just tilting at
windmills.
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