President Obama and his family will be going to Africa later this month. But the trip won't be cheap; it's expected to cost American taxpayers $60 to $100 million, according to the Washington Post.

"When President Obama makes his first extended trip to sub-Saharan Africa later this month, the federal agencies charged with keeping him safe won’t be taking any chances. Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship, with a fully staffed medical trauma center, will be stationed offshore in case of emergency," reports the Post.

"Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet-proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

"The extraordinary security provisions — which will cost the government tens of millions of dollars — are outlined in a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. While the preparations appear to be in line with similar travels in the past, the document offers an unusual glimpse into the colossal efforts to protect the U.S. commander-in-chief on trips abroad."

After the paper questioned the costs of a planned family safari, the White House nixed the plan. "The president and first lady had also planned to take a Tanzanian safari as part of the trip, which would have required the president’s special counter-assault team to carry sniper rifles with high-caliber rounds that could neutralize cheetahs, lions or other animals if they became a threat, according to the planning document. But the White House canceled the safari on Wednesday following inquiries from The Washington Post about the trip’s purpose and expense, according to a person familiar with the decision."

The paper adds, "Obama’s trip could cost the federal government $60 million to $100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years, according to one person familiar with the journey who was not authorized to speak for attribution. The Secret Service planning document, which was provided to The Post by a person who is concerned about the amount of resources necessary for the trip, does not specify costs."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamas-family-trip-africa-cost-60-100-million_735195.html

Barack Obama's "Social Innovation" Slush Fund

By Michelle Malkin
We all know now what the vengeful Obama IRS has been doing to conservative nonprofits the past four years: strangling them in the crib. But do you know how much pampering and largesse far-left welfare-state charities have received while limited-government groups suffered? You don't know the half of it.

Before President Obama took office, I warned that Democrats planned to steer untold amounts of taxpayer dollars to his shady community-organizing pals. The Dems' 2008 party platform proposed the creation of a "Social Investment Fund Network" to subsidize "social entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations (that) are assisting schools, lifting families out of poverty, filling health care gaps and inspiring others to lead change in their own communities."

Investigative journalist James O'Keefe's pioneering work helped bring down the fraudsters of ACORN. But a thousand other ACORN-style knockoffs have metastasized in the shadows. Not long after Obama took office, big-government Democrats and Republicans handed him the $6 billion mandatory "volunteerism" package known as the "SERVE America Act." The boondoggle fueled legions of new government "volunteers," including a Clean Energy Corps, an Education Corps, a Healthy Futures Corps, a Veterans Service Corps and an expanded National Civilian Community Corps for disaster relief and energy conservation.

In addition to creating thousands of make-work jobs and boosting bloated national service bureaucracies, the legislation also carved out a left-wing slush fund known as the Social Innovation Fund. In its four-year existence, SIF has doled out $140 million to 20 handpicked grant-making organizations, which in turn have chosen 197 "promising nonprofits" for government support.

Obama promised "accountability" measures to ensure the money is spent wisely. But who has been assessing the effectiveness of the spending? As I reported at the outset, it's interest-conflicted foxes in the social entrepreneurship community guarding the government-grant henhouse.

Among the lucky winners of these crony SIF monies: Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which received $4.2 million and had employed Patrick Corvington, former head of the Corporation for National and Community Service; and social welfare outfit New Profit Inc., which received $5 million and had employed former SIF Executive Director Paul Carttar. New Profit's conflicts are gobsmacking. Nonprofit Quarterly noted that SIF "owes its existence at least in part to New Profit, which in 2007 put together a coalition of nonprofit groups called America Forward to advocate for, among other things, the creation of a federal fund."

The inspector general overseeing SIF, AmeriCorps and other SERVE Act programs agreed with critics that the Social Innovation Fund grant application process lacked transparency, lacked a policy on handling staff conflicts of interest and failed to fully document grant award decisions. Another IG audit released just last week revealed that a prominent SIF grantee, the progressive Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, "fail(ed) to remove two of its employees, who were known by CEO management to have criminal histories that made them ineligible, from working on the SIF grant."

As Paul Light, a public policy professor at New York University who served on a review panel for the fund, told National Public Radio: "It's not clear yet what taxpayers have gotten for the money." The phony-baloney statistics that SIF bureaucrats tout to show how many have been "served" simply demonstrate the Nanny State "entrepreneurs'" real agenda: maximizing the number of government dependents and rewarding social welfare operatives.

The Obama administration's politicization of charity -- or the "Solyndra-ization of philanthropy," as the Manhattan Institute's Howard Husock calls it -- has created a permanent taxpayer-backed pipeline to Democratic partisan outfits masquerading as public-interest do-gooders. There's nothing "innovative" about underwriting the same failed dependency-inducing community organizing fronts while persecuting others based on ideology.

It's self-SERVE-ing Chicago business as usual.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/06/14/barack-obamas-social-innovation-slush-fund-n1619747/page/full

Is it Still 1984?

Which of the latest Obama scandals annoys you the most? Me, I haven't gotten over Obamacare yet. Or the Sandy Hook attack on the Second Amendment. But lately my money's on the Big Brother scandal. That bothers me a lot. It's 2013 and we're sliding back to 1984. Big Brother Obama is watching you. But all of the scandals share a common element. They show the pattern -- the signature -- of how this administration operates. And I wonder how many people have picked up on it yet.

Obama told us the September 11, 2012 attack on the Benghazi "diplomatic mission" was caused by an amateurish anti-Muslim video on YouTube. We found out later the video had only been viewed a few dozen times in the two and a half months it was on the internet.

Obama told us Ambassador Stevens was on a diplomatic mission to review plans for a new cultural center for Benghazi. But whistleblowers report it was actually a bungled arms deal, another Fast and Furious. And this time Islamic extremists got the weapons, which include Stinger portable surface-to-air missiles. If so, there isn't a passenger jet in the world that is safe from them.

Obama went before the United Nations on September 25 and told the world that, "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." At the time he was still peddling the YouTube video cover-up story. It was a dazzling performance. Millions fell for it.

Obama's IRS told us the political targeting of patriotic and Tea Party nonprofits was an isolated operation by two "rogue" "low-level" employees in the Cincinnati office. Then they told us the targeting wasn't politically motivated. Only we find out the IRS political targeting was a nation-wide operation that has been going on for years, and that a senior-level IRS task force ran the program from Washington, D.C. Our money is on Valerie Jarrett and Obama pulling the strings from the Oval Office.

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program's about."
Obama told us not to worry about government snooping into every aspect of our private lives. But then we find out there's a great deal to worry about, because Big Brother is monitoring the mail, email, phone calls, business transactions, and web use of every single citizen in the Land of Liberty. We discover that the NSA PRISM program monitors and records communications and user data from Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, YouTube, and about fifty other companies. We learned that "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type." Big Brother is watching you. Right now. Under Obama, 2013 is 1984.

We live in a nation whose Supreme Court ruled that abortion is Constitutionally protected because women have a right to privacy. If privacy is so important that children can be legally killed to protect it, then how in the world can the Obama administration deprive us of all that we have?

Obama mandated that the IRS administer some of the most important elements of ObamaCare. The IRS will punish us if we do not comply. ObamaCare isn't about health care. It's about government control. It's about instituting socialism. When Senator Cornyn discovered that the IRS official in charge of the political targeting of patriotic nonprofits, Sarah Hall Ingram, was now responsible for administering IRS control over ObamaCare, he said,

"Now more than ever, we need to prevent the IRS from having any role in Americans' health carre. I do not support Obamacare, and after the events of last week, I cannot support giving the IRS any more responsibility or taxpayer dollars to implement a broken law."

Obama told Ohio State University graduates to "reject these voices" that warn of government encroachment on personal privacy, civil liberties and freedom. Obama tells us to trust him. Everything will be okay. Trust Obama? He recently said,

"You know, when I came into this office, I made two commitments that are more than any commitment I make: number one, to keep the American people safe; and number two, to uphold the Constitution. And that includes what I consider to be a constitutional right to privacy and an observance of civil liberties."

Paul Jacob of Townhall.com found the statement to be as laughable as most of us do. "You don't trust President Barack Obama?" he said in his article, "Be advised: President Obama finds "your lack of faith disturbing." Darth Vader would be proud. This Orwellian doublespeak is worthy of the man who singlehandedly constitutes the greatest threat ever to the American people's freedom, liberty, and Constitutional rights.

The common element to all these scandals is the administration's constant, deliberate, and arrogant pattern of deception. The goal? Clearly it is to undermine the Constitution and the rule of law to advance his socialist agenda.

From the attack on the First Amendment via Associated Press wiretaps and criminal conspiracy charges against Fox reporter James Rosen, to the Sandy Hook child massacre attack on the Second Amendment, we now have Obama and his progressive ilk going after every American's Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to protection against unreasonable search and seizure and due process. The cover ruse for these attacks is Islamic terrorism. Or as the administration terms it: man-caused disasters. Trust Obama?

In the same speech, Obama brought up the very question his policies and actions have raised in the minds of all clear-headed Americans,

"If people can't trust not only the executive branch, but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."

It is a question of trust. At this point few Americans trust their government and many fear it. This administration has established a pattern of deception aimed at undermining the Constitution and rule of law. How can there be trust when we are surrounded by so much deception?

Yes, we're going to have some problems here.

PK'S NOTE: As someone said in an article yesterday, "Hitler never killed a single Jew."

The Buck Never Reaches Obama

The Obama administration's handling of its multiple scandals paints a picture of those who believe they are above the law. There's a pattern of arrogance, dismissiveness, denial, scapegoating, stonewalling, lying, false professions of ignorance, assurances of accountability and punishing whistle-blowers.

The numerous parallels in the administration's handling of the Fast and Furious and Internal Revenue Service scandals alone are too striking to be coincidental. The recurring theme is that the buck never stops at the Obama White House.

With Fast and Furious, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives adopted an ill-conceived, indefensible plan to deliberately walk guns into Mexico with the hope that they would end up at scenes of crimes perpetrated by Mexican drug lords and thus lead to their arrests.

Under the plan, ATF agents were instructed to reject their training and not follow the weapons but wait until after crimes had been committed and people had been injured or killed with the weapons and then try to link them to the drug lords.

When the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry led to the outing of this operation, everyone in the administration denied knowledge and approval of it.

The Department of Justice blamed U.S. attorneys and "rogue" ATF agents, though they are under the DOJ umbrella anyway. The ATF blamed Main Justice. The White House professed total ignorance, despite evidence that a key presidential aide had been directly informed. In fact, top Justice Department officials had to have been aware of the details of the operation through detailed wiretap affidavits they were required to approve. Emails further prove their knowledge, as well.

The administration claimed Fast and Furious was just a continuation of Operation Wide Receiver, a gun-walking operation that had begun under President George W. Bush. But that operation had been discontinued, and it differed from Fast and Furious in at least four significant ways.

Wide Receiver involved "controlled delivery." The agents would follow the weapons and seize them before they went into Mexico. In Wide Receiver, the Mexican authorities were fully apprised of the operation and cooperated with the ATF on interdiction, whereas with Fast and Furious, they were deceived and kept in the dark. Wide Receiver was on a much smaller scale. Maybe one-fourth the weapons were involved. And when weapons got away in Wide Receiver, the program was immediately discontinued, unlike with Fast and Furious.

Attorney General Eric Holder denied being behind Fast and Furious but was caught red-handed lying to Congress about when he found out about it. In May, he told Congress he'd learned about it just a couple of weeks before, yet he had received emails and memos some months earlier detailing the operation. He then claimed he had neither read nor been briefed about those emails. Even if true, this is wholly unacceptable nonfeasance for which he not only did not apologize but indignantly faced down his congressional inquisitors as if they were the ones at fault.

Top officials in the Justice Department, including Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, were caught lying in a Feb. 4, 2011, letter to Sen. Charles Grassley, in which they claimed the "ATF makes every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation into Mexico." On the very day Breuer approved of that letter, he was trying to convince Mexican authorities, who had previously been kept in the dark, that gun walking was a good idea. Under questioning from Rep. Trey Gowdy, Holder refused to admit the letter was "demonstrably and materially false" and said only that it "contained inaccuracies."

When Congress tried to get to the bottom of the scandal, which resulted in not only Terry's death but the injury or death of 200 Mexicans and the commission of 11 violent crimes in the United States involving 57 Fast and Furious weapons, Holder stonewalled. He used a concurrent investigation by the inspector general as an excuse to withhold from Congress some 74,000 documents concerning the matter. To protect Holder and fortify his stone wall, the most transparent president, Barack Obama, invoked executive privilege.
Fast-forward to the IRS scandal and compare the administration's reaction. In both scandals:

--Holder lied and then lied about his lying.

--The administration investigated itself and stonewalled congressional investigators.

--The administration denied culpability and knowledge and blamed the wrongdoing on rogue employees -- in Phoenix and Cincinnati, respectively.

--The administration blamed Bush. With Fast and Furious, Wide Receiver was the culprit. With the IRS scandal, it was the fault of a Bush appointee.

--Obama expressed shock and varying levels of outrage, promised to bring to account those responsible and then proceeded to do the opposite.

--Congressional Democrats obstructed and ran interference for the administration.

--Obama did his best to shield those accountable, rewarding the wrongdoers and, in some cases, punishing the whistle-blowers.

Congress must not be deterred by the administration's evasions. It must turn up the heat and be just as persistent in demanding accountability as the administration is in dodging it.

http://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2013/06/14/the-buck-never-reaches-obama-n1619702/page/full

PK'S NOTE: I don't know if I agree with him on this. I'm certainly not a CEO nor is anyone I know but we are Conservatives. He may be on to something here but it isn't the targeting of a type or group. It's standing by conservative values all. the. time.

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum spoke Thursday at the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington about the failure of the Republican party and its presidential nominee to speak to the concerns of middle class and working people. Politico's James Hohmann reports:

“One after another, they talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single —factory worker went out there,” Santorum told a few hundred conservative activists at an “after-hours session” of the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage.”

Santorum did not mention Romney, who he challenged in the primaries, by name during a 21-minute speech in a dim ballroom at the Marriott (a company on whose board Romney sits). But there was no doubt who he was talking about.

“When all you do is talk to people who are owners, talk to folks who are ‘Type As’ who want to succeed economically, we’re talking to a very small group of people,” he said. “No wonder they don’t think we care about them. No wonder they don’t think we understand them. Folks, if we’re going to win, you just need to think about who you talk to in your life.”

Trying to carve out a role as a leading populist in the 2016 field, Santorum insisted that Republicans must “talk to the folks who are worried about the next paycheck,” not the CEOs.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/santorum-where-republicans-went-wrong-2012_735259.html

Dem rep wants ‘atheist chaplains’ for U.S. military

Happening now on Capitol Hill: Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., is introducing an amendment to create “atheist chaplain” positions in the military. Yes, someone to minister religion to those who don’t believe in it.

Question: Wouldn’t this, by definition, be the easiest/laziest job ever?

http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/06/14/dem-rep-wants-atheist-chaplains-for-u-s-military/

Our Enemy the Administrative State

The vague "fundamental transformation" promised by Barack Obama prior to his first inauguration is nearly complete. America's political system has been transformed from a constitutionally limited government into a modern administrative state of unlimited government. A vast, extra-constitutional and unelected bureaucracy has been empowered with broad governing authority, including both legislative and judicial powers. The unfolding scandals associated with an alphabet soup of government agencies such as the IRS, DOJ, and NSA, along with a myriad of actions taken by the HHS, EPA, DHS, and NLRB, illuminate the fundamental threat that this type of government poses to individual liberty and to the maintenance of a free society.

The origin of America's contemporary administrative state has been detailed by noted scholar and author Ronald J. Pestritto. The idea began with the late 19^th- and early 20^th-century Progressive intellectuals, whose premise was that the constitutionally limited government of our Founders, set up to safeguard against the "old" problem of tyranny, was no longer needed in the modern democratic state. Restrictions on government action needed to be lifted in order to solve the new social and economic injustices which these people believed were plaguing society.

The broad range of activities that the Progressives wanted the government to control through regulation was not possible under the existing separation of powers. In order to achieve the degree of control that they deemed necessary, they envisioned an enlarged national administrative apparatus composed of agencies staffed by "thoroughly trained and completely educated men" responsible for setting policies, investigating violations, and adjudicating disputes in matters involving their specific areas of expertise -- a combination of powers completely incompatible with the Constitution.

Furthermore, they advocated that this new professional class of administrators be independent and free from political control, with wide latitude for discretionary action. Woodrow Wilson, one of the chief proponents of this system, believed that a secure position in the bureaucracy, with tenure and good pay, would relieve the civil servant of his natural self-interest, freeing him to focus solely on the objective good of society.

Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal," a response to the Great Depression, transformed these Progressive theories into a political movement, which in principle mandated a government solution for every economic and social problem. Roosevelt launched a large bureaucracy, empowering it with broad governing authority, which gave birth to the modern American administrative state. It has grown steadily over the years under the direction of both political parties, with major outgrowths during the "Great Society" of the Johnson years and with the proliferation of agency "czars" during the Obama years.

The consequences of implementing these Progressive ideas as the foundation of our contemporary government are profound. Charlotte A. Twight, author of Dependent on DC: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans, sums it up:

In the span of barely one lifetime, a nation grounded in the ideals of individual liberty has been transformed into one in which federal decisions control even such personal matters as what health care we are permitted to buy (as well as what type of light bulbs we can use, what type of toilets we can have in our homes, what size sodas we are allowed to consume, etc.)[.] ... A vast web of legal rules and regulations now enmeshes Americans in a tangle of law so complex, so contradictory, so uncertain, that most of us can no longer understand or comply with it.

Under this system, the objective rule of law has been increasingly undermined. The tangle of rules and regulations make the exercise of any right uncertain. Furthermore, the proliferation of rules and regulations over nearly every aspect of human conduct invites selective enforcement and discretionary interpretation by the prevailing government officials in charge. Recent examples of this abound with respect to the DOJ and immigration and voter fraud enforcement, HHS and ObamaCare exemptions, and NLRB decisions against specific industries, to name a few.

In addition, the principle of equal protection under the law is effectively eviscerated when the government has the ability to play favorites, helping its supporters and harming its enemies. Recent revelations demonstrate that our government is, in fact, engaging in such unlawful behavior regarding the IRS harassment of individuals and groups whose political ideology the current administration disagrees with. Considering these trends, the implications of the recently exposed NSA personal data-gathering on ordinary citizens should be frightening to everyone.

Moreover, the freedom from self-interest and political control of the administrative class envisioned by the early Progressives is not possible. The political party in charge appoints the agency heads, who in turn select the staff. Many are members of public-sector unions who lobby politicians for concessions, using sizeable campaign donations. Collusion develops where agencies quickly align themselves with politicians who will support them. They will oppose those who criticize this cozy arrangement and threaten the beneficial status quo.

When government and its agencies are unbound by the separation of powers and the rule of law and routinely subordinate individual liberty to their arbitrary mandates, to which citizens have little or no recourse, authoritarianism replaces democratic self-rule.

Such is the legacy of "progress" that Progressives have created with their administrative state.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/our_enemy_the_administrative_state.html#ixzz2WCrIBPAY

In Syria Decision, Obama's Hypocrisy is Complete--and Dangerous

With the announcement Thursday that the U.S. will send weapons to rebel forces in the Syrian civil war, President Barack Obama's hypocrisy on war is now complete.

When he directed U.S. forces to join the fight against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, President Obama had no authorization from Congress. But he had the support of the UN Security Council, which George W. Bush--as the left constantly noted--did not in Iraq.

However, in Syria, President Obama has no formal UN support at all. Though the decrepit UN Human Rights Council has condemned the Syrian government, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has criticized all external powers supplying weapons to the conflict.

The UN General Assembly has only backed a political solution, and with Russia, which backs the regime, in the Security Council there is no chance for action there.

None of this is to say that the United Nations should be the judge of whether, when and how the United States uses military force or provides military assistance.

Yet that is the standard that Obama and the anti-war left set when opposing the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. In praising the war effort in Libya, President Obama has proudly contrasted it to the Iraq War, noting that in Libya the UN guided "the collective will to act."

Another criticism then-Sen. Obama made of the Iraq War, notably in his infamous and contrived 2002 anti-war speech, was that it lacked a "clear rationale."

The same is certainly true of assistance to the Syrian rebels, which--aside from a desire to end the regime's atrocities, which also applied to Saddam Hussein's Iraq--has no clear strategic objective. In fact, entering late, on what is apparently the losing side, poses great strategic problems.

In 2002, Sen. Obama also opposed the Iraq War on the grounds that it "will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda."

In this case President Obama is not only fanning the flames of sectarian conflict in the Middle East--joining a Sunni "jihad"--but is now arming rebel forces dominated by Al Qaeda terrorists.

That is, emphatically, the wrong intervention, and will invariably result in blowback as U.S. weapons are turned against Syrian civilians and American allies who stand in the way of Al Qaeda's ambitions in Syria and the region.

If there was a time to supply arms to the forces fighting the Assad regime--and, arguably, there was, before Al Qaeda took over the resistance--that date has long since passed. Now, weapons may do more harm than good.

One intervention which could force both sides to the negotiating table without arming Al Qaeda and fueling the war is the establishment of a no-fly zone over the country, which would also help stop the Syrian military from using chemical and biological weapons.

Again, however, President Obama's delays have proved costly, as Russia has committed anti-aircraft defenses to the regime that could make a no-fly zone harder to maintain.

Iran is all-in for the Assad regime, providing weapons, military advisers, and its Lebanese Hezbollah army to the cause. That is why intervention in Syria ought to be part of a broader regional strategy to bring down the Iranian regime.

But sending rifles and anti-tank guns to guerillas and thugs is not a tactic equal to the Iranian challenge, and may in fact embolden Tehran.

If so, Obama's hypocrisy could have very dangerous consequences.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/06/14/In-Syria-Decision-Obama-s-Hypocrisy-is-Complete