Current Events - August 14, 2013

PK'S NOTE: We've got three more years of this person, people. Sigh. But let's not just sit on our butts and complain. We DO something. Read THE LIBERTY AMENDMENTS by Mark Levin. (Mine should be here today). We focus on getting vocal and active in 2014 mid-terms -- winning TRULY conservative candidates -- and consider the options from this book.

With His Polls Slumping, the Economy in Decline, and a Strong al-Qaeda, Obama Flees Washington

President Obama has fled the White House for the peace and serenity of the beaches and golf links of Martha's Vineyard, leaving behind a mess of polls with failure written all over them.

In the sweltering, dog days of August, Obama has left town for a one week vacation, hoping to escape the many troubles that plague his presidency: a declining economy; his job approval polls in a nose dive; and the latest news that the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the country's direction under his policies.

The Gallup Poll this week shows his job approval marks falling to the low 40s, and "three-quarters of Americans are now dissatisfied" with our country's direction, up sharply from 68 percent in July.

While the news media seem to remind us almost hourly that the Republicans are also unpopular, Gallup's pollsters find that public satisfaction with the Democrats (the people who kill all those House GOP budget cuts) has sunk seven points in this month alone to 37 percent.

"At 22 percent, U.S. satisfaction with the direction of the country is the lowest Gallup has seen since March," the polling organization reported Tuesday.

Obama may be able to temporarily run from his failing grades, but he can't hide from them. More than half of all Americans now disapprove of the job he is doing, and it's not hard to see why.

The economy is not getting stronger in the fifth year of his presidency, it's getting weaker, growing in the last three months by little over 1 percent. "We're still very much living through what amounts to a low-grade depression," writes New York Times economist Paul Krugman, one of Obama's earliest supporters.

Americans are suffering from the dearth of good paying, full-time jobs. "Since January, 833,000 more Americans reported working part- time," while almost 100,000 fewer Americans "have full-time positions," says economist Peter Morici.

Having trouble finding a job? Millions of Americans say they can't find one in Obama's economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 240,000 adults left the labor force and stopped looking for work in July.

Black unemployment was 12.6 percent and Hispanic unemployment is nearly 10 percent. Obama doesn't talk about this which may be why he doesn't vacation in his home state of Illinois where more than 9 percent are out of work.

Throw in higher rents across the country, an average of $3.60 for a gallon of regular gas, a declining stock market that's shrinking worker retirement funds, and one can understand why Americans aren't happy with this president.

The war on terrorism isn't going so well, either. Indeed, Obama dropped President Bush's declared "war on terror" when he became president, hoping to reach out and make nice with the Muslim world.

When that didn't work in his first four years, he ran for re- election insisting al-Qaeda was "on the run" and that its terrorist ranks have been decimated. But events over the past year tell a far different story.

Al-Qaeda has expanded its reach throughout the Middle East and across North Africa, and stepped up its presence and a much more lethal offensive in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead of being "decimated," as we were told, al-Qaeda leaders have been lobbing threats of attacks against the U.S., forcing the White House to shut down nearly twenty embassies abroad, and putting us on a higher alert here at home.

But the growing terrorist threat under Obama's policies of retreat and retrenchment doesn't stop there. In its lead, front page story Tuesday, The Washington Post ran this headline: "Al-Qaeda's Iraq affiliate expands presence in Syria." A subhead states that al-Qaeda is "gaining regional dimensions."

"A rebranded version of Iraq's al-Qaeda affiliate is surging onto the front lines of the war in neighboring Syria, expanding into territory seized by other rebel groups and carving out the kind of sanctuaries that the U.S. military spent more than a decade fighting to prevent in Iraq and Afghanistan," the Post reported.

The widening terrorist insurgency, now calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq, "has been bolstered by an influx of thousands of foreign fighters from the region and beyond," the Post said.

Does this sound like al-Qaeda is, as Obama boasted, "on the run"?

Obama assumed the presidency with a foolish laundry list of long outdated and failed liberal ideas, believing he could revive the American economy if he spent enough money on a 1930s-style agenda of public works projects and other federal spending programs.

The result was about $6 trillion in higher debt that didn't restore the economy and unemployment to pre-recession levels. In the fifth year of his failed presidency, hiring is still "sluggish" and the recovery is still "tepid", to quote many of the latest newspaper headlines.

Congress is in no mood to spend more money on his shell game economics that would only throw good money after bad. It's clear that his latest big spending proposals are going nowhere for the rest of his presidency.

Obama seems to know this but won't admit it in public. Last month, he meekly proposed linking new tax reforms to more spending on his job programs. Republican leaders rejected his proposal out of hand.

Now he's become a speech president, delivering "major" addresses around the country, but with no really new ideas or proposals to restore our country to its former greatness.

America is in decline. Confidence in our once-powerful economy is eroding. Americans are dispirited and unhappy about our country's course. We have lost our way.

A new direction awaits a future president with a vision of a newly-ascendant, wealth-creating America.

http://townhall.com/columnists/donaldlambro/2013/08/14/with-his-polls-slumping-the-economy-in-decline-and-a-strong-alqaeda-obama-flees-washington-n1663448/page/full

Amid Myriad Crises, Obama to Meet with 1972 Miami Dolphins

Nothing is more valuable than a president’s time, but that won’t stop President Obama from meeting next week, for no apparent reason, with the 1972 Miami Dolphins.

From the White House:

On Tuesday, August 20, the President will welcome the undefeated 1972 Super Bowl Champion Miami Dolphins to the White House for the first White House ceremony honoring their historic season.

The Dolphins were the only NFL football team in history to complete an undefeated season, including a Super Bowl VII victory over the Washington Redskins. But other than that it would amuse the president and his aides, it’s unclear why they would be invited to the White House 40 years later.

While Obama takes time out of his day to live out the aging sports fan’s dream of standing in the same room with Bob Griese, Larry Csonka, Nick Buoniconti, Mercury Morris and Don Shula, the economy will remain stuck in low gear, the Middle East will still be in flames, and al Qaeda will continue its revival.

Presidential meetings with recently crowned champion sports teams are a tradition and one of a president’s signatures wastes of time. Obama has only expanded the practice, extending it to teams from previous eras and even Division III college teams. He met last month with the 1963 Loyola University of Chicago Ramblers championship basketball team.

Meanwhile, the White House remains closed to average Americans due to the sequester.

http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2013/08/14/myriad-crises-obama-meet-1972-miami-dolphins/ 

Today’s damaging leak: Al Qaeda code words intercepted by U.S. triggered embassy closures

  OutFrontCNN        ✔ @OutFrontCNN

#BREAKING: U.S. breaks code in al Qaeda message. Source tells @CNN specific words made attack seem imminent. @ErinBurnett has more 7p ET.

Is this a damaging leak? Sure sounded like it when CNN tweeted this out last night:

“Breaks code” makes it sound like Al Qaeda’s sending encrypted messages (e.g., “K&b4Z*EN” for “attack”) and the NSA’s secretly deciphering them with some sort of jihadi Enigma machine. That’s not what’s happening — I think. Here’s what CNN’s article says:

The intercepted al Qaeda communications that sparked the closure of U.S. embassies in the Middle East and North Africa contained specific words that American intelligence interpreted as a coded message for what they believed signaled a potentially imminent attack, CNN has learned…

A U.S. official declined to discuss specific code words on the intercepts but told CNN “there was a sense of imminence, a sense of the overall area at risk and the known actors. There was great concern.”

Members of Congress have indicated that National Security Agency surveillance programs played a role in intercepting and monitoring recent al Qaeda communications.

Code words, not code. They didn’t break a mathematically encrypted cipher, they just interpreted certain phrases used in Al Qaeda’s communications as a signal that an attack was coming. Not “K&b4Z*EN,” in other words, but “The eagle flies at midnight.” They’ve been doing that for years and AQ surely knows it. That’s how the feds busted the New York City subway plot four years ago:

More likely, the break in that case came when British police busted a ring of alleged terrorists in April 2009. A search of a computer belonging to one of the suspects produced an email address that was linked to an al Qaeda operative. A court order was obtained for surveillance of that particular address, and investigators took note of a message that they traced to a man in Colorado named Mohammed Wali Zazi. The message contained a line that jumped out, given that “wedding” is an al Qaeda code word for an attack dating back to 9/11.
“The marriage is ready.”

Presumably they’re not still using “wedding” as code for an attack (although they were, very stupidly, apparently still using it eight years after 9/11), but context is everything here. If you’re an NSA analyst reading messages between Al Qaeda numbers one and two and one of them says, for example, “Preparations for the banquet are complete,” your antenna’s going to go up. That is to say, the fact that some intel source is whispering to CNN about this doesn’t necessarily mean that the NSA has a copy of Al Qaeda’s “jihadi code words” dictionary; it may just mean that they intuited from the unusual nature of the communications that any references to an impending event must be code for an attack. What you may have here is less a real leak than some intel source bragging on an otherwise mundane bit of analysis in order to boost the NSA’s reputation after it’s taken a hit.

If they want to brag about something, they should brag about this — assuming the prominence of the targets isn’t also being overstated for publicity reasons. Exit question via the Daily Caller: Any word yet from Eric Holder on whether he’ll be investigating the truly damaging leak about U.S. intelligence infiltrating Al Qaeda’s online “conference call”? That information’s so sensitive, it must have come from someone near the top of the intel food chain. Very dangerous to national security, and yet nothing but silence so far from the DOJ. Go figure that yet another leak showcasing Team Obama’s jihadi-busting prowess isn’t being vigorously pursued.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/14/todays-damaging-leak-al-qaeda-code-words-intercepted-by-u-s-triggered-embassy-closures/

Eric Holder's Travel Expenses Exceeded $4 Million in Four Years

With a struggling economy and government debt piling up, President Obama promised to look at the budget line by line. Well, I’ve got a few lines he can examine. How about starting with the taxpayer-funded personal junkets taken by Obama administration officials (including the First Family)?

Recently, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit to obtain records detailing the costs of President Obama’s February 2013 “boys’ weekend” in Palm Beach, Florida, as well as the simultaneous vacations of Michelle Obama and Joseph Biden in Aspen, Colorado (our previous discoveries regarding the First Family’s vacations can be found here).

JW placed Attorney General Eric Holder’s personal travel under the microscope, releasing documents from the Department of Justice (DOJ) revealing that between March 27, 2009, and August 24, 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder accrued $4,263,704.01 in total travel expenses. This included $697,525.20 in taxpayer-funded personal travel expenses. We acquired these records in June in response to an August 2012 Freedom of Information Act request.

Altogether, Holder took 213 out-of-Washington trips during the 42 months for which we obtained records. His 31 personal trips during the time period included two trips to Martha’s Vineyard with a flight-only price tag of $95,184.50, as well as eight trips to Farmingdale, New York, at a flight cost of $118,553.71. 

On September 9, 2010, Holder took a one-day personal jaunt to gambling mecca Atlantic City that cost the taxpayers $7,408 in flight expenses alone. Wasn’t it President Obama who once cautioned American taxpayers that when “times are tough,” the American people should “tighten their belts” instead of that “blowing a bunch of cash” on Vegas?

Holder’s first taxpayer-funded trip noted in the documents was to an April 2009 “US/Mexico Arms Trafficking Strategy Meeting” (government cost “unavailable”) concerning gun-running between the US and Mexico, an issue in which the attorney general subsequently said he had no involvement. Among other controversial Holder travel expenditures:

• In April, 2011, Holder charged taxpayers $15,452.50 for a speaking engagement at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in New York City.

• In June, 2012, Holder charged $38,108.18 in “business and personal” expenses to address LULAC, a liberal group that strongly supports amnesty for illegal immigrants, in Orlando and New Orleans.

• In July, 2012, Holder charged an additional $38,108.18, this time fully billed to the taxpayers, to speak before La Raza, another controversial pro-amnesty group, in Las Vegas.

• Also in July, 2012, Holder flew on a Department of Defense plane, at unknown cost, to speak before the NAACP convention in Houston.

The documents also include Holder’s personal expense form reports for room service and lodging.

Now, to be fair, by long-standing presidential executive fiat, Attorney General Holder is a “required use” official who must take government aircraft for all travel while in office due to “security and communications needs,” according to a February 2013 U.S. Government Accountability Office report. The requirement dates most recently from 2004.  

However, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, “For personal trips, Holder is required to reimburse the government for the equivalent commercial coach fare, which is often much less than the total trip costs according to the GAO.” 

Here’s the thing. Holder doesn’t fly commercial. He usually flies on a Gulfstream V, the same private luxury jet owned by former Apple chairman Steve Jobs and billionaire businessman Mark Cuban. So no wonder the numbers do not square in favor of the taxpayer.

Last Tuesday night, I appeared on Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor” program with guest host Laura Ingraham to discuss these luxury trips. In my interview with Ingraham, I noted the tone deafness of the Obama administration when it comes to these luxury vacations: “[Holder’s] personal trips cost $700,000 or so. He should be more sensitive to the costs his personal junkets are costing the American people…Our debt is out of control and they should cut these costs back.” You can watch the segment here. 

And then there is also the question of all of those alleged “official trips.” Take a look at the list above, and note the timing of Holder’s speeches and the groups involved. Some of these 2012 trips were for speeches to leftist groups essential to the president’s reelection campaign. And, as I said on Fox News, if someone wants to call these specific trips “official business,” then I have a bridge to sell them. 

The Obama administration has so blurred the lines between official government business and Obama campaign business that it’s difficult to know where one leaves off and the other begins. This is not an excuse for wrongdoing. It’s just an observation on the DC shell game.

We should hope that these documents help Attorney General Holder understand the burden his unnecessary personal travel places on American taxpayers. The notion that federal officials such as Holder have access to a fleet of luxury jets for discounted personal travel for “security” reasons should strike most Americans as a scam that needs to be reformed.

And, in case you’re wondering, we criticize Republicans for similar travel abuse.  See this 2008 McClatchy news story, entitled “Attorney general's private trips have cost taxpayers.”

In the meantime, JW will continue to do what it can to bring the light of day the costs associated with these luxury vacations, hoping that public scrutiny might lead to some necessary changes.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/13/Attorney-General-Holder-s-Travel-Expenses-Exceeded-4-Million-in-Four-Years

John Kerry: 'This Little Thing Called the Internet ... Makes It Much Harder to Govern'



Speaking to State Department personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that "this little thing called the Internet ... makes it much harder to govern."

He also said that "ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators."

"I’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly great book like [Henry] Kissinger’s book about diplomacy where you think about the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the balance of power and how difficult it was for countries to advance their interests and years and years of wars," Kerry said to a gathering of State Department employees and their families.

"And we sometimes say to ourselves, boy, aren’t we lucky," Kerry continued.

"Well, folks," he said, "ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.

"It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest," said Kerry, "and that is complicated by a rise of sectarianism and religious extremism that is prepared to employ violent means to impose on other people a way of thinking and a way of living that is completely contrary to everything the United States of America has ever stood for. So we need to keep in mind what our goals are and how complicated this world is that we’re operating in."

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/john-kerry-little-thing-called-internet-makes-it-much-harder-govern#sthash.h7gcU3P1.dpuf

Problems With Authority

Lawless regulators and the White House earn a judicial rebuke.

 President Obama asserted the unilateral power to "tweak" inconvenient laws in last Friday's news conference, underscoring his Administration's increasingly cavalier notions about law enforcement. So it's good that the judiciary—a coequal branch of government, in case the Administration forgot—is starting to check the White House.

In a major rebuke on Tuesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an unusual writ of mandamus, which is a direct judicial order compelling the government to fulfill a legal obligation. This "extraordinary remedy" is nominally about nuclear waste, writes Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the 2-1 majority, yet the case "raises significant questions about the scope of the Executive's authority to disregard federal statutes."

In re: Aiken County is another episode in the political soap opera about spent-fuel storage at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, an Energy Department project that requires the approval of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1983 requires that the NRC 503780.BY +4.76% "shall consider" the license application for the repository and "shall issue a final decision approving or disapproving" it within three years of submission.

Yucca has since been infamously stop-and-go amid opposition from the green lobby and not-in-my-backyard Nevadans and Californians. This particular application was submitted to the NRC in June 2008.

Mr. Obama promised to kill Yucca as a candidate and the Energy Department tried to yank the license application after his election. But an NRC safety board made up of administrative judges ruled unanimously that this was illegal unless Congress passed a law authorizing it. Mr. Obama then teamed up with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to stack the NRC with anti-Yucca appointees. 

Although Congress appropriated money to conduct the review, the NRC flat-out refused, in violation of the three-year statutory deadline. "By its own admission, the Commission has no current intention of complying with the law," writes Judge Kavanaugh, despite a 2011 ruling from a separate D.C. Circuit panel instructing the NRC to follow through. The ruling also invited Congress "to clarify this issue if it wished to do so."

Congress did not amend the 1983 statute. "As things stand, therefore, the Commission is simply flouting the law," Judge Kavanaugh continues. "In light of the constitutional respect owed to Congress, and having fully exhausted the alternatives available to us," the court had no option other than the mandamus writ.

So ponder that one: A federal court is stating, overtly, that federal regulators are behaving as if they are a law unto themselves. Judge A. Raymond Randolph notes in a concurrence that former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who has since resigned, "orchestrated a systematic campaign of noncompliance." If Mr. Jaczko worked on Wall Street he'd be indicted.

Judge Kavanaugh then offers some remedial legal education in "basic constitutional principles" for the President who used to be a constitutional law professor. Under Article II and Supreme Court precedents, the President must enforce mandates when Congress appropriates money, as well as abide by prohibitions. If he objects on constitutional grounds, he may decline to enforce a statute until the case is adjudicated in the courts. "But the President may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections," writes the court.

That is especially notable given that ObamaCare's employer-insurance requirement and other provisions are precisely such unambiguous statutory mandates, with hard start dates. The executive has broad enforcement and interpretative discretion but not the wholesale authority to suspend core parts of laws, even ones he co-wrote.

All of this highlights that Mr. Obama is not merely redefining this or that statute as he goes but also the architecture of the U.S. political system. As with the judicial slapdowns on his non-recess recess appointments that the Supreme Court will hear next term, Judge Kavanaugh warns that endorsing the NRC's legal position "would gravely upset the balance of powers between the Branches and represent a major and unwarranted expansion of the Executive's power." 

The professors and pundits who fret about the Imperial Presidency go into hibernation when the President is a Democrat, so it is crucial that the courts reject Mr. Obama's increasing contempt for constitutional limits.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324085304579010743875400898.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop 

Unreal: NAACP calls on Justice Dept., Secret Service to investigate rodeo clown flap

The Missouri chapter of the NAACP appealed for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Secret Service to launch an investigation and open a federal case against the rodeo clown who donned a mask of President Obama’s face and mocked with the crowd: Do you want to see a bull run down Mr. Obama?

The NAACP says the clown was guilty of inciting violence against the president.

In a statement reported by Breitbart, the NAACP’s state president, Mary Ratliff, wrote: “The activities at the Missouri State Fair targeting and inciting violence against our president are serious and warrant a full review by both the Secret Service and the Justice Department. Incidents involving individuals acting out with extreme violent behavior in movie theaters, schools, churches, political appearances, and outdoor events in general speaks volume to the irresponsible behavior of all the parties involved with the incendiary events at the Missouri State Fair.”

The rodeo incident has grabbed national headlines. And the fallout so far has included the resignation of the head of Missouri’s rodeo-clown organization, and the announcement of Missouri State Fair officials that all rodeo clowns will now have to take sensitivity training as a condition of their employment.

Meanwhile, the clown who actually performed the skit — donned a mask of the president and mocked as an announcer asked the crowd if they wanted to see a bull run him down — has been banned for life from state rodeo performances.

Now the call is for the federal government to get involved.

Ms. Ratliff also said, in her statement, that the state is to blame for providing funding for the fair, an annual popular event.

“Our legislature has failed to support Medicare Expansion in Missouri, has consistently attempted to dismantle our Human Rights Commission, fail to adequately fund urban schools — [which] are predominantly African American — yet they are subsidizing the Missouri State Fair to the tune of $400,000. We are calling for the subsidy to stop.”

She went on, Breitbart reported, to say that Governor Nixon’s “planned Pancake Breakfast for Thursday should be his ‘Last Supper’ at the Missouri State Fair in response to the racially intolerant attacks on his Commander in Chief.”

 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/14/naacp-calls-doj-secret-service-investigate-rodeo-c/#ixzz2bxUIm5U9

Apology to Barney, Barack and Bernanke: I Forgot You’re Exempt From Our Laws

I want to apologize for doubting those guys, Barney, Barack and Bernanke. 

Turns out that giving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac $188 billion wasn’t going to entail any risk at all to the government, its employees, agents and beneficiaries. 

Richard Lehmann has the details in Forbes. 

“In fact, the two organizations [Fannie and Freddie] have repaid $146 billion of the $188 billion advanced to them since they were taken over,” write Lehmann. “In addition, some $90 billion of ‘profits’ were paid to the Treasury that went toward U.S. debt and deficit reduction.”

And all this time I thought that the trillion dollars stimulus that didn’t create jobs, the green energy scam that killed the green energy business in the US, the bailout and subsidization of the auto industry, the war on energy, the failed Dodd-Frank banking reforms, the Obamacare debacle, the rising numbers of people on food stamps, the deformation of our workforce to part-time employment, the arbitrary reinterpretation of the MACT act, the tax hikes on every single American worker and the failure to pass a budget- or even get a vote on one- since going 0-for-96 in 2010 on the Senate vote for a budget, was just more proof that Democrats knew nothing about fiscal matters. 

I now see I was wrong.

Turns out that those guys could hang with Enron, Worldcom, Tyco International and a lot of the other “Big Boys” when it comes to accounting prowess. But they have an unfair advantage: They don't have to follow our laws.

“Does anyone remember that the biggest buyer of Fannie and Freddie mortgages is none other than the Federal Reserve Bank,” continues Lehmann, “a government organization that has no bottom line profit measure. The Fed, with its quantitative easing program, is simply buying $40 billion monthly in packaged mortgage MBS securities valued at prices that are giving Fannie that wonderful profit.”

So the government gave Fannie and Freddie money to bail them out and then bought their product- that is mortgage bonds- via the Federal Reserve, which is taking losses on those transactions?

I have that right, now?

Great. 

What a scam. 

Because of course the Federal Reserve doesn’t have to follow the laws that govern mere corporations, taxpayers, non-profits or any other organization ruled by Generally Accepted Accounting Procedures.
The Federal Reserve doesn’t have to mark down their losses

According to Lehmann this is the financial equivalent of General Motors selling their excess inventory in the Chevy Volt to themselves at full retail, and counting it as a profit.

And that turns double-entry bookkeeping into single-entry profit machines where the final entry is filled-in by you the taxpayer.

Sort of a double-cross-entry bookkeeping.

Of course if GM did that, someone might go to jail. Yeah, it’s GM so a jail term is unlikely. But if a company without the political juice of GM did it -- say Ford, or some other company not owned by Warren Buffett—there’d be jail terms for sure. 

But the laws of man or God or science do not bind the government in accounting, fiscal or monetary matters.
So, it’s possible that we’ll never really know how much the government has lost so far on quantitative easing (QE). 

As I pointed out last week, the Federal Reserve System, it’s been guesstimated, may have racked up $192 billion in losses on those transactions-- just from the recent rise in interest rates alone. 

"Our estimate shows that the spike in bond yields since the first quarter of this year,” writes Scott Minerd, the Global Chief Investment Officer at Guggenheim Partners, “has caused a mark-to-market loss of $192 billion on the Fed’s holding assets, equivalent to approximately all of the unrealized gains that the Fed had accumulated since it began to implement quantitative easing in late 2008.”

Interest rates have continued to rise, despite the Feds easy money policies and zero-interest-rate policy. While the Fed ideally would like to keep interest rates from rising, the rate on the ten-year Treasury bond has risen from a low of 1.51% to a 52-week high of 2.74% printed recently.

Reality will eventually intervene in government operations says the bond market, even if the Fed can effectively shrug off the QE losses by papering them over. 

In February, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that says that the budget deficit will grow through 2023 and “will eventually require the government to raise taxes, reduce benefits and services, or undertake some combination of those two actions,” reportedCBSNews at the time- and all of that just to cover interest payments.

“In its annual Budget and Economic Outlook,” writes CBSNews, “the CBO said debt held by the public will be bigger by 2023 than in any year since 1951 and will be at 77 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2023, far above the 40-year average of 39 percent of GDP. As a result, the CBO report said, the federal government’s interest costs ‘will be very high’ and will be rising. Interest costs will more than double by the end of the ten-year forecasting period.”

The CBO projected in February that interest rates on the Ten-Year Treasury Note will rise from 2.1 percent to 5.2 percent in 2017.

Since then interest rates have added 60 basis points to 2.70, well started on its way to 5 percent.

We may never know the details of what QE wrought but eventually taxpayers will pay. 

So once again, I apologize for doubting Barney, Barack and Bernanke.

I thought they couldn’t find new and unique ways to screw over taxpayers, while benefiting the government, its employees, agents and beneficiaries.

In this, I now know, I was wrong. 

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2013/08/14/apology-to-barney-barack-and-bernanke-i-forgot-youre-exempt-from-our-laws-n1663800/page/full
 

Obamacare Delays: A User’s Guide

Government delays cost control measure in latest of series of Obamacare hiccups

The decision to delay a provision that was meant to limit the out-of-pocket health costs paid by individuals is the third such deferral of a key Obamacare component since July.

“The administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care,” the New York Times reported on Monday. The provision limited out-of-pocket and deductible costs to $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family.

However, “federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers” that enables them to either eradicate these limits or increase the threshold and set higher maximums.

The change was published on the Department of Labor’s website in February, but went unnoticed until it was explained in Part XII of “FAQs about the Affordable Care Act Implementation.”

The modification joins a growing list of provisions that have been pushed to the side in what critics say is an effort to soften the blow of a flawed piece of legislation.

The employer mandate was delayed for a year in July. Officials pointed to feedback from businesses as the reason for the delay, noting there were “concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively.”

The administration announced that same week that Health and Human Services (HHS) would rely on consumers’ “self-reports” to determine eligibility for Obamacare benefits. Critics said the change would invite fraud.

The president’s signature legislation has been plagued by delays and repealed provisions since its initial passage.

When the administration was “unable to meet tight deadlines” the decision was made to defer the small business insurance marketplace, removing “the option [for employers] to provide workers with a choice of health plans” and instead limiting them to a single plan, the New York Times wrote.

The Government Accountability Office reported that U.S. officials “missed deadlines and remain behind schedule on key parts” of the law, and that a number of states had “failed to complete many of the tasks assigned for implementation.”

Congress in 2011 “repeal[ed] the healthcare reform law’s 1099 tax reporting requirement, the first provision of the Democrats’ law to get the ax,” according to the Hill.

An internal inspection last week found HHS was also behind on “tests related to protecting privacy.”
Instances such as these have led Republicans to encourage repeal of the law.

“Our goal is to repeal all of Obamacare,” House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio.) noted during a May press conference.

“I would remind you that the president has signed into law seven different bills that repealed or defunded parts of that law. Is it enough? No. Full repeal is needed to keep this law from doing more damage to our economy and raising health care,” Boehner said. “Republicans will continue to work to scrap the law in its entirety so we can focus on patient-centered reforms that lower costs and protect jobs. Because jobs is what this is all about.”

Republican members of the House voted to delay the individual mandate and called on the Senate to take similar steps.

Lawmakers such as Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) have taken a more contentious approach, urging Republicans to refuse to vote for a continuing resolution if it includes funding for the Affordable Care Act.

Lee reiterated his support for the plan in light of the todays report.

http://freebeacon.com/obamacare-delays-mount/

Obamacare Exemption: None Dare Call It Treason

Even by the standards of Washington, this is one sick, twisted and deceitful deal. Quite possibly, it is a whole new low, even for the federal government. 

 Had we innocent, taxpaying citizens not long ago lost our capacity to be outraged by the disgraceful manner in which this place operates, we would already be in all-out political revolt. Against President Obama. Against Democrats in Congress. And, especially, Republicans.

 Literally, revolutionary wars have been fought over less. 

Last week, while many Americans spent hard-saved money on long overdue vacations, the snakes and weasels inside the federal bureaucracy schemed until they hatched an evil plan. It would feather their own nests with more of your money, protect themselves from the ravages of the laws they foist upon us, desecrate our Constitution and then smear us with insult so putrid it would make a roadside vulture gag.

 All the legal, constitutional and parliamentary maneuvering is enough to confuse Albert Einstein, but here is the bottom line: Congress and staff managed to get themselves exempted from one of the most punishing aspects of Obamacare.

 Yes, you should be sharpening the tines of your pitchforks.

 Back when the President and his henchmen rammed Obamacare through Congress, Republicans inserted a key provision requiring that whatever Frankenstein healthcare boondoggle got yoked upon the hardworking American people would also be yoked around the necks of every congressman and staffer on Capitol Hill. President Obama, being the slick fellow that he is, made sure it did not apply to him or anybody working for him in the White House.

 The noble idea was that if they were seizing control of our titanic -- yet still largely functioning --health care system and started ramming into every passing iceberg, then, by God, they were not going to get to be first in line for the life boats. No, they were going to go down with the ship.

 If Obamacare was good enough for the American people, it should be good enough for Congress. 

Well, that was BEFORE the bill passed, when they still needed to get it through. Now, it simply will not do.

It turns out that the healthcare packages currently provided to Congress and their staff are so generous and the squalor that will be caused by Obamacare is so terrible that the healthcare law simply cannot be applied to such precious people.

The thought is so terrifying that staffers from both parties in both chambers of Congress declared they would quit if forced to endure Obamacare. To those of us paying the bills around here, this sounded like a great idea.

But the federal bureaucracy blanched in terror. There would be a mass exodus of "talent," they shrieked. There will be a "brain drain!" 

After all, without these people, who would come up with all these fantastic new laws like, say, Obamacare?

I mean, if it was "talent" and "brains" that got us into this mess, maybe it's time to try something else. Like letting them all quit. Or exempting all Americans from Obamacare.

Instead, after personal pleas made directly to President Obama, his administration quietly ruled last week in the dead of August that Congress and staff would be exempted.

Now they will dispute this and say that, indeed, they are being forced out of their cushy government health insurance plans and into the Obamacare health exchanges. This much is true. But there is a dirty, dirty secret. You are still paying for their insurance.

If a regular citizen makes $100,000 a year working for a private company and loses his insurance because of  Obamacare, he must pay out of his pocket for the insurance he will be forced to purchase from the exchanges.

However, if you are a sainted Congressional staffer earning $100,000 a year and enter the exchanges, guess who picks up the tab for your new insurance plan? That's right, your employer, the federal government, the lowly taxpayer.

In other words, under Obamacare, the only people forced into the exchanges whose insurance will still be paid for by their employer will be members of Congress and their staff.

Not only is this sneaky, self-dealing and cynical, it is a dishonest bait-and-switch. And once again, we lowly taxpayers are the suckers who get stuck with the bill, get chained down by their terrible laws and laughed at all the way to the hospital. 

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/14/None-Dare-call-treason

The Illegal Alien Murderer of Vanessa Pham

By Michelle Malkin
Why is gun control the only policy we're allowed to discuss when horrific murders occur? In the liberal mindset, "root causes" of crime begin and end with the Second Amendment. But who pays the price when our public guardians fail to secure our borders, refuse to deport serial criminal offenders, and enable drug-crazed menaces to prey upon innocent citizens? 

Meet 27-year-old Julio Miguel Blanco-Garcia. An illegal alien from Guatemala, he has lived and worked in Fairfax County, Va., for at least 11 years. The region is a notorious "sanctuary" for immigration law-breakers where elected officials and big business look the other way for cheap labor and cheap votes.

When he wasn't working illegally as a construction worker in the government-fueled Boomtown 'burb or getting himself high on drugs, Blanco-Garcia was building up a lengthy rap sheet. According to Fairfax County court records cited by the Fairfax City Patch.com, Blanco-Garcia has been arrested for:

--Public swearing/intoxication in March 2010.
--Petit larceny in September 2011.
--Concealment/Price alteration of merchandise in April 2012.

With the feds granting blanket amnesty waivers by administrative fiat and refusing to fix the deportation abyss, coupled with brazen "don't ask, don't tell" sanctuary policies by local officials, Blanco-Garcia managed to escape detention and deportation for more than a decade. In December 2012, the Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force (which includes U.S. Marshals staff, Fairfax County police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and D.C. fugitive operations officers) finally caught up with Blanco-Garcia. They detained him after determining "that he was in violation of U.S. immigration law."

But it was too late for 19-year-old college freshman Vanessa Pham. In July 2010, the bubbly art student's decision to be a Good Samaritan to open-borders beneficiary Blanco-Garcia cost her life. After getting her nails done at a Fairfax Plaza salon, she encountered the illegal alien and his infant daughter in the parking lot. Blanco-Garcia was strung out on $400 worth of PCP.

According to prosecutors, he asked Pham to take him to the hospital. She let the man and his baby into her car. When Pham took a wrong turn, Blanco-Garcia turned on her -- stabbing her more than a dozen times with a knife he was carrying. She veered into a ditch; he coldly wiped her blood off of his hands with a baby wipe and clambered out of the sunroof with the child.

Cops found the blade of the murder weapon, with the killer's DNA, under Pham's seat. But for nearly three years, her friends and family agonized as the DNA remained unidentified and the case unsolved. The investigative break? Illegal alien Blanco-Garcia continued his criminal havoc -- surprise, surprise -- and attempted to steal several bottles of champagne from a local grocery tore. He was convicted of larceny in April 2012. By December, law enforcement had tied his fingerprints to Pham's murder. Blanco-Garcia's trial begins next week.

True to form, the whitewash media have ignored Blanco-Garcia's immigration status and the public policy implications of our government's systemic, bipartisan refusal to enforce the laws already on the books. The Washington Post (which employed illegal alien reporter turned amnesty activist Jose Antonio Vargas for years and glorified the amnesty mob marches in 2006 and 2007) conveniently failed to mention Blanco-Garcia's illegal alien status. Some crimes are more equal than others.

According to immigration activists pushing to grant Guatemala "temporary protected status" -- a de facto amnesty program run by the Department of Homeland Security that confers permanent residency, taxpayer subsidies and preferential employment treatment to line-jumpers, border-crossers and visa overstayers -- there are approximately 1.7 million Guatemalans in the U.S. A whopping 60 percent of them, like Blanco-Garcia, are here illegally.

That's on top of the jaw-dropping backlog of 500,000-plus fugitive deportees who had their day in immigration court, were ordered to leave the country and then were released and absconded into the ether.
And that's on top of 1 million-plus visa holders whom the feds have lost track of because Congress never bothered to fulfill its legislative mandate to create a functioning entry-exit system -- something Washington has promised to do six times over the past 17 years.

The horrific murder of Vanessa Pham was 100 percent preventable. Blanco-Garcia never should have been here in the first place. After each encounter with law enforcement, he should have been detained, deported and kept out. For good. 

I repeat: We spend billions of dollars on homeland security, but our government can't even track and deport repeat convicted criminal aliens. These are not the well-meaning "newcomers" who just want to "pursue economic opportunities" by "doing the jobs no one else will do." These are foreign-born thugs, druggies, sex offenders, murderers and repeat drunk drivers who are destroying the American Dream.

If our immigration and entrance system cannot effectively monitor, detain and kick out known American Destroyers, how can amnesty-peddling politicians in either party be trusted to provide for the common defense of law-abiding citizens pursuing the American Dream?

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/08/14/the-illegal-alien-murderer-of-vanessa-pham-n1663617

Arizona school district wants parents to submit to contract agreeing to lock up guns

A school district in a generally rural section of northwest Tucson, Arizona is asking the parents of high school students and junior high school students to pledge never to use guns or violence to resolve problems.

The “Student/Parent/Principal Contract for Eliminating Guns and Weapons from School 2013 — 2014″ was part of the Flowing Wells Unified School District’s registration packet for the upcoming school year, reports the Arizona Daily Independent.

Second Amendment advocates see the terms of the contract — particularly the ones set out for parents — as a patronizing attempt to govern behavior in private homes.

Parents who sign the agreement promise to teach high schoolers “how to settle arguments without resorting to violence” and to tell their kids to report “guns and weapons they see on campus to an appropriate adult” at school.

The contract also has parents saying, “I will carry out my responsibility to teach my children how to settle arguments without resorting to violence, and to encourage him/her to use those ideas when necessary.”

Exactly what “those ideas” are is left entirely unexplained.

The contract also states: “I will teach, including by personal example, my teenager about the dangers and consequences of the misuse of guns and weapons, and I will keep any guns I own under lock, away from school grounds and away from my children.”

The “under lock” requirement has raised particular local ire. The state of Arizona has an open-carry law. 
 
While public school campuses are among the places where open-carry is prohibited, it is not unusual, especially in rural areas, to see people carrying guns. Hunting is also popular. The school district even has its very own junior rifle team. Consequently, some parents are hesitant to sign a contract agreeing to lock guns away from teenagers at all times.

An image of the contract — on putrid bright green paper — is on display at the website of Gun Owners of Arizona, a statewide pro-gun group.

In addition to parents, Flowing Wells Unified is asking students themselves to sign the contract. School principals will also sign the document.

District officials assured the Daily Independent that parents and kids who refuse to sign the unilateral, non-negotiated contract will suffer no negative consequences.

It’s not clear what negative consequences violators of any signed contract would suffer beyond the penalties for breaking existing state laws that have nothing to do with the contract.

Administrators said that only two parents have voiced concerns about the contract so far. One father signed the document but then, after giving it some thought, asked for it back. There are no details about the other parent.

The Flowing Wells superintendent, David Baker, said the contract was written years ago. (It’s not clear how long it has been in use since it was initially created.)

“It is important that people understand the district in context,” Baker said. “We have great parents and kids.”

His big goal, he said, is to keep unwanted guns off campus. Baker also said that 150 students from the district are Junior ROTC members. He added that he doesn’t think school bureaucrats need to teach local parents how to raise children.

The district has seen no reports of guns on campus or gun violence at a school in recent memory, according to one staffer who has been with the district for a decade.

The state of Arizona is no stranger of anti-gun paranoia in its public schools. In February, a freshman at Poston Butte High School made the mistake of setting a picture of an AK-47 as the desktop background on his school-issued computer. 

The incident occurred not too far up the road from Flowing Wells in Tan Valley. The student, Daniel McClaine, Jr., found the image on the internet and liked it, partly because he is interested in serving in the military after graduation.

At the time, district policy stated that students could not use school-issued laptops to send or display “offensive messages or pictures.”

A teacher reportedly ratted McClaine out after noticing the Soviet-era rifle on the computer. The boy originally received a three-day suspension. However, after McClaine’s father contacted the local press, Florence Unified School District officials suddenly decided that the younger McClaine could return to school immediately.

 http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/14/arizona-school-district-wants-parents-to-submit-to-contract-agreeing-to-lock-up-guns/#ixzz2bxKyaVh8

 

Feinstein wants to limit who can be a journalist

The most recent congressional threat to the free press in the United States comes from California Democrat U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

In a proposed amendment to a media shield law being considered by Congress, Feinstein writes that only paid journalists should be given protections from prosecution for what they say or write.  The language in her proposal is raising concerns from First Amendment advocates because it seems to leave out bloggers and other nontraditional forms of journalism that have proliferated in recent years thanks to the Internet.

“It rubs me the wrong way that the government thinks it should be in the business of determining who should be considered a journalist,” said Ken Bunting, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition at the Missouri School of Journalism.

But on the other hand, Bunting said, there is a great need for federal shield law in light of recent attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to force journalists to give up information about confidential sources.

The difficulty with writing any such law — this is the third time Congress has attempted to craft a federal shield law — is that any such law would have to set standards for who counts as a journalist or what qualifies as an “act of journalism.”

There are shield laws on the books in 40 states, but they do not apply in federal court.  The First Amendment of the U.S Constitution promises that the right to a free press “shall not be infringed.”

The proposed federal shield law would protect journalists from having to comply with subpoenas or court orders forcing them to reveal sources and other confidential information.  The important question, of course, is how to determine that the shield law applies to one person and not another.

In other words, how do you determine someone is a journalist?

Feinstein, chairwoman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee (and a staunch defender of the government’s right to spy on anyone at any time), does not want to see a shield law that would protect employees of WikiLeaks and other leak-driven news organizations.

At a congressional hearing on the matter last week, Feinstein said shield laws should only apply to “real reporters.”

An amendment offered by Feinstein would extend shield-law protections to those who work as a “salaried employee, independent contractor, or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information,” though students working for news outlets would similarly be covered.  The definition seems to leave out the new tide of bloggers and citizen journalists who thrive on the Internet.

Calls and emails to Feinstein’s office were not returned on Monday.

In states with shield laws, the difference between being protected by them or not can be great.

Take the case of Crystal Cox, for example.  A self-described “investigative blogger” from Seattle, Cox broke a story about financial malpractice at a major investment bank, prompting a lawsuit for defamation.

Cox argued in court that she should be covered by Oregon’s shield laws, but a judge found she was not protected because she was not part of the traditional media.

As a result, she was ordered to pay $2.5 million to the investment firm.

The laws in many states are lagging behind the reality of journalism today, where anyone with a camera, smart phone or a computer can break an important story.

“The distinction between who gets paid to do journalism and who doesn’t is going to be come essentially meaningless as we go forward with this technological revolution,” said Kelly McBride, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school based in St. Petersburg, Fla.

McBride, the recent author of a book on journalism ethics in the Internet age, said shield laws are meant to ensure a vibrant marketplace of ideas where all voices can be heard.

“To the extent that you limit the shield law, you limit who is in that marketplace,” she said.

Feinstein is not the only member of Congress seeking to limit the definition of journalists.  Last week, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., sent letters to a number of organizations – including the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which runs Watchdog.org – seeking information about the legitimacy of nonprofit investigative reporters.

A spokesman for Durbin later told Watchdog.org the senator was not targeting any specific individual or group.

http://watchdog.org/100682/feinstein-wants-to-limit-who-can-be-a-journalist/

Behind an Ethanol Special Favor

An Alon USA Energy refinery in Louisiana was the only one—out of 143—exempted from an EPA mandate. Why?

By Kimberley Strassel
Why does the public demand transparency in government? Read on. 

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency issued its annual renewable-fuels mandate, telling refineries how much ethanol they must blend into the nation's gas supply. This quota, which grows each year, is becoming a horrific financial burden on the industry, forcing many refineries to buy federal ethanol "credits" to satisfy the rules. The skyrocketing price of those credits is adding hundreds of millions of dollars to refineries' annual costs. 

So it was more than a little curious that the EPA, as part of its rule, announced it was exempting just one mystery refinery (out of 143) from this year's mandate. The dispensation amounts to a significant financial favor to one lucky player, as I wrote in the Journal on Friday. Further reporting has revealed that the refinery is Alon USA Energy's ALJ -2.67% Krotz Springs facility in Louisiana. There's reason to wonder why Krotz Springs alone got a deal. 

The EPA maintains a program that allows "small refineries"—those with an average capacity of less than 155,000 barrels of crude daily—to apply for a hardship exemption from the mandate. Krotz Springs was one of four refineries that applied for 2013. The other three—Hunt Refining in Alabama, Kern Oil & Refining in California and Placid Refining in Louisiana—are small, privately held concerns. The biggest, Placid, has a capacity of about 57,000 barrels a day, according to January statistics from the federal Energy Information Administration. 

Krotz Springs has a capacity of 80,000 barrels, so it meets the definition. Then again, Krotz Springs is just one of Alon's five refineries, which are located in Louisiana, Texas and California, and have a combined capacity of about 215,000 barrels. A New York Stock Exchange-listed company, Alon isn't exactly a mom-and-pop outfit.

Krotz Springs is a merchant refinery, and the ethanol mandate takes a particularly hard toll on such outfits. Alon earlier this month reported a big hit to its second-quarter earnings, partly due to what it estimates this year will be $20 million in ethanol-credit expenses. So yes, Krotz Springs is hurt by the rule. 

Then again, so are other refineries. What particularly burned the industry about this exemption is that the EPA is requiring the rest of the industry (including other small, struggling refineries) to pay to cover the Krotz Springs pass. 

So what's so special about Alon? If nothing else, it appears to understand how Washington works. Lobbying disclosure records show Alon paid $60,000 in the second quarter of 2013 to the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips firm. This was the same quarter when Alon filed for its exemption. The records show that Manatt lobbied in the House and in the Senate for Alon on the sole issue of "renewable fuel standards." Alon didn't report any appreciable lobbying expenses for the year preceding the quarter. The records also did not turn up similar lobbying efforts by other refineries applying for an exemption. 

Republican Sen. David Vitter's office acknowledged on Tuesday that he had joined other Louisiana politicians in sending a letter to President Obama supporting the Krotz Springs exemption. Sen. Vitter's co-signers were Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, and Republican Reps. Charles Boustany and Rodney Alexander. Mr. Vitter's spokesman said the office had not been approached by other refineries for support, and noted that the senator has been pushing to waive the 2014 ethanol mandate for every refinery. 

Ms. Landrieu's office would not answer inquiries about whether the senator had further involvement in the exemption. This is worth knowing, given that Ms. Landrieu's tough re-election next year will help determine whether Democrats hold the Senate. The Obama administration has an interest in helping her out.

Industry analysts meanwhile note that Alon has a financial tie up with J. Aron, the commodities-trading arm of Goldman Sachs. That bank has more than a few of its ex-executives in key Obama administration positions, and it has retained ex-Obama officials like former White House counsel Gregory Craig to do work for it. 

"There's no question [Krotz Springs] is a disadvantaged refinery," Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at Gasbuddy.com, tells me. "But there are other merchant refineries that are disadvantaged. And within the industry there is a healthy sense of cynicism about this [exemption], given the Goldman Sachs-J.Aron relationship." 

In response to queries, an Alon spokesman said the company did not think it "appropriate to respond to any questions on the status of the application or the exemption process." The EPA did not respond to inquiries about why Alon received the exemption. The EPA had previously told me that its "case by case" decisions on exemptions are based on "metrics" and Energy Department "recommendations."

Maybe so. Perhaps Krotz Springs is facing a financial challenge that dwarfs that of other small refineries. Perhaps the EPA conducted a careful analysis, devoid of political pressure 

The problem is we don't know. The EPA, citing confidentiality restrictions, won't explain the process. We are to trust that it did the right thing. Yet this is the same Obama administration that has spent years doling out billions in grants and loans to politically connected energy companies and junking federal rules to help favored players. Why trust the EPA now? 

With federal mandates growing to crushing sizes, agencies like the EPA increasingly hold discretionary powers that can mean life or death for companies. The public deserves to know how and why that power is being exercised.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324769704579010813339261246.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Fair Housing, Obama Style

Jimmy Carter, the 39^th president of the U.S., was, until Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama came along, considered as the worst president in U.S. history.  But Jimmy Carter, to his credit, in 1976, did say, "I am not going to use the federal government's authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnic homogeneous neighborhoods.  I think it is good to maintain the homogeneity of neighborhoods if they've been established that way."  So chalk one up for Carter.

Too bad (for us) that Obama can't (or won't) say the same.  Obama, through Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is pushing "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing," (AFFH) a program to "... allow the feds to track diversity in America's neighborhoods and then push policies to change those it deems discriminatory." 

Guess who gets to decide if discrimination is present.  Why, HUD, naturally.  This is the definition of a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

The AFFH program will require HUD to try to remedy what it considers segregation and discrimination in neighborhoods through data collection and the use of a massive database.  Data from this so-called "discrimination database" will be used with transportation and infrastructure planning, housing financing policies, and zoning laws to alleviate what HUD deems as discrimination and segregation.  Just what America needs: another government database.  Can anyone say "NSA"?

According to HUD, AFFH will "... provide HUD program participants with more effective means to affirmatively further the purposes and policies of the Fair Housing Act, which is Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968," which "...directs HUD's program participants to take steps proactively to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities for all."

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan introduced this plan in July at the NAACP convention.  Donovan said:

Unfortunately, in too many of our hardest hit communities, no matter how hard a child or her parents work, the life chances of that child, even her lifespan, is determined by the zip code she grows up in.  This is simply wrong.

OK, Donovan, start a pilot program in Detroit, the Mecca of Democrat rule, and see how well AFFH works there.  Or perhaps Chicago.  Or perhaps New Orleans.  Or perhaps Atlanta.  All of those cities are Democrat strongholds, all with numerous zip codes, all with (reverse) discrimination and segregation.  See how successful AFFH is there before spending the money necessary to go nationwide. 

HUD and Donovan are reverting to the old and well-worn Progressive/Democrat/Liberal playbook of comparing apples with oranges in an effort to get their way, to try to gather data that will support their position so HUD (and Obama) can act as it desires, to impose his will upon us. 

HUD blames poverty on zip codes, something that studies have not supported, rather than other socio-economic factors that studies have shown to contribute to poverty.  For example, Dr. David Hilfiker, in his book Poverty in Urban America: Its Causes and Cures, says: "Causes of poverty are always multiple, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing. It is the combined, intertwined effect of these various factors that is so intractable." Hilfiker lists several causes:

• Racial Discrimination: "... the history of discrimination helped to create the ghetto environment."
• Segregation: "Continuing, imposed, severe segregation of African Americans from the rest of society is the single most important cause of urban black poverty" (emphasis mine).
• Education: "Because elementary and secondary schools are primarily funded through local taxes, cities with large numbers of poor people have fewer resources per child and are therefore less able to fund decent education" (emphasis in the original).
• Health Care: "Poor people, therefore, cannot afford to purchase insurance on their own, so they remain uncovered, spending significant percentages of their income on doctor or emergency room visits, especially if they have young children."
• Criminal Justice System: "Since ex-cons find it much harder to get jobs, the impact of the criminal justice system on poverty is doubly harsh."

Whether you agree with Hilfiker or not is not at issue here.  The fact is, Hilfiker's list does not include zip codes.  For HUD, it's all about the acquisition of power. 

Hilfiker concludes by stating, "As long as ghettos exist, most of the people who live there will be poor."  Gosh, I didn't realize that ghetto-creating segregation was imposed on anyone.  Did I miss something here?  I thought that imposing segregation was unlawful.  I guess that AFFH, by imposing HUD's will, will be able to eliminate ghettos one zip code at a time.  Imposing segregation: bad; imposing AFFH: good.  Or so HUD thinks.  Consistency is not one of HUD's strengths.

Of the AFFH program, Edward Pinto, of the American Enterprise Institute, said:

This is just the latest of a series of attempts by HUD to social engineer the American people. It started with public housing and urban renewal, which failed spectacularly back in the 50's and 60's.  They tried it again in the 90's when they wanted to transform house finance, do away with down payments, and the result was millions of foreclosures and financial collapse.

For HUD, history and past performance doesn't count.

And from Rob Astorino, of the Westchester County Executive (the head of the executive branch of the Westchester County NY government), we get this perspective:

What they [Donovan and HUD] are trying to do is to say discrimination and zoning is the same thing.  They are not.  Discrimination won't be tolerated.  I won't tolerate it.  Zoning though, protects what can and can't be built in a neighborhood.

As Marilyn Assenheim  says, "Call AFFH what it is; it is: the Lyin' King [Obama]'s recreation of America."

We are losing our freedoms one step at a time.  AFFH is just the latest manifestation of that loss.

On a tangential note, where do Carter and Obama rank as presidents?  Interestingly, in a poll conducted by Siena College, and published by US News and World Report, two hundred thirty eight presidential scholars ranked Barack Obama as 15^th.  But the poll's validity can be questioned, as the scholars ranked Obama as 6^th in imagination, 7^th in communication ability, 8^th in intelligence, and 10^th in ability to compromise.  I guess that the "presidential scholars" were hand-picked by Siena College for their ability to ignore what Obama is currently doing and provide the rankings it sought.  By the way, the poll ranked Carter 32^nd.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/fair_housing_obama_style.html#ixzz2bxw0IuQD

Presidential Lawlessness: It's So Cool

When the law no longer commands respect, one can pretty well write off a nation that pretends to be a constitutional republic. But how can The People respect the law when the government doesn't? President Obama seems to regard the law as a mere inconvenience.
In his must-read August 5 article "The Front Man" at National Review, Kevin Williamson sums up our Harvard Law School president's taste for lawlessness: "He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park."

With a compliant Congress in his first two years, and a divided, gridlocked Congress thereafter, Mr. Obama has been able to "get away with" an awful lot. One of the ways the president flouts the law is by not enforcing it, such as in his recent "decision" to delay enforcing the employer mandate of ObamaCare. Where does the president get off thinking he has the authority to refuse to enforce a law? The president doesn't seem to understand his job.

Also, under Obama the executive branch just makes up law, a task generally reserved for the legislative branch. Williamson reports that "although the IRS has no statutory power to collect Affordable Care Act -- related fines in states that have not voluntarily set up health-care exchanges, Obama's managers there have announced that they will do so anyway."

That announcement brings to mind a provision in the ACA concerning enforcement of the individual mandate: "In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure. [Sec. 5000A(g)(2)(A), page 249]" With regard to this prohibition, it remains to be seen whether Obama's minions at the IRS will announce "that they will do so anyway"?

The president might also conclude that the $95 penalty in 2014 for noncompliance with the individual mandate isn't nearly enough to offset what government is going to be spending on ObamaCare. Obama might then "decide" to raise the penalty himself, and deliver his usual spiel: "If Congress won't act, I will."

Along with his extra-constitutional decisions to ignore or vacate the law, Obama also unilaterally exempts his friends from the law. Williamson: "Neither does the law empower him arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in organized labor from the law, but he has done that too." Obama has been granting waivers from the ACA mandates since 2011. The latest is his exemption of Congress and its staff from the mandate. Obama is buying off Congress.

To read more about the "legal gymnastics" involved in this exemption, read the August 7 article "Members Only" in the Wall Street Journal. Obama is turning the law upside down in order to bail out Congress. So the taxpayer will continue to pay for the Cadillac health insurance plans of Congress. "Illegal dispensations for the ruling class, different rules for the hoi polloi."

The law is not the law if it doesn't apply to everyone. Obama's arbitrary exceptions from the ACA for his friends are utterly corrosive; they breed contempt for all law. We cannot have contempt for law if we are to remain a constitutional republic. If laws are foisted upon the citizenry against their wishes, as was the case with ObamaCare, the government invites massive noncompliance at the very least.

Congress should give the president a choice: Either agree to a postponement of everything in the ACA that was mandated to go into effect in 2014 (in which case Congress would pass a quick bill to that effect), or enforce the ACA in its entirety as written, including the employer mandate --- either full steam ahead or a year-long delay of everything. That might be a better tactic for the GOP than trying to defund the ACA. In any case, if Obama doesn't find that choice agreeable and instead chooses to go his merry way postponing only the employer mandate, then Congress should impeach and remove him from office. No president has the authority to pick and choose which laws he will enforce. The question is: How likely is it that the Democrat-controlled Senate would be up for such a showdown?

"If Congress won't act, I will," the president repeatedly assures us. But that's not the way it works in a constitutional republic of laws. Nonetheless, Obama acts, and who's going to stop him? As he lists the president's unconstitutional power grabs, Williamson makes an unflattering comparison:

That President Obama has adopted President Nixon's approach but limited himself to health care might be considered progress if he had not adopted as a general principle one of Nixon's unfortunate maxims: When the president does it, it isn't illegal. President Nixon's lawlessness was sneaky, and he had the decency to be ashamed of it. President Obama's lawlessness is as bland and bloodless as the man himself, and practiced openly, as though it were a virtue. President Nixon privately kept an enemies list; President Obama publicly promises that "we're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends."

Barack Obama, of course, is too cool to feel shame. So one wonders what's next for our oh-so-cool presidente. Perhaps he'll "decide" to bail out public worker unions in Detroit. Bondholders would no doubt again be stiffed, even though they're supposed to be first in line for the proceeds of a bankruptcy.

The Supreme Court is partly responsible for Obama's unconstitutional power grabs. In salvaging ObamaCare, the Court had to rewrite the law. Obama might surmise: If you can legislate from the bench, then you can legislate from the White House too. If the Supreme Court can rewrite the law then so can I. After all, I'm the cool one. In fact, I'm The One.

The Court made a grievous mistake in not reversing ObamaCare, and they could have ended it easily, as they had found it unconstitutional on two counts. Of course, given our president, had the Court struck down ObamaCare, Obama might have "decided" to enforce it anyway.
In rewriting the law in order to save it, the Court ruled that a penalty is a tax and a command is a choice. That paved the way for Obama's lawlessness. We must hope that the Court is beginning to understand what its wretched ruling has wrought.

Velociraptors are so cool. Like all good velociraptors, President Obama continues to test the perimeter, nudging, poking, and shoving to see how much he can get away with and how far he can go. And with an in-the-tank media, an unmoored Court, and an irrelevant Congress, what's to stop him?

 http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/presidential_lawlessness_its_so_cool.html#ixzz2bxtNjDP8

Obama's 21st century tyranny

Article 1, Section 1 of the United States Constitution states:

All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

There is nothing ambiguous in that single sentence. All legislative powers really means just that, all legislative powers. There are no exceptions for executive orders or the utopian desires of our new progressive princes, Obama's politically appointed czars. The Constitution was designed so that all laws were to be submitted in public, written and debated in public, voted on in congressional committees in full public view and the bill's final votes for passage were to be cast in public.

From forbes.com:

First, there was the delay of Obamacare's Medicare cuts until after the election. Then there was the delay of the law's employer mandate. Then there was the announcement, buried in the Federal Register, that the administration would delay enforcement of a number of key eligibility requirements for the law's health insurance subsidies, relying on the "honor system" instead. Now comes word that another costly provision of the health law-its caps on out-of-pocket insurance costs-will be delayed for one more year.

Why does Congress allow a sitting President to alter a law that they themselves passed and which was signed into legislation? Such alterations are simply unconstitutional.

If a President can unilaterally change or alter Obamacare or any other Federal law without Congressional approval, then our political institutions have been effectively dissolved, and America has fell into the dark pit of unbridled despotism. 

By delaying the employer mandate (whose fines are defined as taxes by the Supreme Court), but not the individual mandate. Obama has created a two-tier tax system based on the employment status of the taxpayer. That is simply unconstitutional under the 14^th Amendment's equal protection clause. So this is more than a just a delay of a Federal law, this changes the amount of taxes some taxpayers will have to pay...entirely by executive fiat.

Obama's illegal, immoral (as if our Narcissist-in-Chief actually gives damn about morality) and unconstitutional honeymoon with tyranny can only lead to further and more destructive abuses of existing Federal regulations. Since this President has seemingly gotten away with delaying a Federal law for one year, what's to stop him from delaying any federal laws from being enforced for two years, five years or even twenty-five years?

We all know that famous ribald joke:

A famous man at a charity banquet asks the beautiful young woman next to him, "Assuming that we gave the money to charity, would you sleep with me for ten thousand dollars?" After some thought she says, "Yes." "And would you for two dollars?" "Why, what do you think I am!" "We've already decided that. Now we're just haggling about price."

Just substitute despot for prostitute and we are haggling over what constitutes a post-Constitutional America.

Could Obama expedite implementing the Senate's version of  the current immigration reform bill by simply delaying the funding to build and maintain the new border fences?  Easy as the stoke of a pen.  How about changing tax depreciation tables without Congressional approval? Just sign there, Mr. President.

Why would Obama even need Congress or the Courts, if the laws Congress passes are flexible, changeable, spongy, adjustable, pliable, ductile,, malleable and ultimately removable? He simply wouldn't.  With such singular  dictatorial authority,  Obama may easily eradicate his political enemies and the ensure the payoffs of his political cronies.

America is dangerously close to having a functional 21^st century tyranny sustained by a rampart of interlocking of governmental databases and a zealous bureaucracy that seeks out  and punishes  any reactionary dissent.  All this with the blessings of the MSM, whose fate will be the fate of all "useful idiots" once their usefulness has passed.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/obamas_21st_century_tyranny.html#ixzz2bxwR7sDs

The Constitution Can Unite Conservatives, Libertarians and Independents ... and Even Save the GOP

The GOP confronts what could be a crippling dilemma. If real it could prove fatal to its viability as a political party. Electoral victory requires both its libertarians and its social conservatives. And they are at odds.

These two crucial elements have a strained relationship. The libertarians, overrepresented in the party’s donor, underrepresented in its activist, base keep marginalizing social conservatives. Libertarians keep trying to blunt conservative impact inside the GOP and in campaigns.

This is magnificent. But it is not war.

Meanwhile, social conservatives look upon libertarians in much the same way as the U.S. Army troops looked at Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still. No good can come of this. My fellow conservatives! Repeat after me: Klaatu barada nikto.

Both party elements need to work together to survive the assault by Big Brother. For many years, libertarians and the social conservatives made common cause against the common enemy of communism. Communism is dead. No comparably impressive adversary appears on the horizon. (Obamunism, for all of its horrors, is a pallid threat compared with having 45,000 nuclear weapons pointed your way.)

And, as we discovered in 2008 and 2012, divided we fall. This is especially true in that the party’s Superconsultants and operatives tend to truckle to the donor base. And if the donors say to marginalize the social conservatives, well, Republican Superconsultants live by the golden rule: “he who has the gold makes the rules.” They do so even if it consistently, demonstrably, loses elections.

Will the libertarian-conservative anti-Big-Brother coalition crumble? Will the GOP break into warring duchies? It could happen.

Consider the Great Christie-Paul War of Words of 2013. The urban-elite Chris Christie launched a Pearl Harbor attack against the rural-populist Rand Paul. Enough of that would, of course, leave the field clear for the Democrats to elect the whole federal government in 2016. And, Gov. Christie, while Time Magazine will reward you with sycophantic coverage for driving wedges in the Republican coalition that’s … trading birthright for pottage.

But a crumble is not the most likely outcome. The GOP more likely is poised to emerge more strongly than it has been in many cycles. As quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said, “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

What the Republican Party is confronting appears more a paradox than a dilemma. Its predicament could prove a source of strength rather than doom.

The intra-party fracture is most pronounced when it comes to policies touching on sexual mores. Libertarians tend to reflect the mores of urban elites, favoring gay marriage and, for many (although by no means all), a laissez faireattitude toward abortion. This sophisticated stand, of course, wins props from The New York Times. It brings rewards from many, wealthy, party donors.

Yet it has several major handicaps. The most salient of these is that it demonstrably loses votes. For a political entity, that’s a poison pill.

Traditional values as vote getter (not just within the party base but with Independents — including ethnics and blue collar workers) violates the meta-narrative of the party elites. Still, the conclusion that traditional values is a net, and a legitimate, vote getter is almost impossible to avoid.

As Frank Cannon, president of the American Principles Project (with which this columnist has a professional association) has repeatedly pointed out, while sophisticated values has social cachet they lose net votes. Presidential candidate John McCain, refusing to campaign on social issues, lost California by a whopping 24 points. That same year California’s Prop 8, banning gay marriage, won by 4 points.

This fact makes urban elites uncomfortable. They consider “traditional values” déclassé … or even bigoted. Nonsense. America is, after all, a representative democracy. It is from the “consent of the governed,” the Declaration of Independence says, that are derived “the just powers” for which Governments are instituted among Men.

It is right here, and in the Declaration’s successor document, the Constitution, that the forces uniting libertarianism and conservatism, and the key to the GOP’s salvation, reside. The Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, is replete with guarantees of liberty upon which libertarians and conservatives can build a healthy concordat — even including provisions with which they might not be fully comfortable.

Enter … Constitutionalism.

As George Washington stated in his farewell address: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness. . . ."  Prohibiting morality and ethical codes to religion, or to society because based in religion, makes a travesty of the Bill of Rights. Moral codes of religions have Constitutional dignity. The State is constrained, by the Constitution, to show some respect.

Whether or not one agrees with orthodox religious values … the adherents are legitimately, and constitutionally, entitled to have, to practice, and to press for the State to reflect their values. Libertarians and conservatives can disagree while taking a principled stand for the legitimacy, under the Constitution, of one another’s position. Even though many libertarians fully approve of gay marriage they can, with authenticity, also honor the First Amendment guarantee of “… no law …prohibiting the free exercise [of religion].”

Preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights, provides ample grounds for unity between libertarians and most conservatives. Many of our civil liberties — dear to libertarians and conservatives both — are under assault by progressive forces.

There is much to collaborate on: preserving freedom of speech, and of the press, and of the free exercise of religion; honoring the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances; not infringing the right to keep and bear arms; rehabilitation the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonably searches and seizures; the right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Even, casting the net a bit wider, the classical gold standard and the repeal of the Estate tax!

Meanwhile, social democrats have their own, abundant, internal contradictions. Most glaring right now: the American health care system indeed is a scandal. We get some of the most expensive and worst health care of any industrialized country. Yet the Democrats’ purported solution, Obamacare, portends to thrust us out of the frying pan … and into the fire. Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat and one of its legislative architects, called it “a huge train wreck coming down.” Good intentions are no substitute for making us mere voters actually better off.

American progressives keep promising Denmark, a true socialist workers paradise and the happiest country in the world, and delivering Detroit: now entering the Ninth Circle of Hell.

Bohr’s comment about paradoxes and progress connotes that there are no such things as paradoxes in nature. The discovery of an apparent paradox creates the possibility of progress by revealing a fallacy in our perspective. Only at the far fringes of libertarianism and conservatism do these two worldviews enter red-line-crossing conflict. They are natural allies.

Call this columnist crazy but … respect for the Constitution, and our constitutional rights, can reunite the GOP, and unite it with the Independents, creating a winning combination. Crazy? This columnist, again, takes solace from Bohr, this time to Wolfgang Pauli: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

Enter Constitutionalism.

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/ralphbenko/2013/08/14/the-constitution-can-unite-conservatives-libertarians-and-independents--and-even-save-the-gop-n1663765/page/full 

Levin to the Rescue

Only those happily trampling on the last vestiges of freedom will deny that our federal government as a constitutional republic has ceased to function. The president can no longer control (nor does this one want to control) the enormous and ever-expanding bureaucracy functioning as a government by fiat. The legislative branch, so corrupted, so drunk by the allure of power, so disdainful of its constituents, is unable to stop its bankrupting ways. The judiciary is perhaps the worst. The Supreme Court is openly rejecting the authority of the Constitution itself. 

If the federal government refuses to adhere to the enumerated powers of the Constitution, what can the citizenry do about it? The events of the past five years (more, actually) prove this. It has become virtually impossible to stop the agenda of a radical Chief Executive who brazenly uses the federal government as his personal political machine. It is almost impossible to defeat an incumbent member of Congress with all the advantages it has awarded itself. For all intents it is impossible to replace a member of the Supreme Court.
The left is content with this terrible turn of events. By "transformation" they meant the transfer of power to the state.

Conservatives are loath to declare American exceptionalism dead, yet are powerless to stop the statist steamroller. With every cycle, the situation worsens. At some point the unthinkable -- tyranny -- is upon us. We are running out of time. Only radical surgery will save the patient now.

Enter Dr. Mark Levin with his new book, "The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic". Levin is a Constitutional scholar -- and he shines. He argues passionately that the federal government can be brought under control only if new limitations are thrust upon it by its citizenry. He proposes a Constitutional convention, not one called by Congress but one impaneled by two-thirds of state legislatures, and which would require a three-fourths margin to pass any new amendments. It is the lesser known of the two options provided by Article V of the Constitution. 

What should a Constitutional convention tackle? Levin offers eleven amendments for consideration, with appropriate subdivisions, each carefully researched and each designed to reduce the power of the state.
Term limits for Congress is the first liberty amendment Levin offers. It is my view also the most important.

Only when there are limits (12 years of service) will Congress be populated by men and women driven only by the call to service, not the siren song of power. The millions delivered by special interests for the re-election of incumbents who, in turn, reward said interests with billions in grants, contracts, tax shelters and the like -- will cease. 

Levin calls for other limitations on Congress. He proposes an amendment to limit federal spending and another to limit taxation, the combination, which will restore fiscal sanity while devolving power from the state. He offers an amendment to repeal the 17th Amendment, returning to the Article 1 mandate that Senators be chosen by their state legislators.

What about the Supreme Court? "(S)hould five individuals be making political and public policy decisions and imposing them on every corner of the nation ... as they pursue even newer and more novel paths around the Constitution in exercising judicial review?" Levin points to the obvious: Sometimes mistakes are made (Roberts, anyone?) and America shouldn't be punished for the rest of that jurist's life. He proposes 12-year term limits for them, as well.

What can be done to control, even reduce the size and scope of the bureaucracy? All federal departments and agencies must be re-authorized by Congress every three years or be terminated -- that's what.

There's a liberty amendment to protect and promote free enterprise, now under vicious assault. One to protect private property given the ability of the federal government suddenly to steal it. Amendments to increase the power of the States, and finally, an amendment to protect the voting process.

Who would have thought any such amendments would ever be needed? And that's the point. Such is the nature of the crisis.

Levin quotes Tocqueville reflecting on the Constitutional Convention of 1776: "(I)t is new in history of society to see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself when apprised by the legislature that the wheels of its government are stopped."

It is time for our legislatures once more to issue the clarion call

Levin hopes "The Liberty Amendments" will launch a national discussion, and it will. Levin is a consequential man, and this is a consequential book. Some critics will dismiss the concept out of hand. It is they who should be dismissed -- unless they have bold new alternatives to propose. Nothing else is working, and nothing else will do. We have reached the tipping point. 

http://townhall.com/columnists/brentbozell/2013/08/14/levin-to-the-rescue-n1663627/page/full