McConnell's Billion Dollar 'Kentucky Kickback:' The Only Public Works Earmark in Debt Limit Deal
By Michael Patrick LeahyThe recent debt limit deal negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) included only one earmark for a major public works project--an additional $2.1 billion authorization for the Olmsted Dam Project in McConnell's home state of Kentucky.
Despite McConnell's protestations that he had nothing to do with the inclusion of the additional funding in the deal he negotiated, the Senate Conservatives Fund charged last week that "now Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell has an Obamacare earmark of his own . . . In exchange for funding Obamacare and raising the debt limit, Mitch McConnell has secured a $2 billion Kentucky kickback."
PK'S NOTE: Have you ordered this book yet? Mine will be here tomorrow.
Documents: Congress Charges Secret Fee to Land Top Committee Spots
By Wynton Hall
Members of Congress must pay secret fees known as “party dues” to the Democratic and Republican parties to secure and maintain top committee chairmanships and assignments, newly uncovered internal documents reveal.
The never-before-published lists are reprinted inside the new book Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets, written by Government Accountability Institute President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer.
... The book contains copies of the Democratic and Republican price lists detailing how much money lawmakers must raise to obtain and keep their seats on congressional committees. The so-called “party dues” lawmakers must contribute for committee assignments are separate and apart from the fundraising they conduct for their own campaigns. If lawmakers fail to make their tribute payment to their party, they can lose their place on a powerful committee.
... Schweizer contends that the common belief that outside forces and special interests seek to bribe Washington politicians is wrong. The reverse is true: lawmakers use a series of "brass knuckle legislative tactics" to politically extort wealthy interests and industries into forking over large political donations—some of which can then be funneled to a politician’s friends or family members.
...According to the author, committee assignments have far more to do with fundraising prowess than policy expertise.
“We want to believe that committee assignments are based on knowledge, expertise, and background,” writes Schweizer in Extortion. “But a member of Congress will end up on a powerful committee like the House Ways and Means Committee or Financial Services Committee only if he or she can raise money.”
Lawmakers Abusing Leadership PACs in Crosshairs of Schweizer, '60 Minutes'
By Tony Lee
....Hall
said the leadership PACs are usually not used for re-election efforts
and instead serve as a "crony piggy bank" used to "dole out favors" and
"buy votes." In discussing the 60 Minutes exposé that revealed
"what is going on with leadership PAC corruption," which Hall described
as "one of the dirtiest little secrets in Washington," he said that
though the PACs are supposedly meant to help "members of your party,"
there are "sneaky loopholes" that allow lawmakers to have "lifestyle
upgrades" that are "eye-opening."
Though
Hall noted lawmakers are not allowed to hire family members for
congressional staff, there is "no rule that prevents" lawmakers from
taking donor money and "handing it to their own family members" by
"routing money to family members through their leaderships PACs."
...Schweizer's investigation revealed that lawmakers do indeed use the PACs
to live a "jet-set lifestyle" of fine wine and limousines legally
financed by the leadership PACs. Hall noted that lobbyists and special
interest groups can easily donate money to leadership PACs to buy
influence and said Representatives can even go on fundraising blitzes
months before they retire and give themselves a "nice exit check"
because the money from the leadership PACs can be spent even after a
lawmaker dies.
Palin: Congress Has America Caught Up in 'Endless Extortion Scheme'
By Sarah Palin
America is suffering from an epic case of Armageddon fatigue. Budget showdown, government shutdown, debt ceiling debacle—the stakes are real but the establishment seems to feed off the chaos they create as a means to foment fear and outrage and translate it into campaign donations for themselves.
Look closely and you’ll see that something seismic is going on under the surface of the manufactured chaos in D.C.
Washington has morphed into an extortion racket, a place where members of the permanent political class threaten to inflict legislative and regulatory pain to extract campaign donations that they can then siphon into the pockets of themselves and their family members.
In a new book featured this Sunday on 60 Minutes titled Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets, Peter Schweizer explains how Washington politicians use a set of mafia-style legislative tactics to extort people and industries into donating to them out of fear of political and legal reprisals.
Schweizer interviewed former Chairman of Apache Corporation Ray Plank. Plank said campaign cash and lobbying contracts now function as “protection money” to keep lawmakers and regulators from going after you.
“It’s what you expect from the mafia,” said Plank. “They basically come to you and say, ‘We are going to shove this bat up your ass and give you an enema. You better play ball.’ We saw a great deal of it. It’s an insidious blight.”
There are left-wing progressives on Wall Street and in the high-tech world who bankrolled President Obama’s campaign because they love his radical agenda. But as Schweizer points out, many gave because they know they have to; if they don’t, Obama will come after them.
That’s a lesson the Tea Party knows all too well. After the Tea Party’s historic 2010 midterm victory, Obama unleashed Attorney General Eric Holder to go after the oil and gas sector, which had given four times as much to Republicans as to Democrats. As Obama said in October 2010, “We are going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”
Of course, not everyone gets subjected to these Godfather-style shakedowns. Case in point: Obama bundler and former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine of MF Global shame. After "losing" $1.6 billion of MF Global customer money, Corzine walked away without a scratch. In Extortion, Schweizer publishes a devastating quote from Lisa Timmerman, a 17-year MF Global employee who served as the firm’s assistant comptroller for five years, saying: “Corzine is a major Obama fundraiser [which] is keeping prosecutors from bringing criminal charges against him.”
But what about the rest of us? What about the average American mom and dad just trying to stay afloat in the disastrous Obama economy? We don’t have the funds to throw “protection money” at the political extortionists in Washington who are eager to foist things like Obamacare on us. Only Obama’s union cronies and members of the permanent political class are given Obamacare waivers and spared the pain of the policies D.C. inflicts on the rest of us. Big business got an Obamacare exemption that Obama refuses to give ordinary individuals who can’t even sign up for Obamacare on the broken exchange websites, but they’ll still be fined for not doing so!
And what about the GOP establishment? Why haven’t they been able to clean up the extortion racket in Washington? You have to ask yourself, has the party machine fought this corruption or does it participate in it? As a senior House Republican told Fox News on Thursday, it’s “highly unlikely” Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) will be challenged because few have the muscle to match his ability to “raise money.”
In fact, the ability to raise money is apparently key to all the power in Washington. Here’s how bad it’s gotten: the Democratic and Republican Parties actually have a secret price list—officially known as “party dues”—that tells members of Congress how much money they must extract from donors in order to win a chairmanship or a top slot on a powerful Congressional committee. Schweizer somehow obtained the top-secret lists and included the never-before-published documents in Extortion.
But fundraising isn’t the only thing D.C. employs to keep people in line. Over in the Senate, Democrats like Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) use thug tactics on Tea Party members and activists who stand in their way. In a devastating chapter on Harry Reid, Schweizer includes a quote from Reid’s former chief of staff Susan McCue, who in 2005 said Reid seizes on a person’s weaknesses to “disarm, to endear, to threaten, but most of all to instill fear.”
The fact that these strong-arm tactics take place in Washington doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve fought this type of corruption my entire political career. And those who disagreed with me politically used thug-like tactics to try to bankrupt my family with frivolous lawsuits in Alaska, and it hasn’t stopped to this day.
It’s time for Washington to stop threatening citizens and scaring up dollars through an endless extortion scheme of manufactured crises. It’s time for leaders to lead. That means doing right by voters without requiring them to pay protection money in advance.
You have to wonder whether Constitutional rule of law even exists when separate rules apply for powerful and well-connected men like Jon Corzine. And you have to wonder whether we really have government of the people, by the people, and for the people when the only way We the People can be heard is if we grease the palms of the ruling class.
Enough is enough. If the permanent political class won’t drain the swamp, we will. We should follow the advice in the title of Schweizer’s last book and “Throw Them All Out.” 2014 is just around the corner.
Why ObamaCare is a fantastic success
By Wayne Allyn Root...The GOP needs to stop calling ObamaCare a “trainwreck.” That means it’s a mistake, or accident. That means it’s a gigantic flop, or failure. It’s NOT.
This is a brilliant, cynical, and purposeful attempt to damage the U.S. economy, kill jobs, and bring down capitalism.
It’s not a failure, it’s Obama’s grand success.
It’s not a “trainwreck,” ObamaCare is a suicide attack. He wants to hurt us, to bring us to our knees, to capitulate- so we agree under duress to accept big government.
1-800-ObamaCare-Denial
Website problems don't matter when your intentions are good.
...Insurance companies are also already sending out notices to millions of consumers cancelling individual policies because they are non-compliant with ObamaCare's new mandates. Kaiser Health News, usually a cheerleader for the law, reports that "Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state." Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people, Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20% of its individual market customers, and Independence Blue Cross of Philadelphia is dropping about 45%.Remember when Mr. Obama said you could keep your policy if you liked it?
The White House could have asked Congress for a delay to get the exchanges right and avoid this debacle. Liberals claim to be in favor of "what works and what doesn't," as Mr. Obama likes to say, and the exchanges clearly belong to the latter category.
But the exchanges fiasco is revealing the larger truth that ObamaCare's claim to technocratic expertise was always a political con. It won over the New Yorker and made ObamaCare designer Peter Orszag a celebrity. But it was all a veneer for ObamaCare's real goal, which is to centralize political control over health care.
That false front is clear now as we are told to ignore the faulty rollout because it will get fixed, eventually, and in any case the law is really about reducing inequality. At least now Democrats are being honest. The actual results will always matter less to liberals than their good intentions and expanding the reach of government.
...Mr. Obama did identify one culprit on Monday—naturally, the Republicans who he claimed somehow sabotaged Healthcare.gov despite having nothing to do with its development. "I just want to remind everybody, we did not wage this long and contentious battle just around a website," he said. Yes, and that's what should really scare the public.
Obamacare Site for Spanish Speakers Has Never Worked
While HealthCare.gov has been plagued with tech problems since its Oct. 1 launch, the Spanish-language version hasn’t even worked a single day.
Reporter Follows Obama's Advice, Calls ObamaCare 800 Number; Get's Referred Back To Troubled Website
Obama the Blameless
By David Limbaugh...Obama insisted that “the essence of the law — the health insurance that’s available to people — is working just fine. In some cases, actually, it’s exceeding expectations. The prices are lower than we expected; the choice is greater than we expected.”
Excuse me, but everyone paying attention knows that is crazy talk. The prices to consumers are consistently higher — much higher — on average and in most places. The overall cost to the government may be as much as three times greater than he promised when he was hoodwinking the Congressional Budget Office into scoring this monstrosity as revenue-neutral.
Choices greater than expected? Well, I would say they must not have expected much, because choices are demonstrably diminishing. But we know better. He promised to expand our choices.
Apparently, the president can't walk and chew gum at the same time
By Rick MoranPress secretary Jay Carney claims that President Obama is not focused on assigning blame for the disastrous rollout of the Obamacare website. He's more interested in getting "these problems fixed and make sure the system is working."
So he can't do both at the same time?
...This is a no-brainer. Fire Sebelious and anyone else at HHS who oversaw the design and building of the website. What could be simpler? Bureaucrats love flow charts showing lines of authority so don't tell me this project didn't have one. Just lop off the top 3 or 4 names and send them packing.
Poyner Offers a Media Style Guide to Gloss Over Millions of ObamaCare's Victims
By John NolteYou would think this brutal reality sucker-punching so many among The 99% would be a major media story. But to protect ObamaCare and its namesake, it is not. And over at the journalist site Poynter, The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff published a rather chilling Style Guide on how the media can continue to spew ObamaCare happy talk while ignoring or dismissing the millions of ObamaCare victims
Kliff's article is published under the Orwellian title: "How to avoid mistakes in covering the Affordable Care Act." There are five points in the article, and without saying so, Kliff's second point offers the media a primer on how to write around the fact that ObamaCare is breaking every major promise Barack Obama made to the working and middle class: I won’t raise your taxes. If you like your insurance you can keep it. After health reform is the law of the land, your premium costs will decrease.
As problems mount with Obamacare, it seems that Democrats and their allies in the media are trying to detach the name "Obama" from the law that is his "signature achievement," the "game-changer" that was to ensure Americans' health would depend on the state. Instead, we are hearing the term "Affordable Care Act" being applied to the fiasco.
...The best efforts of these pols and their media allies won't matter. Everyone knows OBama piushed this, that it is his baby, and that he continues to defend it. "Obamacare" it is and forever shall remain. Can anyone remember the official name of the act that came to be known as "Hillarycare"?
By Brian Cates
...The goal of ObamaCare is a national transformation from a country where 85% had health insurance & of those 87% were happy with their plan, to one where almost no one will be happy with what they have been forced to take.
After a few years of this new situation, Progressives figured people would be ready to hear their solution to the problem: a single payer system.
If people were never going to voluntarily hand over their private insurance plans, they would just have to be tricked into it then.
Let that sink in: Since American citizens were never going to voluntarily hand over their health insurance plans, a strategy was formed in which those plans would be stripped from them involuntarily. And that strategy was the Affordable Care Act and the multitude of lies that Democrats told about it.
The 10 Rules In The Establishment Republican Handbook
By John Hawkins1) There is nothing ever worth fighting for except Democrat policies: If you're going to fight for something, make sure you're fighting your own base to help the Democrats achieve some policy goal that makes Tea Partiers want to stab themselves in their eyes. This makes you appear reasonable to the mainstream media and the howls of outrage from your base make it more likely that the New York Times will say nice things about you.
2) You must systematically destroy any person, place, or thing that excites conservatives: Nothing good ever comes from conservatives getting excited; so make sure to target anything and anyone that gets them fired up. If it's a person like Ted Cruz or Sarah Palin, trash him or her publicly or have your aides leak stories to the press if you're not brave enough to go that far. If it's a strategy, put it down and undercut it at every opportunity. If it's a group like the Senate Conservatives Fund or Freedomworks, scorn it and complain that it's bad for the Republican Party.
A Deficit of Stories
As much as think tanks, we need storytelling tanks — and a way to disperse the stories far and wide
By Lee HabeebHow did it happen? How did we wake up one day to find ourselves cast as the bad guys for trying to save future generations from a lifetime of indebtedness? Why are we punished for pointing out that if we keep spending more money than we take in, we won’t continue to be a great country? Why do Americans view the Republican party more negatively than they view Democrats, when it’s Democrats who gave us Detroit? And Democrats who might soon turn America into Detroit?
...It’s simple. We’re losing the debate about our deficits, and many other things, because we have a deficit of our own — a storytelling deficit.
...“Those who tell the stories rule society,” Plato once said. And the poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.” Stories are packed not with hard data but with something far more powerful: emotional data. That’s why we remember them and why they’re so easily transported, even through generations. Stories stir our souls.
...But we are not telling enough stories. Mostly, we’re preaching to the choir. Not a bad thing, because choirs need to be fed, but why don’t we own more distribution channels and content providers? Do we believe we can reason our way to victory, using our superior arguments to win back our country?
...Regrettably, we have too few people communicating our story effectively, which is the story of free enterprise and the American character. We’ve developed a deep bench of Ph.D.’s and invested billions in our great think tanks, but we’ve invested almost nothing when it comes to telling stories and making venues where we can share those stories.
...We need our big donors — most of them big dreamers themselves — to invest in a few good men and women who will construct new distribution platforms and storytelling tanks. Invest big, and let those people hire people who look and sound like America, who like America, and who share America’s values. Then watch the audience come, and revenue, too. And watch us shape the cultural narrative for a change.
Let’s stop complaining about our storytelling deficit, about the media bias and our media-pipeline problem. It’s time to construct our own.
The Tea Party: Last Hope for America
By Lloyd Marcus
...we are in a war of two opposing ideas, striving for and celebrating American exceptionalism versus a gimme-my-government-handout America.
Washington elites on both sides of the political aisle have launched an all-out assault to destroy the Tea Party and the lawmakers who represent our principles and values.
...We, the Tea Party, are the instruments of real change in D.C. Quite frankly, Washington elites are appalled by our arrogance. Who do we Tea Party yahoos think we are, trying to make demands of them?
Patriots, I wish to send out a clarion call to stand strong in your commitment to preserving the freedoms we have left and restoring those we have lost. Also, it is vitally crucial that you remain loyal and defend our representatives Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee with every fiber of your being. Without their courageous voices championing our mission, the battle for America is easily lost.
Big Labor threatens to end careers of Democrats who support entitlement reform
By Sean HigginsIn a shot across the bow of political moderates, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka threatened Monday to use Big Labor's resources to unseat any Democrat who supports entitlement reform.
..."Let me just say this one for the record. No politician — I don’t care the political party — will get away with cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits. Don’t try it. And this warning goes double for Democrats. We will never forget. We will never forgive. And we will never stop working to end your career," Trumka said.
By Sonny Bunch
...To me, that’s the worst part of the whole anti-Redskins phenomenon. It’s not opposing the term itself that’s annoying; that’s defensible. It’s not even getting indignant with people who don’t see a problem with using it. It’s the sanctimony coupled with the faddishness of the whole thing. How dare Dan Snyder disagree with something that the left didn’t care about five minutes ago? How dare he? Somewhere the owner of the Cleveland Indians is watching all this and wondering when it’ll be his turn, and who’ll decide when it is.As I joked on Twitter, all the liberals in good standing who are also Redskins fans who have jumped with both feet onto the “R-Word” bandwagon amuse me to no end. You know why you weren’t offended by this last year, or the year before, or in the 1990s, or in the 1980s? Because the word isn’t offensive to anyone other than a handful of professionally outraged busybodies who have spent these last few years trying to convince everyone else that they should also be outraged. It’s absurd.
Hollywood and the New Racism
By J R DunnIf you believe press reports, Twelve Years a Slave is undeniably one of the greatest -- perhaps the greatest -- film of 2013. Not due to any skill in filmmaking, which remains to be seen, or audience response -- the film was only released last weekend. But solely because Slave ...is this year's PC film, one made for the single purpose of preaching a very contemporary and meticulously constructed racial message.
...These films are all examples of a generally unrecognized subgenre of the propaganda film. They are racial films designed to raise an admonishing finger toward the white audience regarding its "legacy" as slaveholders while bolstering the blacks in their conviction of victimhood.
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