Is Chris Christie political road kill?
By Todd Starnes.....I am not a fan of Gov. Christie. He’s not exactly a friend of conservatives and he’s been way too chummy with his BFF President Obama. But give credit where credit is due.
Gov. Christie stood before the cameras and took his lumps like a man. He did so without the use of a TelePrompter. The buck stopped with Christie. In the Obama White House, the buck stops with his newly-bearded spokesman.
The governor seemed genuinely contrite and remorseful. He did not stand before the reporters defiantly shrieking, “What difference does it make?”
He took immediate action and fired the person responsible for the political payback.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but to my knowledge, no one has been fired for Fast & Furious, the Benghazi terrorist attack, the IRS scandal, the NSA scandal or the ObamaCare debacle. No one.
But by golly, the Mainstream Media and Democrats are getting their pound of flesh over bumper-to-bumper traffic over the Hudson River.
Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told the Associated Press the “revelations are troubling for any public official.” But she said: “They also indicate what we’ve come to expect from Gov. Christie – when people oppose him, he exacts retribution.”
That’s almost farcical coming from a presidential administration that launched Internal Revenue Service investigations against Tea Party organizations and pro-life organizations.
Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) called the actions by Christie’s administration “the worst type of political retaliation and abuse of public trust.”
I respectfully disagree. An Internal Revue Service audit of Billy Graham and ordering a church to turn over its membership roles is the worst type of political retaliation and abuse of the public trust.
To our knowledge, Gov. Christie did not secretly spy on traffic reporters or threaten to throw them in jail for suggesting alternative routes to avoid congestion.
No one lost their automobile insurance.
He did not blame the lane closures on a YouTube video. Terrorists did not blow up the bridge nor did they did they harm the head of the Port Authority on the streets of Fort Lee.
He did not order the New Jersey State Police to spy on motorists to determine whether they were using the left lane or the right.
Last summer President Obama took Republicans to task for what he called an “endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals.”
Yet he remains noticeably silent when his own party piles into a pickup truck and tries to run down Christie like he’s a possum crossing a Southern highway.
The scandal is not the closing of the George Washington Bridge. The real scandal is a Mainstream Media that somehow thinks getting home late for Hamburger Helper is akin to terrorists attacking an American consulate in Benghazi.
In the face of such absurdity, Christie was shockingly calm and measured. Had he been a lesser man, I suspect the governor would’ve told those reporters to blow it out their tail pipes.
CNN Host Grills Wasserman Schultz About Thinking Christie’s Hiding Something While Obama Always Claims to Be in the Dark
By Bridget Johnson
CNN host Don Lemon grilled Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on how it’s OK to assume Chris Christie is hiding something while assuming that President Obama is always forthcoming.
Wasserman Schultz was eager to spread the message that the New Jersey governor had committed wrongdoing, a news drop that conveniently steered attention away from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ revelations a day earlier about Hillary Clinton.
...Lemon asked Wasserman Schultz about the controversies faced by Obama over the past year. “Each time the president has claimed that he didn’t know. He didn’t know about the NSA spying on allies. He didn’t know that about the Obamacare website. He didn’t know that if you — that you wouldn’t be able to keep your doctor — so what’s the difference between Christie not knowing and the president not knowing?”
“The difference is the issues that President Obama said he didn’t know about were policy issues. This is a scandal. A scandal that leads right to his office in which his staff and possibly him exacted political retribution in retaliation for a Democratic mayor in Fort Lee refusing to endorse him in his re- election. As a result they ordered the shutdown of three lanes of the George Washington Bridge on the first day of school, snarling traffic, trapping children in school buses,” Wasserman Schultz responded.
Lemon pointed out that Obama calls everything “made-up scandals,” so why couldn’t Christie’s involvement be overblown, too?
PK'S NOTE: Refer to the top of the post's cartoons.
Study: Half of all Congress People Are Now Millionaires
By Daniel DohertyNot everyone is, of course, but more than half are -- for the first time ever. So when the president talks about income inequality in his forthcoming State of the Union Address, I suspect the middle class will feel completely at ease knowing full well the legislative branch truly understands their plight
White House stops short of veto threats on House healthcare bills
By Pete KasperowiczThe Obama administration stopped short Thursday of threatening to veto House bills to require officials to tell people if their personal data has been compromised through ObamaCare, and to require weekly reports on the health law's implementation.
The White House said in two Statements of Administration Policy that it opposed both bills, one of which is set for a Friday vote in the House.
Members of Congress Won't Read This Bill
By Amy PaynePassing bills to find out what’s in them… that was so 2010, right?
Sadly, no.
Any day now, Congress is likely to release the trillion-dollar Trojan horse that is the spending bill for 2014. It’s going to be big, and it’s going to be rushed. And few members of Congress (if any) are going to read it all.
Government budgeting isn’t supposed to be done this way.
It takes 12 spending bills to fund the entire government. But in an omnibus—the type of bill experts are expecting—Congress throws all of those together and just votes once on the whole thing.
This type of rushed, bloated spending bill is guaranteed to include ineffective government programs, giveaways to corporate cronies, and pork projects. And these are not harmless—taxpayers are funding each and every one. This approach will increase spending, waste taxpayer dollars, and raise our national debt.
As Heritage’s Grover M. Hermann Fellow Romina Boccia warns, “If there were more time, such red flags would be revealed, increasing opposition to the effort—which is why appropriators are expected to provide as little time as possible between introducing the bill and the final vote.”
For lawmakers who have said they can’t find any room to cut, Heritage experts have a few ideas. Taxpayers could save $10.2 billion if Congress just got rid of these 10 wasteful federal programs.
Taxpayers need to make it clear that passing bills to see what’s in them—like Obamacare—won’t fly any more. We expect our elected officials to know what they’re voting on—and what they’re charging taxpayers for.
Dem Senator’s Staff Caught Intimidating Agency Over Obamacare Cancellation Numbers
By Daniel DohertyWhen a crisis strikes, every politician reacts differently. Some meet the challenge head on and deal with the consequences; others, of course, do not. On Thursday, CompleteColorado.com reported that Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) -- who, coincidentally, is up for re-election in 2014 -- pressed the Colorado Division of Insurance last November to either review the number of cancelled policies in the state, or water-down what the word “cancellation” means. The end-goal was to make it seem as if the total number of citizens who lost their health insurance in Colorado was lower than reported.
...Devastating. Here we have a U.S. Senate office caught red-handed engaging in the politics of intimidation and coercion. How many voters, if they only knew about this story, would be inclined to support Senator Udall in the next election cycle? Hmmm.
PK'S NOTE: Remember that thing about changing the language...?
....Pelosi has referred to the law previously as Obamacare, although she also told Meet the Press host David Gregory she’d “always” called it the Affordable Care Act during a contentious November interview.
Full exchange:
Q: The three “Obamacare” bills on the
floor tomorrow in the House, some Democrats have indicated they might
be open to supporting them. How strongly are you pushing members to vote
against them? And does it start to become a sign of weakening support
if more Democrats –
NANCY PELOSI: Absolutely not. First of
all, it’s called the “Affordable Care Act.” If that’s what you’re
referencing, yeah, they are going after the Affordable Care Act. They’re
saying, let’s do everything we can to take away health insurance from 9
million Americans who already have it and prevent many more millions of
Americans from having it.
Beware the Left-Wing-Funded "Main Street" Republicans
By Michelle MalkinWhat do George Soros, labor unions and money-grubbing former GOP Rep. Steven LaTourette all have in common? They're control freaks. They're power hounds. They're united against tea party conservatives. And they all have operated under the umbrella of D.C. groups masquerading as "Main Street" Republicans.
LaTourette heads up the so-called "Main Street Partnership," which claims to represent "thoughtful," "pragmatic," "common sense" and "centrist" Republican leadership. Reality check: The pro-bailout, pro-debt, pro-amnesty, anti-drilling group founded by former liberal New York GOP Congressman Amory Houghton includes three liberal Senate Republicans (John McCain, Mark Kirk and Susan Collins) and 52 center-left House Republicans. LaTourette himself is a self-serving Beltway barnacle who held office for nearly two decades. Now he's leveraging his new tea party-bashing platform to benefit a family-operated lobbying business.
The New York Times shed light on LaTourette's tangled web of GOP establishment outfits last week. But that story just scratched the surface. As the paper reported, the Main Street Partnership is a nonprofit group that charges members up to $25,000 per year to rub elbows with Washington's rich and powerful. The Main Street Advocacy Fund and the Defending Main Street SuperPAC are political satellites planning to amass $8 million to bolster Republican liberals and moderates facing tea party challengers in 2014. McDonald Hopkins Government Strategies is LaTourette's lobbying firm.
...Along with the anti-tea party U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the "Main Street" fat cats and union leaders have banded together to help President Obama push through illegal alien amnesty. The payoff: cheap labor for big business, cheap votes for the Democratic Party.
Main Street Partnership's chief operating and financial officer is Sarah Chamberlain Resnick. She also serves on the partnership's board of directors and previously served as an officer of the soft-money-raising Main Street Individual Fund. The MSIF is yet another spinoff group that received $50,000 from progressive billionaire George Soros in 2002 soon after it was created. Soros also dangled a "seven-figure contribution" in front of the Main Street Partnership, but Resnick said the group declined that one. The MSIF accepted a separate $50,000 Soros donation during the 2004 election cycle. It was mysteriously returned in November 2005 after I called attention to it.
These various groups are legally independent entities on paper, but have shared staff and legal resources.When I reported on the "Main Street" farce eight years ago, the partnership's counsel sent me a threatening letter baselessly claiming I had made "libelous" statements about its network. My sin? Exposing the radical environmental funders of "Main Street" Republicans who had sabotaged House conservative efforts to open up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The "Main Street" Republicans back then gloated over their successful campaign to force squishy GOP leaders in D.C. to cave in to the left. There's nothing principled about their agenda. It's not about "common sense." It's about the Benjamins. These statists in populist clothing are running a Washington incumbency protection racket. Same as it ever was.
Why Obama's Promise That Americans Could Keep Their Insurance Was So Important
By Carrie Lukas....New laws tend to be sold as helping those who truly face hardship and challenges. Proponents focus on the benefits provided to those sympathetic individuals and ignore the many other very real, though often less obvious, impacts of the proposal.
Take the “Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act” or the FAMILY Act, which was recently introduced by Democrats in Congress. This legislation would dramatically expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to create a federal entitlement program to provide paid-leave to qualified workers. Workers would be entitled to 60 days of family and medical leave per year during which they would receive two-thirds of their average pay from the federal government.
(PK'S NOTE: WHAT??!!??)
Proponents claim this would be an inexpensive program providing needed assistance to those who currently lack paid-leave, and would particularly benefit women by providing paid maternity leave. Undoubtedly, they will point to real-life, tear-jerking examples of people who would benefit from this new entitlement: A single mom working hard for $30,000 a year, but who lacks paid leave and whose child has just come down with cancer. That’s heartbreaking. A young married couple struggling to get by as both parents work; after a difficult C-section birth, the women needed to take time off to recover but didn’t have paid leave. Now they are facing bankruptcy. Again, it’s heartbreaking.
Of course, everyone wants to help those people. We want a system that takes care of those in trouble. Yet before signing on to sweeping legislation that would create a new federally-administrated, national entitlement program and effectively change the employment contract of 140 million working Americans, people should ask, isn’t there a more targeted way to help those facing such instances of hardship?
After all, while some will benefit from the new entitlement program, others will pay a considerable cost. Beyond the new payroll tax to fund the new benefit, there are other costs that will impact wages and employment opportunities, particularly for women. Knowing that any worker facing a medical issue can take up to three months of paid leave creates a new, big risk for employers. While the federal government would pick up the direct cost of workers’ wages, businesses would still have to identify and train a replacement, or shift work to remaining employees. That can result in significant lost productivity, particularly for very small businesses. (PK'S NOTE: Do they truly not understand where the "federal money" comes from?)
...A key lesson from ObamaCare is that major new laws and new entitlement programs impact everyone, not just those who receive checks from the federal government. And the biggest costs often dwarf the direct new taxes that are imposed.
Experts slam DOJ letter telling schools to implement race-based punishments
By Robby SoaveEducation experts decried a new memo from the Departments of Justice and Education that instructs public schools throughout the country to cease punishing disruptive students if they fall into certain racial categories, such as black or Hispanic.
The letter, released on Wednesday, states that it is a violation of federal law for schools to punish certain races more than others, even if those punishments stem from completely neutral rules. For example, equal numbers of black students and white students should be punished for tardiness, even if black students are more often tardy than white students.
Here is the relevant section of the letter:
“Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race.One may wonder what schools should be policing, if they are not allowed to address tardiness, possession of prohibited devices, insubordination and school uniform violations — but the letter does not elaborate on disciplinary causes it finds acceptable.
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