Obama heads to Asia as tensions in Ukraine continue to flare

By Susan Crabtree

President Obama is moving forward with his seven-day trip to Asia this week as clashes between Ukraine and Russia continue and tensions in the region continue to simmer.
The president will leave Tuesday evening for Tokyo, Japan, where he will begin his four-country tour through Asia. After Japan, he will head to South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines on a make-up trip that was originally scheduled to do during the government shutdown last fall.

While Obama administration officials touted the travel as an important opportunity to to pursue a “strategy of rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific region,” developments in Ukraine are continuing to make headlines and distract from the president's long-attempted pivot to Asia.
....Obama is dispatching Vice President Joe Biden to Kiev Monday night. After an agreement last week aimed at easing the tensions, the Ukrainian government said it would set down its weapons and cease trying to take back buildings occupied by pro-Russian forces for the Easter weekend. But the accusations of blame between Ukraine and Russia continued over the weekend, after a shootout at a checkpoint in eastern Ukraine held by the separatists left at least three of them dead.
Before Obama departs for Japan, he and the first family will host the White House Easter Egg Roll Monday, and Tuesday he will travel to Oso, Wash., to view the devastation from the recent mudslide and meet with families affected by the disaster.

Iran Won’t Have a Nuclear Weapon. Period!

By Roger L Simon
What happens when presidents lie?
The American public has had plenty of experience with this in recent years. Liar-president could be the new hyphenate occupation like writer-producer or architect-contractor. Almost every president has shaded things a bit, but three modern ones have been unabashed bull artists — Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and, of course, Barack Obama.
Clinton ultimately got a pass for his prevarications. Nixon didn’t. Neither deserved one. But our current liar-president deserves one even less, because his lies have been of substance, affecting policy. Nixon and Clinton just lied in self-defense — normal human cowardice.
Obama is something else again. He lies proactively and often reflexively. By proactively I mean the obvious, such as “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period!” By reflexively I mean that emotional no-man’s-land when someone says something they don’t really mean, but they say it anyway because they think it sounds good or makes them seem as if they are doing the right thing.
The red line against Syrian chemical weapons is a perfect example. Did Obama ever have any intention of following up on that? Who knows? (Not only are most of those weapons still in Syria, the French say Assad may still be using them.)
Does the president himself know he is lying? I am not sure. Obama would not be the first person to think that pronouncing something made it so — and he has spent his life from a very young age surrounded by people who have not contradicted him. The implications of this are quite disturbing, if you think about them.
It’s a form of what shrinks call “magical thinking” and is an indication of a disconnected personality. It is so, if you think so, as Pirandello famously put it (alternatively translated as “Right you are, if you think you are.”)
But whatever the case, Obama’s lies have far greater impact than the other presidents’ because almost no one across an increasingly fractious world believes him anymore. What a relief that must be to the Iranians not to have to pay attention to his huffing and puffing about sanctions or whatever pathetic amount of saber-rattling, already pro forma, he might do. The nuclear talks can now go on in the spirit to which the mullahs are accustomed — a charade. Obama is one of them — he lies too. Everybody lies. Hahaha.
So they can produce a faux document, assuming we even get to read it, that no one adheres to and move on. Does anyone expect otherwise? Could a man who could not even be honest about the details of a health insurance plan be trusted to negotiate the enrichment of uranium in a secretive country on another continent governed by religious fanatics who have been hiding their activities for decades and for whom deception is a way of life?
What will Obama say if and when a dirty nuke explodes in one of our shopping malls, thousands die and the global economy goes into free fall? Maybe he will forget he ever said “Iran won’t have a nuclear weapon. Period!”
Okay, he never said “period” in this case. Everyone would have doubled over in hysterical laughter. Maybe he’d just press that old reset button with Russia and get Vladimir on the line to help solve things.

GAO report: White House directly involved in Enroll America fundraising

By Ed Morrissey
When Congress refused to appropriate more funds for ObamaCare enrollment after already committing a deluge of cash to that effort, now-outgoing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius began working the phones to perform an end run around Capitol Hill. Sebelius began calling corporate CEOs to push them into donating millions of dollars to Enroll America, an outside group started by Anne Filipic, a former White House staffer. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigated, and discovered that Filipic wasn’t the only White House staffer involved in the fundraising campaign:
The White House allegedly was involved in seeking financial support for a pro-ObamaCare group, according to a new report issued in response to Republican concerns about the administration’s fundraising efforts.
Until now, outgoing Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was the only official known to have solicited financial support for Enroll America, a nonprofit that promoted enrollment for the Affordable Care Act. But a Government Accountability Office report released Monday detailed not only the secretary’s involvement but that of a White House adviser.
...It’s worth noting at this point that HHS regulates these markets in significant ways, especially after the passage of ObamaCare. This wasn’t just a case of working the phones for a charity. This was the Cabinet official with the most impact on these businesses extolling the efforts of a supposedly independent group launched by a close adviser to the President. It doesn’t take much ink to connect those dots, which is why insurers began complaining loudly enough about the pressure for Congress and the media to take notice.
It was a shakedown, pure and simple, to wring more money and assistance out of industry players in order to bypass Congress on funding operations within the executive branch. That should prompt Congress to demand more answers, and perhaps to cut off even more funding to HHS until they get them.

Delaying Keystone Decision Makes Very Little Sense

By Daniel Doherty
The bombshell announcement last week that the White House would delay (once again) making a decision vis-à-vis the Keystone XL Pipeline until after the 2014 midterm elections is leaving many pundits on cable television scratching their heads. One the one hand, the decision ostensibly makes sense; progressive mega donors have pledged lots of money to re-elect Democrats who oppose the project, and thus green lighting the pipeline would significantly imperil the size of the party’s war chest come November. On the other hand, many vulnerable red state Senate Democrats support the project and desperately need an issue to campaign on that is popular with the public. This is it. But because the administration feels as if they’re in a ‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’ situation, they’re punting until after the midterms. Go figure.

Supreme Court to address whether campaign lies are a crime

By Sean Lengell
The Supreme Court is set to address whether the age-old act of political mudslinging and false accusations are a crime, with the fate -- or at least the tone -- of campaign attack ads at stake.
The case brings into conflict two deeply held constitutional values: the right of wide open and unlimited speech, particularly in a political realm, and the notion of protecting the truth — especially when a person's charter character is maligned.
The high court on Tuesday is scheduled to hear oral arguments for Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, which centers on a dispute between former Rep. Steve Driehaus and the anti-abortion group, which waged an aggressive attack on the Ohio Democrat's failed re-election bid in 2010

Obama admin wants to require companies to give workers’ numbers, addresses to unions before labor elections

By Patrick Howley
The Obama administration is poised to change regulations to allow for union “ambush elections” in which workers have less time to decide whether or not to join a union — and in which workers’ phone numbers and home addresses are provided to unions.
The administration’s National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) proposed rules would allow for union elections — in which workers at a company vote whether or not to unionize — to be held 10 days after a petition is filed. And what, exactly, would be happening to the unions during those 10 days? The new rules require employers to disclose workers’ personal information, including phone numbers, home addresses, and information about when they work their shifts.
Insiders close to the situation believe the new rules will almost certainly go into effect with few or no fundamental changes.

Both at Home and Abroad, Obama's Presidency is Floundering

By Donald Lambro
Barack Obama is getting a number of critical report cards on his foreign and domestic policies lately.
Here at home, Janet Yellen, in her first monetary policy address as the head of the Federal Reserve Board, said the labor markets were still weak, and that it will likely take two years or more before the U.S. fully recovers from its recession. Ouch.
If Yellen's forecast proves right, this means it will have taken Obama's administration nearly eight years to lift our economy out of its long and painful lethargy.
She expressed grave concern that the economy's 6.7 percent unemployment rate was still significantly above the jobless level the Fed considers normal.
While Yellen was voicing some anguish over the large number of long-term unemployed and those who can find only low-paying, part-time work, Obama was campaigning in Oakdale, Penn., dishing out job-training grants at a local community college.
Obama has been spending tens of billions of dollars on a wasteful, duplicative maze of job-training programs that do nothing to create new jobs.
....With his party facing its toughest election challenges in years, "and burdened with persistently high unemployment, Obama is playing the race, gender and class cards. Fabricating fear and injustice, such tactics keep the economy in slow gear and make worse the very people the president professes to help," says University of Maryland business economist Peter Morici.
....In a front-page story Thursday, The Washington Post took the president to task for his failed policy, announced three years ago, to refocus U.S. attention on Asia, which his advisers said would become a pillar of his foreign policy.
"The result, as Obama prepares to travel to the region next week, has been a loss of confidence among some U.S. allies about the administration's commitment at a time of escalating regional tensions," Post correspondent David Nakamura said in a devastating critique of Obama's Asian policy.
"Relations between Japan and South Korea are at one of the lowest points since World War II, and China has provoked both with aggressive actions at sea despite a personal plea from Vice President Biden in December," he reported.

Government funded, peer-reviewed study concludes biofuels worse than gasoline for the environment

By Thomas Lifson

The $30 billion or so wasted each year on the federal government’s biofuels mandates and subsidies needs to end now. The program is a complete disaster, and now has been shown to harm the environment, something anti-warmist skeptics (aka, deniers) have warned about for many years. Even the left wing UK Guardian reports via AP:

Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a new study shows, challenging the Obama administration's conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change.

A $500,000 study – paid for by the federal government and released Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change – concludes that biofuels made with corn residue release 7% more greenhouse gases in the early years compared with conventional gasoline.

...Actually, this analysis has been coming, even from warmist central at the UN. In Forbes, James Conca reports:

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released two of its Working Group reports at the end of last month (WGI and WGIII), and their short discussion of biofuels has ignited a fierce debate as to whether they’re of any environmental benefit at all.

The IPCC was quite diplomatic in its discussion, saying “Biofuels have direct, fuel‐cycle GHG emissions that are typically 30–90% lower than those for gasoline or diesel fuels. However, since for some biofuels indirect emissions—including from land use change—can lead to greater total emissions than when using petroleum products, policy support needs to be considered on a case by case basis” (IPCC 2014 Chapter 8).

The summary in the new report also states, “Increasing bioenergy crop cultivation poses risks to ecosystems and biodiversity” (WGIII).

...So we are starving poor people overseas and stretching the budgets of our own poor for a program that has no environmental benefits. Can we please kill it now?

The Increasing Desperation of Democrats

Slanders and lies may be part of a deliberate strategy to drive up turnout in November.

By John Fund

....What is going on? Increasingly, journalists who cover the White House are concluding that the smears are part of a conscious strategy to distract voters from Obamacare, the sluggish economy, and foreign-policy reverses; the attacks are intended, the thinking goes, to drive up resentment and hence turnout among the Democratic base.
Major Garrett, the CBS White House correspondent, has talked with White House aides who confirm that the administration is working from the theory of “stray voltage,” as developed by former White House senior adviser David Plouffe. “The theory goes like this,” Garrett wrote. “Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness,”
Deliberately misstating information about key issues in order to keep certain issues before the public is often a premeditated strategy. “The tactic represents one more step in the embrace of cynicism that has characterized President Obama’s journey in office,” John Dickerson wrote at Slate. “Facts, schmacts. As long as people are talking about an issue where my party has an advantage with voters, it’s good.”
...I’m not so sure. Democratic consultants may not care in the short term that such tactics diminish the office of the president and undermine trust among the American people. But Dickerson suggests that presidents are right to “worry that people won’t think they aren’t honest or trustworthy if they keep using facts that don’t pan out.” A new Fox poll finds that 61 percent of Americans now believe that President Obama lies some or all of the time on “important matters,” while only 15 percent say Obama never lies. But among his base voters, 37 percent of African Americans and 31 percent of Democrats say he never lies: These are the people Democrats hope can be brought to the polls with overheated rhetoric.

Sharyl Attkisson Says She ‘Became a Target’ of the Left Over Her Reporting — and Guess How CBS News Treated Bush Compared to Obama

By Dave Urbanski
Sharyl Attkisson, the investigative reporter who resigned from CBS News and said the network clamped down on stories critical of the Obama administration, on Sunday said Media Matters targeted her and may have been paid to do so.
Attkisson added in her interview with CNN’s “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter that while she never was discouraged from hard-hitting reports on the George W. Bush administration, when it came to her critical coverage of the Obama White House, CBS regularly balked.
As for Media Matters, a left-leaning outfit that critiques news coverage, Attkisson said that “when I persisted with Fast and Furious and some of the green energy stories I was doing, I clearly at some point became a target.”
...As for the differences between how CBS News brass treated and covered the Bush compared to the Obama administration, Attkisson noted that she “didn’t sense any resistance to doing stories that were perceived to be negative to the Bush administration by anybody ever.” But as for the Obama White House, she said “I have done stories that were not received well because people thought they would reflect poorly upon this administration.”
Attkisson went further, noting a “fairly well-discussed” topic inside CBS News “that there are some managers recently who have been so ideologically entrenched that there is a feeling and discussion that some of them, certainly not all of them, have a difficult time viewing a story that may reflect negatively upon government or the administration as a story of value.”
....Attkisson also gave parting advice to readers and viewers of the news in search of the truth.
“There are very sophisticated efforts to manipulate the images and the information that you see every day, in ways that you won’t recognize,” she said. “And I think we can all be a little more savvy about that.”

But Seriously, Just How Slow-Witted is John Boehner?

By C. Edmund Wright

As he moves from lobbyists to the golf course, from press conferences to the tanning bed, he remains oblivious to all that is around him. He has power, incredible power, and yet to this day he has no understanding of the election that made it so. Moreover, all around him are astonishing opportunities for him to be an historic figure -- one who could and should be the man who did more than any other single person in turning back the red tide of Obama. It’s all there for Speaker of the House, and yet John Boehner manages to miss it all -- as he guarantees his spot as the most spectacular failure in the history of Speakers of the House.

So seriously, just how dense is this guy? I’m not being flippant, or overly dramatic. His performance, in light of the momentous circumstances, necessitates just that question in the most literal and serious sense. Mr. Boehner, I frankly think you’re sort of stupid. Either that, or you are plagued by an amazing lack of situational awareness.

Consider: For months, the IRS has done their best to guarantee that they are known as nothing but part of the Democratic Party election machine. Lois Lerner remains such an unsympathetic figure that the last public photo of her might as well have been a set of legs with red slippers sticking out from under a house. Elijah Cummings has been exposed as a corrupt and inarticulate embarrassment, and an email trail is emerging that would make Nixon’s use of the IRS look like child’s play. This one scandal is an incredible teaching opportunity of the inherent evils of the liberal bureaucratic political state. Donald Rumsfeld understands this. Boehner? Not so much. He’s talking about immigration deform.

If that weren’t enough, there is another epoch-making story unfolding in Nevada, as the Bundy Ranch is being invaded by an army of militarized bureaucrats that most of us didn’t know exists -- working for a bureaucracy that is apparently in charge of more land mass than the majority of world governments. Who the hell are these robo-crats, and who is paying for and authorizing their intimidating and dangerous cross-dressing? Apparently, in this case, the boy king of this hidden empire is a former political aide from the office of Harry Reid. Again, a silver platter of an opportunity has presented itself.

But no, Boehner would rather work behind the scenes to spoil the efforts of the Tea Party groups.

Oh, and while we’re at it, the Bundy story is far more than just some delicious viral YouTube videos. It brings up some very important questions, such as why does the Federal Government own more land in Nevada than everybody combined owns in the United Kingdom? Why does the BLM control one eighth of the entire landmass of the country? And just how many dirty Harry Reid deals are going on everywhere while most of us had no idea how big the BLM was and how little of our own country the rest of us own?

Uh, Mr. Boehner, these are questions of stupefying importance, and while millions of Americans are asking them, they will not get the traction they deserve until someone in a position of power asks them. You know, like a Speaker who is in the opposition party?

This is all erupting of course after many months of hearing about drones, wire tapping, data mining and all kinds of other government gone wild amusements. Oh, and lest we forget, this is after seven months of the nation being shown the withering failure of Obama Care -- itself an hour by hour lesson on why those wanting government solutions are wrong and those of us opposing them are right.

There is an obvious mosaic that the simple unfolding of events is presenting, an unmistakable pattern of a government that is too big, too powerful, too arbitrary, too corrupt and too incompetent to do anything right. People are scared of them, sick of them, and would rush to the support of anyone who would but grab this opportunity and run with it. Government bureaucrats have foisted a nauseating sclerosis on our entire culture, and these cubicle dwelling microbes are wielding the incredible power at their disposal that results from endless government regulations combined with their anonymity, invisibility and isolation.

We are a nation of subjects whose lives and businesses are being destroyed, largely by people we will never meet and cannot confront. This is what the bureaucratic state does, and there is supposed to be a political party that opposes this. There is a political base of supporters that damned sure do. Never in our history can our arguments be made simply from the daily headlines. Never has the battlefield of ideas been so softened by reality. Never has there been such a possibility for a Speaker of the House of the opposition party.

But regrettably, that position is now held by a man simply not clever enough to realize it. Less than two years into his career, Boehner helped craft the marvelous Contract with America. Ten years later, he had sunk to helping write “No Child Left Behind.” And ten years after that, his intellectual slippage has continued. So Mr. Boehner, just how obtuse are you? Seriously.

PK'S NOTE: Home school, home school, home school. Our country is lost.

See what they’ll be teaching in the Chicago public schools

By Chuck Ross
Chicago public schools are set to introduce a new Afro-centric curriculum, according to a closely-guarded copy obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The curriculum covers kindergarten through tenth grade and is designed to align with Common Core. It includes a web

link to TheAfrican.com, a website whose publisher decries “fake-Jews” and calls the United States a “Zionist-occupied enemy territory.”
The site also claims that the world will end sometime this year and that President Barack Obama is “merely another trick of [the beast of the 4th Kingdom].”
...But some of the subjects, including those discussed at TheAfrican.com, are heavily controversial. The Chicago curriculum topic discussed at TheAfrican.com is “The Black Athena,” a book written by historian Martin Bernal. Sixth and ninth grade Chicago students will discuss the book and an accompanying full-length Youtube documentary.

In the work, Bernal claimed that ancient Greeks stole much of its civilization from Egypt, which, Bernal asserts, was populated by blacks. The Chicago curriculum entertains rebuttals to Bernal’s theory but skews heavily in its favor.

Ron Fritze, a historian, the dean of Athens State University, and author of the book “Invented Knowledge,” says that Bernal’s theories are not historically accurate and have no place in Chicago schools.

....Chicago fifth graders will be exposed to another controversial and widely-criticized theory in Ivan van Sertima’s “They Came Before Columbus.” Van Sertima, who taught at Rutgers University, theorized that Africans populated the Americas well before Columbus.
But critics largely panned the work. In a 1977 New York Times book review, archaeologist Glyn Daniel called van Sertima’s work “ignorant rubbish” and labeled it “myth and folklore.”
Fritze is critical as well.
“I and most historians of exploration consider ‘They Came Before Columbus’ to be very wrong in its contentions about African voyages to the Americas,” he told TheDCNF.
Nevertheless, the IAAAS curriculum provides a unit on the work that includes links to seven-part Youtube video series.

...The Chicago curriculum does focus heavily on well established history and events — including discussions on slavery, the histories of black inventors, the civil rights movement and President Obama.

But other sections also delve into controversial areas. The eighth grade literacy section unit, titled “Being an Advocate to Social Justice,” directs students to the website for the American Civil Liberties Union. It also includes a poem titled “Racism is Around Me Everywhere,” cartoons from the website LeftyCartoons.com, and it encourages discussion of Attorney General Eric Holder’s infamous “nation of cowards” quote.

The ninth grade literacy section encompasses a study of the Pan African Movement. Teachers are encouraged to engage their students in debate over voluntary segregation. “Have someone read the following resolution, Resolved: voluntary segregation promotes growth in a diverse community. Teams then participate in a graded formal debate.”

Tenth graders are introduced to “critical race theory,” which holds that institutional racism and white privilege are pervasive throughout society.