After Making Statement on Ft. Hood, Obama Heads to DNC Fundraiser
By Katie PavlichAs you know by now there has been another shooting at Ft. Hood in Texas. At this point, there are fatalities and multiple people are severely wounded. President Obama briefly left a fundraiser in Chicago to make a statement about the situation, saying "We are going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”
Nedra Pickler ✔ @nedrapickler Follow
Obama spoke from Chicago Cut steakhouse, in same room where he just met w/ about 25 DNC donors who paid up to $32,400
On Wednesday evening, President Obama was being kept up to date on the developments from the mass shooting at Fort Hood while reportedly attending fundraisers for the 2014 election cycle. According to White House spokesman Josh Earnest, Obama is in the loop while at the fundraisers.
Nedra Pickler ✔ @nedrapickler Follow
Now in Obama motorcade heading to 2nd DNC fundraiser in Lincoln Park home w/ about 55 donors who paid up to $10K
Obama Calls GOP Policies 'Stinkburger' and 'Meanwich'
By Warner Todd HustonOn Wednesday, during a visit to the University of Michigan, President Obama dumbed down his rhetoric to BuzzFeed-style name calling by saying that Republicans are offering "stinkburger" ideas that are a real "meanwich."
Obama spoke at the University of Michigan before a crowd of some 1,000 students and a limited number of reporters mainly to sell a hike in the minimum wage, pushing his theme, "give America a raise."
As CBS News's Mark Knoller tweeted from the event, President Obama slammed the GOP for its economic policies but granted that "they're not necessarily cold-hearted." Obama then went on to say that if GOP policies were deli food, they'd be a "stinkburger" or a "meanwich."
Apparently the deli that Obama visited before the speech was still in his head. From the podium he said, "If they tried to sell this sandwich at Zingerman’s they’d have to call it the Stinkburger or the Meanwich."
The President told students that regarding the minimum wage, "You've got a choice. You can give America the shaft, or you can give it a raise." He further claimed that a raise in the wage would "lift millions of people out of poverty right away."
The sales pitch is strange enough in that out of the 144 million Americans who work for a living, only 1.6 million workers (or only 1.1 percent of the workforce) make the minimum wage, so it is a bit hard to understand how a hike in the wage is "giving America a raise." Yet Obama got even farther out into the political weeds by indulging in some childish-sounding name calling in his comments about his GOP opponents.
It seems that Obama felt he had to dumb down his rhetoric for a university filled with youngsters bred on BuzzFeed and Upworthy instead of Lincoln or Cicero.
PK'S NOTE: For $700 million you could give each and every American almost $2 million to pay for our own medical costs. Think about it.
With Nearly $700M to Advertise Obamacare, Obama Claims WH Didn't Make 'Hard Sell'
By Tony LeeEven though President Barack Obama's White House budgeted nearly $700 million to market Obamacare, Obama falsely claimed on Tuesday that his administration never tried to sell the law feverishly.
"We didn't make a hard sell," Obama farcically claimed on Tuesday as he was touting the 7.1 million Americans who have enrolled in Obamacare. "We didn't have billions of dollars of commercials like some critics did."
Perhaps he made his remarks in an attempt to make it seem like there was a lot of demand for Obamacare and Americans signed up for it without being compelled to do so.
But the Obama administration budgeted at least $684 million to promote the law, according to an Associated Press report. And the Obama administration's full-court press to blanket the airwaves with advertisements and public service announcements was evident last month. Obama and his team convinced popular athletes like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James to sell Obamacare as commercials for the law ran on outlets like ESPN. Administration officials went on various radio shows. Obama even appeared on Between Two Ferns. And Vice President Joe Biden, as Breitbart News reported, went on Rachel Ray's show on the deadline to sign up for Obamacare to sell the plan as host Rachel Ray was moved to tears.
In addition to sports stars, entertainers like Alyssa Milano, Sarah Silverman, Taye Diggs, Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Wilde, and Gabrielle Union, among others, have been selling the law for the last six months, and their endorsements are often worth more and cut through the clutter faster than the infamous "Pajama Boy" ads.
Report: EPA tested deadly pollutants on humans to push Obama admin’s agenda
By Michael BastaschThe Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting dangerous experiments on humans over the past few years in order to justify more onerous clean air regulations.
The agency conducted tests on people with health issues and the elderly, exposing them to high levels of potentially lethal pollutants, without disclosing the risks of cancer and death, according to a newly released government report.
These experiments exposed people, including those with asthma and heart problems, to dangerously high levels of toxic pollutants, including diesel fumes, reads a EPA inspector general report obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The EPA also exposed people with health issues to levels of pollutants up to 50 times greater than the agency says is safe for humans.
The EPA conducted five experiments in 2010 and 2011 to look at the health effects of particulate matter, or PM, and diesel exhaust on humans. The IG’s report found that the EPA did get consent forms from 81 people in five studies. But the IG also found that “exposure risks were not always consistently represented.”
“Further, the EPA did not include information on long-term cancer risks in its diesel exhaust studies’ consent forms,” the IG’s report noted. “An EPA manager considered these long-term risks minimal for short-term study exposures” but “human subjects were not informed of this risk in the consent form.”
According to the IG’s report, “only one of five studies’ consent forms provided the subject with information on the upper range of the pollutant” they would be exposed to, but even more alarming is that only “two of five alerted study subjects to the risk of death for older individuals with cardiovascular disease.”
PK'S NOTE: The part I don't understand.... and this goes for a lot of what Obama has done....no President can make law with Executive Orders. Why are they (Congress) allowing him this power? It absolutely baffles me.
House Republicans' Secret Immigration Ploy
By Matthew Boyle & Jonathan StrongHouse Republicans are quietly working to insert immigration legislation into the text of the Department of Defense authorization bill that would allow so-called DREAMers to obtain permanent legal residency by joining the military, Breitbart News has learned.
The language, which if successful would mark the first effort by House Republicans to provide any form of amnesty since the GOP took control of the House in 2010, has set off a panic among top immigration hawks that the effort could open an immigration Pandora’s box, paving the way for broader legislation.
.....“If we're going to put out the bait, which is: come into the U.S., break in, so to speak, smuggle yourself into the military, put on the uniform of the United States, take an oath to uphold our Constitution, which may or may not mean anything to them, and now we're going to reward you with citizenship -- I think it's just a bizarre thing to do, to reward people for breaking our laws. That's what amnesty is,” said Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King.
....At the same time, though, GOP proponents of Gang of Eight-style legislation have recently begun to worry that the window for enacting immigration bills is rapidly closing, causing them to ramp up their behind-the-scenes efforts.
The reason: a growing certainty that President Obama is planning to enact amnesty by executive fiat, blowing up the chances of legislation for the rest of his presidency.
“It's going to happen. He's getting a lot of pressure, and he's already told some people he's going to. He's told a bunch of people. I think he will. I think he has to,” said one senior member of Congress who asked that his name not be used.
“I'm hearing that he will do it by August. When that happens, it's poof! The right will go off the rails, just because it's unconstitutional -- and they'll be right about that stuff. They'll fly off the rails, which will then get the Democrats [to close ranks]. And then it's a presidential election. That's coming, and as soon as that happens, it's over,” the lawmaker said.
...King, who came to learn of the secretive effort in an interview, said he will offer an amendment to the NDAA bill to strip it of the immigration provisions and work diligently to kill the proposal.
“I can't let something like this happen. I can't let it happen,” King said.
The Government Motors scandal deepens
By Thomas Lifson
No matter how sympathetic a figure General Motors
CEO Mary Barra presents (a woman leading an auto maker!!), the company
has been caught deciding that it would be cheaper to let people die in
accidents caused by a faulty ignition switch than to correct the
problem. Daniel Howes of the Detroit News explains the smoking gun:
“None of the solutions represents an acceptable business case.” Credit those to a still-anonymous GM engineer, who argued in an internal memo that fixes for a faulty ignition switch blamed for at least 13 deaths and more than 30 accidents could not be done cheaply enough to make it worthwhile for the GM of a decade ago.
....David Harsanyi, writing at The Federalist, asks some embarrassing questions for the government that bailed out GM:
Before plowing billions of tax dollars into saving the United Automobile Workers, did the Car Czar or any other Obama officials take extra care to review DOT records to insure that taxpayers would not be funding the preventable deaths of American citizens? (snip)… surely the possibility of this kind of negligence is worth a look. Can anyone with access to the administration ask some of these questions? Because if you take credit for “saving” a company (actually, an “industry,” as no one would ever driven again if Obama hadn’t saved the day) you also get credit for “saving” the real-life unscrupulous version of the company. “I placed my bet on American workers,” Obama told union workers in 2012. “And I’d make that same bet again any day of the week. And now, three years later that bet is paying off.” Betting $80 billion of someone else’s money to prop up sympathetic labor unions isn’t exactly fraught with political risk. Unless it turns out that your administration was less concerned about the safety defects of the company you owned than the company you disliked. That would be corruption.
Jimmy Fallon mocks Obama’s supposed 7.1 million Obamacare sign-up triumph
By Jamie WeinsteinThe host of NBC’s “Tonight Show” continued his comedic assault on Obamacare Tuesday night, mocking Obama’s supposed triumph in signing up 7.1 million Americans on the Obamacare exchanges by the March 31 deadline.
“The White House says it has surpassed its goal for people enrolled in Obamacare. It’s amazing what you can achieve when you make something mandatory and fine people if they don’t do it and then keep extending the deadline for months,” Fallon quipped. “It’s like a Cinderella story. It’s just a beautiful thing. You make everyone do it.”
“If you still haven’t enrolled, you might have to pay a penalty called the ‘Individual Shared Responsibility Payment,’ which is 1 percent of your salary,” he continued. “Then Americans said, ‘Hey, good thing I don’t have a job
.’”The First Amendment Is Such a Nuisance
By Rich LowryEvery time the Supreme Court rules in favor of the First Amendment in a campaign-finance case, the left recoils in disgust.
The court’s 5-4 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC is the latest occasion for the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. The court struck down the limit on the aggregate amount a donor can give to candidates and political party committees, an arbitrary restriction it ruled incompatible with First Amendment protections for political expression.
In unison, the left pronounced itself outraged. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who had $11 million in his campaign treasury as of December 2013 — despite being a senator for life, called the decision “another step on the road to ruination.”
The First Amendment is for strippers, flag burners, pornographers, funeral protesters and neo-Nazis, but not for people trying to give money to political parties or candidates. They are a suspect class, marked out as a threat to democracy because they want to participate in democracy.
.....But if you accept the base limits, the aggregate limits on the total anyone can give to candidates in a single cycle ($48,600) and to party committees and PACs in a single cycle ($74,600) make no sense. By the logic of the law, if a contribution to one candidate of $5,200 or less is not corrupting, there should be no fear that a donor giving a couple of dozen candidates that amount will be corrupting. Each of the candidates is receiving the proscribed amount or less.
Once a donor has hit the aggregate limit, though, it functions as an outright ban on further donations to candidates or parties — even though these individual donations aren’t corrupting. This is an impingement of his or her political rights without any possible upside of preventing graft. In other words, it is obviously a violation of the First Amendment.
The critics of the decision object to it partly on egalitarian grounds: Very few donors have the resources to contribute enough to bump up against the aggregate limits, therefore the decision is “unfair.” It gives disproportionate influence to a few people.
A free political system always has such disparities, though. Should Thomas Paine have been silenced, since his incredible rhetorical powers made him so much more influential than other pamphleteers at the time, let alone ordinary people? Should The New York Times be shuttered since it exercises more power over the political process than almost anyone else in New York?
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) natters on about the decision creating an “oligarchic form of society.” Of course, as a member of the most self-regarding body in all of American politics, Sanders has more influence than almost everyone in Burlington, Vt., combined. He could remedy this inequality by resigning his seat tomorrow — but no, he insists on retaining his exalted place in the American ruling class.
At the root of the left’s opposition to McCutcheon, and Citizens United before it, is that it reduces governmental control over the political process. That control is taken, ipso facto, to be a good thing.
If the First Amendment gets in the way, so much the worse for the First Amendment. Remember: The position of the Obama administration in oral arguments over Citizens United was that the government could ban books printed by corporations. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, has proposed amending the First Amendment to give the government more latitude to limit political expression.
In his decision, Roberts writes “that the First Amendment ‘is designed and intended to remove governmental restraints’ from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views should be voiced largely into the hands of each of us.” For those lamenting the decision, that is precisely the problem.
Muslim clerics: Women should cease to exist
By Ethel Fenig
Hey liberal feminists--feminazi this:
(And no, this is not a joke.)
Islamabad - Sharia Correspondent: The Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) concluded their 192nd meeting on Thursday with the ruling that women are un-Islamic and that their mere existence contradicted Sharia and the will of Allah. As the meeting concluded CII Chairman Maulana Muhammad Khan Shirani noted that women by existing defied the laws of nature, and to protect Islam and the Sharia women should be forced to stop existing as soon as possible. (bold added)The announcement comes a couple of days after CII’s 191st meeting where they dubbed laws related to minimum marriage age to be un-Islamic.After declaring women to be un-Islamic, Shirani explained that there were actually two kinds of women – haraam and makrooh. “We can divide all women in the world into two distinct categories: those who are haraam and those who are makrooh. Now the difference between haraam and makrooh is that the former is categorically forbidden while the latter is really really disliked,” Shirani said.....Officials told Khabaristan Today that the council members deliberated over various historic references related to women and concluded that each woman is a source of fitna and a perpetual enemy of Islam. They also decided that by restricting them to their subordinate, bordering on slave status, the momineen and the mujahideen can ensure that Islam continues to be the religion of peace, prosperity and gender equality. (bold added)
The Income-Inequality Love Train
The Obama Democrats and IMF want the U.S. to slow down and divide up the pie.
By Daniel Henninger...Next in line to get its income-inequality ticket punched is the International Monetary Fund. A few weeks ago, 20 authors with the IMF's fiscal affairs department published a report called "Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality."
According to the report, "Rising income inequality in advanced and developing countries has coincided with growing public support for income redistribution." The Fund staff then goes about explaining how the world's nations can get moving toward income redistribution.
What's noteworthy about the IMF's dive into income inequality is that it comes just as its legions of white-hat supporters are trying to shame Senate Republicans into voting to let the organization double its general fund to $733 billion, plus give emerging-market nations more voting power to authorize payouts from the Fund's resources. "Dereliction of duty," cries the Economist's editorialists about the Republicans' doubts. In a speech Wednesday, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde noted that the U.S. alone is withholding support.
Any GOP senator still wavering over the IMF should print out "Fiscal Policy and Income Inequality" for reading over the Easter and Passover recess. Its novel idea is that tax-and-spend is under-utilized.
The report cautions up front that it is nothing more than a staff report that does not advocate any "redistributive goal or policy instrument for fiscal redistribution." Uh-huh. Reuters, as did most press coverage of the report, noted that it's "another sign of a shift in [the IMF's] thinking about income disparity." The head of Oxfam's Washington office, Nicolas Mombrial, saw it that way: "In the bad old days, the IMF asked governments to cut public spending and taxes. We hope this research and Christine Lagarde's recent statements are a sign that they are changing their tune."
Here's the chorus. After positing that "income inequality has increased" in recent decades (measured, as always, by the Gini coefficient), the report cites among the causes "declining top marginal tax rates." In response, it proposes reinstituting more steeply "progressive" income tax regimes almost everywhere, though it allows that the top rate should max out between 50% and 60%. The purpose is explicit: "These taxes should focus on raising revenue to finance other redistributive instruments."
Under a subhead, "Implementing progressive personal income tax rate structures can contribute to reducing inequality," it notices that 27 countries, mostly in Eastern Europe or Central Asia, have flat-tax systems, that their results are "less distributive" and there is "scope for more progression at the top." So much for the flatter tax regimes proposed here by Rep. Dave Camp, and the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin commissions.
If this is where the IMF's head is, it can go there—on its own.
Inequality is forever a worthy subject. As is justice. And fairness. All these have puzzled humanity since at least the Old Testament. What's unacceptable about the income-inequality agenda of the Obama Democrats, the United Nations and the IMF is that all assume that the U.S.'s historic century of strong, capital-driven growth is over, and that it must reorder its priorities to admit the reality of reduced long-term economic performance. In short, it's time to slow down and divide up what pie we've got.
That's what Europe did. That's what Vladimir Putin saw. That's what the United States would be nuts to do.
The Media Won’t Cover Leland Yee’s Alleged Gun-Running Because They’re Democrat Operatives with By-Lines
By Bryan Preston
The only thing I can do with this Glenn Reynolds column is endorse every single word of it. It is absolutely right.
Yee told an FBI agent that, in exchange for $2 million in cash, he’d fill a shopping list of weapons, which he took personal responsibility for delivering, according to the indictment. He also allegedly “masterminded” a complex scheme bring illegal weapons into the country, agreeing to “facilitate” a meeting with an illegal arms dealer to arrange for the weapons to be imported via Newark, N.J. In arranging all of this, the indictment said, Yee relied on connections with Filipino terrorist groups who could supply “heavy” weapons, including the Muslim terrorists of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Yee allegedly noted that the Muslim terrorists had no reservations about kidnapping, extortion and murder....CNN’s excuse about not covering mere state senators rings especially hollow to anyone who has watched Texas politics over the past year. Do a site search of state Sen. Wendy Davis and you’ll find a whole lot of CNN stories about a certain state senator.
This all sounds like news. You’ve got charges of huge bribes, rampant hypocrisy, illegal weapons and even a connection with foreign terrorists — and from a leading politician in an important state.
But — and here’s the part Hollywood would miss — outside of local media like San Francisco magazine, the coverage was surprisingly muted.The New York Times buried the story as a one-paragraph Associated Press report on page A21, with the bland dog-bites-man headline, “California: State Senator Accused of Corruption.” This even though Yee was suspended, along with two others, from the California state senate in light of the indictment.
CNN, home (also until last week) of Piers Morgan, whom Yee had praised for his anti-gun activism, didn’t report the story at all. When prodded by viewers, the networksnarked that it doesn’t do state senators. Which is odd, because searching the name of my own state senator, Stacey Campfield, turns up a page of results, involving criticisms of him for saying something “extreme”. Meanwhile, CNN found time to bashWisconsin state senator and supporter of Gov. Scott Walker, Randy Hopper over marital problems.
But there’s a difference. They’re Republicans. When Republicans do things that embarrass their party, the national media are happy to take note, even if they’re mere state senators. But when Democrats like Yee get busted for actual felonies, and pretty dramatic ones at that, the press suddenly isn’t interested.
..Everyone knows why MSNBC isn’t interested in the Leland Yee story. He’s a Democrat and they’re open leftwingers. But CNN is still supposed to be a news network. They have no excuse for omitting the Yee story. It’s obvious that the only thing stopping them from covering Yee is that, if the charges against him are true, the anti-gun gun-running Democrat is the biggest hypocrite in the political universe. But the likes of CNN are right behind him.
By David Steinberg
Last week, Erick Erickson reported that John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy — the three most powerful Republican members of the House — would be attending a private weekend retreat at Amelia Island to discuss how to “bolster our incumbents who are under attack from the far right.” The retreat is sponsored by Republican Main Street Partnership, a PAC headed by liberal Republican Steve LaTourette and funded by several Democratic Party-supporting organizations.
Since Erickson’s report, Boehner has announced he will not be attending due to a “scheduling conflict.”
As of today, the event has disappeared from Main Street’s Events page.
Will Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy still attend? Is the event still on?
I have placed calls to both congressional offices. I have also contacted Main Street to ask why the event listing has been removed, and why Main Street’s website contains no other mention of what would be their largest event of the year.
No comments:
Post a Comment