The Obamas Have Spent Over $44,351,777.12 In Taxpayer Cash On Travel
By Ariel CohenThe Obamas have spent over 44 million dollars in taxpayer money on travel and vacations. Some are even calling him the “most well-trvaeled, expensive” president in our nation’s history.
As Americans head off for the long holiday weekend, let’s take a look back at some of the president’s holiday spending.
Our president vacations a lot — we’re talking $44,351,777.12 worth of “a lot,” with most expenses charged to the American taxpayer.
As of March 2014, Obama has spent more time traveling internationally than any other president, taking 31 trips since assuming office in 2009. The 119 days spent overseas have cost taxpayers millions of dollars.
At the same point in their respective presidencies, George W. Bush had spent 116 days on 28 trips, Bill Clinton had spent 113 days on 27 trips and Ronald Reagan had spent 73 days on just 14 trips.
By Susan Crabtree
President Obama will face more pressure this week to help resolve the immigration crisis at the Texas border as he travels to the state for three fundraisers and a speech focused on the economy.
...Obama will head to Texas Wednesday after headlining a fundraiser in Denver the same day.
On Monday, the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will host a group of teachers at the White House for lunch to “discuss the administration's efforts to ensure that every student is taught by an effective educator,” the White House said over the weekend.
On Tuesday, he will meet with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at the White House ahead of the NATO summit to be held in Wales in September.
...On Thursday morning, Obama also plans to deliver remarks on the economy at a theater in Austin.
David Axelrod: Gosh, Obama is just too complex for you plebes
By T. Becket Adams...No, here love died between voters and the president because he's just too darn complex, or so says David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to the president.
National Review's Rich Lowry flagged this gem of a quote in a recent New York Times article:
Reagan significantly changed the trajectory of the country for better and worse. But he restored a sense of clarity. Bush and Cheney were black and white, and after them, Americans wanted someone smart enough to get the nuances and deal with complexities. Now I think people are tired of complexity and they're hungering for clarity, a simpler time. But that's going to be hard to restore in the world today.Just so we’re clear: The president's decline in popularity is not because of the lagging economy, the many White House’s scandals or the administration's dithering in the face of an increasingly unstable world.
Nope. Obama’s poor marks are because he’s just too complex for voters.
Congress has just weeks to replenish expiring highway fund
By Susan Ferrechio
Roadwork nationwide could screech to a halt if Congress doesn't act soon.
Congress returns this week to confront the looming expiration of federal funds for highway projects, but there isn’t much time to pass legislation. That has left states worried they’ll no longer receive federal funding that pays for most state bridge and road repairs.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx sent a letter last week to state transportation officials, warning them funding will be reduced in August until Congress acts to replenish the Highway Trust Fund.
...But neither the House nor Senate has scheduled time this week to debate legislation to fund highway projects, even though just a handful of workdays remain before lawmakers depart for the August recess.
The House this week is slated to debate an energy and water appropriations bill and a workforce training measure, while the Senate may consider a “Sportsmen's Act,” which, among other things, would allow states to electronically grant stamps for duck hunting.
All Obama's World's a Stage
By Cindy Simpson...“Have you noticed,” Jonah Goldberg recently remarked, “that basically the only way this White House can get out from under one scandal or controversy is by getting crushed by another?”
That cycle -- scandal, outrage, subsequent rejection as “phony,” followed by another scandal -- has conveniently appeared throughout the Obama presidency. Pick any scandal and watch it run through the wash: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
“Scandal exhaustion,” noted Tom Blumer, seems to be a part of the left’s “Cloward-Piven attempt to overwhelm opponents. With so many scandals out there, no single outrage can generate concerted, sufficiently visible opposition.”
It’s “a scandal a month,” Ben Shapiro commented, “and then every so often, President Obama decides to replace one scandal with another, the media loses interest. Two years later, we’re still asking the same questions and then told, ‘Dude, that happened like two years ago.’”
Besides brushing off scandals as old news, Goldberg observed that the complex often focuses attention on the GOP reaction of “outrage” instead of the outrageousness of the scandal itself.
And should anyone take note of the remarkable timing of the scandal cycle, there’s always the most effective and often-used weapon of the left: Ridicule. In this piece published at The New Republic titled “The Maddening Illogic of the IRS ‘Coverup’ Conspiracy Theory,” the author asserted:
Yet
I'm 100 percent confident that if the IRS or another government agency
were to rescue the Lerner emails a week from now, and provide them to
Congress, the same people who are currently treating their absence as
proof of a coverup would cast their reappearance as a conveniently-timed
distraction from some other scandal.
The
scandal-a-month program, conspiracy or not, certainly appears to be
working to the benefit of the Democrats. In typical “Hollywood” fashion,
noted
John Hinderaker, they “have learned how to make childishness pay” by
using talk of impeachment and lawsuits over the scandals as “fundraising
props.”Federal Agents With Riot Gear Arriving In Murrieta To Subdue Immigration Protesters
By Katie FratesFederal agents will be arriving in Murrieta, Calif., the site of ongoing protests against the recent flood of illegal immigrants into the town, on Monday to quell protesters, Breitbart has learned.
Murrieta has been in the news since June 1 when protesters blocked a convoy of buses carrying illegal immigrants to a local border patrol station.
Protesters have not left yet, and federal agents are supposedly fed up with American citizens being concerned about their hometown.
John Henry, a Murrieta resident for over two decades, was told by local officers that the feds will be barricading streets.
“We’re being told that federal Marshals or ICE will be here in the next few days and that they are bringing riot gear,” Henry said. “They’re apparently going to be blocking off the street with concrete blockades so that no vehicles can get through. The River County Sheriff’s Department showed up last night and brought a huge watch tower that shoots up into the air 35 feet.”
Why the White House Wants Amnesty
by Ben Shapiro....But this strategy isn’t what Democrats are up to. Cloward-Piven’s goal was to create impetus for government to guarantee a universal living. The modern Democratic Party is significantly less interested in guaranteed benefits than for an economic leveling. The motivating factor of the left is not caring for the poor but tearing down the wealthy. The philosophy of the Democratic Party was embodied by Barack Obama’s response to a moderator question in 2008: “I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”
Fairness. Not prosperity. Fairness.
And so the Democrats will move to bankrupt the system. No welfare state can survive with open borders. That is a truism. And yet that’s exactly what Democrats are now promoting: open borders with a full welfare state. Why? Not because Democrats believe that the homegrown poor in America will be better off with more people joining them on the dole; they won’t. Rather, Democrats love the size and scope of the state and despise the rival the state faces in individual success. A growing welfare base requires higher taxation, more degradation of individual success. That is the goal.
It is the goal of the left’s hero of the moment, Thomas Piketty, who seeks a global tax on wealth in order to heal “inequality” – not to bring prosperity. It is the goal of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who suggests that all wealth is communal, and none is individual:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own -- nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory -- and hire someone to protect against this -- because of the work the rest of us did.Obviously, none of this does anything worthwhile for immigrants who come here to seek prosperity rather than fairness. But the rise in illegal immigration certainly creates impetus for higher taxes, more economic leveling, and a decline in prosperity for purposes of fairness. The Obama administration isn’t merely taking advantage of a good crisis. They’re creating one in order to do so.
By Larry O'Connor
CNN’s Sally Kohn says using the term “illegal” to describe anyone who enters or stays in America illegally is tantamount to employing a racial slur such as the “n-word” or the “f-word” as a disparaging term for a homosexual man.
You could see this one coming a mile away. As the border crisis grows and politicians, pundits, and media personalities debate and discuss the problem of the 50,000+ unaccompanied alien children who’ve illegally entered our country over the past several months, leave it to liberal commentators to focus their arguments on the appropriate politically correct euphemisms used to identify the children.
Kohn writes in a column on CNN.com:
During the civil rights era, Alabama Gov. George Wallace was asked by a supporter why he was fixated on the politics of race. Wallace replied, “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about n*ggers, and they stomped the floor.”This is a common tactic employed by the left. Instead of arguing the actual merits of their cause or the actual issue of the border crisis they instead attack you for the perfectly legitimate word you use when making your point about the issue. And why not? The issues and merits don’t play well for the left right now, so much easier to call their opponents “racist” or “intolerant haters” than have to try to convince Americans that everyone and anyone should be welcomed as new citizens if they illegally cross our nation’s borders.
In the 1980s, during the rise of the gay rights movement, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms accused a political opponent for supporting “f*ggots, perverts, [and] sexual deviates of this nation.”
Today, opponents of immigration reform attack undocumented immigrants as “illegal immigrants.” Even worse, like anti-immigration extremists, some prominent elected officials use the term “illegals.” Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, said, “I urge all Mainers to tell your city councilors and selectmen to stop handing out your money to illegals.”
Once upon a time, the n-word and f-word were utterly acceptable terminology in undermining not only the basic rights but basic humanity of black people and gay people. That those terms seem radically inappropriate and out of step with mainstream culture now is only because social movements and legal and political changes have shifted the landscape. But make no mistake about it, words matter, not only in reflecting certain dehumanizing attitudes toward historically marginalized groups but in actively perpetuating and rationalizing that dehumanization.
Not the same thing? Of course it is.
No, ‘Illegal’ Is Not Like the N-Word
Suppressing language does not change objective reality
By Walter Hudson....No, it isn’t. Kohn’s equivalence is beyond despicable.
The n-word serves no descriptive purpose. It does not speak to a factual truth about its object. The n-word is plainly and only derogatory.
The word “illegal” is an adjective with objective meaning that describes a factual reality. We call illegal immigrants “illegal” because they are here illegally. It’s pretty simple.
Of course, Kohn knows that. An eighth grader knows that. Surely, someone writing for CNN understands that words have meaning and that communicating concepts accurately proves essential to any policy debate. We may therefore conclude with confidence that Kohn’s campaign to remove “illegal” from our policy vernacular is a naked attempt to deny the illegality of certain immigration by erasing any linguistic reference to it.
The answer is no, Sally. We’re not changing our language to suit your agenda. We’re not going to stop categorizing people objectively as illegal immigrants. We’re not going to dilute the gravity of truly derogatory terms by conflating them with one that is not.
Study: Conservative Books Missing From Freshman Reading Programs
A study conducted by Young America’s Foundation found that conservative books are missing from freshman reading programs.
Ashley Pratte, of Young America’s Foundation, spoke to Tucker Carlson this morning on “Fox and Friends” about the findings. She said colleges are seeking to indoctrinate students before they even arrive.
“It’s not enough that courses tend to trend more liberal now on campus and then your graduation speakers are liberal commencement speakers now, but now these freshman required reading programs are delving into concepts that truly present liberal themes. And there’s not one that we found on there that promoted free market principles or capitalism, which are things that maybe students should be learning,” she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment