The Oklahoman
February  22,2013


Sequestration, the name given to automatic budget cuts set to begin March 1, was the brainchild of the Obama administration back in 2011 when a deal was being sought to raise the debt ceiling. Now President Barack Obama is blaming Republicans in Congress for the fact the sequester may actually occur.

Obama touched on this during his State of the Union speech. He was at it again Tuesday, telling those assembled that if the sequester occurs, “people will lose their jobs.” No kidding!
Under the sequester, the government would have to cut $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. The military would absorb more cuts than any other federal department. This would take a significant toll here in Oklahoma, home to three Air Force bases, an Army fort and an ammunition plant. Job losses and furloughs would be plentiful.

Obama on Tuesday said he has proposed a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction — that is, more taxes on the rich. A plan by Democrats in the House and Senate, he said, seeks such balance by ensuring “that billionaires can't pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.”

He never tires of using class envy as a cudgel; indeed, in the next breath he said Republican proposals “ask nothing of the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations, so the burden is all on first responders or seniors or middle-class families.” The GOP, Obama says, would “rather have these cuts go into effect than close a single tax loophole for the wealthiest Americans. Not one.”

The Great Divider is banking on Republicans caving under his never-ending assault. No doubt, if the sequester goes into effect, the GOP will be painted as the reason why. Read Complete Article Here

The Ulserman Report
Jan 30,2013

Reports are now incoming regarding a petulant Barack Obama, upset over a bi-partisan effort in the Senate to come up with a resolution on the immigration issue, that did so with little to no input from the Obama White House. Obama demanded he be given the spotlight, flying to Las Vegas to give another empty political grandstanding speech that said nothing the day after the Senate announced it was already moving forward on the very same issue. Oh – and the cost to taxpayers for that unnecessary trip was hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As one of our Insiders stated a few weeks ago, Barack Obama is already entering Lame Duck status. It’s not full blown Lame Duckery by any means – he still wields the considerable and influential support of an adoring media, (while polls once again confirm America as a whole remains lukewarm to both him and his policies) and the bully pulpit of the White House – but Democrats are already starting to pull away from The Man Calling Himself Obama.

And why shouldn’t they? What has Barack Obama done for other Democrats? He has helped push the party so far left that once his celebrity is removed from the already limited attention span of the American public, the party faces the daunting task of trying to repair itself in the wake of the destruction Obama is leaving behind. Their only hope, and that is what was underway with this most recent bi-partisan effort in the Senate, is to already begin the work of mending the proverbial political fences with their Republican counterparts. 


Ah – and that brings us to the Republicans of course. Just as the eight years of G.W. Bush harmed the GOP’s general brand-name appeal to the public (not entirely deserved by the way – the media slammed the Bush presidency 24/7 for much of those eight years), the Party of Lincoln has just recently started to repair its own damaged operating system. Election 2008 was a near-throw away effort with but one bright spot and a clear marker of where the party should find its strongest base of support, and that was in the candidate for Vice President, Sarah Palin. (Liberals will now scoff at that last line – like well trained harpies they have learned to instantly react negatively to any mention of Palin) But it was Sarah Palin’s appeal to both fiscal and social conservatives that soon after the 2008 election formed into the considerable force dubbed The Tea Party that swept aside Democrats during the 2010 Midterm Election in the most lopsided national election in a generation.

The Old Guard of the Republican Party soon viewed this Tea Party movement with increasing suspicion, due in great part to the simple fact it could not entirely control it. House Speaker John Boehner, who was made Speaker because of the Tea Party, has spent the last two years attempting to compromise between them and his own Republican establishment. The result has been a fractured and somewhat incompetent party that has more often than not, been outplayed by both Barack Obama and his Mainstream Media support system. In 2012 voters voted celebrity over common sense. Celebrity though is fleeting – and Democrats are now increasingly viewing the president through that prism.

The political dynamics of the last four years are starting to shift now though, and this week’s odd Obama speech in Las Vegas is one of the first real signals of that reality. That was Senate leadership telling the president – We Don’t Need You. The fact is, that has been how things have run since Barack Obama entered the White House. Obama enjoys giving speeches but little else. Democrats have long voiced concern over how little Barack Obama engages in the actual forming of policy. As president, Obama rarely speaks to members of Congress, or even members of his own cabinet. Much of what reaches him comes through the filter of powerful figures such as Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett – whose second floor office is just a short walk from the upstairs study where the president spends so much of his time during his days at the White House. And it is Jarrett who keeps her hand atop the heads of the many Czar appointments of Barack Obama – those shadow figures given access to the policy powers of the Executive Branch with no Congressional oversight.

President Obama’s speech yesterday on immigration policy was little more than a hissy fit. Upset at having even a bit of attention taken away from himself, he flew to Las Vegas despite some Democrats suggesting he not do so for fear of interrupting the still forming agreement between Democrat and Republican leaders. Barack Obama ignored that request – as he has ignored Democrats all along, and flew to Vegas regardless.

The teleprompter was loaded up, and by God, he was going to give that speech because HE is more important than any issue – immigration included. Read Article Here

RedState
By Dan Mc Laughlin
December 28,2012

 The school shooting atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut has, predictably, touched off another round of the perennial gun-control debate. Especially for parents of young children (my youngest is the same age as most of the victims), the horror of the shootings is almost beyond description, and tends to make rational discussion impossible. And also unseemly, as Jonah Goldberg has explained. More to the point, this is one of those issues where the public demands foolproof solutions that remain elusive: we keep saying “never again” after mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and all sorts of other manmade and supposedly preventable disasters, but there’s never a perfect answer that guarantees that any such thing will never happen again (this is, for example, why anti-terrorism policies are best focused on terrorist organizations rather than lone nuts). We can only and always base public policy proposals on what will reasonably improve the situation without imposing costs we can’t live with.

The reality of no perfect or costless solutions lends both a hysterical quality to the gun debate as well as a one-sided burden of proof. Gun control advocates suggest a goal (the complete non-existence of firearms) that is not politically, legally or practically possible, and argue that opponents of any gun control measure show how their alternative would be 100% effective by comparison to a gun control utopia that doesn’t and never will exist. In a more rational, realistic debate, you would compare the actual proposed gun controls to a world without those proposals – and in that rational world, the first question for gun control advocates after Newtown is why gun control in Connecticut didn’t work after the Brady Campaign hailed the state’s tough gun laws as a model of public safety. Gun control – complete with an “assault weapons ban,” waiting periods, background checks, “gun free school zone” laws and the rest – was already tried in Connecticut, and it failed to make a difference. If Newtown means anything in the gun debate, it’s that gun control doesn’t work.

The trenches are long-since dug on both sides; if you can find clips of Archie Bunker discussing an issue on YouTube, chances are that we have already had a “national conversation” about that issue. Of course, changing the culture can be at least as important as changing the law, so it is certainly helpful to look again at how we handle things like responsible gun ownership and mental illness (besides the shooter himself, his mother bears responsibility for having firearms under the same roof with such a mentally unbalanced young man). If there’s one valuable service the NRA could provide in this debate – and Wayne LaPierre’s ham-handed press conference failed to provide – it is stepping up the cultural battle to engage responsible gun owners outside of government.

But both advocates and opponents of gun control tend to fall too easily into knee-jerk slogans that go too far. It is no less true for being a truism, for example, that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and that we don’t get nearly as many calls for controlling, say, knives or baseball bats when they are misused. But it is also true that guns are the most efficient, portable, and cost-effective killing tools we have: that’s exactly why they remain the weapon of choice for soldiers, cops, criminals, and hunters all over the world (and why the right to own a gun matters). There’s a strong case that good people with guns can be a more effective answer to armed criminals than gun control; gun control advocates are almost invariably willfully blind to the value of this. But that doesn’t mean that proposals to arm everyone, everywhere are a good idea with no costs or a perfect, foolproof solution. It does no good for defenders of gun rights to overstate their arguments, any more than it helps proponents of gun control to ignore the costs and limitations of gun control or to react with incredulity to the idea that the Constitution means what it says. Frankly, if your approach to the Second Amendment is to laugh and ignore it, I’m not going to trust you to take the rest of the Bill of Rights seriously either.     Read  More Here

Breitbart
December 4, 2012
By Tony Lee

It took the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 159 pages to explain one new Obamacare tax on investments that will be used to pay for Obamacare.
Only individuals and families making more than $200,000 and $250,000, respectively, will be impacted by the tax, which “applies to a broad range of investment securities ranging from stocks and bonds to commodity securities and specialized derivatives.”

According to the IRS, if a person makes $180,000 in wages and earns $90,000 from investment income for a modified adjusted gross income of $270,000, the 3.8% tax would apply to the $70,000 and the taxpayer would pay $2,660 in surtaxes."
This is just one of many Obamacare taxes and rules that will require an army of new IRS officials to be hired to explain, enforce, and collect the various taxes.

Read More
 

The Blaze
November 16,2012
By Maeleine Morgenstern


 Former CIA Director David Petraeus testified Friday that the spy agency’s first talking points called the Sept. 11 Libya attacks an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist act, but that that language was removed for the final version ultimately used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, lawmakers said.

Petraeus testified that the CIA’s initial response referred to militant groups Ansar al-Shariah and Al-Qaeda, the Associated Press reported, but that those names were replaced with the word “extremist” during an inter-agency process to come up with a final draft. Petraeus did not know which federal agency made the change.

“No one knows yet exactly who came up with the final version of the talking points,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) told reporters after the closed-door House Intelligence Committee hearing.

Rice’s CIA talking points for a series of television appearances on Sept. 16 also called Benghazi “spontaneously inspired” by the anti-video protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and “evolved into a direct assault,” despite Petraeus’ testimony Friday that he believed from the start that terrorists were involved.
“The fact is, the reference to al-Qaida was taken out somewhere along the line by someone outside the intelligence community,” King said, according to the AP. “We need to find out who did it and why.”

But Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) said Petraeus testified that the CIA’s draft points were circulated to other intelligence and federal agencies for review. Udall told the AP that Petraeus said all agency leaders, including Petraeus himself, were presented with the final document and all signed off on it.

“The assessment that was publicly shared in unclassified talking points went through a process of editing,” Udall said. “The extremist description was put in because in an unclassified document you want to be careful who you identify as being involved.”

Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the Benghazi assault.  Read More Here

WND
By Albert Thompson
November 6,2012



There are a variety of tools you can use online to create your own electoral maps, such as 270towin_com and electoralmap-_net. I encourage readers to have some fun on what is sure to be a long day.

Could the United States have a tie election? This seems increasingly unlikely, but in the interest of Election Day fun I’ll speculate.

With the electoral contest still in doubt, new polling data continue to receive considerable media attention. The presidential election will likely come down to a handful of states. These states – all of which Obama won in 2008 – will determine the election.



We are a large country, but pollsters continue to rely on unbelievably small samples. Groups of 1,000 are used to gauge the opinion of 130 million voters. There is a great risk of underrepresentation, especially among media wary conservative voters.

Conventional wisdom is that Romney will win if he carries Ohio and Florida. Obama wins if he carries either Ohio or Florida, as the margin of a Romney victory is believed to be around 15 electoral votes. Ohio has eighteen and Florida 29.

Romney’s path to victory lies through the states carried by George W. Bush in the 2000 election. Due to population changes, the Bush v. Gore map is more favorable to the GOP in 2012. The states that produced a slim 271-267 victory for Bush over Gore would produce a safer 285-253 victory for Romney over Obama. With Bush 2000 as the model, Romney could still win the election if Obama were to take Virginia, where the population of the government-employee-heavy D.C. suburbs have grown, or if Romney if were lose a smaller state like New Hampshire.



But there is potential for a tie if Romney fails to carry particular Bush 2000 states.

For example, if Obama wins in Virginia but loses Florida, and Romney wins Ohio but loses in Colorado, we could be headed for a 269-a-piece split. If the race is that close, then Romney will have to watch Nebraska to ensure that it does not split its electors and award one to Obama as it did in 2008. Obama will have to ensure that Maine does not award an elector to Romney, but that seems far less likely to occur. Maine and Nebraska are the only states to award electors based on the results in individual congressional districts.

In this case, the Congress will choose the president and vice president. This could be a major cause of concern should partisans decide to take to the streets. Protests could spiral out of control. Hopefully the nation’s governors have security plans in place. 

Read More

Did you know that one-third of children in Ohio are enrolled in Medicaid? Neither did I, until last week when I picked up a copy of the Bucyrus (Ohio) Telegraph-Forum and read down to the seventh paragraph of a story headlined, "Study says more children have health insurance."

The positive spin in the headline was undercut by the statistical facts of the story: "The increase in children on insurance comes as median incomes across the state were relatively flat, and the percentage of families in poverty -- especially those with children -- rose slightly." An increase in poverty, in other words, actually reduced the number of uninsured children by qualifying them for coverage under a government program for the poor. Such was the substance of the explanation by Angela Krile, spokeswoman for the Ohio Children's Hospital Association, who said: "Really, this just shows the importance of Medicaid in our state for children."

Americans have become accustomed to this sort of "good news" in the Obama era, and there was more of it in that small-town Ohio paper. "Unemployment remains the same," declared the headline across the top of the front page. The story explained that, although the official unemployment rate in Crawford County, Ohio (population 43,389) declined from 9 percent in July to 8 percent in August, it wasn't because more people were working. "Since the number of employed stayed the same, 200 people went off of unemployment because their time limit is up and they have not found work yet," Dave Williamson, director of the Crawford County Economic Development Partnership, told the Bucyrus paper. "We have no more people working than we did last month."

Extrapolate such statistical hocus-pocus at the local level across the entire state of Ohio, or nationwide, and you understand how some people might be deceived into believing that the Obama administration has actually produced an economic recovery. Yet it doesn't take much effort to discover how grim the situation really is. Right there on the same front page of the same newspaper was another headline that made this unfortunately clear. "Local children are going hungry," was the headline on the story about a local charitable effort to help feed the shockingly large number of poor children in Bucyrus. A spokeswoman for the project said "more than 70 percent of our students require assistance with food by receiving free or reduced lunches." That percentage has risen in recent years, and this evidence of increasing poverty in a small Ohio town (Bucyrus has a population of 12,253) may come as a shock to anyone who has bought into the Obama administration's claims that the president's policies have meaningfully improved the economy in Ohio or anywhere else.

Convincing voters that President Obama's economic policies have been an abject failure -- and that another four years would only make this failure worse -- is the primary task Mitt Romney must accomplish in tonight's debate. Conservatives who have opposed the Obama agenda all along are understandably exasperated by recent polls indicating that most Americans either think the economy is improving or else don't blame the president for the continuing malaise. How could it be, for example, that Obama has led the 14 most recent polls included in the Real Clear Politics average? How could a Roanoke College poll show Obama ahead 47-39 -- eight points! -- in Virginia? How could a Columbus Dispatch poll show Obama leading 51-42 -- nine points! -- in Ohio?

Skeptics who detect evidence of bias in these polls have been denounced by Jonathan Chait as "poll denialists," one of those accusations, like "homophobia," by which those who disagree with liberals are casually diagnosed as mentally ill. If the polls are not biased, however, conservatives must confront the question: Who's really crazy here? Us, or the surprisingly large percentage of people who think it's a good idea to re-elect this miserable failure of a president?

One alternative to what might be called the Mass Insanity Theory of Obama's mysterious poll advantage is to fault Romney himself for having failed to attack the incumbent with sufficient stridency. The "Blame Mitt" school of thought is fairly sizeable among conservatives with less-than-fond memories of 2008 Republican nominee John McCain's kid-gloves approach to his Democratic opponent. However, having attended several rallies at which both Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan slammed the president pretty hard in their speeches, I am reluctant to believe that the GOP candidates are guilty of being too nice to Obama. As much as some of our friends may wish to hear the president excoriated as a lying Marxist who is deliberately trying to destroy the American constitutional republic, it's unrealistic to expect that kind of accusation to be made directly by his Republican challenger.
If these theories -- biased polls, mass insanity, or a "too nice" GOP candidate -- are all inadequate to explain why Obama appears to be taking a substantial lead into tonight's debate, what's left? Ah, yes: The damned liberal media!
This was the topic of a remarkable open letter last week from the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell III and other conservatives who charged that the media "are rigging this election and taking sides in order to pre-determine the outcome," and that, in doing so, biased journalists "have breached the public trust by willfully turning a blind eye to the government's public policy failures, both domestic and foreign."

What could explain such a dereliction of professional duty except partisan loyalty? A number of studies have shown that Democrats in the press corps outnumber Republicans by margins of at least 4-to-1 and perhaps as much as 12-to-1. One of the best-known of these studies, based on a survey of Washington-based reporters after the 1992 election, found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton, more than twice the 43 percent vote Clinton got from the electorate at large. Citing particular proofs of this bias (we all have our favorite examples, including Nina Burleigh's infamously lascivious praise of Clinton) seems at this point redundant, and efforts to counteract this bias by exposing it seem futile. The reporters and editors whom former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg accused of a "slobbering love affair" with Obama four years ago have no sense of shame about serving as stenographers for the Democrat's re-election campaign, and liberal journalists tend to reject all conservative criticism as "whining" from disgruntled wingnuts.Read More Here

 The Washington Times
By Stpehen Dinan
September 17,2012


With excruciating detail, the White House’s budget office has laid out exactly where it will have to cut $109 billion from federal spending in January, including $11.1 billion from Medicare and $54.7 billion from defense spending.
The defense cuts include $21.5 billion from operations and maintenance for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and the reserves and National Guard, and nearly $1.4 billion from military aid to Afghanistan, with tens of billions of dollars coming from procurement and other Pentagon accounts.
“The report leaves no question that the sequestration would be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments, and core government functions,” the White House budget office said in the report released Friday.

Also on the chopping block are various items including fencing and technology along the U.S.-Mexico border, the government’s internal watchdogs and local environmental programs.
The cuts fall particularly heavy on the federal civilian workforce, where staffing levels and salaries would be docked more than 8 percent almost across the board.

The National Institutes of Health would face cuts of $2.5 billion, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would have to trim $464 million, according to the 394-page report, issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The cuts are set up by the terms of last year’s debt deal, which requires the automatic “sequesters” in exchange for granting the administration the borrowing authority to go deeper into debt. The bipartisan deficit supercommittee was supposed to come up with replacements for the sequesters, but left the automatic cuts in place. They are due to take effect Jan. 2.

The White House budget office took pains to say that it didn’t have any discretion and didn’t support the cuts.
“The percentage cuts in this report, and the identification of exempt and non-exempt accounts, reflect the requirements of the laws that the administration is applying,” the report said. “With the single exception of military personnel accounts, the administration cannot choose which programs to exempt, or what percentage cuts to apply.”
Administration officials said the numbers are preliminary and will be updated based on 2013 spending levels that Congress is addressing this month.

While military personnel were specifically exempted, other parts of the Pentagon will have to cut nearly 10 percent. The Army is slated to lose nearly $7 billion in operations and maintenance funding, and the Navy and Air Force will lose $4.3 billion each in operations money.

Border fencing and technology would take a $33 million hit, and salaries and staffing for the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also would be cut.

At a time when embassy security is a concern in the aftermath of attacks, that account would be cut by $129 million.

Read Original Article Here
 

The Blaze
By Becket Adams
August 28., 2012


No matter how hard some people try to spin the numbers, the U.S. economy just isn’t on the “right track” for many Americans.

Consider, for example, the fact that U.S. household median annual incomes have dropped from $53,508 to $50,964 since June 2009, according to new report from Sentier Research.

That’s a decline of 4.8 percent over a three-year period.

And that’s not all: As Business Insider’s Jill Krasny notes, “several types of households fared much worse than that.”

“[A]lmost every group is worse off now than it was three years ago, with the exception of households with householders 65-years-old and over,” said Sentier Research’s Gordon Green.

Well, at least we got that, right?

Based on a closer inspection of the report, Business Insider put together the following list of who’s “falling behind”:

Non-family households: This group saw its real median annual income decline by 7.5 percent, from $33,002 to $30,512. Family households declined a little less than that by 4.7 percent.

Single households: Men living alone saw their real median income drop by 9.4 percent, while women’s dropped by 4.5 percent.

Black households: Compared to white and Hispanic households, Black householders’ income declined the most by 11.1 percent, from $35,567 to $32,498.

Householders without a college degree: People with some education but no degree saw their real median annual income slide by 9.3 percent, from $50,948 to $46,200. Associates degree holders saw theirs taper off by 8.6 percent, from $60,602 to $55,374.

Self-employed households: This group’s annual income fell 9.4 percent, from $73,695 to $66,752. Private sector workers fared only a little bit better, with a decline of 4.5 percent.

Households in the West: In contrast to households in the Midwest region which barely saw a decline, households in the West felt their yearly incomes decrease by 8.5 percent, from $59,065 to $54,071.

Households with householders between 55 and 66: Compared to millennials who saw their real median household income drop 8.9 percent, boomers’ declined by 9.7 percent, from $61,716 to $55,748.

Read Article Here