March 8, 2013
PRESIDENT OBAMA began his second term with a promise to push harder on energy and climate change. The events of the past week remind us that he won’t have to contend just with Republicans and coal-state Democrats determined to oppose reasonable measures to combat global warming. He will also have to sidestep environmentalists demanding that he fight the wrong battles.
Last Friday, the State Department released a new draft analysis of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, opposition to which has become a counterproductive obsession of many in the environmental movement. In its 2,000 pages, the report dismantled the case that nixing the Canadian pipeline must be a priority for anyone concerned about climate change, explaining anew that accepting or rejecting the project won’t make much difference to global emissions, U.S. oil consumption or world oil markets.
Under anti-Keystone activists’ very best scenario — Keystone XL and all other new pipeline capacity restricted — they could hope to reduce Canadian oil-sands production by only 2 to 4 percent by 2030. As long as the world demands oil, energy companies will find it profitable to extract and transport their product in all sorts of ways. If new pipelines are out of the picture, companies will rely more on rail, the use of which they could easily ramp up.
The analysis underscores the extent to which activists have trumped up a relatively mundane infrastructure issue into the premier environmental fight of this decade, leading to big marches and acts of civil disobedience to advance a cause that is worthy of neither. The activists ought to pick more important fights. Until they do, the president should ignore their pressure.
Mr. Obama should also ignore the complaints about Ernest Moniz, whom the president nominated Monday to head the Energy Department. Mr. Moniz, an MIT professor, favors renewable sources of electricity — but also nuclear power and natural gas. That’s a sin among some in the environmental movement, although it should not be. Mr. Moniz was right, for example, when he argued that natural gas can help cut the nation’s carbon emissions over the next couple of decades, because burning it produces half the emissions of burning coal. What’s needed is not knee-jerk opposition to natural gas but, rather, sensible regulations to ensure that communities near well sites are safe and that the country sees the most emissions benefits from its use of the fuel. Mr. Obama so far has taken that course, and we hope his appointment of Mr. Moniz means that he will stay on track.
Instead of indulging in distractions, Mr. Obama and his friends in the environmental movement should push for policies that could make a significant difference by cutting demand for carbon-intensive fuels. As we argued Sunday, a carbon tax is a cause that really is worth fighting for.
WaPo
Friday, March 8, 2013
Will the Left Finally Get the Tea Party Now?
March 8, 2013
by Joel B. Pollak
Breitbart.com
Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster against the confirmation of CIA Director and "drone czar" John Brennan offers a "teachable moment" to the media and the left about the Tea Party. As they seethe in outrage and confusion that it took a Republican to question the constitutionality of drone attacks, it is important to remind our friends on the other side that it wasn't just any Republican, but a--gasp!--Tea Party Republican who spoke "truth to power."
Not only that, but the Senators who were first to offer their assistance were also Tea Party Republicans--the so-called McCarthyist Ted Cruz of Texas, and Marco "Water Break" Rubio of Florida. All three of these Senators won their primary elections against candidates favored by the Republican establishment. All three have been attacked by the left and smeared as racist and extremist for belonging to the Tea Party. Yet without them, no one from either party would have questioned a policy that the left once saw as a dangerous abuse of executive power.
Only one Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, supported Paul. (Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois came to the floor very late in the game to offer a few challenging questions and formally end debate when Paul finally yielded.) Ryan Grim and Mollie Reilly of the Huffington Post observed: "...progressives who might have assumed to have been supportive were absent, leaving members of the GOP as the sole defenders of civil liberties. The White House was equally silent." Some Democrats, notably Maxine Waters, even slammed Paul as "destructive."
What many on the left and in the media have willfully failed to understand is that the Tea Party exists to defend the Constitution from unconstitutional encroachments on power and dangerous expansions in the size and cost of government. It did not merely arise in opposition to President Barack Obama; it had its roots in conservative outrage at the bailouts of the last months of George W. Bush's presidency. At its core, the Tea Party is about American values, not Republican politics. It exists not to obstruct the Democrats but to restore the Constitution.
Rand Paul's filibuster provided a useful contrast between the Tea Party and the GOP establishment. While Paul stood on the Senate floor, unable to leave the chamber to eat, a dozen other Republicans chose to dine with President Obama in a gesture of bipartisanship. (The contrast is not exact; a few Tea Party favorites attended the dinner, too, and joined Paul later in the Senate chamber.) It had already been hours since Wyden joined Paul's protest, illustrating that true bipartisanship is forged on the basis of shared principles, not just political necessity.
Democrats and journalists like to describe the Tea Party as "hostage-takers," holding Republican leaders and moderates in their thrall while they try to dismantle the government. But in reality it is the Washington elite that have taken the country hostage, forcing through expansions of government power and spending vast sums of money that the nation will struggle for generations to repay. The Tea Party represents the last chance to escape the zero-sum politics and economic stagnation that has plagued much of Europe for the last several years.
As Paul continued, liberals who once railed angrily against Bush were forced to confront the fecklessness of their own party. Hollywood's John Cusack asked: "Where are the so-called progressive Democratic senators?" Meanwhile, the supposedly racist Tea Party Senator from Kentucky was leading the charge. It was not a political ploy for votes, or even an attempt to block one of President Obama's nominees, which Paul acknowledged he would fail to do. It was just a stand on principle--which is what the Tea Party has been about all along.
by Joel B. Pollak
Breitbart.com
Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster against the confirmation of CIA Director and "drone czar" John Brennan offers a "teachable moment" to the media and the left about the Tea Party. As they seethe in outrage and confusion that it took a Republican to question the constitutionality of drone attacks, it is important to remind our friends on the other side that it wasn't just any Republican, but a--gasp!--Tea Party Republican who spoke "truth to power."
Not only that, but the Senators who were first to offer their assistance were also Tea Party Republicans--the so-called McCarthyist Ted Cruz of Texas, and Marco "Water Break" Rubio of Florida. All three of these Senators won their primary elections against candidates favored by the Republican establishment. All three have been attacked by the left and smeared as racist and extremist for belonging to the Tea Party. Yet without them, no one from either party would have questioned a policy that the left once saw as a dangerous abuse of executive power.
Only one Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, supported Paul. (Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois came to the floor very late in the game to offer a few challenging questions and formally end debate when Paul finally yielded.) Ryan Grim and Mollie Reilly of the Huffington Post observed: "...progressives who might have assumed to have been supportive were absent, leaving members of the GOP as the sole defenders of civil liberties. The White House was equally silent." Some Democrats, notably Maxine Waters, even slammed Paul as "destructive."
What many on the left and in the media have willfully failed to understand is that the Tea Party exists to defend the Constitution from unconstitutional encroachments on power and dangerous expansions in the size and cost of government. It did not merely arise in opposition to President Barack Obama; it had its roots in conservative outrage at the bailouts of the last months of George W. Bush's presidency. At its core, the Tea Party is about American values, not Republican politics. It exists not to obstruct the Democrats but to restore the Constitution.
Rand Paul's filibuster provided a useful contrast between the Tea Party and the GOP establishment. While Paul stood on the Senate floor, unable to leave the chamber to eat, a dozen other Republicans chose to dine with President Obama in a gesture of bipartisanship. (The contrast is not exact; a few Tea Party favorites attended the dinner, too, and joined Paul later in the Senate chamber.) It had already been hours since Wyden joined Paul's protest, illustrating that true bipartisanship is forged on the basis of shared principles, not just political necessity.
Democrats and journalists like to describe the Tea Party as "hostage-takers," holding Republican leaders and moderates in their thrall while they try to dismantle the government. But in reality it is the Washington elite that have taken the country hostage, forcing through expansions of government power and spending vast sums of money that the nation will struggle for generations to repay. The Tea Party represents the last chance to escape the zero-sum politics and economic stagnation that has plagued much of Europe for the last several years.
As Paul continued, liberals who once railed angrily against Bush were forced to confront the fecklessness of their own party. Hollywood's John Cusack asked: "Where are the so-called progressive Democratic senators?" Meanwhile, the supposedly racist Tea Party Senator from Kentucky was leading the charge. It was not a political ploy for votes, or even an attempt to block one of President Obama's nominees, which Paul acknowledged he would fail to do. It was just a stand on principle--which is what the Tea Party has been about all along.
How the White House silenced gun control groups
March 8, 2013
President Barack Obama’s gun control agenda is looking more doomed by the day, but gun control advocates still haven’t said a word to complain.
That’s no accident.
The White House knew its post-Newtown effort would require bringing key gun control groups into the fold. So the White House offered a simple arrangement: the groups could have access and involvement, but they’d have to offer silence and support in exchange.
The implied rules, according to conversations with many of those involved: No infighting. No second-guessing in the press. Support whatever the president and Vice President Joe Biden propose. And most of all, don’t make waves or get ahead of the White House.
In exchange: a voice in the discussions, a role in whatever final agreement is made and weekly meetings at the White House with Biden’s chief of staff, Bruce Reed — provided they don’t discuss what happens there.
“The implication is very, very strong when they are calling these meetings and we are all sitting there,” said one regular attendee, who like the others, would only speak about them anonymously. “It’s not like they’re being bullies, it’s them bringing everybody together, not being one-off meetings with groups that might be interested in things other than the bottom line, not providing the forum for that kind of stuff.”
“You’re glad to be in the room,” another participant in the Reed meetings said. “Because this issue has been dead for a long time and now there’s a real opportunity there.”
For the White House, which wouldn’t comment about Reed’s meetings or the relationships with the gun control groups, this strategy was about ensuring the president had a united front as he pushed for new laws — and that he won’t shoulder the blame if and when the negotiations fail.
But he’s forced a major change on some of Washington’s noisiest advocates: the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Third Way, Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Americans for Responsible Solutions, the organization founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and her husband, Mark Kelly. In past fights, gun control groups sparred with each other and got used to dictating the agenda to allies in Congress.
Now they’re just happy to be included in the discussion, and still holding out hope that something might happen.
“There is a lot of reliance on how the White House sees the strategy and the tactics going forward,” said Paul Helmke, who was the Brady Campaign president from 2006 to 2011. “We need the White House.”
That’s held true even as the hopes for any legislation has dimmed on even the most basic measures. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday ended the bipartisan talks on universal background checks with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and filed his own bill without co-sponsors or the suggestions made by Coburn and Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
Keep Reading>>
President Barack Obama’s gun control agenda is looking more doomed by the day, but gun control advocates still haven’t said a word to complain.
That’s no accident.
The White House knew its post-Newtown effort would require bringing key gun control groups into the fold. So the White House offered a simple arrangement: the groups could have access and involvement, but they’d have to offer silence and support in exchange.
The implied rules, according to conversations with many of those involved: No infighting. No second-guessing in the press. Support whatever the president and Vice President Joe Biden propose. And most of all, don’t make waves or get ahead of the White House.
In exchange: a voice in the discussions, a role in whatever final agreement is made and weekly meetings at the White House with Biden’s chief of staff, Bruce Reed — provided they don’t discuss what happens there.
“The implication is very, very strong when they are calling these meetings and we are all sitting there,” said one regular attendee, who like the others, would only speak about them anonymously. “It’s not like they’re being bullies, it’s them bringing everybody together, not being one-off meetings with groups that might be interested in things other than the bottom line, not providing the forum for that kind of stuff.”
“You’re glad to be in the room,” another participant in the Reed meetings said. “Because this issue has been dead for a long time and now there’s a real opportunity there.”
For the White House, which wouldn’t comment about Reed’s meetings or the relationships with the gun control groups, this strategy was about ensuring the president had a united front as he pushed for new laws — and that he won’t shoulder the blame if and when the negotiations fail.
But he’s forced a major change on some of Washington’s noisiest advocates: the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Third Way, Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Americans for Responsible Solutions, the organization founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and her husband, Mark Kelly. In past fights, gun control groups sparred with each other and got used to dictating the agenda to allies in Congress.
Now they’re just happy to be included in the discussion, and still holding out hope that something might happen.
“There is a lot of reliance on how the White House sees the strategy and the tactics going forward,” said Paul Helmke, who was the Brady Campaign president from 2006 to 2011. “We need the White House.”
That’s held true even as the hopes for any legislation has dimmed on even the most basic measures. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday ended the bipartisan talks on universal background checks with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and filed his own bill without co-sponsors or the suggestions made by Coburn and Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
Keep Reading>>
Rotten to the Core: The Feds' Invasive Student Tracking Database
March 8, 2013
Michelle Malkin
HotAir.com
(This is the fourth installment of a continuing series on nationalized academic standards known as the "Common Core.")
While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.
Say goodbye to your children's privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It's yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of "Common Core."
As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core's technological project is "merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce." The 2009 porkulus package included a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" to bribe states into constructing "longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students."
These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data -- health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.
At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education technology gurus were salivating at the prospects of information plunder. "This is going to be a huge win for us," Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters. Cha-ching-ching-ching.
The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material "aligned" to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more than a dozen states are now revolting against). Along with two dozen other tech firms, CompassLearning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core curricular scheme) and a division of conservative Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (which built the database infrastructure).
Another nonprofit startup, "inBloom, Inc.," has evolved out of that partnership to operate the database. The Gates Foundation and other partners provided $100 million in seed money. Reuters reports that inBloom, Inc. will "likely start to charge fees in 2015" to states and school districts participating in the system. "So far, seven states -- Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts -- have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide."
The National Education Data Model, available online at http://nces.sifinfo.org/datamodel/eiebrowser/techview.aspx?instance=studentElementarySecondary, lists hundreds of data points considered indispensable to the nationalized student tracking racket. These include:
--"Bus Stop Arrival Time" and "Bus Stop Description."
--"Dwelling arrangement."
--"Diseases, Illnesses and Other Health Conditions."
--"Religious Affiliation."
--"Telephone Number Type" and "Telephone Status."
Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types and even dental status.
How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn't. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington's top-down nationalized curricular scheme. The Bill Gates-endorsed Common Core "standards" are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of "21st-century technology" masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective "For the Children" altar.
Fed Ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It's about control, control and more control.
Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
Michelle Malkin
HotAir.com
(This is the fourth installment of a continuing series on nationalized academic standards known as the "Common Core.")
While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.
Say goodbye to your children's privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It's yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of "Common Core."
As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core's technological project is "merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce." The 2009 porkulus package included a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" to bribe states into constructing "longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students."
These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data -- health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.
At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education technology gurus were salivating at the prospects of information plunder. "This is going to be a huge win for us," Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters. Cha-ching-ching-ching.
The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material "aligned" to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more than a dozen states are now revolting against). Along with two dozen other tech firms, CompassLearning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core curricular scheme) and a division of conservative Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (which built the database infrastructure).
Another nonprofit startup, "inBloom, Inc.," has evolved out of that partnership to operate the database. The Gates Foundation and other partners provided $100 million in seed money. Reuters reports that inBloom, Inc. will "likely start to charge fees in 2015" to states and school districts participating in the system. "So far, seven states -- Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts -- have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide."
The National Education Data Model, available online at http://nces.sifinfo.org/datamodel/eiebrowser/techview.aspx?instance=studentElementarySecondary, lists hundreds of data points considered indispensable to the nationalized student tracking racket. These include:
--"Bus Stop Arrival Time" and "Bus Stop Description."
--"Dwelling arrangement."
--"Diseases, Illnesses and Other Health Conditions."
--"Religious Affiliation."
--"Telephone Number Type" and "Telephone Status."
Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types and even dental status.
How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn't. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington's top-down nationalized curricular scheme. The Bill Gates-endorsed Common Core "standards" are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of "21st-century technology" masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective "For the Children" altar.
Fed Ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It's about control, control and more control.
Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.
COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM
80% of NYC High School Graduates Can't Read
March 8, 2013
By Ben Shapiro
Breitbart News
In his last State of the City address, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg bragged about his huge taxpayer investments in education. “Now, let me ask you: is there anyone who still believes that New York City can’t get big things done? Since we’re here in Brooklyn, I’ll say it again: Fuhgeddaboudit.”
Bloomberg was right about one thing only: forgetting about it. Because not only are big things not getting done in New York City on education, even small things aren’t getting done. According to officials from City University of New York, a full 80 percent of high school graduates in New York City can’t read when they graduate. As CBS Local reports, “They had to re-learn basic skills – reading, writing, and math – first before they could begin college courses.”
And that’s for the students who graduate. New York City has the lowest graduation rate for black and Hispanic male students in the nation, with only 37 percent graduating. But teachers start off making $45,530 with benefits, and max out at over $100,000.
It’s not just Bloomberg and New York. In the city of Los Angeles, according to The Education Trust-West, just one in every 20 black kindergarteners will graduate from a four-year California college. Overall, a whopping 40 percent of high school students entering public colleges across the country require at least one remedial class in reading, writing or math.
This is the legacy of a teachers union-driven system in our major cities. And it is minorities who pay the highest price.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
By Ben Shapiro
Breitbart News
In his last State of the City address, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg bragged about his huge taxpayer investments in education. “Now, let me ask you: is there anyone who still believes that New York City can’t get big things done? Since we’re here in Brooklyn, I’ll say it again: Fuhgeddaboudit.”
Bloomberg was right about one thing only: forgetting about it. Because not only are big things not getting done in New York City on education, even small things aren’t getting done. According to officials from City University of New York, a full 80 percent of high school graduates in New York City can’t read when they graduate. As CBS Local reports, “They had to re-learn basic skills – reading, writing, and math – first before they could begin college courses.”
And that’s for the students who graduate. New York City has the lowest graduation rate for black and Hispanic male students in the nation, with only 37 percent graduating. But teachers start off making $45,530 with benefits, and max out at over $100,000.
It’s not just Bloomberg and New York. In the city of Los Angeles, according to The Education Trust-West, just one in every 20 black kindergarteners will graduate from a four-year California college. Overall, a whopping 40 percent of high school students entering public colleges across the country require at least one remedial class in reading, writing or math.
This is the legacy of a teachers union-driven system in our major cities. And it is minorities who pay the highest price.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
Election Day could become two weeks long under N.J. Democrats' bill
March 8, 2013
TRENTON — Instead of having one day to vote, New Jersey residents would get a two-week window to cast their ballots in person under a measure approved by an Assembly panel today.
The voting process would undergo a costly sea change if the bill (A3553) becomes law. Every municipality with more than 30,000 voters would have to set up more polling places, keep them open longer and hire more poll workers.
The nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services said yesterday that the changes would cost the state $46 million this year and $20 million in the next year, agreeing with a cost estimate by Gov. Chris Christie’s administration.
The chairman of the state Democratic Party, Assemblyman John Wisniewski, said Hurricane Sandy kept many people at home who would have voted. The superstorm struck New Jersey days before the 2012 elections.
Only 67 percent of registered voters cast their ballots, according to the state Division of Elections. In the last century, the Garden State had never gone below 70 percent in a presidential election year. New Jersey already allows voters to mail in absentee ballots.
"Sandy threw a wrench into the machinery of Election Day and created tremendous confusion," said Wisniewski, a bill sponsor. "This is a matter of convenience and ensuring every resident who is registered and wants to vote will have the opportunity to do so."
The League of Municipalities opposes the bill, saying the changes would be too onerous for local workers.
"A municipality may need to reschedule things like council meetings, meetings of land use boards, or municipal court dates" to meet the voting demand, said Bill Dressel, the group’s executive director.
The bill cleared the Assembly Appropriations Committee and heads to the full chamber. No companion bill has been introduced in the Senate.
TRENTON — Instead of having one day to vote, New Jersey residents would get a two-week window to cast their ballots in person under a measure approved by an Assembly panel today.
The voting process would undergo a costly sea change if the bill (A3553) becomes law. Every municipality with more than 30,000 voters would have to set up more polling places, keep them open longer and hire more poll workers.
The nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services said yesterday that the changes would cost the state $46 million this year and $20 million in the next year, agreeing with a cost estimate by Gov. Chris Christie’s administration.
The chairman of the state Democratic Party, Assemblyman John Wisniewski, said Hurricane Sandy kept many people at home who would have voted. The superstorm struck New Jersey days before the 2012 elections.
Only 67 percent of registered voters cast their ballots, according to the state Division of Elections. In the last century, the Garden State had never gone below 70 percent in a presidential election year. New Jersey already allows voters to mail in absentee ballots.
"Sandy threw a wrench into the machinery of Election Day and created tremendous confusion," said Wisniewski, a bill sponsor. "This is a matter of convenience and ensuring every resident who is registered and wants to vote will have the opportunity to do so."
The League of Municipalities opposes the bill, saying the changes would be too onerous for local workers.
"A municipality may need to reschedule things like council meetings, meetings of land use boards, or municipal court dates" to meet the voting demand, said Bill Dressel, the group’s executive director.
The bill cleared the Assembly Appropriations Committee and heads to the full chamber. No companion bill has been introduced in the Senate.
Santorum petition urges Congress to protect Second Amendment from Obama proposals
March 8, 2013
Pennsylvania's former U.S. Sen. and failed 2012 Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum Thursday launched a petition against gun control measures advocated by President Barack Obama.
The petition quickly earned about 500 signatures in its first half hour, according to the website where signators are asked to add their names.
Santorum, a devout social conservative, acknowledged the grief felt across the nation after the Sandy Hook school shooting, but warned that Obama's efforts – led by Vice President and Scranton native Joe Biden – are manipulating the nation's grief to advance a liberal agenda.
“Sadly, President Obama and liberals in Washington are using this tragedy as a way to further their gun control agenda and infringe upon our Second Amendment rights,” he said in a statement.
Santorum said he was most concerned that the proposed mandatory background check for all gun purchases would amount to the creation of a national gun owner registry.
“We can't wait another day to let Congress know that Americans are united in the protection of our Second Amendment rights and against 'universal background checks,” he said.
source
Pennsylvania's former U.S. Sen. and failed 2012 Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum Thursday launched a petition against gun control measures advocated by President Barack Obama.
The petition quickly earned about 500 signatures in its first half hour, according to the website where signators are asked to add their names.
 |
| Rick Santorum accompanied by his family announced at the Gettysburg Hotel that he has decided to suspend his campaign for the GOP nomination for President Tuesday, April 10, 2012 JOHN C. WHITEHEAD/The Patriot-News |
“Sadly, President Obama and liberals in Washington are using this tragedy as a way to further their gun control agenda and infringe upon our Second Amendment rights,” he said in a statement.
Santorum said he was most concerned that the proposed mandatory background check for all gun purchases would amount to the creation of a national gun owner registry.
“We can't wait another day to let Congress know that Americans are united in the protection of our Second Amendment rights and against 'universal background checks,” he said.
source
School Confiscates Cupcakes Decorated with Toy Soldiers
March 8, 2013
By Todd Starnes
A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.
Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”
Fountain’s wife made a batch of 30 chocolate cupcakes for their son Hunter’s classmates at Schall Elementary School in the town of Caro. The 9-year-old helped decorate the treats with plastic figurines representing World War Two soldiers.
The following morning Fountain said his wife delivered the cupcakes to the front office. The secretary complimented her on the decorations and then took the cakes to Hunter’s class.
“About 15 minutes later the school called my wife and told her the couldn’t serve the cupcakes because the soldiers had guns,” Fountain told Fox News. “My wife told them to remove the soldiers and serve the cupcakes anyway — and I believe she may have used more colorful language.”
The school complied and confiscated the soldiers — sending them home with Hunter in a bag.
“I was offended,” Fountain said. “I support our soldiers and what they stand for. These (plastic soldiers) are representations of World War Two soldiers – our greatest generation. If they aren’t allowed in our schools — who is?”
Principal Susan Wright released a statement to local media defending the decision.
“These are toys that were commonplace in the past,” she wrote. “However, some parents prohibit all guns as toys. In light of that difference, the school offered to replace the soldiers with another item and the soldiers were returned home with the student.”
“Living in a democratic society entails respect for opposing opinions,” she stated. “In the climate of recent events in schools we walk a delicate balance in teaching non-violence in our buildings and trying to ensure a safe, peaceful atmosphere.”
Fountain said it was beyond outrageous to compare American soldiers to deranged mass murderers.
“In our politically correct society they can’t separate the good from the bad,” he said. ”I’m sure hammers are allowed in schools — although a lot of people are killed by hammers.”
Principal Wright explained in her statement that she meant no disrespect to the military.
“By not permitting toy soldiers on cupcakes at school, no disrespect for our military or for the brave men and women who defend our rights to have our differences was intended,” she wrote. “Our commitment is always to our children and creating a safe place for them to learn, grow and have respectful dialogues about their differences.”
Fountain said his little boy is aware of the controversy but doesn’t quite understand what all the fuss is about.
“He’s nine-years-old,” Fountain said. “He was just glad to get his soldiers back.”
“It’s not about a toy,” he said. “It’s not about a cupcake. It’s what the toy represents — and we’re just taking political correctness too far.”
Todd is the author of Dispatches From Bitter America – endorsed by Sarah Palin, Mark Levin and Sean Hannity.
By Todd Starnes
A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.
Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”
Fountain’s wife made a batch of 30 chocolate cupcakes for their son Hunter’s classmates at Schall Elementary School in the town of Caro. The 9-year-old helped decorate the treats with plastic figurines representing World War Two soldiers.
The following morning Fountain said his wife delivered the cupcakes to the front office. The secretary complimented her on the decorations and then took the cakes to Hunter’s class.
“About 15 minutes later the school called my wife and told her the couldn’t serve the cupcakes because the soldiers had guns,” Fountain told Fox News. “My wife told them to remove the soldiers and serve the cupcakes anyway — and I believe she may have used more colorful language.”
The school complied and confiscated the soldiers — sending them home with Hunter in a bag.
“I was offended,” Fountain said. “I support our soldiers and what they stand for. These (plastic soldiers) are representations of World War Two soldiers – our greatest generation. If they aren’t allowed in our schools — who is?”
Principal Susan Wright released a statement to local media defending the decision.
“These are toys that were commonplace in the past,” she wrote. “However, some parents prohibit all guns as toys. In light of that difference, the school offered to replace the soldiers with another item and the soldiers were returned home with the student.”
“Living in a democratic society entails respect for opposing opinions,” she stated. “In the climate of recent events in schools we walk a delicate balance in teaching non-violence in our buildings and trying to ensure a safe, peaceful atmosphere.”
Fountain said it was beyond outrageous to compare American soldiers to deranged mass murderers.
“In our politically correct society they can’t separate the good from the bad,” he said. ”I’m sure hammers are allowed in schools — although a lot of people are killed by hammers.”
Principal Wright explained in her statement that she meant no disrespect to the military.
“By not permitting toy soldiers on cupcakes at school, no disrespect for our military or for the brave men and women who defend our rights to have our differences was intended,” she wrote. “Our commitment is always to our children and creating a safe place for them to learn, grow and have respectful dialogues about their differences.”
Fountain said his little boy is aware of the controversy but doesn’t quite understand what all the fuss is about.
“He’s nine-years-old,” Fountain said. “He was just glad to get his soldiers back.”
“It’s not about a toy,” he said. “It’s not about a cupcake. It’s what the toy represents — and we’re just taking political correctness too far.”
Todd is the author of Dispatches From Bitter America – endorsed by Sarah Palin, Mark Levin and Sean Hannity.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Obama promised to close Guantánamo. Instead, he's made it worse
March 7, 2013
Murtaza Hussain, guestblogging for Glenn Greenwald
Facing deteriorating conditions and the hopelessness of their legal abyss, detainees are starving themselves in protest
In his letters, Guantánamo Bay prisoner Shaker Aamer appeals in desperation to his captors and the outside world:
"Please … torture me in the old way. Here they destroy people mentally and physically without leaving marks."
The 44-year-old British resident and father of four has spent over 11 years incarcerated at Guantánamo despite being cleared for release as early as 2007. To this day never charged with a crime, Aamer is just one of hundreds of detainees who remain imprisoned in Guantánamo. Despite running on an explicit campaign promise to shut down the island prison which has become a symbol of the abuses of the "war on terror", President Obama has continued to preside over its operation.
And by recent accounts, under his tenure, the conditions for prisoners there – from both a physical and legal standpoint – have become markedly worse.
This past month, the majority of prisoners at Guantánamo began a hunger strike in protest of alleged mistreatment at the hands of guards at the facility. According to lawyers for over a dozen men involved in the protest, after weeks of refusing food, their clients are "coughing blood, losing consciousness and becoming weak and fatigued". At least five men are reportedly being strapped down by guards and force-fed through their nostrils – an excruciatingly painful procedure that the UN Human Rights Commission has said it considers to be torture.
For the prisoners, the overwhelming majority of whom have never been charged with a crime and over 50 of whom have been cleared for release for years, this represents their last desperate avenue to protest their fate. Under President Obama's tenure, the Kafkaesque legal nightmare of detainees such as these has become even more entrenched.
The deterioration in detainees' living conditions is believed to be tied to a recent change in the military command of the prison. It has been reported that under the new command regime, mistreatment of prisoners has increased, exacerbating a situation already desperate after over a decade of torture, solitary confinement, and detainee deaths at the camp.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that a detainee was shot in the neck by a guard, the first incident of gunfire known to have occurred in the camp's history. In addition to a pervasive atmosphere of violence at the facility – characterized by beatings and other forms of abuse by camp guards – detainees have increasingly had their meager personal effects confiscated or damaged, without cause or explanation. Mundane items such as family photos, letters and CDs have recently been taken away by camp guards and prisoners copies of the Qur'an have been desecrated under the guise of searching for contraband.
To individuals who have spent over a decade imprisoned under draconian circumstances, separated from their families and without any foreseeable prospect of freedom, the latest round of degradations appear to have represented a breaking-point. In the words of Hilary Stauffer, of the UK-based legal charity Reprieve:
"These men are simply trying to pass their days in something that is a reasonable facsimile to 'normality', simply trying to survive. To have their small daily pleasures – their Qur'ans, their personal items – confiscated, or desecrated, is an unbearable indignity … the saddest part is their only means of protest is a hunger strike – there is literally no other avenue available to them."
That the hunger strike is, in large part, a reflection of the increasing hopelessness of the detainees' situation is obvious to all parties, as well as a direct consequence of the policies of the Obama administration. The passage into law earlier this year of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which contained language and provisions intended to prevent the closure of Guantánamo and make the transfer of detainees from there impossible – has effectively doomed prisoners prospects of freedom.
Even those already cleared for release now face the prospect of indefinite incarceration at the facility – without even the pretense of legal recourse. Despite being publicly petitioned by human rights groups to veto the bill, the NDAA was signed by President Obama – a direct contradiction of his campaign promise to close the prison.
A further demonstration of the Obama administration's resolve to keep open Guantánamo and maintain the indefinite incarceration its prisoners came in the reassignment, in January, of Special Envoy Dan Fried. The man tasked with finding new homes for Guantánamo prisoners – a role described as "the most thankless job in Washington" – was notified early this year of his impending transfer and the abolition of his former post. In closing the special envoy position and transferring its portfolio to a State Department legal department ill-equipped to handle it, Obama has sent a clear message that he intends to maintain the present situation at the prison indefinitely.
Furthermore, the continued denial of access to Guantánamo prisoners for UN torture investigators has made clear that there will be neither a change in detainees' conditions nor any accounting for abuses. For the men at Guantánamo, the message is straightforward: whether they have been cleared for release or not, their freedom will not be forthcoming and their circumstances at Guantánamo will only get worse under this administration.
The hopelessness of indefinite detention – characterized by permanent separation from family and the banishment of the prospect of returning to a normal life – naturally has a deleterious effect on prisoners' well-being. Coupled with increased harassment and humiliation by camp guards, this situation is today manifesting in the supremely desperate act of protest represented in the present mass hunger strike by detainees. That this increasingly draconian reality at Guantánamo has occurred during the tenure of Barack Obama, a man who based his very election in part on a pledge to close the prison, is a tragic irony. It also represents a moral failure on the part of Obama's liberal supporters who excoriated George W Bush for his operation of the camp, but have remained largely acquiescent with President Obama's entrenchment and intensification of his predecessors policies.
For the men who have spent years trapped in Guantánamo and now stare into the legal abyss of permanent detention there, the policies of this administration have meant a worsening of their already fraught conditions. The case of Shaker Aamer, cleared for release in 2007, yet still languishing in Guantánamo nearly six years later, offers some clue as to why the Obama administration may be taking extraordinary measures to ensure detainees such as him remain behind bars. In the words of his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith:
"I have known Shaker for some time; because he is so eloquent and outspoken about the injustices of Guantánamo, he is very definitely viewed as a threat by the US. Not in the sense of being an extremist, but in the sense of being someone who can rather eloquently criticize the nightmare that happened there."
For those who have experienced and borne witness to beatings, torture, and even death at Guantánamo Bay over the past decade, Barack Obama has ensured that the prospect of freedom will remain as remote as ever.
source: UK Guardian
Murtaza Hussain, guestblogging for Glenn Greenwald
Facing deteriorating conditions and the hopelessness of their legal abyss, detainees are starving themselves in protest
 |
| The majority of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are currently on hunger strike to protest the prison conditions and the legal limbo of their position. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images |
"Please … torture me in the old way. Here they destroy people mentally and physically without leaving marks."
The 44-year-old British resident and father of four has spent over 11 years incarcerated at Guantánamo despite being cleared for release as early as 2007. To this day never charged with a crime, Aamer is just one of hundreds of detainees who remain imprisoned in Guantánamo. Despite running on an explicit campaign promise to shut down the island prison which has become a symbol of the abuses of the "war on terror", President Obama has continued to preside over its operation.
And by recent accounts, under his tenure, the conditions for prisoners there – from both a physical and legal standpoint – have become markedly worse.
This past month, the majority of prisoners at Guantánamo began a hunger strike in protest of alleged mistreatment at the hands of guards at the facility. According to lawyers for over a dozen men involved in the protest, after weeks of refusing food, their clients are "coughing blood, losing consciousness and becoming weak and fatigued". At least five men are reportedly being strapped down by guards and force-fed through their nostrils – an excruciatingly painful procedure that the UN Human Rights Commission has said it considers to be torture.
For the prisoners, the overwhelming majority of whom have never been charged with a crime and over 50 of whom have been cleared for release for years, this represents their last desperate avenue to protest their fate. Under President Obama's tenure, the Kafkaesque legal nightmare of detainees such as these has become even more entrenched.
The deterioration in detainees' living conditions is believed to be tied to a recent change in the military command of the prison. It has been reported that under the new command regime, mistreatment of prisoners has increased, exacerbating a situation already desperate after over a decade of torture, solitary confinement, and detainee deaths at the camp.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that a detainee was shot in the neck by a guard, the first incident of gunfire known to have occurred in the camp's history. In addition to a pervasive atmosphere of violence at the facility – characterized by beatings and other forms of abuse by camp guards – detainees have increasingly had their meager personal effects confiscated or damaged, without cause or explanation. Mundane items such as family photos, letters and CDs have recently been taken away by camp guards and prisoners copies of the Qur'an have been desecrated under the guise of searching for contraband.
To individuals who have spent over a decade imprisoned under draconian circumstances, separated from their families and without any foreseeable prospect of freedom, the latest round of degradations appear to have represented a breaking-point. In the words of Hilary Stauffer, of the UK-based legal charity Reprieve:
"These men are simply trying to pass their days in something that is a reasonable facsimile to 'normality', simply trying to survive. To have their small daily pleasures – their Qur'ans, their personal items – confiscated, or desecrated, is an unbearable indignity … the saddest part is their only means of protest is a hunger strike – there is literally no other avenue available to them."
That the hunger strike is, in large part, a reflection of the increasing hopelessness of the detainees' situation is obvious to all parties, as well as a direct consequence of the policies of the Obama administration. The passage into law earlier this year of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which contained language and provisions intended to prevent the closure of Guantánamo and make the transfer of detainees from there impossible – has effectively doomed prisoners prospects of freedom.
Even those already cleared for release now face the prospect of indefinite incarceration at the facility – without even the pretense of legal recourse. Despite being publicly petitioned by human rights groups to veto the bill, the NDAA was signed by President Obama – a direct contradiction of his campaign promise to close the prison.
A further demonstration of the Obama administration's resolve to keep open Guantánamo and maintain the indefinite incarceration its prisoners came in the reassignment, in January, of Special Envoy Dan Fried. The man tasked with finding new homes for Guantánamo prisoners – a role described as "the most thankless job in Washington" – was notified early this year of his impending transfer and the abolition of his former post. In closing the special envoy position and transferring its portfolio to a State Department legal department ill-equipped to handle it, Obama has sent a clear message that he intends to maintain the present situation at the prison indefinitely.
Furthermore, the continued denial of access to Guantánamo prisoners for UN torture investigators has made clear that there will be neither a change in detainees' conditions nor any accounting for abuses. For the men at Guantánamo, the message is straightforward: whether they have been cleared for release or not, their freedom will not be forthcoming and their circumstances at Guantánamo will only get worse under this administration.
The hopelessness of indefinite detention – characterized by permanent separation from family and the banishment of the prospect of returning to a normal life – naturally has a deleterious effect on prisoners' well-being. Coupled with increased harassment and humiliation by camp guards, this situation is today manifesting in the supremely desperate act of protest represented in the present mass hunger strike by detainees. That this increasingly draconian reality at Guantánamo has occurred during the tenure of Barack Obama, a man who based his very election in part on a pledge to close the prison, is a tragic irony. It also represents a moral failure on the part of Obama's liberal supporters who excoriated George W Bush for his operation of the camp, but have remained largely acquiescent with President Obama's entrenchment and intensification of his predecessors policies.
For the men who have spent years trapped in Guantánamo and now stare into the legal abyss of permanent detention there, the policies of this administration have meant a worsening of their already fraught conditions. The case of Shaker Aamer, cleared for release in 2007, yet still languishing in Guantánamo nearly six years later, offers some clue as to why the Obama administration may be taking extraordinary measures to ensure detainees such as him remain behind bars. In the words of his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith:
"I have known Shaker for some time; because he is so eloquent and outspoken about the injustices of Guantánamo, he is very definitely viewed as a threat by the US. Not in the sense of being an extremist, but in the sense of being someone who can rather eloquently criticize the nightmare that happened there."
For those who have experienced and borne witness to beatings, torture, and even death at Guantánamo Bay over the past decade, Barack Obama has ensured that the prospect of freedom will remain as remote as ever.
source: UK Guardian
Judicial Nominee Who Helped Sue Gun Makers Is 'Exactly' Who We Need To Serve, Obama Says
March 7, 2013
By Joe Schoffstall
(CNS News) - Today, President Barack Obama said Caitlin Halligan, who was once again blocked by Senate Republicans on an up-or-down vote for confirmation, is "exactly the kind of person" who should serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
"A majority of the Senate agrees that Ms. Halligan is exactly the kind of person who should serve on this court, and I urge Senate Republicans to allow the Senate to express its will and to confirm Ms. Halligan without further delay," Obama stated.
However, Halligan is considered to the "most anti-Second Amendment nominee" Obama has ever pushed, according to a senate GOP aide who spoke with Breitbart News in late February.
Matthew Boyle writes of Halligan:
In a May 5, 2003 speech, Halligan revealed that she played a role in lawsuits against firearms manufacturers in which authorities were attempting to hold them accountable for crimes committed with firearms. Her comments came in the context of bashing the then-pending Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).
"If enacted, this legislation would nullify lawsuits brought by nearly 30 cities and counties -including one filed by my office-as well as scores of lawsuits brought by individual victims or groups harmed by gun violence," Halligan said. "Such an action would likely cut off at the pass any attempt by States to find solutions - through the legal system or their own legislatures - that might reduce gun crime or promote greater responsibility among gun dealers.
On December 5, 2011, the following was written in a letter by the NRA to members of the U.S. Senate when Halligan was first nominated for the position by President Obama.
(Partial letter): "Our opposition is based on Ms. Halligan's attacks on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans. Specifically, she worked to undermine the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), enacted in 2005 with strong bipartisan support. This legislation was critically important in ending a wave of lawsuits sponsored by anti-gun organizations and governments, which sought to blame firearms manufacturers and dealers for the criminal misuse of their products by third parties. This bill was an essential protection both for the Second Amendment rights of honest Americans and for the continued existence of the domestic firearms industry as a supplier of arms for our nation's defense."
It continues, "Among the governments that sued the industry was the state of New York. This case was pending while Ms. Halligan was New York's solicitor general, and she strongly supported the litigation both inside and outside the courtroom." To read the full letter, click here.
In the later part of 2011, she was successfully filibustered by Senate Republicans. She went on to be re-nominated by the president in 2012. However, that nomination timed out at the conclusion of the 112th Congress. This is the third time the president has nominated her for this position.
By Joe Schoffstall
(CNS News) - Today, President Barack Obama said Caitlin Halligan, who was once again blocked by Senate Republicans on an up-or-down vote for confirmation, is "exactly the kind of person" who should serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
"A majority of the Senate agrees that Ms. Halligan is exactly the kind of person who should serve on this court, and I urge Senate Republicans to allow the Senate to express its will and to confirm Ms. Halligan without further delay," Obama stated.
However, Halligan is considered to the "most anti-Second Amendment nominee" Obama has ever pushed, according to a senate GOP aide who spoke with Breitbart News in late February.
Matthew Boyle writes of Halligan:
In a May 5, 2003 speech, Halligan revealed that she played a role in lawsuits against firearms manufacturers in which authorities were attempting to hold them accountable for crimes committed with firearms. Her comments came in the context of bashing the then-pending Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).
"If enacted, this legislation would nullify lawsuits brought by nearly 30 cities and counties -including one filed by my office-as well as scores of lawsuits brought by individual victims or groups harmed by gun violence," Halligan said. "Such an action would likely cut off at the pass any attempt by States to find solutions - through the legal system or their own legislatures - that might reduce gun crime or promote greater responsibility among gun dealers.
On December 5, 2011, the following was written in a letter by the NRA to members of the U.S. Senate when Halligan was first nominated for the position by President Obama.
(Partial letter): "Our opposition is based on Ms. Halligan's attacks on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans. Specifically, she worked to undermine the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), enacted in 2005 with strong bipartisan support. This legislation was critically important in ending a wave of lawsuits sponsored by anti-gun organizations and governments, which sought to blame firearms manufacturers and dealers for the criminal misuse of their products by third parties. This bill was an essential protection both for the Second Amendment rights of honest Americans and for the continued existence of the domestic firearms industry as a supplier of arms for our nation's defense."
It continues, "Among the governments that sued the industry was the state of New York. This case was pending while Ms. Halligan was New York's solicitor general, and she strongly supported the litigation both inside and outside the courtroom." To read the full letter, click here.
In the later part of 2011, she was successfully filibustered by Senate Republicans. She went on to be re-nominated by the president in 2012. However, that nomination timed out at the conclusion of the 112th Congress. This is the third time the president has nominated her for this position.
WaPo: Yep, White House is still lying about janitors
March 7, 2013
by Mary Katharine Ham
(Hot Air) - This is so perfectly symbolic of the White House’s strategy on sequestration, that I had to highlight it. This is the second time the Washington Post fact-checker has awarded the administration Pinnocchios (four this time) in one week, for the same lie. Which is to say, wow, this is a really big, fat lie.
First, the substance of the claim in question, made in backpedaling response to Glenn Kessler’s first fact check on the issue of janitors:
“You know, those Capitol janitors will not get as much overtime. I’m sure they think less pay, that they’re taking home, does hurt.”
— Gene Sperling, director of the White House economic council, on ABC News’ “This Week,” March 3, 2013
“On the issue of the janitors, if you work for an hourly wage and you earn overtime, and you depend on that overtime to make ends meet, it is simply a fact that a reduction in overtime is a reduction in your pay.”
— White House spokesman Jay Carney, news briefing, March 4
The verdict: complete malarkey, as Joe Biden might say.
First of all, we should note that the White House’s story kept evolving as we reported last week’s column. It’s almost as if the president’s aides had to scramble to come up with reasons why the president could be correct, without actually knowing the facts.
So, when we forwarded to White House aides an AOC memo saying no furloughs were planned, White House aides latched onto a line about overtime reductions. For a couple of hours, we were also told that the janitors were on contract — and contracts were being curtailed. But that line of reasoning turned out to be incorrect. Then, after the statements from the Capitol were issued, there was no longer any response.
But, as seen by the quotes above, the talking point about “overtime” did not fade away.
AOC officials declined to discuss janitor compensation, but SAA officials were willing to share details. Given that the AOC and SAA janitors essentially work side by side, it is reasonable to assume that the pay statistics are roughly similar.
Bret H. Swanson, assistant sergeant at arms for operations and the manager of cleaning technicians, said 27 people are employed on the night cleaning shift and 16 people on a day shift; a majority of the cleaning takes place at night. There is a differential for the overnight shift, so the night janitors earn an average of $51,644 a year and the day janitors earn an average of $49,481.
And the overtime pay? It averaged $304 per employee in fiscal year 2012 and $388 per employee thus far in the current fiscal year. “Cleaning technicians do not earn what I would consider to be a great deal of overtime pay,” Swanson said.
In other words, overtime amounts to only pittance of the overall pay — about $6.50 a week on top of wages of $1,000 a week. That’s much different from Carney’s claim of having to “depend on that overtime to make ends meet.”
Indeed, even before the sequester was implemented, Capitol Hill janitors have already earned more overtime pay than they did in all of last year. Swanson said the higher amount so far this year is because of “the demands of beginning a new Congress and hosting a presidential inauguration during a weekend that also included a federal holiday.”
Hey, we all struggle with the truth every now and then, right?
The Obama administration has overreached three times in the past 10 days in attempting to illustrate the negative impact of the sequester spending cuts in the short term, giving fodder to those seeking to play down the impact of the cuts.
On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters that major airports had seen lines ballooning to 150-200 percent their normal size. The Transportation Security Administration later clarified that it was not yet seeing longer-than-normal checkpoint lines, though Customs and Border Protection told CBS News there had been increased wait times at two airports due to reduced staffing.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, however, that “officials representing a dozen major airports said there were few if any unusual flight delays or lines at security or customs checkpoints.” That included an official at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, which is one of the two airports that had been specifically cited by Customs and Border Protection.
On Friday, meanwhile, President Obama said that janitors at the U.S. Capitol would receive a pay cut due to the sequester cuts. Carlos Elias, the superintendent of the U.S. Capitol building and the Capitol Visitors Center, quickly emailed employees to say “This is NOT TRUE,” adding that “The pay and benefits of EACH of our employees WILL NOT be impacted.”
The prior Sunday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan had said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.” He later acknowledged that he “misspoke” after fact checkers found no evidence for the claim.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked what was being done to ensure the figures were not being exaggerated. Carney responded by pointing to long-term projections of job losses from economic analysts and “numerous examples already of what’s going to happen,” including plans to furlough 750,000 Department of Defense Workers.
Pressed about the issue again Tuesday – specifically why Napolitano did not check her facts before making her claims regarding longer lines – Carney said it is a “fact” that “there will be negative effects on our air traffic because of the reductions in FAA man hours, air traffic controllers in particular.”
“And efforts to muddy that fact by, you know, singling out a certain statement…we can do that, but there are real people out there who will be delayed or who will have their wages cut or…who will lose their jobs as a result of the sequester, while folks in Washington are arguing over whether this particular impact happened when we said it was going to happen or a week later or a month later,” he said.
No wonder the president is “recalibrating.” The fact that he lied about all this is getting dangerously close to being common knowledge. It’s even seeped into the Buzzfeed coverage, which means people who pay no attention to politics are even hearing this loud and clear.
Tim Carney offers a heads-up for those who might just now be noticing this trend:
by Mary Katharine Ham
(Hot Air) - This is so perfectly symbolic of the White House’s strategy on sequestration, that I had to highlight it. This is the second time the Washington Post fact-checker has awarded the administration Pinnocchios (four this time) in one week, for the same lie. Which is to say, wow, this is a really big, fat lie.
First, the substance of the claim in question, made in backpedaling response to Glenn Kessler’s first fact check on the issue of janitors:
“You know, those Capitol janitors will not get as much overtime. I’m sure they think less pay, that they’re taking home, does hurt.”
— Gene Sperling, director of the White House economic council, on ABC News’ “This Week,” March 3, 2013
“On the issue of the janitors, if you work for an hourly wage and you earn overtime, and you depend on that overtime to make ends meet, it is simply a fact that a reduction in overtime is a reduction in your pay.”
— White House spokesman Jay Carney, news briefing, March 4
The verdict: complete malarkey, as Joe Biden might say.
First of all, we should note that the White House’s story kept evolving as we reported last week’s column. It’s almost as if the president’s aides had to scramble to come up with reasons why the president could be correct, without actually knowing the facts.
So, when we forwarded to White House aides an AOC memo saying no furloughs were planned, White House aides latched onto a line about overtime reductions. For a couple of hours, we were also told that the janitors were on contract — and contracts were being curtailed. But that line of reasoning turned out to be incorrect. Then, after the statements from the Capitol were issued, there was no longer any response.
But, as seen by the quotes above, the talking point about “overtime” did not fade away.
AOC officials declined to discuss janitor compensation, but SAA officials were willing to share details. Given that the AOC and SAA janitors essentially work side by side, it is reasonable to assume that the pay statistics are roughly similar.
Bret H. Swanson, assistant sergeant at arms for operations and the manager of cleaning technicians, said 27 people are employed on the night cleaning shift and 16 people on a day shift; a majority of the cleaning takes place at night. There is a differential for the overnight shift, so the night janitors earn an average of $51,644 a year and the day janitors earn an average of $49,481.
And the overtime pay? It averaged $304 per employee in fiscal year 2012 and $388 per employee thus far in the current fiscal year. “Cleaning technicians do not earn what I would consider to be a great deal of overtime pay,” Swanson said.
In other words, overtime amounts to only pittance of the overall pay — about $6.50 a week on top of wages of $1,000 a week. That’s much different from Carney’s claim of having to “depend on that overtime to make ends meet.”
Indeed, even before the sequester was implemented, Capitol Hill janitors have already earned more overtime pay than they did in all of last year. Swanson said the higher amount so far this year is because of “the demands of beginning a new Congress and hosting a presidential inauguration during a weekend that also included a federal holiday.”
Hey, we all struggle with the truth every now and then, right?
The Obama administration has overreached three times in the past 10 days in attempting to illustrate the negative impact of the sequester spending cuts in the short term, giving fodder to those seeking to play down the impact of the cuts.
On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters that major airports had seen lines ballooning to 150-200 percent their normal size. The Transportation Security Administration later clarified that it was not yet seeing longer-than-normal checkpoint lines, though Customs and Border Protection told CBS News there had been increased wait times at two airports due to reduced staffing.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, however, that “officials representing a dozen major airports said there were few if any unusual flight delays or lines at security or customs checkpoints.” That included an official at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, which is one of the two airports that had been specifically cited by Customs and Border Protection.
On Friday, meanwhile, President Obama said that janitors at the U.S. Capitol would receive a pay cut due to the sequester cuts. Carlos Elias, the superintendent of the U.S. Capitol building and the Capitol Visitors Center, quickly emailed employees to say “This is NOT TRUE,” adding that “The pay and benefits of EACH of our employees WILL NOT be impacted.”
The prior Sunday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan had said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.” He later acknowledged that he “misspoke” after fact checkers found no evidence for the claim.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked what was being done to ensure the figures were not being exaggerated. Carney responded by pointing to long-term projections of job losses from economic analysts and “numerous examples already of what’s going to happen,” including plans to furlough 750,000 Department of Defense Workers.
Pressed about the issue again Tuesday – specifically why Napolitano did not check her facts before making her claims regarding longer lines – Carney said it is a “fact” that “there will be negative effects on our air traffic because of the reductions in FAA man hours, air traffic controllers in particular.”
“And efforts to muddy that fact by, you know, singling out a certain statement…we can do that, but there are real people out there who will be delayed or who will have their wages cut or…who will lose their jobs as a result of the sequester, while folks in Washington are arguing over whether this particular impact happened when we said it was going to happen or a week later or a month later,” he said.
No wonder the president is “recalibrating.” The fact that he lied about all this is getting dangerously close to being common knowledge. It’s even seeped into the Buzzfeed coverage, which means people who pay no attention to politics are even hearing this loud and clear.
Tim Carney offers a heads-up for those who might just now be noticing this trend:
State Dept. Offers Special Two-Year Passports for Transgenders in Transition
March 7, 2013
by Penny Starr
(CNSNews.com) – The State Department’s website features travel information for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender individuals, including advice on getting a temporary passport if you are a transgender in transition.
"In order to have the passport issued in your new gender, you must submit a physician certificate with your application that validates whether your gender transition is in process or complete," says the State Department.
"If a physician certifies that your transition is in process, you are eligible for a limited validity two-year passport," says the department.
"If a physician certifies that your transition is complete, you are eligible for a full validity ten-year passport," it says.
In any events, says the State Department, "The passport photo submitted with your application must accurately reflect your current appearance."
The department website also warns that some countries consider homosexuality a crime.
“Before choosing one’s international destination, LGBT travelers should carefully consider the laws and biases of their international destination and decide how open one can be regarding one’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” the website states.
“Avoid excessive physical displays of affection in public, particularly in more conservative countries or regions,” the website states in a list of recommendations entitled “While You’re There.”
Travelers who have HIV or AIDS are directed to the Bureau of Consular Affair’s website for information on restrictions for traveling abroad.
Links offered on the site include two “fact sheets” from State and the White House where “accomplishments” on gay rights by the Obama administration are detailed.
by Penny Starr
 |
| Secretary of State John Kerry (AP Photo) |
"In order to have the passport issued in your new gender, you must submit a physician certificate with your application that validates whether your gender transition is in process or complete," says the State Department.
"If a physician certifies that your transition is in process, you are eligible for a limited validity two-year passport," says the department.
"If a physician certifies that your transition is complete, you are eligible for a full validity ten-year passport," it says.
In any events, says the State Department, "The passport photo submitted with your application must accurately reflect your current appearance."
The department website also warns that some countries consider homosexuality a crime.
“Before choosing one’s international destination, LGBT travelers should carefully consider the laws and biases of their international destination and decide how open one can be regarding one’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” the website states.
“Avoid excessive physical displays of affection in public, particularly in more conservative countries or regions,” the website states in a list of recommendations entitled “While You’re There.”
Travelers who have HIV or AIDS are directed to the Bureau of Consular Affair’s website for information on restrictions for traveling abroad.
Links offered on the site include two “fact sheets” from State and the White House where “accomplishments” on gay rights by the Obama administration are detailed.
REPORT: Youth Healthcare Premiums to Skyrocket 145%-203%
March 7, 2013
by Celia Bigelow
Breitbart.com
If health insurance prices triple, do we still have to call Obamacare the "Affordable Care Act”?
A report released yesterday by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce reveals the devastating reality many Americans will face when Obamacare is in full force next year. While the majority of Americans will likely see their healthcare premiums increase, no one will swallow the cost burden more than young Americans.
Previous studies have reported that youth healthcare premiums could increase as much as 45 percent, but the the House Committee report concluded that young Americans could see an increase as much as 203 percent.
"Recent college graduates with entry-level jobs who are struggling to pay off student loan debt could see their premiums increase on average between 145 and 189 percent,” the report said. “Some studies estimate young adults could experience premium increases as high as 203 percent. Any increase, let alone tripling current costs, could break the bank for young adults who have just started out on their own."
The current average payment for health care premiums among young Americans is $648, but will increase to $1,872 under the Obamacare legislation. The graph below breaks down the average increases in healthcare premiums for young Americans in major cities:
According to the report, young Americans are disproportionately affected by Obamacare for three reasons:
1. Guaranteed Issue and Community Rating: In other words, price controls. Obamacare mandates that all Americans pay healthcare premiums regardless of anticipated medical expenses. Young Americans must subsidize retirees who use healthcare far more often to level the insurance price disparity between younger and older Americans.
2. Essential Health Benefits: Obamacare mandates certain health servives be covered by health insurance. These include coverage for preventive and wellness services, chronic disease management, rehabilitative and habilitative services, and many more. In short, the more categories you are forced to cover, the more expensive your premium will be. No more affordable catastrophic plans.
3. Taxes and Fees on Plans, Drugs, and Medical Devices: The total cost of new taxes and fees on drug manufacturers, device manufacturers, and health care plans is $165 billion. This will ultimately be passed on to the consumer in higher premiums.
Families will also see a significant increase in their healthcare premiums. One of the studies in the report found that a family could see the costs of their premiums rise to $7,186 in the next decade.
With a stagnant economy, unprecedented levels of unemployment (youth unemployment currently 17.6 percent), and average household expenses on the rise (gas, food, energy, etc), there are very few people that can afford $800-$4,000 more to pay for the rise in healthcare premiums.
Remember when President Obama said, “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan”? Or that Obamacare would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family.” Me too.
by Celia Bigelow
Breitbart.com
If health insurance prices triple, do we still have to call Obamacare the "Affordable Care Act”?
A report released yesterday by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce reveals the devastating reality many Americans will face when Obamacare is in full force next year. While the majority of Americans will likely see their healthcare premiums increase, no one will swallow the cost burden more than young Americans.
Previous studies have reported that youth healthcare premiums could increase as much as 45 percent, but the the House Committee report concluded that young Americans could see an increase as much as 203 percent.
"Recent college graduates with entry-level jobs who are struggling to pay off student loan debt could see their premiums increase on average between 145 and 189 percent,” the report said. “Some studies estimate young adults could experience premium increases as high as 203 percent. Any increase, let alone tripling current costs, could break the bank for young adults who have just started out on their own."
The current average payment for health care premiums among young Americans is $648, but will increase to $1,872 under the Obamacare legislation. The graph below breaks down the average increases in healthcare premiums for young Americans in major cities:
According to the report, young Americans are disproportionately affected by Obamacare for three reasons:
1. Guaranteed Issue and Community Rating: In other words, price controls. Obamacare mandates that all Americans pay healthcare premiums regardless of anticipated medical expenses. Young Americans must subsidize retirees who use healthcare far more often to level the insurance price disparity between younger and older Americans.
2. Essential Health Benefits: Obamacare mandates certain health servives be covered by health insurance. These include coverage for preventive and wellness services, chronic disease management, rehabilitative and habilitative services, and many more. In short, the more categories you are forced to cover, the more expensive your premium will be. No more affordable catastrophic plans.
3. Taxes and Fees on Plans, Drugs, and Medical Devices: The total cost of new taxes and fees on drug manufacturers, device manufacturers, and health care plans is $165 billion. This will ultimately be passed on to the consumer in higher premiums.
Families will also see a significant increase in their healthcare premiums. One of the studies in the report found that a family could see the costs of their premiums rise to $7,186 in the next decade.
With a stagnant economy, unprecedented levels of unemployment (youth unemployment currently 17.6 percent), and average household expenses on the rise (gas, food, energy, etc), there are very few people that can afford $800-$4,000 more to pay for the rise in healthcare premiums.
Remember when President Obama said, “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan”? Or that Obamacare would “bring down premiums by $2,500 for the typical family.” Me too.
EXCLUSIVE: ACLU Backs Paul's Filibuster
March 7, 2013
by Ben Shapiro
Breitbart.com
On Wednesday afternoon, Christopher Anders, Senior Legislative Council at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington D.C., spoke with Breitbart News exclusively about Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster of the John Brennan nomination to CIA director over the administration’s failures to answer questions about domestic use of drones. Anders backed Paul to the hilt, and was highly critical of the Obama administration.
“It’s certainly a courageous and historic effort by Senator Rand Paul and his colleagues, who are now increasing in numbers and coming to the fore in support of his filibuster,” said Anders. “The information Senator Paul is looking for goes to the very core of what the US is and who Americans are as a people.” Anders pointed out that the information Paul seeks is easy for the administration to hand over – it “ought to be a no-brainer,” he said. “It ought to be upsetting for everyone, all Americans of both parties, to not be able to get a straight answer to what is a very straightforward question from Senator Paul.”
Anders went on to explain that the Department of Justice could post the legal memos in question on the internet within an hour, or Xerox them and send them to the floor of the Senate. “The American people have a right to know,” said Anders. “Senator Paul is right to push for that information and I think he’s doing a very good job of exercising his constitutional duty as a member of Congress in our system of checks and balances to help serve as a check on the executive branch, on the president.”
Anders called the administration’s stonewalling “inexcusable.” The standards apparently applied by the administration, he continued, “are not standards recognized by any court in the land, any court anywhere in the world.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
by Ben Shapiro
Breitbart.com
On Wednesday afternoon, Christopher Anders, Senior Legislative Council at the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington D.C., spoke with Breitbart News exclusively about Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster of the John Brennan nomination to CIA director over the administration’s failures to answer questions about domestic use of drones. Anders backed Paul to the hilt, and was highly critical of the Obama administration.
“It’s certainly a courageous and historic effort by Senator Rand Paul and his colleagues, who are now increasing in numbers and coming to the fore in support of his filibuster,” said Anders. “The information Senator Paul is looking for goes to the very core of what the US is and who Americans are as a people.” Anders pointed out that the information Paul seeks is easy for the administration to hand over – it “ought to be a no-brainer,” he said. “It ought to be upsetting for everyone, all Americans of both parties, to not be able to get a straight answer to what is a very straightforward question from Senator Paul.”
Anders went on to explain that the Department of Justice could post the legal memos in question on the internet within an hour, or Xerox them and send them to the floor of the Senate. “The American people have a right to know,” said Anders. “Senator Paul is right to push for that information and I think he’s doing a very good job of exercising his constitutional duty as a member of Congress in our system of checks and balances to help serve as a check on the executive branch, on the president.”
Anders called the administration’s stonewalling “inexcusable.” The standards apparently applied by the administration, he continued, “are not standards recognized by any court in the land, any court anywhere in the world.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
The sins of Secretary Clinton are falling on John Kerry
March 7, 2013
John Kerry is going to have a rough tenure as secretary of state. But let’s face it, whoever came after Hillary Clinton was going to have to deal with a foreign affairs press corps that has been sleeping for four years. From the moment Hillary entered Foggy Bottom, political reporters have treated their beloved secretary of state with kid gloves.
Watching media outlets now play catch-up on just how dangerous the world really is makes you feel a bit sorry for Kerry. Suddenly the State Department reporters have realized that Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, GITMO is still open, North Korea is invigorated, the Russians are actively out-maneuvering us, Syria is in flames and the French are leading the fight against Al Qaeda.
The mainstream media decided long ago that Hillary Clinton was going to be a fabulous global leader regardless of how she performed. Liberal outlets from the New York Times to Foreign Policy magazine are now busy cleaning up Hillary’s failed record. Robert Mackey and Mark Landler of the Times have dutifully given Hillary a news makeover, while Foreign Policy magazine is out with a new piece blaming Obama for the foreign policy failures because he froze Hillary out.
Following Obama’s final election and with Hillary building toward one in 2016, the media are giving their presumptive Democratic nominee all the successes and forcing Obama to fall on his sword for the failures.
The political press, like foreign policy reporters, has been all too willing to help Hillary build her global credentials by ignoring the world’s problems, and more importantly the fact that she did little to deal with them. Although secretary of state for just a month, Foreign Policy says John Kerry has already managed to ruin the U.S.-Russian relationship. The magazine’s headline: “Russian Foreign Minister Won’t Return Kerry’s Call” -- never mind that it was Hillary Clinton who spearheaded a “Russian reset” that emboldened Russian leaders.
Following Clinton’s antagonizing and patronizing Russian policy shift last December, when she accused Vladimir Putin of attempting to “re-Sovietize the region,” American and Russian leaders have publicly cited increased tensions between the two nations. Yet somehow it is Secretary Kerry’s fault that the Kremlin won’t return his phone calls.
Problems with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, too, escalated during Clinton’s tenure at State. His anti-Israel rhetoric over the last four years certainly isn’t new. Yet Erdogan’s latest comments saying Zionism is a crime against humanity remind us of his actions during the Gaza Flotilla incident in 2010, in which a skirmish with Israeli commandoes left nine Turkish citizens dead.
Yet instead of helping the Israeli and Turkish governments weather the episode with relations intact, Secretary Clinton was notably absent from the international arena at the time, even skipping, along with Ambassador Susan Rice, the United Nations’ emergency session addressing the incident. Kerry, on the other hand, quickly condemned Erdogan’s recent comments and yet hasn’t received the press’ laud atory praise that Clinton did.
While the State Department reporters traveled the world with Hillary for the last four years talking about the importance of the participation of women in the political process, Iran was building a bomb, Assad was killing 70,000 of his people, North Korea was testing a missile that can now reportedly reach Los Angeles, and China and Japan have reached the brink of war over a set of small, uninhabited islands. On each of these issues Secretary Clinton did little to meliorate the situation, ceding America’s influence to the ineffective international community or ignoring the problem altogether.
Though they asserted so in criticism, one can only hope that the Foreign Policy Journal is correct in writing that Secretary Kerry is “not a Clinton on U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Nevertheless, as she prepares her 2016 presidential campaign, America’s political reporters are content to claim Hillary Clinton a successful secretary of state despite the fact that they struggle to show evidence to prove the point. Is there one single priority foreign policy issue that Hillary Clinton resolved or can be credited with for doing the heavy lifting?
It just isn’t plausible for reporters to claim that so much fell apart in the one month John Kerry has been in charge at State.
Source: Richard Grenell served as the spokesman for 4 U.S. Ambassadors to the U.N. including John Negroponte, John Danforth, John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad. He currently writes from Los Angeles where his pieces can be seen at www.richardgrenell.com
 |
| FILE - In this March 1, 2013, photo, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at a news conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu at Ankara Palace in Ankara, Turkey. With the smile of a seasoned politician, a flair for languages and a vast repertoire of personal anecdotes, Kerry schmoozed and cajoled his way through Europe and the Middle East on his first trip abroad as America's top envoy over the past 10 days. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, Pool, file) |
Watching media outlets now play catch-up on just how dangerous the world really is makes you feel a bit sorry for Kerry. Suddenly the State Department reporters have realized that Iran is about to get a nuclear weapon, GITMO is still open, North Korea is invigorated, the Russians are actively out-maneuvering us, Syria is in flames and the French are leading the fight against Al Qaeda.
The mainstream media decided long ago that Hillary Clinton was going to be a fabulous global leader regardless of how she performed. Liberal outlets from the New York Times to Foreign Policy magazine are now busy cleaning up Hillary’s failed record. Robert Mackey and Mark Landler of the Times have dutifully given Hillary a news makeover, while Foreign Policy magazine is out with a new piece blaming Obama for the foreign policy failures because he froze Hillary out.
Following Obama’s final election and with Hillary building toward one in 2016, the media are giving their presumptive Democratic nominee all the successes and forcing Obama to fall on his sword for the failures.
The political press, like foreign policy reporters, has been all too willing to help Hillary build her global credentials by ignoring the world’s problems, and more importantly the fact that she did little to deal with them. Although secretary of state for just a month, Foreign Policy says John Kerry has already managed to ruin the U.S.-Russian relationship. The magazine’s headline: “Russian Foreign Minister Won’t Return Kerry’s Call” -- never mind that it was Hillary Clinton who spearheaded a “Russian reset” that emboldened Russian leaders.
Following Clinton’s antagonizing and patronizing Russian policy shift last December, when she accused Vladimir Putin of attempting to “re-Sovietize the region,” American and Russian leaders have publicly cited increased tensions between the two nations. Yet somehow it is Secretary Kerry’s fault that the Kremlin won’t return his phone calls.
Problems with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, too, escalated during Clinton’s tenure at State. His anti-Israel rhetoric over the last four years certainly isn’t new. Yet Erdogan’s latest comments saying Zionism is a crime against humanity remind us of his actions during the Gaza Flotilla incident in 2010, in which a skirmish with Israeli commandoes left nine Turkish citizens dead.
Yet instead of helping the Israeli and Turkish governments weather the episode with relations intact, Secretary Clinton was notably absent from the international arena at the time, even skipping, along with Ambassador Susan Rice, the United Nations’ emergency session addressing the incident. Kerry, on the other hand, quickly condemned Erdogan’s recent comments and yet hasn’t received the press’ laud atory praise that Clinton did.
While the State Department reporters traveled the world with Hillary for the last four years talking about the importance of the participation of women in the political process, Iran was building a bomb, Assad was killing 70,000 of his people, North Korea was testing a missile that can now reportedly reach Los Angeles, and China and Japan have reached the brink of war over a set of small, uninhabited islands. On each of these issues Secretary Clinton did little to meliorate the situation, ceding America’s influence to the ineffective international community or ignoring the problem altogether.
Though they asserted so in criticism, one can only hope that the Foreign Policy Journal is correct in writing that Secretary Kerry is “not a Clinton on U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Nevertheless, as she prepares her 2016 presidential campaign, America’s political reporters are content to claim Hillary Clinton a successful secretary of state despite the fact that they struggle to show evidence to prove the point. Is there one single priority foreign policy issue that Hillary Clinton resolved or can be credited with for doing the heavy lifting?
It just isn’t plausible for reporters to claim that so much fell apart in the one month John Kerry has been in charge at State.
Source: Richard Grenell served as the spokesman for 4 U.S. Ambassadors to the U.N. including John Negroponte, John Danforth, John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad. He currently writes from Los Angeles where his pieces can be seen at www.richardgrenell.com
Weirdo Florida senator's bill would require anger management courses for bullet buyers. Pisses me off just thinking about it..
March 7, 2013
A Florida legislator wants anyone trying to buy ammunition to complete an anger management program first, in what critics say is the latest example of local lawmakers reaching for constitutionally-dubious solutions to the problem of gun violence.
The bill filed Saturday by state Sen. Audrey Gibson, D-Jacksonville, would require a three-day waiting period for the sale of any firearm and the sale of ammunition to anyone who has not completed anger management courses. The proposal would require ammo buyers to take the anger management courses every 10 years.
“This is not about guns," Gibson said. "This is about ammunition and not only for the safety of the general community, but also for the safety of law enforcement.”
Gibson said she’s concerned with citizens stockpiling ammunition, potentially creating dangerous situations should those individuals ever come in contact with law enforcement agencies or criminals.
“It’s about getting people to think, really, about how much ammunition they need,” Gibson said. “It’s a step, I think, in a safer direction. It’s about getting people to think before they buy.”
Gibson insisted the bill is not “accusatory” toward gun and ammunition owners, but rather an effort to improve the safety of her community. She recalled the death of a Jacksonville man, Jordan Davis, 17, who was fatally shot during a confrontation with another man in November. Michael David Dunn, 46, of Satellite Beach, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the case.
Gibson first announced her intentions to introduce such legislation last month during a rally for Davis, saying “people are just not as patient as they used to be,” according to the Florida Times-Union.
“We see the rage on the road all the time,” she continued Wednesday. “People are just more impatient, I don’t know what it is.”
Gibson’s bill does not offer a threshold for the amount of ammunition needed to necessitate the need for anger management courses.
“It is unlawful to: A) Sell ammunition to another person who does not present certification that he or she has successfully completed an anger-management program consisting of at least 2 hours of online or face-to-face instruction in anger-management techniques,” the bill reads. “The certification must be renewed every 10 years. B) Purchase or otherwise obtain ammunition by fraud, false pretense, or false representation.”
Those in violation of the bill, if passed, would face a second-degree misdemeanor charge. Anyone found in violation a second time within a year of a prior conviction would face a first-degree misdemeanor charge.
Critics of the bill, however, derided the legislation as “absolutely ridiculous” and suggested that Gibson take a course on the U.S. Constitution.
“When I first saw it, I thought it had to be a joke,” said Sean Caranna, executive director of Florida Carry, a nonprofit group championing the right to bear arms. “They’re trying to say that anyone who owns a gun or shoots a gun or has ammunition for it needs counseling and obviously has some anger problems.”
Caranna said he was disappointed that Gibson wasted her time on the bill instead of focusing on other issues like jobs or the state’s rate of foreclosures, which is the highest in the nation.
“We’ve got a lot of issues that should be the focus of these bill slots with limited filing, but instead we put in something as ridiculous as this,” he said. “I don’t see a planet where this passes. This is an attempt to grab attention – it has to be. And that’s really disappointing.”
Jon Gutmacher, an Orlando attorney and author of “Florida Firearms: Law, Use & Ownership,” told FoxNews.com that the bill would almost certainly be found to be unconstitutional based on prior restraint.
“It has no reasonable relationship to anything,” he said. “There has to be a reasonable basis to believe that a person had a substantial anger problem that could cause public harm.”
Gutmacher said he found the bill to be an “insult” to any gun owner in the Sunshine State.
“It’s absurd on its face,” he continued. “And anyone who proposes that legislation is in my mind unfit for the legislature because it shows a basic problem with their thinking process, aside from their lack of understanding of what the Constitution is all about. That’s the kind of bill that doesn’t even get past committee.”
source: fox
 |
| Florida State Sen. Audrey Gibson wants to require bullet buyers to undergo anger management courses. (Flsenate.gov, Reuters) |
The bill filed Saturday by state Sen. Audrey Gibson, D-Jacksonville, would require a three-day waiting period for the sale of any firearm and the sale of ammunition to anyone who has not completed anger management courses. The proposal would require ammo buyers to take the anger management courses every 10 years.
“This is not about guns," Gibson said. "This is about ammunition and not only for the safety of the general community, but also for the safety of law enforcement.”
Gibson said she’s concerned with citizens stockpiling ammunition, potentially creating dangerous situations should those individuals ever come in contact with law enforcement agencies or criminals.
“It’s about getting people to think, really, about how much ammunition they need,” Gibson said. “It’s a step, I think, in a safer direction. It’s about getting people to think before they buy.”
Gibson insisted the bill is not “accusatory” toward gun and ammunition owners, but rather an effort to improve the safety of her community. She recalled the death of a Jacksonville man, Jordan Davis, 17, who was fatally shot during a confrontation with another man in November. Michael David Dunn, 46, of Satellite Beach, has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the case.
Gibson first announced her intentions to introduce such legislation last month during a rally for Davis, saying “people are just not as patient as they used to be,” according to the Florida Times-Union.
“We see the rage on the road all the time,” she continued Wednesday. “People are just more impatient, I don’t know what it is.”
Gibson’s bill does not offer a threshold for the amount of ammunition needed to necessitate the need for anger management courses.
“It is unlawful to: A) Sell ammunition to another person who does not present certification that he or she has successfully completed an anger-management program consisting of at least 2 hours of online or face-to-face instruction in anger-management techniques,” the bill reads. “The certification must be renewed every 10 years. B) Purchase or otherwise obtain ammunition by fraud, false pretense, or false representation.”
Those in violation of the bill, if passed, would face a second-degree misdemeanor charge. Anyone found in violation a second time within a year of a prior conviction would face a first-degree misdemeanor charge.
Critics of the bill, however, derided the legislation as “absolutely ridiculous” and suggested that Gibson take a course on the U.S. Constitution.
“When I first saw it, I thought it had to be a joke,” said Sean Caranna, executive director of Florida Carry, a nonprofit group championing the right to bear arms. “They’re trying to say that anyone who owns a gun or shoots a gun or has ammunition for it needs counseling and obviously has some anger problems.”
Caranna said he was disappointed that Gibson wasted her time on the bill instead of focusing on other issues like jobs or the state’s rate of foreclosures, which is the highest in the nation.
“We’ve got a lot of issues that should be the focus of these bill slots with limited filing, but instead we put in something as ridiculous as this,” he said. “I don’t see a planet where this passes. This is an attempt to grab attention – it has to be. And that’s really disappointing.”
Jon Gutmacher, an Orlando attorney and author of “Florida Firearms: Law, Use & Ownership,” told FoxNews.com that the bill would almost certainly be found to be unconstitutional based on prior restraint.
“It has no reasonable relationship to anything,” he said. “There has to be a reasonable basis to believe that a person had a substantial anger problem that could cause public harm.”
Gutmacher said he found the bill to be an “insult” to any gun owner in the Sunshine State.
“It’s absurd on its face,” he continued. “And anyone who proposes that legislation is in my mind unfit for the legislature because it shows a basic problem with their thinking process, aside from their lack of understanding of what the Constitution is all about. That’s the kind of bill that doesn’t even get past committee.”
source: fox
ACLU launches national investigation into police militarization
March 7, 2013
ACLU has filed public records requests in 24 states investigating federal funding for the militarization of state and local law enforcement.
On Wednesday, American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in 24 states filed over 177 public records requests with law enforcement agencies to determine the extent to which federal funding and support has fueled the militarization of state and local police departments.
Requests will include information on SWAT team weapons, deployment, injury rate, and funding. According to an ACLU statement:
"Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created for overseas combat theaters – and yet very little is known about exactly how many police departments have military weapons and training, how militarized the police have become, and how extensively federal money is incentivizing this trend. It’s time to understand the true scope of the militarization of policing in America and the impact it is having in our neighborhoods."
ACLU cites ten cases where the use of excess force and weaponry demonstrate the need for investigation. In one case, police blinded themselves with a flash bang grenade and then mistakenly shot a sleeping nine-year-old.
Police in Paragould Arkansas had to pull back from a plan to patrol streets in full SWAT gear after public pressure mounted. The Paragould Police Chief had said he expected most people stopped would be innocent of any crime, but claimed it was the civilian's responsibility to "prove" innocence.
In 2012, police in New Hampshire received federal funds for a counter-attack vehicle, citing "terrorism" to the Department of Homeland Security, and asking "what red-blooded American cop isn't going to be excited about getting a toy like this?"
UPI
ACLU has filed public records requests in 24 states investigating federal funding for the militarization of state and local law enforcement.
 |
| Pittsburgh police SWAT team members pictured in 2012. (File/UPI/Archie Carpenter) License photo |
Requests will include information on SWAT team weapons, deployment, injury rate, and funding. According to an ACLU statement:
"Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created for overseas combat theaters – and yet very little is known about exactly how many police departments have military weapons and training, how militarized the police have become, and how extensively federal money is incentivizing this trend. It’s time to understand the true scope of the militarization of policing in America and the impact it is having in our neighborhoods."
ACLU cites ten cases where the use of excess force and weaponry demonstrate the need for investigation. In one case, police blinded themselves with a flash bang grenade and then mistakenly shot a sleeping nine-year-old.
Police in Paragould Arkansas had to pull back from a plan to patrol streets in full SWAT gear after public pressure mounted. The Paragould Police Chief had said he expected most people stopped would be innocent of any crime, but claimed it was the civilian's responsibility to "prove" innocence.
In 2012, police in New Hampshire received federal funds for a counter-attack vehicle, citing "terrorism" to the Department of Homeland Security, and asking "what red-blooded American cop isn't going to be excited about getting a toy like this?"
UPI
Say Wut? Jon Stewart voices support for Rand Paul filibuster: ‘Holy Howard Roark’s ghost’
March 7, 2013
by Jeff Poor
Daily Caller
As Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster of the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director wound late into the night, he got the support of one unlikely media personality: Comedy Central “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart.
“Holy Howard Roark’s ghost — it looks like we got us a good old fashion actual talkie filibuster,” Stewart said. “The kind our grandparents tried to tell us about but never got through, because we were too busy playing jacks and tiddlywinks with our friends waiting for our turn to freebase in the shed. Ah, the ‘70s or ‘50s, or whatever timeframe I appear to be.”
“Rand Paul had sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking just a simple question: Can the president use a drone to take out an American citizen on U.S. soil?” Stewart continued. “You would think he would get a letter back like, ‘No, way.’ Holder writes him back a letter that never directingly addressing the question kind of, sort of implied that hypothetically in the right — yes, yes, we can do that. We can do that probably won’t, but yes. So, Sen. Rand Paul to draw attention to the issue of the execution of executive executions executed the classical old school filibuster. I mean he’s out there talking. This isn’t one of those — he’s using the filibuster the way it’s meant to be used.”
“[I] can’t say I agree with Rand Paul about everything,” Stewart added. “But as issues go, drone oversight is one certainly worth kicking up a fuss for.”
by Jeff Poor
Daily Caller
As Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s filibuster of the nomination of John Brennan to be CIA director wound late into the night, he got the support of one unlikely media personality: Comedy Central “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart.
“Holy Howard Roark’s ghost — it looks like we got us a good old fashion actual talkie filibuster,” Stewart said. “The kind our grandparents tried to tell us about but never got through, because we were too busy playing jacks and tiddlywinks with our friends waiting for our turn to freebase in the shed. Ah, the ‘70s or ‘50s, or whatever timeframe I appear to be.”
“Rand Paul had sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking just a simple question: Can the president use a drone to take out an American citizen on U.S. soil?” Stewart continued. “You would think he would get a letter back like, ‘No, way.’ Holder writes him back a letter that never directingly addressing the question kind of, sort of implied that hypothetically in the right — yes, yes, we can do that. We can do that probably won’t, but yes. So, Sen. Rand Paul to draw attention to the issue of the execution of executive executions executed the classical old school filibuster. I mean he’s out there talking. This isn’t one of those — he’s using the filibuster the way it’s meant to be used.”
“[I] can’t say I agree with Rand Paul about everything,” Stewart added. “But as issues go, drone oversight is one certainly worth kicking up a fuss for.”
Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?
March 7, 2013
By Jim Geraghty
National Review
The midweek edition of the Morning Jolt, making its way through thepiles of snow mostly rain in northern Virginia, features the death of Hugo Chávez, Donald Trump joining the roster of CPAC speakers, the administration’s claim that it can kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil with drones, and then this big question for conservatives to tackle . . .
Our Big Challenge: Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?
My fellow conservatives . . . the state of our movement is not strong. Let’s face it. We’re depressed. We feel betrayed by the American electorate.
We feel betrayed by inner-city African-Americans, who can see the abysmal results of decades of Democratic governance all around them and who suffer the most from those failed policies, yet somehow keep sending the same crooks and losers back into office. Put aside Obama and these voters’ obvious pride of electing and reelecting the first African-American president; why is there no functioning alternative party in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Newark, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and barely one in New York or Los Angeles?
We feel betrayed that anyone, let alone a significant chunk of the electorate, could believe that our belief that this country should control its borders is driven by racism, xenophobia, and a hatred of immigrants.
We feel betrayed by young people, who also have suffered greatly from these failed policies. They’ve been told that a college education was the ticket to a good life, and they’ve taken on crushing debt for jobs that don’t exist and may never exist. Their professors failed to teach them the skills to thrive in a competitive job market and overcome adversity, and yet they haven’t yet seemed to turn on them in outrage. No, instead, they turn to government, enticed by the promise of free birth control.
Anyway, since the election, we’ve been marinating in this very grim story: we, a bunch of Americans who love freedom and believed that we can live happy lives if the government will just get out of the way, got swamped by a growing swarm of voters who believe that government — the very same government that had disappointed them and failed them time and again — will solve their problems.
So . . . what’s our story to come back?
I don’t quite mean our policies, although that’s part of it. What is our story? You get stories from Obama all the time. The story is pretty simple, deliberately so, and large chunks of it are hogwash. But it’s believable enough for enough people:
In the beginning, there was Bush, and Bush was bad. There was war, and it was bad; the war created the deficits, and so did Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Because all the money went to tax cuts and wars, the government didn’t make necessary “investments” in “roads and bridges” and “green energy.” People couldn’t get health care. The oceans were rising.
Then we elected Obama, and it started getting better immediately! Okay, not everywhere, and maybe the progress and improvement was really hard to measure, but Obama inherited the worst crises of any president ever. Nobody could have generated better results than he did. The arc of history bent more toward justice, and better days are ahead, just you wait and see . . .
Now, you can come up with dozens of objections to those few sentences, but for the average Obama voter, that’s the gist of the state of the country from 2001 to today. It’s not all that different from your usual religious narrative, you have a fall of paradise (the election of Bush) the Devil (Bush), the messiah figure (Obama), the coming of a new kingdom and ultimate utopia. The purpose of the believer is to continue to believe in the redeeming messiah figure in the face of skepticism and doubt, because belief in him makes you one of the special and enlightened ones, and so on.
So . . . keeping in mind that we want to avoid all the creepy messianic vibes . . . what’s our story?
It’s going to be written by minds wiser than me, but I think we all know some of the key elements:
The American people have the tools they need to succeed and thrive. Now, when you look around you and see Snooki and the marching phalanx of idiotic reality stars, you may begin to wonder about this. But a core element of a philosophy built around individual rights is the notion that the vast majority of individuals are doing just fine as they are. Grown adults don’t need some sort of robed master or political or cultural elite to tell us what to do, how to think, how to live. If we do seek out teachers, mentors, wise men and women to help us make better decisions, it is best to find them outside of the coercive and inherently corrupting power of the state. We don’t need some massive social engineering or reeducation to cure us of backwards ways. In fact . . .
We are right to be wary of the powerful, because most of the folks who are supposed to be better than us, smarter than us, more wise than us, and more virtuous than us have failed us miserably. Where shall we start, the Wall Street Wizards who thought it was a good idea to start making six-figure loans to just about anybody, wrecking the old-fashioned virtue of credit? How about the government that takes in record tax revenue and still has trouble keeping this year’s deficit below $900 billion? The media botches stories regularly, our political leaders get caught in scandals like clockwork, epic mismanagement turns beautiful parts of the country like California into places nobody wants to live, or can afford to live . . .
We must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. While diplomacy will always have a role in our foreign policy, the world is always going to have hostile states and hostile forces, who can only be deterred through military force. Foreign populations do not care if our leader lived abroad as a child, nor do they oppose us because our leader is too much like a cowboy. No amount of self-proclaimed “empathy” or “smart diplomacy” can overrule geopolitical realities. If we intervene in the world’s trouble spots, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign leaders will demonize us and blame us for everything that goes wrong. If we do not intervene, horrific bloodshed on a grand scale follows (see Syria). Perhaps we need some variation of “speak softly, and carry a big stick.”
Right now, there’s a conundrum at the heart of the conservative movement. Our entire philosophy is about trusting the people, in faith that they know what’s best for themselves, can spend their own money more wisely than the government can, and find the solutions that work best for their communities . . . and right now, we don’t really trust the people.
By Jim Geraghty
National Review
The midweek edition of the Morning Jolt, making its way through the
Our Big Challenge: Do We on the Right Still Trust the People?
My fellow conservatives . . . the state of our movement is not strong. Let’s face it. We’re depressed. We feel betrayed by the American electorate.
We feel betrayed by inner-city African-Americans, who can see the abysmal results of decades of Democratic governance all around them and who suffer the most from those failed policies, yet somehow keep sending the same crooks and losers back into office. Put aside Obama and these voters’ obvious pride of electing and reelecting the first African-American president; why is there no functioning alternative party in Washington, D.C., Detroit, Newark, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and barely one in New York or Los Angeles?
We feel betrayed that anyone, let alone a significant chunk of the electorate, could believe that our belief that this country should control its borders is driven by racism, xenophobia, and a hatred of immigrants.
We feel betrayed by young people, who also have suffered greatly from these failed policies. They’ve been told that a college education was the ticket to a good life, and they’ve taken on crushing debt for jobs that don’t exist and may never exist. Their professors failed to teach them the skills to thrive in a competitive job market and overcome adversity, and yet they haven’t yet seemed to turn on them in outrage. No, instead, they turn to government, enticed by the promise of free birth control.
Anyway, since the election, we’ve been marinating in this very grim story: we, a bunch of Americans who love freedom and believed that we can live happy lives if the government will just get out of the way, got swamped by a growing swarm of voters who believe that government — the very same government that had disappointed them and failed them time and again — will solve their problems.
So . . . what’s our story to come back?
I don’t quite mean our policies, although that’s part of it. What is our story? You get stories from Obama all the time. The story is pretty simple, deliberately so, and large chunks of it are hogwash. But it’s believable enough for enough people:
In the beginning, there was Bush, and Bush was bad. There was war, and it was bad; the war created the deficits, and so did Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Because all the money went to tax cuts and wars, the government didn’t make necessary “investments” in “roads and bridges” and “green energy.” People couldn’t get health care. The oceans were rising.
Then we elected Obama, and it started getting better immediately! Okay, not everywhere, and maybe the progress and improvement was really hard to measure, but Obama inherited the worst crises of any president ever. Nobody could have generated better results than he did. The arc of history bent more toward justice, and better days are ahead, just you wait and see . . .
Now, you can come up with dozens of objections to those few sentences, but for the average Obama voter, that’s the gist of the state of the country from 2001 to today. It’s not all that different from your usual religious narrative, you have a fall of paradise (the election of Bush) the Devil (Bush), the messiah figure (Obama), the coming of a new kingdom and ultimate utopia. The purpose of the believer is to continue to believe in the redeeming messiah figure in the face of skepticism and doubt, because belief in him makes you one of the special and enlightened ones, and so on.
So . . . keeping in mind that we want to avoid all the creepy messianic vibes . . . what’s our story?
It’s going to be written by minds wiser than me, but I think we all know some of the key elements:
The American people have the tools they need to succeed and thrive. Now, when you look around you and see Snooki and the marching phalanx of idiotic reality stars, you may begin to wonder about this. But a core element of a philosophy built around individual rights is the notion that the vast majority of individuals are doing just fine as they are. Grown adults don’t need some sort of robed master or political or cultural elite to tell us what to do, how to think, how to live. If we do seek out teachers, mentors, wise men and women to help us make better decisions, it is best to find them outside of the coercive and inherently corrupting power of the state. We don’t need some massive social engineering or reeducation to cure us of backwards ways. In fact . . .
We are right to be wary of the powerful, because most of the folks who are supposed to be better than us, smarter than us, more wise than us, and more virtuous than us have failed us miserably. Where shall we start, the Wall Street Wizards who thought it was a good idea to start making six-figure loans to just about anybody, wrecking the old-fashioned virtue of credit? How about the government that takes in record tax revenue and still has trouble keeping this year’s deficit below $900 billion? The media botches stories regularly, our political leaders get caught in scandals like clockwork, epic mismanagement turns beautiful parts of the country like California into places nobody wants to live, or can afford to live . . .
We must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. While diplomacy will always have a role in our foreign policy, the world is always going to have hostile states and hostile forces, who can only be deterred through military force. Foreign populations do not care if our leader lived abroad as a child, nor do they oppose us because our leader is too much like a cowboy. No amount of self-proclaimed “empathy” or “smart diplomacy” can overrule geopolitical realities. If we intervene in the world’s trouble spots, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, foreign leaders will demonize us and blame us for everything that goes wrong. If we do not intervene, horrific bloodshed on a grand scale follows (see Syria). Perhaps we need some variation of “speak softly, and carry a big stick.”
Right now, there’s a conundrum at the heart of the conservative movement. Our entire philosophy is about trusting the people, in faith that they know what’s best for themselves, can spend their own money more wisely than the government can, and find the solutions that work best for their communities . . . and right now, we don’t really trust the people.
Several States Closer to Overthrowing Electoral College
March 7, 2013
George Washington once warned against those who would undermine the Constitution. “It is requisite,” he wrote, “that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon [constitutional] principles however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.”
Washington’s statement could easily have been aimed at the anti–Electoral College National Popular Vote effort, which is currently working to win support in several states. The measure has been approved by committees in Minnesota and Oklahoma and is pending on the Minnesota House and Oklahoma Senate floor. NPV is still pending in and could soon be approved by Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island legislative committees.
NPV asks states to change their method of elector allocation. Rather than give their electors to the winner of a state’s vote, they would give their electors to the winner of the national popular vote. NPV’s plan works through an interstate compact that could go into effect with as few as eleven states on board. Thus, a minority of states could force a direct-national-election system upon the country, even if a majority of states disagree.
Keep in mind that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention directly rejected such a national direct-election process. Yet NPV states now claim the authority to sign a contract and unilaterally change this decision. They conveniently blow by the constitutionally provided process for change: the formal amendment process, which requires supermajority approval.
Supporters deny that their plan is an end-run around the amendment process, even as they describe their plan in terms that echo Washington’s warnings.
The New York Times calls NPV an “innovative new proposal for states to take the lead in undoing the Electoral College.” The LA Times similarly lauds this method of replacing the Electoral College, which is “more clever” than the “difficult” constitutional amendment process. Former presidential candidate John B. Anderson calls the plan an “innovative approach that is a politically practical way to achieve the goal of nationwide popular election of the President.”
That pesky constitutional-amendment process. So impractical!
NPV supporters have given themselves away by the manner in which they discuss their plan. Perhaps legislators in Minnesota, Oklahoma, and elsewhere should take the hint. As Washington observed, NPV is merely trying to “undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.”
Source — Tara Ross is the author of Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College.
George Washington once warned against those who would undermine the Constitution. “It is requisite,” he wrote, “that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon [constitutional] principles however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.”
Washington’s statement could easily have been aimed at the anti–Electoral College National Popular Vote effort, which is currently working to win support in several states. The measure has been approved by committees in Minnesota and Oklahoma and is pending on the Minnesota House and Oklahoma Senate floor. NPV is still pending in and could soon be approved by Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island legislative committees.
NPV asks states to change their method of elector allocation. Rather than give their electors to the winner of a state’s vote, they would give their electors to the winner of the national popular vote. NPV’s plan works through an interstate compact that could go into effect with as few as eleven states on board. Thus, a minority of states could force a direct-national-election system upon the country, even if a majority of states disagree.
Keep in mind that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention directly rejected such a national direct-election process. Yet NPV states now claim the authority to sign a contract and unilaterally change this decision. They conveniently blow by the constitutionally provided process for change: the formal amendment process, which requires supermajority approval.
Supporters deny that their plan is an end-run around the amendment process, even as they describe their plan in terms that echo Washington’s warnings.
The New York Times calls NPV an “innovative new proposal for states to take the lead in undoing the Electoral College.” The LA Times similarly lauds this method of replacing the Electoral College, which is “more clever” than the “difficult” constitutional amendment process. Former presidential candidate John B. Anderson calls the plan an “innovative approach that is a politically practical way to achieve the goal of nationwide popular election of the President.”
That pesky constitutional-amendment process. So impractical!
NPV supporters have given themselves away by the manner in which they discuss their plan. Perhaps legislators in Minnesota, Oklahoma, and elsewhere should take the hint. As Washington observed, NPV is merely trying to “undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.”
Source — Tara Ross is the author of Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College.
Britain's Health Care System: Its Problems Continue
March 7, 2013
Socialized Medicine: Missed the last horror story from Great Britain's government health care system? Don't worry, another alarming report will come soon. They just keep piling up like firewood in the fall.
On our minds right now is the story from the Daily Mail, which reported last week that nearly 40% of National Health Service workers — doctors, nurses and paramedics — said they would not recommend their own workplace to friends or family who need care.
More than 101,000 NHS workers responded to a survey that asked them if they agreed with the following statement:
"If a friend or relative needed treatment, I would be happy with the standard of care provided by this organization."
While 63% said they agreed or strongly agreed, 12% said they disagreed or strongly disagreed while a quarter, reports the Daily Mail, "did not 'express a preference.'"
"That left 37% of staff who did not recommend treatment."
This finding is a significant indictment. Even worse, at two of the system's worst hospitals, only 35% said they would recommend care at their workplace, and 17% overall said they "did not think patient care was their manager's top priority."
What would be a manager's focus, then? Saving money in a state-run system that can't tax enough to pay for the care it has promised?
Playing the bureaucratic game in a regime in which health care decisions are made by politics rather than by the patient and doctor working together?
One hospital within the NHS no longer subject to politics is Hinchingbrooke. The facility, located in Cambridgeshire, north of London, was privatized last year after, the Mail reports, being "on the verge of going bust."
But now, NHS data show it is "ranked as one of the highest" hospitals for "patient happiness and waiting times." It "tops the list for short waiting times" and patient satisfaction has increased to 85%.
The private company operating the Hinchingbrooke facility has "dramatically cut losses at the hospital by 60% and will soon begin to pay off burgeoning debts racked up from years of mismanagement."
The improvement has been so profound that another hospital, the George Eliot in Warwickshire, might follow Hinchingbrooke's lead.
So what changed at Hinchingbrooke? The incentives.
The hospital went from an unresponsive, inefficient bureaucratic shambles in which patients were not its central mission to a private enterprise that has to make a profit, which means it must satisfy its customers.
The future of American hospitals is that of the Hinchingbrooke facility before it went private. ObamaCare is a hard step toward a single-payer system run by the government. The American hospitals of tomorrow might not be under direct government control in an identical model of the British NHS. But they will be under Washington's indirect control since it holds the purse.
Washington will therefore be making health care choices for patients it doesn't know, setting pay for doctors and nurses, rationing treatment, operating an inflexible bureaucracy, and killing the incentives for professionals and workers to provide quality treatment, timely care and clean facilities.
Even before the Democrats' Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law, the government's share of health care spending in the U.S. was roughly 45%. Thanks to the law, it's headed even higher.
Writing last year in Forbes, Chris Conover, a physician and scholar, reported that when ObamaCare takes effect, "the private sector's share of health care spending will be reduced to a mere 33%." Which means the government will control two-thirds of health care.
This should be unacceptable in a free society.
It should be unacceptable to anyone who understands that government involvement is destroying health care in Britain, a nation that, as many have pointed out, has had more than 60 years to prove that socialized medicine works but has actually shown the opposite.
The evidence just keeps rolling in.
IBD
Socialized Medicine: Missed the last horror story from Great Britain's government health care system? Don't worry, another alarming report will come soon. They just keep piling up like firewood in the fall.
On our minds right now is the story from the Daily Mail, which reported last week that nearly 40% of National Health Service workers — doctors, nurses and paramedics — said they would not recommend their own workplace to friends or family who need care.
More than 101,000 NHS workers responded to a survey that asked them if they agreed with the following statement:
"If a friend or relative needed treatment, I would be happy with the standard of care provided by this organization."
While 63% said they agreed or strongly agreed, 12% said they disagreed or strongly disagreed while a quarter, reports the Daily Mail, "did not 'express a preference.'"
"That left 37% of staff who did not recommend treatment."
This finding is a significant indictment. Even worse, at two of the system's worst hospitals, only 35% said they would recommend care at their workplace, and 17% overall said they "did not think patient care was their manager's top priority."
What would be a manager's focus, then? Saving money in a state-run system that can't tax enough to pay for the care it has promised?
Playing the bureaucratic game in a regime in which health care decisions are made by politics rather than by the patient and doctor working together?
One hospital within the NHS no longer subject to politics is Hinchingbrooke. The facility, located in Cambridgeshire, north of London, was privatized last year after, the Mail reports, being "on the verge of going bust."
But now, NHS data show it is "ranked as one of the highest" hospitals for "patient happiness and waiting times." It "tops the list for short waiting times" and patient satisfaction has increased to 85%.
The private company operating the Hinchingbrooke facility has "dramatically cut losses at the hospital by 60% and will soon begin to pay off burgeoning debts racked up from years of mismanagement."
The improvement has been so profound that another hospital, the George Eliot in Warwickshire, might follow Hinchingbrooke's lead.
So what changed at Hinchingbrooke? The incentives.
The hospital went from an unresponsive, inefficient bureaucratic shambles in which patients were not its central mission to a private enterprise that has to make a profit, which means it must satisfy its customers.
The future of American hospitals is that of the Hinchingbrooke facility before it went private. ObamaCare is a hard step toward a single-payer system run by the government. The American hospitals of tomorrow might not be under direct government control in an identical model of the British NHS. But they will be under Washington's indirect control since it holds the purse.
Washington will therefore be making health care choices for patients it doesn't know, setting pay for doctors and nurses, rationing treatment, operating an inflexible bureaucracy, and killing the incentives for professionals and workers to provide quality treatment, timely care and clean facilities.
Even before the Democrats' Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law, the government's share of health care spending in the U.S. was roughly 45%. Thanks to the law, it's headed even higher.
Writing last year in Forbes, Chris Conover, a physician and scholar, reported that when ObamaCare takes effect, "the private sector's share of health care spending will be reduced to a mere 33%." Which means the government will control two-thirds of health care.
This should be unacceptable in a free society.
It should be unacceptable to anyone who understands that government involvement is destroying health care in Britain, a nation that, as many have pointed out, has had more than 60 years to prove that socialized medicine works but has actually shown the opposite.
The evidence just keeps rolling in.
IBD
Contrary To What Jimmy Carter Says, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez Was No Friend Of The Poor
March 7, 2013
Socialism: The left is out in force, bleating its praise for deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as a champion of the poor. It's a big lie. Fact is, Chavez hurt the poor, not just in Venezuela, but all over the world.
Socialism: The left is out in force, bleating its praise for deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as somehow a champion of the poor. It's lies. Fact is, Chavez hurt the poor, not just in Venezuela, but all over the world.
Chavez's death from cancer Tuesday set off a chorus of wailing from the left's politicos, media and movie stars, hailing Chavez as a friend of the poor.
"President Chavez cared deeply about the poor," declared Citizens Energy President Joe Kennedy, who's made it his business to distribute Chavez's oil handouts to the poor to help the dictator's political ends.
"His legacy in his nation, and in the hemisphere," said Rep. Jose Serrano, a Bronx Democrat, will be "a better life for the poor and downtrodden."
Chavez's "positive legacies," said forever-naive ex-President Jimmy Carter, was for "the gains made for the poor and vulnerable."
The New York Times credited Chavez with "empowering and energizing millions of poor people" while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson praised Chavez for providing (Cuban) medical care, saying "frankly, it was the first time in many decades that a leader paid that kind of attention to the poor majority in Venezuela."
The Nation sighed that Chavez wasn't dictator enough. "It wasn't too much control, but too little," pined longtime Chavez toady Greg Grandin.
"Poor people around the world have lost a champion," said Hollywood actor Sean Penn.
"He used the oil (money to) eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health care (and) education (for) all," tweeted filmmaker Michael Moore.
"A great hero," said director Oliver Stone.
It's the Left's Big Lie, writ loud, stupid and vulgar, like Chavez himself. The ugly reality is, Chavez's Castro-inspired socialist model, far from helping the poor, left them worse off than ever even as Venezuela's neighbors in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama and Chile have risen by embracing free markets.
Chavez's currency devaluation and capital controls made everything from toilet paper to tires expensive and scarce in Venezuela, harming the poor — who spend 80% of their income on necessities — most.
His wretched Cuban education and health care starved public institutions and chased competent doctors and educators abroad. His farm and business expropriations killed jobs. And he turned Venezuela into a crime hellhole, which the poor suffered from most.
His harm to the poor went beyond Venezuela. Starting in 2002, he worked to drive oil prices skyward by cutting production and monopolizing resources.
Higher oil prices hurt the world's poor at the pump. But they also raise the cost of food, and lead to factories being shut down. And this helps the poor?
The only proven way to lift the poor from poverty is to embrace free markets. Yet those who praise this odious, now-dead dictator don't seem to get that they served as Chavez's "useful idiots," as Vladimir Lenin called those naive Western socialists who aided his totalitarian rule.
Hopefully, Chavez's death will mean his Chavista model of socialist failure will be buried along with him.
IBD
Socialism: The left is out in force, bleating its praise for deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as a champion of the poor. It's a big lie. Fact is, Chavez hurt the poor, not just in Venezuela, but all over the world.
Socialism: The left is out in force, bleating its praise for deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez as somehow a champion of the poor. It's lies. Fact is, Chavez hurt the poor, not just in Venezuela, but all over the world.
Chavez's death from cancer Tuesday set off a chorus of wailing from the left's politicos, media and movie stars, hailing Chavez as a friend of the poor.
"President Chavez cared deeply about the poor," declared Citizens Energy President Joe Kennedy, who's made it his business to distribute Chavez's oil handouts to the poor to help the dictator's political ends.
"His legacy in his nation, and in the hemisphere," said Rep. Jose Serrano, a Bronx Democrat, will be "a better life for the poor and downtrodden."
Chavez's "positive legacies," said forever-naive ex-President Jimmy Carter, was for "the gains made for the poor and vulnerable."
The New York Times credited Chavez with "empowering and energizing millions of poor people" while Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson praised Chavez for providing (Cuban) medical care, saying "frankly, it was the first time in many decades that a leader paid that kind of attention to the poor majority in Venezuela."
The Nation sighed that Chavez wasn't dictator enough. "It wasn't too much control, but too little," pined longtime Chavez toady Greg Grandin.
"Poor people around the world have lost a champion," said Hollywood actor Sean Penn.
"He used the oil (money to) eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health care (and) education (for) all," tweeted filmmaker Michael Moore.
"A great hero," said director Oliver Stone.
It's the Left's Big Lie, writ loud, stupid and vulgar, like Chavez himself. The ugly reality is, Chavez's Castro-inspired socialist model, far from helping the poor, left them worse off than ever even as Venezuela's neighbors in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama and Chile have risen by embracing free markets.
Chavez's currency devaluation and capital controls made everything from toilet paper to tires expensive and scarce in Venezuela, harming the poor — who spend 80% of their income on necessities — most.
His wretched Cuban education and health care starved public institutions and chased competent doctors and educators abroad. His farm and business expropriations killed jobs. And he turned Venezuela into a crime hellhole, which the poor suffered from most.
His harm to the poor went beyond Venezuela. Starting in 2002, he worked to drive oil prices skyward by cutting production and monopolizing resources.
Higher oil prices hurt the world's poor at the pump. But they also raise the cost of food, and lead to factories being shut down. And this helps the poor?
The only proven way to lift the poor from poverty is to embrace free markets. Yet those who praise this odious, now-dead dictator don't seem to get that they served as Chavez's "useful idiots," as Vladimir Lenin called those naive Western socialists who aided his totalitarian rule.
Hopefully, Chavez's death will mean his Chavista model of socialist failure will be buried along with him.
IBD
CONFIRMED! Bailey O’Neil was a victim of black on white violence
March 7, 2013
Philadelphia, Pa - We were correct to assume the media was censoring the race of the attackers. However, Channel 10 could not resist interviewing the father of one of the thugs. This interview confirms that Bailey was the victim of black on white violence.
Bailey O’Neil was beat to death by two thugs at the majority black Darby Township school outside of Philadelphia. Bailey was hospitalized and rapidly deteriorated. He was taken off life support and died about two months after the mob beating.
The school suspended the perps for two days and never pursued criminal charges. To date, the perps have never been charged with a crime.
Philadelphia has so much racially motivated black on white violence that even the left-wing Philadelphia Magazine just ran a headlining article about it.
source
Philadelphia, Pa - We were correct to assume the media was censoring the race of the attackers. However, Channel 10 could not resist interviewing the father of one of the thugs. This interview confirms that Bailey was the victim of black on white violence.
 |
| Bailey O'Neil |
The school suspended the perps for two days and never pursued criminal charges. To date, the perps have never been charged with a crime.
Philadelphia has so much racially motivated black on white violence that even the left-wing Philadelphia Magazine just ran a headlining article about it.
source
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