Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Say What? July 9th, 2012 Edition [Reader Post]

Flopping Aces [Reader's Post]

Liberals:

President Obama to a young-looking grandmother: “Let me tell you, first of all. I love nurses. Can I tell you. You look great. This is a good looking woman.” Personally, I don’t find this offensive at all, but if Mitt Romney said this, it would be front page news, along with cries of sexism.

Liberals on the economy:

DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “I’m pretty happy about 28 straight months of job growth in the private sector.”

Vice President Joe Biden: “[Romney believes] somehow, that those so-called job creators will make everything okay for the rest of us,” Biden said at the National Education Association conference. “We believe that the way to build this country is the way we always have, from the middle out . . . [to] invest in the things that have always made our economy grow: innovation, research, development, infrastructure, and education.” Again proving that, even though Obama is a terrible president, he is not the worst president that we could have.

President Obama, explaining how bailouts are his vision for our economy: “Let’s talk about my theory, my vision. When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, and more than 1 million jobs were on the line, one in eight jobs in Ohio depends on the auto industry – not just the folks in the auto plants, not just the union workers, but all those suppliers up and down the chain – every restaurant outside the plant, every store, every school, depends on those jobs in that industry.” I think that most businesses, after having $20 billion+ pumped into them (and not paid back) could be in reasonable shape right now as well.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka of the poor June jobs report: “The cruel reality is Mitt Romney and his Republican allies in Congress are willing to sabotage the recovery in the hope of scoring political points against the President.” Someone needs to tell Trumka that Romney is a private citizen, at this point in time, running for an elective position. I suspect that President Obama has just a teeny bit more affect on the economy than Mitt Romney does.

President Obama on the poor June jobs report: “That overall means that businesses have created 4.4 million jobs over the past 28 months. That’s a step in the right direction. . . But we can’t be satisfied because our goal was never to keep on working to get back to where we were in 2007.” Whoops, did he just say, get back to the George W. Bush economy?


Vice President Joe Biden: “The very wealthy are just as noble and patriotic as the middle class. But nothing has been asked of them in this horrendous recession. And it’s time to just act.”

Liberals on Obamacare:

President Obama: “I’ll work with anybody who wants to work with me to continue to improve our health care system and our health care laws, but the law I passed is here to stay.”


President Obama: “You have to take responsibility, and if you don’t, you’re going to be penalized for it, and that’s the right thing to do. I have consistently kept my promise not to raise taxes on people [making] under $250,000 a year.” So, government-mandated stuff will cost you more money, but that is not a tax.


WH press secretary Jay Carney: “…it is simply a fallacy to say that this [penalty] is a broad-based tax. That’s not what the opinion stated that was authored by the Chief Justice. The Affordable Care Act is constitutional under Congress’s taxing authority, but this is clearly a penalty that affects less than 1 percent of the American population. And it is a penalty you only pay as a matter of choice, if you’re in that 1 percent and you can afford health insurance but choose not to.”


Nancy Pelosi, explaining why Obamacare is not a huge new tax: “It’s a penalty which comes under the tax code.”


The Liberal agenda:

The United States Department of Agriculture explains on its “Outreach Toolkits” page: “Our common goal is to increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Our purpose is to ensure that those going through difficult times can feed their families healthy, nutritious food. By working as a team, we can accomplish these goals.” Or, to put it more bluntly, 1 in 7 Americans receiving foodstamps is just not enough.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka: “Let’s call this right-wing ‘freedom’ catch phrase what it really is: a grossly political strategy to dupe the public, which holds the word ‘freedom’ as something sacred.” He further warned that people might opt out of social security, out of a union or out of paying union dues.


Liberals just making stuff up:

President Obama, when asked about reaching across the aisle: “I suspect that most people…would acknowledge that I’ve tried real hard, and we just haven’t gotten the kind of willingness on the part of the Republicans to engage on a whole range of issues that, I wish had happened, and, part of what I think needs to happen in this election is the voters once again have to send a message, `We want common sense ideas. We don’t folks who are just saying no to everything.’ Even stuff, traditionally [they] were in favor of. .” Many Congressmen in high positions have not heard anything directly from the President for a year and a half (like Mitch McConnell).

Joe Biden to the National Education Association: “Gov. Romney is a good man. . I assume he cares as much about America and the education system as I do. But the fact of the matter is, we have a fundamentally different view. He doesn’t think that you all know much about how to educate. His allies characterize you as not caring about students, but caring about yourselves.”

Obama campaign guy David Axelrod: “What happened after Nixon is we as a country said we need a higher level of disclosure. Governor Romney and his campaign have stone-walled and are trying to turn the clock back 50 years on transparency and disclosure.” One thing that I have noticed is, the Obama campaign is closing in on a handful of sound bites, and everyone is repeating those sound bites over and over. The association between Nixon and Romney is one of them.


The campaign:

Michelle Obama: “To anyone who says that church is no place to talk about these issues, you tell them there is no place better – no place better.”

Barrack Obama: “One way or the other, this will be my last campaign.”

Obama: “I remember my favorite vacation when I was a kid, traveling with my mom and my grandma and my sister, and we traveled the country on Greyhound buses, railroads. And once in a while we’d rent a car, not that often, and stay at Howard Johnsons.”

Obama campaign guy, Jim Messina: “One hundred million [collected by the Romney campaign] is alarming enough, but it doesn’t even include the millions pouring into pro-Romney super PACs – or the fact that, unlike four years ago, it’s perfectly legal for the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Karl Rove, and anonymous billionaires to funnel unlimited money into attacking President Obama in critical battleground states.”

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “I’d really like to see Mitt Romney release more than one year of tax records because there’s been disturbing reports recently that he’s got a . . . secretive Bermuda corporation that no one knows anything about, investment in the Caymans . . . he’s got a Swiss bank account…Americans need to ask themselves: why does an American businessman need a Swiss bank account and secretive investments like that?” If I had enough money on hand, I’d have money in other currencies and in foreign banks as well. I will guarantee that Democrat donor George Soros has money stashed all over the place.

Jumping Joe Biden, asking for money:

“Want to have a cup of coffee sometime soon?

I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about, but mainly I just want to say thanks for helping out.

Make a donation of $3 or whatever you can to grow this grassroots campaign, and be automatically entered for the chance to come hang out – flight, hotel, and coffee on us. You can even bring a guest.”

Russian Alexey Pushkov, chairman of the international affairs committee of the State Duma, and a Putin ally: “We don’t think that for us Romney will be an easy partner. We think that Romney will be, on the rhetorical side, a replay of the Bush administration…If he is serious about this, I’m afraid he may choose the neocon-type people. . . In the first year of his presidency, we may have a full-scale crisis.” What a shock! The Russian autocrats support the socialist president.

Posted on BarackObama.com: “I grew up on a plantation in the heart of Klan territory: Lexington, Mississippi, in the 1950s. Emmett Till was killed 35 miles away from where I lived. He was fourteen years old at the time and so was I.” This goes on for awhile, mostly about the right to vote; but no mention is made of the KKK being made up of Democrats.

It’s all about racism…

Chris Rock tweet: “Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks”


Former Politico write Joe Williams, of his being fired from Politico: “It’s the schoolyard bully concept. They’re in the business of gathering scalps. They’re in the business of pushing independent organizations to their point of view or at least to having to react to their point of view…I think the right has such an agenda here … that it’s impossible for this to be an isolated case.” Somehow, right wing conservative media and organizations caused him to be fired. One of his tweets included the words “Either Ann Romney meant Mitt is flaccid or that when we “unzip him” we’ll find out he’s a dick.” That sounds pretty normal for a news guy, right?

Liberals on global warming:

Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events.”

Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona: “This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, when asked if all of the fires in the United States were linked to global warming: “You have to look at climate change over a period of years, not just one summer. You could always have one abnormal summer. But when you see one after another after another then you can see, yeah, there’s a pattern here.”

NBC Nightly News correspondent Anne Thompson: “Leading some to question if this wildfire season is worse because of climate change.”

The Compliant Obama Press Corps:

AP headline in Yahoo News: “Poll: Election winner won’t affect economy much”

AP headline and sub-headline: “Most Doubt President Affects Economy” “Poll: Half doubt next president will alter economy”

The Atlantic Wire headline: “Voters Think the Election Won’t Affect The Economy”

If it is a Democratic incumbent, and the gas prices are high and the economy sucks, well, then, the President really does not have much effect on either one of these. However, if this were an incumbent Republican, there would be economic stories featuring the words great depression in the first few paragraphs of many of their stories, even if the economy is rosy.


Norah O’Donnell (NPR?): “…while the president’s on a bus, Romney‘s been on a boat, photographed while on vacation with his family in New Hampshire, and facing criticism from his own party.”


Kristin A. Lee of New York Daily News: “…as Mitt Romney continued a family getaway at his multi-million dollar New Hampshire compound on Friday, President Obama recalled riding on Greyhound buses and staying at Howard Johnson hotels on his own childhood vacations.” The actual vacations that the President and his First Lady have made apparently were not germane to this story. The fact that the Romney’s paid for their own vacations is probably not important either.

Washington Post’s “In the Loop” columnist: “Summer’s in full swing, and unless your family is rather Romney-esque, there’s a chance you’ll be spending some time in one of the country’s hundreds of national parks.”

ABC News‘s Emily Friedman: “…just a few hours after telling reporters the jobs report today was a ‘kick in the gut’ for Americans, Mitt Romney returned to his vacation, driving his high-power speedboat, filled to the brim with his kids and grandkids, to a nearby home for a dip in Lake Winnipesaukee.” In case this is too subtle for you, we have the lousy jobs’ numbers being closely associated with Mitt Romney going on vacation. In the Obama Media Complex, it is just as likely to see an association between Mitt Romney and the jobs’ numbers as President Obama and these jobs’ numbers.

The AP: “If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks. Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho. These are the kinds of extremes climate scientists have predicted will come with climate change.”

The Washington Post: “No one predicted fires like the current ones, but years ago climate scientists warned state and federal officials that they could start seeing early springs, more hot and dry weather, and frequent and perhaps severe droughts.”

Paula Faris (ABC news) on gas prices going down: “This is great news…And, Amy, the best news, it might drop another 50 cents by Halloween, just in time for the election.”

Liberal Celebrities:

Lucy Lawless, Xena Princess Warrior, Global Warming Expert, Eco-warrior: “The scientists have been screaming about this for 15 years, and of late, it’s unanimous – there’s only a few wackos who deny climate change”

Actor Morgan Freeman: “First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him . . . they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white – very white American, Kansas, middle of America. There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president – he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Liberals from the past:

President Obama in 2010 of Abound Solar: “Abound Solar Manufacturing,,,will manufacture advanced solar panels at two new plants, creating more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs. A Colorado plant is already underway, and an Indiana plant will be built in what’s now an empty Chrysler factory. When fully operational, these plants will produce millions of state-of-the-art solar panels each year. Already, I’ve seen the payoff from these investments.” Shuttered factories are “humming with new workers…rolling up their sleeves to help America win the race for the clean energy economy.” Two years later, things aren’t looking so good. The company, which was owned by a well-connected top Democratic donor, has declared bankruptcy and is laying off workers. Taxpayers are potentially on the hook for $70 million in funds drawn from the loan guarantee. Abound Solar is now under investigation by the House.

Anita Dunn, then-White House communications director, of Fox News: “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Candidate Obama running for Senator in 2004, and complaining that 315,000 jobs created under the Bush administration and a 5.6% unemployment rate was good enough: “After three dismal years of job-loss, we all welcome encouraging statistics. But for most Americans, the health of our economy is measured in a different and more personal way: If I lose my job, where will I find one that pays as well and offers real benefits? Can I afford health-care coverage on my own, or the cost of sending my children to college? Will I ever be able to save and retire with dignity and security? These are the questions I hear hardworking people asking. For them, the basic rewards of a middle-class life, rewards that we once took for granted, have become an elusive dream.”

Thomas Santa Lucia professor at Amherst, 2009: “One hundred fifty years from now, historians may rate Obama the second best president ever. Lincoln is likely to always be number one. Not even Lincoln, however, has had a more “meteoric rise” than the 44th president-elect. Indeed, it is unprecedented.”

Liberal civility:

A South Florida representative to the Democratic National Committee and friend to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, from a series of leaked emails: “The illegal . occupation [of Palestine] must end… Slavery was ended. Apartheid was ended, and so this occupation must also end. Code Pink is promoting PEACE and FREEDOM. Get on board…By supporting Israeli occupation with U.S. foreign military aid, we are all complicit and guilty of their crimes against humanity…The continued Israeli occupation of Palestine is ugly, on moral, ethical, religious, and legal grounds, and no amount of marketing will cover up this ugliness. What possible justification you have for continuing this unholy occupation is beyond my understanding.”

Stephanie Miller @obamasbestfan: “@billmaher In this country EVERYTHING is a crap shoot with the GOP in control! Wish sum1 would chew their faces off!!!!”

Stephanie Miller @obamasbestfan: @billmaher the GOP has proven anyone can hatef__k anything!!!”


That is Stephanie above; such a lovely girl.

Stephanie Miller @obamasbestfan: “I’ll be like Pres. Obama any day rather than those GOP test tube projects gone wrong they are why ABORTION is legal!!”

Stephanie Miller tweet: “Has the GOP all drank the kool aid??? Too bad it wasn’t the Jim Jones special!!!”

Stephanie Miller tweet: “better than those GOP vomit buckets Not 1 of them have a wrking head above their shoulders unfort. the 1 btwn the legs seem to wrk fine”

Stephanie Miller is somewhat of an emotional supporter of president Obama, featured on the Obama-Biden election site.

Occupy this:

MicCheckWallStreet‘s website (an Occupy Wall Street group) asking for donations of money so they can throw it out of a window: “Every dollar you donate is guaranteed to be thrown off a building and is tax deductible, what more could you ask for?!” Oh, I don’t know, maybe something that is not so blatantly stupid?

Muslims:

Ansar Dine spokesman Sanda Abu Mohamed on the destruction of historically significant sites in Mali: “We’re going to destroy everything before we apply Sharia in this city.”



Moderates/Affiliation Unknown:

Rev. William Owens, the president of CAAP (the Coalition of African-American Pastors): “By embracing gay marriage, President Obama is leading the country down an immoral path. The Black Church has always been the conscience of America, and today we are calling on black pastors and black Christians to withhold support from President Obama until he corrects course.”

CAAP letter to Obama and Holder: “President Obama is the fulfillment of our dreams for our sons. And he has broken our hearts by using his power and position to endorse as a civil right something that is simply wrong. . . Some things are bigger than the next election.”

Liz Marlantes of the Christian Science Monitor on Obamacare: “[Obamacare] has been a tricky issue for the Obama White House. Any time you’ve got the White House coming out and saying, ‘We want to get back and talk about the economy,’ you know it’s a bad issue for them.”

Legal immigrant Igor: “I’m living the American dream now. American is the best country in the world. You guys just don’t really know how blessed you are.”

Former Office of Management and Budget Director James Nussle: “Recovery? Recovery? Seriously? …And Obama‘s in Ohio right now trying to explain this to a bunch of diners. No way! This doesn’t compute to anybody out there. There’s no recovery.”

CBS’s Mark Knoller tweet: Pres Obama says his accountant says he can afford to pay a little more in taxes and that Romney “can sure pay a little more.” I think that is pretty much sums up the Obama economic philosophy.

Mark Knoller tweet: “Unemployment rates: adult men 7.8%; adult women 7.4%; teenagers 23.7%; whites 7.4%; blacks 14.4%; Hispanics 11.0%. Asians 6.3%.”

Mark Knoller tweet: Pres Obama again tells supporters “the other side” will spend more money than ever and rain ads down on them saying “it’s all my fault.”

Former documentary filmmaker Erick Allen Bell: “The liberal media, which I didn’t believe existed before this – I thought that was invented by Rush Limbaugh – there is a liberal media. And they do have a bias. They’re not interested in this story. I wrongly thought that the opposition to the mosque was about evangelicals wanting to maintain the home court advantage and just not wanting another religion to have such a big facility in their town. Sure enough, there is no such thing as radical Islam – it doesn’t exist. Islam is radical. Muslims, fortunately, in America mostly – not radical. But Islam is radical to the core.” Bell originally set out to make a film about the construction of a large mosque in Tennessee. He was going to reveal the religious intolerance of southern evangelicals but, as he pursued this subject further, his original intent was upended and what he discovered about radical Islam while making the film forced him to reconsider his preconceptions.

Jonas Max Farris, centrist liberal economist on Fox News: “We can’t have millionaires leaving our country to avoid taxes.”

Didn’t get their names:

Marine: “Get over it; we’re not equal.”

Black dude: “Because of political correctness, I am called an African-American; I don’t know s___ about Africa.”

Crossfire:

Wolf Blitzer: “The Solicitor General tells the Supreme Court representing the Obama administration it is in fact a tax, it’ll be administered by the IRS, it’ll be collected on April 15th; why can’t you acknowledge that it is in fact a tax?”

DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “Because it’s a penalty; it’s not a tax.”


Charles Krauthammer: “Obama has to defend the policies he’s instituted. Five trillion dollars of debt added leaving us with a 1.7 percent economic expansion. That is a disaster. I think, yes, the Romney argument is not lies. The argument is—“

Nina Totenberg, NPR: [Laughs]

Krauthammer: “—you conducted a Keynesian experiment – here’s the argument – and it did not succeed, because it sprinkled all this money on programs, crony capitalism and government jobs, which is not the key to growth, and that’s the major distinction between the policies of the Left and the Right, Democrats and Conservatives.”

Mark Shields, PBS: “Well we do all of this equal time of who’s at fault, I just point out one thing: George Herbert Walker Bush dared to raise taxes in 1991. Since that action, 21 years, Republicans have not voted for a single broad-based tax increase, and that’s become the theology of the party, the ideology of the party, the definition of the party, and that is irresponsible.”
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CBS’s Jeff Glor: “David, you keep calling Mitt Romney the ‘outsourcer-in-chief’. We heard what the President said on the trail, indicating that he sent jobs overseas. Fact Check, as you know, looked at this, found no evidence that Mitt Romney, while he was still running Bain Capital shipped American jobs overseas. Is it fair to keep those ads on the air?”

David Axelrod: “Yeah, it absolutely is. First of all, those ads are based on reporting — assiduous reporting, by the Washington Post, based on documents from the securities and exchange commission. So, we take issue with that particular fact check. The other issue that’s in contention is Governor Romney keeps contending that he was not involved with Bain Capital after 1999, and, in fact, he remained as the chief executive and sole owner until 2001, and documents reflect that as well. So he — you know, he can’t run on his record and run from his record at the same time. And we’re not going to allow him to do that.”

Glor: David, last night, you said that Mitt Romney was the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon. You said this to CBS News Radio. I think that would strike a lot of people as extreme. Do you stand by those comments?

Axelrod: “Oh, I absolutely do. Listen, you mentioned the $100 million that Mitt Romney raised. You know, he’s the first presidential candidate since that time — in recent years, Republicans and Democrats have all revealed who’s raising money for them – the so-called bundlers. You have no idea, as we sit here, who is raising this money for Mitt Romney. He’s the first candidate, Republican or Democrat, who hasn’t released a series of years of tax returns. His father was a pioneer in this, when he ran for president, and said, you have to release multiple years or else, people can hide some of what they’re doing. We just learned the other day, Jeff, from the Associated Press that Governor Romney has this Bermuda business, and he transferred it to his wife’s ownership the day before he became governor of Massachusetts, so he wouldn’t have to put it on an ethics form.

This is the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon. What happened after Nixon was, we, as a country, said we need a higher level of disclosure, so people know who their candidates are, what their entanglements are and we can make judgments on it. Governor Romney and his campaign have stonewalled, and they’re trying to turn the clock back 50 years on transparency and disclosure. So I absolutely stand by it, and the real question is, you know, is the news media going to press him on it? And I know that Jan Crawford had an interview with him the other day, and she had a very brief time with him. But I’d like to see those questions asked of him.”


Host: “So many businessmen and others have said that the message has become one of class warfare, attacking the rich, attacking people who make a profit, people who make jobs. Why is that that tone has been set that people believe that this is a class war?”

Valerie Jarrett, presidential aid: “Well, they may be watching one particular network.”

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White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in 2010: “at strictly political events we would not use [the presidential seal].”

An Obama campaign official 2012: “it’s common practice for sitting presidents to use the presidential seal at campaign events when they are running for re-election.”
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CNN interviewer: “One of the side arguments [made to the Supreme Court], kind of like the back-up argument, was that it was a tax.”

Obama campaign national press secretary Ben LaBolt: “It never referred to it as a tax; it said that it was a penalty.” Which is simply not true.



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Democrat Rep. Andre Carson: “America will never tap into educational innovation and ingenuity without looking at the model that we have in our madrassas, in our schools, where innovation is encouraged, where the foundation is the Quran. And that model that we are pushing in some of our schools meets the multiple needs of students.”

Carson, when these remarks became public: “My remarks at ICNA call attention to the fact that faith-based schools throughout this country have excelled because of innovative instructional methods and a willingness to engage different learning styles – whether visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. While I do not believe that any particular faith should be the foundation of our public schools, it is important that we take note of the instructional tools these schools utilize to empower their young people. Christian, Jewish, and Islamic schools have experienced notable success by casting off a one-size-fits-all approach to education, and this is a model we must replicate. Having attended a parochial elementary school myself, I’ve seen these successes first hand. If we are going to take American education to the next level, we must expand successful models and implement the practices that will enable success for our students.”
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David Axelrod tweet: “Romney meets w/Murdoch last week, which world only learned from Rupert‘s tweet. How long does media let Mitt get away w/out pool coverage?”

Mark Knoller tweet: “Same might be asked of @davidaxelrod why press barred from 25 Obama Campaign fundraisers so far this year.”
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Liberal Adam Lachinsky: “Let me play the Reagan optimist—

Neil Cavuto: “Wow, that is a fox moment.”

Conservatives:

Allen West: “When you go back and you read the documents, the Declaration of Independence, the full declaration, the full Constitution, you’ll understand limited government, you’ll understand fiscal responsibility, you’ll understand individual sovereignty, free markets . . . strong national defense. But there are people on the other side, and you can call them whatever you wish, you can call it Communism, Progressivism, Socialism, Marxism, or Statism. . . They believe in creating and expanding an entitlement or welfare state.”


Edward Klein, who wrote The Amateur: “It is the hallmark of a political amateur to ignore the advice of wise men and women who tell him what he doesn’t want to hear and, instead, embrace those who cater to his inexperience, vanity, and worst instincts. This has been the pattern of the Obama presidency. And that was exactly what happened in the case of ObamaCare.”

Jane Pitt (Brad Pitt’s mom) in a letter to the editor, to News-Leader.com: “I think any Christian should spend much time in prayer before refusing to vote for a family man with high morals, business experience, who is against abortion, and shares Christian conviction concerning homosexuality just because he is a Mormon. Any Christian who does not vote or writes in a name is casting a vote for Romney‘s opponent, Barack Hussein Obama – a man who sat in Jeremiah Wright‘s church for years, did not hold a public ceremony to mark the National Day of Prayer, and is a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage.”

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal: “The president, his administration, needs to understand what makes this country great in part is that we’re not dependent on government programs. It seems to me like the president measures success by how many people are on food stamp rolls and government-run health care. That’s not the American dream.”


Mitt Romney: “I said that I agreed with the dissent and the dissent made it very clear that they felt it was unconstitutional. But the dissent lost. It’s in the minority. And so now the Supreme Court has spoken, and while I agreed with dissent, it’s taken over by the fact that the majority of the court said that it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax.”

Paula Priesse: “July 8th – Big govt. again “off the rails.” Initial budget for the CA rail project was $33 billion. Some now put it at $100B. Mostly state money but fed funds also. Despite this, and ignoring the state auditor’s reports, the CA Senate voted Friday to plow full speed ahead. First leg (no environmental complaints) will be between Madera & Bakersfield. Great for viewing coyotes & brush rabbits. This mother of all boondoggles will cost travelers more money & time than airline passengers on similar routes. It will straddle fault lines and its est. completion date is 2033. When CA goes belly up (and it will) we sane folks BETTER NOT get stuck with the tab! Let Hollywood libs pay for it. They’re good at fundraisers. And fantasy!”


Mitt Romney: “What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first.” I.e., repeal Obamacare.

Romney spokesman Ryan Williams: “From our perspective, Obamacare has been and will continue to be a central issue in the campaign. It presents voters with a bright line that divides the two candidates. Gov. Romney is going to repeal Obamacare and President Obama is going to keep it. There is a clear choice in November.”

Josh Bolton: “The North Korean patent office—I bet that’s a beehive of activity.”

Neil Cavuto on Fox News: “We’re you looking at the folks behind the vice president? Did it not look like a hostage tape? You’ve got a government already spending a trillion bucks on jobs and it’s not getting much bang for those bucks—now wants to spend more of your bucks on jobs. So, we are asking this morning, what the buck?”

Gary B. Smith, economist on Fox News: “The UN is the only thing that makes our government look efficient.”

Bill O’Reilly on what’s up next: “[Dennis] Miller and [Adam] Corolla up next—I’m tempted to say for mature audiences only, but that would be very misleading.”

Conservatives being mean:

Maine Gov. Paul LePage: “We the people have been told there is no choice. You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo – the IRS.”


From Rush Limbaugh’s Pearls of Wisdom:

Rush: “The Constitution is the greatest document ever written in the world regarding individual liberty and freedom. It’s not taught that way. It’s taught as an antiquated piece of out-of-date junk that limits what the government can do for people, giving them this and giving them that and making them eat that for their own benefit and making them drive that for their own benefit.”


Rush: “If you’re a statist, if you’re a dictator, if you’re an authoritarian, the Constitution of the United States is your biggest enemy because all it does is tell you what you can’t do. It limits you. It limits your power over your citizens, your subjects, your people. We can’t have that.”

Rush: “Didn’t the Democrat Party spend millions advertising for more people to take free handouts from the government? Isn’t there a big advertising campaign right now to expand the scope of food stamps to the food free riders? Hell’s bells, folks, the Democrat Party is the free rider party.”


Rush: “The entire mission of the Democrat Party is to create more and more free riders. Haven’t they seen to it that almost half the country doesn’t pay income tax, a bunch of free riders? Isn’t their goal to get more and more people dependent on the government?”


Rush: “The biggest problem we have is that nobody’s gonna get screwed ’til starting in 2014 or 2015. That’s when the screw job implements. Nobody’s gonna get screwed between now and the election.”


Rush: “There is going to remain a top-drawer health care in this country only for the rich because it’s gonna be direct pay with no insurance involved or very little insurance, and that’s why you don’t see any of the super rich upset about this because they know none of it’s gonna impact them.”

Rush: “If there is a second Obama term, it will be noted for two things: a continuing, long recession, and widespread breakdowns in the implementation of his health reform plan.”

Rush: “You know, if something is unconstitutional, the legislative and presidential branches have violated the Constitution. It’s the role of judiciary to uphold the Constitution, not throw it back to the corrupt bunch that created it in the first place. Where’s the win-win in that? Where is the silver lining in throwing it back to the corrupt party that gave us this in the first place?”

Rush: “I don’t care what John Roberts said, I don’t care what Romney’s guy says, and I don’t care what the argument ends up determining whether it’s a tax or a penalty. What are we gonna end up with? We’re gonna end up with massive transfers of wealth from individuals to the government.”

Rush: “People do not want government-run health care. It forces them into an inferior system. Everybody who knows anything about this bill knows that.”

Rush: “Republicans are busy arguing semantics — tax, penalty, silver lining — rather than exposing what Obamacare does to every American using health care and every American who’s going to use it. It does enormous damage to the Constitution.”


The Conservative Press:


Brit Hume of Fox News, when it was suggested that Obama needs to sell Obamacare: “He made dozens of speeches [already]. This is a problem with the dogs don’t like the dog food.”

Snarky comments from Weasel Zippers:

Obamanomics: More People Went On Disability Than Got Jobs In June.
Or as Obama called it, a “step in the right direction.”

Team Mitt: “From our perspective, Obamacare has been and will continue to be a central issue in the campaign”


More and more every day it appears that Mitt’s walking into a Reagan-like moment. He better not whiff.

Occupiers Drop $5K Out Window To Protest Citizens United Ruling.
And libs wonder why people think they suck with money.Oh, and they videotaped it, and managed to suck at making a movie as well.

Obama Dissed During Campaign Speech: Crowd Yells “Where’s Michelle?”.
Probably off lecturing people about how fat they are.

New CNN Poll Finds 63% Of Americans View Individual Mandate As A Tax, Only 39% Agree With Obama That It’s A Penalty.


Still, this won’t stop Obama and the Democrats from insisting water isn’t wet.

Zambia: George W. Bush Helps Renovate Clinic That Specializes in Early Detection and Treatment of Cervical Cancer
All this while his idiot successor is busy hiring IRS agents to implement his signature achievement.

Norah O’Donnell interrogates John Boehner on GOP replacement for Obamacare – Neglects to ask if he supports government-funded detox for Obots

Conservatives not making any sense:

Former presidential candidate Jon Huntsman: “I will not be attending this year’s convention, nor any Republican convention in the future, until the party focuses on a bigger, bolder, more confident future for the United States – a future based on problem solving, inclusiveness, and a willingness to address the trust deficit, which is every bit as corrosive as our fiscal and economic deficits.” He released his delegates to Mitt Romney.

About Gary Kukis: A retired math teacher who spends most of his time exegeting the Old Testament and, once a week, puts out an ezeen.

The Prodigal Daughter: Katie Holmes Returns To Catholicism, Suri Banned From Scientology


Following the quick and unexpected settlement of her divorce proceedings, Katie Holmes has been doing a bit of house-cleaning in her personal life, part of which includes her return to the Catholic faith, five years after leaving it in favor of soon-to-be ex-husband Tom Cruise’s Scientology... FULL STORY>>

PFG Is Now MFG(lobal) Part 2 As $220 Million In Segregated Client Money Has Just Vaporized

UPDATE 2: Have no fear though since as recently as January 2012, the CFTC did not find any "material breaches of customer funds protection requirements" at FCMs (firms like PFGBest)

UPDATE 1: Account-holders may not be so surprised to find who is the custodian for the PFGBest FX accounts: none other than huge MFGlobal fans, JPMorgan!


Remember when the entire segregated account fiasco was supposedly fixed in the aftermath of the November 2011 MF Global bankruptcy, and where regulators: the CFTC, the SEC, the CME, and anyone you asked, swore up and down this would never happen again? Turns out that 7 months later, the spirit of MFG has struck again, only this time with one letter switched: it is now known as PFG, as we suggested first 3 hours ago when we broke the story. From the just filed affidavit by Lauren Brinati who is working with the National Futures Association, which in turn has just filed notice prohibiting PFGBest from operating further, and freezing all of its accounts:
On or about June 29, 2012 PFG reported to NFA that it had approximately $400 million in segregated funds, of which more than $225 million were purportedly on deposit at U.S. Bank
On or about July 9, 2012, NFA received information indicating that PFG's Chairman may have falsified bank records
On July 9, 2012, NFA made inquiry with US Bank and learned that rather than the $225 million that PFG had reported as being on deposit at US Bank just days earlier, PFG had only approximately $5 million on deposit at U.S. Bank.

Translation: another $220 million segregated account pillage has just taken place, in the vein of none other than Jon Corzine and MF Global.

The money has now officially vaporized.

It is truly wonderful of the NFA to finally get involved, after PFG's clients have lost about 98% of their cash held with the firm.

In other potential news, a rather prominent New York bank, recently closely associated with marine wildlife, may have just cut its Q2 losses by up to $220 million.

And now for a moment of sarcasm, courtesy of Jack Pearson.

Article continues>>

Latest Obama Executive Order: New Federal Golf Regulations

Today, President Obama signed a new executive order creating even more regulation of the economy on top of Obamacare and the EPA.

New Federal Golf Regulations


President Obama has recently appointed a Golf Czar (Elizabeth Warren) and major regulatory changes in the game of golf will become effective January 1, 2013. This is only a preview as the complete rule book (expect 1000+ pages) is being rewritten as people read it and see what’s in it.

Here are a few of the changes.

Golfers with handicaps:
- below 10 will have their green fees increased by 35%.
- between 11 and 18 will see no increase in green fees.
- above 18 will get a $20 check each time they play.

The term “gimmie” will be changed to “entitlement” and will be used as follows:
- handicaps below 10, no entitlements.
- handicaps from 11 to 17, entitlements for putter length putts.
- handicaps above 18, if your ball is on green, no need to putt, just pick it up.

These entitlements are intended to bring about fairness and, most importantly, equality in scoring. In addition, a Player will be limited to a maximum of one birdie or six pars in any given 18-hole round. Any excess must be given to those fellow players who have not yet scored a birdie or par. Only after all players have received a birdie or par from the player actually making the birdie or par, can that player begin to count his pars and birdies again. The current USGA handicap system will be used for the above purposes, but the term “net score” will be available only for scoring those players with handicaps of 18 and above.

This is intended to “re-distribute” the success of winning by making sure that in every competition, the above 18 handicap players will post only “net score” against every other player’s “gross score”. These new Regulations are intended to CHANGE the game of golf.

Golf should be about Fairness. It is not about ability, hard work, practice, and responsibility. Therefore this is “the right thing to do.”\\

New EPA/Department of the Interior Federally-Approved Golf Course – Elizabeth Warren Signature Design

A Faithful Nation


Liberty Magazine:

I
n August 2008 Rick Santorum gave a speech to students at Ave Maria University, a Catholic institution, in Florida. More than anything, Santorum reminded the students that they were fortunate to be living at a time when God's army was needed to rebuff satanic attacks against the institutions that form the framework of society.

"This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war at all. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies, Satan, would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country, the United States of America," said Santorum.

Santorum, himself a Catholic, then described the fall of the academic world. The next target was the church. "Now you'd say, 'Well, wait, the Catholic Church?' No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian Ethic. . . . But this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic. Mainstream, mainline Protestantism. And of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country, and it is in a shambles. It is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. . . . And what better way to go after smart people who also believe they're pious—to use both vanity and pride to go after the church."

As a Protestant, I was initially offended by this statement when the media spread the word that Santorum believed that Protestantism was gone from the world of Christianity. I wanted to jump up and shout, "I'm still here!" And I'm not alone. In fact, the National Council of Churches claims that nearly 45 million Americans, or 16 percent of the electorate, are members of mainstream, mainline Protestant churches. This doesn't include the millions of other evangelicals who fall within the wide range of Protestantism that is broadly defined as Christians not belonging to the Roman Catholic or Eastern churches.

It may seem incredible that a candidate for the highest office in the land could express himself using such cutting terms, but what did he actually mean? Certainly Santorum wasn't so much attacking Protestantism as much as he was lamenting a condition that he believed had led to the decline of Judeo-Christian values in America. As Santorum saw it, the devil had used "those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that have so deeply rooted in the American tradition."

While beliefs may vary between members of a diverse range of faith groups, Protestants generally share several beliefs. Protestants are Christians who deny the divine authority of the pope and believe in the Reformation principles justification by faith alone rather than by works, the priesthood of believers, and the primacy of the Bible as the source of revealed truth.1

In 1517, German-Catholic monk Martin Luther unwittingly split the Catholic Church in Europe when he nailed his ninety-five theses regarding the power and efficacy of indulgences to the door of the chapel at Wittenberg.2 At the time, the Vatican was commercially selling "indulgences" that would allow believers the opportunity to shorten the "temporal punishment" that members of the communion of the saints faced to purify themselves on the way to eternal life in heaven. Catholics believed that the church contained the one body of Christ, and the holiness of some could work to the benefit of others, living or dead.

In Catholic thought, there was God, then the saints, then the church hierarchy that handled the spiritual welfare, then the government that served the civil functions, and then finally the individual. Martin Luther argued, in contrast, that the individual believer stood before God. He believed in the "priesthood of all believers."3 From Luther's perspective, no church authority or government could stand in the role of mediator between the believer and God.

The implications of this view, which took on the term Protestant after a group of German princes "protested" the inevitable Papal injunction against Luther, shook the very structure of Europe. No longer could kings claim to rule generation after generation by divine right; a pope could no longer claim that he held the keys to salvation or ask others to jump through extra hoops in order to gain salvation. In Protestant thought, salvation was attained through faith in Jesus Christ, and the common person could have a personal relationship directly with Christ who stood in the role of priest and advocate before God the Father.

Protestantism also encouraged Bible study and individual prayers. Before the Protestant Reformation, it was largely illegal for common people to have access to the Bible. In 1229 the Council of Toulouse formed an ecclesiastical tribunal to seek out heretics, later known as the Inquisition. Canon 14 of the Council stated: "We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or New Testament; unless anyone from motive of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the blessed Virgin; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books."4

In the centuries that followed, the idea that believers were equals in the eyes of God was fundamental to the formation of the American form of democracy in which any citizen could become active in government. People could freely choose to group together to form churches, or not. The government would not establish churches or limit the free exercise rights of the citizens. The rights of believers and nonbelievers alike were jealously protected.
Americans could benefit from the unprecedented individual civil and religious freedom that resulted from keeping the sphere of the church distinct from the sphere of the state. What an individual believed about God, or how he or she exercised these beliefs, was no concern of the state. The state did not get involved in what the church taught, and churches could not set the agenda for the state.

This individualist Protestant ethic and republic form of government were the two factors that made America a free country and set the standard for true freedom of religion. The American legal system was rooted in the rule of law, specifically the United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights, not in the individual whims of government officials or religious leaders. The resulting environment gave religion, spirituality, property rights, and entrepreneurship the room to thrive throughout American history. The primary times when these principles were challenged occurred in situations when people attempted to use the force of politics or religion, or a combination of both, to rob others of their God-given freedoms and inherent human worth.

While there were certainly practical reasons for the proposition of religious freedom, evident in the establishment and free exercise clauses of the First Amendment, the Founders went beyond a simple expression of tolerance to appreciation of the freedom itself.

In contrast to European countries that support their "national churches" with tax money, and where birthright plays a large role in determining the likelihood of individual success, the American form of government has proved its benefits to Americans, whether they are children of generations of Americans or recent immigrants. This freedom of self-determination forms the cradle of the American dream.

Even as Santorum recognizes the contribution of mainline Protestantism to the foundation of the United States, he argues that Protestantism is in a mode of self-destruction. Indeed, mainstream Protestantism has fallen on hard times. Many American churchgoers have grown tired of theological and moral standards that change with the times as much of the Protestant world tracks a popular culture that caters to the lowest common denominator. Yet, can one fault churches when it is no advertising secret that magazines featuring cover stories of the latest Kardashian mishap sell far more copies to an American public that does not want to spend its leisure time contemplating the greater, more complex issues of life? Santorum decries the vanity and sensuality that has pervaded Protestantism, as things that once seemed unthinkable in Christianity have become accepted norms.

Historically, the collapse of moderate religious groups is often replaced with either secularism, such as that following the French Revolution, or fundamentalism, such as that experienced in post-Mubarak Egypt. There are certainly forces at work in America pushing along both of these lines of thought. Secularists are uncomfortable when churches espouse politically incorrect beliefs, and fundamentalists seek to restore their concept of Judeo-Christian values through a variety of means, including the use of legislation that they hope will somehow limit the availability of sin.

In contrast to the tepidity of mainline Protestantism, Roman Catholicism has avoided much of this turmoil. Catholicism has long addressed moral issues by stating moral standards that it remains firm on regardless of whether or not adherents agree with them or live by them. Although not perfect in this application, rightly or wrongly, there is no question as to what the Catholic Church believes. This strength of conviction, based as much on religious hierarchy as ideological belief, places Catholic and fundamentalist evangelical ideas at a powerful political advantage over Protestant churches that approach issues from an individual perspective that might ultimately carry the day.

For the wrong type of religious fundamentalism to take root in America, the principles of Protestantism and democracy need only to begin to fail. Protestant America is in danger of following these trends when it stops believing in the power of God and begins to believe in the value of beliefs. When belief becomes primary, there is pressure to use the power of the church to first influence politicians with compatible views and to extend the power of the church to the government and into the local communities.

Just because Christians believe something does not mean that the government needs to make a law to enforce that belief. To put it bluntly, in America it is legal to believe things that could compromise your own eternal salvation. The state will not stand in the way of incorrect theology. And it would be wrong for the state to assume such power, because, in Protestant thought, spiritual actions and even knowledge without an internal change of heart are worthless.

Conservatives who often express great concern about an emerging "nanny state" ought to take specific note of religious rules coming from the right as well as the left. If Protestantism is, as Santorum suggests, on life support, then it is in desperate need of revival as a belief system that recognizes that the grace of God can fall unfiltered on individuals. Protestantism, indeed Christianity and other religious beliefs, are here to tell the world that there is something more than what we see around us and to point to transcendental beliefs.

If American Protestantism wants to reach its potential, it needs to work to elevate humanity, not by conforming itself to secular society or forcing secular society to conform to its religion, but by pointing the world to a better alternative. If the Protestant faith community can truly embrace this calling—and it is a calling, not a prodding—it will achieve the transformation that it seeks to achieve in the hearts of Americans and people around the world.

Michael Peabody writes from Los Angeles, California. A lawyer, he founded the ReligiousLiberty.TV Web site.

SHOCKER: White House Doesn't Know Who it's Friends Are in Obama Endorsed Arab Spring

As Islamists Gain Influence, Washington Reassesses Who Its Friends Are

New York Times:

WASHINGTON — In his first major speech last month, Mohamed Morsi, the new Egyptian president, pledged to seek the release of a notorious Egyptian terrorist from a North Carolina prison. Not long before that, a member of a designated terrorist organization, Gamaa al-Islamiyya — who also happens to be a recently elected member of the Egyptian Parliament — was welcomed to Washington as part of an official delegation sponsored by the State Department.

Obama administration officials made no public comment on Mr. Morsi’s promise and struggled to explain why the Egyptian Parliament member, Hani Nour Eldin, got a visa, citing privacy rules and declining to say whether he had been granted a waiver from the ban on such visitors or whether his affiliation simply escaped notice.

Pressed by reporters after the visa quickly became a Congressional controversy, a State Department spokeswoman, Victoria J. Nuland, said Mr. Eldin had been judged to pose no threat to the United States.

“It’s a new day in Egypt,” she added. “It’s a new day in a lot of countries across the Middle East and North Africa.”

For the Obama administration, as it navigates the tumultuous effects of the Arab Spring, it’s a complicated day, as well. Long-held assumptions about who is a friend of the United States and who is not have been upset, leaving many Americans confused.

“Right now, the United States is kind of in a trance when it looks at the Middle East,” said Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University. “Everything has changed.”

The overthrow of dictators across the Arab world and the rise of Islamists to new influence or power is forcing Washington to reassess decades-old judgments. The most important is in Egypt, where Mr. Morsi, representing the region’s most powerful Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, won a close election. His move on Sunday to revive the dissolved Parliament had Western experts scrambling to understand his strategy.

In Tunisia, a once-banned Islamist party, Ennahda, won a plurality of seats in elections last year, and Islamists have won new support in Yemen as well. In Saturday’s voting, Libya appeared to buck the trend, when a coalition led by a moderate political scientist seemed to edge out two Islamist parties.

But in a sign of the political potency of religion, the leader of the winning coalition, Mahmoud Jibril, went out of his way to reject the “secular” label for his National Forces Alliance and reached out to the Islamists. “There are no extremists,” he said.

In the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans largely viewed the Middle East and Islam through the lens of the terrorism threat. The United States exercised stark judgments, encapsulated by President George W. Bush’s warning to the world nine days after the attacks: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Foreign Muslim scholars were denied visas because of outspoken views at odds with American policy. American officials did not always carefully distinguish between Islamists, who advocate a leading role for Islam in government, and violent jihadists, who espouse the same goal but advocate terrorism to achieve it.

American hostility to Islamist movements, in fact, long predated Sept. 11, in part because of the United States’ support for secular autocrats in Arab countries. During the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was officially banned, so American diplomats in Cairo kept contacts quiet and informal.

“We have not engaged the Muslim Brotherhood,” Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, declared in a 2005 speech in Cairo, “and we won’t.”

Experts on the Middle East suggest that the recent controversies over Mr. Morsi’s statement and Mr. Eldin’s visa are only the beginning of a long, contentious process of adjustment for the United States, with implications for American aid and Arab countries’ relations with Israel.

But they suggest that Americans should not assume that the rise of Islamists puts the United States in greater danger from terrorists. The opposite may well be the case, they say.

“I would say people should not be too alarmed by the anti-American rhetoric,” said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, based in Washington. The end last year of the Mubarak rule in Egypt, he said, “is an important step in combating terrorism in the region and undermining its appeal.”

“People can freely vent their frustrations and go to the polls to vote,” he added.

Next Page »

David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo.

Biden's Hometown Mayor Slashes Union Pay to Minimum Wage

Pennsylvania city workers to take mayor to court over across-the-board minimum wage salaries

myFOXnepa.com:

Employees of a Pennsylvania city, who have all seen their salaries cut to minimum wage as the mayor grapples with budget problems, are hoping a judge restores their paychecks in full.

myFOXnepa.com

Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty cut everyone's pay -- including his own -- on Friday, saying the state's sixth-largest city is broke because the City Council blocked his proposed tax increase. Doherty, a Democrat, warned nearly 400 police officers, firefighters and public works employees about his doomsday plan, prompting a Lackawanna County judge to order the city to pay full wages to all employees, citing that it is a violation of their contracts. Hours later, the payday envelopes went out, and, despite the judge's order, they were light.

“This needs to be resolved," Scranton firefighter and president of the local firefighters union John Judge told FoxNews.com. "My members are getting a check for $7.25 an hour. These are people that are the head of their households. They have mortgages. They have other living costs. They are now going to have to throw their bills in a hat and randomly pick what gets paid on time.”

The judge was not in his chambers Monday, but attorneys for the local city workers' unions were planning to go to court Tuesday morning to ask him to hold Doherty in contempt of court for violating the injunction.

In addition to scaling back wages, Doherty's move cut off overtime, worker's compensation and disability.

The city of Scranton has battled budget woes for years, but the problems reached a boiling point after the City Council blocked Doherty's plan to raise taxes to cover a $16.8 million shortfall, opting instead to borrow money to cover the budget gap.

“The mayor is trying to strong-arm the council into doing what he wants, but it’s the city’s employees that are paying the price,” Judge said, adding that the workers in his department saw their paystubs go from about $1,500 every two weeks after deductions to a gross pay of about $600. “This is not a case of no cash. It’s a cash-flow problem.”

The cuts were sudden, as city employees were only given eight days' notice. Doherty also claimed last week that there is only $5,000 left in the city’s accounts.

“The employees are the ones in the middle of this battle between the mayor and the council," said Sam Vitris, president of the public works union. “We’ve had four or five recovery plans over the years and none of them seemed to have worked. The stalemate between them has led the city to run out of money.”

Doherty has maintained for months that if the City Council had not refused his 2012 budget proposal, which included a 29 percent tax hike, the city would not be in a dire situation. Doherty did not return repeated calls for comment.

Brad Pitt's mom in fear after slamming Obama

Jane Pitt, mother of actor Brad Pitt, has been scared into silence by the hate-filled, vulgar and even violent reaction to her public assertion that Barack Obama is “a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage.”

Pitt has even been the subject of death threats following her letter to the editor of Missouri’s Springfield News-Leader in which she asserted failure to vote for Republican presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney constituted a vote for Obama.. FULL STORY>>

Obama's plan to 'fix' economy looks a lot like ... China's

China boosts state firms as entrepreneurs struggle

ZHANJIANG, China (AP) - Reformers say China needs more entrepreneurs like Liu Peijian. His chain of six furniture stores employs 60 people. But Beijing's response to the deepest economic slump since the 2008 crisis is to pump money into state industry, leaving businesspeople like Liu who create jobs to fend for themselves...

Western Culture-Hating Islamist Sect gets big welcome in Washington

Washington (CNN) – You’ve almost certainly never heard of him, but Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad drew some serious star power at a recent Capitol Hill reception in his honor.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Republican Sen. John Cornyn were among the many lawmakers who showed up to meet Ahmad, a Muslim leader who was in town last week on a rare U.S. visit from London.

At a time when the United States is struggling with its views about Islam – as Islamists gain power in the Middle East and with ongoing concerns about Quran-citing terrorists – it’s not hard to see Ahmad’s appeal to both parties. As he said in his Capitol Hill speech, he has “love for all, hatred for none.”

It’s a sentiment that Sen. Robert Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, echoed in introducing Ahmad, praising the “leadership you have shown to tolerance and to peace.”

It’s not just Ahmad who espouses his can’t-we-all-get-along read on Islam. The 61-year-old is the spiritual leader of the global Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, whose friendliness toward the West and whose criticism of other Muslims has earned the sect allies at the highest level of the U.S government, even as it faces mortal enemies in other parts of the world.

Unlike most Muslims, Ahmadis believe that the 19th century founder of their sect was the metaphorical Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

It’s because of that belief that Sunni and Shiite Muslims do not regard Ahmadis as true Muslims. The rift has provoked Egypt to charge Ahmadis with blasphemy, Saudi Arabia to deport them and Pakistan to pass a law that designates Ahmadis as non-Muslims.

Persecuted abroad

On a sweltering recent Friday, a long line of people sat patiently in a mosque on the outskirts of Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington. Despite the heat and humidity, they seemed happy to be there, waiting for a chance to meet the leader of their faith.

Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, who leads an international Ahmadi community is the sect’s fifth Khalifa, or leader. The group claims tens of millions of followers around the world, but outside experts say the number is smaller, in the millions.

For Ahmad and his followers, their relatively small sect is the real face of Islam, which has more than a billion followers around the world.

“It is time that we, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, should give the real and true picture of Islam,” Ahmad said in an interview inside the Silver Spring mosque. “I will always be talking about peace. That peace is not from myself or some new teaching but it is the true, real teaching which I gather and get from the holy Quran.”

That emphasis, says Ahsanullah Zafar, the leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA, is rooted in a belief that the only jihad worth practicing is against one’s own self – a jihad of self-improvement. The word jihad is often translated as struggle or war.

“Even more important than prayer, which we talk about a lot, is how you behave as a human being,” Zafar said. “It is not physical fighting that accomplishes anything. It is dialogue and the progressivism that leads somewhere.”


Founded in 1889, the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect is the only Islamic group that believes that a second prophet has come, in the form of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Ahmad lived at a time of great religious upheaval, said Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic Studies at American University.

“In India, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad said that he has the message of the renewal of Islam,” Ahmed said. “Slowly it began to build momentum - it is a kind of spirited, modern version of Islam.”

Ahmed characterized the makeup of the Ahmadis as “very scholarly, very prominent leaders in Pakistan.”

But when the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist political party in Pakistan, began to push the country to a more orthodox view of Islam in the 1970s, the Ahmadis were cast out.

Jamaat-e-Islami argued that the Ahmadis did not conform to a key tenet of Islam – the finality of the prophet Mohammed. “That is the elephant in the room for the Ahmadis,” said American University’s Ahmed. “The Ahmadis say that there are two kind of prophets. One is the lawgiver. Then there are messengers who come with a message and not necessarily a new book.”

In light of the crackdown, many Ahmadis began to leave Pakistan, some as religious refugees. Large numbers of Ahmadis now live in Germany, England, Ghana, Canada and the United States, where the Ahmadis claim tens of thousands of followers.

But persecution persists.

In 2010, almost 100 people were killed when two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore, Pakistan, were attacked by men armed with hand grenades and AK-47s.

In the U.S. government’s 2012 International Religious Freedom Report, the plight of Pakistan’s Ahmadis was front and center.

“Among Pakistan‘s religious minorities, Ahmadis are subject to the most severe legal restrictions and officially sanctioned discrimination,” reads the report. The same report outlined violence against Ahmadis in Indonesia, where it said that at least 50 Ahmadiyya mosques have been vandalized.

A unique view of Islam

Harsh treatment in various corners of the world has instilled a deep Ahmadi appreciation for life in the United States.

“In America, all these small Muslim communities are flourishing, they love being in America,” said Ahmed. “They are 100% Muslim and they are 100% American.”

Ahmad, the Ahmadis’ current leader, was in the United States for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s annual convention, which drew 10,000 to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, last week.

“Wherever I go I have one goal … to meet my people,” Ahmad said.


But he was also here to meet politicians and journalists. For the Ahmadis, the scrutiny of American Muslims in the decade since 9/11 has been treated as an opportunity to discuss beliefs and answer questions.

Many in the community came out in favor of Rep. Peter King’s, R-New York, insistence last year on holding congressional hearings on radicalization within American Islam, even as other Muslim groups blasted the hearings as anti-Muslim.

“If the government thinks that congressional hearings will improve homeland security and help expose those exploiting Islam, I assure full cooperation. I, too, aspire to have a more secure America,” wrote Kashif N. Chaudhry, the director of an Ahmadi youth program in the United States, in a New York Times letter to the editor.

Chaudhry was hardly the only Ahmadi Muslim to speak up.

“You need to be with other people, you need to talk about your ideas and in that conversation and discussion, new things arise,” said Zafar. “It is like throwing the seed and putting water on it, you need the seed and you need the water for it to sprout.”

“We need to come together with the people around us in the United States, we need to do that and see how it flowers,” he continued.

The split between the Ahmadis and other Islamic sects is also apparent in how Ahmad, the sect’s leader, talks about extremists.

“Nowadays, Islam is being targeted only because of so-called Muslim groups who claim themselves to be Muslims but are not following the true teachings of Islam,” Ahmad said, speaking of what he calls “fundamentalists Muslims.” “If it is that Islam that is being portrayed by those orthodox Muslims, then I don’t think there is any chance in spreading Islam.”

Using terms like “so-called Muslims,” to refer to some outsiders has not endeared Ahmadis to other Muslims. Leading Sunni and Shiite groups are reluctant to even talk about the Ahmadis.

CNN contacted the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, two major Muslim groups, and neither responded to requests for comment.

A future in America

Zafar, the leader of the Ahmadis in the United States, said his sect is looking to grow.

The group has an organized media operation and operates three 24/7 satellite-television channels under the name Muslim Television Ahmadiyya International.

The initial purpose of the channels was to broadcast the sermons of the Khalifa, but it also provides other programs in different languages. The Silver Spring mosque is surrounded by large satellite dishes that beam the shows around the world.

In addition to satellite television, the Ahmadis run Islam International Publications, a publishing outfit.

Many Ahmadis are concerned about the version of Islam being portrayed in the media, which they say is too focused on the radical elements of Islam and not focused enough on peaceful Muslims.

“Right now there is a caricature of Islam,” said Zafar. “The biggest challenge I believe in the United States is for Muslims to get out of that image of extremist behaviors which are so popular in the press.”

Ahmed of American University sees the future of the Ahmadis as a bridge between Islam and the West.

“On the American side, they [the Ahmadis] are acting as a positive bridge to Islam and the Americans need that right now,” he said. “And then for Muslims, if they do link up and join mainstream Muslims, they are able to give Islam a link to the world and also help them work out these polemics that are tearing the world apart.”

For now, Ahmadis are stuck in between those two worlds.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Ahmadi Muslims believe their founder was the Second Coming of the Prophet Mohammed. They believe he was the metaphorical Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Dan Merica

Message to America's teachers: Back Obama or else..

GOP teachers balk at Obama-centric NEA convention

WASHINGTON (AP) - It had all the trappings of a re-election rally: thousands packing a convention center, Barack Obama T-shirts, videos celebrating the health care law, and a wall-size banner with encouraging messages to the incumbent president.

"You are our knight in shining armor - Sarah C., Norman, Okla.," read one inscription.

But this Obama love fest in Washington was not a campaign event. The nearly 9,000 gathered were teachers in town for the National Education Association's weeklong annual convention.

For the Republican teachers in attendance, the digs at their political views were impossible to overlook....

Obama Administration Offers Up "Fast & Furious," Election Year Charades

Feds name 4 suspects linked to Fast and Furious

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — Authorities made a rare disclosure Monday linked to the botched gun-smuggling investigation known as Operation Fast and Furious, revealing identities and requesting the public's help in capturing four fugitives accused in the shooting death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent 18 months ago.

The announcement comes in the wake of pressure from U.S. House Republicans who led a vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, criticizing the nation's top prosecutor for withholding information related to the probe.

"We believe it's in the best interest of this ongoing investigation to unseal the case at this point in time and to enlist the assistance of the general publics in both Mexico and the United States," said federal prosecutor Laura Duffy. She said the decision to release the information came independently and would not discuss the recent congressional action against Holder.

Operation Fast and Furious was launched in 2009 to catch trafficking kingpins, but federal agents lost track of about 1,400 of the more than 2,000 weapons — including AK-47s and other high-powered assault rifles.

Some of the guns purchased illegally with the government's knowledge were later found at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S.

Critics have hammered federal authorities for allowing informants to walk away from Phoenix-area gun shops with weapons, rather than immediately arresting suspects and seizing firearms.

Since the fatal shootout near the U.S.-Mexico line in December 2010, deep flaws in the government's weapons trafficking case have come to light. Federal authorities have repeatedly declined to disclose information related to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, such as what became of the gun used to kill him.

The release of the suspects' identities in a newly unsealed indictment Monday came with the offer of a $1 million reward for information leading to their capture.

The FBI says it is seeking information related to Jesus Rosario Favela-Astorga, 31, Ivan Soto-Barraza, 34, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes, 34, and Lionel Portillo-Meza.

Portillo-Meza's age and birthplace were unavailable. The other three fugitives were born in Mexico, but their hometowns were not available.

Authorities had previously released the identity of the fifth suspect, Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, of El Fuerte in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. He was shot during the gunfight, and has been in custody since the night of the shooting. He has pleaded not guilty in the case, telling investigators that he raised his weapon toward the agents during the shootout but didn't fire, the FBI said in records.

His age was not immediately available.

All five have been charged with murder. They also face charges of assaulting four federal agents.

FBI agents declined to discuss which fugitive is suspected of firing the shot that killed Terry. They also would not comment on whether the weapon was linked to an Operation Fast and Furious purchase.

The five men, plus another who faces lesser charges in the case, came to the U.S. from Mexico in order to rob marijuana smugglers, the indictment said.

The disclosures are among the few details released by authorities despite repeated requests from congressional leaders and news organizations, including The Associated Press. The FBI, ATF, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have all denied Freedom of Information Act requests that seek reports and other documents in the investigation of the shooting.

Patrick McGroder, an attorney for the Terry family, said in a statement that Monday's information shows that the prosecution is moving forward, but efforts to hold federal officials accountable for the flawed investigation remain stalled.

McGroder says Holder's office should release the documents sought by members of Congress.

Agent Terry "and his family rightly deserve a full and thorough explanation of how Operation Fast and Furious came to be," McGroder said.

Terry, a former Marine and Michigan police officer, was part of an elite squad similar to a police SWAT team that was sent to the remote areas north of Nogales known for border crime, drug smuggling and violence.

FBI Special Agent James Turgal said in announcing the reward that "we stand in support of the Terry family and our partners in Border Patrol."

Associated Press writer Jacques Billeaud contributed from Phoenix.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Obama Administration Closes National Drug Intel Center

Mexican cartel violence is at an all-time high along the increasingly porous southern border yet the Obama Administration has shut down a critical intelligence agency dedicated to identifying, tracking and severing the nexus between drug trafficking and terrorism.

It’s a senseless move, which is why it was done very quietly. The only real way to discover that the Justice Department’s 19-year-old National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) has been closed is by trying to visit its website. It simply says that on June 15, 2012, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) closed. The public is redirected to another website with “historical materials, an archived version of the NDIC.” KEEP READING>>

Shock Video: Proof That Terrorists Are Entering U.S. From Mexican Border

The federal government is hiding this information...



Hat tip: Bluegrass Pundit

Texas governor rejects two provisions of health law

(Reuters) - Texas Governor Rick Perry said on Monday his state will not implement a Medicaid expansion or health insurance exchange, two provisions of the federal healthcare law upheld last month by the U.S. Supreme Court...

SunPower: Twice As Bad As Solyndra, Twice As Bad For Obama


A photovoltaic solar panel ranch similar to the California Solar Valley Ranch under construction by SunPower in the state’s San Luis Obispo County. The $1.2 billion loan guarantee to support the project was finalized in hours before the loan program expired Sept. 30. The company announced Aug. 5 that it will build the panels for the ranch at a new factory it will open in Mexico.


DOE photo

The Fine Print on Democrats’ ‘One Million Jobs Saved’ Figure…

One of the big Democrat talking points on the Sunday shows yesterday was the argument that the auto bailout, began under President Bush and expanded under President Obama, “saved one million jobs.”

The figure comes from the Center for Automotive Research. (The CAR is funded by… the federal government, state and local governments, and corporate contributions, and is affiliated with… General Motors and Chrysler. An equally applicable headline would be, “nonprofit group study surprisingly supportive of hand that feeds it.”)

However, that report also states, “At the rough price tag of $80 billion in government assistance, each job CAR said was saved during the last two years cost taxpayers nearly $57,000.” In other words, if you handed everyone with a job endangered by a traditional bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler a check for $50,000, you would save taxpayers almost $10 billion.

Keep in mind, if the U.S. government sold its GM stock today, it would lose $16.3 billion.

But at least GM sales are up, right? Well, here’s the fine print: “Government purchases of GM vehicles rose a whopping 79 percent in June.”

Yes, taxpayer dollars are being used to buy products from a taxpayer-bailed-out company, to prove to taxpayers that the original bailout was a wise decision.

Controversial Pastor Declares “Obama Dead”

Video designed to link activists to violent extremism.



Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who gained notoriety after he burned the Qur’an, has produced a video calling for the death of the Obama administration. In the video, Jones stands beside a mock gravestone that reads “Obama Dead” and talks about the failures of Obama.

In 2010, Jones announced he planned to burn 200 Qur’ans on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The threat by the Christian Dove World Outreach Center pastor resulted in protests around the world in which 20 people died.

Jones, who announced in October he would run for president, denounced Obama for supporting abortion and allowing an influx of illegal aliens into the country.

The video will undoubtedly allow the corporate media to characterize anti-abortion and anti-illegal immigrant activists as violent extremists who are calling for the death of the president.

Obama Campaign Sues Website Pimping Obama Swag

Lawyers for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign are going to court Monday in Washington to ask a judge to stop a website from selling T-Shirts, bumper stickers and buttons with the campaign’s signature “O” logo...

Obama to Announce He’s to the Left of Pelosi

There’s not much room over there, but President Obama found it.....

Democrats reduced to hiding in bushes, posting creepy stalker videos.

....Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci (R) told Politico that a neighbor had caught somebody doing precisely that, and I’m pretty sure Politico believes him: they have collected some really, really creepy videos (including one targeting Renacci) of what is apparently an organized effort to sit outside candidate/legislator houses and businesses and… film them....

Obama Prepares to Drop Tax-Increase Bomb On Job Creators

President Obama is obviously panicked. Last month Obama and his supporters spent a lot more than Mitt Romney, but even with that cash advantage and the media on their side, the polls haven't budged. Moreover, the President and his campaign have been running around frantically trying to find something that will stick to Romney, be it provable lies about his outsourcing and outright smears involving offshore accounts. Still, Obama can't get above 47% and Romney hasn't even started campaigning in earnest or spending the $160 million he has on hand....

Will Obama Destroy Socialism?

You can make corncob pipes, eighteen wheel trucks or microprocessors-- but you can't make jobs. Jobs are not a commodity or a service. They cannot be created independently through a job creating program. Rather they are the side-effect of a working economy. Trying to shortcut the economy with job creation programs is like trying to run a fruit orchard by neglecting the trees and instead buying fruit at inflated prices to resell to your customers at a lower price. It's feasible, but not sustainable.

The government can promote job creation through subsidized education and training, but there is a ceiling on such efforts, since government programs still have to be paid for through taxation. It can encourage companies to do business locally through tax breaks, though this is an admission that the tax rates are an obstacle to job growth. But what it cannot do is create jobs out of whole cloth. Except for government jobs.

Just about anyone in the White House this term would have launched job creation programs. And like most such efforts they would have been a wash. But Barack Hussein Obama's approach was different in that he did not even pretend to make the effort. His economic programs went by business friendly names, but invariably turned out to be concerned with only one kind of job creation. The creation of public sector jobs.

The spoils system has a long history in American politics, but it was never as spoiled as all this. There is no parallel in American history for the spoils system being used not just to rotate out supporters of the old administration and replace them with your lackeys, but to hijack the economy as your own spoils system to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Obama responded to an economic crisis by working to create two kinds of jobs. Government and union jobs. This was not about anything as simple as rewarding his supporters. The Black community got very little in exchange for supporting him. The Hispanic community similarly ended up with some token appointments, but not much to show for it. This was about shifting jobs from the private sector into the public sector and its feeders. To manufacture the types of jobs that feed money back into the Democratic party and expand the scope of the government bureaucracy.

No previous administration has as thoroughly disdained and tried to crush the private sector. But then none of them were nearly as clueless or irresponsible when it come to basic economics. The Democrats who had spent eight years mocking Reaganomics, practiced a Krugmanonics that treated money like an imaginary number. In Krugmanomics wealth is created through spending, and poverty is created by practicing wise fiscal management. The whole premise of Krugmanomics makes no sense, unless you have already decided that the private sector is a mythical beast with no room in the socialist bestiary.

This wasn't even Keynesian, it most closely resembled the Bolshevik radicalism that destroyed the Russian economy, right down to the belated realization that only by assigning some limited role to the private sector could the situation be salvaged. Obama's pre-election turn echoes Lenin's New Economic Program. But like Lenin, Obama hasn't embraced the free market. All he has done is tried to retreat to it after the spend and burn economics of his brightest radicals had ignited too much public fury.

Obama has only one idea. The same one idea that the left has beaten into the ground repeatedly. The monopolization of power. This monopolization is disguised behind organizations claiming to represent the people, community activists, unions and public interest lobbies, whose only message is the vital necessity of a government monopoly in every economic area of life.

It's the old Soviet strategy writ large. Every red error brought back to life and pushed forward with cunning and brute force, but no understanding of why it failed last time around. The slower transition of Wells' "Open Conspiracy" does not make them any better at running a country, than the radical armed revolts of the Bolsheviks did. Repeating the same mistakes at 1/20th the speed does not lead to a better outcome. Only to more chances to see that they are going the wrong way.

The left's total abandonment of individual choice, its insistence that a moral society can only come from total submission to the rule of the enlightened, does not just lead to tyranny, but to economic disaster. The last term has been another reminder of why the enlightened are not qualified to to run every aspect of a society, and why economic collectivism is no substitute for individualism. A healthy society gains its energy from individual decision making, a diversity of choices leading to a diversity of outcomes. An unhealthy one is tightly constrained by the five or ten year plan of a dictator and his cronies.

The left has never questioned the rightness of its destination, only the best way to get there. And that is its greatest blind spot. Within the left there has been debate on the speed of the transition and the best way to achieve it. Violent revolution or a slow takeover from within. Stamp out the bourgeoisie or brainwash their children into joining your ranks. But these concerns with tactics and the political correctness of one approach over another, always end up overlooking the larger questions. Because it is taken for granted that the system of collective tyranny they champion is bound to work.

Fanatics rarely question their own motives or the rightness of their beliefs. And the left breeds that brand of fanaticism the way the sewers of Paris bred rats. That makes them capable of ruthlessly pursuing a course, but not of recognizing that the course itself is wrong. The left spends so much time fighting to seize a country, unable to realize that it cannot keep it as anything more than a backward dictatorship with nuclear weapons and widespread hunger.

The fanatic's greatest error is to believe that he shapes reality, rather than reality shaping him. And that is an error which Obama catastrophically fell into. The more his imagemakers surrounded him with an aura of invincibility, the less aware he and they became of the possibility of failure. The very halo that they planted on his head, made his abuses of power inevitable, and also his downfall. To pose in a halo is to deny human error. And that denial of human error by those who are born to the red leads the left to ideological disputes that can only be settled with purges and to economic disasters that cannot happen because their politically correct positions have endowed them with a sense of inevitable historical destiny.

The manifest destiny of socialism has been the left's greatest article of faith. It says that one way or another they must win. The stages of history make it inevitable. That knowledge of inevitable progression, from feudalism to capitalism to socialism blinds them to the realization that their way is nothing more than feudalism under a red flag. Which is exactly what it became in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Obama's greatest asset was that sense of inevitability which he projected as confidence. But that confidence is now at odds with a country where massive unemployment has led to resentment of his Versailles lifestyle, the parties, globe trotting tours and vacations more appropriate to royalty, than the elected official of a republic. The public has never shared the left's sense of historical inevitability. It does not understand why Obama is so cheerful when the rest of the country is suffering. It is less interested in Isms, than in functionality. And the state of nation under Obama is a state of extreme dysfunction.

That dysfunction is causing Americans to question many elements of the left's slow takeover, elements that they would have left alone if the radicalism of their new masters had not occasioned a blowback that is sweeping well beyond a mere repeal of the Obama years. The media had positioned Obama as a new FDR, but instead he is emerging as the Anti-FDR. Not the man who will sell Americans on socialism, but the man who will finally turn them against it.

The left mistook the economic disaster they had orchestrated as the end of capitalism. It was however a premature celebration. While the media rebukes the public for its glumness, its unwillingness to see that the time of hope and change means that the economy no longer matters, that a bad economy becomes a good one if we say so-- the recovery that comes may be an ideological one. A recovery from the ideology which first brought on the disaster. While the left had hoped to use the economy to destroy the free market as a vital force, it may be that their own attempt to do so will instead destroy socialism.

Senate Republicans eye budget tactic to de-fund health care law

WASHINGTON - With some powerful Texans in the vanguard, Republican lawmakers return Monday to a deeply divided Capitol Hill and tenacious election-year tactics to get rid of President Barack Obama's health care plan.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that upheld the Affordable Care Act, the GOP-controlled House may vote as soon as Wednesday on outright repeal.

"Ultimately Obamacare is going to be repealed at the ballot box," says Texas Republican Congressman Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

"But in the meantime, our vote will demonstrate that we are committed to repealing the law in its entirety to start with a fresh slate as well as to point out serious flaws in the law," adds the former state lawmaker and Chamber of Commerce executive.

In the Democratic-led Senate, where leaders dismiss the upcoming House action as "just a show vote," Texas Sen. John Cornyn and other Senate GOP leaders are looking for added Republican senators in the fall elections and an arcane legislative tool known as budget reconciliation to help target Obama's health care blueprint early next year.

As chairman of Senate Republicans' campaign operation, Cornyn is angling to return the Senate to Republican control by adding a net gain of at least four new Republican senators to the 47 Senate seats already held by Republicans.

"Come January, 51 Republican senators could turn around Obama-care," says Cornyn, a second-term senator from San Antonio. "The budget reconciliation process is somewhat of a gift."

Key senators like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Dallas, a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, hold potential levers as well. "The court's ruling does not settle the debate," says Hutchison, who leaves office in January. "Congress can stop implementation of this disastrous government takeover of health care by repealing the law - or by de-funding implementation."

Little-known process

The little-known budget reconciliation procedure, dating from the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, enables a politically-divided Congress to drive through controversial tax and spending legislation to finance the annual budget blueprint adopted by the House and Senate.

The measure limits debate in the House and the Senate to just 20 hours, bars Senate filibusters and enables a Senate majority with less than a 60-vote super-majority to approve legislation.

It has been used almost two dozen times since 1980 to break Senate logjams, helping Republicans win passage of welfare reform in 1996 as well as $1 trillion in tax cuts enacted under former President George W. Bush in 2001, 2003 and 2005.

Amid the current political gridlock on Capitol Hill, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats controlling the Senate, "there is zero chance the health care law will be repealed this year," says political scientist Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia. "But if Republicans gain enough seats in the Senate, hold the House and win the presidency, 'Obamacare' will be dramatically changed or abolished."

In addition to gaining seats, Republicans also would have to overcome Senate rules and various budget calculations to harness budget reconciliation in their bid to overturn the health care law, cautions Richard Kogan, an analyst at the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

"It is doable," says the former adviser to the White House budget office during the first two years of the Obama administration and a veteran of 21 years on the staff of the House Budget Committee. "It may be they can't do it all with a simple repeal of everything - but they can certainly get rid of almost all of the things that they object to by a majority vote," Kogan adds.

Picking the elements to save and the elements to scrap could pose immense political challenges for the Republican effort, cautions Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

"You can talk all you want about repeal and you can show you have a road map for doing it if you get elected," Ornstein said. "But you leave the system in tatters if you do it without a reasonable replacement, and they've got nothing - that's the bottom line."

Obama’s DOT now forcing airlines to allow pigs to fly with passengers ‘for emotional support’

Who needs a pig for ‘emotional support?’ A Muslim perhaps? The pot belly pigs can weight up to 300 pounds.

“If you are not satisfied with the credibility of the answers to these questions or if the service animal is an emotional support or psychiatric service animal, you may request further verification,” the guidebook states. “You should also call a CRO [Complaints Resolution Official] if there is any further doubt as to whether the pot-bellied pig is the passenger’s service animal.”


What’s next? Allowing Goats to be ‘emotional support’ animals on plane rights?

Idiot Obama Supporters Cheer When Obama Says “We Need To Have A Tax Code Where Secretaries Aren’t Paying Lower Tax Rates Than Their Bosses”

YayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyI’mAProgressiveIdiotThatWillCheerForAnythingTheWonSays!

Littering suspect shot, wounded by deputy

VICTORVILLE, Calif. (KABC) -- A Victorville man who was allegedly littering was shot and wounded by a deputy after a confrontation on Saturday.

Investigators say the deputy saw 53-year-old Timothy Gray littering and started to question him in the area of Amargosa Road and Midtown Drive at 9:18 a.m. They say Gray started acting strangely, then pulled out a knife and charged at the deputy.

The deputy fired at Gray, who was then flown to a local hospital. The deputy was not wounded.

'Affordable' Care Act? Not so much for Sacramento

Obama's healthcare overhaul is one more costly program for a red-ink state.

#Occupy Sympathizing City Officials Attack Tea Party Over Flag Display

Will New Paul Voters Disappear Like New Obama Voters?

I, for one, was delighted at the surge of new, mostly younger people who registered to vote for the first time in order to support Ron Paul in this year’s presidential primaries and caucuses. I explained to non-Paul supporters that the GOP should embrace them because the Republican Party is aging and needs new blood.

However, I saw a study of new, mostly younger people who registered to vote for the first time in 2008 for Barack Obama which makes me wonder about the long-term impact of Paul people..

Obama's Broken Promise to Wounded Warriors

Our veterans are now being condemned to the worst of Obamacare coverage.

For most Americans who oppose Obamacare, the constitutionality of the law's mandate to buy insurance is less important than the power government has under the law to rob them of medical freedom. Ironically, those that lose freedom under Obamacare first could be the wounded warriors who fought for our freedom.

In 2010 President Obama promised Obamacare wouldn't diminish health benefits for service families or retirees. He told the 9.6 million veterans and active duty personnel, who use TRICARE -- the Defense Department's health plan -- or go to Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals and clinics, that they would be better off:

"If you're in the VA or TRICARE, this will not force you to change systems…veterans would be eligible, potentially, for this health care exchange where they could select from a different set of plans and get some help in paying for their premiums depending on income levels."

Yet, last week the administration unveiled a plan to remake TRICARE that breaks that promise. Most observers have focused on a proposal to raise premiums for military retirees younger than 65 from $460 a year to as much as $2,048 by 2017 (if they're receiving more than $45,178 in retirement pay).

But that change is only part of a broader proposal that could weaken TRICARE and force many veterans into health exchanges and Medicaid. It assumes most of the three-quarters of military retirees who are eligible to receive health care through their employer would do so. However, if wealthier and healthier veterans migrate to private health plans, it will leave TRICARE caring only for veterans with lower incomes and more battle-related diseases such as traumatic brain injury, post traumatic stress disorder, lost limbs and physical disabilities. More expensive and smaller group coverage will lead to even higher premiums and co-pays.

Additionally, the administration wants to steer more TRICARE patients into military treatment facilities (MTFs). It also wants to close more military bases. That will reduce the number of MTFs and base clinics. There are already long wait lists at MTFs for veterans suffering from battlefield injuries and illnesses. Obama's proposals compound this tragedy.

The administration is also cutting payments for private doctors who participate in TRICARE. Those who do participate are already paid much less than they get in private health plans. A 2008 Defense Department reported warned:

Since the TRICARE population is much smaller, there is less motivation to take on these patients at the low Medicare rates. In fact, among providers who are accepting new patients while turning away TRICARE patients, the Survey of Civilian Physician Acceptance of TRICARE… found reimbursement rates were the most commonly cited reason for not accepting TRICARE beneficiaries.

Without adequate reimbursement, there is a concern that dependents and retirees will face an ever-shrinking pool of providers willing to treat them. Particularly for the active duty and mobilized reserve populations, limited access to health care providers could have a significant negative impact on recruiting, retention, and readiness.

Reducing TRICARE enrollment and reimbursement will leave veterans with fewer choices and less care. While many veterans could get coverage through employers or a health exchange, thousands more could be forced into Medicaid.

Nearly 12 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans live in poverty. A staggering 30 percent are either unemployed or have stopped looking for work altogether. Medicaid is their only non-TRICARE alternative. Veterans with family who with a combination of military pension (available after 20 years of service) and income make up to $32,000 a year would be required to enroll in Medicaid if they forgo TRICARE. Anyone earning above that could pay more out pocket under Obamacare than the $3,000 TRICARE cap on such costs.

Finally, the military health system too often misdiagnoses or ignores the increase in the number of veterans with severe physical and mental health disabilities. Even controlling for perverse incentives to discourage recovery (you lose benefits if you are well), nearly 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans since 2001 suffer from PTSD or TBI. (Six percent have both.) Hundreds of thousands of veterans have lost limbs or have physical injuries requiring long-term rehabilitation.

At present, the number of veterans seeking care for these conditions already overwhelms MTFs. While more veterans are receiving specialty care, a recent study showed that a majority of those with a diagnosis do not get such treatment. Shifting them to Medicaid could even be worse: waiting lists for Medicaid treatment of brain injuries and physical disabilities are growing even without veterans. Limits on coverage are often worse than the VA's.

Veterans should be given more liberty to get the care the need, when they need it. Whether or not the Supreme Court decides Obamacare is constitutional, one thing is certain: The president's proposal forces our veterans to fight one more battle to get the care our nation owes them.

Excellent Anti-Union News From Multiple Places Including US Supreme Court

At long last unions are on the run and losing battles in multiple places at once. Let's take a look at some dates and headlines.

June 7, 2012 LA Times: 2 big cities OK cuts to worker pension costs

A Recipe for the Pursuit of Happiness

Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute penned a July 7 New York Times op-ed, “Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals”...

Arpaio team finds the man who forged Obama Birth Certificate

Is this the news that is going to be reported by Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio at a News Conference scheduled for July 17?



There is proof that Barack Obama's birth certificate, which the White House released in April 2011 is in fact a forgery and the investigation team knows who did it. Could the Presidency of Barack Obama be the biggest fraud in United States history? July 17th is when Sheriff Arpaio's investigation team will release the critical information.

Shock Alliance: Farrakhan Praises Integration of Scientology Into Nation of Islam Theology, Says Whites Should Use it to Become ‘Civilized’ & to Avoid Being ‘Devil Christians’ & ‘Satan

The Minister Louis Farrakhan has integrated Scientology into National of Islam theology
Farrakhan continues to praise L. Ron Hubbard, the allegedly racist, white founder of the Church of Scientology
The radical faith leader is training hundreds of NOI adherents in controversial “auditing” and Dianetics techniques used in Scientology to help blacks overcome trauma in their past
He believes adopting Scientology will help whites avoid being “devil Christians” and “Satan Jews.”

Wind Power Faces Taxing Headwind

WEST BRANCH, Iowa—Acciona Windpower's generator-assembly plant here in the heart of the corn belt is down to its last domestic order as the U.S. wind energy industry faces a sharp slowdown.

Demand for the school bus-size pods it assembles to house the guts of a wind turbine is drying up as a key federal tax credit nears expiration. Acciona is now banking on foreign orders to keep the plant going next year, while hoping the credit will be extended.

The debate over renewing the credit is dividing Republicans, with conservative lawmakers from wind states joining Democrats to push for an ...

Rep. Allen West: True Racism Lies With White Liberals

Iran Named to Group Overseeing U.N. Arms Treaty Conference; ‘Like Choosing Bernie Madoff to Police Fraud’

(CNSNews.com) – Iran has been chosen as a member of the “bureau” overseeing a month-long United Nations conference in New York aimed at finalizing a controversial global “arms trade treaty....”

Hill Poll: Majority feel Obama has changed country for worse

Two-thirds of likely voters say President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America — but it’s changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority.

A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.

The results signal broad voter unease with the direction the nation has taken under Obama’s leadership and present a major challenge for the incumbent Democrat as he seeks reelection this fall.

Conducted for The Hill by Pulse Opinion Research, the poll comes in the wake of last month’s Supreme Court decision that upheld the primary elements of Obama’s signature healthcare legislation.


It found 68 percent of likely voters — regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of Obama — believe the president has substantially transformed the country since his 2009 inauguration.

The feeling that Obama has changed the country for the worse is strongest among Republicans, at 91 percent, compared to 71 percent of Democrats who support Obama’s brand of change.

Strikingly, 1-in-5 Democrats say they feel Obama has changed the United States for the worse.

Compared to the sentiment about Obama’s impact, fewer people see presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney as a candidate who will change the country dramatically if elected.

Still, 50 percent of people think Romney will bring a “significant” level of change — a finding that may reflect the desire among anti-Obama voters for a reversal of the president’s policies.

Debate about Obama’s first-term legacy has intensified since the Supreme Court ruled the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to be constitutional.

The healthcare legislation, once fully implemented, would usher in the most sweeping changes to the nation’s social safety net since the 1960s.

To Obama’s supporters, the ruling was a validation of his 2008 campaign theme of “change we can believe in.” At that time, Obama hinted at his ambitions to become a transformative president in the mold of Ronald Reagan.

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it,” he told the Reno Gazette-Journal in January 2008.

Beyond the healthcare law, Obama won passage of the Dodd-Frank financial industry reforms, generally viewed as the biggest Wall Street regulatory changes since the 1930s.

In the absence of major immigration legislation, Obama recently eased deportation rules for young illegal immigrants brought to the country as children.

Obama’s ambitions for big change fell short in other areas. He has been unable to pass climate change legislation or repeal the Bush-era tax rates.

On social issues, Obama recently became the first president to endorse gay marriage.

Independent of voter opinions about how the country has changed, The Hill Poll found an overwhelming majority of voters — 89 percent — view the choice between Obama and Romney as important in terms of the future impact on the country.

Almost half (47 percent) say they are paying more attention to this year’s election than the 2008 vote. Republicans are generally paying more attention than Democrats — 56 percent to 44 percent — to the 2012 campaign compared to 2008.

Among centrists, views are evenly split on how Obama has changed the country — with 40 percent saying the United States is better today and 42 percent saying it is worse off. Eighty percent of liberals think Obama has changed the country for the better.

There is a marked difference of opinion along racial lines, with just 29 percent of whites saying Obama has changed the country for the better compared to 92 percent of blacks.

The poll was conducted among 1,000 likely voters on July 5 and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Click here to view data from The Hill Poll.

Anti-Obama Float In Utah Town's Fourth Of July Parade Is Reported To Secret Service

Welcome to the Obamanation, where Democrats regard insults to their Messiah as threats worthy of US Secret Service investigation.



Via Fox 13 News:

HUNTSVILLE, Utah — A parade entry portraying President Barack Obama and using the term “Obamanation” has made some angry, and others upset at the negative attention. It happened in the city’s annual Fourth of July parade.

The float showed a person dressed as President Obama with one sign that read “Huntsville Welcomes Obama’s Farewell Tour?”

On the back, another sign said, “Ask about our assault gun plan. Call Eric Holder.”

On one side of the issue, people are saying the float was disrespectful and had no place in a patriotic parade. The other side says it was all in good fun.

Huntsville Mayor Jim Truett and City Council member Laurie Allen say the entry doesn’t reflect the views of the city. They say it was entered at the last minute, not through usual protocol and they would not have approved it if they had seen it.

Delusional Obamaphile Hill Reporter: Health law mandate isn’t ‘largest tax,’ despite GOP claims

Health law mandate isn’t ‘largest tax,’ despite GOP claims

To hear Republicans tell it, the individual mandate to buy health insurance that the Supreme Court has now declared to be a tax is the “largest tax in America’s history.”

Yet even when considered as a revenue-raising tax, the mandate at the center of President Obama's signature legislation is not even the largest tax increase in the 2010 healthcare law, much less in the history of the republic....

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., 'pretty happy' with economy

Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla. Says she is “pretty happy” with the ongoing economic recovery according to a report by The Examiner, published Sunday, July 8.
Wasserman-Shultz, the Florida Democrat who chairs the Democratic National Committee (DNC), quickly became the butt of political jokes as some Republicans suggested she’s been on "Mars," or a “fantasy land.”
“I am pretty happy about straight 28 months of job growth in the private sector,” Wasserman-Schultz said on Fox News Sunday when asked about the latest jobs report showing 8.2 percent unemployment nationally and 80,000 jobs created. Wasserman-Shultz’s comments came after a string of dismal job reports that has the Obama campaign playing defense. President Obama himself was ridiculed recently in similar fashion after saying the "private sector was doing fine."
Mr. Obama walked his statement back, later saying the private sector "certainly isn't doing fine," but Wasserman Shultz may have reignited that political firestorm, at least in Florida.

“Like I’ve said — we — and President Obama has said, we continue — we need to continue to improve and we need to do more and we need to work together,” Wasserman Schultz added when Fox News’ John Roberts pressed her about those figures. ” But I am pleased that the manufacturing has had a resurgence and created 500,000 jobs in the last 28 months.”

American Patriot Proves Obama Tax Pays For “Free” Illegal Alien Health Care

Henninger: ObamaCare's Lost Tribe: Doctors

The practice of medicine is the Obama health-care law's biggest loser.

Back at the at the dawn of ObamaCare in June 2009, speaking to the American Medical Association's annual meeting, President Obama said: "No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period."

But will your doctor be able to keep you? Or will your doctor even want to keep you, rather than quit medicine?

Obama's 'missing year' at Columbia found?

Clearinghouse claims its reports were wrong, transcript still under wraps

NEW YORK – Two separate database reports from the National Student Clearinghouse last year that contradicted President Obama’s claim he attended Columbia University for two years added to the intrigue generated by Obama’s unwillingness to discuss his time at the Ivy League institution, his block on the release of educational records, and the many political science students and faculty there in the early 1980s who say they don’t remember him.

Swirling amid the black hole of information are a host of theories about Obama’s whereabouts – particularly during the 1981-1982 school year – including speculation he was working for the CIA in Pakistan.

Now, the clearinghouse, with permission from Columbia, has decided to make an exception to its media policy and address WND’s inquiry into the discrepancy. Why do clearinghouse records indicate Obama was at the school only during the 1982-83 school year while Obama and Columbia’s spokesman have insisted he began attending the New York City school in the fall of 1981?

Janine Greenwood, vice president and general counsel for the clearinghouse, told WND there was a “computer error” in their system that has been corrected. She said she confirmed with Columbia that Obama was at the university for two academic years, not one.

Greenwood said she “tried to untangle this” discrepancy one year ago after two “DegreeVerify certificates” from the Herndon, Va.-based clearinghouse –obtained through a fee-based request – indicated Obama attended Columbia College at Columbia University only in the 1982-1983 academic year, from Sept. 1, 1982 until May 31, 1983, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree May 17, 1983.

“All I know is [the record] was right originally, and somewhere along the line it went off the rails, and then it was right again,” she said.

“We basically had two records running simultaneously, and it just depended on how you input the name and the other information as to which records you got,” she explained to WND in an interview Friday.

Greenwood confirmed a disclaimer on the clearinghouse website stating the organization relies on the accuracy of the information supplied by each educational institution and cannot edit, modify or delete any student degree or enrollment data.

Founded in 1993, the clearinghouse describes itself as “the nation’s trusted source for education verification and student educational outcomes research.” Participating colleges and universities provide the clearinghouse with enrollment and degree information on their students and authorize it to respond on their behalf for degree confirmation in conformity with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974.

The two separate reports indicating Obama attended Columbia for only one year were generated in March 2011. One, obtained by lawyer Orly Taitz, was used in a court filing contesting Obama’s eligibility. The other found its way to Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse investigating Obama’s eligibility for the presidential ballot in Arizona.

Greenwood said at least one of the two people who submitted the request for a report of Obama’s record received a correct report as well as an incorrect one. She added that the people who obtained the records probably violated the clearinghouse’s terms of use, because acquisition of records is limited to degree confirmation for the purposes of employment and education.

She said she contacted the Columbia registrar’s office last year to clear up the discrepancy.

“We have confirmed with Columbia that the two years was the correct record,” she said.

However, Columbia’s top media spokesman – who says the issue of Obama’s attendance at the university is his “beat,” as all questions on the matter are routed to him – told WND a day before the interview with Greenwood that he couldn’t explain why the database reports indicated Obama attended Columbia only one year. Robert Hornsby said he was unaware of any contact between Columbia and the National Student Clearinghouse regarding the discrepancy.

After the interview Friday with Greenwood, WND asked Hornsby in a follow-up email to confirm that he had no knowledge of the fact that the clearinghouse says it resolved the issue one year ago.

Hornsby confirmed he was unaware of the contact but insisted “that does not alter the facts, which are clear.”

In the Thursday interview, Hornsby said regarding the clearinghouse’s information: “I don’t know what they’re basing their information on or what their system is for logging, but I can confirm, as a matter of fact, that President Obama was here in September 1981 as a transfer student from Occidental.”

Asked whether he had personally seen a transcript that would verify Obama attended classes during the 1981-82 school year, Hornsby said, “You’re looking for proof I cannot provide.”

He noted academic records are protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, “and we don’t talk about any student’s academic records, presidents or otherwise.”

Hornsby said his information is based on confirmation from “people that have the authority” in the registrar’s office.

“I can’t help you by giving you some more solid thing about having seen a transcript or anything like that,” he told WND. “Our records show he was here, and that’s what we’re standing by. I don’t really have anything else to say.”

Obama’s autobiography “Dreams from My Father,” the Columbia University website and two best-selling biographies by authors favorably disposed to the president all assert Obama attended Columbia for two years, from 1981 to 1983.

Unlike previous presidents, however, Obama has refused to release any transcripts or other documentation regarding his education, going back to Kindergarten.

Is Obama constitutionally eligible to serve? Here’s WND’s complete archive of news reports on the issue

Arpaio’s lead investigator in the eligibility probe, Mike Zullo, provided to WND the National Student Clearinghouse report it obtained, which was derived from a paid request to the clearinghouse.

Two weeks ago, WND submitted two paid inquiries – one with the name Barry Soetoro and the other with Barack Hussein Obama – to the National Student Clearinghouse to confirm the previous reports. The clearinghouse acknowledged receipt of the inquiries but gave no further information.

Did he attend classes at Columbia?

Henry Franklin Graff, professor emeritus of history at Columbia for 46 years, has cast doubt on claims Obama attended classes at the New York City university.

“I have no recollection of Barack Obama at Columbia, and I am sure he never attended any of my classes,” Graff told WND in a telephone interview.

“For 46 years, I taught political history, diplomatic history and one of the pioneering courses on presidential history, and every future politician of note who went through Columbia in those years took one or more of my classes – every one, that is, except Barack Obama.”

Graff further told WND no professor he knew could remember having Obama as a student at Columbia.

“Nobody I knew at Columbia ever remembers Obama being there,” Graff insisted.

The undocumented student

On Nov. 5, 2008, Columbia University celebrated Obama’s election as president by publishing an article in Columbia News titled “Barack Obama, CC ’83, First Columbia Graduate Elected President of the United States.”

“Obama attended Columbia College from 1981 to 1983, after transferring in his junior year from Occidental College,” the article read in part.

In his 2010 biography of Obama, “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” journalist David Remnick states on pages 112-113 that Obama moved to New York City in the summer of 1981 to co-occupy an apartment at 142 West 109th Street, off Amsterdam Avenue, with Occidental friend Phil Boerner.

Remnick does not provide footnotes to document the claims, however.

Two pages later, Remnick recounts how on the night of Nov. 24, 1982, Obama’s father was killed driving drunk in Nairobi, “during Obama’s first semester of his senior year at Columbia,” with the assumption this was Obama’s second academic year at Columbia.
Remnick footnotes the passage regarding the death of Obama’s father on page 215 with a reference to an article by Jon Meacham titled “On His Own,” published in Newsweek Sept. 1, 2008.

Meacham’s mention of Obama attending Columbia is so limited that he fails to specify the amount of time Obama spent attending classes at the university.

In his 2012 biography of Obama, “Barack Obama: The Story,” author and editor David Maraniss recounts, beginning on page 418, an Obama move to New York City on Aug. 25, 1981, “a week before orientation day at Columbia College.”

On pages 465-466, Maraniss writes of Obama’s last month at Columbia, May 1983:

[Obama] had received mostly A’s in his coursework during those two years, he said later, and finished with a 3.7 grade point average. Including his two years at Occidental, his college education had cost about fifty thousand dollars for the four years and was a family effort. About half came from scholarships and student loans, a bit from the off-the-books part-time summer jobs, and most of the rest from his grandmother, Tut, who had devoted part of her salary each year to his education.

Although the passage is not accompanied by a footnote, the reference “he said later” suggests Maraniss got the information from Obama himself or from interviews in which Obama presented the information.

The “off-the-books” part-time summer employment is unlikely to be independently verified. Nor does Maraniss produce any Columbia transcript or reference to a transcript that would document the grade-point average. Maraniss also fails to provide or reference any Columbia financial records that might have given insight into the source or sources Obama used to pay tuition.

Columbia: ‘Obama’s lost years’

No less than Obama-supporting Snopes.com has admitted little is known about Obama’s Columbia years.

“Even those who have studied Barack Obama’s background in detail don’t generally know much about his time at Columbia University, however, as he hasn’t revealed much about that period of his life in his public writings and statements, nor has he made his transcripts or other school records from Columbia available for public examination,” the website states.

An editorial titled “Obama’s Lost Years,” published in the Wall Street Journal Sept. 11, 2008, noted Fox News contacted some 400 students who were at Columbia from 1981 to 1983 and found no one who remembered him.

New York Times reporter Janny Scott, who later wrote a favorable biography of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, wrote in an Oct. 30, 2007, story that Obama “declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.”

“He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman, told Scott.

Scott wrote that one person who did remember Obama was Michael L. Baron, who taught a senior seminar on international politics and American policy. Baron said he was Obama’s adviser on the senior thesis for that course and gave him an A for the course. Baron later wrote Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School.

An Associated Press story May 16, 2008, also stated the Obama campaign declined to discuss Obama’s “time at Columbia and his friendships in general.”

The campaign, however, listed five locations where Obama lived during a period of four years in New York City: three on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and two in Brooklyn. His memoir mentions two others on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the AP noted.

After Columbia, Obama says he spent two years as a writer for a business newsletter and as a coordinator at City College in Harlem for an environmental and consumer advocacy group. In 1985, he left for Chicago.