Wednesday, February 27, 2013

The White House Court Jesters of Sequester: Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory spending "cuts" of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of "sequestration" was Obama's idea in the first place. But that hasn't stopped the Chicken Little in Chief



Traffic alert: There's a massive clown car pileup in the Beltway. And with the White House court jesters of sequester behind the wheel, no one is safe. Fiscal sanity, of course, is the ultimate victim.
President Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory spending "cuts" of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of "sequestration" was Obama's idea in the first place.

But that hasn't stopped the Chicken Little in Chief from surrounding himself with every last teacher, senior citizen and emergency responder who will be catastrophically victimized by hardhearted Republicans. Curses on those meanie Republicans! How dare they acquiesce to the very plan for "cuts" -- or rather, negligible reductions in the explosive rate of federal spending growth -- that Obama himself hatched?
How low will the kick-the-can Democrats go? Among the ridiculous claims the administration is making: The National Drug Intelligence Center will lose $2 million from its $20 million budget. That scary factoid appears in an ominous Office of Management and Budget report purporting to calculate the Sequester Disaster. So lock the doors and hide the children, right?

Wrong. As Reason magazine's Mike Riggs points out, the NDIC shut down in June 2012, and some of its responsibilities were absorbed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Ready for more reckless, feckless farce? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano played Henny Penny during a panicked speech at the Brookings Institution Tuesday. She warned that her agency's "core critical mission areas" would be undermined by the sequester. To cynically underscore the point, "waves" of illegal aliens were released this week from at least three detention centers in Texas, Florida and Louisiana, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed the release of some illegal immigrants Monday night, but would not say how many or from which detention centers.

The real punch line, as I've reported relentlessly, is that the catch and release of criminal illegal aliens has been bipartisan standard operating procedure for decades. The persistent deportation and removal abyss allows hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens -- many of them known repeat criminal offenders -- to pass through the immigration court system and then disappear into the ether because we have no determined will to track them down and kick them all out of the country.

While Napolitano shrieks about decimation of the DHS workforce, DHS workers tell me that the double-dipping of retired ICE brass -- who get back on the payroll as "rehired annuitants" -- is rampant.
While this open-borders White House phonily gnashes its teeth over the sequester's effect on national security, its top officials are lobbying for a massive nationwide amnesty that would foster a tsunami of increased illegal immigration for generations to come. The shamnesty beneficiaries will be welcomed with open arms, discounted college tuition, home loans and Obamacare. And as every outraged rank-and-file border agent will tell you, DHS top officials have instituted systemic non-enforcement and sabotage of detention, deportation and removal functions.

In another emetic performance, Obama parachuted into a Virginia naval shipyard this week to decry Pentagon cuts that would gut our military. But I repeat: The reductions in spending are CINO: Cuts In Name Only. If the sequester goes into effect, Pentagon spending will increase by $121 billion between 2014 and 2023. Fiscal watchdog GOP Sen. Tom Coburn adds that $70 billion is spent by the Defense Department on "nondefense" expenditures each year.

Send in the clowns. Wait. Don't bother. They're here.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/02/27/the-white-house-court-jesters-of-sequester-n1521244/page/full/

The White House has posted a fact free list of disastrous outcomes we can expect if Obama doesn't get his way on sequestration. Don't believe a word of it White House Dumps a Diaper Load on Sequestration

Who knew the government could make a mere $85 billion go so far? Cops and teachers will be fired, first responders gone, never mind that they’re not paid by the federal government in the first place.

Planes won’t fly, no more security at airports, massive lay offs and furloughs of essential government contractors. The end of medical research. Illegals will swarm the border. Oh, wait. Never mind on that one.
Our government is getting all of that for a lousy $85 billion?

Even the number is deceptive. There is no “cutting” being proposed; merely less of an increase over the last budget. For all of the democrat bleating over draconian cuts, 2013 spending is still going to be higher than 2012 spending.

For all of his squawking about the coming sequester apocalypse, the whole mess was Obama’s idea in the first place. The only untouchable sacred cows? Not our military, but food stamps and medicaid. Those programs won’t be affected, but our military will take a hit. That alone should identify the plan as Obama originated

If Obama were serious about saving money, there’s plenty of lard to slice out of government spending; massive bureaucracies run by somnambulant desk jockeys. Let’s take a good look at how much redundancy across useless agencies we’re paying for right now. That is a much better place to start than the DOD.
Senator Rand Paul had a few good suggestions on Sean Hannity’s show. How about not replacing a few pencil pushers who retire and use natural attrition to cut back on federal money wasting? Or perhaps we could live without the $5 million goldfish study? There’s plenty of junk to cut.

Most telling of all, Senator Paul pointed out that there already is $100 billion in the federal budget that can’t be accounted for.

The White House has posted a fact free list of disastrous outcomes we can expect if Obama doesn’t get his way on sequestration. Don’t believe a word of it.


http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53384?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=c0fc02e287-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email

The middle class wasn't wiped out by the individual accumulation of wealth, but by the political accumulation of wealth and power Capitalism: A Hate Story

 Year 1 of Obama, two fat cats named Michael Moore and Harvey Weinstein released a movie. Their magnum opus was “Capitalism: A Love Story”. The unsubtly sarcastic point after the colon was that capitalism was an unmitigated bag of evil. And to reaffirm the faith of capitalism-haters in the evils of capitalism, here was a movie put out by a bunch of corporations owned by millionaires.

he traditional image of the anti-capitalist as a ragamuffin who dies of consumption in his garret has always been at odds with the real image of the anti-capitalist as a rich man or the son of a rich man. When Obama launched his big push for higher taxes, he enlisted as his ally none other than the richest man in the country. And when Occupy Wall Street’s demographics were broken down, the courageous opponents of capitalism turned out to be the sons and daughters of the upper class.

This sort of thing isn’t a surprise, it’s history. Lenin’s father was a nobleman. Cuba’s dictator attended Castro’s wedding. The man of the people is rather often stuck at the bottom of the top of the pole. The people who make revolutions are not the dispossessed, but those who are close enough to see what power really looks like, but have no hope of wielding absolute power unless they enlist the mob. They are close enough to see the throne, but not close enough to non-violently sit down in it.

That’s not even the case in America. Here we instead have the bizarre spectacle of Nicholas II and Batista calling for a revolution against the petite bourgeoisie. It’s a class war being waged by billionaires against people earning six figures a year. It’s millionaires making movies for profit using workers to denounce the practice of making things for profit using workers.



All of this is done in the name of democracy. Just look at the Democracy Alliance, an alliance of left-wing billionaires spending huge amounts of money to win elections. What could be more democratic than that except actually paying individuals for their vote. But just as there are bad capitalist movies and good capitalist anti-capitalist movies, there are bad billionaires who use their fortunes to influence the political process and good billionaires who use their fortunes to etc…

The Koch Brothers are bad. George Soros is good. Sheldon Adelson is bad. The Sandlers are good. The good billionaires on this list have arguably done far more damage to the little people and to the political process, but good money and bad money have nothing to do with real world consequences. Good billionaires give money to the left. Bad billionaires give money to the right or just swim in giant piles of it every evening before taking a cruise on their solid gold yachts.

Outrageous compensation packages for CEOs in non-profit companies

We are told incessantly that income inequality is a serious issue by organizations receiving millions from the holders of billions to say that. But income inequality is only a serious issue in some sectors. It’s fashionable to talk about the outrageous compensation packages for CEOs in for-profit companies, but not the outrageous compensation packages for CEOs in non-profit companies.

The president of a snack food companies who uses corporate profits to cover a huge salary is an evil pig, but the president of a charity who pulls in a huge salary using donations and government grants is a humanitarian. Again, the non-profit president is arguably a worse human being than the for-profit president, but it’s not about the consequences or the moral weight of the act.

Good evil CEOs work at non-profits and do nothing while chewing up public money that is taken by force from the people. Bad evil CEOs oversee the production of productions that people voluntarily buy.
Similarly the university presidents of liberal arts colleges who saddle their students with six-figure debts in exchange for useless degrees are advancing the cause of knowledge, no matter how many dirty deals they make with financial institutions. But the presidents of for-profit schools that hand out useless degrees in exchange for five-figure debts are a blight on the educational landscape. It’s not just anybody who can hand out useless degrees in exchange for debt. You have to know some Latin too.

Good people support taxing the middle class and bringing in huge numbers of unskilled workers to the country to work cheaply and then tax the middle class some more to cover their social benefits. And of course they’re good people. They even offer the children of the middle class a chance to go to college and rack up six figures worth of student debt that they can then use to write essays protesting income inequality.
And there’s no conspiracy to see here. If you think that you might as well suspect that the Democracy Alliance wasn’t really about promoting democracy, but about using giant piles of ill-gotten loot to hijack that democracy.

Ever since the birth of democracy and even before it, politics has come down to who claims to care the most for the people. There was hardly a monstrous tyrant who didn’t claim that his heart bled red for the people. Usually it was the people who ended up bleeding red, but the sentiment was there. We still suffer from a surplus of humanitarians who ache for the opportunity to take power and do the will of the people. And by the will of the people, they mean their own will.

It doesn’t really matter if you call it capitalism or socialism or anythingism. Power is about power and money is about money

It doesn’t really matter if you call it capitalism or socialism or anythingism. Power is about power and money is about money. Strip away the labels and you have a lot of powerful people trading money for power with the agenda of accumulating more of both. It doesn’t really matter what you call a billionaire who makes his fortune on currency speculation trying to dictate elections or a former politician who uses his clout to promote a crisis that his investments tend to profit from.

They’re the good guys, if you listen to the people concerned with income inequality, which is to say that they give piles of money to the right causes and it would be impolite for all the good guys to notice that they make even bigger piles of money bashing capitalism.

The concern trolls of income inequality tell us that the escalating gap is a crisis, but that’s another distraction. The issue isn’t how big the gap between you and the CEO of Sears is. The issue is how much of a challenge it is for people to make it to the middle class and stay in the middle class. And that’s not a problem that can be solved by taking more money from the CEO of Sears.

Confiscating wealth may be a tempting strategy if you’re a Russian peasant in 1918, but the wealth redistribution invariably applies more to the largest segments of the population because even in a country where the poor really are poor, their resources can be indefinitely confiscated, while those of the rich cannot be.
The revolution may start with the merchants, but when all the wine is drunk and all the mansions are sacked, and Lenin has sold the best paintings in the museums to Armand Hammer (another good lefty tycoon) it trickles down to the peasants who retain wealth through sheer numbers. Armand Hammer flies the paintings home and the peasants get marched off to collective farms. The income inequality problem doesn’t actually get solved, but no one talks about it anymore for fear of being shot.

It’s always easy to frame the problem in terms of the hoarding of capital by the wealthy, but the wealthy aren’t actually hoarding their wealth. The wealthiest Americans tend to give their wealth away through various foundations. Bill Gates is spending his fortune trying to wipe out Cholera. Ted Turner has plugged it into the United Nations. David Koch had given hundreds of millions of dollars to Lincoln Center and MIT. It’s not a new tradition either. The names of Carnegie and Rockefeller are all over landmarks in New York City, including libraries and theaters.

If the ladder up the classes has gotten shakier, it is doubtfully the fault of the plutocrats for being rich. The 1 percent is not a new phenomenon in the country’s history, nor is the denunciation of them for being rich. Americans have had a complicated relationship with wealth for a long time and that hasn’t changed. What has changed is the rise of a third factor.

It’s silly to talk about the conspicuous consumption of even the most outrageous rich, when the government rips through more money in a day than every billionaire combined could possibly spend. And that spending has been driven in no small part by agitation from political organizations funded by billionaires and millionaires, sometimes out of an insistence on political philanthropy and sometimes for darker motives.
Incomes haven’t become more unequal because the rich have grabbed all the money and stuffed it into a vault, but because the traditional ladder of success has been cut away and replaced with a clumsy government elevator that sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t, and requires a whole lot of maintenance. But its defenders say that elevators are modern and smooth. They may not fit many people, but it is a quick easy ride. And the people down below are told to demand that the rich make more elevators for them and then everything will be alright.

The middle class wasn’t wiped out by the individual accumulation of wealth, but by the political accumulation of wealth and power

The middle class wasn’t wiped out by the individual accumulation of wealth, but by the political accumulation of wealth and power. The shift from capitalism to socialism means that the poor live better than they used to, but that they have nowhere to go. And that the middle class is on the road to joining them in a society with a small upper class and a huge lower class that is somehow meant to subsidize its own government benefits. The capitalist ladder over which millions could swarm has been traded in for a socialist elevator that takes you to the top floor if you denounce capitalism often enough, but mostly never goes anywhere.
Rather than a society of aspiring merchants and builders, we instead have a society of beggars and philosopher-kings. The beggars are expected to be angry and the philosopher-kings are expected to be charitable. Eventually the philosopher-kings will expect the beggars to work for very little in exchange for that charity and the beggars will find that social justice protests don’t work well against machine gun nests. Some might think that’s conspiracy, but it’s mostly just history.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53392?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=c0fc02e287-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email

Michigan Gov.: States Dealt with Budget Cuts Larger Than Washington, ‘And We All Got the Job Done

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on Monday said that if states “got the job done” despite dealing with larger budget cuts than Congress has to make in the federal budget, why can’t Washington do the same.
“When you look at the states—I was sitting in the governors meeting yesterday, and as I looked around the room, probably most of us in that room had to deal with budget cuts in the last two or three years larger than what they’re talking about, and we all got the job done. And the question is why can’t it be done here in Washington in a more effective, thoughtful way?” the Republican governor said on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.”
C-SPAN referenced a New York Times story on the sequester that said President Barack Obama is proposing a drop in aid to states. “What are you bracing for in Michigan?” C-SPAN asked Snyder, who was in Washington for the National Governors Associations’ annual meeting.

Snyder said his state is “looking at cuts in many ways.”

“One of the things I’d say though, though is this whole issue of getting to the sequester’s a failure. That was the point of putting it in place to begin with – it wasn’t supposed to happen, and that illustrates the mess in Washington compared to the states,” he said.

Snyder proposed cutting the federal deficit by getting rid of “a number of the prescriptive programs.” There are “way too many programs from the federal government, and I’m not asking for a block grant, but let’s do outcome-based programs,” he said.

There are over 40 workforce programs, for instance, Snyder said. He suggested cutting all but five based on outcomes “and I’m not asking for a block grant, but let’s do outcome-based programs.”
“That would reduce costs substantially, and we could provide better service,” he added.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/michigan-gov-states-dealt-budget-cuts-larger-washington-and-we-all-got-job-done

Sequester 'Not Fair,' Says the President Who Signed Off On It

(CNSNews.com) - The mandatory reductions in anticipated federal spending, required by the Budget Control Act that President Obama signed in 2001, are "not fair," the president said on Tuesday.
“They’re not smart. They’re not fair. They’re a self-inflicted wound that doesn’t have to happen,” the president told workers at Newport News Shipbuilding.

The president invoked the concept of fairness twice in his speech. The second time, he used it to buttress his argument for more taxes on the wealthy:

"We can’t just cut our way to prosperity," Obama told shipbuilders. "We can't ask seniors and working families like yours to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while asking nothing more from the wealthiest and the most powerful. We're not going to grow the middle class just by shifting the cost of health care or college onto families that are already struggling, or forcing communities to lay off more teachers or cops or firefighters or shipbuilders, and then folks who are doing really well don’t have to do anything more. That’s not fair, and it's not good for the economy."
Obama's solution to the automatic, indiscriminate spending reductions (the sequester)  is more tax increases, something Republicans so far have refused to go along with because they just approved tax-rate hikes demanded by Obama and his fellow Democrats.

As Republicans back in Washington railed against the president's constant campaigning instead of negotiating, Obama told shipyard workers to "keep up the pressure" on Congress. "If you stand up and speak out, Congress will listen," he said.

Obama described himself as open to compromise and  negotiation: "If the Republicans in Congress don’t like every detail of my proposal, which I don't expect them to, I’ve told them my door is open. I am more than willing to negotiate. I want to compromise.  There's no reason why we can't come together and find a sensible way to reduce the deficit over the long term without affecting vital services, without hurting families, without impacting outstanding facilities like this one and our national defense."

Obama also told shipbuilders, "I'm not interested in spin; I'm not interested in playing a blame game. At this point, all I'm interested in is just solving problems."

Shortly before Obama said he's not interested in playing a blame game, he indicated that Congress should be blamed if the sequester produces another recession: "Now, all of you, the American people, you’ve worked too hard for too long rebuilding and digging our way out of the financial crisis back in 2007 and 2008 just to see Congress cause another one."

Obama said after four years as president, "you get pretty humble."

"You’d think maybe you wouldn't, but actually you become more humble. You realize what you don't know. You realize all the mistakes you’ve made. But you also realize you can't do things by yourself. That's not how our system works. You’ve got to have the help and the goodwill of Congress, and what that means is you’ve got to make sure that constituents of members of Congress are putting some pressure on them, making sure they’re doing the right thing, putting an end to some of these political games."

Obama certainly is not generating any goodwill among House Republicans.
House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday he doesn't think the president wants to find a solution to the sequester:

"The president has been traveling all over the country, and today going down to Newport News in order to use our military men and women as a prop in yet another campaign rally to support his tax hikes," Boehner told a news conference on Capitol Hill.

“Now the American people know if the president gets more money, they’re just going to spend it.  The fact is is that he’s gotten his tax hikes. It’s time to focus on the real problem here in Washington, and that is spending.

“The president has known for 16 months that the sequester was looming out there when the super committee failed to come to an agreement.  And so for 16 months the president’s been traveling all over the country holding rallies instead of sitting down with Senate leaders in order to try to forge an agreement over there in order to move a bill.  We have a moved a bill in the House twice, we should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something.”

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/sequester-not-fair-says-president-who-signed-it

Testimony: DHS No Longer Uses Control of Border as Measure of Border Patrol.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security no longer uses control of the actual border as a measure of how well the Border Patrol is doing its job, according to written testimony released today by the Government Accountability Office.
The GAO said that by the end of fiscal 2010, the Border Patrol had been able to secure “operational control” of only 44 percent of the U.S.-Mexico border. Then, with 56 percent of the border not under “operational control,” DHS simply stopped using “operational control” as a measure of the Border Patrol’s performance.

Since then, DHS has counted the number of illegal border crossers the Border Patrol apprehends, and used this count as an “interim” measure of whether the Border Patrol is accomplishing its mission.
According to GAO, this “interim” measure limits DHS’s accountability and Congress’s ability to conduct oversight of the department.

“At the end of fiscal year 2010, DHS reported achieving varying levels of operational control of 873 (44 percent) of the nearly 2,000 southwest border miles,” Rebecca Gambler, the GAO’s director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on the Border.
“In fiscal year 2011, citing a need to establish new goals and measures that reflect a more quantitative methodology and an evolving vision for border control, DHS transitioned to using the number of apprehensions on the southwest border as an interim goal and measure,” Gambler said. “As GAO previously testified, this interim measure, which reports on program activity levels and not program results, limits DHS and congressional oversight and accountability.”

Starting in 2004, Congress provided the Border Patrol with a significant increase in resources, which until 2010 were focused on actually securing the physical border of the United States.

“For example, from fiscal years 2004 through 2011, the number of Border Patrol agents on the southwest border nearly doubled, from about 9,500 to about 18,500; and DHS reported that since fiscal year 2006, about $4.4 billion has been invested in southwest border technology and infrastructure,” Gambler testified. “Through fiscal year 2010, these resources were used to support DHS’s goal to achieve 'operational control' of the  nation’s borders by reducing cross-border illegal activity.”

The Border Patrol said it had “operational control” of a mile of border when it could not only detect illegal border crossers there but actually interdict them when they crossed.

“The extent of operational control—also referred to as effective control—was defined as the number of border miles where Border Patrol had the capability to detect, respond to, and interdict cross-border illegal activity,” Gambler testified.

In its most recent strategic plan for DHS, the Obama Administration indicated that it intended to begin focusing resources on “mitigating risk” from illegal penetration of the U.S. border rather than increasing the security of the border itself.

But GAO concluded that the interim measure of counting the illegal border crossers the Border Patrol actually apprehended was not a good measure of the agency's effectiveness.

“Further, studies commissioned by CBP have documented that the number of apprehensions bears little relationship to effectiveness because agency officials do not compare these numbers with the amount of cross-border illegal activity,” Gambler testified.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/testimony-dhs-no-longer-uses-control-border-measure-border-patrol

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

DEBUNKER: OBAMA SAYS DEFICIT CUT BY $2.5 TRILLION. REALLY?


In his weekly radio address on Feb. 9, President Obama said, “Over the last few years, Democrats and Republicans have come together and cut our deficit by more than $2.5 trillion through a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher tax rates for the wealthiest Americans.” The next day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) chimed in: “The fact is, we have had plenty of spending cuts, $1.6 trillion in the Budget Control Act.”
BUNK
In 2009, the year Obama was first inaugurated, the deficit was a whopping $1.4 trillion. If it had been cut by $2.5 trillion since then, the federal government would have run a surplus of more than a trillion dollars in 2012. Instead, it ran a deficit of more than $1.3 trillion. By 2012, the record 2009 deficit had decreased not by $2.5 trillion, as Obama claims, but by just $86 billion. In reality, this deficit reduction was about 3 percent of the president’s claim. Meanwhile, the national debt increased bymore than one-quarter.
Moreover, this deficit reduction was not due to any “spending cuts,” as Obama claims, but entirely to increased revenues:
From 2009 to 2012, revenues increased by more than 17 percent. Nor were these increased revenues due to “higher tax rates,” as the president claims, but to lower tax rates: This revenue growth occurred during the era of the much-maligned Bush tax cuts.
THE DEBUNKER
If this 17 percent revenue growth had been matched in a “balanced mix” including “spending cuts,” as Obama claims, spending during this period would have decreased by roughly 17 percent as well. Instead, spending increased nearly 8 percent. Far from “spending cuts,” as the president claims, this was a spending increase.
25FEB13OnlineDebunker
If there had actually been a “balanced mix” in which the increased revenues were matched by “spending cuts” (rather than a spending hike), as Obama claims, the deficit would have been reduced by more than 30 percent – 10 times the actual decrease.
The president added, “I believe we can finish the job the same way we’ve started it – with a balanced mix of more spending cuts and more tax reform.” In reality, Obama has already gotten substantial new taxes and tax hikes with no spending cut – with a net spending hike, in fact. Proceeding “the same way we’ve started” would mean even more tax hikes, while spending continues to climb.
We can either proceed “the same way we’ve started,” or we can pursue a “balanced mix.” – but not both. Since the president’s already gotten tax hikes, to pursue a “balanced mix,” Congress must now proceed with spending cuts. To avoid sequestration, it must come up with $85 billion in cuts – about 2 percent of Obama’s budget this year.
That’s not difficult. As we have observed before, a 2011 GAO report identified waste, fraud and abuse totaling $135 billion in the Department of Defense, $125 billion in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, $85 billion in the Department of Transportation, etc. In addition, a Cato Institute report last year found that corporate welfare costs $100 billion per year. Cutting these might be painful to politicians and their special-interest donors, but would be beneficial to the American public.
Obama and Pelosi talk the talk about spending cuts, but they refuse to walk the walk.
President Obama is right: We should pursue a “balanced mix.” That means real spending cuts.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/02/25/debunker-president-says-deficit-was-cut-by-2-5-trillion-really/

Oil boom in North Dakota is an example of what the nation could achieve: 3 percent unemployment, 7 percent economic growth FACT CHECK: Is Obama Responsible for Production Increases?




“I’m proud of the fact that under my administration, oil production is higher than it has been in a decade or more. We have seen a doubling of fuel efficiency standards on cars over the next several years, so that is saving people money at the pump,” Obama said.

President Obama still doesn’t seem to get it. Yes, oil production is higher than it has been in a decade or more. But, that is not because of actions taken under the Obama Administration. Rather, it is because of state policies and regulations that have encouraged exploration and development on private and state lands, according to the Congressional Research Service. In fact, 96 percent of the increase in oil production over the past 5 years has been on private and state lands, where President Obama and his administration have no input. On federal and Indian lands, where federal policies and regulations are in force, it takes an extremely long lead time to produce energy, and the Obama administration has repeatedly used delaying tactics and moratoria that have reduced production. In fact, between fiscal years 2010 and 2011, oil production on federal and Indian lands declined by 13 percent.


President Obama also claims that a doubling of fuel efficiency standards over the next several years (actually, a dozen years, by 2025) will save people money at the pump. Mr. Obama must be oblivious to the fact that average gasoline prices have increased by 55 percent between 2009 and 2012, are currently rising, and are at the highest levels recorded for this time of year. This price increase has occurred during his administration.

Does President Obama believe that doubling fuel economy standards by 2025 will make the American public feel better about rising gasoline prices when they won’t be able to afford the new, more efficient cars that are mandated? Does he believe that American parents will feel okay transporting their children in cars of much less weight, which is the only way to achieve such standards? People are keeping their existing cars longer, leading to historic numbers of older cars on the road. In 2011, for example, the average car on U.S. streets was 11 years old, up 12 percent from the previous 5 years. With a bad economy and rapidly rising auto prices in part due to government mandates such as fuel economy, people cannot afford new vehicles, particularly the higher-priced vehicles that stricter economy standards force into the market.
Studies have shown that the Obama fuel economy mandate will force about the 7 million drivers out of the market because the mandate increases the price of automobiles.[ii] Even though these people will not be able to afford a new more efficient car to take to the pump, the President will presumably state that they “saved money at the pump.”

Oil Production on Federal Lands

In February 2009, at the start of the Obama administration, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar beganwithdrawing tractsof public land that had already been approved for oil and gas leasing, even though most of the tracts had undergone a thorough, seven-year-long environmental review.[iii] Then, after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration put a six-month moratorium on both shallow and deep offshore drilling, even though the oil spill accident occurred in deep water and drilling in shallow water had spilled only 15 barrels in the previous 15 years. Although the administration ostensibly lifted the moratorium in October of 2010, drilling permit approvals did not take place, resulting in a so-called “permitorium”. These delays led a Federal Court to hold the Administration in contempt for its actions of slow-walking permits.[iv] Further, the Obama administration did not put in place President Bush’s offshore lease plan for fiscal years 2010 to 2015 that would have opened new areas to drilling, and waited until late 2011, to put forth its own offshore lease plan for the 2012 to 2017 period that reverted basically to the original areas that had been opened to offshore drilling.
Data from the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of Interior shows just how bad the leasing statistics are under President Obama’s administration. According to a study by Nobel Royalties Inc., the number of acres leased on federal onshore lands in the lower 48 states in 2010 was at a 30 year low, with 38.9 million acres leased in 2010 compared to 126.6 million acres leased in 1984—a drop of 69 percent. That study also states that on federal lands, 91 percent of resources are either inaccessible or restricted due to government policies. If the federal government were to allow leasing to gradually trend up to normal levels, the government would receive $442 billion in royalties from federal onshore lands and $363 billion from federal offshore projects between 2013 and 2042, for a total of about $800 billion. Once drilling on federal lands is fully operational and production levels have peaked, however, annual royalty payments could reach $100 billion, putting federal royalty income at $1 trillion over 10 years.[v]
But limiting the leases available on federal lands is not the only destructive policy that the Obama administration has undertaken. The administration dramatically increased the time it takes to get a permit to drill to 307 days in 2012. That’s a 100 percent increase since 2005. By comparison, it takes the oil producing states less than a month to grant a permit to drill on private and state lands. North Dakota, for example, where the unemployment rate is around 3 percent and the state economy is growing at 7 percent annually, takes only 10 days to grant a permit. North Dakota now ranks second among the states in oil production, recently surpassing Alaska in output despite having one sixth the land mass and no offshore oil reserves.


Efficiency Standards for Automobiles

The Institute for Energy Research has already assessed the problems with President Obama’s corporate average fuel economy standards in a recent publication. Basically, there is a trade-off between fuel efficiency, horsepower, safety, and cost. The automobile manufacturers can only go so far in increasing fuel efficiency without reducing the weight of the vehicle, thereby affecting safety. Further, increased fuel economy comes with a cost, so there is a further trade-off between purchasing a new vehicle versus just spending more at the pump. With the economy contracting, it will be more difficult for a middle class family to afford buying the new, more fuel efficient car that President Obama is touting.

Conclusion

If Obama wants more federal revenue, he can get it without raising taxes by just relaxing the restrictions on drilling on federal lands both on and off shore. The new revenue from taxes and royalties would be large, jobs would be created, and the economy would grow rather than contract. The oil boom in North Dakota is an example of what the nation could achieve: 3 percent unemployment, 7 percent economic growth, if only he would embrace oil and gas drilling and innovation in this country. While his rhetoric tries to take credit for growing production, his actions show another story entirely.

Auto Blog, Average U.S. vehicle age rises 12% in the last five years, January 20, 2012
[ii] Proposed Fuel Economy Rules Cut 7 Million Car Buyers Out of New-Vehicle Market, April 12, 2012

[iii] Forbes, Putting the Truth-o-Meter on President Obama’s State of the Union Energy, December 13, 2013

[iv] Bloomberg, U.S. in Contempt over Gulf Drill Ban, Judge Rules, February 3, 2011
[v] The Institute for Policy Innovation, Smart Energy Policy Would Make Obama Look Like an Economic Genius, December 21, 2012

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) is a not-for-profit organization that conducts intensive research and analysis on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets. IER maintains that freely-functioning energy markets provide the most efficient and effective solutions to today’s global energy and environmental challenges and, as such, are critical to the well-being of individuals and society.


http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53371?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=d03792bacc-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email

The current government of the US is a product of the lo/info voter: We're broke, under water, quickly becoming a third-world country The Curse Of The LO/INFO Voter


































Obama LO/INFO voter—sometimes referred to as LIVs—are a curse on America.  It is they who are driving America’s “post constitution” government.  They, however, are SO low-information they have no idea their influence may lie at the root of the problems America faces today.

Now.  Who are these LO/Info voters?  What is a Lo/Info voter?  Let’s take a closer look.
I will guarantee when we finish here you will KNOW who a Lo/Info voter is—and—you might be surprised to learn that YOU fall within their ranks.  Not to worry.  Most of us have been, at one time in our lives, card carrying members of the Lo/Info voter classification.

Let’s begin with the obvious.  Lo/Info voters are people who may vote, but who are, generally speaking, poorly (or badly) informed about politics.  That fact alone speaks volumes concerning the inherent weakness of a democracy.  It can certainly be considered an important reason the Founders of America decided that a Representative Republic was the way to go for this fledgling country and its government.

The LIVs could not define their political ideology if their lives depended upon it.  As a rule, with some exceptions, of course, they have no political ideology of their own.  Instead, they choose candidates that are, for whatever reason, appealing to them.  It could be as simple as the physical appearance of the candidate. In fact, it often IS the visage of the candidate.  For instance, America’s last balding President was Dwight Eisenhower.

Having no coherent political ideology the LIVs are more likely to be swing voters, and they will split a ticket in a heartbeat.

Some years ago, I was conversing with a young man about an upcoming Presidential Election.  He volunteered that he probably would not vote because his vote didn’t really make a difference anyway.  I tried to convince him, as best I could, that he was wrong.  But as the conversation went on I began to understand that this young man knew squat about America’s political system. He was married, a high school graduate with possibly some college, a veteran, gainfully employed, and dumb as a post about politics in America. He was, and I suspect still is, a LIV.

I have a friend, a middle-aged government employee, very intelligent, with more than one college degree, married, very successful in his chosen field, who, when asked his opinion on something or other the government is proposing in Congress, responds with:  “I don’t worry about stuff like that.  There’s nothing I can do about it. So why worry?”

Do either of these examples remind you of some of your friends and acquaintances?
These are LO/INFO voters ... and they are dangerous to America.

America was very carefully designed for people who were educated, moral, and involved in the politics of the country. Over the two and a half centuries America has been on the scene we have seen what can happen to her and her government as fewer and fewer Americans deign to take part in the governing process.
By taking part, I mean not just voting, but following, closely, the goings on in the Congress and the Oval Office and writing letters, e-mails and telephoning or faxing their representative in Congress over their concerns about proposed legislation, etc. It means attending City Council meetings, at least occasionally,  and County Commissioner meetings, too.  All these politicians need to see you and hear you and KNOW hey are being held accountable to and by the voters who selected them as their representatives.
It is frighteningly easy to see what happens to a government when the electorate does not stay involved.  We get exactly what we have today in Washington—a Congress that is so out of touch with their constituents as to seem almost rogue in nature.

The current government of the US is a product of the lo/info voter.  Who else but lo/info voters would vote for a man for President based simply on the color of his skin?  How do we get so many worthless, corrupt, politicians returned term after term to the Congress except by the votes of lo/info voters?

So now, we are paying the price.  We’re broke, under water, quickly becoming a third-world country, and we’re scratching our collective heads wondering how we ever got into this mess.

I submit that wondering how we got into this mess is not the real question.  We already know the answer to that.

The real question is:  “How do we get out of this mess?”

”.


Sequester-Sized Government Waste Can Go First



The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel complained today about $8.5 million in cuts for classroom teachers in Wisconsin if the sequester goes through. The Fort Worth Star Telegram was more worthy, saying that the $67.8 million Texas will lose in education funding is doable for the state.
“That's a lot of money,” says Star-Telegram.com, “but the state is scheduled to receive $4.9 billion in federal funds this year, part of a total school spending plan that tops $40 billion when local funds are included. What the White House is talking about is taking away less than a 10th of a percent of public education spending in Texas. It's doable.”

Both positions in Milwaukee and Houston are understandable. But both are also off the mark.
Because the question that’s most salient here isn’t the monies that are at stake now, but the monies that have been wasted before- and will be wasted again if we don’t demand cuts now. Monies that won't go to teachers and firefighters and cops and soldiers. Money that will reward those who've created the monster.   
With government spending expected to cost $6.3 trillion in the US for 2013, let’s look at the things that we’ve squandered money on thus far; waste that has gone a long way to getting us where we are.
After all, sequester demands that we only cut $44 billion in federal spending. That’s a sum that more or less we’ve wasted on a ton of high profile boondoggles that seem to spark little outrage by the administration that can’t stand the idea of cutting even waste.

As Investor’s Business Daily says:
But will a $44 billion cut in spending out of a $3.8 trillion budget, a mere 1%, really be a "meat cleaver approach" that will "eviscerate" government programs?

Obama frightens people by pretending that the $1 trillion cut takes place right away rather than being spread out over 10 years.

He has taken almost every possible position on spending and taxes. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama continually promised to "cut net spending" and make government smaller. The stimulus was promised not to "raise projected deficits beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two."

Yet, during the fifth year of Obama's presidency, we are told that we can't cut spending, that we need even more government "investments."

The Department of Energy, for example, has sponsored loans of $34.5 billion to tenuous “green” companies, many of which have political connections to the Obama White House.
Let’s call in those loans.

The government’s venture into venture capitalism doesn’t seem like such a good idea to me when classroom teachers are going to get the axe. 

Or maybe we could get General Motors to make due on the $15 billion that taxpayers are in the hole on the public stock offering of GM? Or perhaps we could ask the auto companies to get back the $27 billion that the government wasted on shoring-up the United Auto Workers union in the bailout plan?
Do we really need to save a union with declining membership and relevance, rather than pay teachers?
We can talk healthcare too.

Before we let the government take over the whole healthcare system, they could first clean up the estimated $48 billion in fraud and abuse that the government’s own General Accounting Office says haunts the part of healthcare that the government controls now-- Medicaid and Medicare.
  
“In 2010 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report claiming to have identified $48 billion in what it termed as ‘improper payments,’” reports Forbes. “That’s nearly 10 percent of the $500 billion in outlays for that year.  However, others, including U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, suggest that there is an estimated $60 to $90 billion in fraud in Medicare and a similar amount for Medicaid.”
Holy tamoly: That’s at least $120 billion savings right there.

So if we can find an alternative to the green loans, tell GM to give us back the $42 billion that we wasted on the auto bailout- they have $26 billion in cash today…they can owes us the rest- that $60 billion in savings. Then if we clean up fraud and abuse in the healthcare system that the government runs we could save all told about $180 billion this year, with ongoing savings of $120 billion.
All of this before I cooked dinner, even.
   
Shouldn’t we do that first before raising any taxes or firing any teachers?
I mean cut spending- and waste- not cook dinner.

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2013/02/26/sequestersized-government-waste-can-go-first-n1520374/page/full/

Monday, February 25, 2013

Which Government Spend the Most Per Capita on Government Healthcare: France, Italy, the United States, Sweden, Canada, Greece, or the United Kingdom? government is the problem and less government is the solution

What government spends the most on health care?
  • Is it Canada or the United Kingdom, which are famous (or, if these stories are any indication, infamous would be a better description) for single-payer healthcare systems?
  • Is it Sweden, the home of the cradle-to-grave welfare state?
  • Or France, the land of the world’s most statist people?
  • How about Italy or Greece, nations that have spent themselves into fiscal crisis?
Nope, nope, nope, and nope.
The United States spends more money, on a per-capita basis, than any of those countries. Here’s a chart from a Forbes analysis prepared by Doug Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy.
Per Capita Government Healthcare Spending
There are three big reasons why there’s more government-financed healthcare spending in the United States.
1. Richer nations tend to spend more, regardless of how they structure their healthcare systems.

2. As you can see at the 1:18 mark of this video, the United States is halfway down the road to a 
single-payer system thanks to programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

3. America’s pervasive government-created third-party payer system leads to high prices and costly inefficiency.

So what’s the moral of the story? Simple, notwithstanding the shallow rhetoric that dominates much of the debate, the United States does not have anything close to a free-market healthcare system.
That was true before Obamacare and it’s even more true now that Obamacare has been enacted.
Indeed, it’s quite likely that many nations with “guaranteed” health care actually have more market-oriented systems than the United States.

Avik Roy argues, for instance, that Switzerland’s system is the best in the world. And the chart above certainly shows less direct government spending.

And there’s also the example of Singapore, which also is a very rich nation that has far less government spending on healthcare than the United States.

If you read the Avik Roy articles linked above, and also this study by my Cato colleague Mike Tanner, you’ll see that there’s no perfect system.

Our challenge is that it’s very difficult to put toothpaste back in a tube. Thanks to government programs and backdoor intervention through the tax code, the United States healthcare system is nowhere close to a free market (with a few minor exceptions such as cosmetic surgery and – regardless of what you think of the procedure – abortion).

Yes, I think entitlement reform can make things better, though fixing Medicare and Medicaid should be seen as a necessary but not sufficient condition. As I show in this post, we would simply move a little bit in the right direction on the spectrum between markets and statism.
Tax reform could solve another part of the problem by removing the bias for over-insurance, which presumably would lead people to pay out of pocket and use insurance for large, unexpected costs.
Fundamental tax reform is also the best way to improve the healthcare system. Under current law, compensation in the form of fringe benefits such as health insurance is tax free. Not only is it deductible to employers and non-taxable to employees, it also isn’t hit by the payroll tax. This creates a huge incentive for gold-plated health insurance policies that cover routine costs and have very low deductibles. …Shifting to a flat tax means that all forms of employee compensation are taxed at the same low rate, a reform that presumably over time will encourage both employers and employees to migrate away from the inefficient over-use of insurance that characterizes the current system. For all intents and purposes, the health insurance market presumably would begin to resemble the vastly more efficient and consumer-friendly auto insurance and homeowner’s insurance markets.
In other words, as this poster suggests, government is the problem and less government is the solution

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/danieljmitchell/2013/02/24/which-government-spend-the-most-per-capita-on-government-healthcare-france-italy-the-united-states-sweden-canada-greece-or-the-united-kingdom-n1519116/page/full/

Executive Order 13603 -- Tyranny at the stroke of a pen


Shovel ready: Obama’s big infrastructure myth


resident Barack Obama is reportedly ready to pivot back to the topic of jobs (again) in his State of the Union — which means he won’t be pivoting away from the myth that more “investments” will help stimulate and  “grow the middle class.” That’s the plan. That’s been the only plan.

No doubt, there is a substantive debate to be had over infrastructure spending. What sort do Americans need and want? Do we want expensive and inefficient trains and more green energy projects? Do we want “investments” allocated locally rather than nationally? We can debate those topics, and many other things, but there is no evidence that government infrastructure projects have sparked economic growth.

In his first State of the Union address, Obama claimed that, “Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs.  More than 90 percent of these jobs will be in the private sector – jobs rebuilding our roads and bridges; constructing wind turbines and solar panels; laying broadband and expanding mass transit.”

ut none of his promises came true.  Obama is around 8 million in the hole when it comes to jobs, but let’s focus first on the president’s malleable definition of  “infrastructure,” which is ideologically driven. After all, when Democrats had a chance to spend on legitimate infrastructure they didn’t; the priority was elsewhere. A study by John Taylor at Stanford found that out the total $682 billion package, federal infrastructure spending was just $0.9 billion in 2009 and $1.5 billion through the first half of 2010—or less than four-tenths of 1 percent.”
A year after the stimulus passed, the Associated Press reviewed Transportation Department data on more than $21 billion stimulus projects across the country, and the unemployment data to “assess the effects of road and bridge spending on local unemployment and construction employment.”
Here’s what it found:
A federal spending surge of more than $20 billion for roads and bridges in President Barack Obama’s first stimulus has had no effect on local unemployment rates, raising questions about his argument for billions more to address an “urgent need to accelerate job growth.”
An Associated Press analysis of stimulus spending found that it didn’t matter if a lot of money was spent on highways or none at all: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless. And the stimulus spending only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, the analysis showed.
Furthermore, the Heritage Foundation identified 19 bankrupt green energy companies (“infrastructure”) were unable to be profitable even with $2.6 billion in financial assistance from Washington.
As Investors Business Daily reported in 2011:
In 2009, Obama dedicated $7.2 billion of stimulus funds to build “clean tech” jobs. He vowed to create 5 million jobs over the next decade.
So far, that effort has “created or retained” just 7,140 jobs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s about $1 million per job. The number is actually down from last year, when the EPA claimed 16,605 green jobs.
Spending $1 million per job might not bother the Krugmanites in Washington, but the only thing that kind of money has stimulated is the imagination of Greenies, not the economy.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/02/12/obamas-big-infrastructure-myth/


Saturday, February 23, 2013

The Pro-Growth SequesterNo, it's not Armageddon.

The Pro-Growth SequesterNo, it's not Armageddon.

The Obama administration is whipping up hysteria over the sequester budget cuts and their impact on the economy, the military, first providers, and so forth and so on. Armageddon.
But if you climb into the CBO numbers for 2013, you see a much lighter and easier picture than all the worst-case scenarios being conjured up by the administration.

For example, the $85 billion so-called spending cut is actually budget authority, not budget outlays.
According to the CBO, budget outlays will come down by $44 billion, or one quarter of 1 percent of GDP. (GDP is $15.8 trillion.)

What's more, that $44 billion outlay reduction is only 1.25% of the $3.6 trillion government budget. So the actual outlay reduction is only half the budget-authority savings.

The rest of it will spend out in the years ahead — that is, if Congress doesn't tamper with it.
And please remember that these so-called cuts come off a rising budget baseline in most cases. So the sequester would slow the growth of spending.

They're not real cuts in the level of spending. (Not that a level reduction is a bad idea.)
Looking at the sequester in this light, it's clear that it won't result in economic Armageddon. In fact, I'll make the case that any spending relief is actually pro-growth.
That's right. When the government spending share of GDP declines, so does the true tax burden on the economy.

As a result, more resources are left in the free-market private sector, which will promote real growth.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page points to the Reagan 1980s and the Clinton 1990s, when domestic spending as a share of GDP fell significantly and the private-sector economy boomed.
Ditto for the post-WWII period, when spending declines as a share of the economy were quite substantial and the private economy came back strong.

And I would point to the new book from Amity Shlaes, "Coolidge." Silent Cal was a manic budget cutter who slashed the level of the budget. And he presided over a tremendous U.S. economic boom.
In fact, Coolidge's budget cuts and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's tax-rate cuts were a one-two punch that serves as an example of how to fix our ailing economy today.
And here's an important point: Despite all the pessimism these days, spending as a share of GDP has actually come down in recent years.

40% Give Obama Positive Marks for Job Creation

While a sizable number of U.S. voters see job creation and issues affecting small business as very important, they're narrowly divided over how President Obama is performing in these areas.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 40% of Likely U.S. Voters rate the president’s handling of issues related to job creation as good or excellent.  Forty percent (40%) also give him a poor rating in this area.

On issues related to small business, the president also gets good or excellent ratings from 40%, while another 40% think he is doing a poor job.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/february_2013/40_give_obama_positive_marks_for_job_creation

OBAMA ADMIN. CALLS ON SUPREME COURT TO STRIKE DOWN DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE ACT DEFINING MARRIAGE AS BETWEEN A MAN AND WOMAN


The Obama administration on Friday formally urged the Supreme Court to strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
In a brief filed Friday evening, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli argued that DOMA’s section three, which bars married same-sex couples from filing joint federal tax returns and other federal spousal benefits, is unconstitutional:
Section 3 of DOMA violates the fundamental constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The law denies to tens of thousands of same-sex couples who are legally married under state law an array of important federal benefits that are available to legally married opposite-sex couples. Because this discrimination cannot be justified as substantially furthering any important governmental interest, Section 3 is unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in United States v. Windsor on March 27. At issue is whether the law violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection for legally married same-sex couples. The case surrounds Edith Windsor, who was forced to pay a federal estate tax of $363,053 upon the death of her wife, while heterosexual spouses are generally able to inherit estates tax-free.
The Obama administration’s brief comes almost exactly a year after Obama instructed the Justice Department to no longer defend DOMA’s constitutionality.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/22/obama-admin-calls-on-supreme-court-to-strike-down-defense-of-marriage-act-defining-marriage-as-between-a-man-and-woman/

Friday, February 22, 2013

61% Think State Governments Should Give Out Jobs, Not Welfare


Sixty-one percent (61%) of Likely U.S. Voters think state governments should offer minimum wage jobs instead of welfare payments to those who have lost their jobs and been unsuccessfully looking for work for a year. 

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 21% don’t like this idea. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure about it. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter orFacebook.

The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on February 14-15, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology


http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/business/jobs_employment/february_2013/61_think_state_governments_should_give_out_jobs_not_welfare

If Obama is America’s father, please call CPS Then would somebody call Child Protective Services and find us foster parents?!


By now you likely have heard that Chris Rock considers Barack Obama to be America’s father. If that is true, then would somebody call Child Protective Services and find us foster parents?!
For Chris Rock, America’s true Founding Fathers were disappointingly white. I suspect that whatever color America’s Founding Fathers might have been, they would not have approved of having a failure like Obama among their esteemed membership.
Though the Founding Fathers had many flaws, they were wise enough to eliminate the self-indulgent institution of slavery from America’s future. Further, they crafted the Constitution to help posterity avoid mistakes like Obama, to help America avoid having a “baby daddy” rather than a real father. Despite their imperfections, the Founding Fathers were men of character: Obama is not.

Obama reminds me of my father. And like my father, Obama uses anybody and everything at his disposal for his own personal exploitation. I thought it was despicable that my father stole Christmas presents from our family one year. However, when you consider that Obama not only steals Christmas, he steals our children’s futures–my deadbeat, drug-addicted, murdering father doesn’t seem quite so abhorrent.
My father and Obama do have one difference. My father was convicted of his crimes and served many years in San Quentin, while Obama’s crimes gained him the presidency.
Chris Rock wants a father who has spent the family’s mortgage money, and can’t keep food in the fridge. He wants a father who has gambled away the kids’ college fund, and made us believe he “invested” our money. All that is left for Obama to do is to kill mother for the insurance.
In Rock’s press conference he wanted to convey his respect for the office of the presidency, which is why he wanted to show public support for Obama. However, when asked in 2007 about the possibility of a black Commander-in-Chief, Rock said this concerning George Bush:
“If [America] is ready for a retarded president, why wouldn’t it be ready for an African American president?”
There was no talk then of how citizens needed to shut up and do whatever Bush wanted without question. Chris Rock will step and fetch for Hollywood white men, but there was no way he would do so for a white president. I suspect Rock would rather get that bite in the ass he referenced, than kowtow to a white president.
Rock yearned for a reason to showcase his abject hatred of whites, a sentiment he and other Liberal blacks–people angry without even knowing why–have nutured for decades. Obama is the manifest destiny of that pent-up hatred. Obama represents payback; misplaced payback.
Instead of celebrating Obama’s achievement as the first recognizable black president, Rock denigrates that milestone in America’s societal evolution. Chris Rock is a creation of the guilty white Leftists, and he is unquestionably a modern-day racist. Guilty white Leftists have given Chris Rock, and all racist blacks, permission to be racists.
In some twisted way, these Liberal white elitists feel good being “accepted” by people like Rock, while concurrently holding dominion over them. Liberal elitists make sure that racists, such as Chris Rock, keep their day job. They support Rock’s movies and his twisted ideology, while knowing they still control the puppet strings.
How sad that somebody convinced Chris Rock there would never be a black president in his lifetime, for when he got one, Rock simply reverted back to his reptilian brain: to support Obama based solely on his color. It’s tribal for him.
If Obama’s white heritage were more evident, Rock would dedicate entire comedy routines to the destruction Obama has wreaked in the black community. But Obama proclaims blackness, so tribalism won’t allow Chris Rock to use sanity or logic in his evaluation of Obama. He must blindly support the man who is destroying blacks.
Such is the plight of the liberal black community, and the reason there are so many bad black leaders. So your daddy can’t keep the lights on and beats your mom? Who cares the family’s credit is in the toilet, and daddy spends money like a pimp. Chris Rock is just glad to have his black father in the home.

http://theblacksphere.net/2013/02/obama-dad-call-cps/

Obama Hypocrisy: Hurting Minorities While Claiming : the reason liberal policies and programs always seem to backfire and hurt those they purport to help is because liberals either do not understand human nature or simply ignore it.


The maxim, if you want to FEEL good be a liberal but if you want to DO good be a conservative, has never rung so true. It is disturbing to realize how far liberal Democrats have been able to advance their leftwing agenda by whispering pleasing but false promises in the ears of poor minorities while simultaneously stabbing them in the back. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that contemporary liberalism—so-called progressivism—has done more to harm poor minorities than anything since slavery. In fact, for poor minorities in America, progressivism is little more than a new form of slavery.
Examples abound concerning liberal policies and programs that purport to help poor minorities when in fact they do more harm than good. One such example is the left’s commitment to continually raising the minimum wage in spite of indisputable evidence that doing so creates high unemployment, especially among young blacks and other minorities. Ever higher minimum-wage rates simply freeze young minorities out of the workplace just when they are seeking that all-important first job. Unable to get a job, too many are left spending their idle time on the streets where the criminal element quickly recruits them for nefarious activities that lead to no good. Those poor minorities who refuse to take up a life of crime are still prime targets for another group: liberals looking to expand the ranks of entitled minorities who look to government for their sustenance. Either route is destructive for the individuals in question and for our country.
Another liberal policy that claims to help minorities but in fact hurts them is affirmative action. There are two ways in which affirmative action harms minority students. First, as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. document in their new book Mismatch, affirmative action hurts otherwise qualified minority applicants for college admission by placing them in institutions where they are over their heads academically. These minority students are qualified for college admission and, if placed in institutions appropriate to their academic levels, could succeed. However, placing them in classes with the top students in the world puts them at a competitive disadvantage.
Minority students who are accepted at top-tier universities because they are minorities rather than because their test scores and preparation merit admission fail in high numbers because they are mismatched—not because they are minorities. This phenomenon is no different than a good high school athlete failing in a top tier college program when he could have succeeding at a smaller school. Not every high school football player can play for the University of Alabama. Not every student, regardless of race, can attend America’s top ten universities, but because of affirmative action many minorities who would have succeeded in a good state university are being set up for failure by those who use affirmative action to enroll them in world-class universities where they simply cannot compete.
The latest social issue that is compelling liberals to “help” minorities is gun violence. Their answer, of course, is gun control—more laws that will disarm law-abiding citizens while emboldening violent criminals. Writing for Townhall, conservative economist, professor, and commentator, Thomas Sowell, states: “Although gun control is not usually considered a racial issue, a wholly disproportionate number of Americans killed by guns are black. But here, as elsewhere, liberals’ devotion to their ideology greatly exceeds their concern about what actually happens to flesh and blood human beings as a result of their ideology.”
Sowell accurately states that factual studies over the years in the United States and abroad have repeatedly shown that gun-control laws do not reduce gun violence. Cities in the United States with the toughest gun-control laws have murder rates far above the national average. In fact, the highest murder rates in the world are in countries that have 100 percent gun bans. Consider just a few examples. Measured by murders per 100,000 people, Honduras has a murder rate of 91.6, Jamaica’s is 52.2, South Africa’s is 31.8, the Dominican Republic’s is 25.0, Russia’s is 10.2, and Pakistan’s is 7.8. By way of comparison, the murder rate per 100,000 people in the United States is 4.2, a number that will only increase with stricter gun-control laws.
Additional liberal programs that hurt those they claim to help fall under the broad rubric of welfare, but space limitations require that this be the topic of another column. To conclude this column, the reason liberal policies and programs always seem to backfire and hurt those they purport to help is because liberals either do not understand human nature or simply ignore it. This is unfortunate because as any good leader can tell you, failing to factor human nature into your decisions is what gives rise to the law of unintended consequences, and this law is the Achilles heel of liberal programs and policies—a fact that hurts poor minorities.


Read more: http://patriotupdate.com/articles/liberal-hypocracy-hurting-minorities-while-claiming-to-help-them/#ixzz2LfmspNPw

Obama Cashes In on Wall Street Speeches