White House Retreats From Skeet Shooting Lie
If they ignore it, maybe it will it just go away.
It seemed like an easy enough question: Would President Obama take up
the challenge from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to take her skeet
shooting at Camp David?
But press secretary Jay Carney wasn't going there. Not even a little.
Let's go to the transcript from the White House briefing Wednesday:
Q: Marsha Blackburn has challenged the president's comments about
skeet shooting; she's skeptical of them, and she says she's a btter
skeet shooter then he is and wants to be invited to Camp David for a
contest. Your reaction?
Carney: I have none.
MSNBC Caught Lying - Again
No, Second Amendment supporters did not heckle the father of a Sandy Hook victim. MSNBC lies again.
MSNBC ran a video clip yesterday that portrays the father of a Sandy Hook victim being "heckled" during a legislative hearing.
Martin Bashir, an MSNBC host, ran an edited clip from the hearing,
which omitted the father's request to hear from the audience. Bashir
then referred to the audience members as "hecklers." But the full tape,
provided above by Media Research Center, the right-wing watchdog group,
shows that the father had solicited the audience members' participation.
The father then said, "We're all entitled to our own opinion, and I
respect their opinions and their thoughts."å
Obama Breaks Federal Election Law - Brags About It
Chances that anyone will be prosecuted = zero. Chances that MSM will even report, even less.
Did the Obama campaign run afoul of Federal Election Commission rules when trying to get some of their top donors to pay off Hillary Clinton’s campaign debt from 2008? Bloomberg reports [http://buswk.co/XK30vo] that the campaign’s finance brass had an intern comb through OpenSecrets.org
to find donors who had not maxed out to Clinton in 2008. The FEC puts
strict conditions on the use of its data, banning campaigns from using
it to solicit contributions. “Candidly, it's really not that uncommon,”
said attorney Joseph Birkenstock, an election law specialist with Caplin & Drysdale.
Birkenstock said it’s a gray area — was the campaign using the database
to find new donors for Clinton or just ensuring that existing Obama
donors did not accidentally donate above the legal limits? That’s a big
difference, legally speaking. “That's frankly the reason the data exists
— it's to keep track of who has given and how much,” said Birkenstock.
Soledad O'Brien On The Way Out At CNN?
She's been the female Rick Sanchez for years, which is to say that she's a lazy, unserious journalist who comes to promote a leftist agenda more than an interest in pursuing the truth. Now it seems that she's going to be a victim in CNN's attempt to rehabilitate its image and regain it relevancy. I can remember a time when I would tune into CNN because it was a reasonably honest news outlet. Getting rid of frauds like Soledad O'Brien and Rick Sanchez is a good start.
Obama Repudiates Immigration Deal He Claimed Credit For
A central tenet of the so-called "Gang of Eight's" immigration compromise includes border security. Obama says: No way Jose.
The president will apparently argue that the administration has met
reasonable goals on enforcing current immigration legislation, and that
additional security will merely create new obstacles to legalizing the
roughly 12 million illegal immigrants thought to be living in the United
States. The federal government accelerated deportations in the first years of the Obama presidency, and sent new personnel to patrol the southwestern border.
It seems that it was only yesterday that he was trying to claim credit for the deal. In fact, it was yesterday.
How Ignorant Is MSNBC's Ed Schultz?
Obama's War On Women?
Liberals who loved the facade are surprised by substance, or lack thereof.
President Obama brought his top Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency chiefs together Monday with their potential replacements, and some critics noticed one thing that stood out: Each of them was a white man.
Obama, who made women’s issues a core of his reelection bid, has nominated men to serve in three of his most prominent national security positions, including secretary of state, where Sen. John F. Kerry (D) was named last month to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton. The president on Monday announced former senator Chuck Hagel for the defense job and counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan to head the CIA.
The moves have disappointed some supporters who said they fear, with Clinton’s departure, a paucity of females among Obama’s top advisers, particularly in the traditionally male-dominated field of defense and security.
Richard Nixon Was More Honest Than Barack Obama
At least Nixon turned the tapes over.
The sudden announcement that Lisa Jackson, the controversial head of the Environmental Protection Agency, will be resigning later this month means that the mysterious Richard Windsor will be leaving the building with her.
His is apparently one of several fake names on official EPA e-mail accounts that Jackson used to conduct business while at EPA. Her office claims the name is a combination of her dog’s name and that of the town of East Windsor, N.J., where she once lived.
It’s not uncommon for government officials to have private e-mail accounts. But federal law has set up several barriers to prevent officials from using non-official or secret e-mail addresses to conduct business and then conceal the contents of those accounts from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Politico reports that the EPA was supposed to ensure that anyone requesting Jackson’s e-mails under FOIA would also have access to communications from “Richard Windsor.” “But the system is far from foolproof,” it dryly notes.
When the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market group, came up empty on its FOIA requests for Jackson’s e-mails relating to her anti-coal efforts, it was told by an EPA whistleblower that she was using “Richard Windsor” and other aliases to coordinate with outside anti-coal groups and engage in other activity she wouldn’t want to come to light.
And, what is it about Democrat EPA administrators?
In 2000, Clinton EPA administrator Carol Browner responded to a Landmark Legal Foundation FOIA lawsuit by claiming that she didn’t use her government computer for e-mail. But Browner then ordered the hard drive on the computer to be reformatted and all backup tapes destroyed, just hours after a federal judge ordered her agency to preserve all agency e-mails. “EPA vowed it would avoid such problems going forward,” says Chris Horner, a CEI fellow and author of the new book The Liberal War on Transparency. “They clearly haven’t, and neither have other government agencies under Obama, who in 2009 promised us ‘the most honest and transparent administration in history.’”
Thomas Friedman Discovers That Obama Is Spineless
What was your first clue Thomas?
Maybe Obama has a strategy: First raise taxes on the wealthy, which gives him the credibility with his base to then make big spending cuts in the next round of negotiations. Could be. But raising taxes on the wealthy is easy. Now we’re at the hard part: comprehensive tax reform, entitlement cuts, radical cost-saving approaches to health care and new investments in our growth engines. This will require taking things away from people — to both save and invest. A lot of lobbies will fight it. The president will need to rally the center of the country and the business community to overcome them. He’ll have to change the polls, not just read the polls. He will have to take on his own base and the G.O.P.’s.
Obama has spent a lot of time lately bashing the rich to pay their “fair share.” You know what? There are definitely some Wall Street bankers and C.E.O.’s who deserve that bashing. But there are many successful Americans who got their wealth the old-fashioned way — by risk-taking, going into debt to start a business or pursue a dream. It’s time for the president to do some risk-taking — to stop just hammering the wealthy, which is so easy, and to start selling the country on a strategy to multiply them. We need to tax more millionaires, but we also need more millionaires and middle classes to tax. The president was elected to grow our national pie, not just re-divide it.
Recognizing The Best And Brightest
They’re smarter than you are. And if you ever doubt that, just ask them and they’ll be happy to set you straight. Whether you find them in government, journalism or academia, we are fortunate to have this self-anointed cognitive elite who have assigned themselves the awesome responsibility of doing all of our thinking for us.
To borrow a phrase from our president, we should be thanking them.
And so, as we do each year in this corner, we recognize these gifts to humanity with the Zinc Kozmo, awarded annually to the most outstanding contributions to the advancement of civilization. So just sit back and learn from those who live to tell you how to live your life.
This year, we award the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations Kozmo to Charlette Stoker Manning, the chairwoman of Women in NAACP. After Mitt Romney delivered an inspiring speech about how his vision could create opportunities for black Americans to advance up the economic ladder, Manning ridiculed Romney by arguing that, “You cannot possibly talk about jobs for black people at the level he’s coming from. He’s talking about entrepreneurship, savings accounts — black people can barely find a way to get back and forth from work.”
And so, if you ever think that too much is being expected of you, give a call to Charlette Stoker Manning.
Attorney General Eric Holder wins the James Watt Diversity Kozmo in a landslide.
In 1983, Interior Secretary James Watt famously boasted of his staff’s diversity by explaining that [On my staff] I have a black, two Jews and a cripple.”
This last year, it was discovered that Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has enacted policies that make exceptional efforts to recruit attorneys who are “dwarfs,” have “psychiatric disabilities” or “severe intellectual disabilities.”
Candidates exhibiting these and other challenges could be hired without having to endure the normal, competitive hiring procedures. In fact, they could be hired into jobs that had not even been listed as open. And because there is no greater goal than diversity (diversity of thought exempted, naturally), if you are sufficiently crazy and dim-witted, Eric Holder will create a job for you, especially if you’re short.
Somehow, this explains a great deal.
Over the last year, MSNBC devolved to the point that not even Saturday Night Live or The Onion could create more laughable caricatures of biased reporting. Prime time host Chris Matthews reached the all-time low on September 5th of last year while gushing over Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Matthews, who famously reported experiencing “tingles” traveling up his leg while listening to Barack Obama speeches, was aroused to new levels of sexual excitement by Clinton’s speech, exulting that, “I always figured that if Bill Clinton landed on Mars, he would know how to do it with them. He would know how to reproduce,” Matthews said. “He would know everything.”
Normally, MSNBC would be recognized in the News Media Kozmos, but MSNBC has stepped up and volunteered itself as the propaganda arm of the Obama Administration, even going so far as to attend strategy meeting at the White House. Not even the New York Times goes that far! As such, they get the government rate.
And so, for creating a new sexual orientation minority for colleges and universities to incorporate into their curricula, Chris Matthews earns the inaugural Political-Arousal Confusion Kozmo.
And speaking of higher education, the Excellence in Education Kozmo goes to Central Connecticut State University. At CCSU, you’ll find an art professor named Mike Alewitz who describes his specialty as mural art. Simple-minded skeptics might call this vandalism, but that just exposes the narrowness of their vision.
Alewitz was angry this last summer over what he claimed was a campaign of harassment by his university. He believed that the university was trying to prevent his students from finishing an enormous mural protesting student loan debt.
According to the May 15, 2012 Hartford Courant, “the mural, which will be finished over the summer, depicts students struggling under the strain of college debt as the CCSU mascot, a blue devil, looks on.”
So, what we have here are students who are burdening themselves with student loans to pay tuition for the privilege of learning to paint a mural that protests student loans.
And so, once again, I remind you to thank these people. They certainly believe that they deserve it.
Happy New Year!
Blue Utopia: As California Goes, So Goes The Country?
Let's hope not.
The problems in Blue Utopian society will be similar to the unintended consequence of protecting the Delta Smelt in the Central Valley. The Blues labeled this tiny fish, previously known as “bait,” as an endangered species. The Endangered Species Act was created to protect the American Bald Eagle but now extends protection for the Delta Smelt, forcing water to be diverted from the farms of the Central Valley to the Pacific Ocean. The Delta Stewardship Council shows the water cutoffs had no effect on the smelt population. But it did a devastating effect on another endangered species: the California family. When 300,000 acres went fallow, 37,000 jobs were lost. Unemployment has reached 40% in some areas of the Central Valley. Food lines have appeared in the world's most fertile agricultural valley. Farmworkers were forced to accept bags of carrots grown in China. Orchards that existed for decades died without water. The Central Valley now needs food stamps to feed its residents.
The Blues are excited to impose their vision of Utopia on California. I, for one, will not be here to see it. My home goes on the market next month. My company has already re-located to another state. My children have already moved away seeking a future more promising than anticipated here in California. It is ironic because that is why I left my parents in Cleveland, Ohio to come to California four decades ago. I will be sad to leave my home and friendships acquired over decades. But I realize our leaders will neither notice, and if they did, they would not care.
As the tax revenues continue to fall (as they always do when rates increase), the Blues will rail against the remaining 1%, claiming that if only “they” would pay their fair share, things would be perfect. They will raise rates, fees, costs, and penalties again on the business class, and will do so as long as they hold power.
But there is a problem in Blue Utopia. Short term, the state may be supported by the occasional Internet or Housing Bubble, but the money will finally run out. When it does, maybe they will ask us to come back to the Golden State. They will promise to lower rates and turn the water back on. But it is already too late for the dead orchards of the Central Valley. And it will soon be too late for all but a handful of entrepreneurs of California.
Obamanomics: Women And Minorities Hardest Hit
Unemployment for women and African-Americans rises sharply after the election.
Government unemployment numbers for December showed that while the
general unemployment rate remained flat at 7.8 percent, unemployment
for women and African-Americans rose despite an economy that created
155,000 jobs.
Unemployment for women rose to 7.3 percent in December from 7.0
percent while the rate for African-Americans rose sharply to 14.0
percent from 13.2 percent in November
Al Gore Rushed Sale Of Current TV To Evade Taxes
I thought Democrats were in favor of high taxes on the rich.
Al Jazeera did not disclose the purchase price, but people with direct knowledge of the deal pegged it at around $500 million, indicating a $100 million payout for Mr. Gore, who owned 20 percent of Current. Mr. Gore and his partners were eager to complete the deal by Dec. 31, lest it be subject to higher tax rates that took effect on Jan. 1, according to several people who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. But the deal was not signed until Wednesday.
Al-Jazeera's Views Aligned With Al Gore
Not according to me. According to Al Gore.
Every once in a while a tweet appears that's so silly, it must be a joke. Like this one from Glenn Beck: "Before Al-Jazeera boughtCurrent TV, TheBlaze looked into buying it but we were rejected by progressive owners." Guess what? He's totally serious. The Wall Street Journal caught the detail in its coverage: "Glenn Beck's The Blaze approached Current about buying the channel last year, but was told that 'the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view,' according to a person familiar with the negotiations."
Ross Douthat Calls Out Obama's Dishonesty
No, raising taxes on the rich won't fix anything.
Alas for liberals, the tax debate isn’t that simple, because it’s taking place in the context of immense projected future deficits and a welfare state that seems unsustainable without substantial increases in revenue. Given these realities, fairness and progressivity are necessarily less important to liberalism over the long run than simple dollar figures, and the American left actually has a long-run incentive to make the federal tax code less progressive, because only a broader base can keep the liberal edifice solvent in the long run.
Deficit Reduction Adds 4 Trillion To The Debt
Fiscal responsibility in the age of Obama.
The CBO determined Tuesday that the package, hammered out late Monday evening by Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) would — over the next decade — come with a $3.9 trillion price tag.
The agreement, which is pending before the House after passing in a 89-8 Senate vote early Tuesday, would extend lower tax rates on annual household income under $450,000 and postpone automatic spending cuts for two months.
The extension of lower tax rates for a bulk of the nation's taxpayers and the addition of a permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax would add roughly $3.6 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, the CBO said. Other individual, business, and energy tax extenders would add another $76 billion. The extension of unemployment benefits would cost roughly $30 billion, and the so-called "doc fix" would tally another $25 billion through fiscal 2022.
The CBO says the budget agreement will lead to an overall increase in spending of about $330 billion over 10 years.
All Taxes, No Cuts
Balance?
If there is any good to be extracted from this debacle, it's that it will prove that Obama's way doesn't work.
