The Pajamahadin: 01/01/2014

America's Top Lawyer Can't Defend Obama's Executive Orders

Where in the Constitution does Obama derive his authority? Eric Holder doesn't know.

At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) asked Attorney General Eric Holder to explain the constitutional basis for which President Barack Obama used in his issuance of executive orders:

"I'll be honest with you, I have not seen -- I don't remember looking at or having seen the analysis in some time, so I'm not sure where along the spectrum that would come," Holder said.

I'm beginning to suspect that Eric Holder has never read the Constitution.

Buy Cookies, Support Wendy Davis?

And abortion? What has happened to the Girl Scouts?

A few weeks ago, the Girl Scouts designated Wendy Davis as an “incredible woman” who deserved to be on the list of 2013 “Women of the Year.” Only a month earlier, the organization promoted Kathleen Sebelius as a woman of “courage” on its Facebook page.

Davis is not known for much more than exaggerating her life story and for her filibuster of a pro-life bill in the Texas legislature. Her critics point out that the bill she filibustered was one that limited abortions after viability.

Kathleen Sebelius has been the bête noir of the pro-life movement for her role in Obamacare and mandating abortion coverage even for religious entities, what some Catholic bishops have called the largest expansion of abortion in the country since Roe v. Wade.

All this was too much for Pisciotta, who will ask families across America not to participate in the Girl Scouts' fundraising through cookie sales.

Obama's Hit Man

If you make a movie that Obama doesn't like, expect to meet Preet.

Meet Preet Bharara, the U.S. prosecutor who last week indicted anti-Obama filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza on campaign finance charges. Mr. Bharara is the snapping jaws of Attorney General Eric H. Holder’s junkyard attack dog and the velvet fixer of President Obama’s thorniest political problems.

Mr. D'Souza very well may be guilty of a few winks and nods that wound up violating limits on campaign contributions he was allowed to make to a friend running a long-shot campaign for the Senate. But it does seem rather odd to handcuff a guy and set $500,000 bail for a crime that in the past has been pleaded out as a misdemeanor.

And how exactly is it that one of the few movie directors in all the land not euphorically supportive of President Obama is the one who wound up having his campaign contributions scrutinized by the feds? Has the Department of Justice already combed through the $160 million Hollywood dumped into political campaigns in the past six years — the vast, vast majority of which goes to Mr. Obama and his Democrats? And the first hit just happens to be the one conservative in the whole bunch?

“Routine review,” Mr. Bharara told reporters.

The Politics of Rage

And revenge.

The conservative British writer Peter Hitchens has a clever phrase for those who those who insist on seeing no connection among events that might appear at a glance to have something in common: These people, says Hitchens, are coincidence theorists.

When Bill de Blasio campaigned for mayor on a promise to institute universal pre-kindergarten schooling and fund it with a surtax on the rich, coincidence theorists scoffed at the notion that de Blasio cared more about punishing the well-off than uplifting the poor by offering them a 14th year of dismal education instead of merely 13. Now that Gov. Cuomo has said that the state can fund pre-K without any tax increases, de Blasio promised to push to raise taxes anyway.

De Blasio is, in other words, insisting on applying a painful remedy despite the absence of any underlying disease. Try to apply that kind of logic to any other situation you can imagine.

“I see you have gangrene on your toe. I’m going to have to amputate it. Oh, that’s just some black paint you stepped in? Well, I’m going to amputate anyway. Because that’s what I said what I was going to do.”

Obama Refuses to Consider What is Proven to Work

If you want people to go back to work, then don't mess with Texas. Emulate Texas.

The president likes to think of himself as an empiricist, a nonideological believer in what works. So why is it that his policy approach is the opposite of the one that has worked in Texas and elsewhere?

Andrea Mitchell Plumbs New Depth Of Liberal Stupidity

Iran was a US ally until George W. Bush screwed it up.

If You Raise Enough Money For Obama, You Don't Have To Know Shit

Ambassadorships for sale!

Chuck U. Schumer Encourages Obama To Use IRS To Harass Opposition

Well, thanks to a lap dog press, the Democrats got away with it last time. Why worry about them this time?

New York Sen. Charles Schumer (D) doubled down on his previous calls for President Obama to use the IRS to target Tea Party groups while speaking before the extreme-left, tax-exempt Center for American Progress (CAP) yesterday.

The Washington Free Beacon reports that Schumer advocated that Tea Party organizations be targeted, saying, “the Obama administration should bypass Congress and institute new campaign finance rules through the IRS.”

Schumer is further quoted as saying: “It is clear that we will not pass anything legislatively as long as the House of Representatives is in Republican control, but there are many things that can be done administratively by the IRS and other government agencies — we must redouble those efforts immediately."

“One of the great advantages the Tea Party has is the huge holes in our campaign finance laws created [by] the ill advised decision [Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission].”

Currently, the IRS has proposed regulations that would institutionalize the political targeting that Schumer urges. If they became law, and were equally applied, CAP, the Sierra Club and a number of George Soros's front groups, including ProgressNow, would be at the front of the line for IRS scrutiny.

No they wouldn't. As with every other law, Obama will simply grant waivers to friends and allies.

Howard Kurtz Discovers Media Bias

He's shocked, SHOCKED.

The media continue to be most mesmerized by Chris Christie, who is not only playing defense on the bridge scandal but on subsequent allegations of retaliating against Democratic mayors. The appetite for what would otherwise be a purely Trenton story: seemingly inexhaustible.

The media went wild on Tuesday over the federal charges against former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife, and it is one helluva juicy scandal. But there has been surprisingly little national interest in the saga, and by yesterday the coverage had begun to fade.

Andrew Cuomo has dug himself into a hole with crude remarks about New York State having no place for “extreme conservatives.” But that story is mainly getting traction only on the right.

Pullman's Community of Chronically Indignant Disappointed - Again

“He who decides a case without hearing the other side, though he decide justly, cannot be considered just.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

We can hope that at least a few in the Pullman community have learned an important lesson: Justice is not decided according to the number of “likes” that a Facebook page attracts.

Immediately after the news broke that Washington State University instructor David Warner was fighting for his life after he had incurred a head injury during a bar brawl, an agenda-driven narrative took control and for months drowned out the facts. Much of the narrative was driven by a couple of Facebook groups that concocted a scenario that was never supported by the facts. When it suited them, the members of these groups simply invented their own facts.

Before any real information was publicly known, a rally was held on the WSU campus demanding justice for David Warner. But justice for what? And justice by whose definition? Deep South lynch mobs of a century ago were convinced that they were meting out justice.

Like most college campuses, WSU is afflicted with a community of the chronically indignant whose membership sustain themselves in a condition of perpetual outrage. We also have the moral exhibitionists who hear and condemn the subtle undertones of racism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia in nearly every word they hear spoken.

And so, it was predictable that these people would reflexively seize upon the fable of a gentle, peace-loving Native American man who was savagely kicked and beaten on the street by a gang of drunken, drooling, knuckle dragging white racists.

They didn’t even need facts to support this tale. It was just assumed.

And as they fed upon their own narrative and blocked out the police explanation, we learned that the rally and the Facebook community had adopted a lynch mob mentality no more interested in true justice than were those old Mississippi lynch mobs.

This narrative was sustained even after the Pullman Police Department definitively denied that version of events. Gradually facts began to emerge. We learned that Warner was not attacked. His drinking companion that night was aggressively confronting patrons emerging from the bar after closing time, challenging them to a fight. At least one of those who were challenged encouraged Warner to take his friend home before he got into trouble.

This sage advice was not acted upon.

Eventually Warner’s friend did provoke someone into a confrontation. A struggle ensued. David Warner entered the fray and was knocked down or fell to the pavement. He struck his head and suffered a grievous injury.

From this emerged the tale of a helpless man who was attacked and beaten severely. Apparently, there is evidence of only one blow – the one that likely resulted from his fall. But that story didn’t advance the narrative.

WSU’s hierarchy embraced the meme and even accused the Cougar community with complicity after the fact for failing to come forward as witnesses. This accusation came after numerous witnesses had already come forward, many with cell phone photos and videos. The problem was that no one was coming forward with evidence that supported the false narrative.

The accused perhaps did their reputation no favor by fleeing across the Cascades. Running is what guilty people do, right? But isn’t it also what sensible people do when threatened with a roiling lynch mob?

Even after the facts were all on the table and the district attorney declined to prosecute the case as the mob wished, the Spokane Spokesman-Review headline writers couldn’t help themselves and titled their story, “No Charges planned in attack on WSU Instructor.”

The facts clearly showed that there was no attack on a WSU instructor. He was caught up in a melee provoked by his own friend.

The district attorney couldn’t leave bad enough alone either, stating that one video didn’t show whether or not one of the accused kicked Warner while he lay on the ground. If the video showed nothing, then the district attorney should have said nothing. But he needed to throw the lynch mob a bone to keep them away from him.

The people who rallied for justice and populated the Facebook groups are all convinced that only they can provide the world with its moral compass. But as Thomas Sowell once pointed out, “If navel-gazing, hand-wringing or self-dramatization helped with racial issues, we would have achieved Utopia long ago.”

Obama Takes Time Out of his Busy Schedule

To cement his place in history as a disappointing president.

“He is said to be a reluctant politician: aloof, insular, diffident, arrogant, inert, unwilling to jolly his allies along the fairway and take a 9-iron to his enemies. He doesn’t know anyone in Congress. No one in the House or in the Senate, no one in foreign capitals fears him. He gives a great speech, but he doesn’t understand power. He is a poor executive. Doesn’t it seem as if he hates the job? And so on. This is the knowing talk on Wall Street, on K Street, on Capitol Hill, in green rooms — the ‘Morning Joe’ consensus.”

In fact, asked what he wants to accomplish in the next three years — a hanging curve ball of a question — Obama whiffs: “I will measure myself at the end of my presidency in large part by whether I began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the ladders into the middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic bifurcation in this society.” Laudable goals, but to “begin the process of rebuilding” isn’t exactly a rallying cry, nor concrete enough to be measured.

Even Remnick, many thousands of words in, refers to him as the “Professor-in-Chief.”

Even though Remnick’s goal is to probe Obama the person, it’s hard to understand why, given the vast acreage, he didn’t press more on ObamaCare, given how central that law and its botched rollout is to the legacy that the president discusses.

One Obama comment that’s gotten some attention has to do with race. But it’s been selectively quoted by some, while the full observation is rather unremarkable. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.” That, as Remnick pointed out, is hardly playing the race card. Obama also invokes Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in defending his insistence on speaking out about personal responsibility in the African-American community. The New Yorker piece has also generated headlines about Obama seeming soft on marijuana — but here too, he straddles the issue. “As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.” The president goes on to say that minorities disproportionately wind up in jail on pot charges.

Are You Ready for a Disastrous Century of Global Cooling?

Forget global warming. You're about to freeze your ass off.

“The development of telescopes as astronomical instruments after 1609 enabled observers to track the number of sunspots with unprecedented accuracy. They noted a ‘maximum’ between 1612 and 1614, followed by a ‘minimum’ with virtually no spots in 1617 and 1618, and markedly weaker maxima in 1625-26 and 1637-9. And then, although astronomers around the world made observations on over 8,000 days between 1645 and 1715, they saw virtually no sunspots: The grand total of sunspots observed in those 70 years scarcely reached 100, fewer than currently [the book was published in 2013] appear in a single year. This striking evidence of absence suggests a reduction in solar energy received on earth.”

The result of the “Maunder Minimum” of sunspots was a so-called Little Ice Age, with significantly colder temperatures in the temperate zones, low crop yields to the point of famine and, Parker writes, “a greater frequency of severe weather events—such as flash floods, freak storms, prolonged drought and abnormal (as well as abnormally long) cold spells.”

200,000 Apply To Live On Mars

I hope that the Obamas are on that list. They long, expensive vacations at government expense. They'd be perfect.

If you have ambitions of being one of the first people on Mars, listen up: A Dutch company says it is moving along with its plan to send four lucky Earthlings to colonize the Red Planet. The catch: They won't ever come back.

This first mission will demonstrate technology that would be involved in a permanent human settlement on Mars. If all goes well -- and that's still very much an "if" -- the first pioneers could land on Mars in 2025.

Enthusiasm has been growing since the project's first big announcement in April. More than 200,000 people have signed up to be prospective astronauts, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp said in Washington on Tuesday.

Apparently, they're OK with living out the rest of their lives on Mars. The technology for a return flight doesn't exist -- there's no Kennedy Space Center launch pad over there! -- and having a one-way trip greatly reduces costs, the company has said.

Only 11% of Medicare Enrollees Were Previously Unemployed?

Splat.

Early signals suggest the majority of the 2.2 million people who sought to enroll in private insurance through new marketplaces through Dec. 28 were previously covered elsewhere, raising questions about how swiftly this part of the health overhaul will be able to make a significant dent in the number of uninsured.

Insurers, brokers and consultants estimate at least two-thirds of those consumers previously bought their own coverage or were enrolled in employer-backed plans.
The data, based on surveys of enrollees, are preliminary. But insurers say the tally of newly insured consumers is falling short of their expectations, a worrying trend for an industry looking to the law to expand the ranks of its customers.

About 48 million Americans were uninsured in 2012. The health law is expected to cut 25 million from that total by expanding state-run Medicaid programs and the pool of privately insured people who buy through state marketplaces, also called exchanges.

Only 11% of consumers who bought new coverage under the law were previously uninsured, according to a McKinsey & Co. survey of consumers thought to be eligible for the health-law marketplaces. The result is based on a sampling of 4,563 consumers performed between November and January, of whom 389 had enrolled in new insurance.

Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can't, Cheat

The number of "educators" suspected in the Philadelphia standardized test cheating scandal reaches 138.

Just days after three Philadelphia school principals were fired for alleged cheating, news comes that the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office is conducting a criminal investigation into widespread cheating involving more than 100 educators around the city.

The Philadelphia Inquirer cites sources with knowledge of the criminal inquiry in reporting the attorney general’s involvement, as well as a grand jury to probe a growing scandal that has already ensnared 138 teachers and principals from schools all over the city.

Meanwhile, an official with the union that represents Philadelphia school administrators is blaming the alleged cheating that took place at 53 district schools and three city charter schools on high-stakes testing, and ultimatums from higher-ups to reach performance plateaus.

"Do you know how many of us sat in meetings with our bosses and were told, 'You have to bring your scores up'?" Robert McGrogan, a one-time Philadelphia principal told the Inquirer. "There was no how-to book given to us."

Isn't that what you were supposed to have learned while "earning" you teaching certificate?

MSNBC Exposes Who's Really At Fault in Ambassador Chris Steven's Death

It was Chris Steven's fault.

This should show just low liberals will sink to defend Hillary from her own record.

As 2016 looms in the distance, Democrats are already pondering how to spin a Hillary Clinton campaign that excuses her colossal failures as Secretary of State. The media fix is in and still two full years from the campaign, we are hearing the early rumblings of media hacks looking to fabricate a narrative that is absurdly false.

On Thursday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC, liberal hack Katty Kay blamed Ambassador Chris Stevens for his own death at the hands of Islamic terrorists and outright lied about Stevens rejecting offered security personnel.

Katty Kay: 'Why were they not properly defended? And this report in a way is very sad because Chris Stevens, who was the ambassador who was killed who was clearly a brave and honorable man, was also fallible, and perhaps didn’t ask for, rejected even, some of the security that he might have had.'

Wendy Davis Biography As Honest As You'd Expect

She was a teenager until she was 21. She was such a crappy mother that her second husband was given custody of both of her daughters, even the younger one who was fathered by husband number one.

That's not quite the story she tells about herself.

In an extensive interview last week, Davis acknowledged some chronological errors and incomplete details in what she and her aides have said about her life.

“My language should be tighter,” she said. “I’m learning about using broader, looser language. I need to be more focused on the detail.”

All campaigns seek to cast their candidate in the most positive light and their opponent in less flattering terms. Davis is presenting her story on websites, interviews, speeches and campaign videos. Last week, NBC’s Today show became the latest media outlet to showcase the story of Davis’ difficult early years in a flattering piece.

Using her story to inspire new voters, particularly women, youths and minorities, is a key part of the campaign’s strategy to overcome the state’s heavy Republican bent.

But likely Republican nominee Greg Abbott and his allies are expected to focus on different details to tell voters a competing story. Some will question how much of her success was her own doing, and how bad her circumstances were to start.

Davis defended the accuracy of her overall account as a young single mother who escaped poverty, earned an education and built a successful legal and political career through hard work and determination.

Oh yeah! She lifted herself out of poverty the old fashioned way - by marrying a guy with money, then dumping him and her kids when they were of no further use to her.

Obama Accuses US of Racism

What else could explain his falling approval numbers? It couldn't have anything to do with lying about Obamacare, the Benghazi cover up, Fast and Furious, NSA spying on private phone calls, harassment of reporters, five years of a crappy economy, etc.

President Barack Obama said that racial tensions may have softened his popularity among white voters within the last two years, according to a story posted on the New Yorker magazine’s website today.

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president,” Obama said in the article by David Remnick, appearing in the magazine’s Jan. 27 edition.

“Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president,” Obama said in his most direct comments on how race has affected his political standing since he’s been in office.

Remember When Actors Feared Blacklisting For Incorrect Political Views?

That was yesterday.

A famed actress is facing backlash in San Francisco’s Latino community, after she voiced support for a conservative candidate for California governor.

Maria Conchita Alonso starred in a campaign ad for Assemblyman Tim Donnelly of San Bernardino County, a Tea Party favorite who is seeking the Republican nomination...

...Alonso is an actress of Cuban and Venezuelan descent. She is perhaps best known for her role in the movie “Moscow on the Hudson” which also starred Robin Williams.

The actress was to perform next month at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco’s Mission District in a Spanish-language version of “The Vagina Monologues,” scheduled for a run from February 14th through 17th. The show is being produced by none other than Eliana Lopez, wife of San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.

“We really cannot have her in the show, unfortunately,” Lopez told KPIX 5. She said Alonso abruptly resigned from the cast on Friday, given the backlash on the immigration issue.

“Of course she has the right to say whatever she wants. But we’re in the middle of the Mission. Doing what she is doing is against what we believe,” Lopez said.

How Barack Hussein Obama Responded To That 3 AM Phone Call

Obamacare Enrollment Even Worse Than Thought

Obamacare apologists have been pointing to the pitiful enrollment numbers and claiming that, at the very least, that Barack Hussein Obama has extended insurance coverage to that many previously uncovered Americans. But as it turns out, most of those enrollees had insurance before Obamacare.

The latest reporting on this topic comes from Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal. They cite several industry surveys on the coverage history of those signing up for insurance on the Obamacare exchanges. The first, from McKinsey & Co., indicates that “only 11 percent of consumers who bought new coverage under the law were previously uninsured.” McKinsey surveyed 4,563 individuals “thought to be eligible for the health-law marketplaces,” of which 389 had enrolled in exchange-based plans.

Porn Industry Leaving California For Better Businses Climate

I don't know what more distressing - that so much of the California economy depends upon pornography, or that the state's hyperregulatory environment can't even permit people to screw without the proper permits.

The number of permits requested to make porn films in Los Angeles County has declined by an estimated 95 percent since the law took effect, according to Film LA, a private nonprofit that issues the licenses. The number of applications fell from about 480 in 2012 to just 24 through the first nine months of 2013.

For Myers, who co-owns Mission Control studios and also directs web films, the condom police are just the start of his troubles with Los Angeles. The region had also gotten too expensive for him.

With DVD sales continuing to plummet, the bounce provided by the mommy-porn series "Fifty Shades of Grey" wearing off, and no solid business model in sight, producers in this notoriously low-budget industry are looking for new ways to cut costs.

While Los Angeles requires health checks and charges hundreds of dollars for location permits, Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, does not require health permits and gives out location licenses for a nominal fee.

Harry Reid Places Politics Above Job Creation

Dependency serves the Democrats' political prospects better than prosperity.

The House has passed dozens of jobs bills, many with bipartisan support. Each one would help Americans get the jobs they deserve. Unfortunately, all of these proposals are gathering dust in the Senate.

President Obama’s latest slogan is a “year of action,” but his administration and his party’s leaders in the Senate are sitting on the bench.

They seem to have surrendered to a new normal of high unemployment. Instead of standing shoulder to shoulder with out-of-work Americans, they’re focused on making it easier to live without a job.

They’re focused on bigger government and less opportunity. More debt and fewer jobs.

That might sound good in Washington but back home that’s not the American Dream folks are chasing. It’s definitely not what an economic recovery looks like. And it’s not something we have to settle for.

Republicans hope the president is serious about making 2014 a “year of action.” It should start by giving each of these jobs bills an up-or-down vote in the Senate.

Mr. President, the American people haven’t backed down and neither can we. Call on your party to give these jobs bills a vote.

Democrats' Leftward Lurch Leaving Many Behind

The Washington State Democratic Party has left its former chairman.

The former leader of the Washington State Democratic Party can barely recognize the party he helped build. Paul Barendt served as chairman longer than any in the state’s history. When he retired in 2006, he was probably the most successful chairman that the party had ever seen. The Democrats’ stranglehold on the governor’s office had stretched out to a quarter of a century. Both of Washington’s US Senate seats were occupied by Democrats. And, of great importance to Democrats, all three offices were occupied by women.

The Democratic Party is obsessed with tribalism and identity politics. Democrats count their success by the number of non-whites, non-males and non-heterosexuals they elect. When Democrats choose delegates for their national conventions, they have quotas for every race, nationality and sexual orientation imaginable.

The victims group you belong to counts far more than your competence.

And so it was quite understandable that, having achieved everything that mattered to Democrats, when Barendt retired in 2006, he foresaw nothing but blue skies from now on.
But his confidence in the future of his party and his state have been shaken by the hard left turn the Democrats have taken in the years since his retirement.

The Washington State Democratic Party has taken such a hard turn to the left, that he sees it disassociating itself from the mainstream. “A lot of my liberal friends are gleeful over (Kashama) Sawant’s victory. But I see it as a dark cloud for the party,” he said recently in an interview with Seattle Weekly.

Sawant is the unabashed socialist who recently won a seat on Seattle’s City council. Among her most prominent issues is the $15 per hour minimum wage. Her extremism, and the enthusiasm it stokes among Seattleistas, unsettles Barendt. The excitement her extremism incites has pushed Seattle’s already far left mayor Ed Murray to even further extremes. He has now embraced her idiotic minimum wage ideas and proclaimed that all city employees would henceforth earn at least $15 per hour.

This is not music to Paul Barendt’s ears. He summarized his dissatisfaction with the direction of Washington’s Democratic Party by stating, “I am not a socialist. I am a Democrat.”

The party that he once led doesn’t see it his way. The already far left Democratic Party https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3373322#editor/target=post;postID=5600738567526062385abandoned all connection with reality and has shifted even further to the left.

And he’s not alone. During the last legislative session, two Democrats found their party’s extremism so alarming that they caucused with the Republicans. Rodney Tom (D-Medina) and Senator Tim Sheldon (D-Potlatch) saw the Democratic Party’s agenda as a threat to the state’s economic health. Rather than lend their votes to the far left’s agenda, both have worked to revitalize the state’s business climate.

The Democratic Party’s drift toward the left has left a number of prominent personalities behind. Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat. He stayed in the mainstream while the Democrats drifted left.

“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” he famously explained. “It left me.”

A similar sentiment was expressed by Reagan’s United Nations Ambassador, Jean Kirkpatrick.

During the Nineties, the election of Bill Clinton resulted in wave of Democrats bidding farewell to the party as it drifted leftward. Moderate Democratic Senators Ben Nighthorse Johnson of Colorado and Richard Shelby of Alabama both registered their horror at the direction of their party and abandoned the Democrats to join the Republicans.

Remarkably, another prominent Democrat may find herself left behind as the party lurches left. A story this past week on the CNN website revealed that Hillary Clinton, of all people, might find herself among her party’s detritus. While the news media have all but administered the oath of office to her, CNN found dissatisfaction with her among the Democratic Party base.

Her fatal flaw among the rank and file is that she’s considered too moderate to today’s Democratic Party.

Ruminate on that for a moment. Back when her husband was the president, she was considered far to his left. Lefties viewed her as the anchor that kept her husband from compromising with Republicans. And he was so extreme that nationwide hundreds of elected Democrats switched party affiliation.

And she is now considered too moderate for today’s Democratic Party.

Who would have guessed that Paul Barendt and Hillary Clinton would join Ronald Reagan among those exiled by the Democratic Party for the thought crime of excessive moderation?

Higher Education's Biggest Failure In One Graph

Some knowledge actually isn't. And much is worthless.

"Knowledge may be priceless, but a higher education is clearly not. University administrators keep hiking tuition, the wages of graduates keep falling, and a whole generation of Americans is struggling under the crushing burden of debt as they postpone their dreams for a tomorrow that may never come."

Obama's Dead Cat Bounce Exhausted

Back below 40% approval ratings.

John Kerry's Messiah Complex

Falls even flatter in a region of the world historically overrun with wannabe messiahs.

"Secretary of State John Kerry - who has come to us determined and is acting out of an incomprehensible obsession and a messianic feeling - cannot teach me a single thing about the conflict with the Palestinians," Yaalon was quoted as saying.

"The only thing that can save us is if Kerry wins the Nobel prize and leaves us alone."

Obama Bundler Wins a "Promise Zone"

Hardly surprising. Now that GreenTech has been exposed as nothing more than a means to funnel taxpayer cash to cronies, Obama needed another scam.

An organization headed by a campaign bundler who raised nearly $744,000 for Barack Obama was named a lead partner in a major administration anti-poverty initiative.

Up to $500 million worth of grants and other incentives could be directed to central Los Angeles, an area which Obama recently designated as a “promise zone.” Dixon Slingerland’s non-profit group, Youth Policy Institute, will serve as the city’s lead partner in the program.

According to a New York Times list of top Obama bundlers published two months before the 2012 election, Slingerland helped collect nearly $331,000 for Obama in 2011 and 2012. Since 2007, Slingerland helped raise nearly $744,000 in total.

Fair, Even-Handed Discipline Declared Illegal by Obama Regime

Because black and Mexican kids misbehave in school more frequently than white kids.

“Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race.

Examples of policies that can raise disparate impact concerns include policies that impose mandatory suspension, expulsion, or citation (e.g., ticketing or other fines or summonses) upon any student who commits a specified offense — such as being tardy to class, being in possession of a cellular phone, being found insubordinate, acting out, or not wearing the proper school uniform.”

MoveOn.Org Declares War on the US Economy

One of the few sectors of the economy that has managed to struggle ahead in spite of Barack Hussein Obama has been the fracking. George Soros' MoveOn goons plan to fix that.

Leading left-wing advocacy group MoveOn.org announced a new effort on Thursday to oppose innovations that are propelling the country towards a new abundance of domestically produced energy.

MoveOn bemoaned in an email to supporters the “troubling trend” of increased energy production, which is reducing the U.S. trade deficit, creating well-paying jobs, stabilizing global energy prices, and undermining the economic engine behind some of the world’s most repressive regimes.

MoveOn announced the creation of a new effort called “#FrackingFighter,” which “seeks to slow down the fracking boom that is anticipated to occur across the United States in 2014 and beyond.”
The increased use of hydraulic fracturing, an innovative oil and gas technique, has sent U.S. energy production skyrocketing, MoveOn said. It vowed to slow or reverse that trend.

Of course, Soros has skin in this game. He has made his fortune by parasitizing weak economies, including the US economy. He celebrated the 2008 US financial meltdown as the "culminating point of my life's work."

George Soros is having a very good crisis. Other investors are wilting, political power structures are being upended and market economists are scrambling to fashion new theories, but the world’s most famous speculator is having a belated heyday.

"It is, in a way, the culminating point of my life’s work," the 78-year-old says in his heavy Hungarian accent during an interview at his London mansion.

Obama's Lies, Scandals and Blunders

Hope and change?

• $6 trillion in new national debt under Obama…after he promised to decrease the deficit.

• Obamacare — A massive and incredibly convoluted bill which exponentially increases the federal government’s control over our personal lives…which neither Obama nor a single Democrat even read before passing, and which will likely bankrupt the nation.

• In both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, the Obama campaign purposely disabled the credit card verification system for its Web site donations, allowing anyone from any foreign country to donate with no limit and no proof of identity; in both elections it was demonstrated that people overseas and people with obviously false identities were able to donate to Obama campaign, in direct violation of several laws. To this day it is not known what percentage of Obama’s campaign funds are illegally obtained, since there is no documentation.

• Billions of taxpayer dollars gambled on “green” companies like Solyndra, NextEra, Ener1, Solar Trust and many others — all of which went bankrupt.

• An intentional refusal to enforce federal immigration laws.

• Unemployment at or above 8% for almost his entire term in office (which was actually closer to 15% actual unemployment).

• Operation Fast & Furious — a government-sponsored illegal gun-running scheme designed to purposely go awry so as to induce public outcry for gun control.

• Spent 20 years listening to a racist anti-American pastor (Rev. Jeremiah Wright), whom Obama described as a mentor. On March 18, 2008, Obama gave a speech in which he said “I could no more disown Jeremiah Wright than I could disown my own grandmother” and “[Wright's church, Trinity United] embodies the black community in its entirety.” Now Obama tries to pretend that Jeremiah Wright doesn’t exist, and that his extremist anti-white philosophy didn’t influence Obama’s worldview.

• Increased the percentage of Americans dependent on food stamps to unprecedented levels (now over 15% of the nation’s population).

• Militarily intervened in Libya in 2011 without the Congressional approval required by the War Powers Act — technically an impeachable offense.

• $6 trillion in new national debt under Obama…after he promised to decrease the deficit.

• Obamacare — A massive and incredibly convoluted bill which exponentially increases the federal government’s control over our personal lives…which neither Obama nor a single Democrat even read before passing, and which will likely bankrupt the nation.

• In both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, the Obama campaign purposely disabled the credit card verification system for its Web site donations, allowing anyone from any foreign country to donate with no limit and no proof of identity; in both elections it was demonstrated that people overseas and people with obviously false identities were able to donate to Obama campaign, in direct violation of several laws. To this day it is not known what percentage of Obama’s campaign funds are illegally obtained, since there is no documentation.

• Billions of taxpayer dollars gambled on “green” companies like Solyndra, NextEra, Ener1, Solar Trust and many others — all of which went bankrupt.

• An intentional refusal to enforce federal immigration laws.

• Unemployment at or above 8% for almost his entire term in office (which was actually closer to 15% actual unemployment).

• Operation Fast & Furious — a government-sponsored illegal gun-running scheme designed to purposely go awry so as to induce public outcry for gun control.

• Spent 20 years listening to a racist anti-American pastor (Rev. Jeremiah Wright), whom Obama described as a mentor. On March 18, 2008, Obama gave a speech in which he said “I could no more disown Jeremiah Wright than I could disown my own grandmother” and “[Wright's church, Trinity United] embodies the black community in its entirety.” Now Obama tries to pretend that Jeremiah Wright doesn’t exist, and that his extremist anti-white philosophy didn’t influence Obama’s worldview.

• Increased the percentage of Americans dependent on food stamps to unprecedented levels (now over 15% of the nation’s population).

• Militarily intervened in Libya in 2011 without the Congressional approval required by the War Powers Act — technically an impeachable offense.

Read the whole thing. This is just a small sampling.