Benghazi emails suggest White House aide involved in prepping Rice for ‘video’ explanation http://tiny.iavian.net/2942 @drudgereportapp
"Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the documents read like a PR strategy, not an effort to provide the best available intelligence to the American people."
Dallas IRS office plastered with pro-Obama stickers, screensavers http://tiny.iavian.net/265e @drudgereportapp
Yea, the despicable IRS is really this arrogant in it's unethical ways.
Beijing hotel staff http://tiny.iavian.net/23h0 @drudgereportapp
"Michelle Obama and three of her family members are staying in a $8,350-per-night Beijing presidential suite, but despite a 24-hour butler and other perks that come with the lodging, her entourage has inconvenienced 'pretty much everyone' and made the hotel staff 'fed up,' a well-placed hotel staffer has told MailOnline."
What the Obama team says it wants this time is a “clean” raise—a hike in the debt ceiling that’s paired with no significant changes. In other words, the president wants to continue the same old routine: raise the debt limit, spend more, borrow more—wash, rinse, repeat. The White House argues that a clean hike is the only way to avoid a potential downgrade of the nation’s creditworthiness. If the GOP resists authorizing a hike in the limit, political instability will make creditors wary of further lending, raising the nation’s borrowing costs and destabilizing the global economic system.
Perhaps they should pay a little more attention to what the big credit rating agencies are actually saying. Earlier this week, Fitch put the U.S. government on notice: Yes, it wants the debt limit raised without a major fight, but it also warned that the fundamental strengths of the country’s creditworthiness “are being eroded by the large, albeit steadily declining, structural budget deficit and high and rising public debt.” Without a credible medium term deficit reduction plan, the agency says, a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating is likely by the end of this year. Fitch isn’t the only agency to sound this alarm about unsustainably high debt levels. As The Wall Street Journal noted this week, all three rating firms “have implored lawmakers to lower the country's debt relative to its economic output.”Raising the debt is a very cheap bandaid from a Dollar General placed over a crater of a wound. We have a cruel cycle of reckless spending and debt accumulation. Obama is another politician who throws away former principled positions for unprincipled ones. Peter Suderman continued:
President Obama should be sensitive to this. After all, in 2006, as a young Democratic Senator, faced a vote to raise the debt limit from $8.1 trillion to $8.9 trillion. The deficit was much smaller then—less than $250 billion, compared to today’s $1 trillion-plus gaps—but Obama declared his opposition the debt limit hike anyway. “The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,” he said. “It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.…Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”
Since winning the presidency, Obama has distanced himself from those remarks and the vote they went with, saying it was an example of a new senator making “a political vote.” But Obama is still playing politics with the debt limit—just from a different perch.
He had it right the first time. The fact that the debt limit is up for a vote yet again is a sign of reckless fiscal policies. And the fact that Obama doesn’t seem to want to end the cycle of spending and borrowing that brought us to the point of needing yet another hike is, as he said, a failure of leadership.
If you knew nothing else about President Obama other than looking at the data, you might conclude that he was insensitive to blacks, given that they have done far worse economically under his administration than Hispanics or whites. What is striking is that the president and his advisers still seem to be clueless about which economic policies work and which don’t work.
Obama has made an effort to compare himself with former President Ronald Reagan and has done so in too many speeches. I won't supply all the links but you can perform a Google search to see the speeches. He should stop this though because it is so far beyond the truth. Unlike Reagan, Obama has failed in helping minorities especially Blacks. With an average of 93% of Black Americans voting for Obama in both 2008 and 2012, he had the confidence of the Black community that he would help them reach new levels of economic success. Sadly, the facts paint a more bleak picture and his laughable comparison to Reagan sheds the light on The Gipper's more impressive accomplishments for Black Americans.President Reagan reduced the maximum tax rate on job creators by 60 percent; Mr. Obama increased the maximum tax rate on job creators by 17 percent.
- Under Reagan, adult black unemployment fell by 20 percent, but under Mr. Obama, it has increased by 42 percent.
- Black teenage unemployment fell by 16 percent under Reagan, but has risen by 56 percent under Mr. Obama.
- The increase in unemployment rates has been far worse for blacks under Mr. Obama than for whites and Hispanics.
- Inflation-adjusted real incomes are slightly higher for Hispanics and whites than they were in 2008, but are lower for blacks.
- The labor force participation rate has fallen for all groups, but remains far lower for blacks than for whites and Hispanics.
Adam Smith was one of the first to understand that as a result of new technologies and better political and business institutions and organizations — and, most important, the rule of law and proper incentives — everyone could become better off without taking anything from anyone else. Despite the empirical evidence of the past 200 years that Smith and all of the clear and rational thinkers who followed him were right about economic growth, there is still the widespread belief that for one person to prosper someone else needs to suffer. It is this mindset that serves as the basic rationale for socialism and the state as an instrument of income redistribution. One would think that only the uneducated still would have this mindset, but it is most prevalent in universities.
so dense when it comes to productivity increases and the resulting economic growth, and real rise in living standards is that most classrooms are not much more productive than they were when Aristotle was speaking to a dozen or so students 2,500 years ago. By contrast, entrepreneurs see better ways of producing more for less and visualize and create things that never existed (i.e., the automobile, the airplane, the iPad, etc.) — and they create wealth and jobs. Mr. Obama comes from the government/academic class rather than the entrepreneurial class and has a much more static view of the world.The more static view of the world is anti economic, entrepreneurial, productivity, and wealth creation. Slow growth and stagnation are the current policies.
Reagan thought like an entrepreneur, and thus intuitively understood that economic growth creates opportunities for everyone — most important, for those who have the least. Mr. Obama has fewer senior advisers and top officials in his administration who have had significant private-sector experience than any previous president; hence, like all too many of the European statists and socialists, they think in static terms.The unfortunate irony is that America’s first black president seems bent on continuing a set of policies that can lead only to continued slow growth or stagnation. The ones who are and will suffer the most from these policies are those who have the least. Mr. Obama no doubt has real compassion for the poor, but until he can begin to understand the destructive second-order effects of his policies and see that getting the foot of government off the forces of economic growth is the only real way to make life better for most of them, all too many will continue to suffer unnecessarily.
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| The Pedestal of Lady of Liberty |
We will not forget that liberty here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected.
Americans believe their freedom to be the best instrument and surest safeguard of their welfare . . .that their chief business is to secure for themselves a government which will allow them to acquire the things they covet and which will not debar them from the peaceful enjoyment of those possessions which they have already acquired.
"God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country."
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| I couldn't resist. This picture was so true and hilarious. :) |
Contraception is not an essential medical service more important than treatment for breast cancer, leukemia, colon cancer, and Alzheimer's. Or my knee replacement. If contraception should be "free," why not these other far more vital treatments? Why allow deductibles and co-pays to discourage anyone from getting any medical treatment?Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend blamed opponents for wanting "to fight about contraception being available for women." Robert Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State similarly charged that "the Bishops" want "to personally cut off access" to contraceptives.
In fact, contraceptives are available to all and no one is campaigning to ban the pill, IUD, or condoms. Saying that insurance coverage is necessary for access to contraceptives is like saying insurance coverage is necessary for access to aspirin. Anyone can buy contraceptives today.
But someone has to pay. The only question is who.
Insurance coverage is not "free." Premiums must rise to cover expanded benefits. Female employees will pay more if their insurance is paying more.Of course, the mandate also requires the impotent, infertile, gays, sexually inactive, sexually less active, and those opposed to contraception to pay for those who use contraception, especially in abundance. Why should the former be forced to subsidize the latter? Why is this wealth transfer a new national imperative and "right"?
The president declared: "Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her health. Period." Quite true. But the way to do that is for women to pay for their own health care and decide what they want their health insurance to cover.
