Giving thanks for America’s givers

The Osborns joined countless Americans across the country who stepped up, in small and large ways, to help their fellow citizens in need.

Obama's Sneaky, Deadly, Costly Car Tax

 Costly Car Tax

While all eyes were on the Republican National Convention in Tampa and Hurricane Isaac on the Gulf Coast, the White House was quietly jacking up the price of automobiles and putting future drivers at risk.
Yes, the same cast of fable-tellers who falsely accused GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney of murdering a steelworker's cancer-stricken wife is now directly imposing a draconian environmental regulation that will cost untold American lives.
On Tuesday, the administration announced that it had finalized "historic" new fuel efficiency standards. (Everything's "historic" with these narcissists, isn't it?) President Obama took a break from his historic fundraising drives to proclaim that "(by) the middle of the next decade, our cars will get nearly 55 miles per gallon, almost double what they get today. It'll strengthen our nation's energy security, it's good for middle-class families, and it will help create an economy built to last."
Jon Carson, director of Obama's Office of Public Engagement, took to Twitter to hype how "auto companies support the higher fuel-efficiency standards" and how the rules crafted behind closed doors will "save consumers $8,000" per vehicle. His source for these claims? The New York Times, America's Fishwrap of Record, which has acknowledged it allows the Obama campaign to have "veto power" over reporters' quotes from campaign officials.
And whom did the Times cite for the claim that the rules will "save consumers $8,000"? Why, the administration, of course! "The administration estimated that the new standards would save Americans $1.7 trillion in fuel costs," the Times dutifully regurgitated, "resulting in an average savings of more than $8,000 a vehicle by 2025."
The Obama administration touts the support of the government-bailed-out auto industry for these reckless, expensive regs. What they want you to forget is that the "negotiations" (read: bullying) with White House environmental radicals date back to former Obama green czar Carol Browner's tenure -- when she infamously told auto industry execs "to put nothing in writing, ever" regarding their secret CAFE talks.
Obama's number-massagers cite phony-baloney cost savings that rely on developing future fuel-saving technology. Given this crony government's abysmal track record in "investing" in new technologies (cough -- Solyndra -- cough), we can safely dismiss that fantasy math. What is real for consumers is the $2,000 per vehicle added cost that the new fuel standards will impose now. That figure comes from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
War on Middle-Class Consumers, anyone?
Beyond the White House-media lapdog echo chamber, the economic and public safety objections to these sweeping rules are long grounded and well founded.
For years, free-market analysts and government statisticians have warned of the deadly effect of increasing corporate auto fuel economy standards (CAFE). Sam Kazman at the Competitive Enterprise Institute explained a decade ago: "(T)he evidence on this issue comes from no less a body than the National Academy of Sciences, which issued a report last August finding that CAFE contributes to between 1,300 and 2,600 traffic deaths per year. Given that this program has been in effect for more than two decades, its cumulative toll is staggering."
H. Sterling Burnett of the National Center for Policy Analysis adds that NHTSA data indicate that "322 additional deaths per year occur as a direct result of reducing just 100 pounds from already downsized small cars, with half of the deaths attributed to small car collisions with light trucks/sport utility vehicles." USA Today further calculated that the "size and weight reductions of passenger vehicles undertaken to meet current CAFE standards had resulted in more than 46,000 deaths."
These lethal regulations should be wrapped in yellow police "CAUTION" tape. The tradeoffs are stark and simple: CAFE fuel standards clamp down on the production of larger, more crashworthy cars. Analysts from Harvard to the Brookings Institution to the federal government itself have arrived at the same conclusion: CAFE kills. Welcome to the bloody intersection between the Obama jobs death toll and the Obama green death toll.

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Journo-Tools for Obama

Can we stop calling the hosts of the presidential debates "moderators"? They're left-erators. It's time for the old media godfathers to end the pretense that they're fair and neutral observers of the American political scene. And it's time for the GOP to stop perpetuating these rigged exercises in futility.

Last week, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced the names of 2012's chosen referees: CNN's Candy Crowley, PBS's Jim Lehrer and CBS's Bob Schieffer will preside over the three presidential debates; ABC's Martha Raddatz will host the sole vice presidential debate. While the debate panel trumpeted the gender diversity of its picks, the chromosomal diversity is far outweighed by the political uniformity, class conformity and geographical homogeneity of the group.
Crowley has lived and worked in D.C. for liberal CNN for a quarter-century. Raddatz worked for liberal National Public Radio for five years before joining ABC News; she has been based in the D.C. bureau for the better part of a decade. Schieffer has been a fixture in the nation's capital at CBS News, home of the faked Rathergate documents, for three decades. Lehrer, the liberal patriarch of PBS News, is nearly as aged a Beltway monument as the Washington Monument itself.
The presidential debates are the last bastion of "mainstream" media self-delusion in the 21st century. They are a ritual laughingstock for tens of millions of American viewers who have put up with leading, softball questions for Democratic candidates and combative, fili-blustery lectures for Republican candidates campaign cycle after cycle. Now, Democrats are lobbying the supposedly nonpartisan debate commission to disallow questions about President Obama's phony dog-and-pony deficit panel.
Why does the Republican Party agree to play along with this ideologically stacked deck masquerading as an objective pantheon of disinterested journalism? The Romney campaign's capitulation to the liberal debate racket and its narrative-warpers comes at a time when more and more members of the Fourth Estate itself are admitting that they have served or been treated as tools for the Obama administration:
--Just this week, ABC News correspondent Jake Tapper told conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham that he "thought the media helped tip the scales" for Obama. "I didn't think the coverage in 2008 was especially fair to either Hillary Clinton or John McCain. Sometimes I saw with story selection, magazine covers, photos picked, (the) campaign narrative, that it wasn't always the fairest coverage." Duh.
--MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin acknowledged this weekend on the "Today" show that the Beltway press corps is helping Obama drive campaign issues that most voters don't care about: "I think the press still likes this story a lot. The media is very susceptible to doing what the Obama campaign wants, which is to focus on (Mitt Romney's tax returns). ... Do voters care about it? I don't think so. ... I think it's mostly something that the press and insiders care about."
--Another MSNBC political reporter, Chuck Todd, disclosed that gaffetastic Vice President Joe Biden's staff was trying to edit the press pool reports to cover for the second-in-command's lack of rhetorical command. "This is an outrage that they do this," Todd said.
--Independent political blogger Keith Koffler of whitehousedossier.com reported this week that Team Obama was dictating interview topics to local TV reporters in battleground states, just after holding a kabuki press conference on Monday to capitalize on the Missouri GOP Rep. Todd Akin "legitimate rape"/magical uterus debacle. "In interviews with three local TV stations Monday, two from states critical to Obama's reelection effort, Obama held forth on the possibility of 'sequestration' if he and Congress fail to reach a budget deal, allowing him to make his favorite political point that Republicans are willing to cause grievous harm to the economy and jobs in order to protect the rich from tax increases," Koffler reported.
"The reporters mostly made no effort to hide the arrangement. 'The president invited me to talk about sequestration,' NBC 7 San Diego's reporter told her audience. In the interview, she set Obama up with a perfectly pitched softball the president couldn't have been more eager to take a swing at: 'What do you want individual San Diegans to know about sequestration?' she asked."
These willing lapdogs and stenographers follow in the footsteps of the hallowed Fishwrap of Record, which 'fessed up last month to allowing Obama campaign officials to have "veto power" over statements. "We don't like the practice," said Dean Baquet, managing editor for news at The New York Times. "We encourage our reporters to push back. Unfortunately this practice is becoming increasingly common, and maybe we have to push back harder."
If not the 2012 GOP presidential ticket, then who? If not now, then when?

By: Michelle Malkin

Meet the Real Workers Obama Screwed Over

Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama's sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker's wife.
It's not just a slanderous and false attack. It's a foolish attempt to camouflage the administration's massive jobs death toll, politicized pension plundering and Big Labor bailout cronyism. And it will backfire big time because the thousands and thousands of true victims of Obama's economic wreckage are speaking up and fighting back.
Let's dispense with the "Romney = murderer" meme first. The warped Priorities USA ad features the claims of one Joe Soptic, a former employee at the Kansas City-based GST Steel plant. The plant went bankrupt years after Bain Capital acquired it. Soptic blames Romney for the loss of his job and health insurance -- and for the subsequent death of his wife a "short time after" the plant's closure.
But Romney stopped working for Bain in 1999. The plant closed in 2001. And Soptic's wife died in 2006. Oh, and Soptic admitted to CNN on Tuesday afternoon that the family in fact had health insurance at the time of Soptic's wife's death. But it's still all-powerful, time-traveling, omnipresent Darth Romney's fault.   Cont. Reading
By : Michelle Malkin