‘EXTORTION 17′ NAVY SEAL FAMILIES DEMAND CONGRESS INQUEST

Family members of the 38 military personnel killed in the Aug. 6, 2011 helicopter crash in Afghanistan called for a congressional investigation into the failed Navy flight operation conducted in war-ridden

Tax reform would bring the economy back to life

 

 

 

WASHINGTON — No single labor statistic speaks more loudly, or more painfully, than the announcement that the Obama economy created a puny 88,000 jobs last month.
Even more shocking was the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that 500,000 long-suffering Americans gave up looking for work and thus were no longer counted among the unemployed, falsely shrinking the jobless rate to 7.6 percent.
A stunned White House had little to say about it. Gene Sperling, assistant to the president for economic policy, blamed the minuscule numbers on the budget cuts, and by implication the Republicans, but could not bring himself to admit the dearth of new jobs was due to chronically weak economic growth under the president’s harmful policies.  Cont. Reading

Barack Obama’s new middle class tax hike

President Obama's new budget is a mixture of accounting tricks, dubious projections, "cuts" that amount to spending a bit less than he really wanted to, and of course plenty of tax hikes. Every bad tax-raising idea from the past few years is included. Obama's 2014 budget is a Wayback Machine to the early days of the "fiscal cliff" drama - he's making the same demands that were rejected back then.

Green Tyranny

By: John Stossel
 

Environmental activists and politicians would like you to think that we must love their regulations — or hate trees and animals.

I love trees and animals.

But you can love nature and still hate the tyranny that environmental regulations bring.

The Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will boost gas prices (“only” a penny, although industry says 6 to 9 cents) to make another minuscule improvement to air quality.

In New York City, my mayor wants to ban Styrofoam cups, saying, “I think it’s something we can do without.”

Congress already dictates the design of our cars, toilets and light bulbs.

Originally, environmental rules were a good thing. I love the free market, but it doesn’t offer a practical remedy to pollution. I could sue polluters for violating my property rights, but under our legal system, that’s not even close to practical.

 So in the ’70s, government passed rules that demanded we stop polluting the air and water. Industry put scrubbers in smokestacks. Towns installed sewage treatment. Now the air is quite clean, and I can swim in the rivers around Manhattan.

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THE LAWSUIT THAT MIGHT KILL OBAMACARE

By: John Hayward

 ObamaCare has been challenged on various legal grounds, but one of its most serious legal threats builds upon the very same Supreme Court decision that held it constitutional.  The Washington Times reports on a suit from the Pacific Legal Foundation that has been making its way quietly through the court system:

A challenge filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation contends that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional because the bill originated in the Senate, not the House. Under the Origination Clause of the Constitution, all bills raising revenue must begin in the House.
The Supreme Court upheld most provisions of the act in June, but Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. took pains in the majority opinion to define Obamacare as a federal tax, not a mandate. That was when the Sacramento, Calif.-based foundation’s attorneys had their “aha” moment.
“The court there quite explicitly says, ‘This is not a law passed under the Commerce Clause; this is just a tax,’” foundation attorney Timothy Sandefur said at a Cato Institute forum on legal challenges to the health care act. “Well, then the Origination Clause ought to apply. The courts should not be out there carving in new exceptions to the Origination Clause.”

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“There is no tax increase in the world that will solve our long-term debt problem”

“Let me just say, I love the hospitality, but this is an exaggeration,” laughed Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) as he lifted three full glasses of water from behind his podium at CPAC 2013.  ”One should suffice.”

“Deeds, not words, will paint this country red.”

I suspect Allen West knows that a line like “Deeds, and not words, will paint this country red from California coast to the rocky shores” will be seized by liberals as some kind of bloody threat.  I doubt it bothers him much.

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Domino’s founder wins injunction on ObamaCare

 

 

On Thursday, Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza, won an injunction against ObamaCare’s contraception mandate in federal district court.  Details from the 

 

 

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Maybe Republicans should try being popular

Republicans don’t control the U.S. Senate and they don’t have the presidency.  Instead of wasting time and energy in doomed efforts to defeat President Obama’s Cabinet nominees or sucking up to illegal aliens, why not focus on issues where Republicans can be off-the-charts popular while forcing Democrats into taking stupid positions?
After the slaughters at Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., Tucson, Ariz., and Newtown, Conn., every sentient person knows we need to do something about institutionalizing the mentally ill and — at the very least — keeping guns out of their hands.
That happens to be impossible right now. Involuntary commitments even for the severely psychotic went the way of vagrancy laws. Although federal law technically requires background checks to include records of mental illness, the states and mental health industry refuse to provide that information. Cont. Reading

The Cliffhanger, Feb. 22

 

 

Ever since the language of the “fiscal cliff” was appropriated to describe the political battle over a tax increase, it’s become increasingly clear that every issue is a “cliff” now.  Here are today’s snapshots from the edge…

Coolidge gets new deal in revisionist history

For years, most Americans’ vision of history has been shaped by the New Deal historians. Writing soon after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others celebrated his accomplishments and denigrated his opponents.

Gingrich: A sterile view of collective action

Three things in particular amazed me about President Obama’s inaugural address.
First, I was surprised how much President Obama had to say that I agreed with. His theme of making “real for every American” the promise of our Declaration — “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – is central to the Republican credo. What Republican could dispute that?
He’s the only president who has ever quoted the passage in full in his inaugural address.
President Obama may very well draw something different from that passage than we would, but that’s the heart of the argument we’re about to have.
Second, I was surprised by all the paragraphs that were missing.
The president made virtually no mention of the economy, at a time when millions of Americans are struggling and unemployed. All he said was, “An economic recovery has begun.”
He said, “The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult,” but he failed to mention the oil and gas revolution taking place in the United States that offers the promise of low cost oil and natural gas for many decades to come, if we’ll only seize it.
The president said, “A decade of war is now ending,” and spoke of “winning the peace,” but ignored the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention new danger in Mali, Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran — and for that matter, Libya. He said nothing of Mexico, where just below our border lawlessness continues to rule.
These omissions recalled in my mind the Trotsky line: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” President Obama won’t have the choice to ignore these matters in the real world, even if he could in his speech.
Finally, I was amazed at the gaps in his discussion of “collective action.”
Much of it we could agree with: “No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future.” This is undeniable.
Nor, the president argued, could a single person “build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.” No Republican could dispute this. In fact, no thinking person could dispute this.
Yesterday wasn’t the first time President Obama has appealed to the importance of “collective action.” We’ve heard often from him in the past few years that “there are some things we do better together.”
Indeed, as a Republican I would agree and extend the claim: we do virtually everything better together.
Collective action, the cooperation and collaboration of many millions of people, is the rule, not the exception, in the modern world. It is so common that President Obama seems not to have noticed how many people are already peacefully working together every day on their own volition.
Yesterday as he was inaugurated, thousands of Americans worked to get all the necessary food into New York City. They didn’t even have to be told.
Somehow, without any vote in Congress, those well-fed New Yorkers could drive to the gas station and pump fuel into their cars which thousands of people collaborated to refine from oil. Still more people worked together to extract that oil from two miles below ground, and still others worked to transport it to each of the hundreds of gas stations in the New York area. All so that their fellow Americans could drive their cars wherever they liked, on a whim.
And those cars: Somehow they were assembled from pieces made all over the world, in China and Japan, in Germany and Mexico and in the United States. Probably tens of thousands of people worked together to make each of those cars which crowd the streets of New York City.
None of them could have done these things on their own. All required collective action.
But the president’s definition of “collective action” runs into trouble when he limits it to things we can do “as one nation, and one people.”
When the president speaks of doing things as one people, it doesn’t sound like he’s talking about the kind of collective action that feeds New York City, provides it with affordable energy, and builds its cars — the collective action of small groups and large groups, businesses and charities and variously associated individuals.
The “collective action” the president speaks of is actually an inversion of real collective action, of true cooperation, of genuinely working together.
Obama’s “collective action” transfers to the federal government, to someone else, tasks that we the people now do together, ourselves.
The vision he describes outsources cooperation among citizens, to government — to him, and an army of federal bureaucrats.
Those items he listed as things we must do “as one nation, as one people” are precisely the things the federal government is poorly equipped to do.
The “networks” he referred to? They’re known as the internet, and we didn’t make it “as one nation.” Millions of us, collaborating in small groups, created it together.
Training the math and science graduates of the future? For decades, government has failed to provide equal opportunity in education for all Americans. When we achieve that goal, it will be because government frees students and teachers and parents to choose the education that’s best for them, as charter schools have done in many communities across the country.
The federal government is not, as President Obama implied, the only sphere for collective action. It is not the only place where we work together. Go through his speech and replace the words “together,” “one nation,” and “one people” with “the federal government,” or “bureaucrats” and you will have a better sense of why he is wrong.

By: Newt Gingrich
 

Infiltration, intrigue and Communists

 

 

In writing “Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government”, authors M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein have produced a highly informative volume that will enlighten not only relative newcomers to the field of Communist subversion but scholars as well. What they learn will be utterly sobering. Soviet loyalists, with enormous influence over policy, are revealed to have been far more deeply entrenched than ever previously acknowledged. More surprising, these agents had alarmingly easy access to the Oval Office.
Take the case of Soviet spy Alger Hiss, whom journalists and biographers suggest was not much more than a mid-level State Department staffer at the momentous 1945 wartime Yalta conference, which found FDR accommodating Stalin on virtually every critical post-war issue. In one of their most illuminating chapters, Evans and Romerstein explode the myth that Hiss was just a bit player. He had, in fact, a dominant role, dealing virtually as an equal with foreign ministers and speaking authoritatively for the American government on such crucial topics as the future of Germany and post-war policy in general. Hiss, along with others, even had meetings with the President himself.
Then Secretary of State Edward Stettinius confirmed this remarkable–and previously untold–story in his personal papers and discussions with Walter Johnson, who helped draft Stettinius’s memoirs. The authors unveil more startling news: that it was the Communist Hiss–contrary to Hiss’s denials–who placed the subject of post-war China on the table on the eve of the Crimean conference with Stalin, Churchill and FDR. Hiss informed the British that the U.S. was committed to having the anti-Communist regime of Chiang Kai-shek coalesce with his Red foes –a policy that proved catastrophic for Chiang but was resolutely pushed by Hiss’s fellow conspirators strategically placed throughout our most important governmental institutions.
The book also raises a most interesting question: How come FDR, who apparently had never dealt directly with Hiss or known him personally, urged Stettinius to bring Hiss to the conference? Historians will have to plumb this most intriguing mystery, but a most plausible explanation is that it was one of the swarm of secret Soviet agents channeling policy options to the President. New light is also shed by the authors on how Communist agents, through a variety of tactics, were able to rig data that fatally undermined anti-Communist leaders friendly to the West. China’s Chiang Kai-shek, Yugoslavia’s Draza Mihailovich and the leaders of a free Poland were clearly victims of such insidious disinformation plots, relentlessly echoed by pro-Communist elements in our government and in the media.
Wherever FDR seemed to turn, as the authors document, he was absorbing data furnished by pro-Soviet advisers constantly at his elbow. They, in turn, were gleaning information > from Soviet spies and Stalin enthusiasts firmly lodged in the Foreign Service and in such powerful wartime agencies as the U.S. Treasury, the Office of War Information and the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. At one point, the Treasury Department harbored at least a dozen Communist agents, including Soviet spies Harry Dexter White and Solomon Adler, who were clearly manipulating the non-Communist Treasury chief, Henry Morganthau, on topics ranging from China to slave labor to a plan to neuter a post-war, de-Nazified Germany so it could never challenge Soviet power in Europe.
The chapter on Pearl Harbor is likewise instructive as to how Soviet agents operated. Japan seriously considered an attack on Russia, but Stalin’s agents in the Japanese government and in the highly efficient Sorge spy ring on the island nation helped persuade Imperial Japan to turn its aggression “elsewhere.” That “elsewhere” eventually turned out to be Pearl Harbor. Stalin’s acolytes in the U.S. were simultaneously pushing a foreign policy against Japan that would lead the Japanese away from any designs on Siberia and toward conflict with America.
How did this massive penetration and policy twisting occur? Deception, Evans mentioned at a recent lecture, succeeds best when people want to be deceived. Franklin Roosevelt’s willful blindness to Stalin’s malignant goals, aggravated by the President’s health problems, was clearly a major cause. FDR saw what he wanted to see: that Josef Stalin liked him and would cooperate in preserving a peaceful and just world. That mindset went hand-in-hand with a New Deal bureaucracy chock-a-block with Soviet agents, Communist party members and ardent Stalinist sympathizers, including two FDR confidants, Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins, FDR’s most trusted friend who for several years lived at the White House.
Nor does this begin to exhaust the revelations in “Stalin’s Secret Agents”. The authors, themselves experts on Soviet subversion, detail how the Truman Administration successfully blocked or sabotaged two investigations of Communist infiltration, including a New York grand jury’s probe of ex-Communist courier Elizabeth Bentley’s sworn charges in 1947 against some 40 people, many of whom had been– or were still–working for the U.S. government. (Subsequent investigation has proved the accuracy of her testimony.) The result was that these deadly enemies of the United States walked and the public was shielded from revelations that would have greatly deepened its understanding of the Red conspiracy in America.
All this and more can be found in this very readable–and very well documented–book.
Based in Washington, D.C., Mr. Vernon is a professional writer and a veteran broadcast journalist.

By: Wes Vernon
 

Costly green tax breaks in cliff deal

 

 

 

Most taxpayers found a significant chunk of change missing from their recent paycheck thanks to a last-minute congressional scramble to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, but for many alternative energy companies the deal was a tax break bonanza that will cost the federal government $18 billion in lost revenues over the next decade.
Companies still experimenting with wind to power electricity were the biggest winners landing $12 billion in tax credits that expired on New Year’s Eve.
Another victory was scored by algae growers, who will get $59 million in tax breaks to encourage production of cellulosic biofuel, which still doesn’t actually exist but has been mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for use by refineries.
Adding insult to injury, the algae tax break was passed just days before the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufactures petitioned the EPA, again, to waive the cellulosic biofuel mandate because no domestic supply has existed since the requirement went into effect more than five years ago. To bypass the EPA rule, refineries have had to pay millions of dollars in waiver fines.
“Congress never fails to disappoint, even in times of fiscal crisis,” said Charles T. Drevna, president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. “In this case, by using taxpayers’ money to prop up a politically correct renewable energy industry that would otherwise be non-existent without government subsidies.”
“Further, this administration has clearly and openly favored its version of ‘all of the above’ energy sources, by handing out millions in subsidies to wind, solar, biofuels and other forms of renewable energy,” Drevna said.
Also included in the massive package that totals $75 billion in tax breaks are $650 million in tax credits for the manufacturers of energy-efficient appliances, $404 million for alternative-fueling stations, and $7 million for the makers of electric motorcycles and three-wheel plug-in vehicles.
For commuting workers, a tax break will continue that allows employees to get $240 a month tax free from their paychecks to offset parking costs.
Tax breaks will go to homeowners who install energy-efficient windows, doors, skylights or certain types of air conditioners and water heaters. This tax was part of President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009 but expired in 2011. Another tax credit will be available to builders of energy-efficient homes.
“Basically, it’s a tax dodge,” said Dan Kish, senior vice president for the Institute for Energy Research. “If they want to reduce taxes on companies that’s one thing, but paying certain segments to do something that is not economical just does not make sense.
“The government is just driving up the cost of energy,” Kish said.
Standing on it’s own feet
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) led the fight to defeat the extension of the wind tax credit, which has already poured $16 billion into the fledgling industry since 1992.
During a speech on the Senate floor last month, Alexander said the tax credit is fleecing American taxpayers.
“This is a proposal that is as brazen as a mid-day bank robbery on Main Street,” Alexander said.
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) authored legislation to end the Wind Production Tax Credit that he says picks winners and losers in the energy market.
“The Solyndra scandal has demonstrated that taxpayers must no longer be forced to subsidize these industries. When the government bets on these energy technologies, it typically selects the most unaffordable energy leading to unnecessarily higher energy prices for all Americans,” Pompeo said.
“The wind industry, comprised of numerous multi-billion dollar companies, can and must be able to stand on its own two feet,” Pompeo said.
A report on the use of wind power in California published last month by the Los Angeles Times showed that legally mandated solar and wind power is so unreliable that the demand on power plants using fossil fuels has actually increased.
“Wind and solar energy are called intermittent sources, because the power they produce can suddenly disappear when a cloud bank moves across the Mojave Desert or wind stops blowing through the Tehachapi Mountains,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “In just half an hour, a thousand megawatts of electricity—the output of a nuclear reactor—can disappear and threaten stability of the grid.”
More than 30 states now mandate that wind power or other alternative fuels be used to generate power.
The Heritage Foundation says the wind industry has become too dependent upon government subsidies and that the companies are spending too much time and resources to lobby government for the tax breaks, rather than creating new innovations to lower the cost of power.
“If the wind farms were truly economically competitive, they should be financeable without the generous support of taxpayers,” Nicolas Loris and Katie Tubb wrote for the conservative foundation.
“As the extension gets the industry though another year, they’ll be right back at the bargaining table when the credit expires, adamantly pushing for another extension,” Loris and Tubb said.
“Congress choked under pressure, took a bad idea, and ran with it. Far from addressing the real problem of spending, Congress prolonged some of the worst energy policy,” Loris and Tubb said.
The extra cost to consumers using just 3.5 percent of electricity generated from wind is enormous, at an estimated $10 billion a year, according to the American Tradition Institute.
Interestingly, the construction of massive wind turbines across miles and miles of acres has also created controversy within an important segment of President Barack Obama’s base of supporters, environmentalists.
The American Bird Conservancy filed a lawsuit last summer against the Interior Department claiming wind power projects are killing large numbers of bats and birds.

 

By: Audrey Hudson

Tax rich liberals

Dear Fellow Conservative,

 Republicans have been forced into a Hobson's choice of either letting the Bush tax cuts expire for everyone or agreeing to a tax hike on the top 2 percent of income earners (not to be confused with "the rich," who have already made, inherited or married their money).

If Republicans object to the Democrats' hitting job creators with a tax hike, three things will happen

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The smart legislative strategy for Obama’s second term

Instead of being focused on a phony fiscal cliff, Republicans might focus on how they will approach Obama’s second term.
What should House Republicans do? They are in a very different world than they expected just one month ago. Instead of cooperating with a new President-elect Romney, they find themselves baited, taunted, and attacked by a newly re-elected and re-energized President Obama. Cont.Reading

By: Newt Gingrich

Make the Democrats own the Obama economy

One bright spot of Barack Obama's re-election was knowing that unemployment rates were about to soar for the precise groups that voted for him -- young people, unskilled workers and single women with degrees in gender studies. But now the Democrats are sullying my silver lining by forcing Republicans to block an utterly pointless tax-raising scheme in order to blame the coming economic Armageddon on them.

Democrats are proposing to reinstate the Bush tax cuts for everyone ... except "the rich."

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Demography is destiny

Dear Fellow Conservative,


Liberals brag about having won the hearts and minds of America, as if, through logic and argument, they've persuaded people to accept their bankrupt European socialist ideas.

Democrats haven't changed anyone's mind. They changed the people.

More white people voted for Mitt Romney this year than voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Barack Obama lost white voters by 20 points -- the widest margin since 1984.

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Californians hand over their PIN numbers to Democrats

 

 

 

 

 

By: Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO – After the election results came in, I started searching for two things: a stiff drink and a good out-of-state real estate agent.
The national election sends troubling signs about the direction of the country, but nothing much will change from the past four years, so we know what to expect, even if it isn’t particularly good.
But California voters have sent their state into some new and potentially dark territory, the results of which will soon be felt.

Is the GOP headed for the boneyard?

 

 

 

 

After its second defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, under whom unemployment has never been lower than the day George W. Bush left office, the Republican Party has at last awakened to its existential crisis.
Eighteen states have voted Democratic in six straight elections. Among the six are four of our most populous: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. And Obama has now won two of the three remaining mega-states, Ohio and Florida, twice.
Only Texas remains secure — for now.
At the presidential level, the Republican Party is at death’s door.
Yet one already sees the same physicians writing prescriptions for the same drugs that have been killing the GOP since W’s dad got the smallest share of the vote by a Republican candidate since William Howard Taft in 1912.

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