Life, Liberty, Property
By Seton Motley | July 16, 2012 | Breitbart News
Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech,…or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
By Tom Fitton | July 15, 2012 | Breitbart News
By Ken Klukowski | July 16, 2012 | Breitbart News
By Scott Rasmussen | July 13, 2012 | Rasmussen Reports
There are plenty of reasons that the economy is the most important issue of Election 2012.
Unemployment has remained high for a long time, and even 27 percent of those who have a job are worried about losing it. Only half of homeowners now believe their home is worth more than what they still owe on it. Just 16 percent believe that today’s children will be better off than their parents.
These numbers present a real challenge for President Obama. Americans today rate their own financial health just about the same as they did on the day he was inaugurated, but not nearly as well as they did in the fall of 2008. Only 30 percent believe the country is better off than it was four years ago.
The president does benefit from a belief that he inherited a bad economy and that the recession was created by the Bush administration. But most voters also believe that his policies have hurt more than they’ve helped. Overall, by a 50 percent to 42 percent margin, voters trust Mitt Romney more than the president when it comes to managing the economy.
Still, the president remains very competitive in his bid for re-election. This may be partly due to the fact that there has been some very modest economic growth over the past couple of years. It also may be because Americans aren’t feeling all that good about either candidate. If the president is re-elected, just 32 percent of voters nationwide believe the economy will get better, while 37 percent believe it will get worse. If Romney wins in November, 36 percent expect the economy to improve, but 35 percent believe the opposite.
So Romney has a slight edge, but the emphasis is on the word slight. And among the key block of unaffiliated voters who will decide the election, just one in four expects either man to make things better.
By Alana Goodman | July 16, 2012 | Commentary Magazine
Retired retroactively? Legally CEO? Sounds scandalous, but there’s nothing new when you get past the headlines. The New York Times report today concludes the exact same thing media fact checkers and the Romney campaign have been saying since January — Romney de facto left Bain in 1999, when he went to run the Olympics. His name remained on the SEC forms until the company a.) established that he wouldn’t return to a management role after the Olympics ended, b.) transitioned to a new ownership structure:
Indeed, no evidence has yet emerged that Mr. Romney exercised his powers at Bain after February 1999 or directed the funds’ investments after he left, although his campaign has declined to say if he attended any meetings or had any other contact with Bain during the period. And financial disclosures filed with the Massachusetts ethics commission show that he drew at least $100,000 in 2001 from Bain Capital Inc. — effectively his own till — as a “former executive” and from other Bain entities as a passive general partner.
By Rush Limbaugh | July 16, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.Com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me give you the quote here. This is from the book Dreams… What’s the title? Is it Dreams of, Dreams for, Dreams by, Dreams did? What is it. It’s Dreams from My Father or whatever. Obama wrote, “[T]hat’s what my last two years in high school had been about, after Ray went off to junior college somewhere and I had set the books aside; after I had stopped writing to my father and he’d stopped writing back. I had grown tired of trying to untangle a mess that wasn’t of my making. I had learned not to care. I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. [Marijuana] had helped and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though…”
“Smack” was heroin.
He didn’t do any of that.
But he’s admitted the rest in his book here. He talks about getting into Columbia and the Harvard Law Review and so forth. He didn’t ever have to write anything. The standards for everybody else never applied to him. The requirements for him never applied to anybody else. And he didn’t have to do a whole lot of hard work to get where he wanted to go. So if I’m Romney, I can simply say, “Look, you’re out there blowing some weed, you’re out there snorting a little coke and whatever you did with there.
“And, hey, Obama, how could you afford cocaine when you were in high school?”
By Rush Limbaugh | July 16, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.Com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: It’s Friday night on ABC’s World News Tonight. The senior political correspondent, Jonathan Karl, interviewing Romney. And Jonathan Karl says, “The Obama campaign suggested that you may have committed a felony.” Now, I know he’s gotta ask this. Karl’s not a bad guy, at least when he was at CNN he wasn’t a bad guy. He may have been totally turned now by ABC. I don’t know. Romney, a felon? I learned this early on in my career. Some nameless, faceless journalist would claim that I said something or that I think something that was totally bogus or off-the-wall, irresponsible. Then came requests for interviews. “What do you say to your critics who say that you are X?” And for a while, I made the mistake because nobody told me, nobody taught me, I had to learn this stuff on my own, how to answer it.
I tried to change the journalist’s mind, thinking it was possible. Thinking that’s why the journalist was asking me. Well, how little I knew. There was no changing the journalist’s mind. The journalist didn’t want his mind changed. The whole thing was about putting me on the spot and making me look defensive. “Limbaugh responded vigorously to the claim that he hates one-eyed mules in Alabama. Must be something to it. Limbaugh visibly upset at the charge, obviously upset that somebody has discovered it.” It was obscene. So finally I stopped doing interviews, and I stopped responding to these claims and stopped responding to the premise.
Now, Romney’s in a different situation running for president. After three days of this stuff the Romney campaign decided they needed to do television network media blitzes to deal with it. I saw they were gonna do it, and I said, “Well, okay, maybe he’ll have some success with some viewers, but he’s not gonna change these journalists’ mind, and he’s not gonna get them off the story. This is not gonna end the story.” Well, no, even if he hadn’t done the interviews, that wouldn’t have ended it, either. They woulda just said Romney refuses to talk, must be something there, whatever. This whole technique is never employed against the left. You know, during the Swift boat stuff, do you know the media never interviewed the Swift boat guys? (interruption) What do you mean they couldn’t?
By Rush Limbaugh | July 16, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.Com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Who does Obama think paid the taxes for the roads and the bridges and the stoplights? Who paid for this? Who paid for all of that? People that don’t have anything? People who pay taxes paid for all this stuff! Folks, it’s a shame that we have to sit here and react to this kind of sophistry and explain to people how this country was built and who did it and why it happened and how it happened. Because we live in a period of time where the president of the United States is trying to rewrite the history of this country.
He wants you to believe that socialists built this country. He wants you to believe that the people who built this country got trod on, stepped on, and never got a dime for what they did. Everybody else stole their work and stole their businesses, and everybody that became rich is basically a thief. And the reason he’s doing it is numbers. There are far more millions of people who aren’t rich than there are people who are. So he can fire up those people that are non-rich.
If you’re an average liberal, you’re sitting out there knowing that your life doesn’t matter. If you’re an average liberal, you’re in desperate, vain search for meaning in your life because you know you don’t have any. And everybody wants their lives to matter. Why are liberals so susceptible to running around and buying cheap little cars they think can “save the planet”? ‘Cause liberals come to ’em and say, “You know what? You’ve destroyed the planet, but you can redeem yourself. You can save the planet!”
By Rush Limbaugh | July 16, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.Com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Roanoke, Virginia. This is Friday night. This did not get a lot of coverage at the time. It did not get a lot of coverage over the weekend. The Drive-Bys did not focus on this much. Fox News, at some point, did bring it to people’s attention. He’s at Historic Fire Station No. 1. Grab sound bite number two. Let’s play Elizabeth Warren first, just to show you. We may have a little plagiarism going on here. This is well-known Indian squaw Elizabeth Warren. It was in September of 2011 in Andover, Massachusetts, during a “Talking Tour” running for her Senate against Scott Brown.
By Don Wilkie | July 16, 2012 | American Thinker
Ben Smith of Buzzfeed, when reviewing David Maraniss’ new book Barack Obama: The Story, “counted 38 instances in which the biographer convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama’s own story of his life and his family history.”
The corrected factual record includes the following:
This is bad news for Neil Abercrombie, governor of Hawaii.
He has said too many things on the record that don’t jibe with the facts as we now know them. Yet in The Story, Maraniss relies heavily on this totally unreliable witness. As Jack Cashill so insightfully noted, “[w]ithout Abercrombie, there is no contemporary witness to any kind of relationship [between Ann and Obama Sr.]”
Below are some of the whoppers Governor Abercrombie has told: [Read more…]
By Policy Issues Institute | November 22, 2010 | Western Center for Journalism
Late last month, a reporter asked the head of the Office of Public Engagement Valerie Jarrett what she would tell her close friend Barack Obama about the American uprising against his aggressive liberalism. She replied, “To stay the course and to know that it will get better.” Those were not idle words of comfort; they were marching orders. The president told the New York Times he runs every decision by Jarrett, and she has admitted to Vogue magazine, “I kind of know what makes [both Obamas] who they are.” When she speaks, Obama listens.
“In the history of the modern presidency, Wilson, Roosevelt and Johnson stand out for their legislative achievements, the result of a shrewd strategy and cagey timing. They offer President Barack Obama several different models as he attempts to push through Congress an ambitious domestic agenda of which health care is only one part.
Wilson was able to secure passage of much of his “New Freedom,” a program that included tariff reform, the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve, stronger antitrust measures and the enactment of the progressive income tax. He did it through the kind of skillful manipulation of the Democratic caucus that came naturally to a former college professor who had spent his academic career writing about the need for stronger parties in America.
Wilson coordinated with congressional leaders — “King Caucus,” as Republican critics called them — by using carrots and sticks to make sure Democrats voted the party line and limit Republican participation. Democratic leaders, for instance, used “binding” votes, whereby two-thirds of the party caucus could commit all its members to a vote a particular way on a bill. Legislators who did not abide by a binding vote would lose their party privileges such as treasured committee assignments. Republicans were left out of much of the legislative process, including many conference committee deliberations. “Never did the lash of the presidential and caucus whip cut so deep as today,” one Republican complained.
Roosevelt displayed even greater legislative acumen. While Wilson’s main tactic was to rely on disciplined partisanship, Roosevelt overwhelmed legislators with more proposals than the institution had seen in decades. Will Rogers joked that “Congress doesn’t pass legislation anymore. They just wave at the bills as they go by.” [Emphasis mine] But in truth, Roosevelt often plucked proposals out of Congress and lent them the presidential stamp of authority. The political scientist David Mayhew astutely noted that the 1932 election provided Sen. Robert Wagner of New York a president who would finally sign his bills.
By Policy Issues Institute | October 8, 2010 | Western Center for Journalism
This morning, political commentators are paying a great deal of attention to one of the Los Angeles Times’ stories about Barack Obama’s plans for a Republican takeover of Congress. Unfortunately, they are focusing on the wrong one. Most commentators spent the morning quoting the president’s remarks on a black radio program that a GOP-dominated Congress will result in “hand-to-hand combat.” The reality is most of the action will take place behind their backs and over their heads. All indications are, if Obama cannot get his legislative agenda enacted by Congress, he will impose it by decree.
The evidence comes buried elsewhere in today’s L.A. Times in a piece by Peter Nicholas and Christi Parsons under the hum-drum headline, “Obama Reshapes Administration for a Fresh Strategy.” The story makes clear the “fresh strategy” borders on government by executive fiat. It begins, “As President Obama remakes his senior staff, he is also shaping a new approach for the second half of his term: to advance his agenda through executive actions he can take on his own, rather than pushing plans through an increasingly hostile Congress.” This rule by divine right of kings is confirmed by no less an Obama insider than David Axelrod, who said, “It’s fair to say that the next phase is going to be less about legislative action than it is about managing the change that we’ve brought.” The Times states candidly: [Read more…]
By William L. Anderson | May 9, 2007 | Future of Freedom Foundation
The longest-lasting legacy of Lincoln is not the War Between the States or even the violent way in which slavery ended in the United States. Lincoln was able to use brute force to “settle” the various arguments regarding the centralization of political power in this country. As the late Shelby Foote said during an interview on Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on the Civil War, in the years before the war people spoke of the United States in the plural, as in “the United States are.” However, after the war, people spoke of the country in the singular, as in “the United Statesis.”
Perhaps the most famous document to come from the war was the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order which Lincoln issued on January 1, 1863. Despite the continuing belief that Lincoln’s proclamation “freed the slaves,” in reality, it freed no one, but it did have the effect of further concentrating power in the executive branch.
The Emancipation Proclamation declared that all slaves living in the areas of the Confederate States of America which were not secured by Union forces were legally free. In and of itself, it was a curious claim, as it failed to emancipate slaves held in Union slave states such as Delaware and Kentucky; and people living in the Confederate States did not believe themselves to be subject to Lincoln or any other Northern political institution, so it could not free slaves in those places, at least by itself.
(Union soldiers did use the Emancipation Proclamation to justify releasing slaves as they occupied new territories in the South. However, given the state of the fighting, it is just as likely that Union forces would have freed those slaves anyway, if for no other reason than to cripple the economies of the Southern states, making it more difficult for the Confederates to continue to fight.)
By William L. Anderson | May 7, 2007 | Future of Freedom Foundation
During his presidency, Bill Clinton would conclude his trips abroad by telling his advisors that he was determined to use the powers of his office. Those “powers,” of course, included what are called “executive orders,” which are orders that come from the office of the president of the United States and have the force of law.
Lest anyone think that Congress is supposed to be the supreme lawmaking body of the central government of the United States, those days have long passed. A trend that began during the War Between the States and that accelerated during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression continues unabated. Laws and lawmakers are not what they used to be and certainly not what existed when the republic known as the United States of America was formed.
The typical schoolroom civics class is taught that the U.S. government has three branches — Congress, the president or chief executive, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Congress, it is said, makes the laws, presidents enforce them, and the Court interprets the laws. Each branch has its own delegated powers, which creates a balance in which no entity gains power at the expense of another.
While this makes for nice, tidy civics lessons, the truth is found elsewhere. The political reality of the 20th century, and now the 21st century, is that Congress has faded greatly in importance, with the executive branch gaining the most strength. (Despite what many conservatives claim, the federal courts, while powerful, also have ceded some of their powers to the executive, as shall be later explained.) Furthermore, the executive branch has two powerful entities within it — the presidency itself and the bureaucracies, which in many ways wield more power than the president. One may speak of an “imperial presidency” but a more accurate description is that of an “imperial bureaucracy.” [Read more…]
By Warren Beatty | July 16, 2012 | American Thinker
President Barack Hussein “kill list” Obama has offered over 900 Executive Orders (EO), and he is not even through his first term. He is creating a wonderland of government controls covering everything imaginable, including a list of “Emergency Powers” and martial law EOs. And while Obama is busy issuing EOs to control everything inside the US, he has been issuing EOs to force us to submit to international regulations instead of our US Constitution.
And comments by North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue and former OMB director Peter Orszag only contribute to this pattern.
Is it now time to start connecting the dots? Obama signed EO 13603 on March 22, 2012. Then he signed EO 13617 on June 25, 2012, declaring a national emergency. Then he signed EO 13618 on July 6, 2012.
In EO 13603, entitled, “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” Obama says (among other things) that [we must]:
be prepared, in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements;
Obama has the power, through this EO, to “nationalize” (not seize) private assets in order to protect national interests. Further, the EO effectively states that he can: [Read more…]
"One man with courage is a majority." ~Thomas Jefferson
By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]
By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]
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