Obama Calls Income Gap 'Wrong' — After Widening It

Obama Calls Income Gap 'Wrong' — After Widening It

Obamanomics: The president has been decrying the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S. to help sell his retread tax-and-spend proposals. But those policies have already produced record levels of income inequality.
In his speech in Illinois last week, and at events since, Obama described income inequality in the starkest terms. "This growing inequality is morally wrong," he said, and "undermines the very essence of America."
To be sure, income inequality is a standard trope for liberals, who always use it to advocate more wealth redistribution.
And Obama's latest focus neatly coincides with his plans to push for more federal spending and taxes on the "rich" in coming budget battles.
But what Obama conveniently leaves out of his sermons is that income inequality has grown faster on his watch than any time in the past two decades, at least.
Research by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the average income of the top 1% grew 11.2% in real terms through 2011.
The bottom 99%, in contrast, saw their incomes shrink by 0.4%.
As a result, 121% of the gains in real income during Obama's recovery have gone to the top 1%. By comparison, the top 1% captured 65% of income gains during the Bush expansion of 2002-07, and 45% of the gains under Clinton's expansion in the 1990s.
The Census Bureau's official measure of income inequality — called the Gini index — shows similar results. During the Bush years, the index was flat overall — finishing in 2008 exactly where it started in 2001.
It's gone up each year since Obama has been president and now stands at all-time highs.
It's worth underscoring that the growing income gap under Obama isn't the result of the rich getting fabulously richer. Nor is it any sort of indictment of "trickle down" economics.
Instead, it is the direct result of Obama's historically weak economic recovery, which has left the rest of the country falling behind while the wealthy have managed to make gains.
Census data show, for example, that the poorest 20% of families saw their real average income continue to fall each year from 2009 to 2011 — the last year for which the Census has data — while the top 20% recouped losses suffered in the recession.
The evidence of decline among the nation's most vulnerable shows up elsewhere. There are 2.7 million more people in poverty than there were in 2009. And 14 million more are on food stamps today than in 2009. And after four years of economic recovery, there are still 4.3 million long-term unemployed.
Meanwhile, researchers have found that high-paying jobs lost during the recession are being replaced, if at all, largely by low-paying jobs in the Obama recovery.
All this is in stark contrast to previous economic recoveries, which generally saw at least some income gains across the Census Bureau's income groupings.
Despite this record, Obama's answer is simply to increase the dose of the very same treatments — more government spending, more taxes, more intrusions into the marketplace in the name of "shared prosperity" — that hobbled the recovery and produced the very misery he now claims he can fix.
In other words, Obama is selling snake oil. And that's what's morally wrong.

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/073013-665705-income-gap-grew-sharply-under-obama.htm

Don's Tuesday column

       THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   8/06/2013

Abilities, needs, taxes, benefits, cynicism

You can hear Don Jans speak on the subject of Marxism tonight at the Tea Party Patriots meeting, 6 PM at the Westside Grange. By the way, he’s against it.

What do you really know about Marxism? From the simple but oft stated adage, “From each according to their abilities, to each according the their need,” to the last hundred years of attempts to implement those utopian, collectivist ideals—any objective observer of history would have to concede the utter failure of such systems and ideologies. To its devotees on the hard left in academia, entertainment, government and the body politic, there are always excuses for such abominable records: Poorly formulated planning (as in the USSR’s vaunted but catastrophic 5-year plans), or the inevitable non-cooperation of the “bourgeoisie” (middle-class) who had eeked out and possessed modest abundance, or the ideological reluctance of Western, capitalist nations to prop up socialist regimes through trade.

It has always been the fervent desire and design of the international leftist movement to seize upon the wealthy jewel of the free-market, entrepreneurial world: the United States of America. Domestically, beginning with the dismissive near-derision by progressives like President Woodrow Wilson toward our Founding Documents; to the writings of Godfrey Wilshire (“Socialism Inevitable”); to the quasi-collectivist programs of the government-centric New Deal under FDR; to the realization by socialists that the American people would never knowingly accept socialism but could be fooled with different labels—there has never been any retreat by the humanist, statist left.

Failing to accomplish their goals through military conquest—when the Soviet Union collapsed—only strengthened an existing strategic move by those devoted to socialism to change their terminology and take over the Democrat Party. You would have found little in the news pages or broadcasts in the 60s, 70s and 80s to inform Americans of that process; it proceeded quietly in conferences and seminars, much like those that one Barack H. Obama attended while at Columbia University, documented in Stanley Kurtz’s book, “Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism”.

The so-called “coat and tie” radicals like Hillary Rodham, Barack Obama (and future wife, Michelle) kept their true beliefs masked in euphemisms and coded intellectual double-speak. They let the bomb-throwers like Barack Obama’s future buddy, campaign supporter and fellow leftist-education-transformer, William Ayers, take the flack. Meanwhile, the hard left academic establishment laid the groundwork for redistributionism, power-to-the-downtrodden, American-white-people-all-racists, aka Critical Race Theory, aka “white privilege”. Hence, Marxist community organizations like ACORN, and Saul Alinsky acolytes like Barack Obama, became the shock troops for deconstructing American, free-market private enterprise; and replacing it over time with crony capitalism and redistributive poor and middle-class benefit programs.

What has come to fruition is a system whereby nearly one-half pay no income taxes and more than half receive more in some sort of benefits than they pay in taxes. Rather than urge people to save for their own retirement, their own medical care, and their own children’s future, program after program like ObamaCare encourage just the opposite. The middle-class has always been the greatest enemy to the collectivist schemes of the socialists because that group of people has made their economic life rewarding and relatively comfortable by their own efforts, thus reinforcing their natural skepticism of governmental “take-from-rich-give-to-poor” redistribution.

So, we come full Marxist circle with a massively intrusive and controlling tax/spend/regulate bureaucracy unable to find the funds to honor its self-imposed commitments of benefits to the poor and the middle class. The fiscal reality is that every dollar earned by everyone over $100,000, maybe even less now, would not fill that bill. There are not enough “rich” people, rich folks’ income or even the entire possessions of the rich, to satisfy those commitments in perpetuity. No, the dirty little secret is that only by ratcheting up the tax burden on the middle class, can all those fiscal promises be kept.

Now, it’s “From each taxpayer according to their assigned share, to each benefit receiver according to their legally assigned needs.” It is the most cynical “transformation” of the American dream of self-sufficiency, economic freedom and political liberty to ever be foisted on a nation in all of modern history. It’s never been debated, certainly not by Mr. Hopenchange as he ran for President; even now none of the leftists in the Democrat Party will own up to how much our tax structure will have to grow and expand into ever lower income groups to avoid default on our debts and obligations.

Now, consider an editorial by Investor’s Business Daily, “Obama Calls Income Gap ‘Wrong’—After Widening It,” (7/30, Investors.com). “Obamanomics: The president has been decrying the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S. to help sell his retread tax-and-spend proposals. But those policies have already produced record levels of income inequality… University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the income of the top 1 % grew 11.2% … the bottom 99 % shrank by 0.4%.” Growing income gap=growing demand for more taxes … eventually on all of us. “In other words, Obama is selling snake oil. And that’s what’s morally wrong.”

Dr. Dean says see, I told you Obamacare rate-setting won’t work

by Paul Mirengoff in Democrats, Obamacare

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Howard Dean concludes that the Affordable Care Act’s Independent Advisory Board “will never control costs” and “will cause frustration to providers and patients alike.” A friend comments:

Note what is going on here. The Affordable Care Act was a liberal dream-come-true that was going to create a utopian, leftist society that brought the “dream” of health insurance to all Americans through the guise of big government.
Now, three years after its passage, here is what we have: members of Congress who voted for it predict a train wreck; the president violated the law and the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine by delaying the hated “employer mandate” for a year; dozens or hundreds of religious groups are suing because the ACA violates their religious liberty, the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and a host of other laws; and now the former DNC Chairman denounces the “IPAB” as a disaster.
What to make of these Democrats’ expressions of concern? Well, we can start with the 2014 election, for one thing. The fear is that “ObamaCare” will be such a disaster that the voters will throw out Democrats in large numbers next year.
For this reason, the president decided not to enforce it until after the mid-term election. The strategy is to try to take the “mandate” off the table and hope for a liberal Congressional majority in the president’s last two years. Then, of course, there is the blame-the-Republicans strategy. Mr. Dean’s piece illustrates this approach, as if to say, “see, I told you that ObamaCare was a disaster. If only those pesky Republicans would work with us, we could fix it.”
Does this seem ridiculous? Yes. But then note this concluding line from Mr. Dean’s article: “instead of posturing, getting rid of IPAB is something Democrats and Republicans ought to agree on.”

The Democrats are running scared, and with good reason. If the Republicans can just avoid shooting themselves in the foot, 2014 could turn out to be a big year for the GOP.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/07/dr-dean-says-see-i-told-you-obamacare-rate-setting-wont-work.php

The shale gas revolution: We have not yet begun to boom

 by Erika Johnsen

As I’ve now argued many times over, the Obama administration is extravagantly fond of citing statistics about how our oil imports are way down while our domestic oil production is way up, with the implicit suggestion being that their policies somehow deserve the credit for these phenomena. See, they really are about an “all of the above” energy strategy and you can’t say that they’re anti-oil or anti-fossil fuel, because America is currently experiencing an economic and employment boom via domestic oil and gas production!
In fact, however, much of the credit for the current oil-and-gas boom and our decreased reliance on foreign sources belongs to production on state and private lands, and the Obama administration still has plenty of policies in place actively restricting permitting to the federal lands and waters to which plenty of companies would really like more access. Yes, we’re experiencing an oil-and-gas economic boom, but many of the Obama administration’s policies are coming at the direct opportunity cost of an even bigger boom.
It’s a similar story with natural gas and the many companies who are awaiting on pending applications to export the stuff in its liquified version. Companies are only freely allowed to sell and ship liquified natural gas to countries with whom the United States already has special, specific free trade agreements; but obviously, and as with any industry or economic sector, natural-gas companies would very much like to be allowed expand the market and reap the subsequent economic benefits.
Certain Democrats in Congress — who happen to have various manufacturing and environmental interests, with their own very definite stake in the domestic price of natural gas, vociferously egging them on — have been holding up the show with the patently ridiculous and wildly inconsistent claim that free trade somehow might not be in the “national interest.” Dumb.
The Obama administration, however, has at last been showing some small signs that they might finally be ready to start letting up on the LNG-export front. I missed it last week, but Energy Secretary Moniz again attested that the administration is going to get moving soon:

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said his department will conduct a “fair amount of action” in evaluating applications for natural gas exports amid concerns within the industry over delays.
“I’m planning to go through them as rapidly as I can,” Moniz said, according to Reuters.
Companies looking to ship liquefied natural gas abroad must first apply to the Department of Energy for a permit. These U.S. firms have voiced frustration over lengthy delays and changes to the department’s rules.
About two weeks ago, ExxonMobil (XOM) Chief Executive Rex Tillerson criticized delays in approving more natural gas export projects, saying U.S. companies are losing millions of dollars a day and the nation is losing ground to other countries.
“It’s a very competitive marketplace. It’s not like people are just going to stand at our door like panting dogs just waiting for us to give this (LNG) to them,” Tillerson said.

Unfortunately, however, it sounds like they’ll be doing so at a pretty pathetic pace. DOE officials are saying that they can only approve permits at a pace of one permit every couple of months, which means that companies at the back of this queue (via Real Clear Energy) will be waiting until 2015 at least.

The queue at the Department of Energy for permits to export natural gas to the energy-starved manufacturing nations of Asia is long and not showing any signs of moving. Listed here are the 26 applications that have been put before the Department of Energy. Of them only two permits – Chenier’s Sabine Pass facility in Louisiana and Freeport’s facility in Texas – have been permitted. Meanwhile rival producers such as Qatar, Australia and Indonesia are rapidly signing long-term contracts with Japan, Korea and China. By the time the Department of Energy gets around to acting, there may not be much of a market left.

Natural gas is a cleaner-burning and increasingly popular and economical fuel, and this is all making for one very unnecessary federal case. The determined greenies, of course, doth protest.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/10/the-shale-gas-revolution-we-have-not-yet-begun-to-boom/

Disorder: Judge Recesses Zimmerman Trial, Excludes Damning Evidence (DP: Worth reading to see how biased the judge was)

Disorder: Judge Recesses Zimmerman Trial, Excludes Damning Evidence

Trayvon Martin's phone had hundreds of messages discussing criminal behavior, including trafficking black-market firearms.

by
Bob Owens
 

The State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman took a wild turn late Tuesday evening, as defense attorney Don West got in a heated conversation with Judge Debra Nelson just before 10:oo p.m. Nelson had just expressed her intent to block testimony and evidence recovered from deleted messages on Trayvon Martin’s cell phone.
A forensic expert discovered more than 600 items on Trayvon’s cell phone, including texts and photos between Trayvon and other people with specific references to criminal activity — particularly fighting, drugs, and firearms.

Everyone in the courtroom likely understood which “someone” deleted the evidence, but attorneys and Judge Nelson were very careful not to name Martin.
The forensic expert testified that he recovered multiple conversations between Trayvon Martin and specific family members and friends discussing multi-round street fights and schoolyard fights in which Trayvon Martin had participated. Martin’s half-brother, Demetrius Martin, even asked Trayvon when he would teach him how to fight. Trayvon Martin’s family appeared to know Trayvon was a street fighter.
Most troubling, Conner found multiple conversations — between four and six — where Trayvon discussed attempting to buy black-market guns.
The guns Martin discussed acquiring included a Smith & Wesson Sigma pistol and a .38 Special revolver. One conversation showed Martin trying to sell a .22 revolver, suggesting he was already in possession of it.
One of the participants in one of the gun conversations was a Fulton, possibly a relative on his mother’s side. All of these conversations took place immediately in the days and weeks before Trayvon Martin left Miami for Sanford.
The reason these conversations were hidden until recently is that the deleted texts were created by a password-protected hidden app designed to beat police surveillance by hiding data and data types as different kinds of files than what the police would be looking for.
The key facts in this development:

• Trayvon Martin’s phone was password-protected. The password protection starts automatically after being left unattended for a certain amount of time.
• The “stealth” app designed to further conceal Trayvon’s conversations about weapons, fighting, drugs, and pornography had an additional layer of password protection. He had to log into the phone first, and then to this app to access these conversations or delete them.
• There were thousands of messages, texts, photos, Tweets, Facebook posts, and other bits of evidence hidden this way.
• People who participated in these conversations are all documented by screen name, real name, phone number, social media personas, etc. They are all easily identified and could be deposed – if the defense is given time to do so.
• The state hid this evidence until right before the beginning of the trial, when the prosecution’s Wesley White came forward to present testimony that the state was hiding and may have destroyed evidence. The defense has had no time to recover this data and to depose every witness.

This led to the showdown between incredulous defense attorney Don West, who can’t believe what he’s hearing, and Judge Debra Nelson, who puts the court in recess and exits — as the defense is still trying to talk to her. Watch the video on the next page. (use link to view video):
http://pjmedia.com/blog/disorder-judge-recesses-zimmerman-trial-excludes-damning-evidence/?singlepage=true

When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler (fairly short part--gives the flavor and gist--use link if it piques your interest. Hmm, libs also loved communists from USSR to China, so...)

When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler

Hulton-Deutsch Collection, Corbis

Evidence shows that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party exercised considerable influence over Hollywood, including what films went unmade and what scenes were cut.

By Alexander C. Kafka

Cambridge, Mass.

A debate is raging over Hollywood's alleged collusion with the Nazis. At stake: the moral culpability of Jewish studio heads during cinema's golden age.
The catalyst is a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. The book is still several months from publication, but emotions are running high after an early review in the online magazine Tablet, followed by an exchange of rhetorical fire in The New York Times between Urwand and Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University who this spring published his own account of the era, Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press). The clash comes during a period of heightened scholarly attention to Nazi infiltration and counterinfiltration in Depression-era Los Angeles, complicating the story of Hollywood's stance toward fascism.
Urwand's Hollywood-Hitler focus began in 2004, when, while pursuing his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, he saw an interview with Budd Schulberg in which the screenwriter mentioned that in the 1930s, the head of MGM would show movies to a German consular official in LA and they'd agree on cuts. Urwand knew that anti-Nazi pictures didn't start appearing until 1939, and he suspected that indifference or passivity couldn't fully explain that. He smelled a dissertation topic. "It was the spark," he says, and he spent the next nine years traveling to dozens of archives, piecing the story together.

Enlarge Image

Chronicle Review photograph by Alexander C. Kafka

 

For his forthcoming book, “The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler,” the historian Ben Urwand dug through two dozen archives over nine years.

Enlarge Image

Mike Lovett

For Thomas Doherty, the Hollywood studios’ dealings with the Nazis came down to hardheaded business decisions at a time of more complexity than moralistic hindsight allows.

For Thomas Doherty, the Hollywood studios’ dealings with the Nazis came down to hardheaded business decisions at a time of more complexity than moralistic hindsight allows.

At Sandrine's Bistro, off Harvard Square, Urwand, a slender junior fellow in Harvard University's Society of Fellows, sits down to lunch in short sleeves on a hot, humid day. The Sydney, Australia, native's accent sounds as though it has been gently sanded by a decade and a half in the States. He is affably intense, no less so after a two-espresso appetizer to his gazpacho and lobster salad. The lunch is a break from sorting out his book's index while navigating a steady stream of press calls and e-mails in English and German, although The Collaboration is not due out until October. (In response to the controversy, the press bumped up the release from mid- to early October.)
Urwand's forthright, deadpan expression bursts intermittently into an engaging smile. Should you wish to see that smile vanish, mention Doherty. You'll get a somber look, a mild shake of the head. Urwand won't discuss Hollywood and Hitler specifically, only the more general "mythology," as he puts it, of the studios' staunch antifascism.
Yes, after the Anschluss, in March, 1938, the Munich Agreement, in September, and Kristallnacht, in November, Hollywood's stance toward the Nazis changed, though even then, the films strangely ellipted explicitly Jewish characters. But why did it take so long for the studios to cross cinematic swords with the Führer?
For Urwand, the answer is in the archival evidence: bald complicity with the Nazis. For Doherty, whose book covers some of the same topical ground as Urwand but largely from the standpoint of the era's trade press—Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The Motion Picture Herald, Box Office—it came down to hardheaded business decisions during a time of more ethical, political, and economic complexity than moralistic hindsight allows.
Goldberg McDuffie, a New York publicity firm hired by Harvard University Press, is not as tight-lipped as Urwand when it comes to discussing Doherty. Promotional materials for Urwand's book deride Doherty's as relying on "flawed, superficial accounts in domestic trade papers." Doherty fired back in the Times: Urwand's use of the word "collaboration" he said, was "a slander." "You use that word to describe the Vichy government," he said. "Louis B. Mayer was a greedhead, but he is not the moral equivalent of Vidkun Quisling," a reference to the Norwegian traitor who ran a Nazi-backed regime.
Urwand says he welcomes mitigating evidence. But he's dug through some two dozen archives on two continents (taking classes to bring his high-school German up to "a good reading level" for the task). He's viewed more than 400 films made from 1933 to 1940. (Seeing four or five films a day, many of them quite bad, got "a bit weird," he says.) Ultimately, collaboration is what he found—and collaboration, Zusammenarbeit, is what the studios and the Nazis called it.
It's long been known that the major studios—Columbia, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, United Artists, Universal, Warner Bros.—all tailored and blanched their 1930s product in response to the Motion Picture Production Code; to an American suspicion of Jews generally, and particularly of the Jews who ran Hollywood; and to motion-picture business interests abroad.
But here's the arguable game-changer: Urwand unearthed evidence that suggests the studios were not merely self-censoring in an effort to keep their shareholders, audiences, and industry and government monitors happy. Rather, he says, the studios began working in detailed coordination with Nazi officials, putting profits above principles. ...

(use link for the rest of this article):

http://chronicle.com/article/When-Hollywood-Held-Hands-With/140189/

IRS Paying Over 200 Employees to Work Full-Time For Labor Union

IRS Paying Over 200 Employees to Work Full-Time For Labor Union

By Eliana Johnson

 

The Internal Revenue Service pays over 200 full-time employees not to conduct audits or process tax returns but to work for a federal employees’ union, according to documents released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the advocacy group Americans for Limited Government. Forty-three of those employees are earning six-figure salaries, the documents show.

Oddly, the employees working for the National Treasury Employees Union have titles that suggest they perform work in behalf of the American taxpayer, among them “Tax Examining Technician,” “Internal Revenue Agent,” and “Tax Specialist.”
Known as “official time,” the practice is perfectly legal as a result of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. It continues even as the IRS faces financial woes — due to the sequester, the agency has been forced to close its doors on five days and has also requested more money for its operating budget from Congress.
This is not sitting right with two Republican senators, who sent a letter to the IRS’s acting administrator, Danny Werfel, requesting more information on the practice, including how employee performance is evaluated.
“While the IRS continues to request more funding to further close the more than 14.5 percent tax gap, especially under the current budget crunch and sequestration, it makes little sense to use taxpayer resources to pay for union work,” Tom Coburn and Phil Gingrey wrote Werfel, whom President Obama appointed to head the agency in mid May after disclosures that it had targeted tea-party groups. “This kind of practice takes place only in the government — in the private sector, union work and staff are paid for by union dues,” the senators said.
Gingrey is also trying to put an end to “official time” altogether by repealing the portion of the 1978 law that allows it, but his bill, introduced in January, remains in committee. The IRS had no immediate comment on Monday afternoon.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/352876/irs-paying-over-200-employees-work-full-time-labor-union-eliana-johnson

ABC Still Corrupting Zimmerman case

By Jack Cashill

In a perverse bit of post-trial agitprop, ABC News somehow recruited the one woman of color on George Zimmerman's "all white" jury and twisted her words to reflect the presumed editorial position of ABC News. In this clip from an exclusive Robin Roberts interview which has played just about everywhere including CBS News, Roberts says to the juror, "Some people have said, point blank, 'George Zimmerman got away with murder.' How do you respond to those people who say that?" In the edited video ABC floated about, "Maddy" answers unhesitatingly, "George Zimmerman got away with murder. But you can't get away from God."
This clip led to headlines like "Juror Says Zimmerman 'Got Away With Murder'" in the New York Times. In the article by Lisetta Alvarez -- the reporter who gave the world the phrase "White Hispanic" -- there is not even a mention of the prompt by Roberts. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune ran comparable headlines.

What none of these publications mentioned -- and kudos to Slate's William Saletan for breaking the story -- is that the producers at ABC edited Maddy's response to have her say something she never intended. In the unedited version, after Roberts asks her leading question, Maddy pauses, starts her response over, and clearly plays back Roberts' question as the stated premise to her own answer, "But you can't get away from God." In other words, this is how she would answer that question if asked. She never implied Zimmerman got away with murder, nor agreed with the premise. In fact, she stood by her decision to acquit Zimmerman.

ABC's reporting on this case has descended to a hitherto unexplored level of journalistic malfeasance. "He called police. They suggested he stay in his car," Robert says in her introduction to Maddy's interview. How, one wonders, could ABC get something so fundamental so wrong at this stage of the game? No, the dispatcher, who is not a police officer, never suggested Zimmerman stay in his truck, nor did he even recommend he go back to it. Disinformation of this caliber has fed black paranoia for more than a year and continues unabated.

This corruption, I suppose, should not surprise. From the very beginning, ABC News took the lead in disinforming America about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The Martin family public relations guru, the very white Ryan Julison, was bragging about landing interviews with ABC within two weeks of the shooting in February 2012. "Coordinated interviews with Good Morning America and the family of Trayvon Martin," Julison boasted on his Facebook page on March 10 of that year. "This has certainly struck a nerve around the country."

On March 13, ABC's Matt Gutman violated just about every known rule of journalism, tweeting that George Zimmerman "shot 17yr old teen bc he was black, wore hoodie walking slowly." From day one, Gutman worked under the elitist assumption that the Sanford police were either corrupt, incompetent or both and discounted whatever information led them to refrain from arresting Zimmerman, "likely not 2 be arrested."

Late on March 16 Gutman posted a piece on the ABC News website that helped set the tone of the coverage to come. He based its inflammatory headline, "Trayvon Martin Neighborhood Watch Shooting: 9-1-1 Tapes Send Mom Crying From Room," fully on the word of Julison and admitted as much. In the accompanying video piece for Good Morning America Gutman may have set a new national record for most mistakes of consequence in a two-minute news byte:

GUTMAN: It was February 25^TH.
TRUTH: It was February 26^th.


GUTMAN: Trayvon was staying at his stepmother's.
TRUTH: Martin was a staying with Brandy Green, a girlfriend of his father's. His mother as well as his stepmother, Alicia Stanley, lived in greater Miami.


GUTMAN: He left for the store at half-time of the NBA All-Star Game.
TRUTH: He left hours earlier. He was dead before the game started.


GUTMAN: The "gunshots" are triggering outrage
TRUTH: There was only one gunshot.


GUTMAN: Trayvon was "100 pounds lighter."
TRUTH: He was less than fifty pounds lighter.


GUTMAN: "You can hear him stalk Martin."
TRUTH: He did not stalk Martin. When the dispatcher said to Zimmerman, who was following Martin, "We don't need you to do that," Zimmerman said "okay" and stopped. ABC edited out Zimmerman's "okay" and followed immediately with Gutman saying, "But then came the gunshots."


GUTMAN: Zimmerman had a record -- "battery on a police officer and resisting arrest."
TRUTH: The charges had been dropped. Gutman did not mention that fact.


GUTMAN: Police have been accused of "correcting one eyewitness, while ignoring another."
TRUTH: Yes, but the Sanford PD did so for good reason. Several eyewitnesses had seen very little. Others had seen a lot. On one 9-1-1 call from Witness #11 desperate cries of "help" are clearly audible for roughly forty seconds until they promptly stop with a gunshot. The investigators knew it was Zimmerman who was crying out. An hour after the shooting, that eyewitness, Jonathan Good, told the Sanford PD that he saw a "black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy . . . or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help." According to Good, the black man on top was "throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style."

Gutman may not have heard the audio of these interviews, but "Jon" had spoken on camera to a local ABC affiliate the day after the shooting. "The guy on bottom who I believe had a red sweater on was yelling to me, 'help, help,'" Good said. "I told them to stop and I was calling 9-1-1." In the days when real journalists still walked the planet, the case would have been closed right there.

On March 28, one week after CNN's Anderson Cooper falsely accused Zimmerman of saying "f---ing coons" on his call to the dispatcher, and one day after NBC's The Today Show crudely edited that same call to make Zimmerman sound like he was racially profiling Martin (and got sued for it), ABC News tried to regain its rightful place in the false accusation race. Leading the charge was ace fact-twister Gutman. His online lede was a powerful one: "A police video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman."

As Gutman related, the initial police report claimed that Zimmerman was bleeding from the back of the head and the nose, but in the video, obtained exclusively by ABC, "No abrasions or blood can be seen." Although Gutman did not say so, he surely implied that Zimmerman and the police conspired to exaggerate his injuries.

The folks at the indispensable Conservative Treehouse wasted no time in busting this scam. The police surveillance video, which, Gutman boasted, "was obtained exclusively by ABC News" seemed to move as it shadowed the police and Zimmerman. CCTV surveillance video cameras do not move. They are fixed and stationary. Bottom line: this was not the original video or a digital copy of the original. It was video of a video, quite possibly taken by a Team Trayvon ally using an iPhone or something like it and given to Gutman.

In releasing this copy, Gutman failed to mention the obvious reason for the apparent lack of "blood or bruises" -- namely the loss of resolution from the original to the duplicate, not to mention the fact Zimmerman's wounds had been tended to at the scene.

I could go on with another year's worth of deception by Gutman and ABC, but by April 2012 the network had done more than its share in getting Zimmerman arrested. Now, its all-stars -- Gutman and Roberts chief among them -- are doing their best to deny him vindication. In the process, of course, they stir the embers of racial unrest, but when you've got a personal limo driver to take you to and fro, that's apparently not much of a worry.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/abc_still_corrupting_zimmerman_case.html#ixzz2aTmTPsJe
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GOP Elite View on Immigration Is 'Nonsense'

Sessions to Republicans: GOP Elite View on Immigration Is 'Nonsense'

Daniel Halper

In a sharp memo sent this morning to fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill, Senator Jeff Sessions argues that the GOP elite view on immigration--shared by President Barack Obama and Senator Chuck Schumer--is "nonsense." Instead, Sessions, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, advises his fellow Republicans to adopt a "humble and honest populism."

The Sessions memo begins, "The GOP needs to flip the immigration debate on its head. The same set of GOP strategists, lobbyists, and donors who have always favored a proposal like the Gang of Eight immigration bill argue that the great lesson of the 2012 election is that the GOP needs to push for immediate amnesty and a drastic surge in low-skill immigration. This is nonsense."
The senator from Alabama goes on to argue that Republicans will win big elections if they can appeal to "working Americans of all backgrounds." And he says that if this immigration bill becomes law, "Low-income Americans will be hardest hit"
Sessions's advice to his fellow Republicans is clear: Don't help Obama hurt America. The Republican-lead House is currently working on the Senate-approved immigration bill.
"Like Obamacare, this 1,200-page immigration bill is a legislative monstrosity inimical to the interests of our country and the American people. Polls show again and again that the American people want security accomplished first, that they do not support a large increase in net immigration levels, and that they do not trust the government to deliver on enforcement. The GOP should insist on an approach to immigration that both restores constitutional order and serves the interests of the American worker and taxpayer. But only by refusing any attempt at rescue or reprieve for the Senate bill is there a hope of accomplishing these goals," Sessions writes in conclusion.
"Instead of aiding the President and Senator Schumer in salvaging a bill that would devastate working Americans, Republicans should refocus all of our efforts on a united push to defend these Americans from the Administration’s continued onslaught. His health care policies, tax policies, energy policies, and welfare policies all have one thing in common: they enrich the bureaucracy at the expense of the people. Our goal: higher wages, more and better jobs, smaller household bills, and a solemn determination to aid those struggling towards the goal of achieving financial independence."
Here's a copy of the full memo:

Memo: How The GOP Can Do The Right Thing On Immigration—And Win
July 29, 2013
To: Republican Colleagues
From: Ranking Member Jeff Sessions

The GOP needs to flip the immigration debate on its head.

The same set of GOP strategists, lobbyists, and donors who have always favored a proposal like the Gang of Eight immigration bill argue that the great lesson of the 2012 election is that the GOP needs to push for immediate amnesty and a drastic surge in low-skill immigration.

This is nonsense.

The GOP lost the election—as exit polls clearly show—because it hemorrhaged support from middle- and low-income Americans of all backgrounds. In changing the terms of the immigration debate we will not only prevent the implementation of a disastrous policy, but begin a larger effort to broaden our appeal to working Americans of all backgrounds. Now is the time to speak directly to the real and legitimate concerns of millions of hurting Americans whose wages have declined and whose job prospects have grown only bleaker. This humble and honest populism—in contrast to the Administration’s cheap demagoguery—would open the ears of millions who have turned away from our party. Of course, such a clear and honest message would require saying “no” to certain business demands and powerful interests who shaped the immigration bill in the Senate.

In Senator Schumer’s failed drive to acquire 70 votes, he convinced every single Democrat in his conference to support a bill that adds four times more guest workers than the rejected 2007 immigration plan while dramatically boosting the number of low-skill workers admitted to the country each year on a permanent basis. All this at a time when wages are lower than in 1999, when only 58 percent of U.S. adults are working, and when 47 million residents are on food stamps. Even CBO confirms that the proposal will reduce wages and increase unemployment. Low-income Americans will be hardest hit.

Ordinarily, this would be an act of political suicide for Democrats. How can they possibly succeed with a plan that will so badly injure American workers? Perhaps Senator Schumer, the White House, and their congressional allies believe the GOP lacks the insight to seize this important issue, push away certain financial interests, and make an unapologetic defense of working Americans. They seem, in fact, to expect the GOP House to drag their bill across the finish line. Indeed, more than a few in our party will argue that immigration reform must “serve the needs of businesses.” What about the needs of workers? Since when did we did we accept the idea that the immigration policy for our entire nation—with all its lasting social, economic, and moral implications—should be tailored to suit the financial interests of a few CEOs?

Americans broadly oppose further increases to our current generous immigration levels by a 2-1 margin, but the opposition among those earning less than $30,000 is especially strong: they prefer a reduction to an increase by a 3-1 margin. And no wonder: according to Harvard’s Dr. George Borjas, it’s the working poor whose wages have declined the most as a result of high immigration levels.

The GOP has a choice: it can either deliver President Obama his ultimate legislative triumph—and with it, a crushing hammer blow to working Americans that they will not soon forgive—or it can begin the essential drive to regain the trust of struggling Americans who have turned away. As Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol wrote in a joint op-ed, “the Gang of Eight bill unleashes a flood of additional low-skilled immigration. The last thing low-skilled native and immigrant workers already here should have to deal with is wage-depressing competition from newly arriving workers… It’s most important that the party perform better among working-class and younger voters concerned about economic opportunity and upward mobility.”

Like Obamacare, this 1,200-page immigration bill is a legislative monstrosity inimical to the interests of our country and the American people. Polls show again and again that the American people want security accomplished first, that they do not support a large increase in net immigration levels, and that they do not trust the government to deliver on enforcement. The GOP should insist on an approach to immigration that both restores constitutional order and serves the interests of the American worker and taxpayer. But only by refusing any attempt at rescue or reprieve for the Senate bill is there a hope of accomplishing these goals.

Instead of aiding the President and Senator Schumer in salvaging a bill that would devastate working Americans, Republicans should refocus all of our efforts on a united push to defend these Americans from the Administration’s continued onslaught. His health care policies, tax policies, energy policies, and welfare policies all have one thing in common: they enrich the bureaucracy at the expense of the people. Our goal: higher wages, more and better jobs, smaller household bills, and a solemn determination to aid those struggling towards the goal of achieving financial independence.

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Source URL: http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/sessions-republicans-gop-elite-view-immigration-nonsense_741141.html

More and more Americans are becoming concealed-carry permit holders

by Erika Johnsen

Firearms sales have been on the up and up since President Obama was elected in 2008, and the federal government’s attempt to pass more national gun-control measures did nothing to quell the firearms industry’s personal economic boom. It isn’t merely gun sales, however, that have lately been experiencing a major surge; the WSJ has the numbers indicating an encouraging trend of more and more Americans taking the responsibility of carrying a concealed weapon upon their person. We’re only halfway through 2013, and it already looks like plenty of states are on track for their biggest permitting years on record:

Since July 1 of last year, Florida has granted more than 173,000 new concealed-carry permits, up 17% from the year before and twice as many as five years ago, for a total of about 1.09 million permits in the state.
Ohio, meanwhile, is on pace to nearly double last year’s total of 65,000 new permits, which would be nearly three times as many as in 2007. And Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming and Nebraska all have nearly matched or surpassed last year’s totals with half of 2013 still to go.
A dozen states surveyed for this article, including Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, issued 537,000 permits last year, an 18% increase compared with a year prior and more than double the number issued in 2007. Early figures for 2013 show many states are on pace for their biggest year ever. …
“I suppose it’s the same reason people are reporting gun sales are up and ammunition sales are up,” said Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, referring to concern among gun owners about the recent push for gun control. “It’s nothing unique in Ohio.…It seems to be a consistent trend across the board.”

The mass murders in Newton, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado spurred a gun debate at not only the national but the state level, and much of the media focus was on states that undertook efforts to tighten their gun laws (Connecticut, New York, Maryland, California, and Colorado figuring prominently).
Plenty of states, however, actually went about easing up on gun laws; the WSJ mentions that at least 20 states have loosened laws on concealed-carry, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Individual states’ measures have included making permits cheaper and easier to gets, doing away with permits altogether, allowing concealed carry in more places, and/or generally streamlining the process through which their law-abiding residents can exercise their Second-Amendment freedoms and protect themselves and their families, neighbors, and communities.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/05/more-and-more-americans-are-becoming-concealed-carry-permit-holders/

Police chief killed with rifle lost in ATF gun-tracking program

Police chief killed with rifle lost in ATF gun-tracking program

By Richard A. Serrano

July 5, 2013, 12:45 p.m.

WASHINGTON—A high-powered rifle lost in the ATF’s Fast and Furious controversy was used to kill a Mexican police chief in the state of Jalisco earlier this year, according to internal Department of Justice records, suggesting that weapons from the failed gun-tracking operation have now made it into the hands of violent drug cartels deep inside Mexico.

Luis Lucio Rosales Astorga, the police chief in the city of Hostotipaquillo, was shot to death Jan. 29 when gunmen intercepted his patrol car and opened fire. Also killed was one of his bodyguards. His wife and a second bodyguard were wounded.

Local authorities said eight suspects in their 20s and 30s were arrested after police seized them nearby with a cache of weapons — rifles, grenades, handguns, helmets, bulletproof vests, uniforms and special communications equipment. The area is a hot zone for rival drug gangs, with members of three cartels fighting over turf in the region.

A semi-automatic WASR rifle, the firearm that killed the chief, was traced back to the Lone Wolf Trading Company, a gun store in Glendale, Ariz. The notation on the Department of Justice trace records said the WASR was used in a “HOMICIDE – WILLFUL – KILL –PUB OFF –GUN” –ATF code for “Homicide, Willful Killing of a Public Official, Gun.”

Hundreds of firearms were lost in the Fast and Furious operation. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed illegal purchasers to buy the firearms at the Lone Wolf store in the Phoenix suburb and other gun shops in hopes of tracing them to Mexican cartel leaders.

The WASR used in Jalisco was purchased on Feb. 22, 2010, about three months into the Fast and Furious operation, by 26-year-old Jacob A. Montelongo of Phoenix. He later pleaded guilty to conspiracy, making false statements and smuggling goods from the United States and was sentenced to 41 months in prison.

Court records show Montelongo personally obtained at least 109 firearms during Fast and Furious. How the WASR ended up in the state of Jalisco, which is deep in central Mexico and includes the country’s second-largest metropolis, Guadalajara, remained unclear.

After the shooting in Jalisco, local officials said some of the suspects confessed to two other shootouts in the area, including one that left seven people dead, all part of the continuing feud by rival cartel members.

The ATF declined to discuss the matter; officials said they are still compiling an inventory of all the lost firearms for a complete account of the Fast and Furious operation.

Instead of being tracked, almost all the weapons were lost as they flooded across the border into Mexico. In all, some 211 people were killed or wounded by Fast and Furious weapons in Mexico, according to Mexican authorities. And on this side of the border, a Fast and Furious weapon was found at the Arizona scene where U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was slain in 2010.

Terry’s slaying set off a number of investigations in Washington into Fast and Furious. It led to the firing or demotion of many ATF officials, including the agency’s acting director, who stepped down. It ultimately prompted the GOP-controlled House to vote Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over a number of Fast and Furious records sought by the House Oversight Committee.

Texas vs. California: 6-0, 6-0, 6-0

Texas vs. California: 6-0, 6-0, 6-0

What should be the Federer vs. Nadal of state-level competition has become a lopsided trouncing: Texas has humiliated its opponent in straight sets. The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis is out with its state-by-state economic growth numbers for 2012, and Texas is dancing the two-step all over California’s “recovery.” The Hill reports:

California’s economy shrank an additional 2.6 percent [cumulatively from 2009-2011] before it grew 3.5 percent [in 2012].
So, in the past five years California’s real GDP contracted 0.3 percent, one of ten states where economic activity was less in 2012 than it was in 2008.
By contrast, the BEA revised Texas’ growth upward by 0.5 percent from 2009 to 2011.
Texas’ newly revised real GDP growth from 2009 to 2012 was 13 percent.
From 2009 to 2012, California’s share of the U.S. economy shrank from 13.1 percent to 12.9 percent while Texas’ portion of the American economy increased from 8.2 percent to 9 percent.

The most telling indictment of California’s performance? If you removed oil and gas from the Texas economy, the Lone Star state has still outpaced growth in California. Apologists for the Golden State shouldn’t forget that it is in possession of two-thirds of America’s proven shale reserves, a treasure trove that rivals many resource-rich sovereign countries.
The BEA also found, to the shock of all concerned, that while California was experiencing the largest tax hike in US history, the national economy grew at eight times the pace of California’s. The Texas economy, by contrast, grew 71 percent faster than the national economy that year.
Finally, and most disturbingly, the US Census Bureau found that between 2009 and 2011, California had the highest supplemental poverty measure in America, with 42 percent more people in poverty as a share of the population than Texas. This can’t all be chalked up to immigration either: illegal immigrants account for the same percentage of Texas’s population as they do California’s.
California’s storied industries (tech, agriculture, entertainment) still give it a massive and dynamic economy. But as for which governance model is working best for its citizens, Texas is way ahead.
[Images of Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov. Rick Perry courtesy of Wikimedia]

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/06/25/texas-vs-california-6-0-6-0-6-0/

54 Months: Record Stretch of 7.5%+ Unemployment Continues

54 Months: Record Stretch of 7.5%+ Unemployment Continues

 

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By Terence P. Jeffrey

 

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama board Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on June 26, 2013, before flying to Africa. (AP Photo)

(CNSNews.com) - Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate.
Today, BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate for June was 7.6 percent, the same it was in May.
In December 2008, the month after Obama was first elected and the month before he was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.3 percent. In January 2009, it climbed to 7.8 percent. In February, the month Obama signed what the Congressional Budget Office would later determine was an $830 billion economic stimulus law, the unemployment rate climbed to 8.3 percent.
In the Obama era, the unemployment rate peaked at 10.0 percent in October 2010. It did not dip below 9 percent until October 2011, when it hit 8.9 percent. From August to September 2012, it dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent—the first time during Obama’s tenure it went under 8 percent.
Since then, the lowest it has gone has been 7.5 percent—the rate it hit in April. But after April, it ticked back up to 7.6 percent in May and stayed at 7.6 percent in June.
Prior to Obama’s presidency, the longest stretch of national unemployment at 7.5 percent or higher, as reported by the BLS, was 32 months from September 1981 through April 1984. From August 1981 to September 1981, unemployment climbed from 7.4 percent to 7.6 percent. It then stayed above 7.5 percent until April 1984, when it was at 7.7 percent. In May 1984, it dropped to 7.4 percent.
On January 10, 2009, Christina Romer, who was President-elect Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, and Jared Bernstein, who was Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s top economic adviser, published a report predicting that if Obama’s proposed stimulus plan were enacted the unemployment rate would not top 8 percent.
In a February 2013 report on the impact of Obama’s stimulus law—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—the Congressional Budget Office said that it estimated the law would have the net effect of increasing federal budget deficits by $830 billion between 2009 and 2019.
CBO also estimated that the stimulus had the impact in the last quarter of 2012 of lowering “the unemployment rate by between 0.1 percentage points and 0.4 percentage points.”

- See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/54-months-record-stretch-75-unemployment-continues#sthash.7Id5twfF.dpuf

Midlands Voices: Stop Obamacare in its tracks

Midlands Voices: Stop Obamacare in its tracks

By Ben Sasse

 The author has served as chief of staff for the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and as assistant U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush. Currently president of Midland University, he has been exploring a U.S. Senate candidacy.
 

Obamacare is a ticking time bomb for Democrats in the 2014 elections. Nobody knows this better than President Barack Obama, which is why over the Fourth of July holiday weekend he unilaterally decided to delay its controversial employer mandate provision until after the midterm elections.
No wonder: The $2,000 per-worker fine is disastrously unpopular. Already, employers are laying off workers and dramatically cutting others’ hours in an effort to skirt the new penalty. The fact that this perfectly predictable development surprises many in Washington only underscores that they didn’t really read this 2,300-page monstrosity before they passed it.
Desperate for any appearance of victory, Republican leaders have decided to match the president’s delay with one of their own: proposing legislation to delay for a year the mandate for individuals. Perhaps useful, perhaps not. Well-meaning people can differ about legislative strategy.
But if Republicans don’t have a larger plan to actually oppose this unprecedented power grab in a way the American people will understand, then they will have given up the ghost on actually turning back the slew of new job-killing bureaucracies.
Congress should completely defund Obamacare by October, when the government next runs out of money. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there are times for half-measures, and there are times to get the job done. If Republican leaders intend to vote only on an individual mandate delay, then this half-measure will serve only to keep Obamacare limping along now to wreak its havoc and ruin on the economy later.
Republican leaders are understandably wary of being blamed for a government shutdown at the next showdown about running out of money (yet again).
But Congress must not do anything to prop up this faltering law. For the moment the Obama administration declared the employer mandate would be delayed until after a tough election, this debate transcended a fight over health care and became a fight about transforming our constitutional system of separate but equal branches of government.
This is now about ceding power to a runaway executive branch that the Constitution simply does not allow.
Just because that law bears Obama’s fingerprints and in slang bears his name does not mean that he has the imperial power to curtail it, any more than he could expand it. If he could, what would stop him from simply expanding it to outlaw, say, large Slurpies? Or unilaterally expanding it to mandate that all Americans cough up membership fees for gyms?
By enforcing only the provisions he finds politically expedient or tolerable, the president decided he could make the law what he desires it to be rather than what the words on the page actually say. He essentially granted himself the line item veto.
From the plain reading of the Constitution that the president’s fundamental duty is to “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed” (Article II, Section 3); to the U.S. Supreme Court’s unequivocal judgment in Kendall v. United States (1838) that the president may not claim a power to “control the legislation of Congress”; to the court’s resounding rejection of a mere statutory line-item veto in Clinton v. City of New York (1998) — there is no uncertainty about the president’s duty to either enforce a law entirely or to ask the duly authorized Congress to amend it. He does not have the power of amendment himself.
The Constitution nowhere empowers the president to ask that Congress pass unknowably large laws and then to muck around inside them until he finds portions to choose to implement and enforce.
Sadly, few Democrats in Congress are standing up to express outrage at such a blatant attempt by a president to usurp the powers of the other two branches of government. And it’s downright terrifying that many Republican leaders in Congress appear willing to softly baptize this extraordinary power grab by settling merely for a fig leaf of quid pro quo modification of a different portion of this unpopular law.
If they are serious about their duty to uphold the Constitution, they will stick with defunding the law that the president has just refused to implement in a lawful manner.
The time to fully stop Obamacare is now, for it is suddenly about so much more than health care.

 

The Economy Wouldn’t Be So Rotten If Barack Obama Were President!

by John Hinderaker in Barack Obama, Economy, Obama administration

Today President Obama “pivoted” back to the economy for something like the 11th time. Paul set out the embarrassing history of Obama’s pirouettes here:

“Obama Pivots to Jobs Tour at End of Scandal Filled Week” (ABC News, 5/18/13)
“Obama’s Texas Trip An Attempt To Refocus On Jobs, Economy” (Washington Times, 5/8/13)
“Obama: State Of The Union To Focus On Jobs” (USA Today, 2/8/13)
“Obama Turns To Congress For Jobs Help” (The New York Times, 6/1/12)
“Obama Turns Attention To Economy After Fundraising Pitch (Associated Press, 5/11/12)
“Fresh Off Debt-Ceiling Brawl, Dems Pivot To Talk About Jobs” (The Hill, 8/3/11)
“Obama To Focus On Jobs” (San Jose Mercury News, 1/23/11)
“Obama To Focus On Jobs, Spending In State Of The Union Speech (The Tennessean, 1/27/10)
“Hill Democrats Set To Pivot To Job Creation” (Washington Times, 1/25/10)
“Obama Pivots To Jobs As Key Theme” (Politico, 1/8/10)
“Obama Turns Focus To Job Creation” (Associated Press, 12/5/09)

So what did Obama tell us in his speech today? “Washington” has taken its eye off the ball by failing to focus on the economy!

But with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop. This needs to stop.

So after 4 1/2 years in office, Obama is still campaigning against “Washington,” as though his administration’s failures have nothing to do with him. In recent speeches, Obama has taken to counting down the number of days he still has to serve as president; the number now stands at somewhere around 1,200. We can be sure of one thing: on not a single one of those 1,200 days will Obama ever take responsibility for the consequences of any act or omission he has committed in office.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/07/the-economy-wouldnt-be-so-rotten-if-barack-obama-were-president.php

Mainstream media ignorance of Muslim Brotherhood looms

By HUGH HEWITT

Topics: Islamic Jihad Columnists

"Let us teach these [Egyptian] children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity."
That was a tiny part of the hatred that the leading Muslim Brotherhood intellectual of the last century, Sayyid Qutb, brought back to Egypt from an extended trip to America in the late 1940s. His dream, and the dream of the Brotherhood he led and nourished until his execution by the Nasser regime in 1966, was for a deeply anti-American "theocratic Islamic state."
The founder of the Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, gave the organization its mission of Islamization of the world and its "secret apparatus" within its public core, but it was Qutb who provided the ideological fuel in his books and lectures that powers the movement to this day.
The details of Qutb's life and of the Brotherhood's founding in 1928 and evolution in postwar Egypt can be found in Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

Here is the Wright's key summary of the ideology of the Brotherhood:
"The Islamists wanted to completely reshape society, from the top down, imposing Islamic values on all aspects of life, so that every Muslim could achieve the purest spiritual expression. That could be accomplished only through a strict imposition of Shariah, the legal code drawn from the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, which governs all parts of life."
Ignorance of the Muslim Brotherhood's founding, evolution and still-radical agenda remains profound in the West. Imagine a United States indifferent to communism's theory and practice in the years following the Russian Revolution or even after the opening of the Cold War.
That is the parallel to the indifference in the mainstream media to the Brotherhood today, but the persistence of the ignorance is puzzling because of the existence of such a powerful antidote to it.
Wright is a man of the Left, the New Yorker's most accomplished journalist, and "The Looming Tower" rightfully commands the respect of America's public intellectuals from left to right. So why haven't large swaths of the governing class read it, much less applied its history to the current counterrevolution sweeping Egypt?
I ask most elected officials and almost all journalists I interview if they have read "The Looming Tower." Nine out of 10 candidly admit they have not. The book came out in 2006, so the odds are they won't be getting to it soon even as the Brotherhood enters into a deadly confrontation with Egypt's secularists and as Islamists in Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world encounter organized resistance to their own rush to power of the past two years.
Qutb "saw the West as a single cultural entity," Wright wrote. "The distinctions between capitalism, and Marxism, Christianity and Judaism, fascism and democracy were insignificant by comparison with the single great divide in Qutb's mind: Islam and the East on the one side, and the Christian West on the other."
Everything was inside of Islam or outside and opposed to it. But that didn't mean the outside had nothing to offer. Qutb "saw in the party of Lenin a template for the Islamic politics of the future, the politics he would invent."
So why do American political and media elites remain so steadfastly and stubbornly unwilling to learn the history so relevant to heir own future? Fear built on laziness, bordered by political correctness: They don't want to know.
HUGH HEWITT, Washington Examiner columnist, is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/mainstream-media-ignorance-of-muslim-brotherhood-looms/article/2533579

Federal Employees Now Make 50 % More Than You

 by PatriotsBillboard

Surprise: Federal Employees Make 50 Percent More than You (Benefits Not Included) – Treat Them Right, They Do Whatever They Can To Justify Their Jobs While Screwing Public
7-28-13 Yesterday, as part of our look at the distribution of income for U.S. federal government employees in 2011, we compared them with the distribution of incomes earned by all individual American income earners. But is that really a good comparison?
If we’re talking about major contributors to the level of income inequality in the United States, the answer is clearly yes. But then, that includes everyone from widows drawing Social Security survivors benefits and people who only work part time during the course of the year. One thing we reported in our previous analysis is that roughly 95% of the 2,221,780 civilian, non-postal service members of the U.S. federal government workforce work full-time, all year-round.
So, if we want to get a better sense of how the distribution of income for U.S. federal government employees compares to U.S. individual income earners, we should compare them with the portion of the U.S. population who is employed in full-time jobs, all year round.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done in the following chart!:

In our chart, we find that the median income earned by a U.S. individual in 2011 who works full-time, all year-round is $44,934, some $22,040 less than the median income earned by U.S. federal government employees. And That Doesn’t Included Lavish Benefits. rc
Meanwhile, the average income earned by a U.S. individual in 2011 was $59,804, which is $14,632 less than the average income of $74,436 earned by U.S. federal government employees.
So, once again, we find that the pay of U.S. federal government employees are strongly skewed to the upper end of the income spectrum of the United States.
But then, that only considers the cash portion of their compensation. In the next part of our analysis, we’ll factor in the value of the benefits that each receive!
References
Asbury Park Press. Federal Employees, 2011. [Online Database]. Accessed 28 June 2013
U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey. Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) Supplement. Table PINC-01. Selected Characteristics of People 15 Years and Over, by Total Money Income in 2011, Work Experience in 2011. Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex: Worked Full-Time, Year-Round, Both Sexes, All Races. [Excel Spreadsheet]. Accessed 28 June 2013