-By Warner Todd Huston
President Obama’s home state of Illinois has gained a new distinction: it tops the nation in the growth of the number of its citizens on food stamps.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 15.7 percent of the Land of Lincoln’s population are now enrolled in the food stamp program.
As Joe Schoffstall points out: “The USDA’s latest data shows 2,023,635 Illinoisans were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in February 2013. In February of 2012, 1,831,898 people took part in the program. That’s an increase of 10.5 percent in just one year.”
Schoffstall further notes that, “Illinois was the only state to see a double-digit increase of the number of residents enrolled in the SNAP program from the same time period last year.”
This should come as no surprise. Illinois consistently ranks in with the bottom worst states in nearly every metric used to measure a successful state.
Continue reading “
Illinois Tops Nation in Growth of Food Stamp Recipients”
A coalition of 27 Congressmen have joined together to sign a letter urging the Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder to rescind an order to deport a German family whose only crime was to homeschool their children.
Bob Shrum, a longtime Democrat operative, has decided that President Obama’s handling of the White House during this IRS scandal is bad. Maybe not “Nixonian” bad, but is instead a sort of Carteresque incompetence because of the way the President has handled these recent crises.
President Obama chose former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius to head the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency most involved in implementing the Affordable Care Act. But Sebelius is under heavy criticism for her efforts thus far to break out the “train wreck” that is Obamacare.
The federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has partnered with La Raza–a group widely believed to be racist–to encourage more Hispanics to apply for higher position within the government.
The New York Times is exasperated with the lack of progress in Congress of “fixes” to the massive and far reaching Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. This exasperation has evinced itself in an odd way as the Times seems to be expressing sympathy for lobbyists and businesses trying to make changes to the law.
In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, senior Illinois Senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, expressed his doubt as to whether bloggers deserved Constitutional protection for their work online.
During the May 22 broadcast of National Public Radio’s “
Living up to his promise to attack even Democrats that he deems insufficiently anti-gun, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced an ad buy to criticize Arkansas’ Democrat Senator Mark Pryor.
By all accounts the Interstate 5 bridge collapse in Washington State was a result of an over sized truck load as opposed to “failing infrastructure.” But a plea for greater federal spending figured prominently in many reports on the accident nonetheless.
There has been much speculation in the media on why Obama’s current scandal of the IRS targeting conservative groups for attack didn’t come out last year when the initial flurry of reportage on the incident was seen. Well, The New York Times thinks it has the answer: it was Rush Limbaugh’s fault.
In 2007 when Barack Obama was running for President the first time there was a controversy raging over whether U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez was right to accede to President Bush’s order to fire a handful of U.S. attorneys. Obama then criticized the AG for politicizing the office. Flash forward to 2013 and he’s now standing up for an AG that is far worse than what he claimed Gonzalez ever was.
The intrepid Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News has been one of the few reporters attempting to dig deep into controversial stories–and by controversial we mean stories that Obama would rather see go away. But after her work on Fast & Furious and Benghazi, she is now reporting that she’s been shut out of the information loop by the White House.
A new poll conducted jointly by The Washington Post and ABC News revealed some interesting trends. Among other findings, more Americans feel that Obama and his administration are lying about Benghazi, a majority feel that the IRS acted inappropriately by targeting conservative groups, and the media is still distrusted with a majority feeling that the Justice Department’s seizure of the AP’s phone records was justified. Despite all this disapproval, Obama’s approval rating is still just over 50 percent positive.
The Conservative Hispanic Society has joined the growing list of conservative groups that feel that they, too, were targeted by the Internal Revenue Service in its recent campaign of harassment. In a statement, CHS is “expressing outrage” over what it feels is Obama’s “infiltration of every aspect of our government.”
Earlier today it was reported that several Fox News reporters were targeted by the Department of Justice over interaction with an employee(s) at the State Department. In the investigation, Fox News’ James Rosen was fingered by the DOJ not as just a reporter getting “classified” information, but an “aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator.” This is such a shocking charge that even The New Yorker has come to Rosen’s support.
Bill Press is a liberal radio show host with a syndicated show heard across the country, so, naturally, Press is also an Obama supporter. But even this Obama supporter thinks that it is time for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to be fired.
On the May 19 broadcast of CNN’s State of the Union, host Candy Crowley said that Obama was late in identifying the attacks in Benghazi as terrorism quite contrary to what she said during the Presidential debates late last year.
Politico has declared embattled Attorney General Eric Holder untouchable after the many scandals, lapses, overreaches, and contempt charges have failed to induce the President to fire him.
CNN’s chief anti-gun zealot Piers Morgan may have been loathe to admit it, but this IRS scandal seems to validate some of his detractor’s distrust of government.
On May 14 after news broke that President Obama had once again attacked talk radio host Rush Limbaugh by name, El Rusbo joked that he was “living rent-free in Obama’s head.” It’s hard to fault Limbaugh’s logic on this. After all, the President of the United States of America has used his bully pulpit to bully Rush nearly a dozen times since he became President.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe host, Joe Scarborough, is nearly apoplectic over the recent IRS admission that it used the power of its office to intimidate conservative groups throughout Obama’s presidency. Not necessarily because the IRS was acting so poorly, but because the scandal hurts his anti-gun argument.