-By Warner Todd Huston
This chart doesn’t really even need much commentary. The high growth policies of Texas compared to the high unemployment and Great Depression level mess in the rest of the country (or Obama’s America) is just too obvious.
Click to embiggen!
(H/T Williams and Canman’s Musings.)
-By Warner Todd Huston
As the Benghazi hearings begin anew on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, it is worth remembering that Dave Weigel of Slate.com, the former Journolist member who delights in attempting to debunk conservative narratives, declared in December that Republican suspicions of a Benghazi cover-up by the Obama administration were “pure fiction.”
Weigel cited the report on the Benghazi debacle issued by the State Department’s Accountability Review Board to argue that conservatives and Republicans are barking up the wrong tree with questions on the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans during the attacks on September 11, 2012.
Certainly Weigel is right to note that the State Dept. report doesn’t exactly jibe with many of the reports made during the early hours and days after the attacks by “conservative media, especially,” as Weigel puts it. It would be a minor miracle if they had, after all. Rarely do early reports of any conflagration fit the final facts.
And since Weigel drew his premature conclusions, the Accountability Review Board has itself come under review, partly, according to Fox News, for apparently failing to interview key witnesses to the attack.
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Slate: Claims of Benghazi Cover Up is ‘Pure Fiction’”
Kelsey Harris The Heritage Foundation
Senators return to Washington next week to debate the Gang of Eight’s comprehensive immigration bill. Heritage President Jim DeMint has said the bill is “unfair, it costs too much, and it’s going to make the problem worse.” We’ve put together an infographic that explains some of the major problems with a “comprehensive” approach to immigration reform.
-By Warner Todd Huston
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is touting his newest effort to cancel the U.S. Constitution and the Second Amendment with a gathering of cartoons by 21 cartoonists who have taken a stand against our Constitutional right to self-protection.
As Bloomie has it, they are “the nation’s best loved cartoonists.” But what Bloomberg doesn’t mention is that this gathering isn’t just a bunch of cartoonists goaded to sudden action by current events, but is a list of artists many of whom are well known as left-wing activists. One is even a La Raza activist and is in favor of giving the southwestern US “back” to Mexico.
Far from just a handful of “beloved cartoonists” who found that recent events have proven that a new approach to the Second Amendment is warranted, these folks are long-time left-wingers that have attacked traditional American principals for decades.
The artists are gathered together under the rubric “Cartoonists Demand Action to End Gun Violence” as sponsored by Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
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Bloomberg Assembles Leftist Cartoonists to Attack Second Amendment”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Abortionist Kermit Gosnell has been on trial in Pennsylvania for seven weeks accused of murdering patients and killing babies born alive in a filthy clinic staffed by untrained, unlicensed assistants, but the trial has barely made a blip on big three network news programs.
The trial has been shocking, to say the least, but the networks have still ignored it. But the networks are obviously not trying to shield viewers from shocking trials. A recent review of network programming by the Media Research Center reveals that not all shocking trials are equal in the network’s eyes as they’ve covered dozens of them over the last 42 days.
MRC has found that hundreds of minutes of airtime have been dedicated to the Amanda Knox trial in Spain and the Arizona-based trial of Jodi Arias who is accused of the brutal murder of her boy friend Travis Alexander.
While practically ignoring the Gosnell trial, MRC found that ABC’s Good Morning America has visited the Arias trail 22 times in the last seven weeks alone. Along with the Arias trial, GMA has hit several other sensational trials amounting to 41 separate stories since the Gosnell trial started.
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Network TV Still Ignoring Gosnell”
Kelsey Harris and Diane Katz, The Heritage Foundation
Regulatory costs skyrocketed in the first term of the Obama Administration, which added nearly $70 billion to the already excessive annual burden of government do’s and don’ts. Virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives is controlled to a varying extent by regulation, including how we light our homes, wash our clothes, fuel our cars, feed our families, and obtain our health care.
The consequences are dire: less investment and innovation, fewer jobs, and the erosion of fundamental freedoms.
In a new report, Red Tape Rising: Regulation in Obama’s First Term, our experts detail the number and cost of these many new rules. We put together this infographic to help understand how these costly regulations affect our lives—and pockets.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Coming years late to the story, The New York Times finally took a look at the Pigford scandal that Andrew Breitbart, Lee Stranahan and the Breitbart team exposed starting in 2010. At last the story is making an appearance across the media.
On Friday morning, April 26, the Times published a long piece titled, “U.S. Opens Spigot After Farmers Claim Discrimination” in which Andrew Breitbart and Congressman Steve King were credited for early criticism of the government’s corruption in the scandal.
It should be remembered that the left-wing Media Matters for America scoffed at Andrew Breitbart calling his interest in Pigford the “stupidest conspiracy theory” on the Internet. Now that MM’s precious New York Times has at last come to Andrew’s side on this issue, one wonders how long MM will keep its anti-Breitbart/Pigford posts up on its site.
A nice recap of the scandal penned by Joel Pollak can be seen on Breitbart.com.
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Pigford Across the Media”
-By Warner Todd Huston
In some of its reports on Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the Associated Press chose to edit one of President Obama’s own gags. The AP strangely edited out the word “Muslim” in one of Obama’s self-referential jokes.
Early in his comments on April 26, President Obama made reference to his young life with a joke and a visual image projected on the video screen.
The President joked that everyone loves Michelle and mentioned that she has even appeared on magazine covers. The President said he also appeared on a magazine cover and showed a humorous mock magazine cover on the video screens. The faux cover showed the President golfing on the cover of “Senior Leisure.”
President Obama then said, “These days I look in the mirror and have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be. Time passes, you get a little gray.”
This joke must have been too insensitive for the AP in some of its reports, however.
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AP Edits ‘Muslim’ Out of Obama’s ‘Muslim Socialist’ WHCD Joke”
-By Warner Todd Huston
On the April 25 broadcast of Rock Center, NBC’s special correspondent Chelsea Clinton “interviewed” the Geico Gecko, that fictional cartoon character that fronts many Geico Insurance company television ads.
The “interview” presented the Clinton progeny reaching the height of her journalism career asking questions with the sort of stilted delivery readily seen in any 7th grade stage play while the animated insurance spokesman replied with light hearted quips. Hard hitting journalism, indeed.
NBC billed the segment as “part of Rock Center’s look at some of the most popular television advertisements, Special Correspondent Chelsea Clinton talked to Geico’s Gecko. The Gecko reflected on his new book and his embarrassing high school yearbook photo along with his rise as one of television’s most popular ad men.”
Oddly, even in the description NBC acted as if the cartoon character is a real, living being.
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(VIDEO) Hard Journalism: Chelsea Clinton Interviews Geico’s Gecko”
Kentucky’s senior Republican Senator uncorked a great ad on liberty, conservatism, and American ideals.
Go get ’em Mitch!
-By Warner Todd Huston
Typical of when a Democrat is president, during a keynote monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the President is spared from too many mean spirited barbs. In keeping with that tradition, TBS’ Conan O’Brien poked a lot of fun at Republicans and conservatives with a bit sharper stick than he used to poke Democrats.
This year’s WHCD started with a slew of media outlets discussing the now annual slam on the event as delivered by long-time Washington reporter Tom Brokaw. The semi-retired NBC anchor has lamented for some time that the whole party atmosphere, replete with musicians and Hollywood celebrities–fittingly, this year the Duck Dynasty folks attended–makes a mockery of the seriousness of the media’s work.
After the President delivered his spiel on Saturday night, late night comedian Conan O’Brien took the stage to deliver the keynote address.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans showed up early as the comedian’s targets and naturally, even though he hasn’t been in office for over four years, now, an obligatory slam of George W. Bush as “stupid” had to be delivered.
Near the top of his address Conan mentioned the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library joking that the library had “Millions of books, articles and documents and if you go you can be the first to read them.”
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Conan O’Brien Slams Republicans, Democrats, the Press at WHCD”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) has been a mainstay Washington to-do for years. Lately, however, it has come under fire for turning Hollywood–literally. In the wake of the event, some outlets continued the bashing but most lavished attention on the dinner or at least lauded it as harmless fun.
One of the quickest to slam the event was Sarah Palin, who did not attend. From her Twitter account, Palin indulged some rather salty language in criticism.
That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 28, 2013
Britain’s Guardian newspaper was so fascinated by the whole thing, the paper set Jim Newell to live blog the night.
Newell opened his coverage with a nice slap at the pretentiousness of it all.
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WHCD Lauded and Bashed”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Early in April, CNN reported that it was thinking of resurrecting Crossfire, the left-right political debate show it canceled in 2005. Now, as the network tries to regain its faded status as a cable leader, the network is reportedly wooing Democrat strategist Stephanie Cutter and longtime conservative bon vivant Newt Gingrich to helm a re-launch of the show.
Crossfire debuted on CNN in 1982 and was originally hosted by Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan the duo who first invented the premise as a talk radio show. As the years passed a series of hosts came and went until the series ended in failing ratings amid criticism of its often times shrill rhetoric.
Sources now tell Politico that Cutter and Gingrich are both in negotiations to host the re-launch. Neither personality returned calls to confirm their status.
Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and past candidate for the 2012 GOP nomination for President, is well known. Stephanie Cutter, however, is notorious for her work as Obama’s former deputy campaign manager.
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CNN’s New ‘Crossfire’ To Star Newt Gingrich & Stephanie Cutter?”
-By Warner Todd Huston
President Obama has upset the entire air traffic control system with his furloughing of air traffic controllers, shutting towers down, and generally inconveniencing every airline passenger quite despite his so-called “airline passenger bill of rights.” Obama claims the evil Republicans are at fault for slashing the FAA’s budget. But did they? A review of the real budgets/i> show that the FAA’s budget actually increased. It wasn’t slashed at all.
Obama’s FAA budget went up by millions of dollars. So, tell us again, why are we suffering a damaged airline industry?
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Obama Claims Air Traffic Controllers Cut to the Bone? Then Why is Budget BIGGER!?”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Buried in a recent Politico story is a line that reveals the utter corruption of “money in politics.” But not that of money spent electioneering, but that spent by government from the assumed bottomless pockets of the American taxpayer. It is a corruption that has destroyed the Constitution, laid waste the rule of law, perverted our system, and crushed the American way of life and it must end.
The Politico segment in question is from an April 17 piece talking about the failure of the anti-Second Amendment Democrats of getting their gun-banning bills passed in the Senate. It is a quote from a gun-ban advocacy group decrying that “bribery” doesn’t work in politics like it used to.
“Bribery isn’t what it once was,” said an official with one of the major gun-control groups. “The government has no money. Once upon a time you would throw somebody a post office or a research facility in times like this. Frankly, there’s not a lot of leverage.”
It is a revealing quote.
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The Corruption of Big Spending Democrats”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Jeff Bauman was just a normal, everyday American before he went to Beantown to attend the Boston Marathon.
Jeff Bauman in happier times
Then Islam intervened.
Then came this Muslim extremist…
Muslim cretin Tamerlan Tsarnaev
-By Warner Todd Huston
This video effectively shows how lacking in veracity the left’s talking points about “high capacity” magazines is and how their reasons for banning them is so fee of any intellectual heft.
But, then again, the left really doesn’t care about “high capacity magazines.” What they care about is getting every new little victory in anti-gun legislation because every new law is one step closer to their ultimate goal of banning all firearms. This year’s “common sense” law is next year’s “not far enough” law and another excuse to go father.
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VIDEO: Boone County IN Sheriff Ken Campbell on Absurdity of Magazine Bans”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Obama and his left-wing, anti-Constitution Democrat allies tried desperately to create universal background checks as one step closer to a national gun registry. This is an important point and Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) did an excellent job pointing that out in his latest op ed explaining why he voted against the Toomey/Manchin bill.
“The Toomey-Manchin amendment admirably attempted to carve out certain protections for gun owners, but today’s carve-outs are tomorrow’s loopholes. The current ‘gun show loophole’ was itself once considered a legitimate carve-out that protected certain private sales.”
And this:
“The amendment also took an incremental step toward universal background checks, which, as a Justice Department memo written earlier this year suggested, are effective only when coupled with a national registration system. Admittedly, the Toomey-Manchin plan prohibited a national registry. Yet it required a massive expansion of gun ownership data collected by federally licensed dealers to which the government has access.”
“After all, you cannot track all gun sales without tracking all gun owners. But the government has no business monitoring constitutionally protected activity, like gun ownership, any more than it has any business tracking what books Americans read or how often they attend church.”
These are EXTREMELY important points to remember when talking to others about this background check idea. It is a nother step toward an illicit national gun registry. And then after that comes confiscation.
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Obama’s Failed Attempt to Create a Nat’l Gun Registry”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Remember when Obama took office and one of his biggest promises was that lobbyists would never gain a foothold in his Administration? Well, now that he doesn’t have to stand for election again he’s doing his level best to give lobbyists one of their biggest perks yet. He’s trying to make it legal to give them your tax dollars so they can lobby to increase your taxes. And in fact he’s already broken laws governing lobbyists several times since 2009.
A report by the government watchdog group Cause of Action found that Obama’s Department of Human Services (HHS) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) gave federal money in the 2009 stimulus program to lobbyists and public relations agencies for them to use to advocate for “tax increases on tobacco and sugar sweetened products.” This is a violation of federal law.
Worse, even more money has been earmarked in Obamacare to do the same thing, again in violation of the law.
It gets even worse.
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Obama’s Budget Would Use Tax $$ to Fund Lobbyists Pushing Tax Hikes”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Through President Obama’s loan guarantees, the American people gave hybrid car-maker Fisker Automotive millions of tax dollars, but now Fisker is on the verge of bankruptcy and is facing lawsuits from at least three different groups for not paying its bills.
In the first week of April, lawyers for Fisker’s laid off employees filed suit saying that the government supported company had fired workers without due notice as required by state and federal laws.
The law firm, Outten & Golden, won a similar lawsuit against green energy company Solyndra, another Obama-supported company that went bankrupt.
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Deadbeats: Obama-Supported Fisker Motors Sued for Non-Payment of Bills”
-By Warner Todd Huston
One of the concepts of capitalism is that it is “creative destruction,” in that companies will rise and fall as the need for them ebb and flow and that as some fall new ones will rise and this will keep the economy humming along nicely. But government quashes this cycle with oppressive taxes and what better day than Tax Day to remind us all of how this president is doing a lot of destroying but NO creating.
So, as Americans waste $168 billion annually to try and satisfy the Internal Revenue Service, here are a few charts and a video from Heritage Foundation to show how bad it has gotten. Just a reminder on Tax Day…
Obama 2013 Tax Increase Twice as Large as Looming Sequestration.
13 Obama Tax Hikes on the Middle Class in 2013
Where Did Your Tax Dollar Go?
And now a word from the House Republican Conference…
Tax Day: Destruction, Yes, Creative, Not Even Close”
-By Warner Todd Huston
In a stinging indictment of President Obama’s tenure in the White House, at The Daily Beast Stuart Stevens slams President Obama for the devastating “new normal” that his failed economic polices have brought to the country. Stevens also blames the Old Media complex for ignoring the pain inflicted on America by those same failed policies.
Stevens begins his April 9 piece relating the sort of economic facts that the rest of the media conveniently ignore. He points out that even as the administration claims that unemployment is only around 8 percent, so many people have dropped out of the work force that the unemployment stat is but a hollow representation of the true unemployment rate.
He also points out that 16 million Americans have been added to Obama’s food stamp rolls since 2008, “a 46 percent increase and greater than the population of Ohio,” Stevens says. “More than 50 million Americans now live in poverty. That’s one in six Americans, and one in five American children.”
This, Stevens says sharply, is the worst since LBJ was president and it was so bad then that the Texan launched a “war on poverty” to try and cure it.
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Obama’s ‘Poverty Plagued’ America”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Despite millions if federal loans, last week luxury hybrid car maker Fisker Automotive fired 80% of its employees at its California-based company. But now those employees hired the same law firm that sued “green energy” company Solyndra to charge that Fisker violated state and federal laws with the layoffs.
On April 5, Breitbart reported that Fisker Automotive, Inc. laid off up to 80% of its employees due to a cascade of major errors and bad business decisions even though President Obama pumped millions in federal tax dollars via loan guarantees into the company starting in 2011.
Fisker’s employees were already on a two week furlough when upon coming back to work were told they would be laid off. Employees reported they had received no severance package but did receive pay for vacation time earned.
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Lawyers: Obama-Supported Fisker Motors Layoff Violated Law”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Cass Sunsetein, one of President Obama’s leading left-wing, university eggheads, has penned an interesting piece in New Republic explaining how the nanny state is really a very important and useful aspect of today’s modern Democrat scheme. It’s for your own good, don’t you know?
Launching his April 8 piece, “Why Paternalism Is Your Friend,” Sunstein evokes New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (mostly failed, not that Sunstein says so) nanny state efforts to take away his constituents’ freedom on such things as trans fats, sodas, and guns. Sunstein points out that to his mind, all this “paternalism” isn’t so bad after all. Throughout his piece Sunstein eschews nannyism for “paternalism” because it sounds nicer, of course. Optics, you know?
As an example of useful paternalism, Sunstein praises Obama’s demand that the auto industry once again up its CAFE standards saying that the new requirements would “save money” for everyone and “who could be outraged by that”? Naturally Sunstein simply accepts Obama’s pie-in-the-sky claims and simply assumes the new standards will actually have the impact Obama claims it will.
Sunstein ignores the fact that in many cases the technology doesn’t even yet exist to satisfy Obama’s draconian fuel economy demands. He also ignores many other facts. Such as the fact that one of the easier ways to achieve the new standards is to make smaller, lighter, and more dangerous vehicles. Americans would end up with tiny cars that go slower and have less resistance to accidents making drivers and passengers less safe on the road. Should people be outraged about that, Mr. Sunstein? In his zeal to give Obama all credit, Sunstein apparently doesn’t think so.
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Supernanny Cass Sunstein’s ‘Friendly Paternalism’: It’s For Your Own Good, America”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Liberal cable TV network MSNBC recently aired a corker of a promo, this one showing on-air personality Melissa Harris-Perry saying that our kids aren’t ours, that they belong to the community and parents need to “get over” this crazy idea that their own kids belong to them.
Straight from the Comintern, Harris-Perry says that we could “plan our investments” better if we could just dispense with the idea that kids belong to parents and that parents should have the responsibility to raise them according to the parents’ ideals and principles. All hail the state who, in Harris-Perry’s views, isn’t just big brother, but is also big mother and big father.
Here is a transcript of what the MSNBC screedist said on the promo:
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MSNBC Host Says ‘Get Over It,’ Kids Belong to Community, Not Parents”
-By Warner Todd Huston
In an interesting break from reality, Roll Call posits that Obama has now “given up” on Republicans as partners for helping him get some “governing done” in Washington DC. Of course, the Capitol Hill newspaper fails to show when it was that Obama ever consider the GOP to be his governing partner in the first place.
For Roll Call, writer Steven T. Dennis claims that, “Obama already seems resigned to the reality” that he won’t be able to successfully initiate his massive re-tooling of America to reflect his left-wing agenda because the GOP isn’t interested in “bipartisan action.”
Dennis reports Obama’s recent lamentation that he can’t get anything done without California’s Democrat Representative Nancy Pelosi back in the House Speaker’s chair and notes his complaining that Boehner and the Republicans won’t just bend to his will so he can do what he wants to do.
But, Dennis reports from Obama’s side of the argument, refusing to point out that President Obama has never considered the Republicans and the millions of voters they represent as important partners in running Washington DC in the first place.
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Roll Call: Obama Has ‘Given Up’ On Those Darn Republicans?”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Only three weeks after re-election in 2012, Sheriff Joe Arpaio was hit with a recall effort. Now, with anti-Arpaio petitions in circulation in Maricopa County, Arizona, “America’s Sheriff” is organizing his forces to oppose a recall backed by the deep pockets of the unions, millions in outside money, and a flood of non-Arizonans arriving to act as the left-winger’s ground troops. (See www.savesheriffjoe.org)
Arpaio’s team is being ramrodded by the Conservative Business League and unlike the opposition’s recall efforts, the CBL is an Arizona-based organization. The duo taking the helm of the save Joe campaign is the CBL’s Ron Ludders and Bob Thomas.
Ludders and Thomas say that the left’s effort to destroy Sheriff Joe Arpaio is no less than an effort to use the Colorado model (the campaign that turned Colorado from red to blue) to give Arizona to the Democrats. It is also a mirror of what the left tried to do to Republican Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and, if successful, would be a model for Democrats to regain power in Texas.
Strangely, Arizona’s recall law is incredibly loose. An elected official in The Grand Canyon State can be recalled for any reason at all and, with one exception, at any time. Unlike such laws in most states, the Arizona law does not require a recall for cause such as criminal activity, fraud, or other real reasons. The only rule seems to be that the elected official has to be in office for six months into his first term before a recall can be mounted. This rule did not apply to the six-term Sheriff. To start a recall, petitioners must gather the signatures of 25 percent of the number of votes cast in the last election.
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America’s Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, Stands Alone Against Unions And Outsiders in Recall Effort”
-By Warner Todd Huston
As President Obama is heard scolding Republicans on a near daily basis for forcing a sequester that is shutting down government and halting funding for things like White House tours, he and First Wife Michelle geared up Tuesday for a star-studded, soul music concert in the White House that featured such stars as Justin Timberlake, Queen Latifah, and the Reverend Al Green.
Only a few days before the big April 9 gala concert, President Obama was still warning of the evils of sequestration, but the purported “severe” cutbacks of government spending didn’t stop the President from enjoying a night of stirring soul music during the program titled, In Performance at the White House: Memphis Soul.
The First Lady kicked off the April 9 tribute to Soul with an hour-long, morning program held in the White House State Dining Room and billed as a “guidance” on the upcoming Memphis Soul performance at the White House. The event was held for students and music lovers and featured soul greats Sam Moore, Mavis Staples, Charlie Musselwhite, Ben Harper and also featuring pop star Justin Timberlake as panel members taking questions from the audience.
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Hypocrisy: Concert Rocks Fiscal Doomsaying White House”