Obama was right on the individual mandate…before he was wrong.
Americans agree that the mandate is unconstitutional. A recent Gallup poll found that “Americans overwhelmingly believe the ‘individual mandate,’ as it is often called, is unconstitutional, by a margin of 72% to 20%.” And even a majority of Democrats in the poll agrees with this position.
Doug Ross has a great list (with links for further reading) of the destructive “firsts” that Obama has perpetrated in his first term. It’s well worth taking a look.
Yes, he’s historic, alright.
There are dozens more at Ross’ page, so go check it out at http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/06/president-barack-obamas-complete-list.html.
-By Warner Todd Huston
The price of gasoline getting you down, bunkie? I don’t blame you because it is hitting us all hard in the wallet. Oh, there’s lots of finger pointing, to be sure. The left wants to blame the Republicans sold out to the oil industry, the right blames Obama for refusing to allow us to explore for and go after our own sources of energy because he is sold out to the disastrously failed “green energy” sector.
But there are more than American politics at work in the wildly rising costs of gasoline. China, Europe, the Mid East, they all have a hand in this situation, not to mention the commodities market and the buyers, sellers, and speculators there.
It is definitely not as simple as just blaming either of our political parties.
So, just what the heck is going on here? Tune in to the Fox Business Network tonight and find out.
On Thursday at 7 PM Central Time, FBN’s Gerri Willis presents her special report, The Willis Report: Gas Price Shock. Willis explores the rising cost of gas and oil in the United States and will examine the key influences causing the spike in gas prices enlisting a panel of experts to offer solutions along the way.
Guests will include: Gulf Oil CEO Joe Petrowski; AAA Expert Robert Sinclair; Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Robert Bryce; Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R-ND); Dr. Michael Burgess (R-TX), among others.
Tune in to Fox Business Network on Thursday March 22nd, 7:00 PM/CT and find out what is going on.
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Fox Business Network Special Report: Gas Price Shock!”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The Washington Post did an amazing thing over the weekend. It published a story that highlights the critical failure of the President to achieve what could have been a signature success in his first term, that of achieving a budget compromise with the GOP.
The Post, usually a paper with a center left perspective, really took Obama to task for creeping up to a compromise with GOP House Leader John Boehner but then abruptly pulling away, jettisoning the nearly accepted compromise, and slamming the GOP with his left-wing ideology instead of reaching the agreement that was just within his grasp.
Many Republicans are likely glad that Boehner’s reaching out to the president was slapped away by a hard-core, left wing hand, but the facts on the ground are — at least according to the WaPo — that it was Obama that torpedoed the compromise, quite despite his lies that it is the partisan GOP what done the dirty deed.
the Post describes the situation back in July of 2011. John Boehner the establishment Republican and leader of the House had crept into the White House through a side door that the media could not see. He brought with him the Tea Party-linked Eric Cantor, a “good sign” that the GOP was ready to compromise, says the Post.
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Wash. Post: Obama the Failed and Hard-Edged Partisan President”
-By Warner Todd Huston
The Obama administration’s Department of Justice under embattled Attorney General Eric Holder has rejected Texas’ pre-clearance application for its new voter ID law. The feds say the state did not prove that the law will not discriminate against minority voters, especially Hispanics.
DOJ’s head of the civil rights division, Tom Perez, sent a six-page letter to the Texas director of elections saying that Texas had not “sustained its burden” of proof under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to show that the law will not disenfranchise the roughly 11 percent of Hispanic voters that have no state-issued identification.
Anticipating the Obama administration’s decision, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a federal lawsuit in February to have the law implemented immediately. Washington has until April 9 to respond to the lawsuit.
AG Abbott contends that Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is acting on political grounds, not legal.
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Obama’s Dept. of Justice Rejects Texas Voter I.D. Law”
-By Warner Todd Huston
If you want to see how the left skews the narrative using untrue claims and false imagery to sell a message, you don’t need any other example than President Obama’s recent press conference where he continued to perpetrate the myth that Sandra Flake is somehow an innocent coed, a kid barely out of high school, when she is actually a long-time liberal activist in her 30s.
At the press conference the President was asked about Rush Limbaugh and his apology. Not only did Obama drag his own daughters into the debate, but he said he told activist Fluke that “her parents should be proud of her.” This line feeds into the myth that Sandra Fluke is but a young coed. However, Fluke is 30 years old. People stop assuring folks that their parents should be proud of them once they begin approaching middle age, certainly! If Mz. Fluke’s parents still aren’t proud of her as a 30-year-old, I doubt the president can help matters much.
But the thing here is, the left wants to promulgate the false image that Fluke is a young woman, innocent as the driven snow. She just isn’t. She’s a conniving activist, not a wide-eyed coed.
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False Fronts: Obama Still Pretending Fluke is an Innocent Kid”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Obama and his campaign apparatus have been filling the minds of possible campaign donors with calumnies and untruths about the left’s newest, favorite whipping boys: the Koch brothers. Typical of left-wing demagogues, most of what Obama has been saying about the two libertarian leaning businessmen is simply untrue. But that doesn’t seem to stop him from using the Koch brothers as a boogie man who Obama tells liberals are hiding under their beds at night ready to drag them kicking and screaming into the deep, dark pit of American exceptionalism.
Last week, Obama’s re-election campaign sent out a fundraising letter disparaging the Kochs, saying that they were purposefully “jacking up prices at the pump” in order to hurt Americans. The letter, signed by Obama’s Campaign Manager Jim Messina, also attacked the Tea Party and warned that Mitt Romney was going to court the Kochs who he characterized as “two men obsessed with making Barack Obama a one-term president.”
These scare tactics are blatant for their untruths and were easily demolished in a reply letter written by Phillip Ellender, the President of Koch’s Government & Public Affairs department. (Instead of summarizing, I’ll repost the entirety of the letter below.)
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Worst President Ever: Obama’s Intimidation Tactics Continue”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Last week we all got a great lesson in how the left promotes a lie to make Republicans the enemy and this time President Obama was a chief participant.
This is how the game is played: the left-leaning media establishment makes a claim about how rotten Republicans are and Obama then echoes the claim and presents it as the true state of Republican opposition to his policies. The result is that we have a partisan opinion foisted on the public as truth about how mean the GOP is to this poor, well-meaning president. A false media narrative is established by the partisan press, politician adds said meme to a policy speech, presto-chango, a political “fact” is born. But it’s all just a partisan hit job masquerading as fact.
We are talking, of course, about President Obama’s claim that the GOP is “licking their chops” over the bad news of high gas prices. This is the line uttered by the president in his most misleading energy speech delivered in Florida on February 23.
In that speech, President Obama claimed that Republicans were happy that gas prices were hurting Americans. Obama intended to show that Republicans didn’t care that America was hurting, happy they could use it as a political tool to hurt the president and his well-meaning policies.
Here is what he said:
“Some politicians, they see this as a political opportunity. I know you’re shocked by that. Last week the lead story in one newspaper said, ‘Gasoline prices are on the rise and Republicans are licking their chops.’ That’s a quote. That was the lead. Licking their chops. Only in politics do people root for bad news. Do they greet bad news so enthusiastically.”
Note how Obama uses the partisan slam, published in “one newspaper” written by a left-wing writer and presents this as fact about how Republicans feel about rising gas prices. Note that Obama didn’t quote any actual Republican saying rising gas prices is a good thing. He quoted one of his own follower’s partisan claims and then assigned that false narrative to his political enemies.
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Chop Licking: How Obama Uses Falsehoods to Advance His Policies”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Global warmists finally have an email “gate” of their own that they can turn against “deniers” and they are taking full advantage of it. The Warmists are excited that the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based state policy group, has been “outed” for attempting to undermine the religiously held tenets of global warming. Emails to that effect are claimed to have been leaked from this group and the warmists as well as their handmaidens in the Old Media are touting this scandal as proof of… well, it’s a bit hard to discern what it is proof of. In fact, it isn’t “proof” of much of anything, really.
For one thing the documents are fakes, but even if they weren’t… so what?
For quite some time, for instance, Chicago’s Heartland Institute has been holding events, debates, and seminars on the hoax of global warming. The Heartland Institute has an entire section of its website dedicated to debunking global warming and it has produced books and pamphlets attacking the false “consensus” of man-made global warming. Without question, global warming (a quasi religious belief I personally call globabloney) has been a major focus at Heartland for a long time, to be sure.
That being understood — not only understood but glaringly obvious — leaked emails that purport to show that Heartland has a plan to influence lawmakers, scientists, members of the media, and even schools against global warming is a bit of a “well, duh!” Any ten seconds of time spent on the Institute’s website would tend to make it clear that they are against claims of man-made global warming. At some point, even if the documents were real it should not come as any sort of shocking revelation.
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Heartland Institute: The ‘Gate’ Scandal That Never Was”
Candidate Barack Obama attacking John Edwards in 2007 about spending by outside groups. President Obama, tell your former senior staffer Bill Burton and Priorities USA, Thanks, But No Thanks.
Courtesy of http://citizensunited.org/.
Van Jones promised back in November that the Occupy gang will put up over 2,000 candidates for election in 2012. After AIM’s Ben Johnson did some man-on-the-street pop quizzes in the south this past week, we sure hope they come through on Jones’ promise. Ladies and gentlemen: we present to you the fruits of public school social studies programs.
In the meantime, is the Silliness Coming to an End? Occupy DC gets its eviction notice…
… naturally they are communists and anarchists.
-By Warner Todd Huston
Barack Obama’s avalanche of needless regulations on coal-fueled power plants are going into effect and the net result will be the closing of hundreds of power plants all across the country just when our need for power is increasing. This will absolutely necessitate the cost of our power to skyrocket. But, this is exactly what he wants. He wants to rape us for our power. He said so from the beginning.
Well, now that he’s had the opportunity to put into place just some of the new rules and regulations he wants — and he’s only pushed through a tiny bit of what he really wants, indeed — we are already seeing the results of his attack on us.
Look to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland where six coal-fueled power plants are being shut down by FirstEnergy because the retrofitting the power plants will have to undergo to satisfy Obama’s whims is just too expensive to justify.
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Obama Set to Cost Each of Us Hundreds a Year in Higher Electric Costs”
If you thought the 2012 State of the Union was very similar to President Obama’s past State of the Union speeches, you were right…
Video courtesy of www.gop.com/
In 2008, President-elect Barack Obama announced that change had come to America. After three years, the results of that change make many Americans ready to change it back.
And here is a great for-instance of how the Old Media establishment is covering for their Obammessiah. Let’s get in the way back machine and recall how the price of gas was used as a sledgehammer with which to beat George W. Bush about the head. Remember how it was front page news on a daily basis? Well now gas has lingered at highs that it never stayed at during the Bush years and now analysts are saying gas will reach to $4 a gallon this year — an all time high.
Where is the media on this story? Why isn’t it as big a deal as it was 5 and 6 years ago? Ah, yes. We have The One in office. Gosh. How could I forget that the Old Media doesn’t want negative stories about their messiah? Silly me.
Courtesy AllAmericanBlogger.com
-By Warner Todd Huston
Obama? Why, he’s the middle class warrior, isn’t he? He’s the veritable man of the people, darn it. He has beer summits and he chows down on burgers and fries just like us reg’lar folks. Gone are the arugula days, the million-dollar vacations and secret Hollywood star-studded Halloween parties…. one out of three ain’t bad, anyway. On the other hand, perhaps all those claims of Obama’s middle class appeal are a bit of a show. If Obama’s new high-end, très chic campaign gear is any indication, he’s driving right for the vaunted One Percent.
With such famous haute couture designers as Vera Wang and Diane Von Furstenberg, team Obama is offering designer tote bags at $85, t-shirts with the hefty rice tag of $55, and a “Thakoon-designed silk scarf” that will set you back $95. With all that you’ve hardly got the sort of gear you might wear to a beer summit.
It’s all part of the Democrat Party’s “Runway To Win” campaign to raise cash for the cause.
As to the Republicans, t-shirts on Mitt Romney’s website cost no higher than $30, Newt’s t-shirts are only $20 — or you can get an embroidered polo for $40 — and Ron Paul charges even less offering his Ts for the low, low, dime-store prices of $17 and $18.
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Obama Chic: Now Selling Campaign Gear for the One Percent”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Remember back in the days of the debate over Obamacare when unions were the biggest voices screaming in support of the legislation? Many labor union bosses said that nationalized healthcare was exactly what they wanted. Further they said it was what was good for the country. Yet now we learn that Obama has given waivers to some 550,000 union members so that they don;t have to suffer under Obamacare.
Paul Connor reports that a classic Friday evening document dump from the White House shows that unions employing up to 543,812 members have received waivers fro the Obama administration.
Fridays are often the one day of the week when government agencies satisfy transparency rules and release documents that show what they’ve been up to. They release them on Friday in the early evening because they understand that reporters are already headed home for the weekend and TV news departments have already programed their evening newscasts. These agencies also understand that news agencies don’t often cover heavy news on weekends. Further, by the time Monday rolls around the document will be “old news” and many of them will simply escape attention.
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Obama Excuses Over 500,000 Union Members From Obamacare”
-By Warner Todd Huston
While the Old Media has been ecstatic over recent job numbers, claiming that some 200,000 jobs have been added to the economy, we should note that while Obama giveth Obama also taketh away. The media may be trying to claim the President has “created or saved” jobs (the latest weasel word is he’s created job opportunity) but his policies have also cost jobs. In particular his policies are costing jobs in the medical field.
Last week, layoffs were announced in Mississippi at the University of Mississippi Medical Center due in part to the 80 million dollars that it will cost to implement a new computer system named EPIC Systems, Obama’s newly mandated electronic medical records system.
Naturally, the system Obama is forcing on an entire nation of medical professionals and hospitals is the same system owned and operated by Judith Faulkner, one of his own big donors. Faulkner is also a big donor to the Democrat Party. Not surprisingly, besides affording her the lucrative, crony capitalist business deal, Obama also put Faulkner in a key role on the Health Information Technology Policy Committee, the committee responsible for implementing the President’s e-records policy. She has become known as Obama’s medical records czar.
As hospitals and doctors are forced to launch their own EPIC Systems portals, the costs are forcing hard choices for administrators. All to implement what many call a flawed system.
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Obama’s Electronic Medical Records Requirements Already Causing Job Loss”
-By Warner Todd Huston
This past weekend there was a very quiet — in fact a secret — meeting between the chief of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF), Kenneth Melson, and Congressional investigators looking into the gun walker case (also called Operation Fast and Furious) and the results seem to show that the culpability for arming Mexican narco terrorists by Obama’s administration is more widespread than just by the BATF.
BATF head Melson appeared in secret testimony that made matters worse for the Obama administration, showing that the gun smuggling scandal was a shared program among several federal agencies and not just one from the BATF…
Read the rest at RightPundits.com.
-By Warner Todd Huston
It was hailed as a technological first. President Obama was to hold the first “Twitter Townhall.” The truth is more like it was a desperate attempt by the Obama administration to appeal to the youth vote in which nearly every poll shows him losing ground.
The idea was that questions could be submitted by any American citizen via the Internet social media website Twitter. If you are not aware of what Twitter is, it is sort of like a phone texting service — but Internet-based. But on Twitter users are limited to 140 characters (including spaces) per message.
Anyway, getting to Obama’s “for thee but not for meism,” his first answer during the Twitter Townhall was 1,484 WORDS! So much for 140 characters! I guess cramped limitations are only good for the lowly people while he can indulge volumes of words when he wants to.
In fact, this is sort of an allegory for the way Obama treats the nation. He allows himself all sorts of luxuries, but the lowly people need to “sacrifice” and to be hampered and limited.
Amusingly, Obama probably didn’t expect one of his closest allies, Richard Trumka’s AFL-CIO, to needle him via Twitter, either.
Trumka’s AFL-CIO Twitter feed pointedly asked the prez, “Where are the jobs?”
Ouch.
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Twitter Townhall: Another Case of Obama’s ‘For Thee But Not For Me’ Events”
-By Warner Todd Huston
If you haven’t heard about the Gun Walker case, it’s time you learned. This was an Obama administration Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (BATF) program where guns were sneaked across our southern border by Mexican drug dealers. It turns out that these guns were given them by the Obama administration. The idea was that the BATF could trace how guns get disseminated in Mexico. Officials also hoped that the program would help them find where the drug dealers are and if a few people got killed in the process… well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
The BATF program was code named “Fast and Furious.” Naturally it has become quite controversial and has led to much talk that BATF chief Kenneth Melson will be eliminated from that agency – this has yet to occur, though. This scandal is just in the early stages of becoming a major mess to be hung around Obama’s neck so there is no telling where it will end up. Big scandal? Swept under the rug? Could go either way even though it is a major scandal that should sink several members of the Obama admin, if not Obama himself….
Read the rest at RightPundits.com.
-By Warner Todd Huston
When Barack Obama threw millions of our tax dollars at General Motors to “save it,” the administration claimed that it would not involve itself in the “day-to-day management” of the venerable car company. New emails obtained by The Daily Caller, however, casts doubt on this claim.
In fact, as Matthew Boyle reports, the emails “reveal that Treasury officials were involved in decision-making that led to more than 20,000 non-union workers losing their pensions.”
It turns out that Treasurer Secretary Timothy Geithner pressured GM, widely derided as Government Motors, to cut the pensions for the salaried, non-union employees at Delphi, a company owned by GM.
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Contrary to Claim, White House Did Control GM’s Daily Business And Cut Workers Pay?”
-By Warner Todd Huston
I guess that getting the correct information when arranging a smear campaign and protest is not necessary when you are the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Who needs to be in the right when you are an important, powerful, politically connected union, eh? The seriousness of the charge and the effort to “raise awareness” is far more important than targeting the right people to smear, right?
It seems that the SEIU decided to picket against Marcellus Shale drilling, sometimes called hydrofracking, and the severance tax associated with it. So the government employee union picked a site in Hastings, Pennsylvania to highlight this subject and to shame the company that owns the property into siding with them.
Only one tiny, little problem. There is no Marcellus Shale drilling going on at the site they descended upon with their protests. And there never has been. It turns out the SEIU got the wrong place.
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Union Thugs Protest The Wrong Place!”
-By Warner Todd Huston
At the Detroit Economic Club today, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to claim the auto bailout is a success.
It certainly doesn’t seem like a success for the taxpayers. GM stock is about $30 today, and unless it gets up to $54, the taxpayers lose money on the deal. Why would it go up? You want to fight high gas prices by buying a Volt? How does $41 grand a pop sound? And still GM loses money on every one it sells even at that price. Not only that but we are seeing that government subsides for electric cars is good tax money wasted in any case.
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Geithner’s Spin: Auto Bailout A Success”
Bob Parks of Black & Right gives us another one of his amusing videos…
-By Warner Todd Huston
Chicago, Illinois: A new pro-life billboard will be unveiled on March 29 on Chicago’s South side in a heavily African American area. The Chicago billboard will feature a graphic of President Obama with its message saying, “Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted.”
The display is sponsored by the pro-life group Life Always, the same group that put up a billboard in New York informing New Yorkers that abortion is no less than genocide against America’s black population.
The billboard in New York was so controversial that it only lasted a short time before it was taken down due to death threats and threats of violence issued by abortion activists.
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New Pro-Life Billboard With Obama Image From Group Warning of ‘Black Genocide’”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Newsradio 620 in Milwaukee has a shocking story about the dirty underground efforts by the Chicago political machine loyal to Rahm Emanuel and President Obama that is apparently applying its dark arts again, this time assisting the leftist, fleebagging Wisconsin State Senators in their efforts to thwart the democratic process in the Badger State.
WTMJ is reporting that State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R, Juneau) is saying that organizers attached to Obama is purposefully trying to help the recall effort against GOP lawmakers in Wisconsin.
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Obama’s Chicago Machine Helping Wisconsin Fleebaggers?”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Not only are they ripping off Wisconsin’s taxpayers through their lavish salaries, pensions, and benefits, now government employees and their supporters are causing even more expenses born by Wisconsin’s working poor and middle classes because they have caused $7.5 million in damages with their protests at the Wisconsin State capitol building in Madison.
According to reporting by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the damages to the capitol and its grounds have been estimated at $7.5 million.
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Teacher Thugs Cause $7.5 Million in Damage to Wisc. Capitol Bldg”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute reports on how left-wing radicals are fooling sick people in Wisconsin into imagining that Governor Walker’s budget proposal is meant to kill all sick people.
Here is one of those poor people that have been bamboozled into imagining that they are going to be killed by the state of Wisconsin because Governor Walker is attempting to instill some fiscal sanity in the Badger State.
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Absurd: Leftists Fool People Into Fearing That Wisconsin Budget Bill is Crafted to Kill People”
-By Warner Todd Huston
At a rally in New Jersey, we see more teachers that don’t deserve to be allowed near children for their ignorance of history, their wild-eyed hatred, and their outright stupidity.
In this video we see “teachers” who don’t feel bad about parading around in the streets while their children are left without teachers. Worse, we see this historically ignorant, fact starved fools that think that Governor Chris Christie will start murdering them in the streets like Libyan strongman Muammar Gadhafi has been doing in Libya.
People like this should be immediately fired. There is NO comparison between the current anti-union sentiment being evinced by the majority of Americans today and the murderous oppression being perpetrated by Islamicists in the Middle East and northern Africa.
A so-called teacher that equates Gov. Christ Christie to a Gadhafi-like monster is too stupid to be allowed to teach our children.
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VIDEO: Union Thugs Say Gov. Christie Will ‘Shoot Them’ Like Gadhafi”
-By Warner Todd Huston
Courtesy of the Republican National Committee…
This is exactly right. While every state is drowning in debt, Barack Obama and the billions that unions have spent on him and his Democrat Party is being put toward thwarting the will of the voters and to making the state’s and the federal government’s debt far, far worse.
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Video: Stop Obama and His Union Bosses!”