THIS WEEK’S NEWS
A push to defund ObamaCare using the threat of a government
shutdown is gaining momentum among House and Senate conservatives. On Thursday,
a group of 12 senators sent a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
stating that none would support a measure to fund the government if it includes
resources for the healthcare law. And on the House side, 66 Republicans have
backed an effort by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) to discourage GOP leadership
from bringing any bill to the floor that includes ObamaCare money.
Voters think ObamaCare is going to hurt their wallet and
over half want the law repealed, according to a new Fox News national poll. By
a large 47-11 percent margin, voters expect the 2010 health care law will cost
them rather than save them money in the coming year.
A new CBS News poll finds more Americans than ever want the
Affordable Care Act repealed.
But here’s a warning:
“a lot of thoughtful conservatives are looking (to the day Obamacare) is
scheduled to go fully into effect. On that day the government will begin
subsidizing health insurance for millions of Americans. (A family of four with
income as high as $88,000 will be eligible for subsidies.) When people begin
receiving that entitlement, the dynamics of the Obamacare debate will change.
At that point, the Republican mantra of total repeal will become obsolete. The
administration will mount a huge public relations campaign to highlight
individuals who have received government assistance to help them afford, say,
chemotherapy, or dialysis, or some other life-saving treatment. Will
Republicans advocate cutting off the funds that help pay for such care?...(Will
Obamacare) collapse of its own weight? The administration's insurance against
that is the billions of dollars that will start flowing out of Washington Jan. 1. Once
that happens, Republicans will likely stop talking about Obamacare's collapse
and will instead start searching for ways to limit the harm done to millions of
Americans.”
Would you trust thousands of low-level
Federal bureaucrats and contractors with one-touch access to your private
financial and medical information? Under Obamacare you won’t have any choice. http://rare.us/story/move-over-nsa-here-comes-the-obamacare-big-brother-database/#sthash.6eweXyA4.dpuf
As the reality of Obamacare emerges, a disastrous calamity
imposed on the American people, even the most compliant members of the Obama
fan club are beginning to panic. Three union presidents have sent Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi a scathing
letter decrying Obamacare, showing just how out-of-control this law has become.
This astonishing reversal has been underreported so far, except by the
ever-vigilant Tom Gara in the Wall Street Journal. The fact is that the crater
of Obamacare is getting deeper, with sharper edges. The unions are first-tier
political allies "The goal for the White House over the next 15 months is to make
sure the 2014 elections will not just be a referendum on Obamacare."
Obamacare Call
Center hires
part time workers so they don’t have to offer healthcare benefits
As President Obama campaigns to increase the minimum wage,
his own interns aren’t getting paid a cent to work a minimum of 45 hours a
week.
The US national debt stacked in dollar
bills would stretch from earth to moon five times
Some 61 percent of Americans polled say the nation is headed
off on the wrong track compared to 29 percent who say it's headed in the right
direction;
RINO alert:
“President Obama teams with McCain to cut deals.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/behind-the-curtain-new-power-triangle-94648.html#ixzz2ZyRZ1gxr
“The Democratic Party is battling scandals from New York to San
Diego and from city hall to Capitol Hill, as the party
finds itself on the defensive over embarrassing lapses ranging from sexual
misconduct to multiple scandals ensnaring the Obama administration.”
President Obama talked earlier this year of a Democratic
takeover of the House, but instead his party is now in danger of losing the
Senate. The latest blow to their hopes of keeping the upper chamber came from
former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D),who opted out of a race to replace
retiring Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) Schweitzer’s decision deflated the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s annual retreat on Martha’s Vineyard,
where many senators heard the news. “People were very upset,” said a Democratic
donor who was there.
As part of a pilot scheme to help reduce illegal immigration
in Britain, vans with
billboards emblazoned with the slogan “Go home or face arrest” will be
driven around London
boroughs.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is ripping libertarians —
including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — for challenging government surveillance
programs and failing to understand the dangers of terrorism. “This strain of
libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines
I think is a very dangerous thought…”
Rand Paul to Chris Christie: “You need to talk to more real
Americans.”
Political correctness on steroids: A Christian chaplain in the military is being
officially censored and anti-Christian activists are demanding he be
punished. He’s accused of quoting Dwight Eisenhower: “..there are no atheists in the
foxholes."
A nursing student attending Pima
Community College in Arizona was suspended from class and
subjected to accusations of bigotry when she asked that the course she paid for
be conducted in English.
The U.S. Department of Education has officially opened an
investigation into allegations that an Arizona
high school’s “Redneck Day” amounted to a federal civil rights violation. The
point was to dress like – and spoof – “Duck Dynasty,” an A&E reality TV
show which follows a wealthy, eccentric Louisiana
family. “…one kid bedecked himself in Confederate flag regalia, which offended
some students.”
HUD's New 'Fair Housing' Rule Establishes
Diversity Data for Every Neighborhood in U.S.
Last week Janet Napolitano just about tripled her old salary
as Homeland Security Secretary now that she’s confirmed to be the next
president of the University
of California. While the
Board of Regents assured they’re in the business of education, they thought it
made good business sense to pay her $575,000 a year. In addition, she gets a
free house, an $8,000 car allowance and $142,000 for relocation expenses.
What sequester? The
Defense Department just awarded a $31,200 contract (frame included)
to Portraits, Inc. for an official portrait of former Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta. Can’t they just snap his
picture?
NY food stamp recipients are shipping welfare-funded
groceries to relatives in Jamaica,
Dominican Republic and Haiti
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Shelby Steele: The
Decline of the Civil Rights Establishment
6/21
Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted
moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no
Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of
white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the
much smaller Zimmerman…The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very
little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that
first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch. The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon's
cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America's inner
cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural "truth" that
is the sole source of the leadership's dwindling power. Put bluntly, this
leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it
cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background,
was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away
with killing a black person without undermining the leadership's very reason
for being.
The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it
triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean—the
supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the
civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child?
Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking
carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in
self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.
And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where
all of America
begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos.
Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury
could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a
different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment's mistake was to get ahead
of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no
evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department
investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope
that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to
see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested
with obsolescence.
One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman
verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today's
civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas
on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without
fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill
over George Zimmerman?
There are vast career
opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr.
Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless
work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign
blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be
drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of
the corruption and irrelevance of today's civil-rights leadership.
Another good read:
Statism is turning America
into Detroit –
Ayn Rand´s Starnesville come to life. The Observer,
naturally, quotes a native complaining that ‘capitalism has failed us,’ but
capitalism is the one thing the place desperately needs. Detroit has been under Leftist
administrations for half a century. It has spent too much and borrowed too
much, driving away business and becoming a tool of the government unions.
Of Detroit’s $11 billion debt, $9 billion is accounted
for by public sector salaries and pensions…..Under the mountain of accumulated
obligations, the money going into, say, the emergency services is not providing
services but pensions. Result? It takes the police an hour to respond to a 911
call and two thirds of ambulances can’t be driven. This is a failure, not of
the private sector, but of the state. And, even now, the state is fighting to
look after its clients: a court struck down the bankruptcy application on
grounds that ‘will lessen the pension benefits of public employees’. Which brings us to the scariest thing of all. Detroit
could all too easily be a forerunner for the rest of the United States……As Mark
Steyn puts it in the National Review: “Like
Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion,
according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class
and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan
“immigration reform” actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled chain
migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions
are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric
Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious
examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the
class of “community organizers” and the unfortunate denizens of the communities
so organized…..Oh dear. No wonder the president would
rather talk about Trayvon Martin.”
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Illinois Review, a conservative blog, recently unearthed
Illinois Senate records showing that then-state Senator Obama voted for and
even co-sponsored a 2004 bill that expanded the protection of the state's 1961
stand-your-ground law to include immunity from civil liability for people who
use deadly force to defend themselves or their property. The bill wasn't
controversial in the liberal legislature, passing the Senate without dissent
and the state House with only two nays before then-Governor Rod Blagojevich,
also a Democrat, signed it.”
-The Wall Street Journal
"We wonder if Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder is
familiar with the case of Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville, a black woman who received a
20-year prison sentence in May 2012 for firing warning shots against her
allegedly abusive husband. The judge rejected a defense under Florida's stand-your-ground law. Alexander
told police it was to escape a brutal beating by her husband, against whom
she'd already taken out a protective order. For defending herself, she went to
jail -- as some still wish for George Zimmerman. But by standing her ground with
a firearm, she may have saved her life, just like Zimmerman."
-Investor's
Business Daily
"The moral-religious outlook of an older America ...
restrained some of the wilder impulses of the human species. It was
acknowledged fairly regularly that actions produced consequences; that as a man
sowed, so he reaped -- due to which reality it was useful to think carefully
about the crop one was planting, all the while watching the weather. ...
Appraisals of this character fell out of favor as politics assumed a larger and
larger role in life. What politician was going to go around with dour face and
wagging finger, warning happy constituents of reckonings to come? The ancient
moral law fell into disuse. History as a predictor of outcomes turned into
televised entertainment. And so ... Detroit.
Maybe Chicago.
Maybe Los Angeles.
Maybe a Medicare system yoked to unrealistic promises made for the sake of
political returns, the future shoved further into the future, the can kicked as
far down the road as possible. A moral overhaul for a nation suffering from the
neglect of sound moral teaching is, you might say, a bit overdue."
-William
Murchison
__________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
In the People’s Republic of Seattle, Mayor McGinn says he won’t support a
Whole Foods development unless the company raises the wages of its workers. Whole
Foods pays nonmanagement workers on average $16 an hour in Seattle, plus health benefits. Whole Foods has been picked as one of
Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work” for 16 years in a row. McGinn’s action
raises questions. Such as: What standards do businesses now need to meet to
locate in Seattle?
Do they have to run their payrolls past the mayor?
“You can take the community organizer out of the South Side,
but you can’t take the community organizer out of the community organizer.
Today, America
heard threats from the increasingly predictable President Alinsky. “The
position of the middle class will erode further,” Mr. Obama said. “Inequality
will continue to increase, money’s power will distort our politics even more.
Social tensions will rise, as various groups fight to hold on to what they
have, start blaming somebody else for why their position isn’t improving.
That’s not the America
we know.” This is standard-fare Das Kapital by Karl Marx.”
__________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Remember when scientists and other truth-seekers used to get
all riled up about the way the Catholic Church treated Galileo? The outcry was
not over the fact that Galileo was a "peer-reviewed" researcher, and
therefore beyond question. Quite the contrary: the argument was that, from the
point of view of the quest for truth, no one, including the representatives of
official orthodoxy and authority, ought to be regarded as beyond question. In
the Michael Mann lawsuit against Mark Steyn and National Review, it is the "award-winning
researcher" who is joining the fight for Church orthodoxy, while the
defendants are the persecuted Galileos.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/mann_vs_steyn_heresy_shall_be_crushed.html#ixzz2aACxDCRm
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
SECOND AMENDMENT
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D – Calif.) cited her oath to “protect
and defend” the U.S.
Constitution as the reason Congress should enact harsher gun control measures.
Only nine years ago, in the Illinois state senate, President Obama
co-sponsored a bill that strengthened his state’s 1961 Stand Your Ground law.
South Carolina's
Nikki Haley test-fires machine guns and brags 'I did it in heels'
__________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Ann Coulter: Only
black people are expected to never speak against their community. Might we
spend five minutes admiring the courage of blacks who step forward and tell the
truth to cops, juries and reporters in the middle of our periodic racial
Armageddons? …….."I know George, he's my friend." That was Elouise Dilligard, George
Zimmerman's final defense witness. Clear as a bell, this black woman spoke
warmly about "my neighbor George" and went on to describe his nose
being disfigured and bloody right after the shooting. You won't see her on CNN, though. In fact,
you'll never hear a peep about any of these courageous black people, unless you
obsessively research every "race" case of the last 30 years, as I did
for my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. (All these
black heroes appear in my book.) Whites never need to be brave this way.
There's absolutely no pressure on white people to root for their race. In fact,
there's often pressure to root against their race. Instead of being
asked to weep over President Obama's ever having been looked at suspiciously
(probably by Jesse Jackson), could we reflect on the fortitude of ordinary
black citizens who resist "racial solidarity" and speak the truth?
Knocking Zimmerman for his supposed
"overzealousness" ignores the fact that he was doing a job he had
volunteered to do: supporting law enforcement by serving as a neighborhood
watch captain. His community had experienced a rash of property crime that prompted
his neighbors' "decision last September to start a neighborhood-watch
organization, which was initiated by Zimmerman himself. The burglary of Olivia
Bertalan's home was just one of at least eight reported over the previous 14
months-several of which, neighbors said, involved young black men…..As to the
"series of reactions" it "set in train," at whose door may
most of those reactions be laid?.... The
pictures of Zimmerman's injuries bear out his account of the ordeal he was undergoing
and indicate that (Martin) was in the process of killing (Zimmerman). Martin had completely subdued Zimmerman, but
not satisfied with his thuggish triumph, he jumped on his hapless victim and
subjected his head to blunt-force trauma with deadly weapons: to wit, his fists
and the hard concrete sidewalk. Zimmerman endured nearly a minute of this
before he acted. His shot was not "punitive," but preventive…He was
being murdered -- and he stopped it…..These refined gentlemen in their
comfortable offices need to cease their unwarranted criticism of an innocent
man who has already been through too much - and who is sure to go through more.
They're simply echoing the calumny of lead prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda, who
in his closing statement declared that Zimmerman "[has] got a gun, he has
the equalizer, he's gonna take care of it, he's a wannabe cop." Wrong.
George Zimmerman was an ordinary citizen trying to perform a service to a
community with a crime problem.
If Obama Had A City, It
Would Look like Detroit. Consider the following regarding the city of Detroit: 40% of its
street lamps don’t work. 210 of its 317 public parks have been closed…It takes
an hour for police to respond to a 911 call. Only a third of its ambulances are
drivable. One-third of the city has been abandoned. Forty-seven percent of
adults are functionally illiterate Evidently 50 years of governance by
compassionate Obama community organizer types have driven out the business
class and now there is no one left to rail against.
News item: “Unions
ask Obama for Detroit
bailout”
“As I’ve written elsewhere the present crisis is one of
information. Society is increasingly unable to solve its pressing problems not
for lack of a solution or resources, but primarily from an unshakable
determination not to face politically inconvenient facts. Take for example, Chicago’s new
crime-fighting strategy. “Chicago
police are going to hand deliver letters to people suspected of committing or
being victims of gun crimes in an effort to stem violence in the city,
according to a new report. ” This is a triumph of PR over policy, fiction over
reality and madness over sanity.”
How is the U.S.
like Sweden?
In its low murder rate. That is, if you include in the statistics only
non-blacks in the U.S.
legally. In round numbers, there are
about 250 million non-blacks in the U.S. legally. So their murder rate
is about 1.0 per 100,000, or the same as Sweden´s. A murder rate of 1.0 is in
the same league as the Europeans who like to call us gun-crazy cowboys. But
it´s not the "cowboys" who are doing the killing. (In fact, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming have
murder rates significantly lower than the U.S. average.)
_________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"It is discouraging to think how many people are
shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
-Noel Coward
"The timid civilized world has found nothing with which
to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than
concessions and smiles."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
______________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: The Obama administration has admitted that under Obamacare,
you might not be able to keep your doctor. At first the president guaranteed
you'd be able to keep your doctor, and now they're saying you "might"
be able to. Today Obama changed his slogan from "Yes we can" to
"Perhaps we could try. Can’t promise anything."…… According to a new
study, lying gets easier over time. People get better at lying the more they do
it. See, that's why you have to have term limits…….Detroit has become the
largest city in U.S.
history to file for bankruptcy. What happened was Detroit's population dropped something like
70 percent, but the government got bigger. The tax base got smaller, but the
government got bigger. Thank God that kind of thing could never happen in Washington.
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