op ed review 12/14
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Boehner cuts another budget deal: “A Winter Festival of Unrestrained Spending”
The Incredible Shrinking GOP.
The federal debt has increased by $3.8 trillion in the 3.8
years that have passed since House Speaker John Boehner cut his first spending
deal with Senate Democrats and President Obama.
On Tuesday, Democrats in the Senate, who will lose control
of the chamber in just three weeks, released a report focused on interrogation
techniques — during the administration of George W. Bush. Yes, Mr. Obama is all
about transparency, as long as it’s not about his administration. Despite
warnings from top Obama officials, that release of the once-classified report
would endanger Americans abroad, the president demanded that the United States
explain its actions to — terrorists.
The release of the report will be felt in courtrooms across
the globe in the months and years to come. Attorneys for human rights
organizations are now poring over the 525-page declassified summary of the
Senate majority report to find new material that could revive long-dormant and
failed civil and criminal lawsuits on behalf of those detained by the Central
Intelligence Agency.
Wasting no time, a top UN special investigator called for
the prosecution of senior U.S. officials who authorized and carried out
“enhanced interrogation techniques” as part of former President George W.
Bush´s national security policy after 9/11.
As US tears itself apart over torture of terrorists, let´s
just remember who we´re up against: ISIS throws man off roof to his death for
being gay.
Dems' final loss: Landrieu crushed. Cassidy trounces incumbent with Republicans
set to control 54 Senate seats in the next Congress.
Republicans now control every U.S. Senate seat, legislative
chamber, and governor’s mansion across the Deep South – from Texas to the
Carolinas.
A tea party group greeted Jonathan Gruber, the man at the
center of Obamacare’s troubled public image, with T-shirts reading “I’m with
Stupid” when he showed up before a congressional panel. Gruber was caught-on-tape
making remarks about the “stupidity of the American voter” and the need to game
budget rules to pass Obamacare.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/8/jonathan-gruber-to-face-hostile-house-panel-tea-pa/#ixzz3LPq0ShoY
Obamacare Architect Gruber also says “Abortion Of ´Marginal Children´ (is a) ´Social Good´.”
Obamacare Architect Gruber also says “Abortion Of ´Marginal Children´ (is a) ´Social Good´.”
The U.S. Treasury continued to rake in tax dollars at a
record rate in November as the federal government closed out the first two
months of fiscal 2015 with $404,155,000,000 in total receipts.
But they spend much more:
Average Federal Spending Per Household Nearly $30K
President Obama stayed only one night in Australia for the
G-20 summit, but the entire presidential delegation required over 4,000 rooms
costing in excess of $1.7 million for the entire stay.
Support for gun rights is higher than it’s been in decades,
according to the latest data from the Pew Research Center that signals a
stunning turnaround in how Americans feel about the issue just two years after
the Newtown school shooting.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. expressed astonishment that
President Obama had not actually signed the executive order to carry out the amnesty
policy he announced to the nation in a televised address Nov. 20. As a result of the president’s use of a memo
instead of an official order, the senator observed: “We don’t even have a
really significant, direct, legal direction that we can ascertain, precisely
what the president is doing. It’s a stunning event in my view.”….The Obama
administration is opening a facility in Crystal City, Virginia, to implement
the president’s amnesty plan and is hiring 1,000 full-time and permanent staff
members to quickly approve illegal immigrants’ applications for amnesty. Sessions
also learned the administration will provide work permits, photo IDs, Social
Security and Medicare to illegal immigrants. He noted that all of those
benefits for illegal immigrants had been rejected by Congress.
Order? What
order? “The explanation, I assume, is
that Obama thinks it will be harder to mount a legal challenge to his
unconstitutional usurpation if there is no actual order that defines what he
has done. There is no bottom to the depth of the Obama administration’s
corruption.”
The states challenging President Obama’s deportation amnesty
have already won the first round in court after the case landed in the lap of
Judge Andrew S. Hanen, a Bush appointee who issued a scorching rebuke to the
Department of Homeland Security last year, accusing it of refusing to follow
border security laws.
Military Times: Military morale suffering due to budget cuts, loss of mission….
When Department of Justice officials arrived in Ferguson,
Mo., one day after the death of Michael Brown, it wasn’t just to conduct an
investigation on potential civil-rights violations. In fact, officials from one
Justice Department office were conducting meetings with Ferguson residents to
educate them on subjects such as “white privilege.”
Barack Obama tells Black Entertainment Television that
racism is “deeply rooted” in the United States.
As Great Britain continues to become a more “multicultural”
society, school nativity scenes – a staple of the Christmas season – are
becoming increasingly secularized. School
nativity scenes replace baby Jesus with Elvis, aliens and recycling bins!
Although the major media remain mum on the subject, it
appears that a black female sergeant by the name of Kizzy Adoni supervised the
arrest of the 6’4,” 400 lb. Eric Garner in New York City on July 17, 2014. As
NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo and former LAPD Sergeant Stacey Koon can attest,
there seems to a serious double standard at play here. Only Pantaleo, however, faced indictment.
Adoni, by contrast, was offered immunity to testify against him.
_________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
John Hayward, Human
Events 12/12
Money is once more flowing out of Congress to all manner of
follies and outrages, thanks to an omnibus spending bill that funds everything
except Homeland Security through September of 2015 – throwing away every scrap
of leverage the incoming Republican majority could possibly exercise against
Emperor Obama, ensuring that no one outside the authors of Democrat Party
fundraising email spam will be talking about shutdowns, and effectively
neutering freshly-elected conservatives.
The GOP leadership can get through another year with its favorite wheezy
excuse for not standing up and fighting for anything: Our hands are tied. Sure, the knots are a bit clumsy, but that’s
to be expected when you tie your own hands.
It’ll be good enough for the permanent Beltway culture, which can have a
very merry Christmas, riding their one-horse open sleighs down streets coated
with a fresh blizzard of taxpayer dollars, jingling all the way.
Americans with some vague memory of how the system is supposed
to work might be wondering what happened to the sober deliberation of
budgets, the careful spending of every dollar, and even the basic rules of
accounting. Welcome to the new
millennium, old-timers! We don’t do
things that way anymore. Government by
perpetual crisis is so much more exciting, and lucrative for the
Ruling Class. Now we wait until the
hands of the fiscal doomsday clock stand at one minute to midnight, and the
political class has to fund everything with “emergency spending bills,”
scribbled in blind haste and posted on glitchy websites for public review in a
half-hearted ritual of “transparency.”… Anyone who raises the slightest
objection to this panicky spending bonanza is denounced as a penny-pinching
extremist monster who just wants to kill children, puppies, and kittens for
fun, by shutting down the government that keeps them alive. You don’t want Obama to throw up barricades
around your national parks and memorials again, do you? No?
Then shut up and spend. We live in the shadow of the “cromnibus”,
an appropriately clunky word that combines “continuing resolution”
emergency tactics with “omnibus spending” irresponsibility. The Cromnibus is a flabby beast with a gaping
maw and many tentacles to feed itself, but it lacks eyes, ears, and a frontal
lobe.
The sole reservation in the winter spending festival is the
Department of Homeland Security – which, as Fox News explains, is only funded
through February, so the GOP leadership can pretend it’s going to stage a huge
fight over Obama’s illegal amnesty orders next year. This is supposed to mollify the starchy
citizens who still care about antiquated notions like the rule of law, the
separation of powers, the value of citizenship, and national security long
enough for the Establishment to enjoy its holiday vacation.
Wonderful. Let’s have a big round of applause for the
GOP Establishment, ladies and gentlemen!
They managed to throw away the most remarkable electoral victory in a
generation in only one month, maneuvering themselves into a position where the
losers who got crushed will be making demands to win their support for a bill
that effectively ratifies their will through half of their sojourn in electoral
exile.
There was no reason to give the
defeated Democrats anything except a stop-gap bill to fund the government
through January, at which point the incoming Republican majorities should have
exercised control over everything.
If the Democrats don’t like that deal, let them shut down the
government in a fit of pique, and tell voters how the party they just threw out
of power should be allowed to control their lives for an extra year……All of
this multi-trillion-dollar monstrosity is linked together; all of it
should be on the table; the flab should be liposuctioned out of every agency at
once in a comprehensive plan for fiscal sanity and increased American liberty.
I think a liposuction metaphor is particularly appropriate,
because the federal faceplant over Ebola should have taught us that over-funded
agencies are not merely wasteful, but inefficient. They fail at their core responsibilities when
given extravagant funding to purchase bright shiny objects to distract
themselves. If you want the Centers for
Disease Control to focus on controlling diseases, don’t give them zillions of
dollars to spend on building fancy bureaucratic palaces and conducting
monkey-gambling studies. We should be
having that discussion immediately, while the failures of managerial liberalism
are fresh in the public mind.
Some conservative stalwarts have
expressed a desire to keep the lame-duck Congress from waddling away with a
trillion dollars tucked under its mangy wings, but they concede the panicky
rush to pump out “emergency” spending makes it difficult to mount effective
resistance.
Gee, it’s too bad the Republican leadership can’t play a
hand well against Democrats, isn’t it?
They only turn into card sharks when they’re playing against the
conservatives in their own party. Don’t
expect them to be pulling any cards from their sleeves when they sit down for
their scheduled February game of Amnesty Hold ‘Em, and the dead-eyed Democrats
on the other side of the table begin screaming “Republican extremists want to
defund Homeland Security!”….
The Republican leadership isn’t just bad at standing up for
its principles and fulfilling commitments to its voters. It seems institutionally incapable of
understanding, as Democrats do, that power won today must be used to set the
stage for tomorrow’s elections.
Democrats target constituencies and service them, including
constituencies that aren’t actually American citizens. Republicans try to figure out how badly they
can get away with disappointing their base while they service a Beltway culture
some of them fear, and others profit from.
If the Republican leadership was smart, they’d be looping
events such as Jonathan Gruber’s disastrous House testimony into a big-picture
assault on arrogant, wasteful government, and reminding the hard-working,
rules-obeying American taxpayer how much contempt Democrats hold them in. A proper budget debate right after the
holidays would be a great way to do that.
The Democrats fear nothing more than a sharp Republican Party
playing that kind of hardball and appealing directly to the working middle
class, which is so comprehensively betrayed by the Democrat philosophy of
rewarding its big contributors and powerful special interests at the expense of
everyone else….
If all this “omnibus spending bill” jazz sounds familiar,
it’s because we’ve played through the same hammy drama every year for the
better part of a decade. In fact, the
term “cromnibus” – currently beloved of such feisty insurgents as Senator Ted
Cruz (R-TX) – is said to have been coined by the office of then-House Minority
Leader John Bohener, circa 2007, when he energetically criticized the Democrat
majority for doing exactly what Boehner is doing today. The Cromnibus has devoured those who once
fought to keep it at bay. No one in
power even pretends to be interested in responsible government any
more, because the American people don’t loudly insist on it… and we should have
learned by now that only our loudest, angriest, most unified cries can be heard
over the constant seductive whisper of the Cromnibus. Enjoy your latest round of desperate
last-minute must-pass emergency spending from the same arrogant elites who
claim they alone have the wisdom to manage every aspect of your life, and be
advised you’ll be getting the same “present” from them next Christmas,
and the one after that.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education
will unveil nearly $1 billion in new ‘investments’ to ‘expand access to
high-quality early childhood education to every child in America’ from ‘birth
and continuing to age 5.’ It’s a retread of President Obama’s 2013 State of the
Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top
Early Learning Challenge program. … Think Obamacare is bad? Well, welcome to
TotCare. The goal of the educational central planners, you see, is the
elimination of competition. The fact is that the vast majority of Pre-K kids
are already happily enrolled in early childhood programs outside of Fed Ed’s
clutches. The ‘problem’ isn’t most families' lack of access to preschool. It’s
Washington’s lack of access to your kids for their institutionalized
warehousing, data mining and pedagogical propaganda schemes. The Nanny State’s
ceaseless quest for control keeps creepily rolling along.”
-Michelle Malkin
“Obama was diagnosed with acid reflux. His approval rating
is so low that he’s starting to get pushback from his esophagus...”
-Jimmy Kimmel
_______________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Al Gore speaks to a half full room. “Polite applause”. Still preaching ecological hellfire….
Climate science is “settled” according to the news media,
that is, unless scientists conclude climate change is not connected to a
specific climate occurrence. That was precisely the conclusion of a team of
federal scientists came to when they studied California’s three-year drought.
They determined “natural cycles” and “sea surface temperatures” were “main
drivers” of that ongoing dry spell. NBC’s website responded by saying the
science wasn’t settled about the cause of the drought. The New York Times
buried the news far back in its A section and none of the broadcast networks
news programs mentioned the findings on Dec.
_______________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
ISIS is trying to sell the remains of beheaded journalist James
Foley to his parents or the US government for $1 million, according to a new
report.
____________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Women flood ranks of GOP
With a stroke of his pen, President Obama recently changed
the future of Americans and of our nation – fundamentally transforming America
from the greatest nation on earth to a future as a banana republic. Robert
Rector, Senior Research Fellow with the Heritage Foundation, stated that
President Obama’s amnesty for four million illegal immigrants will cost
Americans about $2 trillion -- approximately $40 billion per year -- over the
next five decades. If all illegal
immigrants are granted amnesty, they would receive “.…$9.4 trillion in
government benefits and services and pay $3.1 trillion in taxes…They would
generate a lifetime fiscal deficit…of $6.3 trillion…This should be considered a
minimum estimate.” Once the wealthiest nation in the world, America has now
become a welfare country. At the end of 2012 the U.S. Census Bureau reported
out of a population of 309,467,000 there were 109,631,000 people living in
households receiving federal welfare benefits. Yet there were only 103,087,000 full-time
year-round workers in the United States with 16,606,000 of those being
government employees.
_________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“A society that puts equality … ahead of freedom will end up
with neither equality nor freedom.”
-Milton
Friedman
"We must reject the idea
that every time a law is broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker.
It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable
for his actions."
-Ronald Reagan
posted by gary at
4:50 PM
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