Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

What I enjoy most about the Obama era is the civility: Prez says GOP supports Iranian "Death to America" Chants

Post-racial, post-partisan healing. It's what I love most about this administration.

I realize that resorting to force may be tempting in the face of the rhetoric and behavior that emanates from parts of Iran. It is offensive. It is incendiary. We do take it seriously. But superpowers should not act impulsively in response to talks… Just because Iranian hardliners chant ‘Death to America” does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe. In fact, it’s those hardliners that are more satisfied with the status quo. It’s those hardliners chanting “death to America” who’ve been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican Caucus.

In related news, Iran's leaders openly seek the nuclear annihilation of America, England, and Israel.

And water is wet.


Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

DHS Says ‘Path To Citizenship’ Will Help Fight Homegrown Terror

By Rachel Stoltzfoos

The top U.S. immigration agency told a Senate subcommittee it is working to blunt homegrown terrorism by marketing U.S. citizenship to immigrants.

“In furtherance of DHS’s mission to safeguard the homeland, [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] is committed to fostering integration and community cohesion,” the agency recently told the Immigration and the National Interest Subcommittee in records obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“USCIS engages and supports partners to welcome immigrants, promote English language learning and education on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and encourage U.S. citizenship.”

The subcommittee had pointed to the arrest of Six Somali men on terror-related charges in Minnesota — where a large population of Somali refugees was resettled — as evidence of the threat and then asked whether USCIS can guarantee other communities won’t face similar threats from the thousands of Syrian war refugees that have been settled stateside.

Referring to its efforts to promote citizenship, officials from USCIS made an appeal to nationalism: “These efforts emphasize the role that shared citizenship rights and responsibilities play to unify all Americans.”

The For the Record Questions with USCIS followed an April hearing on the Obama Administration’s plan to grant Central American minors related to illegal immigrants in the U.S. refugee or parole status, and fly them into the country.

Terror Victims’ Lawsuit Seeks to Block Obama’s Gift of $150 Billion to Iran

By Investigative Project on Terrorism

A deal to provide Iran with as much as $150 billion in sanctions relief over its nuclear weapons program should be blocked until the Islamic Republic pays court-awarded damages to American victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, a lawsuit filed Wednesday in New York federal court said.

The plaintiffs, victims of attacks by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, have judgments worth $152 million that they have been unable to collect. Similar lawsuits in U.S. courts have generated billions of dollars more in damages. Iran, the lawsuit said, should not see a dime of sanctions relief until those victims are compensated.

By law, the lawsuit said, Iran should not be granted any relief until there is "a certification by the President that Iran is no longer a financier and sponsor of terror. That terrorism condition has not been satisfied."

Even the White House admits that Iran continues to sponsor international terrorism.

The lawsuit, facilitated by Shurat Hadin, or Israel Law Center, names the departments of State and Treasury, along with their respective secretaries, John Kerry and Jacob Lew. The two departments are responsible for enacting and enforcing the sanctions against Iran.

Releasing the frozen Iranian assets strips victims of "their last remaining opportunity to pressure Iran to satisfy their judgments,' the lawsuit said. And it violates terms of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, passed by Congress in 2002. The law aimed to help victims enforce their judgments by pursuing blocked assets belonging to terror sponsors. It contains the phrase "Notwithstanding any other provision of law," which should prevail over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the formal name of the Iran deal, negotiated by the U.S. and the P5+1 allies, the lawsuit said.

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

If Governor John Kasich is on the Republican ticket, Obamacare repeal is off the table

By Jason Hart

Republicans can forget about campaigning against Obamacare in 2016 if Ohio Gov. John Kasich is on the party’s presidential ticket.

Conventional wisdom says Kasich will need to explain his Obamacare Medicaid expansion to Republican primary voters — but he’s been explaining it for two years.

That’s the problem: most of Kasich’s arguments for Medicaid coverage for working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities sound like they were written by Democratic strategists.

The longer Kasich is in the presidential race, the greater the potential for Democrats to capitalize on Kasich’s promotion of Obamacare.

“What we’ve seen as a result of this? Saved lives, there’s no question about it,” Kasich said when asked about Obamacare expansion at an Ohio Chamber of Commerce event.

“Turning down your money back to Montana on an ideological basis when people can lose their lives because they get no help doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Kasich growled at an Obamacare skeptic in Montana.

If Kasich is the Republican nominee for president or vice president, expect to see Democratic campaign ads using Kasich’s tortured talking points against Obamacare critics.

In short, Kasich has worked to turn his own primary election problem into a general election problem for every Republican candidate.

Today’s Hillarious Hillary Highlights

Collected from the real-time news portal you may know as BadBlue News. You're welcome, America.

Data point 1:

Uh-Oh: Hillary Losing White Women.. and Every Other Demographic

The Wall Street Journal is sounding the alarm for Team Hillary after the results of a new WSJ/NBC News poll show her losing white women voters and, well, basically every other demographic...

But WSJ notes that that's not the only "worrisome trend" for the Democratic presidential frontrunner. She's also lost many Independents, whose opinion of her has plummeted from an "evenly split" perception earlier this year to now being underwater 27/52. The opinion of Clinton among African-Americans also dropped in the last few months, falling from 81/3 to 66/15.
Data point 2:

All That’s Wrong With Washington in One Picture

By Against Crony Capitalism

I’ve gotten some criticism over the last couple of days for not being hard enough on the Republicans. Trust me: the crony Republicans are full on targets for sure. Long time readers know this. Saying that, here’s a good one from one of the generally good guys in Washington, who happens to be a Republican.

On the other hand it could be worse.

CAPITALISM COMIX: The $70K Minimum Wage

With a tip o' the cap to ZeroHedge:
Meet 31-year-old Dan Price... Dan is the CEO of Seattle-based credit card payments processing firm Gravity Payments, and three months ago, he did a funny thing. After talking with a friend who confessed to having difficulties making student loan payments and rent each month on an annual salary of $40,000, Dan decided to set a $70,000 per year pay floor at Gravity.
Needless to say, the unintended consequences were catastrophic. Employees who earned $70,000 by dint of hard work felt they had been shafted; several quit. Price's friends in the business community were ticked off - he had established what they felt was an unsustainable minimum wage. And his older brother is suing him, presumably because of his, uhm, novel approach to management.

Which led our long-suffering summer intern Biff Spackle (@BiffSpackle) to create this riff on Mr. Price's folly.


Can I get a rimshot, please?

Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

Monday, August 03, 2015

FUNNIEST CHART O' THE DAY: Breakdown of Where Bill and Hillary Clinton’s "Charitable" Donations Went

According to their tax returns, it turns out that essentially all of the Clinton family's "charitable donations" were directed back to their own "charities".

As TaxProf notes, the family’s charitable giving from 2007 onward has been a case study in moving money around. Since 2007, the Clintons “made $15 million (10.8 percent of their AGI) of charitable contributions, $14.9 million of which went to the Clinton Family Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.”

That leaves $100,000 for charitable uses that don’t directly involve the Clinton family and their globalist friends.

As a reminder, in April I created a chart illustrating where the Clinton Global Graft Initiative's various expenditures went. It's equally amusing.

Little wonder Hillary's email server "disappeared".


Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

WELFARE STATE SUCCESS STORY #8,091: More Kids Living In Poverty Now Than During Great Recession

By Nick Sorrentino

A picture from an Indian reservation in South Dakota. American Indians have gotten the rawest deal in America as a group, and the US government has managed their affairs to a large degree since conquering them. So what does that tell you?
This is what happens when government layers regulations on top of regulations. When it makes it very difficult to start businesses. When it encourages government dependence for electoral reasons. (It does. I hate that it does, but it does.) When government rewards companies which partner with politicians with taxpayer money and favors.This is what happens when the people running the show in Washington abandon the spirit of free enterprise, the spirit of freedom, and instead embrace the languid mediocrity of the welfare state.

No child should be hungry. But the welfare state is not the way to keep bellies full. Non-profits need to be empowered, and government and the dependence it creates must be reduced in a real way. (This must be done over time but with tangible and verifiable milestones. Corporate dependence needs to be cut tomorrow however.)

Cue this story in USA Today:

NEW BOOK BY OBAMA’S PARTNER IN PEACE: Denies Holocausts, Calls for Destruction of Israel

By The Tower

A new book by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei refers to the Holocaust as “a propaganda ploy” and promotes the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, Iran expert Amir Taheri wrote Saturday for The New York Post.

Taheri wrote that he received a copy of the book, currently available only in Iran, from a friend living there. In the book, Khamenei writes that his plan does not involve a plan to “massacre the Jews” or engage in “classical wars” to destroy Israel. Rather, his goal is to engage Israel in a long period of “low-intensity warfare,” which would prompt most Israeli Jews to leave for the safety of other countries.

Khamenei boasts about the success of his plans to make life impossible for Israelis through terror attacks from Lebanon and Gaza. His latest scheme is to recruit “fighters” in the West Bank to set up Hezbollah-style units.

“We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in the 33-day war by Hezbollah against Israel in 2006 and in the 22-day war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip,” he boasts.

Khamenei describes Israel as “a cancerous tumor” whose elimination would mean that “the West’s hegemony and threats will be discredited” in the Middle East. In its place, he boasts, “the hegemony of Iran will be promoted.”

Khamenei’s plan would allow Jews with “genuine roots” to remain in Israel as “protected minorities.” At some point, Israel would revert to United Nations control, and a referendum of Palestinians and their descendants and any remaining Jews would be held “to create the new state of Palestine.”

Khamenei wrote that his proposal is not based on anti-Semitism, which he claimed was a European phenomenon, but on “well-established Islamic principles.” One of those principles is that any land that was once under Muslim control – which includes large chunks of Europe, China, and India – can never be ruled by non-Muslims.

John Kasich Has a $14 Billion Obamacare Problem

By Jason Hart, Ohio Watchdog

Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s habit of telling voters “Ohio money” pays for his Obamacare Medicaid expansion is about to catch up to him.

To silence conservative critics, Kasich says Obamacare expansion is bringing $14 billion of Ohio money back to Ohio from the federal government.

But that’s not how the expansion works — a fact Kasich’s opponents in a crowded Republican presidential primary are certain to point out.

There is no vault of “Ohio money” set aside to pay for Kasich’s Obamacare expansion, which has already increased federal welfare spending by $4 billion.

Matt Mayer, president of free-market think tank Opportunity Ohio, expects the governor’s message to fall apart when it’s challenged by other presidential candidates.

Sunday, August 02, 2015

NEW COMIC STRIP: The Hilarious Hijinx of Hillary

Illustrated by our summer intern, @BiffSpackle:

Biff's entire, awesome comic collection can be viewed here. You're welcome.

OBAMA’S BIOGRAPHY: Some Assembly Required

By Lawrence Sellin

Bottom line up front: The political establishment and the media are hiding the greatest fraud and Constitutional crisis in American history to protect a hopelessly corrupt status quo.

They continue the charade while desperately trying to run out the clock on Obama because they know if the full truth about him was ever told, the American people would rise up with uncontainable anger against the permanent political class and their collaborators in the media. The vast majority of the members of our lawless one-party, political-media state would lose their jobs and many would go to prison.

Such a description would go a long way towards explaining why Obama, who never lets facts or logic get in the way of his political agenda, is undeterred by any legal constraints and why the Republican leadership is so submissive and cooperative. There may be subtle policy differences among them, but one thing is palpably clear to the political-media establishment - if he goes down, they all go down.

There is, in fact, no credible evidence that Obama was actually born anywhere.

The official version is that Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961 at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. His mother was Stanley Ann Dunham, born in Wichita, Kansas, and his father, Barack Obama, Sr., from Kenya.

Neither Kapiʻolani nor Queens Medical Center, both in Honolulu, Hawaii have ever confirmed from their hospital records that Obama was born in either hospital.

It is worth noting that Hawaiian law allows the state to issue a certificate of live birth even if the child is born outside of Hawaii, provided that the parents have been legal residents for at least one year immediately preceding the birth. Many of those have been published in Hawaiian newspapers as local births.

At times during his life, Obama designated his birthplace as Kenya, and Joel Gilbert has presented a convincing account that his real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA member and propagandist.

Who knows? Obama's life is a biographical jigsaw puzzle of poorly-fitting and missing pieces.

Display this one weird bumper sticker and watch liberal heads explode!

Spotted at Sobieski's feed:


Absolutely perfect.

Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

Saturday, August 01, 2015

Obama Hiding Text of Iran Nuclear Deals And Unclassified Documents From the American People and... Congress

By The Investigative Project on Terrorism

Crucial aspects of the Iran nuclear deal remain hidden from the public, and in some instances, from the American government, Bloomberg reports.

In a closed-door session with House members Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry revealed that two side deals between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were reached. Kerry said he neither read nor possesses the secret agreements.

According to U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., a member of the House Intelligence Committee who attended the closed-door session, Congress also is in the dark on these agreements.

"Kerry told me directly that he has not read the secret side deals. He told us the State Department does not have possession of these documents," Pompeo told Bloomberg View columnists Josh Rogin and Eli Lake.

Furthermore, other secret agreements kept from the public were presented to Congress on Monday – part of 18 documents the White House were required to disclose – including secret letters of understanding between the U.S., France, Germany , and the United Kingdom that outline some of the ambiguous aspects of the nuclear deal.

Seventeen of these documents are unclassified, yet they are stored in ultra-secure facilities intended for top-secret information, the Daily Beast reports. These extraordinary precautions indicate that the Obama administration is seeking to keep unclassified documents from reaching the public.

*CRUNCH* THIS POPCORN IS GETTING GOOD! Federal Judge Slaps Hillary and Huma With Full Disclosure Demands

By Judicial Watch

(31 July 2015, Washington DC) – Today U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the U.S. State Department to request that Hillary Clinton and her top aides confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all government records in their possession, return any other government records immediately, and describe their use of Hillary Clinton’s email server to conduct government business. The court issued the ruling late today after holding a status hearing in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuit that sought records about Huma Abedin, the former Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)). The lawsuit reopened last month because of revelations about Hillary Clinton’s email records.

The text of Judge Sullivan’s minute order, which was issued at 5:46 pm:

As agreed by the parties at the July 31, 2015 status hearing, the Government shall produce a copy of the letters sent by the State Department to Mrs. Hillary Clinton, Ms. Huma Abedin and Ms. Cheryl Mills regarding the collection of government records in their possession. These communications shall be posted on the docket forthwith. The Government has also agreed to share with Plaintiff’s counsel the responses sent by Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills. These communications shall also be posted on the docket forthwith. In addition, as related to Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests in this case, the Government is HEREBY ORDERED to:

Friday, July 31, 2015

Improbable Dialogue Comix

Masterfully illustrated by our year-round summer intern, Biff Spackle (follow Biff on Twitter at @BiffSpackle).

You can see some of our all-time best comic strips here.
 

CHANGE, PART 1,803: Obama Edits Oath of Allegiance for New Americans, Deletes Pledge to Defend the U.S.

By Warner Todd Huston

Newly naturalized Americans will no longer have to pledge to defend the USA thanks to the Obama administration’s decision to remove the lines requiring new citizens to bear arms on behalf of the United States or perform noncombatant duties in the armed forces in times of war.

Obama’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ruled that effective on July 21 of this year, some candidates for naturalization will skip the services clause while taking the oath to become Americans.

So that means that in an age when people are streaming here to pretend to become Americans in order to commit acts of terror, now Obama won’t even ask them to voice the words that they will defend the USA.

The current oath reads as follows:

Here is the Ironclad Case for Impeaching IRS Head John Koskinen

By Logan Albright

Key members of the House Freedom Caucus are demanding that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen be removed from office. In an op-ed written for the Wall Street Journal, Reps. Jim Jordan and Ron DeSantis told President Obama that if the Commissioner is not removed, they will begin the proceedings to impeach him.

Modern Americans view impeachment with a sort of awe and reverence. To most, it seems like an inconceivably drastic thing to do. But it was not always this way, nor was it the intention of the founders. Impeachment has always been a practical tool for getting rid of bad actors in government and, given the amount of government corruption we see today, a tool that should be used with much greater frequency.

If there is any doubt that Koskinen is a worthy target for impeachment, let’s run down a few of his misdeeds since he assumed the office in 2013.

First, the IRS targeting scandal. In 2013, it emerged that the IRS had been targeting conservative non-profit groups, delaying their applications, demanding ridiculous amounts of paperwork including highly invasive personal questions, and general obstructing conservative grassroots activities. The American Enterprise Institute estimated that this depressed Republican voter turnout in the 2012 elections, and could have even made the difference between Barack Obama winning or losing.

Of course, this was all before Koskinen became commissioner, so what does it have to do with him? Koskinen assumed office in December 2013, during the ongoing investigation into the scandal. Any serious public servant would have done everything possible to clean up the agency and get to the bottom of the wrongdoing. Koskinen instead chose to obstruct. Koskinen responded to subpoenas for emails regarding the scandal with the unbelievable claim that all the emails from the specified time period had suddenly gone missing.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

DEMOCRAT POLICIES WORK! Which country is out of food, pays doctors $15 a month, and has no beer?

By Daniel Greenfield

Venezuela used to have oil literally coming out of the ground. Then the Socialists took over and under Hugo Chavez made it a model for the world... to run away from. Here's what's going on in Venezuela now.

Universal Health Care - Venezuela's widely praised government health care system is doing great. Doctors are being paid $15 a month

In some hospitals, they had less than a third of the medical supplies they require. Almost every patient told me they had to buy at least some of their drugs on the street.

Oncologists said that people who were diagnosed with breast cancer sometimes had to wait more than 18 months for treatment, while surgeons said that other patients often die while waiting for operations.

It's not just a lack of medicines that is making life difficult. Spiralling inflation, which topped 600 percent in July 2015, has meant that doctors' salaries are now worth less than £10 per month.

That's about $15 a month. But even that may be optimistic because Venezuelan currency is monopoly money. Obama had to bail out Cuba because Venezuela couldn't keep carrying Castro.

 It’s taken what, no more than a couple of decades, to turn an oil rich middle income country into something worse than most sub-Saharan economic wastelands (the minimum manufacturing wage in Ethiopia is currently $21 a month or so).

Minimum wage in Venezuela is now about $11 a month. But that's okay because there's no food to buy so the government is just confiscating it from farmers, Bolshevik style.