
Seeing as how the only places President
In other words, s*** just got real for the Democrats.

Hold. On.What was Obama's security detail thinking? They took away the Latinos' knives and forks before Obama entered and spoke, but there's no mention of "shivs." You know what those people are capable of, ... right? Man, his popularity really must be down.
“It’s very important that you use your utensils as soon as possible,” National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials board member Raquel Regalado told about 1000 delegates at the group’s annual conference.
Regalado hurried the diners to finish up their salads and pre-cut chicken breasts, saying that the Secret Service required that there be no knives at the tables and that the forks be rounded up before Obama entered the room.

That headline is a big promise. But here it is: The economic history of the world going back to Year 1 showing the major powers' share of world GDP, from a research letter written by Michael Cembalest, chairman of market and investment strategy at JP Morgan.
...Before the Industrial Revolution, there wasn't really any such thing as lasting income growth from productivity. In the thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution, civilization was stuck in the Malthusian Trap. If lots of people died, incomes tended to go up, as fewer workers benefited from a stable supply of crops. If lots of people were born, however, incomes would fall, which often led to more deaths. That explains the "trap," and it also explains why populations so closely approximated GDP around the world...
The United States was born when rebellious colonists declared their independence from an imperial ruler who had vastly overstepped his bounds. “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” they wrote in their Declaration of Independence.
Today’s presidency lacks the regal air of George III. But imperialism is back, in a big way.
Last week, the Obama Administration’s Department of Homeland Security issued a memorandum instructing U.S. immigration officials to use their “prosecutorial discretion” to create a policy scheme contrary to existing law, designed to implement legislation that Congress hasn’t passed.
The President himself has admitted he doesn’t have the authority to do this. “The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you, not just on immigration reform. But that’s not how our system works,” he told Hispanic activists last year. “That’s not how our democracy functions.”
We can now see before us a persistent pattern of disregard for the powers of the legislative branch in favor of administrative decision-making without—and often in spite of—congressional action. This violates the spirit—and potentially the letter—of the Constitution’s separation of the legislative and executive powers of Congress and the President...
Likewise, the Administration has often simply refused to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress:
- Even though the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected the President’s cap-and-trade plan, his Environmental Protection Agency classified carbon dioxide, the compound that sustains vegetative life, as a pollutant so that it could regulate it under the Clean Air Act.
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- After the Employee Free Choice Act—designed to bolster labor unions’ dwindling membership rolls—was defeated by Congress, the National Labor Relations Board announced a rule that would implement “snap elections” for union representation, limiting employers’ abilities to make their case to workers and virtually guaranteeing a higher rate of unionization at the expense of workplace democracy.
- After an Internet regulation proposal failed to make it through Congress, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would regulate the Web anyway, even despite a federal court’s ruling that it had no authority to do so.
- Although Congress consistently has barred the Department of Education from getting involved in curriculum matters, the Administration has offered waivers for the No Child Left Behind law in exchange for states adopting national education standards, all without congressional authorization.
On Tuesday, the President invoked executive privilege to avoid handing over some 1,300 documents in an ongoing Congressional investigation. The Supreme Court has held that executive privilege cannot be invoked to shield wrongdoing.
- Since it objects to existing federal immigration laws, the Administration has decided to apply those laws selectively and actively prevent the state (like Arizona) from enforcing those laws themselves.
- Rather than push Congress to repeal federal laws against marijuana use, the Department of Justice (DOJ) simply decided it would no longer enforce those laws.
- DOJ also has announced that it would stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act or defending it from legal challenge rather than seeking legislative recourse.
At every level, this argument is specious and dishonest: "the public debt" described in the 14th Amendment refers to the f***ing debt that's already been issued.Nancy Pelosi Calls for Constitutional Abrogation of the Debt Ceiling
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urged President Barack Obama to avoid a new debt-ceiling showdown by stating that a statutory borrowing limit is inconsistent with Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states that "the validity of the public debt of the United States ... shall not be questioned."
Democrats took an oath to uphold the Constitution. It turns out that they lied under oath. On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi had this to say about the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's move to vote Eric Holder in contempt of Congress:
They’re going after Eric Holder because he is supporting measures to overturn these voter suppression initiatives in the states...
...Suffice it to say, at least one member of the House strongly disagreed, and offered this epic response.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) yesterday called House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi “mind-numbingly stupid” and said that there is something medically wrong with her brain because she believes Republicans are unfairly targeting Attorney General Eric Holder... "I don’t know what was wrong with her yesterday or today or whenever she said that, but I would schedule an appointment with my doctor if she thinks that we are doing this to suppress votes this fall. That is mind-numbingly stupid."

Major Lawsuit Challenges the Constitutionality of Dodd-Frank: PowerQOTD: "...this move [Obama's claim of Executive Privilege] has suddenly brought Fast and Furious to page one and the top of the newscast like nothing else could. The majority of the country, which was mostly ignorant of this scandal are now in the loop.
As the cited former White House counsel said, “the documents now to be withheld must be dynamite.” In fact, they must be so explosive that the White House is desperate enough to try to weather this self-inflicted political storm in lieu of exposing them." --Bruce McQuain
This latest involves a complex web that suggests the Obama re-election campaign is coordinating with liberal activists to deceive the public that attempts to shut down conservative speech are grown from the “grassroots”, instead of being falsely manufactured by tech-savvy secretive operatives...
One such attempt was the targeting of Rush Limbaugh during the Sandra Fluke debacle. It is now known that those organizing the #StopRush campaign were using hundreds of fake identities in order to make it appear that public outrage was greater than it was...
The Daily Caller reported on the close relationship between Media Matters and the Obama administration, and the compliance they receive from ostensibly objective cable news channels... '"We were pretty much writing their prime time," a former Media Matters employee said of the cable channel MSNBC. 'But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.'"
...Media Matters’ founder David Brock, noted for his erratic and paranoid behavior, also heads SuperPAC American Bridge, which received a million dollar contribution from George Soros, and both organizations orchestrate attacks on religion while decrying conservatives in popular media.
So why are there howls in the media about the influence of contributors on the right, such as the Koch brothers, but not those on the left, when there appears to be collusion to manipulate news media, lie to the public, and subvert honest political debate?
...All the while, Obama’s communications head David Axelrod whines about SuperPACs destroying America... If we had any kind of responsible mainstream press with a twinge of integrity, they would demand answers from the Obama re-election campaign. But there isn’t... So it’s up to you and me.
John Fund:
Team Obama has launched an offensive against WGN, the Chicago Tribune's radio station, for interviewing Stanley Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz is a conservative writer who this week forced the University of Illinois to finally open its records on Sen. Obama's association with William Ayers, the unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist.
An Obama campaign email to supporters called Mr. Kurtz a "slimy character assassin" whose "divisive, destructive ranting" should be confronted. WGN producer Zack Christenson says the outpouring of negative calls and emails is "unprecedented." He also notes that it is curious -- because "we wanted the Obama campaign's take" on Mr. Kurtz's findings, but the campaign declined to put anyone on air.
The university released more than 1,000 files relating to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). A cursory review of the files reveals that Obama and Ayers "attended board meetings, retreats and at least one news conference together," which contradicts Obama's statement on April 16, 2008 during a Democratic debate.
This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.
Actually, Obama and Ayers were very close. This is evidenced by not only their leadership of the CAC, but also their collaboration as directors of the Woods Fund and its numerous troubling relationships.
Working together as the heads of the Annenberg Challenge, Ayers and Obama facilitated a handout of more than $160 million in and around the Chicago school system. These funds went to groups that purportedly were going to improve student achievement.
The effort failed miserably by every measure.
Kurtz began his review of the CAC's papers and was invited on Milt Rosenberg's long-running Chicago radio show to discuss his initial findings. Though Obama's campaign declined an invitation to appear on the show, it did broadcast an "Obama Action Wire" requesting that supporters phone the show and interrupt Kurtz' appearance.
The station, WGN, has made a stream of the broadcast available online, here, and it has to be heard to be believed. Obama’s robotic legions dutifully jammed the station’s phone lines and inundated the program with emails, attacking Kurtz personally. Pressed by Rosenberg to specify what inaccuracies Kurtz was guilty of, caller after caller demurred, mulishly railing that “we just want it to stop,” and that criticism of Obama was “just not what we want to hear as Americans.”
Steve Diamond, writing at the left-leaning Global Labor blog, decried the tactics:
Caller after caller to WGN read off talking points provided them by the Obama campaign alleging that Dr. Kurtz, and by implication and sometimes directly, Milt Rosenberg, was "smearing" Barack Obama and finding Obama "guilty by association." They also accused Kurtz of lying.
Yet, when pressed for specifics, these callers had none.
This gang of callers and emailers reminded me of the "turbas" - the street thugs organized by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas who would be deployed on a moment's notice to harass independent trade unionists, human rights activists and government critics during the Sandinistas' rule over Nicaragua in the 1980's. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela - a favorite haunt of Bill Ayers and other "Progressives for Obama" - uses similar bodies in Caracas neighborhoods.
Ostensibly, Obama's campaign embraces post-partisan "change." Yet its use of brown-shirts to disrupt a radio program -- rather than offer a reasoned debate -- smacks of neanderthal tactics.
It is an ominous glimpse into the future...
The combination of energy production and job creation is potent force. It’s one reason a bipartisan majority in the U.S. House today approved the Domestic Energy and Jobs Act, legislation that would increase access to America’s resources and spur job creation.
With the national unemployment rate still stuck above 8 percent, congressional Republicans hit the road in May to highlight how energy initiatives could cure America’s economic woes. One of the stops was in North Dakota — a state that Heritage and the Institute for Energy Research recently visited.
...The economic boom taking place in North Dakota is a result of fracking in the Bakken oil fields. As this Heritage chart reveals, North Dakota surpassed Alaska in March and California in December to become the second-biggest producer of crude oil in the United States.
It was made possible by sensible state regulations, advancements in technology and the ability to drill on private lands.
• NPR -- "Offline Nuclear Plant Squeezes Energy Access In Calif.":With summer here — and increased energy use with it — the state is bracing for the possibility of rolling blackouts in San Diego, Los Angeles and Orange County. L.A. Times reporter Abby Sewell talks with Melissa Block about what's being done to stave off an energy calamity.
When the Texas power grid demand hit about 65,000 megawatts last summer, [it] issued emergency conservation requests. For comparison, the grid hit about 56,000 megawatts on Monday.
Once the grid hits capacity, rolling blackouts can occur. That is when targeted areas have electricity cut off for a short period. Hospitals and other emergency or essential places are normally exempt from such blackouts.
...We don’t have to live in the dark ages, but we don’t need to run every electrical component we have in the house/office.
During the course of the House investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder has been forced to retract two significant pieces of evidence he submitted as part of his sworn testimony.
Fast and Furious: Covering up the Death of a U.S. Agent: FoundryQOTD: "Obvious, But Worth Saying Again: Executive privilege can be invoked to protect national security secrets and, to a lesser extent, confidential advice given to the president.
It cannot be used to protect strategizing about how to lie to Congress." --Ace
The significant risk of an economic slowdown in the U.S. economy, which is still 71% consumer spending, tends to come when you have the saving rate rising at the same time you have a shock, such as an energy & inflation spike. Looking at 2012, the personal saving rate has declined to 3.4%, and with inflation now trending lower (following the drop in energy prices), it does not appear that we have the typical pre-conditions for a domestic recession this year, despite the uncertainty in Europe. WTI oil at $82 is significant.
However, we must stop short of saying that these 2012 developments make the U.S. economy robust to shocks, including the 2013 “fiscal cliff.” The main reason is that nominal GDP still looks vulnerable, running at just below a 4% pace. A more robust expansion would typically be characterized by nominal growth of at least 6%, ie, something is wrong.
Not many investors we visit with watch nominal GDP closely. Many people got burned in the 1970s – you had 9% growth, but it was with 9% inflation, so there was zero real growth. That’s certainly a fair calculation. But there’s still some information in nominal GDP as well – it is telling us how rapidly the nominal dollar “pie” is expanding. All companies report revenues, costs, and profits in nominal dollars. With sluggish nominal GDP, it’s not clear we have fast enough growth to see both profits expand and labor compensation grow (to support future top-line growth).
That’s the “something” that is wrong. It’s tough to say you are in a self-reinforcing wage-income-sales spiral with the “pie” expanding so sluggishly. This doesn’t mean you have to be in recession, in inflation-adjusted terms, right away. But it does suggest the U.S. economy is vulnerable to shocks, especially if other exogenous sources of demand are waning (Europe is weakening, China is slowing, India is slowing, etc).
The Obama administration spent $10 billion to create 355 renewable energy jobs per year, according to testimony offered Tuesday before Congress by a Congressional Research Services expert.
Asked by Rep. Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) “how many jobs were created” in 2009 and 2010 under the 1603 renewable energy grant program authorized by the Obama administration, a CRS specialist in public finance admitted that $10 billion was spent to create 3,666 construction jobs over a two-year period–and only 355 jobs per year going forward.
Dr. Molly Sherlock, the CRS specialist [estimated the] "...direct jobs created at 355,” Sherlock said...
“So for direct jobs—just if we look at the first year, this is average jobs per year, it’s 355 jobs per year—in two years, 355 jobs created a year, $10 billion?” Gardner asked.
“That would be jobs per year going forward,” Sherlock responded, “so these would be jobs that would be retained, average jobs per year going forward, yes.”
“For $10 billion?” Gardner clarified.
“Yes,” Sherlock said.
Let’s see… Issa’s committee is conducting contempt hearings against Eric Holder as we speak because the A.G. refuses to comply with a subpoena. During all that, President Obama, who had never heard of Fast & Furious and knows nothing about it, invoked executive privilege to protect something he’s totally unfamilar with from being made public… whatever it is... Speaking of blaming Bush, the Justice Department just retracted a claim Holder made last week that his Bush administration predecessor had been briefed on F & F. In other words, Holder lied to Congress.
Project Gun Runner (Fast and Furious) was launched under the orders of President Barack Obama with the knowledge of Attorney General Eric Holder. Deputy Attorney General David Ogden announced the Obama Administration’s new and aggressive ‘comprehensive plan’ on March, 24, 2009. The plan was aimed at disrupting gun trafficking between the United States and Mexico.
Is this what Eric Holder meant by his threat [last week] of [an impending] Constitutional Crisis? ... If so, then by their own admission, Obama and the Department of Justice is admitting that they are caught in a corner and the only way out is putting the Constitution in peril.
In 2005, then-Senator Obama had some pretty strong ideas about what the Attorney General’s duties were. Speaking on the Senate floor during the nomination confirmation of President George W. Bush’s Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, Obama explained why he opposed the nomination.
... “The President is not the Attorney General’s client; the people are,” Obama added. “And so the true test of an Attorney General nominee is whether that person is ready to put the Constitution of the people before the political agenda of the President.”
In a desperate attempt to prevent the contempt vote in the last few hours, Holder asked President Obama to invoke executive privilege to shield these 1,300 pages of documents from Congress, and the President apparently agreed to do so. Yet that is not the end of the story. Even if properly involved, the Supreme Court has made clear that executive privilege is not absolute. DOJ must provide an explanation why all those documents fit one of the recognized categories of executive privilege. It is questionable whether they all are legitimately subject to executive privilege, for several reasons.
For more than a year now, the Obama Justice Department under leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder has been stonewalling the House Oversight Committee's independent investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, citing an on going investigation within DOJ by the inspector general. DOJ has asked Congressional investigators to wait for the inspector general's report and before pushing for more information about the program... Out of 80,000 documents requested for review by Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, Holder's DOJ has turned over 6,000, leaving 74,000 with the [I.G.] ...Despite the so-called "ongoing," year long internal investigation by the inspector general, Eric Holder has yet to be interviewed.
Will the last one to leave vintage media's newsroom please turn off the lights? Aside from Fox News and CBS' Sharyl Attkisson, no vintage media outlet publicized the thousands of murder weapons, the lies coming from Holder's DOJ, and the subsequent coverup.Today, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, possibly the dumbest person ever to walk the halls of Congress, blamed Bush for the Fast & Furious debacle. If that’s the case, since when does the Obama administration go out of its way to protect Bush?
Holder Tells Congress Executive Branch Is Beyond the Law: ConservatoryQOTD: "If anyone can remember a time since the pre-civil rights era when prominent politicians, especially a sitting governor, effectively boycotted the Democratic National Convention, I’d like to know when it happened.
This should be major news. It’s not unreasonable to believe that the establishment press will try very hard to downplay this development. One clue will be how much the AP extends its currently posted item. You can bet the ranch that if any Republican governor were to decide not to come the party’s convention this fall, it would front-page and leading-the-broadcast news." --Tom Blumer
Worried US tells Egypt's military to cede power
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Obama administration warned Egypt's military leaders on Monday to speedily hand over power or risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. military and economic aid to the country.
As Egypt's Islamist candidate claimed victory in a presidential run-off, Pentagon and State Department officials expressed concern with a last-minute decree by Egypt's ruling military council giving itself sweeping authority to maintain its grip on power and subordinate the nominal head of state. The move followed last week's dissolution of parliament by an Egyptian court.
"This is a critical moment in Egypt, and the world is watching closely," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters. "We are particularly concerned by decisions that appear to prolong the military's hold on power."
...Nuland said Egypt's military authorities need to "restore popular and international confidence in the democratic transition process" by ensuring an inclusive constitution-writing process, a democratically elected parliament and a swift handover of power to a civilian government.
The private sector is not fine, as some extremely worrisome economic news today emphasizes.
The government’s April Job Opening and Labor Turnover report was, in the words of JPMorgan economists, “soft, lending some credence to the view that the April-May slowing seen in the payroll report was real and not a statistical fluke.”
– The number of job openings in April fell 325,000 to 3.416 million. That’s the lowest level since November of last year.
– But here is the real red flag. Private job openings fell 282,000 — the most since early 2009 — to 3.080 million. Early 2009, if you recall, saw the economy just hemorrhaging jobs.
– One bright spot in this report in March was the rising in people quitting their jobs, showing some confidence in the economy. But that “completely reversed itself in April.”
The Pathologies of Progressivism: ThorntonQOTD: "The big question, of course, is what happens to a malignant narcissist when reality is so overwhelming that his normal coping mechanisms — self-aggrandizement and the denigration of others — no longer work? ... One could say that insanity is the last refuge of a narcissist. If the real world will no longer conform to his self-image, he’ll deny the real world, and come up with a better one that allows him to boast to his heart’s content, not just about his own alleged qualities, but about larger, objective reality." --Bookworm Room
More Killed in Chicago this Year than Afghanistan
As many as 200 Chicago police officers were assigned to provide extra security for the wedding of White House adviser Valerie Jarrett’s daughter, despite the fact that this year Windy City residents have been slain in greater numbers than U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan...
While 144 Americans have died in Afghanistan in 2012, a whopping 228 Chicago residents have been killed, and the murder rate is up a staggering 35 percent from last year. That’s a rash of homicides quadruple the rate of New York City’s, and police and crime experts fear it may only get worse.
...In the midst of a recent homicide spike and prediction of a weekend weather scorcher, Sneed is told somewhere between 100 to 200 police officers will be dispatched to help “secure the perimeter” of a high-profile wedding in Kenwood.
Via MEMRI, reading and translating what the legacy media doesn’t want you to know.
Iranian Regime Offers Obama a 'Win-Win' Deal: Recognize Our Nuclear Rights – And You Will Be Reelected
In its June 11, 2012 editorial, the Sobh-e Sadeq weekly, which is the organ of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), attempts to persuade U.S. President Barack Obama that recognizing Iran's nuclear rights at the upcoming nuclear talks in Moscow, June 18-19, will get him reelected. The editorial, headlined "The Importance of the Moscow Conference for Iran and Obama," states that Obama has an opportunity to turn the Moscow talks into a springboard to victory in November. Warning that it is Obama's time that is running out, not Iran's, it adds that if he does not promote recognition of Iran's nuclear rights at the Moscow talks – what the paper calls "a win-win" for both sides – Tehran will simply bide its time and wait for his successor.
For the main points of the Iranian editorial click here.