Shuts down Veterans’ memorials #LikeABoss pic.twitter.com/N9XQPWoGl3
— Cameron Gray (@Cameron_Gray) May 23, 2014Ted Cruz, however, really is a boss:
Shuts down Veterans’ memorials #LikeABoss pic.twitter.com/N9XQPWoGl3
— Cameron Gray (@Cameron_Gray) May 23, 2014Scandal: While his clueless Veterans Affairs secretary stays, the president issues his response: If reports are true, people will be held accountable — that is, as soon as he gets the inspector general's report in August.
'If these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable, it is disgraceful and I will not tolerate it, period," the president said, drawing a red line in his first public comments in weeks on the issue after a meeting with Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki at the White House.His faux outrage and emotionless tap-dancing differed little from his comments when the IRS was found to be targeting Tea Party groups to aid his re-election.
"If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous and there's no place for it," he said then, promising to wait, yep, for an inspector general's report.
Veterans are tired of waiting for reports. There have been at least 50 of them, as senators pointed out to Shinseki at a hearing, not counting the transition briefing President-elect Obama received in 2008 about a problem he pledged to address in 2009.
Now he has to wait for one more?
As the Washington Times notes, Obama's transition team was warned in 2008 of no less than three audits that showed the VA Department was misreporting wait times for medical treatment, including one audit revealing delays nearly 10 times worse than officially acknowledged. As we have noted, Obama promised then to fix a situation he now says he doesn't have enough data on.
Obama, at his meandering presser Wednesday, said he wants "to know the full scope of this problem, and that's why I ordered Secretary Shinseki to investigate."
QOTD: "...our veterans, our military have to be a priority. He [Obama] said he ran on that for his campaign. You know when he was Senator that he, you know, the veterans meetings that he went to - he missed 19 out of 37 of those meetings. You know he was told in 2008 this was a problem, he did nothing about it! So I don’t understand that. Number one. Number two, if this government cannot handle taking care of 5 million veterans, how are they gonna handle taking care of 300 million Americans with ObamaCare? How?" --Stacey Dash
RICHMOND, Va. — Some 308,000 Virginia voters are also registered elsewhere, according to an analysis of 22 states’ election records.
The finding follows Watchdog.org’s report of 44,000 people who appear to be registered in both Virginia and Maryland.The latest survey found the 308,000 double registrations by matching names, birth dates and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.
The Virginia Voters Alliance, which reported the results, identified “big gaps” in the voter-registration process.
“Say you move to Kansas and tell the election office there that you were registered in Virginia when you submit your Kansas voter-registration form,” explained VVA president Reagan George. “If the Kansas election official is bureaucratically lazy or politically motivated your name never gets removed. The same thing can happen on the Virginia end, and you stay double registered.”
How many of the 308,000 voters cast multiple ballots in a single election is not known.
Leave it to the Obama administration to come up with perhaps the most backdoor strategy to date to go after guns.
Operation Choke Point, launched by the Department of Justice in 2013, was initially set up to monitor banks and other financial institutions that handle transactions for payday loan businesses and other online lenders the government considered open to fraudulent activities. What does this have to do with guns?
Operation Choke Point is now being used to intimidate banks that do business with online merchants the Obama administration deems “high-risk.” On that list are porn stores, escort services, drug paraphernalia shops and, you guessed it, gun retailers.
In other words, if you’re a bank, the government may be breathing down your neck about businesses it deems “high-risk” for fraudulent activity. It may swoop in at any time to open up an investigation into your banking business if its agents “think” one of your clients is engaged in illegal behavior. Why would you take on that client in the first place? It’s much less costly for you to stop dealing with these companies than to submit to investigations and audits.That means gun shops that offer their products online and use a third-party company such as PayPal to handle credit card transactions are increasingly not worth the risk.
Peter Weinstock, an attorney focusing on investigations of financial institutions, says, “This administration has very clearly told the banking industry which customers they feel represent ‘reputational risk’ to do business with. So financial institutions are reacting to this extraordinary enforcement arsenal by being ultra-conservative in who they do business with: Any companies that engage in any margin of risk as defined by this administration are being dropped.”
Already, gun retailers in Florida, Nevada and Arizona have experienced the fallout of such heavy-handed government tactics – from banks freezing their accounts and refusing to process their credit card transactions to dropping their accounts altogether.
..."I hope there are people who love the feature and post more," says Facebook's product manager excitedly about the new feature they just added. We suspect people will not... As the WSJ reports, starting Wednesday, the app has the ability to recognize music and television shows playing in the vicinity of users. Read that again... 'in the vicinity of users'. In other words, Facebook is unveiling its own NSA-style eavesdropping feature (on you and all your friends). Don't worry though... even if users decide not to share what they’re hearing or watching, Facebook will hold onto the data in anonymous form, keeping tabs on how many users watched particular shows. Sound familiar?
Facebook’s mobile app just grew a keen sense of hearing. Starting Wednesday, the app has the ability to recognize music and television shows playing in the vicinity of users... The feature is designed to make it easier for users to share. When users begin to write a post, the Facebook app will offer to include information about music or shows playing in the background.
...If enough users opt in, the new Feature could give Facebook enough data to start compiling television ratings. Even if users decide not to share what they’re hearing or watching, Facebook will hold onto the data in anonymous form, keeping tabs on how many users watched particular shows...
We are sure this will not be abused or hacked by the NSA... and we are sure there will be plenty of small digital print that users will understand... One wonders though, is there any way for non-Facebook users to know that they are being eavesdropped upon?
QOTD: "Sensing easy prey in people who so avidly cooperate in their own destruction, the media has relentlessly expanded its strategy for portraying conservatives as gibbering idiots for whom no sane voter would press the lever. For decades the media has collaborated with Democrats and the liberal elites in creating a superstructure that exists for the sole purpose of humiliating conservative candidates and spokesmen. It is proactive, universal, and often quite successful. It has also been virtually ignored by the conservative establishment, which consistently behaves as if American politics is a gentleman’s pastime operating by the same rules that it did in the late 19th century...
...This is the system we’re facing in 2014. Has anybody learned from these events -- from the self-immolation of O’Donnell and Akin, from the Sandra and Trayvon conspiracies, the blatant sabotage of Mitt Romney? The record certainly doesn’t show it. There has been no discussion of the media enemy, no evaluation, no strategizing...
...The striking thing about all this is how predictable it is, and how everyone involved fails to predict it. When Candidate X stands up and gets blown to atoms, do the rest of the Republican candidates out there flee the field? Do they attack the plummy voice and the guys who are winging the explosives their way? They do not. They crouch behind their bushes, waiting to be called on, waiting to be blown up." ..." --J.R. Dunn
Here’s a link to the Democrat proposal to repeal the First Amendment.
It has up to 41 co-sponsors now and it will apparently get voted upon this year.
Remarkable. No one has noticed!
On its face, the language of the amendment would undo all existing First Amendment protections, including those enjoyed by “news organizations.” After all, one of the signature activities of journalism is the endorsement of some candidates and the opposing of others, and it takes the expenditure of some “funds” to do that.
But there’s a funny thing I have yet to see anyone else notice. The Udall amendment contains the following language as its Section 3: “Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress the power to abridge the freedom of the press.”
I don’t think I have ever before seen a proposed constitutional amendment that directly contradicts itself.
E = mc². It’s one of the most basic and fundamental equations throughout astrophysics. But it does more than suggest that mass and energy are interconnected, it implies that light can be physically transformed into matter.
But can it really — physically — be done? Scientists proposed the theory more than 80 years ago, but only today have they paved the way to make this transformation routinely on Earth.
...In 1934, two physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler proposed that it should be possible to turn light into matter by smashing together only two photons, the fundamental particles of light, to create an electron and a positron. It was the simplest method of turning light into matter ever predicted, but it has never been observed in the laboratory...
Past experiments have required the addition of massive high-energy particles. We’ve seen from the development of nuclear weapons and fission reactors that a tiny amount of matter can yield a tremendous amount of energy. So it seems Breit and Wheeler’s theory would require the opposite effect: tremendous amounts of energy from photons to yield a tiny amount of matter.
This experiment will be a first in that it doesn’t require the addition of massive high-energy particles. It will be performed purely from photons.
On the surface, the economic atmosphere of the U.S. has appeared rather calm and uneventful. Stocks are up, employment isn’t great but jobs aren’t collapsing into the void (at least not openly), and the U.S. dollar seems to be going strong. Peel away the thin veneer, however, and a different financial horror show is revealed.
U.S. stocks have enjoyed unprecedented crash protection due to a steady infusion of fiat money from the Federal Reserve known as quantitative easing. With the advent of the “taper”, QE is now swiftly coming to a close (as is evident in the overall reduction in treasury market purchases), and is slated to end by this fall, if not sooner.Employment has been boosted only in statistical presentation, and not in reality. The Labor Department’s creative accounting of job numbers omits numerous factors, the most important being the issue of long term unemployed. Millions of people who have been jobless for so long they no longer qualify for benefits are being removed from the rolls. This quiet catastrophe has the side bonus of making it appear as though unemployment is going down.
U.S. Treasury bonds, and by extension the dollar, have also stayed afloat due to the river of stimulus being introduced by the Federal Reserve. That same river, through QE, is now drying up.
QOTD: "The federal government is piecing together a sweeping national “biosurveillance” system that will give bureaucrats near real-time access to Americans’ private medical information in the name of national security... “Health situational awareness includes biosurveillance and other health and non-health inputs (e.g., lab/diagnostics, health service utilization, active intelligence, and supply chain information), as well as systems and processes for effective communication among responders and critical health resource monitoring and allocation,” the draft states.
...the NHSS proposal would allow the federal government to monitor an individual’s behavior before, during and after any government-defined health “incident” – which could be anything from a local outbreak of the flu to a terrorist anthrax attack." --Barbara Hollingsworth
Pelosi using your tax dollars and the Capitol Building to attack you
Tonight, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are using your tax dollars to host the premiere of a film that attacks conservative groups – in the U.S. Capitol.
This partisan attack in the people’s house cannot stand and we have filed an ethics complaint [PDF] to hold Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid accountable.
Congress expressly prohibits partisan political rallies and fundraisers on the grounds of the Capitol or within its walls. As House Administration Chairman Rep. Candice Miller (R – MI) said, the “work in this hallowed building must solely be in the interests of the American people and not in the interests of any political cause.”
Pelosi’s office denied that the event was the premiere screening, despite it being called such by Politico, Fox News, MSNBC, and the film’s own producers in an RSVP now removed from their own site...
Not only do rules prohibit the use of House rooms for screenings, but they expressly prohibit any events that are campaign or political in nature.
The drunk driver who killed a veteran Arizona police officer in a head-on freeway collision this month is an illegal immigrant with a criminal history that nevertheless qualified for amnesty under President Obama’s broad plan.
Why else would he be free to drive U.S. highways and work off the books as a gardener? The devastating story comes out of Phoenix, where an off-duty Mesa Police Officer (Brandon Mendoza) driving home from work, got slammed head-on. In the other car was Raul Silva Corona, an illegal alien from Chihuahua Mexico with a blood-alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit, according to various news reports.Officer Mendoza was only 32 years old and he served 13 years on the Mesa Police Department. Before crashing into him, Corona drove 35 miles along several Phoenix-area freeways in the wrong direction. Authorities received dozens of calls from drivers who saw the drunken man speeding the wrong way and they tried to pursue him, but couldn’t stop him. Both men died instantly and hundreds attended a vigil for the popular officer last week.
Initial news reports did not mention the drunk driver’s illegal status or criminal history, probably because it’s not politically correct. The media conveniently dismisses these crucial facts as irrelevant, though it’s a very important issue. Back in 1994 Corona pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy in Adams County Colorado, according to court records obtained by the mainstream news outlet linked above. Evidently, it was part of a deal in which prosecutors dismissed the more serious charges of burglary, assault and leaving the scene of an accident.
Under Obama’s amnesty, tens of thousands of illegal aliens with criminal records more serious than Corona’s are being released from U.S. custody. Just last week Judicial Watch reported that in 2013 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) freed 36,007 illegal immigrants convicted of violent and serious crimes from detention centers throughout the nation. The crimes include homicide, sexual assault, theft, kidnapping and alcohol-related driving convictions, according to the government’s own records. The breathtaking documents were obtained by a nonpartisan research center dedicated to studying immigration issues.
Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media and the political establishment to protect Barack Obama, they can no longer hide the incompetence and criminality of the most divisive and sordid administration in American history.
Former National Security Council Spokesman Tommy “dude, this was like two years ago” Vietor is the poster boy of the Obama Administration; a collection of inexperienced, emotionally immature ideologues, whose “the ends justify the means” mentality permits them to tell any lie, violate any law and indifferently sacrifice lives as long as it serves their political objectives.This bungling and scandal-prone gaggle of amoral nitwits, led by a talking teleprompter, survives only because the extent of their dishonesty is matched by that of the political-media establishment and the public’s inexplicable willingness to tolerate it.
It is, in fact, explainable. Just as certain banks were “too big to fail,” Barack Obama is, quite simply, too corrupt to fail.
The “too big to fail” theory asserts that certain financial institutions are so large and so interconnected that their failure would be disastrous to the economy, and they, therefore, must be supported by government when they face difficulty.
Likewise, politicians and the media know that exposing Obama would reveal their own dereliction of duty, their complicity to undermine the Constitution, their continuous flouting the rule of law and uncover their willful ignorance of his alleged felonies and confirm their participation in the greatest election fraud and Constitutional crisis in American history. They know that the truth would topple the corrupt status quo and terminate their exclusive grip on political power, allowing the American people to regain control of their government. The political and media elite will do anything to prevent that, even risk the survival of the country, rather than risk their careers and the financial benefits.
I don’t like Bill Clinton.
From the get-go, his Eddie Haskell-goes-to-Washington act rubbed me the wrong way.
But we’re talking about politicians, not popes, and I was never one of those Clinton haters who frothed at the mouth, seeing conspiracies behind every potted plant from Little Rock to D.C.
Now, Monica Lewinsky is back in the news because the former White House intern wrote an article in this month’s Vanity Fair, reflecting on her tryst that consumed the media and the entire nation for nearly two years.
We all know the sordid story, but whether you thought it was a witch hunt or not, the bottom line was Bill Clinton was to blame for it, not the 22-year-old intern.
From the moment news of the scandal leaked, Clinton looked out only for himself. He let White House insiders begin a whispering campaign that Lewinsky was a sex-crazed stalker. At the time, maybe they didn’t know the truth.
But Clinton did, and he did nothing to stop it.
He let the rumors and slander swirl around the young woman until the infamous stained blue dress left Clinton, in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens, with no one left to lie to and he had to fess up.
In the meantime, Lewinsky, the object of countless dirty jokes, could barely show her face in public and considered suicide.
QOTD: "...Big Racism is trying to lay the predicate for another round of Brown v. Board of Education lawsuits aimed at imposing racial gerrymandering on student populations and the makeup of faculty in elementary and secondary schools. This report is just another small part of the grand scheme.
Many factors go into improving student performance. Diversity in the faculty may be one, no one knows. Even if it is, the cost and injustice of achieving such an ideal is too great for the benefit. How does having minority children in predominantly minority schools interacting with mostly minority teachers prepare them for the work force? What are the ethical considerations of assigning minority teachers to low performing schools based on their race then evaluating them based on student achievement when we know the teacher’s race more likely than not can’t influence that outcome? Shouldn’t experienced and motivated teachers, regardless of race, be given incentives to move to low performing schools rather than using an “alternative credentialing” process to hire minority teachers. (I apologize here if I seem to conflate schools with high minority populations with low performing schools. This isn’t the case.)
By defining diversity as something that is good, despite no evidence that it actually produces anything other than grievance mongering, the left attempts to encourage racial animosity and division for their own political ends and personal gain." --streiff
IRS scandal: “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it.”
Healthcare.gov: “Nobody’s madder than me about the website not working as well as it should.”
Lavish spending at the General Services Administration: “On the GSA issue, he was I think it’s fair to say apoplectic.” (Former White House senior advisor David Axelrod)
“Fast and Furious:” “It’s very upsetting to me to think that somebody showed such bad judgment that they would allow something like that to happen.”
Secret Service scandal: “If it turns out some of the allegations that have been made in the press are confirmed, then, of course, I’ll be angry.”
Judicial Watch today released a 106-page document obtained on May 1 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), revealing that on its first full day of operation, October 1, 2013, Obamacare’s Healthcare.gov received only one enrollment. The document, obtained in response to a November 25, 2013, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against HHS, also reveals that on the second day of Healthcare.gov operation, 48% of registrations failed......The full extent of the failure, however, is reflected in the details provided by the Judicial Watch FOIA document revelations. They include:
- On October 1, there were 43,208 accounts created and 1 enrollment. (Page 49)
- As of October 31, 2013, there were 1,319,425 accounts created nationwide – but only 30,512 actual enrollments in Obamacare. (Page 19)
- On October 1, 2013, at the end of the first day (4:30), the Senior Advisor at Center forConsumer Information and Insurance Oversight, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Brigid M. Russell, sent out an email to her staff with a subject line celebrating “2 enrollments!” The body copy of the email read: “We have our second official FFM enrollment! The first two Form 834s sent out are to: 1) CareSource in Ohio, 2) BCBS of North Carolina. (Page 90)
- Official figures contained in the HHS report provide conflicting figures as to the number of enrollments. FFM [Federally Facilitated Marketplace] statistics show 23,259 cumulative to-date applications submitted as of 10/2/13 and 286 completed plan selections. Earlier numbers show 356 enrollments created as of 7pm on 10/2/13 that were completed with Form 834s sent. (Pages 91-92)
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney wound up with egg on his face Monday as he told reporters that President Barack Obama first learned from a TV news report that his Veterans Administration was denying medical care to vets with secret off-the-books-waiting lists...
...Obama has come under fire before for saying he was made aware of scandal-worthy shortcomings in his own administration by watching television, including the IRS tea party-targeting scandal that rocked Washington 12 months ago and the Operation Fast and Furious saga that has tainted his Justice Department for years.
...A CNN reporter asked Carney on Monday when the president was 'first made aware ... of these fraudulent lists that were being kept to hide the wait times' at VA medical centers... 'You mean the specific allegations,' Carney asked, 'that I think were reported first by your news network out of Phoenix, I believe? ... We learned about them through the reports. I will double check if that is not the case. But that is when we learned about them and that is when I understand Secretary Shinseki learned about them, and he immediately took the action that he has taken.'
After the Operation Fast and Furious scandal broke, Obama responded to national outrage in an interview broadcast by CNN's John King on October 12, 2011, similarly saying he was out of the loop until he turned on his television.