politics

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News/Politics 12-23-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

I’ll start it off with these two.

UPDATE!

I’m having a real hard time with this administration’s idea of foreign policy. What is wrong with these people?

Not only are we releasing spies in exchange for pretty much nothing, but now we find out we’ve been helping one of the imprisoned spies artificially inseminate his wife in Cuba. 

How would that work you ask? By sending his sperm from prison to Panama, with the help of a US Senator, as part of the negotiations.

From StarsAndStripes  “Cuba is celebrating the return of three intelligence agents imprisoned in the United States for more than a decade, and the joyful but puzzling news that one of their wives is expecting just two weeks from now.

Adriana Perez’s pregnancy has been the talk of Cuba since she appeared with Gerardo Hernandez at the island’s parliament this weekend. Perez beamed and held hands with Hernandez as he caressed her baby bump, clearly visible beneath a flowing blue dress.

A top aide to U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said Monday that the lawmaker helped arrange for Perez’s artificial insemination, one of the stranger chapters of 18 months of back-channel negotiations that culminated with Washington and Havana’s announcement they will resume diplomatic ties after more than 50 years of hostility.

Tim Rieser, foreign policy adviser to Leahy, told The Associated Press that it all began with a February 2013 trip to Cuba by Leahy, who has visited the island multiple times since the early 1990s, met with both former and current presidents Fidel and Raul Castro and opposes the U.S. embargo.”

“Back home, Leahy’s office began working with U.S. government officials. Conjugal visits are not allowed in the federal penitentiary system, but officials identified a precedent where artificial insemination had been permitted for an inmate.”

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1. The absolute worst idea yet from the gun control gang. Steal your parents gun and take it to school to give to your teacher. I kid you not.

Did you spot the 3 crimes he committed? More on that here,

From National review  “Moreover, in the course of his little ploy, the kid breaks pretty much every law on the books. He takes a gun out of his house (not only is this felony burglary, but he’s not old enough to carry a firearm in public); he then takes that gun into a school (that’s against federal and state law); and, finally, he transfers it to a teacher without a background check, thereby breaking the very rule that progressives tell us is necessary to keep us all safe from gun violence. And for what, pray? Typically, anti-gun commercials focus in on a specific safety issue: a lack of trigger locks, or background checks, or safe-storage, for example. This one seems to feature a child who is saying, “I don’t want any guns in the house at all.” This absolute approach is extreme, even for today’s class of wildly incompetent control freaks.”

And just imagine the fun when he shows up at school with it. 🙄

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2. A Christmas surprise from ObamaCare. Further proof that Gruber and Obama think you’re too stupid to make these kind of important decisions yourself.

From TheWashingtonTimes  “If you like your health care plan, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has a Christmas surprise for you! When will this new present arrive? December 25th.

In an ongoing effort to keep Obamacare numbers elevated, CMS has embarked on the next step of its government takeover of healthcare.

It seems CMS is taking a page from Jonathan Gruber’s book; rather than allowing the “stupid” masses to make a decision on their own health plan, CMS has proposed a new rule that includes an overly reaching provision allowing CMS to re-enroll anyone who has not made the annual trek back to healthcare.gov in a cheaper plan of CMS’ choosing.

That’s right, the government will choose your plan, perhaps limit access to your doctor, and ultimately make the decision on what is “best” for you.”

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News/Politics 12-22-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread

I’ll start things off with a question.

Do they have a point? Let’s face it, this bunch has been agitating the snot out of the situation. Is this just an unavoidable tragedy, or have they helped egg this on with their racist rhetoric?

From TheDailyMail  “Many are blaming the murder of two New York City cops on Saturday afternoon on Mayor Bill de Blasio following his recent support for protesters in the city marching in opposition to a grand jury’s decision to not indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner.

Hundreds have taken to social media to say that de Blasio has ‘blood on his hands’ and should ‘be charged with murder’ after the two men were killed ‘execution style’ in Brooklyn. 

What’s more, many feel that de Blasio should not attend the officers’ funerals, this after many members of the NYPD signed a petition asking that the Mayor not attend their service should they be killed in the line of duty in light of his recent actions.

This as hundreds of NYPD members turned their backs on de Blasio as he entered a news conference Saturday afternoon. These same officers later lined the streets outside the Woodhull medical Center and silently saluted as the bodies of the two slain officers were taken away. 

Pat Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said in a statement; ‘That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall in the office of the Mayor.’

Mayor de Blasio responded to this, saying in a statement; ‘It’s unfortunate that in a time of great tragedy, some would resort to the irresponsible, overheated rhetoric that angers and divides people.'”

Says the man who along with Sharpton and Obama did all that and then some.

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by

News/Politics 12-19-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread!

Here’s a couple to start off.

1. This first one I offer for your consideration with no comment.

From TheFederalist  “Yes, Christians Can Support Torture”

“Majorities of Christians support the use of torture in some instances. And they’re not bad Christians for doing so.”

“In a recent post cited by Patheos, nondenominational pastor Brian Zahnd brashly proclaims “You Cannot Be Christian and Support Torture.”

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2. Shouldn’t liberals be crying about “separation of church and state?” Oh that’s right, they only do that when it’s conservative types proposing the “faith-based initiatives.” Since it’s the Obama admin, he gets a pass because they know he doesn’t really believe all that stuff and this is just a means to an end.

FromCNSNews  “Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell met with “faith organizations from across the country” last week to ask them to help people enroll in federal health care insurance plans created through the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

“We know that the most effective voices on helping folks learn about the Affordable Care Act are voices in their community and voices that they trust,” Burwell said to reporters following the “closed press” meeting on Friday.”

“While addressing reporters, Burwell was flanked by two people who attended the meeting: Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, National Catholic Social Justice Lobby and Amy Cotton, senior policy manager at the National Council of Jewish Women.

Campbell supported liberal causes, including the reelection of President Barack Obama. In September, Campbell and other nun activists did their third tour to fight what they say is “dark money” from Charles and David Koch to GOP political campaigns.

According to its website, Cotton’s organization takes “a progressive stance on such issues as child welfare, women’s rights, and reproductive freedom.”

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News/Politics 12-18-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread!

Here’s a few to start things off.

1. Republicans have chosen 3 new Senators for the Armed Services Committee.

From DefenseOne  “A lieutenant colonel in the Iowa Army National Guard and the first female combat veteran in the Senate. A former Army Ranger and captain educated in the Ivy League. A lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserves who worked on former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s national security staff. These are the three newly elected senators who will serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Republicans announced Monday.

Senators-elect Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, Rep. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, all post-9/11 veterans who served in either Iraq, Afghanistan or both wars, will serve on the Senate’s defense committee, according to incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. The Republican conference and full Senate will ratify the picks.”

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2. Since our state SG refused to do her job because all these dirty politicians are Dems like her, some local prosecutors are stepping up.

From Philly.com  “Philadelphia prosecutors announced criminal charges Tuesday against two more elected officials swept up in the undercover sting investigation that state Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane had argued could not be successfully prosecuted.

District Attorney Seth Williams announced conspiracy, bribery and conflict of interest charges against state Reps. Vanessa Lowery Brown and Ronald G. Waters, both Philadelphia Democrats, for accepting cash from an undercover operative.

In announcing the charges, Williams had harsh words for Kane, who he said had to be forced through “judicial intervention” to turn over key documents in the case.”

“After The Inquirer first broke the news of the aborted operation, Kane vigorously defended her decision. She contended the investigation was poorly managed, relied on a questionable undercover agent, and was possibly tainted by racial targeting. All five elected officials captured on tape are African American.”

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3. Obama and Clinton sure love those foreign contributions, huh? And of course Menendez’s dirty little fingers are all over this too.

From MSN/NYTimes  “The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials.

The woman, Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids. But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Ms. Isaías could work for an Obama fund-raiser with close ties to the administration.

It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the Isaías family, which the government of Ecuador accuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.

The family, which has been investigated by federal law enforcement agencies on suspicion of money laundering and immigration fraud, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to American political campaigns in recent years. During that time, it has repeatedly received favorable treatment from the highest levels of the American government, including from New Jersey’s senior senator and the State Department.

The Obama administration has allowed the family’s patriarchs, Roberto and William Isaías, to remain in the United States, refusing to extradite them to Ecuador. The two brothers were sentenced in absentia in 2012 to eight years in prison, accused of running their bank into the ground and then presenting false balance sheets to profit from bailout funds. In a highly politicized case, Ecuador says the fraud cost the country $400 million.”

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News/Politics 12-17-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

Open Thread, so you tell me….. 🙂

Here’s a few from me.

1. Who needs Congress when you have a king?

From USAToday  “President Obama has issued a form of executive action known as the presidential memorandum more often than any other president in history — using it to take unilateral action even as he has signed fewer executive orders.

When these two forms of directives are taken together, Obama is on track to take more high-level executive actions than any president since Harry Truman battled the “Do Nothing Congress” almost seven decades ago, according to a USA TODAY review of presidential documents.

Obama has issued executive orders to give federal employees the day after Christmas off, to impose economic sanctions and to determine how national secrets are classified. He’s used presidential memoranda to make policy on gun control, immigration and labor regulations. Tuesday, he used a memorandum to declare Bristol Bay, Alaska, off-limits to oil and gas exploration.

Like executive orders, presidential memoranda don’t require action by Congress. They have the same force of law as executive orders and often have consequences just as far-reaching. And some of the most significant actions of the Obama presidency have come not by executive order but by presidential memoranda.

 Obama has made prolific use of memoranda despite his own claims that he’s used his executive power less than other presidents. “

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2. Probably meaningless here, but let’s hope this is a sign of things to come.

From CNSNews  “A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania issued a “memorandum opinion” on Tuesday stating that President Barack Obama’s unilateral action on immigration–which would allow some illegal aliens to stay in the United States and work–is unconstitutional.

“The November 20, 2014 executive action on immigration is unconstitutional,” says Judge Arthur J. Schwab in one heading of the “memorandum opinion” he issued in the case of United States of America v. Elionardo Juarez-Escobar.

“President Obama’s unilateral legislative action violates the separation of powers provided for in the Constitution as well as the Take Care Clause, and therefore, is unconstitutional,” said the judge.”

“”President Obama contended that although legislation is the most appropriate course of action to solve the immigration debate, his Executive Action was necessary because of Congress’s failure to pass legislation, acceptable to him, in this regard,” said the court. “This proposition is arbitrary and does not negate the requirement that the November 20, 2014 Executive Action be lawfully within the President’s executive authority. It is not.””

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3. Blow the whistle, face illegal retaliation.

From StarsAndStripes  ” For 24 years, Navy Cmdr. Jeff Hawker served his country, leaving active duty to continue treating his military brethren as a Department of Veterans Affairs doctor. After he started working at the Salem VA Medical Center, though, he said it took just a few months for officials at the medical center to oust him and to destroy his career after he reported dangerous medical practices.

“You serve and you come back and you run into the corruption and malpractice” of the VA , he said.

At a time when the VA is scrambling to hire doctors to make up for a critical shortfall, Hawker said he was the victim of a so-called “sham peer review,” a problem many say is widespread in the VA and little reported because the victims fear bringing attention to their negative reviews.

Hawker said vindictive local VA officials have effectively ended his career after he voiced serious concerns about patient safety at a busy Virginia hospital, including a doctor performing procedures Hawker said he wasn’t trained to do and life-threatening medical errors. Worse, Hawker said, veterans there are still at serious risk months after he reported the problems.”

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4. What a joke. This will help contain costs, right? 🙄

From TheHill  “The White House wants healthcare providers to get serious about bulking up their defenses against climate change.

In a best-practice guide for healthcare providers and policymakers released on Monday, the administration advises them on how to best improve their “climate readiness.”

The guide is one piece of a larger initiative at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)  launched by President Obama last year, and provides information to healthcare facilities on how to prepare of extreme weather events the administration says is tied to climate change.

The guidelines released by the White House on Monday include commitments from leading healthcare providers across the country to bulk up climate resilience at facilities and of operations.

“HHS recognizes climate change as one of the top public health challenges of our time,” the White House said.”

And most folks without an agenda recognize this as one of the biggest scams of our time.

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by

News/Politics 12-15-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Just one question……

What didn’t they cave on?

From HumanEvents  “As they had a habit of saying throughout the interstellar empire of “Dune,” the spice must flow.  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 any more.  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.”  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 a gaping maw and many tentacles to feed itself, but it lacks eyes, ears, and a frontal lobe.

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.“

Even when they win, they still find a way to lose.

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2. Interesting tactic. But will it accomplish anything?

From FoxNews  “”75 of 91 homicides Black lives,” read a recent headline in the renowned black newspaper’s crusade against black-on-black violence. It was accompanied, as always, by a literal body count: The name, race and manner of death for every homicide in Pittsburgh in 2014 — with victims being overwhelmingly black, as the headline shows.

For years across the news media, stories have focused on cases like the killing of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. And for years, the Courier has kept asking: What about all these other black lives lost? That gun on its front page might as well be a finger pointed at black America — from a mirror.

 “We are challenging the community to own this problem,” says Rod Doss, editor and publisher of the 107-year-old weekly newspaper, which sometimes does an in-depth story on a particular victim but unfailingly updates and reprints its list, including whether anyone has been arrested.

 The campaign began almost a decade ago because editors at the Courier simply felt black-on-black killings were not getting the attention they deserved. At first, it met with strong resistance from the paper’s readership — “almost like we were uncovering dirty laundry. Nobody wanted us to talk about it,” Doss says. 

 Slowly, though, that attitude started to change. The number of rallies and vigils increased. Mothers of the dead banded together to try to stop the tragedies. Police were pressured to solve more of the murders.”

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3. Social Security continues it’s policy of trying to collect overpayments from survivors, despite assurances that it would stop the practice.

From MSN  “The Social Security Administration, which announced in April that it would stop trying to collect debts from the children of people who were allegedly overpaid benefits decades ago, has continued to demand such payments and now defends that practice in court documents.

After The Washington Post reported in April that the Treasury Department had confiscated $75 million in tax refunds due to about 400,000 Americans whose ancestors owed money to Social Security, the agency’s acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, said efforts to collect on those old debts would cease immediately.

But although some people whose refunds were seized were reimbursed in recent months, some of those same taxpayers have since received new demands from Social Security, asserting that the debts remain and seeking repayment.

In March, the U.S. government intercepted Mary Grice’s tax refunds from both the IRS and the state of Maryland. It turned out that after Grice’s father died in 1960, when she was 4, her mother got survivor benefits to help feed and clothe her five children. Social Security says it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it’s not sure who — in 1977. With Grice’s mother long since dead, the government came after Mary to pay the debt.

The Takoma Park woman, now 58, filed suit against Social Security, challenging the government’s right to take her money without notice to satisfy her mother’s debt. After The Post wrote about her case, the government returned Grice’s tax refunds to her. But in August, she received a new bill from Social Security, seeking the same $2,997 that the agency had refunded to her four months earlier.”

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4. Obama’s new college ratings system is already under fire and it hasn’t event launched yet.

From FoxNews  “A controversial Obama administration rating system for colleges and universities already is being scrutinized ahead of its late-December rollout by educators who claim the government’s goal of more transparency could come at the expense of schools that don’t happen to fit the ivory tower model. 

The federal government, with its long-awaited rating system, is trying to hold the country’s 7,000 colleges and universities accountable not only to taxpayers, but also to prospective students trying to weigh the pros and cons of different institutions.”

“But critics say the government should butt out and worry a broad system could lead to unintended consequences — like creating perverse incentives for schools in pursuit of higher ratings. They worry it could hurt institutions that serve low-income and underprivileged students, as well as junior colleges and those that feature liberal arts programs. 

“What we are opposed to is the federal government taking the factors IT thinks is important from a policy perspective and putting a federal letter grade INSTEAD of leaving that judgment up to students and families depending on their individual needs,” Pete Boyle, vice president of public affairs for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, told FoxNews.com in an email. “

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