State of the Union

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News/Politics 1-21-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Before we get to the obvious big one I’d like to remind everyone of something. Let’s look at the bright side. If past history is any indication, only 30% of what Obama promised last night stands a chance of actually happening. 🙂

From TheWashingtonTimes  “Judging by his recent history, it doesn’t really matter what President Obama says in Tuesday’s State of the Union address — Congress is going to ignore him anyway.

Mr. Obama has the second-worst record of getting his State of the Union policy requests enacted into law of any president in the last five decades, according to an analysis by two scholars that puts him only above the unelected two-year presidency of Gerald Ford.

From 2009 through 2014, Mr. Obama issued 209 different calls for action from Congress in his speeches, but only saw lawmakers follow through on 64 of them — good for just 30 percent. That’s only slightly better than Mr. Ford’s 28 percent success rate, and is well below the likes of President Clinton, the previous Democratic president, who won 44 percent of his policies even though he faced a Congress more Republican than Mr. Obama has.”

And here’s a breakdown on the 112 SOTU promises he didn’t keep going into last night.

From Grabien  “The media are already analyzing the new proposals President Obama is set to layout this evening in his sixth annual State of the Union address (seventh if you count his unofficial 2009 address). Here at Grabien, we’re also looking at results. Taking a look back at past SOTU promises, How many actually ever materialized? 

The numbers aren’t pretty. From 2009 through 2014, we count 112 promises that to date remain unfulfilled. 

We should also note that many of these promises are duplicated from one year to another. For example, every year he has pledged to pass comprehensive immigration reform, overhaul corporate taxes, reduce regulations, and close Guantanamo Bay.”

They have a list of them all, and a nice video montage at the link so you can see and hear them for yourself.

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2. Now unto last nights affair…..

Obama calls for civility, then isn’t.

From TheWashingtonTimes  “President Obama spent much of Tuesday’s State of the Union calling for civility in politics — then taunted Republicans over his two election victories, after many of them applauded the looming end of his political career.

Mr. Obama issued a broad call for “a better politics” that began with common principles, and said his agenda isn’t political, pointing out “I have no more campaigns to run.””

“Mr. Obama’s two separate veto threats in his speech this year is tied for the most in any State of the Union going back at least a century. President George W. Bush also issued two veto threats in 2008, and President Clinton issued two in 1996.”

“But Mr. Obama’s threat may have been the broadest, with one of his threats covering everything from immigration to tweaking Obamacare to revamping the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms.”

He wants to work with Republicans, but only on his agenda. Not happening.

If you missed the speech, or just couldn’t take anymore, here’s the prepared transcript of his remarks.

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3. Is it just me, or was the Republican response as bad as I thought? Not so much the content as her delivery. Personally I thought Paul Ryan’s rebuttal on the Brett Baier show was much better than hers. I’ll find the video and post it later.

From APNews  “Republicans controlling Congress will focus on people’s concerns about jobs and health care and steer the country away from President Barack Obama’s failed policies, the newly minted senator delivering her party’s official response to the State of Union address said Tuesday.

In remarks that mixed calls for bipartisan cooperation with a flexing of GOP independence, freshman Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, cited Americans’ worries about stagnant wages, lost jobs and canceled health care coverage. She called on Obama to cooperate with Republicans to simplify the tax code by lowering rates and eliminating unspecified loopholes, and to ease trade barriers with Europe and Asia.

“Americans have been hurting, but when we demanded solutions, too often Washington responded with the same stale mindset that led to failed policies like Obamacare,” Ernst, referring to Obama’s health care overhaul, said in excerpts from her speech released before its delivery. “It’s a mindset that gave us political talking points, not serious solutions.””

Here’s the Ryan “rebuttal.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NETBgd2Hq34&x-yt-cl=84359240&x-yt-ts=1421782837&feature=player_detailpage

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4. Here’s more on Obama’s speech.

From TheDailyMail  “Obama accused of class warfare: President with ‘no more campaigns to fight’ riles Republicans with State of the Union tax increases for the rich – to pay for laundry list of progressive proposals 

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5. Uh-oh. Maybe this has something to do with the President not mentioning Al-Qaeda last night.

From Bloomberg  “The U.S. government should immediately close and evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

I asked her today whether the embassy, which remains open despite raging violence throughout the Yemeni capital, should be closed. She responded: “Based on what I know so far, yes.”

“I’m very concerned about our embassy there, who is still there, who isn’t still there, and what the plans are,” Feinstein added.

White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett said today on MSNBC that no decisions have been made on whether to close the embassy. A car carrying U.S. diplomatic personnel was fired on in Sana’a in a neighborhood away from the embassy. Houthi rebels, who control the much of the capital, have now reportedly taken over the presidential palace.

CNN reported today that the Pentagon has moved two warships, the amphibious assault ship Iwo Jima and the dock landing craft Fort McHenry, into the area pre-emptively in case a request for an evacuation is made. So far, the State Department has not asked the military for assistance.”

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News/Politics 1-20-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Something to keep in mind as you listen to the SOTU speech. The middle class has already taken a beating under his plans, so why would anyone think his new plans will be any different?

From Yahoo  “Ahead of Obama’s annual address, the business community is expecting the president to press for passage of the Trans-Pacific trade treaty, though a debate rages within the Democratic Party over whether that would create more middle class jobs than would be lost to increased imports.

Others say he may seek more overtime pay for mid-level salaried workers, propose a higher federal minimum wage, or renew calls for major infrastructure spending.

Along with the tax plan, Obama has proposed expanded access to community college education and improved family leave policies, while some of his allies have called for an outright wealth transfer from the top to the middle.

For Obama’s legacy none of that may matter.

The forces at work in the American economy appear so entrenched that Obama may be remembered as the president who pulled the nation from its worst downturn since the Great Depression, but failed to arrest deepening economic inequality.”

I’d argue it happened in spite of Obama’s policies, not because of. Class warfare is not an economic strategy, but you’ll hear plenty of it tonight.

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2. Global Warming: The most dishonest year on record.

From TheFederalist  “Last week, according to our crackerjack mainstream media, NASA announced that 2014 was the hottest year, like, ever.

No, really. The New York Times began its report with: “Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history.”

Well, not really. As we’re about to see, this is a claim that dissolves on contact with actual science. But that didn’t stop the press from running with it.

If you follow the link I gave to the New York Times piece, you will see that this opening sentence has since been rewritten, for reasons which will soon become clear. But the Times wasn’t the only paper to start with that claim, and most of the headlines are still up. The Washington Post has: “2014 Was the Hottest Year in Recorded History.” The Boston Globe: “2014 Was Earth’s Hottest Year in Recorded History.” And so on.

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3. Is an attorney who sticks it to victims really who we want as the nation’s AG?

From NationalReview  “It should go without saying that the U.S. attorney general, as our nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, is expected to wield the Justice Department’s full powers to fight for those victimized by crime. It should also go without saying that federal prosecutors routinely make deals with criminals to secure convictions for other, larger crimes, or to save themselves time and the taxpayers’ money — and that those criminals’ victims sometimes come out the losers in such deals. Yet new evidence suggests that Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s pick to take DOJ’s reins from Eric Holder, may have gone beyond the accepted norms of prosecutorial conduct in her time in charge of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. Lynch’s office appears to have let self-professed criminals walk free in exchange for their cooperation with her office, watched impassively as they committed further crimes, and intentionally kept the victims of those crimes in the dark — denying them their chance to seek tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution in direct contravention of federal law.

In April 2013, Paul Cassell, a former federal judge and law professor at the University of Utah, testified before the House Judiciary Committee, urging the committee to investigate potential wrongdoing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York in its handling of a stock-fraud case, U.S. v. John Doe. Though he didn’t mention Lynch by name, Cassell alleged that her office had failed to comply with important provisions of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act and the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act. The provisions require federal prosecutors to notify victims of criminal proceedings against those who wronged them, so as to guarantee them their legal right to pursue full and timely restitution against the accused. According to Cassell’s testimony, the restitution in question amounted to over $40 million.

The Doe case began just before Lynch’s first term in charge of the Eastern District. In 1998, Felix Sater — later revealed to be the “Doe” to whom the case refers — pleaded guilty to federal money-laundering and fraud charges in a RICO case, admitting that he had artificially inflated the price of stock he bought cheaply, defrauding investors and reaping millions of dollars in profit for himself. Then Sater, who has well-documented connections to the Mafia, apparently leveraged those connections to strike a deal.

In exchange for the government’s protection in keeping his case sealed and secret, the New York Times reported in 2007, Sater may have worked with the CIA, offering to purchase a dozen missiles from Osama bin Laden on the black market. He also reportedly provided evidence against the Mafia. When Sater was eventually convicted in 2009, the government argued vociferously for leniency on his behalf at sentencing, and he served no time behind bars. Despite having previously signed a cooperation agreement with the Justice Department acknowledging that he owed $60 million in restitution, he was given a paltry $25,000 fine and told to forfeit his house in the Hamptons.”

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4. How Boko Haram made people OK with slaughter.

From TheDailyBeast  “In the first few days after Boko Haram’s recent attack in the remote village of Baga, most of the news coverage I saw about it concerned the lack of news. Why, the media wondered, was the media not more interested? As many as 2,000 people had been slaughtered, a figure that, if true, would dwarf the number killed in Paris around the same time.

A big reason the Boko Haram killings haven’t gotten much press is that there isn’t much press there. Baga is extremely remote, with little or no cell service, and it is, by all accounts, a war zone. Nor is the Nigerian government cooperative, or forthcoming, about what’s going on: The military claims no more than 150 people were killed, including militants. President Goodluck Jonathan, who is in the midst of a reelection campaign, hasn’t even publicly commented on the attack.

But even if the western media had been more present, I’m not convinced the western audience would have been more interested. Because, at bottom, there’s a pervading sense here that what happened in Paris was decidedly not normal, while what happened in Nigeria decidedly was.

And normal, unfortunately, doesn’t make the news.”

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News/Politics 1-30-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

Lot’s to cover today, and in no particular order…

1. First, some good news. Kim posted it yesterday, but I’m reposting it.

From FoxNews  “A number of motorists who had to abandon their vehicles in the snow on Highway 280 outside of Birmingham, Ala. were able to find shelter in the storm thanks to the kindness and generosity of Chick-fil-A restaurant employees and the restaurant’s owner, Mark Meadows.

Once the snow started accumulating, Meadows closed the restaurant and sent his staff home. But a few hours later, many of them returned – unable to get to their homes.”

“Some of the drivers had been stuck in their cars for nearly seven hours without any food or water. So the staff of the Chick-fil-A decided to lend a helping hand.

“We cooked several hundred sandwiches and stood out on both sides of 280 and handed out the sandwiches to anyone we could get to – as long as we had food to give out.”

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2. In other storm news, the blame game has begun. People want to know why this happened and how authorities could be taken by surprise.

From NBCNews  “Under fire from Georgia government officials caught flat-footed by the winter storm that socked the South this week, weather forecasters are mad as heck and want them know: They’re not going to take it anymore.

With the capital city, Atlanta, paralyzed by less than 3 inches of snow, Georgia officials complained that they weren’t warned what was on the way Tuesday:”

“In a post on a blog he set up Wednesday specifically to defend the performance of forecasting services this week, Shepherd pointed out that the weather service issued watches and warnings well before the storm arrived, providing plenty of time for Georgia officials to make the right decisions.

“Yet, as soon as I saw what was unfolding with kids being stranded in schools, 6+ hour commutes, and other horror stories, I knew it was coming, I knew it. Some in the public, social medial or decision-making positions would ‘blame’ the  meteorologists,” Shepherd wrote in a post titled “An Open Thank You to Meteorologists in Atlanta.”

Officials in Atlanta and the state of Georgia all seem to have come from the Ray Nagin school of government. Don’t do your job, and then blame someone else for your failure to act even though you had plenty of warning the storm was coming. So it’s probably Bush’s fault.

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3. Now that everyone has had time to digest the SofU speech, more reactions are out as well, as the next few will show.

First they blame Bush for everything, now they’re plagiarizing him?

facepalm-double

I’ve been waiting for the chance to use that. 🙂

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4. Some folks seemed to really like the speech though. 🙂

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5. Somebody’s gettin’ audited.

From TheHill “Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) said Tuesday night he left President Obama’s State of the Union speech early after “hearing how the president is further abusing his Constitutional powers.”

“Stockman said Obama was promising to “break his oath of office and begin enacting his own brand of law through executive decree.”

“This is a wholesale violation of his oath of office and a disqualifying offense,” the Texas congressman said.

Stockman also criticized Obama for refusing to admit “his policies have failed,” and for advancing a plan for more taxes and spending that is a “blueprint for perpetual poverty.”

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6. With the President’s talk of ruling by executive order, some have questioned where he thinks he gets this authority. Even his own Attorney General can’t answer that question, and he’s the one who would defend those actions in court.

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “Attorney General Eric Holder couldn’t explain the constitutional basis for executive orders such as President Obama’s delay of the employer mandate because he hasn’t read the legal analysis — or at least, hasn’t seen it in a long time.

“I’ll be honest with you, I have not seen — I don’t remember looking at or having seen the analysis in some time, so I’m not sure where along the spectrum that would come,” Holder replied when Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked him to explain the nature of Obama’s constitutional power to delay the mandate.”

“”When you look at the quality, not just the quantity but the quality, the nature of the executive orders that he has issued, he has usurped an extraordinary amount of authority within the executive branch,” Lee countered. “This is not precedented, and I point to the delay — the unilateral delay, lawless delay, in my opinion — of the employer mandate as an example of this. And so, at a minimum, I think he owes us an explanation as to what his legal analysis was.”

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7. ICE union officials have taken the opportunity to point out the President’s violation of, and failure to enforce other laws, as well as his hypocrisy.

From NationalReview  “Chris Crane, president of the National ICE Council, the union representing officers of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, issued a statement Tuesday ahead of President Obama’s State of the Union address. Crane blasted the president for his repeated refusal to meet with ICE officers at the White House, and asked House Republican leaders to consult with ICE personnel as they work to outline their immigration reform “principles”:

According to news accounts, the President has once again invited illegal immigrants to the State of the Union – and yet the President still refuses to meet with ICE officers. We have a President who will provide those illegally in the US with the seat of honor at one of the most important events of the year, but ICE officers who serve under him are unwelcome in the White House. This is symptomatic of the President’s continued demonstration of contempt for immigration officers and his blatant disregard for Congressionally-enacted law. ICE officers are forced every day to release violent offenders back into the streets; we are prohibited from enforcing immigration violations and document fraud and from cracking down on illegal employment; we are prohibited from enforcing public charge law to protect taxpayers; and we are forced to catch-and-release illegal aliens who are not ‘priorities’ even when officers’ believe there is a threat to public safety.”

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8. I could use a triple face palm for this one. Another Obama admin foreign policy success.

From Reuters  “- Syria has given up less than 5 percent of its chemical weapons arsenal and will miss next week’s deadline to send all toxic agents abroad for destruction, sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

The deliveries, in two shipments this month to the northern Syrian port of Latakia, totaled 4.1 percent of the roughly 1,300 tonnes of toxic agents reported by Damascus to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“It’s not enough and there is no sign of more,” one source briefed on the situation said. 

by

News/Politics 1-29-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. In case you hadn’t heard, last night was the State of the Union address.

If you missed it, you didn’t miss much you hadn’t already heard.  

From TheHill  “The White House had foreshadowed that Obama’s address would emphasize a new willingness by the president to use executive action, and Obama promised a dozen actions in the next year, including the creation of new “starter” savings accounts and a hike in the minimum wage for federal contractors.

Throughout the speech, the president stressed that the government should work to provide “opportunity for all,” by addressing head-on the problems of income inequality and waning mobility.

Those proposals, along with other calls to Obama’s liberal base, were intended to embolden Democrats ahead of this year’s midterm elections but were delivered in a measured tone.

“What I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. Some require congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you,” Obama said.”

That would be a first.

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2. Here’s some excerpts from the Republican rebuttal. Again, if you missed it, you didn’t miss much.

From Speaker Boehner 

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3. Ted Cruz and “The Imperial Presidency of Barack Obama.”

From TheWallStJournal  “Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night.

The president’s taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology. The great 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu observed: “There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.” America’s Founding Fathers took this warning to heart, and we should too.

Rule of law doesn’t simply mean that society has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men. That no one—and especially not the president—is above the law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president the express duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Yet rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is charged to enforce. When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.”

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4. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before….  “We have to pass it to find out what’s in it.”

Only this time, it’s Republicans. And even after they pledged to not do stuff like this.

From NationalJournal  “Congressional negotiators released a massive 959-page farm bill Monday night, giving House members less than 48 hours to dig through the bill before they’re expected to pass it Wednesday.

Sound familiar? Congress did the same thing two weeks ago with the omnibus spending bill, taking less than a week to pass a nearly 1,600-page tome (and that’s not even included the appendices!). The farm bill is expected to follow a similar route through Congress, potentially hitting the president’s desk by the end of this week.

That quickened pace breaks—at least in spirit—a House Republican transparency pledge from 2011, promising constituents that they would not vote on any legislation for at least three days after it has been released for public consumption. House Speaker John Boehner’s office argues that neither bill violates the three-day rule, though both were posted online on Monday evenings and scheduled for Wednesday votes.”

Yeah! Who you gonna believe? The Speaker’s office, or your lyin’ eyes?

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5. Of course he will. Can’t be losin’ all those campaign dollars for Dems, now can we? It’s the reason they set ObamaCare up this way. It’s the bloodiest kind of cronyism.

From TheWashingtonExaminer  “The Obama administration is threatening a veto of legislation that would permanently ban federal funds for abortion.

In a statement on Monday, the administration said the measure would intrude on women’s reproductive rights and prohibit the ability of individuals to spend their own money on insurance coverage for abortion under President Barack Obama’s health care law.”

As we learned yesterday, everyone is already paying a surcharge for it.  This would fix that. But it’s obvious that the President doesn’t want it fixed.

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6. Snow hits the South, millions lose their minds….. 🙄

Come on people, act like you’ve done this before. 🙂

From NBCNews  “On Tuesday, the city was ready to give them a workout for the first time in at least three years. A rare winter storm stretched from Texas to Virginia, grounding thousands of flights and making a snowy, icy mess of roads.

Traffic came to a complete stop in the Atlanta area, where a traffic officer delivered a baby late Tuesday afternoon in the back seat of the car for a couple who were stranded in icy conditions on Interstate 285 in the suburb of Sandy Springs. A spokesman for the Sandy Springs police said mom and baby, who weren’t identified, were doing fine.

Classes were canceled from Texas to the Carolinas, while some school districts that did open told parents it would be safer to simply let their kids stay at school overnight.”

😯 Poor kids.

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by

News/Politics 1-28-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Here we go again. 🙄

From TheHill  “The White House said Monday that President Obama would not pay “an ideological ransom” in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

“The American people cannot — and the president will not on their behalf — pay an ideological ransom just so that Congress will do its job and pay the bills that Congress has racked up,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. “It’s just irresponsible.”

The comments came after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested over the weekend that the GOP wanted to “attach something significant for the country” — like the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline — to a debt limit increase.

“Any president’s request to raise the debt ceiling, whether this one or previous presidents, is a good opportunity to try to do something about the debt. I think the president is taking an unreasonable position to suggest that we ought to treat his request to raise the debt ceiling like some kind of motherhood resolution that everybody says ‘aye,’ and we don’t do anything, when we have the stagnant economy and this massive debt created under his administration,” McConnell told Fox News.”

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2. The first lady is bringing a gay NBA player to the S. of the U. speech tonight as one of her guests. I guess to make a statement. Some have decided to use the invite to make a statement of their own as well.

From TheWashingtonTimes  “The father of one of the men who died in the terrorist attack in Benghazi will attend Tuesday’s State of the Union address, escalating the battle of the guests that takes place every year.

Rep. Jim Bridenstine’s invitation to Charles Woods, father of former Navy SEAL and Benghazi terrorist attack victim Tyrone Woods, is the latest evidence that the real politics of the major speech happens well above the president’s head, in the public viewing galleries.”

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3. One of the themes you’ll hear tonight will be the new buzz words “income inequality.” And as is usually the case, it’s someone with a lot of money doing the complaining about it. (Funny though, it’s always our money they want to use to “fix” it, not theirs.)

Tonight the president will cheerlead his new meme, and filthy rich Democrats will follow suit, and the press will run with it, just like always. And as always, they miss their own hypocrisy. They completely miss that they’re the “evil” rich they rail about.

This lady is a perfect example, just like the president. She rails against CEO’s and their outrageous pay, yet fails to mention her husband George Lucas is worth 7.3 billion. She’s a real spokesperson for the little people. Funny though, she didn’t mention how much of their money she’ll be giving to help offset this inequality. Weird right? 🙄

From NewsBusters  “CBS analyst Mellody Hobson, whose husband George Lucas is worth $7.3 billion, appeared on This Morning to slam excessive salaries for corporate bosses. Discussing income inequality and Barack Obama’s planned discussion at the State of the Union, Hobson lashed out, “If you look today, the typical CEO makes 354 times more than the typical worker in his or her company, mostly his because there are so few women running companies.” (How much more does the male Lucas make than the average worker?)

She continued, “If you look back to 1980, that difference was just 42 times. So it’s been that kind of income inequality that has started a lot of backlash and chatter…” Co-host Norah O’Donnell introduced the segment by highlighting a hyperbolic letter to the Wall Street Journal by CEO Tom Perkins comparing the treatment of the wealthy to Jews during the Holocaust. O’Donnell promoted, “[President Obama] calls [income inequality] one of the defining challenges of our time. How do you think that will be received by people in the business community?”

“Hobson cheered Obama’s efforts: “Well, one, I’ve heard the President directly speak on these issues. I heard him right before Thanksgiving firsthand talk about this issue of the middle class…. Additionally what I would call it is positive populism.”

I‘d call it class warfare.

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4. The NY Times public editor is calling out the Times for it’s lack of coverage of the March for Life.

From LifeNews  “Kudos to New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan for asking why the Times couldn’t provide much coverage of Wednesday’s March for Life. Hundreds, if not thousands of New Yorkers were there, so “Was this local participation, or the event itself, worthy of a news story in the paper of record? Apparently not.”

“The Times, in print, published only a stand-alone photograph of the event on Page A17 with a two-line caption on Thursday.” Sullivan reproduced complaints from pro-life readers:”

“Another reader made the point that The Times’s political agenda was on display, not only in the lack of coverage of the event but also in what it did choose to give a major amount of space to in the same day’s paper: a front-page article about a Catholic school in suburban Seattle where students are protesting the firing of a school official who was let go after he married his male partner.

Francis H. Hoffman wrote: “A handful of young people from Seattle who support their fired vice principal merits big coverage, but a massive pro-life march in a winter storm is all but ignored. And the motto of the New York Times is, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” I guess pro-life news is not fit to print.”

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5. This one is sad, and he deserves it. Yet at the same time I don’t understand why it’s OK for a woman to do it either without the father’s permission. Both are parents of the child after all. It seems a little contradictory. And the plea was for other charges. They didn’t address the major issues, like whether the defense’s claim that Roe v. Wade protected him as well was valid, since he was the father.

From LifeSiteNews  “The man who tricked his ex-girlfriend into taking an abortion-inducing drug has been sentenced to nearly 14 years in prison.

John Andrew Welden received the full negotiated sentence of 13 years and eight months in a hearing at 1:30 this afternoon.

“I don’t think Mr. Welden is an evil person, but he committed an evil act and for that he’s going to have to pay the consequences,” said U.S. District Judge Richard A. Lazzara as he imposed the full sentence.

Welden signed a plea bargain in September to avoid life in prison for violating the 2004 Unborn Victims of Violence Act. But Lazzara, a 1997 Clinton appointee, nearly let Welden escape with only 41 months in prison.”

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6. The more we know, the worse it gets. I’m sure the administration is in no hurry to rectify this. And they don’t dare cave and let Republicans re-write any of it.

From WatchDog.org  “Insurance companies working under the Obamacare umbrella have secretly added a surcharge to cover the cost of abortions, an apparent violation of federal law that forbids the practice, congressional leaders charge.

Consumers signing up for insurance in an Obamacare exchange won’t find a single sentence telling them that they will pay at least $1 a month to fund abortions.

“The president promised when the health care bill passed that it would not cover abortion. We knew that was an empty promise as the bill stipulated a $1 a month surcharge for plans that covered abortions,” said Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., who chairs the House’s Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Health. “On top of that … it’s near impossible to decipher which plans include abortion and at what cost!”

To fix this, a House bill will be introduced this week to demand full disclosure and a separate itemized premium. It also will prohibit federal subsidies for Obamacare insurance plans that cover abortion. That bill, HR-7, or the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” will be introduced by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.”

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