Rand Paul Exposes $25,000 Federal Grant for Oscars Museum

Sen. Rand Paul put Hollywood in the spotlight Monday revealing a $25,000 federal grant billing taxpayers for the building of an Oscars museum.

The National Endowment for the Arts is sending the federal dollars to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science to help build what the academyclaims as the “world’s premier museum” exploring the history and future of movies.

The Kentucky Republican revealed the spending in his latest “Waste Report,” which he uses to publicly uncover “egregious” instances of excessive government spending.

“$25,000 might be small in the scope of the federal budget or in Hollywood, it is over half what the average worker makes in a year, and equals the full federal tax liability of almost four average Americans,” Paul said in the report.

He questioned why the government would send the chunk of money to the academy given the group’s “abundance of wealth.”

“In addition to scores of Hollywood brass ponying up donations to the museum, the academy is flush with cash; it makes profits of roughly $50 million on the Oscars alone,” Paul said.

The museum, set to open in 2017, will receive the grant to subsidize planning for its exhibits. Paul highlights the museum will include a space shuttle from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which he said the academy bought for a “cool” $344,000.

“One must wonder, when cries ring out about what constitutes a fair share of taxes for someone to pay, why are any of those tax dollars going to support a museum that does not need it?” Paul said.

Via: Daily Signal

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Obama's Minimum Wage Ruse

President Obama's newfound enthusiasm for the minimum wage is the political equivalent of a ruse of war.

With an eye on the approaching midterm elections, the Demagogue-in-Chief hopes to lure his Republican enemies into a discussion on his ideological home turf so he can pound away at them mercilessly and distract from his own political problems.

As his approval rating slides, Obama has heartily embraced the red herring as the cornerstone of his public relations strategy.  Bearing his by now familiar deer-in-the-headlights look, he officially knows next to nothing about what his administration is doing and is constantly on the lookout for scapegoats and other distractions.

Democrats, as well as those leftists not disillusioned with Obama, desperately want to recapture the House and hang onto the Senate in the hope of imposing even more destructive progressive policies on the populace before a new president takes over in January 2017.  The November congressional elections give these left-wingers their last kick at the legislative can during the Obama presidency.  It is Obama's final opportunity to drop-kick America over the cliff and into the bottomless socialist abyss.

Obama promises that 2014 will be "a year of action."  The president plans to keep the chattering classes busy blathering on endlessly about stuff that doesn't matter to normal people.  He knows dragging voters to the polls in an off-year election is hard, so he wants to excite his base.

Obama is pushing a minimum wage increase, an otherwise marginal issue voters place well down on the list of national priorities, because he needs to get left-wing voters emotional.  Even though under 3 percent of all workers in the nation (and an even lower percentage of full-time workers) earn the minimum wage, Obama knows that whipping up indignation over the issue gets voters to the polls.

Obama's former employer and legal client ACORN, the huge community organizing network that went bankrupt in 2010, viewed raising the minimum wage as an electoral crowd pleaser.

Via: American Thinker

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