They Hate Your Guts (Democrats and their voters).

I would like to address myself to the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refugees teeming to America’s shore, the homeless, the economically, socially, and mentally tempest-tossed. Also, I’d like to address the young, the hip, the progressive, the compassionate, and the caring. I’d like a word with everyone who votes for Democrats.

GARY LOCKE

Democrats hate your guts.

Democrats need your vote and they’ll do anything—no matter how low and degrading—to get it. They hate you the way a whore hates a john.

All politicians hate people. Politics is a way to gain power over people without justification for having that power. Nothing in the 11,000-year history of politics—going back to the governing elites of Mesopotamia—indicates that politicians are wiser, smarter, kinder, more moral, or better skilled at any craft (aside from politics) than we are.

But political rulers need the acquiescence of the ruled to slake the craving for power. Politicians hate you the way a junkie hates junk.

Politicians gain power by means of empty promises or threats, or both when they’re on their game. Should you vote for people who are good at politics? No. You should vote for Republicans. We’re lousy.

Believe me, I know why you don’t vote for Republicans. You see the Republican candidates and they look so .  .  . Bush-League, Dog Walker, Rubio Rube, Get-Outta-the-Carson, Hucka-Upchuck, Ap-Paul-ling, Cruz Control, Fat-Fried Christie Crispy, Son-of-a-Kasich, Dingleberry Perry, Flee the Fiorina, Sancta-Santorum, Graham Cracker, and Nervous 7/11 Night Shift Manager Jindal.

And never mind the busted flush Trump Card who should be spray-painted with Rust-Oleum primer, have a squirt gun super-glued to his hand, and kicked through the front door of the Ferguson, Mo., police station.

You think, “I don’t want to vote for these people.”

Just between you and me, we Republicans think the same thing.

Republican politicians stink. This is because real Republicans don’t go into politics. We have a life. We have families, jobs, responsibilities, and it takes all our time and energy to avoid them and go play golf. We leave politics to our halt, our lame, and our feeble-minded. Republican candidacies are sinecures for members of the GOP who are otherwise useless and/or retired.

Democrats, on the other hand, are brilliant politicians. And I mean that as a vicious slur. Think how we use the word “politics.” Are “office politics” ever a good thing? When somebody “plays politics” to get a promotion, does he or she deserve it? When we call a coworker “a real politician,” is that a compliment?

“But,” you say, “Republicans don’t love us either.” And we don’t. As voters you are demographic groups. Republicans do not love demographic groups. Actually, Republicans do not love groups at all, with a few exceptions: The guys in the combat unit they commanded. Blood relations old enough to have been dead for years. Intimates of their private clubs. Golf buddies. Fellow guests at the Alfalfa dinner. And everybody in Bohemian Grove. But this love is proclaimed only after copious drink has been taken.

Loving you would mean Republicans are paying attention to you. We aren’t. Republicans pay attention to only a few people:

* Members of their golf foursome

* Business-associate members of their golf foursome

* Investment adviser members of their golf foursome

* Members of other golf foursomes at the 19th hole

* Their spouses (that is, their most recent spouses, married for being rich or hot)

* Their children (except the artisanal pot grower in Mendocino who’s shacked up with a holistic dance therapist—he’s cut out of the will)

And in that order.

Democrats pay a lot of attention to you. They offer you all sorts of trick-or-treat giveaways.

Benefits are the way government is expanded. The more government expansion, the more opportunities for politicians to get power. (Beware of razor blades in the candy apples.)

Democrats offer you regulations to make your life safer from razor blades in candy apples. Regulations expand government with unelected regulatory bodies so that politicians can get power without bothering about your vote.

Via: Weekly Standard

Continue Reading.....

Don’t Fear The Shutdown… well, it *kind* of scans.

 

SunnyRight‏@sunnyright

From the people who brought you "The Koch Bros will hurt Republicans in 2014" comes "Attacking @PPAct will hurt Republicans in 2016"

• RETWEETS7
• FAVORITES5
• 

2:10 PM - 31 Jul 2015

More

With some clarifications, sure. First off: yes, very little that happens with a shutdown in Congress this year will have any effect on the national elections next year.  This is, of course, broadly similar to what happened in 2013: everybody who wasn’t part of the Republican grassroots (and a few of them, too) was convinced that the shutdown would do permanent damage to the GOP brand, right up to the point where Obamacare blew up in the missile silo. Technically, something equivalent has not yet happened this year.  But something will. Something always will. You can’t subject the populace to a year-plus-long rant about the inequities of the Republican party without said populace eventually tuning it out.

Second: unfortunately, you can’t really count on the Democrats being as dumb in 2015 as they were in 2013 – and they were dumb. Starting with the Democrats not taking the free gift that the GOP had offered them – there’s a bunch of former Senators and governors who wish that they had – and following with not capitalizing on even the transitory advantage the shutdown gave them. At this point somebody’s going to smugly mutter ‘Virginia,’ and I’ll mutter ‘sitting governor obvious en route to being indicted,’ and then we can all pick sides over who to blame in the Virginia gubernatorial election. I will note that, the way things were going, one more week and we would have won that race… which does not suggest that the Democrats really followed through on things. Presumably they’ve learned better. Obviously, it’s great if the Democrats haven’t, but it’s safer to assume that they have.

Third: this year’s races. A shutdown could very well affect the Kentucky gubernatorial race between Matt Bevin and Jack Conway. It probably won’t hurt Mississippi’s, given that Phil Bryant is running for re-election and he’s pretty popular. As for Louisiana’s… are we certain that a Democrat will even survive the jungle primary in the first place? – So if you do favor a shutdown of the government over Planned Parenthood funding, you should also be in favor of making sure that it doesn’t hurt Matt Bevin‘s gubernatorial bid.

Via: Red State

Continue Reading....

[EDITORIAL] Republicans are embracing many versions of Reaganism

The Republican Party has a bigger problem than Donald Trump: It hasn’t figured out what it wants to be.

GOP candidates still worship the legacy of Ronald Reagan, and cast themselves as Reagan’s heirs; there’s hardly a GOP stump speech in Iowa or New Hampshire that doesn’t invoke the 40th president’s name. “Every Republican likes to think he or she is the next Ronald Reagan,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul noted last year.

But there’s little consensus among conservatives about what Reaganism means in 2015 beyond the basic principles of small government and lower taxes.

When Reagan arrived in the White House 34 years ago, the top federal tax rate was 70 percent and the economy was crippled by inflation and recession. Now the top tax rate is below 40 percent and the main economic problem is stagnant middle class incomes.

What Would Ronnie Do? The candidates can’t agree.

“The core of the Republican debate is over what Reaganism means today,” said Henry Olsen, a conservative scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “And the major candidates are giving quite different answers.”

Confusingly, each of the leading candidates can claim to represent at least one facet of their favorite modern president.

Jeb Bush is campaigning as Reagan the conciliator, an optimistic conservative who reached out to nonbelievers. But his measured tone — and his last name — have reduced his appeal to the right-wing base.

“There’s an element of anger among many conservatives that wasn’t present 15 years ago, but Bush seems to find it incomprehensible,” Olsen said.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is campaigning as Reagan the innovator; he’s done more than any other candidate to roll out new proposals, including a tax reform plan (co-written with Sen. Mike Lee of Utah) that would lower taxes for families with children. But that’s landed him in trouble with those who think the Gipper would have wanted to cut tax rates deeply instead; the Wall Street Journal editorial page condemned Rubio’s idea as “redistribution.”

Wisconsin’s Scott Walker is campaigning as Reagan the combative governor, an outsider who made his state government smaller. He’s likened his fight with public employee unions to Reagan’s decision to break the federal air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981.

And Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is campaigning as Reagan the ideologue, a conservative who — unlike the real Reagan — disdains the idea of compromise even in his own party. (He’s proposed a flat tax, which would lower rates on the affluent but raise them on lower-income taxpayers.) “Nobody quotes Reagan more and understands him less,” Olsen jibed.

There are more candidates — from the relatively moderate Ohio Gov. John Kasich to the libertarian Paul to the social conservative Rick Santorum — who also consider themselves Reaganites. And they might all be right. Reagan’s White House included conservatives of many different stripes, from the pugnacious Patrick J. Buchanan to the pragmatic James A. Baker III.

So when Republicans vote in primaries and caucuses next year, they’ll be choosing one version of Reaganism over another, but that may not be the most important choice they make.

Equally important will be the temperament of the candidate they pick, especially his or her ability to reknit a fractious party back together.

There’s nothing wrong with vigorous intra-party debate, of course. But today’s GOP is fragmented into at least five factions: libertarians, social conservatives, tea party conservatives, establishment conservatives and moderate conservatives. And that could make the process of unifying the party around a nominee longer and more difficult than it has been in the past.

When Reagan ran in 1980, there were only seven candidates in the race; this year there are 16. And many of them have access to seemingly endless supplies of money, which means they won’t feel much pressure to drop out even if they fare badly.

If Republicans are lucky, the winner will be a candidate who not only updates Reagan’s message, but also shares his ability to unify his party and broaden its appeal. That, too — not just the ability to communicate a conservative ideology — was Reagan’s political genius.

Editorial by The Los Angeles Times

Via: Hays Daily News

Continue Reading....

Bernie Sanders explodes a right-wing myth: ‘Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal’

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said the immigration debate is framed exactly wrong.

Republicans vilify President Barack Obama for supposedly opening the border to ever-increasing multitudes of immigrants, legally or otherwise, but the Democratic presidential candidate said blame is cast in the wrong direction, reported Vox.

“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal,” Sanders said in a wide-ranging interview with the website. “That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.”

Sanders frequently targets the libertarian industrialists Charles and David Koch as unhealthy influences on American democracy — but he’s not the first to notice their support for an open borders policy.

The conservative Breitbart and the white supremacist VDARE website each blasted the Koch brothers for sponsoring a “pro-amnesty Buzzfeed event” in 2013, and two writers for the Koch-sponsored Reason — former contributing editor David Weigel and current editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie — have always been supportive of immigration reform.

That’s at odds with what many Republicans believe, and Sanders told Vox that an open border would be disastrous to the American economy.

“It would make everybody in America poorer — you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that,” Sanders said. “If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or (the United Kingdom) or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people.”

He said conservative corporate interests pushed for open borders, not liberals.

“What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy,” Sanders said. “Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour — that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, (and) I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.”

The senator said flooding the job market with foreign candidates willing to work for low pay would be especially harmful to younger Americans trying to enter the workforce.

“You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today?” he said. “If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?”

“I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer,” Sanders said.

Via: Raw Story

Continue Reading...

Watchdog report: Fake applicants were automatically re-enrolled in Obamacare

It shouldn’t come as a surprise anymore, but a new report has found yet another issue with Healthcare.gov.

A new report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, found that 11 fictitious image: http://cdn.redalertpolitics.com/files/2014/11/Health-Overhaul-Open-_Dobs.jpg

people created as part of a watchdog effort to test for fraud detection were able to automatically re-enroll in Obamacare coverage.

This report, released by Congressional Republicans Wednesday, is a follow up to one from last year.

It found that the Healthcare.gov marketplace still had no way to test for fake documents.

Eleven out of the 12 people created for the test were able to maintain their coverage through the end of 2014 and then were automatically re-enrolled for 2015. Some were even re-enrolled despite not providing the additional documentation requested.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services defended its process by saying that there has been “no indication of a meaningful level of fraud,” but the GAO pointed out point that there could be fraud that officials do not know about because they are not equipped to detect it.

Congressional Republicans slammed the report’s findings.

“That the administration failed to weed out fake applicants one year later is yet another shocking development that, unfortunately, continues the trend of ObamaCare’s gross mismanagement at the expense of hardworking taxpayers,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), as quoted by The Hill.

“Last year, this committee warned that weaknesses in HealthCare.gov could put billions of taxpayer dollars at risk, and the GAO undercover review has confirmed our concerns,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said. “One year later, this investigation continues to reveal alarming flaws in the ObamaCare system.”

Via: Red Alert Politics

Continue Reading....

‘Flat-out lie’: Cruz calls McConnell a liar on Senate floor

An extraordinary scene unfolded on the Senate floor Friday as Republican Sen. Ted Cruz bluntly accused Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of lying and said he's running the Senate like his Democratic predecessor. 

The charges from the Texas senator and GOP presidential candidate were a rare departure from the Senate's usual staid decorum, even for a politician famous for his fiery speeches. 

At issue were assurances Cruz claimed McConnell, R-Ky., had given that there was no deal to allow a vote to renew the federal Export-Import Bank -- a little-known federal agency that has become a rallying cry for conservatives. Cruz rose to deliver his remarks moments after McConnell had lined up a vote on the bank. 

"It saddens me to say this. I sat in my office, I told my staff the majority leader looked me in the eye and looked 54 Republicans in the eye. I cannot believe he would tell a flat-out lie, and I voted based on those assurances that he made to each and every one of us," Cruz said. 

"What we just saw today was an absolute demonstration that not only what he told every Republican senator, but what he told the press over and over and over again, was a simple lie." 

Reports had emerged earlier this year that McConnell privately pledged a vote on the Ex-Im Bank, in exchange for winning support on President Obama's trade agenda. Cruz says he was assured at the time there was no deal. 

Via: Fox News

Continue Reading.....

Meet the 41 Companies That Donate Directly to Planned Parenthood

In the wake of two videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of aborted fetal body parts, Republicans in Congress are working to ensure Planned Parenthood is stripped of its federal funding.

However, it’s not only the government that fills Planned Parenthood’s coffers.According to 2nd Vote, a website and app that tracks the flow of money from consumers to political causes, more than 25 percent of Planned Parenthood’s $1.3 billion annual revenue comes from private donations, which includes corporate contributions.

2nd Vote researched the corporations and organizations to find which supported Planned Parenthood and found that more than three dozen donated to the group. Some companies donated directly, while others matched employee gifts.

Forty-one corporations and organizations directly contribute to the group.

Planned Parenthood has come under heavy fire following the release of videos from the Center for Medical Progress.

The first video, released last week, showed Planned Parenthood senior executive Dr. Deborah Nucatola meeting with actors portraying buyers from a “human biologics company.” The “buyers” discussed the sale of fetal body parts with Nucatola while they dined over lunch.

In the second video, released today, Dr. Mary Gattner, president of Planned Parenthood’s Medical Director’s Council, is seen negotiating the price of aborted fetal body parts.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading....

After Five Years, Dodd-Frank Is a Failure

by VERONIQUE DE RUGY July 20, 2015 2:13 PM 

When the Dodd-Frank Act took effect on July 21, 2010, critics were fast to predict that the 2,300 page-long legislation, which passed the House without a single Republican vote and received only three GOP votes in the Senate would fail. Tomorrow will mark the five-year anniversary of Dodd-Frank and its unfortunate distorting effects. Just as when it was passed, the legislation remains unable to address the problems it was intended to. 

  The legislation has overwhelmed the regulatory system, stifled the financial industry, impaired economic growth, and done nothing to correct the pernicious effects of “too big to fail.” But that’s only the beginning: Many more of its regulations still need to be written, some several years down the road, all of which injects massive uncertainty into the financial industry. Here is a round-up of interesting articles to read before this sad anniversary. First, we have a great piece by Chairman Hensarling in the Wall Street Journal (“After Five Years, Dodd-Frank is a Failure.”). Thankfully for us, the chairman is as committed to getting rid of Dodd-Frank as he was to getting rid of the Ex-Im Bank. I wish him the same success and more. The whole thing is worth a read, but here are a few paragraphs: Dodd-Frank was supposedly aimed at Wall Street, but it hit Main Street hard. 

Community financial institutions, which make the bulk of small business loans, are overwhelmed by the law’s complexity. Government figures indicate that the country is losing on average one community bank or credit union a day. Before Dodd-Frank, 75% of banks offered free checking. Two years after it passed, only 39% did so—a trend various scholars have attributed to Dodd-Frank’s “Durbin amendment,” which imposed price controls on the fee paid by retailers when consumers use a debit card. Bank fees have also increased due to Dodd-Frank, leading to a rise of the unbanked and underbanked among low- and moderate-income Americans. Has Dodd-Frank nevertheless made the financial system more secure? Many of the threats to financial stability identified in thelatest report of Dodd-Frank’s Financial Stability Oversight Council are primarily the result of the law itself, along with other government policies. There’s also a new report by John Berlau at CEI that shows how Dodd-Frank has stifled competition among the banks even more so than before the financial crisis.

 A failure to approve new banks, for instance, means that those “too big to fail” banks are now more entrenched than ever. In the last five years, regulators have approved only one new bank, as opposed to an average of 170 new banks per year before 2010. As Berlau notes: “This lack of new bank competitors is one important reason why a large bank failure could severely curtail the supply of credit and availability of financial services. That in turn sets the stage for a continuing cycle of bailouts.”  The New York Times has an interesting piece (“Fannie and Freddie are Back, Bigger and Badder Than Ever“) by Bethany McLean. It’s must read recap of the promises of what Freddie and Fannie would achieve vs. actually happened, along with the failure to reform two agencies in the aftermath of the financial crisis.    The proposed solutions for this mess? Among other things,

 Senator Warren believes it’s time to bring back the Glass-Steagall Act, a law that would require big banks to divide commercial and investment banking. Most economists and Federal Reserve policymakers disagree that the repeal of Glass-Steagall had anything to do with the financial crisis but, Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders Martin O’Malley support the idea nonetheless. Hillary Clinton hasn’t said yet what she thinks of the proposal. However, according to Kevin Cirilli at The Hill, the White House is distancing itself from this push: The White House wants to keep its distance from a liberal push to re-implement legislation that would break up big banks… “At this point, we believe that the kind of implementation of Wall Street reform is the most effective way to protect our economy and middle-class taxpayers,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at a press briefing Friday when asked whether President Obama supports it. … Earnest said the administration is still focused on implementing the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law.   “Wall Street reform has been incredibly effective at reforming our financial system in a way that looks our for the interests of middle-class families and taxpayers,” Earnest said.

Via: National Review

Continue Reading.....

[VIDEO] EPA ‘secret science’ under the microscope as GOP lawmakers seek ban

The Environmental Protection Agency for years has issued costly clean air rules based, in part, on two '90s-era studies linking air pollution with death. 

But, critics say, the same agency has stymied efforts to access the data behind them. The transparency concerns have Republican lawmakers on a new campaign to end the use of what they dub "secret science." 

"Why would the EPA want to hide this information from the American people?" House science committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, asked EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy at a hearing last week. 

Smith is among those pushing legislation to bar the use of "secret science" for EPA regulations -- namely, Clean Air Act rules that Republicans say are based on research hidden from public view. The bill has passed the House and now awaits action on the Senate floor. 

"The most expensive rules coming out of the EPA rely on secret science," Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), said in a statement to FoxNews.com. "Americans deserve to have access to technical information and data being used to develop EPA rules that significantly impact their daily lives." 

For its part, the EPA has argued that releasing the data could compromise confidential personal information, and that it didn't have access to all the research anyway, among other issues. The agency made an effort to contact the original institutions behind the studies in 2013, but Republicans say they again would not hand over everything. 

During last week's hearing, McCarthy questioned why lawmakers have focused on this -- and why anyone would want to seek out this kind of granular information. 

"The EPA totally supports both transparency as well as a strong peer-reviewed independent science process, but the bill I'm afraid I don't think will get us there," she said. "I don't actually need the raw data in order to develop science, that's not how it's done. ... I do not know of what value raw data is to the general public." 

But Smith said the agency "has a responsibility to be open and transparent with the people it serves, and whose money it spends."

Further, Inhofe said the data pertains to everything from forthcoming emissions rules for power plants to mercury rules recently challenged by a major Supreme Court ruling. 

The Republican legislation -- called the Secret Science Reform Act of 2015 -- would bar the EPA from issuing certain rules unless all relevant research is named and publicly available for those who want it. In seeking the change, critics say the EPA's air quality rules for years have relied largely on two studies from the 1990s whose data is not entirely accessible -- including a 1993 Harvard studylinking air pollution and mortality in certain U.S. cities, and another from the American Cancer Society.  

In the mercury case cited by Inhofe, the high court ruled last month that the EPA should have factored in the costs of recent rules targeting mercury and other pollution. McCarthy reportedly has said the "very narrow" ruling won't affect the separate and ongoing effort to draft new power plant emissions rules, which could be completed in a matter of weeks. The White House has taken a similar stance in downplaying the implications of the 5-4 decision. 

But the ruling nevertheless has emboldened critics. And the "secret science" legislation could add to that pressure. 

An EPW committee aide told FoxNews.com the legislation, if approved, potentially could impact both the mercury and greenhouse gas emissions rules. 

"Really, this is just simple transparency," the aide said. 

Via: Fox News

Continue Reading....

The True Cost of Immigration

Democrats, along with a number of equally feckless Republicans, are extolling the virtues of “comprehensive immigration reform.” Such jargon obscures their real agenda, which is the abandonment of the rule of law in favor of a political expediency that benefits the ruling class and its campaign contributors. A ruling class and campaign contributors who seek to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” into a nation where progressive power is permanent, and cheap labor is plentiful. Hence, while those virtues are put front and center before the public, the vices associated with illegal immigration are relegated to the back of the proverbial bus. Here’s a look at some of those vices.

We begin with crime. There are a number of statistical measurements. One is a 2011 Government Accountability Office (GAO) reportrevealing that the number SCAAP criminal alien incarcerations in state prison systems and local jails in FY2009 (the most recent data available) was about 296,000. As American Thinker’s Randall Hoven explains, “SCAAP is the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program and in this context means ‘illegal aliens’ ‚Äì a GAO term meaning ‘Noncitizens whom ICE verified were [or whom states and local jurisdictions believe to be] illegally in the United States at the time of incarceration.’”

Another is a report by the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) obtained by Breitbart News. It shows that while illegal aliens comprise 3.5 percent of the nation’s population, they comprised a whopping 36.7 percent of federal sentences following criminal convictions in FY 2014. The actual number of crimes for which these illegals received sentences was 27,505. The primary categories include drug trafficking, kidnapping/hostage taking, drug possession, money laundering and murder convictions.

This data comprise actual convictions of federal offenders subject to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (SRA). Omitted from the list are state and death penalty cases, as well as “cases initiated but for which no convictions were obtained, offenders convicted for whom no sentences were yet issued, and offenders sentenced but for whom no sentencing documents were submitted to the Commission.” And while the data do include immigration violations, which makes up the lion’s share of convictions, eliminating that category entirely would still have illegals comprising 13.6 percent of all sentenced offenders, a number that far exceeds the aforementioned 3.5 percent of the total U.S. population they represent.

More germane is data revealed by Judicial Watch (JW). They note that “as of April 26, 2014, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had released 165,900 convicted criminal aliens throughout the United States, including many convicted of such violent crimes as homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and aggravated assault.” These illegals, along with 706,950 non-criminal illegals, were ordered to leave the country, “but have not done so and remain free,” JW reveals. JW also explains the documents reveal the difficulty ICE has with local policies that interfere with federal enforcement of immigration law. Those would be “sanctuary city” policies and JW cites a case in Montgomery County, MD where officials prevented ICE from gaining access to an illegal charged with rape.

Via: Canada Free Press

Continue Reading....

[VIDEO] Obama Taunts GOP on Iran Deal by Comparing Himself to Reagan

President Obama has two routes for getting the Iran nuclear deal approved by Congress. The more difficult path involves attempting to woo Republicans, though they've already vowed to kill the deal. Or Obama could just shore up support among Democrats so when he vetoes the GOP's "resolution of disapproval" Congress won't have the votes to override him. Supposedly the White House has not settled on which path it will pursue, but Obama's decision to invoke the name of the GOP's favorite human in explaining his rationale for the deal suggests he isn't all that concerned about angering them further. He said in an interview with the New York Times' Thomas Friedman:

You know, I have a lot of differences with Ronald Reagan, but where I completely admire him was his recognition that if you were able to verify an agreements that you would negotiate with the evil empire that was hellbent on our destruction and was a far greater existential threat to us than Iran will ever be [then it would be worth doing]. I had a lot of disagreements with Richard Nixon, but he understood there was the prospect, the possibility, that China could take a different path. You test these things, and as long as we are preserving our security capacity — as long as we are not giving away our ability to respond forcefully, militarily, where necessary to protect our friends and our allies — that is a risk we have to take. It is a practical, common-sense position. It’s not naïve; it’s a recognition that if we can in fact resolve some of these differences, without resort to force, that will be a lot better for us and the people of that region.

Obama said he doubts they'll get many Republicans onboard, since "there’s a certain party line that has to be toed, within their primaries and among many sitting members of Congress." But he said that's "not across the board" and called out one candidate by name. "It’ll be interesting to see what somebody like a Rand Paul has to say about this," Obama said. Apparently the interview took place before Paul had registered his opposition with a series of GIFs.

Via: New York Mag

Continue Reading....