Conservative Happenings

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz Has No Idea What This Obama Kill List Thing Is All About

WeAreChange.org, an independent journalism outfit, snagged a quick interview with Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, at last week’s presidential debate.

The National Defense Authorization Act, infinite detention, the prosecution of journalists and similar expressions of executive authority (none of which were actually brought up in the debate) are some of We Are Change’s pet issues. When they attempt to get Wasserman Schultz to talk about the NDAA she won’t bite. She’s obviously in the “spin room” to spin the debate in President Barack Obama's favor and certainly isn’t going to do something crazy like talk actual policy.

But when Luke Rudkowski brings up Obama’s “kill list” of terrorist targets he’s working to take out — due process be damned — the conversation turns amazingly, awesomely awful real fast. Wasserman Schultz purports to have no idea what this list even is. She may be playing dumb, but her facial expressions in the video lead me to believe that she thinks she’s being punked and that Rudkowski is some sort of Borat knockoff:

Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald, who has a lengthy rant over at The Guardianabout what is either an amazing amount of dumbness or an amazing amount of deliberate partisan arrogance on display.

Via: Reason

Massachusetts Congressional Race 6th District: Gambling question torches Tierney-Tisei debate

John Tierney

Richard Tisei

NEWTON — It took mere seconds of airtime for moderator Jim Braude of NECN to ask about the gambling scandal plaguing Congressman, and the gloves were tossed to the mat Thursday night in a primetime television debate.

Republican opponent Richard Tisei pounced on the question — the first asked directly about Tierney’s family in four debates to date.

“He said he had no knowledge of what was going on, but both of his brothers-in-law contradicted him and said he did know what was going on,” Tisei said, referring to the multimillion-dollar offshore gambling scheme that Tierney’s brothers-in-law were running in Antigua.

Tisei then hammered the congressman on his trip to Antigua to visit brother-in-law Robert Eremian, “in the middle of the gambling operation,” as well as the reported $220,000 in gifts the congressman’s wife, Patrice Tierney, received from her now-fugitive brother when she managed a multimillion-dollar account for him in Salem.

“I do think there should be a congressional investigation,” Tisei said when asked if Tierney did anything illegal.

The congressman, who has been hounded by the scandal since his wife was charged with filing faulty tax returns for her brother in 2010, responded sternly.

“My two brothers-in-law didn’t say that, when the (Boston) Globe went down to visit my brother-in-law down there, he had nothing to offer them in terms of that,” Tierney said. When confronted that one of his brothers in-law, Daniel Eremian, told a Salem News reporter that Tierney “knew everything” about the operation, the congressman replied, “You can take his word, or you can take mine.”

As he has throughout the campaign, Tierney noted that the judge in his wife’s case — in which she pleaded guilty to being “willfully blind” to the true nature of her brother’s operation — indicated at one point that Tierney is “‘not implicated in any way, shape or form,’ and he’s right on this,” Tierney said.

Tisei challenged that claim, saying that Judge William Young “never cleared you of anything.”

“Judge Young said the congressman has nothing to do with this, meaning the sentencing hearing,” Tisei said. “He wasn’t looking at the whole thing.” He noted several news organizations who have called Tierney’s use of the judge’s quote “misleading.”

Tierney again went on the offensive.

“Misleading? Richard, you have lied and used insinuation and innuendo on this whole thing and spent $3 million doing it,” Tierney said. “My wife paid a terrible price on that; she took responsibility for not knowing on that.

Via: Gloucester Times

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Third debate could be dated before it’s over

President Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney will meet for the third and final presidential debate Monday night to discuss foreign policy. It is a broad topic that was sidelined in the first debate on domestic issues and engendered only one question at the candidate's subsequent tete-a-tete, a town-hall meeting.

At last, we will hear the candidates' uninterrupted views on America's security. The debate's topics have already been disclosed by moderator Bob Schieffer. They include the usual cast of ominous characters: the long war in Afghanistan, the red lines of Iran and Israel, the rising power of China, and the changing Middle East. Another query, on ”America's role in the world,” could be a softball or a snoozer, but might also be quite revealing.

Nonetheless, the night may not be greeted with the rapt attention that attended the other two. The foreign policy debate is fighting an uphill battle for relevance not only because of the condition of our economy, the fight over our taxes, and the looming fiscal cliff. It is because, for those who remember other recent debates on international affairs, the gap between what was asked and what the winning candidate actually faced as president has been wide.

A candidate's policy towards Iran, Afghanistan, or China will have to share center stage with the unpredicted, the incidental, and the utterly dramatic once he becomes president or wins a second term. The stylized theatrics of a debate stand in sharp contrast to the randomness of the world.

”I am not going to make unilateral cuts in our strategic defense systems or support some freeze when they 1 / 8the Soviet Union 3 / 8 have superiority. I'm not going to do that, because I think the jury is still out on the Soviet experiment,” Vice President George H. W. Bush stated on Sep. 25, 1988, when he faced Governor Michael Dukakis. The jury would soon rule; the Berlin Wall fell just over a year later. Eastern Europeans realized they were being governed by a spent ideology and weak captor. The Soviet empire would dissolve by the end of Bush's presidency. Strategic defense debates were replaced by diplomatic challenges in a new, open Europe.

Via: Heraldonline.com

Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/10/20/4351191/third-debate-could-be-dated-before.html#storylink=cpy

Why Does Obama's White House Pay Women Less?

Equity: The president touts equal pay for equal work but hasn't practiced what he preaches with the women he has employed — including a well-known staffer who complained of a hostile work environment.

It remains a mystery as to why equal pay for women was one of the questions elected by unofficial Team Obama debate coach Candy Crowley of CNN during the second presidential debate.

But it let President Obama launch into breathtaking hypocrisy regarding the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

Lilly Ledbetter, which in Crowley's view ranked right up there with BenghaziGate as a pivotal issue, woke up one morning complaining that her male counterparts were getting paid more money for the same work and decided to sue for redress of this perceived grievance.

After she was told she had missed the statutory deadline, her case made it to the Supreme Court, which said too bad, but you missed the deadline.

So Congress passed the Fair Pay Act, which does more for lawyers than it does for women, merely extending the statute of limitations for pay-discrimination lawsuits from 180 days from the violation to 180 days after the last paycheck issued that was affected by that discrimination.

When Katherine Fenton asked Obama what he intended to do about "women making only 72% of what their male counterparts earn," the question was based on a false premise and a false statistic — one calculated by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, by comparing all male with all female workers, regardless of experience, productivity, number of hours put in or length of service.

When you factor these things in, Furchtgott-Roth says, women make about 95 cents to a man's dollar, which may explain why, since the Ledbetter Act was passed in January 2009, only 35 women have filed lawsuits under the new law.

Via: IBD

Continue Reading...

Every Green Energy Failure Is News

USA Today (10/17/12) ran a story about a battery manufacturer filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. But the story might as well have been a press release from the Mitt Romney campaign.

"Another Blow for Green Energy" read the headline. Wendy Koch's piece led off with this:

An electric vehicle battery maker that was awarded $249 million in federal stimulus funds filed for Chapter 11 reorganization on Tuesday, giving GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney potential ammunition to attack President Obama's green-energy subsidies.

It's a short article, but it's hard to avoid the central theme: This is good news for the Romney campaign. Koch writes:

Its Chapter 11 filing will likely spur further GOP criticism, which escalated once solar panel manufacturer Solyndra filed for Chapter 11 protection in September 2011 after receiving more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees.

In the first presidential debate October 3, Romney called four aid recipients "losers," including Solyndra, Fisker, EV car maker Tesla Motors and auto battery manufacturer Ener1.

"You don't just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers," Romney told Obama in a sharp exchange.

On Tuesday, Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul called A123's bankruptcy "yet another failure for the president's disastrous strategy of gambling away billions of taxpayer dollars on a strategy of government-led growth that simply does not work."

If it's important to note the campaign ramifications of this story, then perhaps readers should know that Romney claimed that about half of the companies receiving green energy loan guarantees have gone out of business. That is, as you might expect, completely false.

Via: Fair

MSNBC Host 'Lucky' to Get Paid Half as Much as Her Male Co-Host

This morning, as MSNBC's Morning Joe came to an end, co-host Mika Brzezinski had some praise for colleagues and the company she works for. "We've been talking a lot this week about women and equal pay and all these issues," she said. "I have to say, in all seriousness, I'm very lucky to be working with you [co-host Joe Scarborough] and for a company [MSNBC] who has actually dealt with this problem transparently."

Which basically amounts to Brzezinski saying that she is "lucky" to get paid half as much as Joe Scarborough.

After all, according to the Daily Beast (whose editor, Tina Brown, is a frequent guest on the show), Scarborough makes a cool $4 million per year, while Brzezinski's salary is half as much, coming in at $2 million per year.

Brzezinski's colleague Andrea Mitchell made this point on air yesterday--that pay disparity exists at MSNBC. Politico reports:

During an interview Thursday, Mitt Romney senior adviser Barbara Comstock told Andrea Mitchell that “we know here at MSNBC the guys get paid more" — and the MSNBC host replied, “We certainly do.”

For Brzezinski's part, it's more than a bit odd that she would play down the problems at MSNBC now.

After all, her public dispute with MSNBC about pay equity has been well known. In fact, she's made it herself on her own show.

"We make less than our male counterparts," said Brzezinski last year. "I found out on this show that I made a lot less than Joe. 14 times less."

Via: Weekly Standard

Report: Medicaid And Medicare Enrollees Now Outnumber Full-Time Private Sector Workforce

(CNSNews.com) - The combined number of people enrolled in Medicaid and Medicare--the government health-care programs for the poor, disabled and elderly--now exceeds the number of full-time private sector workers in the United States.

In 2011, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), there were 70.4 million people who enrolled in Medicaid for at least one month. There were also 48.849 million people enrolled in Medicare. That gave Medicaid and Medicare a gross combined enrollment of 119.249 million in 2011.

At the same time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 112,556,000 people worked full-time in the United States in 2011. Of these 112,556,000 full-time workers, 17,806,000 worked for government (at the federal, state or local level) and 94,750,000 worked for the private sector.

The gross combined enrollment of 119.249 million in Medicaid and Medicare in 2011 outnumbered the 112.556 million full-time workers employed in both the private sector and in government in 2011.

However, there are a certain number of people each year—called “dual enrollees” by CMS—who enroll in both Medicaid and Medicare because they are eligible for both. According to CMS, however, the most recently developed data for the actual number of “dual enrollees” is for 2008--when a total of 61.9 million people were enrolled in Medicaid and 9.3 million of them were “dual enrollees” who also enrolled in Medicare.

Via: CNS News

Continue Reading...

Obama Campaign Borrows $15M from Bank of America

Warren Buffett invested $5B in BofA last year

POLL: ROMNEY'S OHIO FAVORABLES UP 30 SINCE FEBRUARY

Public Policy Polling announced Saturday afternoon that presidential candidate Mitt Romney has seen a 30-point upward swing in his favorability ratings in the state of Ohio since February.

The numbers were juxtaposed in a succinct Twitter update:

The 21-point increase in those who favor the former Massachusetts Governor suggests more than half of the 16% undecided from the February figure, once exposed to him directly through the Republican National Convention and presidential debates, have adopted a positive view of the GOP challenger.

Even if all those who are currently undecided come from the 9% who used to have an unfavorable view of Romney, that would mean all 16% of former undecideds have swung to a positive view of the candidate along with 5% of those formerly unfavorable.

The complete poll shows Romney with a 47% favorable rating among independents, 41% unfavorable, and 12% unsure. Among that same group, the February numbers had Romney at 30% favorable and 53% unfavorable -- a 29-point net positive shift.

Via: Breitbart

Bill Clinton: “Impatient” Americans Haven’t Recognized How Awesome A Job Obama Has Done Yet…

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that President Barack Obama is facing a tough re-election race because "impatient" Americans haven't fully recognized an economy on the mend.

Campaigning for Obama in Green Bay, Wis., Clinton urged voters to stay the course as more signs of a recovery sink in. Clinton said voters should judge Obama on the past three years, in which private sector job growth has made up for lost ground.

"This shouldn't be a race," Clinton said. "The only reason it is, is because Americans are impatient on things not made before yesterday and they don't understand why the economy is not totally hunky-dory again."

The former president said Obama's difficulty in his race with Republican challenger Mitt Romney is that "people don't feel it yet" even as the unemployment rate ticks down and the manufacturing sector perks up. Clinton said Obama deserves credit for stabilizing a situation that saw the country hemorrhage jobs well into his first year.

"Gov. Romney acts like from the minute the president took his hand off the Bible he was responsible for every lost job," Clinton said.

Everywhere he goes, Romney argues that the tepid recovery is grounds for a change. The shape of the economy consistently tops lists of voter concerns.

A local police official said 2,200 turned out to hear Clinton at a college fieldhouse. Clinton won Wisconsin in both of his presidential campaigns.

Republicans think they can flip the state, which hasn't gone to them since 1984. Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan is on Romney's ticket and has campaigned heavily in the state in the past few months.

Via: Fox News

Continue Reading...

Top 10 Wasteful Government Programs

The Motley Fool, a financial publication with a sense of humor, recently compiled a list of the top 10 wasteful government-funded programs.

The first on the list was originally reported by The Daily Caller’s Paul Conner.

1. There’s an app for that

So many wasteful programs, I hardly know where to begin! How about with $100,000 in prizes offered by the Department of Energy to develop an energy app that would help users track their energy usage in their home. It’s a novel idea as our energy resources are finite and the DOE has pushed both consumers and businesses to utilize the available green energy subsidies available to them. However, there’s just one slight problem with the DOE contest: Apps that do this already exist — at least five of them to be exact. Perhaps someone should invest in an app that tracks apps for the DOE?

2. Alms for the rich

Just because you made $66 billion in net revenue doesn’t mean you won’t take a handout when one is offered… right PepsiCo. (NYSE: PEP ) ? According to Coburn’s report, Pepsi and Theo Muller Group are teaming up to open a yogurt manufacturing facility at the Genesee Valley Agri-Business Park in New York. Unable to use the supplied municipal water in the yogurt-making process, or the $4.2 billion in cash on its balance sheet, Pepsi gladly accepted slightly more than $1.3 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce to build a new aquifer-direct water supply system, a new road leading to the plant, and to improve the parks’ wastewater capacity.

Via: Daily Caller

Continue Reading...

Report: 2,000 Dead People Received Food Stamps

(CNSNews.com) – New York and Massachusetts are administering food stamps to 2,000 dead people, according to Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-Okla.) catalog of government waste.

The 2012 Waste Book, released earlier this week, documents $4.5 billion in waste in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps.

Among his findings, Coburn said that, “The USDA Inspector General found roughly 2,000 dead people are still receiving food stamps in New York and Massachusetts combined.”

“Additionally, its investigation revealed 7,236 people in these states are receiving duplicate benefits, while 286 are on state lists that should exclude them from receiving food stamps,” the report said, amounting to $1.4 million in unnecessary payments each month, or $147.03 for each recipient, dead or alive.

But the waste in SNAP does not end there, as Coburn found that individuals who smoke marijuana can receive added benefits.

“In three states,” Coburn writes, “some individuals received more food stamp benefits simply because they smoke marijuana.”

Under the section “More money for the marijuana munchies,” the Oklahoma Senator detailed how some states previously offered a deduction for pot smokers.

Marijuana cigarettes and marijuana pipe. (AP)

“Marijuana has been linked to an increased appetite, known as getting the ‘munchies,’ so perhaps it is no surprise the states of Maine, New Mexico, and Oregon gave extra food stamp benefits to users of the illegal drug,” the report states.

It continues: “These states allowed some marijuana users to deduct the cost of the drug from their income when determining the amount of the benefits provided for which they are eligible. In Oregon, the deduction ‘[i]ncluded … fees for obtaining a state-issued medical marijuana card, expenses incurred while cultivating marijuana and the costs of purchasing it from a third-party grower.’”

Via: CNS News

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Public Policy Polling announced Saturday afternoon that presidential candidate Mitt Romney has seen a 30-point upward swing in his favorability ratings in the state of Ohio since February.

Popular Posts