Obama National Campaign Co-Chair Donated $10,000 to Paul Ryan

A big-time donor to President Barack Obama is also a financial supporter of Paul Ryan. Marc Benioff, a national campaign co-chair for President Obama's reelection campaign, donated $10,000 to Ryan's political action committee earlier this summer, in June, according to CNN.

Benioff has helped raise more than $500,000 for Obama's re-election effort, and even hosted a $35,800-a-plate fundraiser featuring Stevie Wonder and hip-hop artist Will.i.am.

The founder and CEO of Salesforce.com is also an Obama national campaign co-chair, a distinction awarded to select Democratic heavyweights like Rahm Emanuel, Dick Durbin and Russ Feingold.

"I'm squarely a supporter of the president, and he is absolutely the right man for the job," Benioff said Monday.

But the tech executive is also a fan of Ryan -- Mitt Romney's running mate and a rising Republican star. In June, Benioff donated $10,000 to Ryan's political action committee after meeting with the candidate, who at the time had not been named to the GOP ticket and was running for re-election in the House.

Benioff tells CNN: "The nation's fiscal difficulties must be addressed, the CEO said, and Ryan's ideas offer 'a lot of the right long-term thinking for the country.'"

Via: The Weekly Standard

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VA under investigation over $5M conferences featuring 'Patton' parody

• Secretary Eric Shinseki's Veterans Affairs Department is under fire for $5 million spent on two conferences, featuring a pricey parody of the movie "Patton."

On the heels of the GSA spending scandal in Vegas, employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs are now under investigation over a pair of Orlando conferences that ran $5 million and featured a pricey video parody of the movie "Patton." 

The price tag on those conferences, held last summer, far exceeds the roughly $830,000 spent by the General Services Administration in Las Vegas. The VA inspector general's office says it's been investigating since April and is preparing to release a report by next month. 

The potential spending scandal sequel has now caught the eye of House oversight committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who fired off a letter to Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki last week pressing the department for answers. 

Issa revealed several conference details, including the claim that $52,000 was spent "to produce an 18-minute video starring a paid actor satirizing the opening scene from the movie Patton" -- the 1970 film starring George C. Scott as Gen. George Patton. 

Issa questioned why the VA hired an outside group to make the video when the department "has videographers and editors on staff." 

Issa also wrote that another $84,000 was spent on "promotional items such as branded pens, highlighters, hand sanitizers and USB drives." 

Via: Fox News

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BEST PLACES FOR JOB GROWTH LARGELY RED STATES

Texas is a great place to move if you’re looking for work.

Duh.

Of course it is; Texas is a red state. And one example is Fort Bend County, which once was famous for farming, but now attracts company after company looking for a business-friendly environment. Texas doesn’t kill businesses with taxes, the county has a strong school system, and it’s close to Houston, so corporations are flocking to Fort Bend. Among them are a Fluor Enterprises, an engineering firm that is purchasing land for a plant that will add 2,000 jobs; oil services firm Schlumberger, which has a 240-acre campus; CVR Energy, whose headquarters reside there; and Team Industrial Services, which intends to relocate its headquarters and 100 jobs to Fort Bend.

It’s not just Texas; in this era of rampant unemployment, guess which color states had the lowest unemployment in July? The top four were red: North Dakota, at 3.0%, Nebraska, 4.0%, South Dakota, 4,4%, and Oklahoma, 4.9%. 

And the elites on the coasts think they’re so much smarter.

Via: Breitbart

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DNC TO PROMOTE 'SUCCESS' OF AUTO BAILOUT

The DNC has plenty of good elected official seats still available. 

The (Convention planning) documents also give a glimpse of what parts of Obama’s record will get the most attention in the campaign, with one piece — the auto bailout — rating several mentions in the plan....

President Barack Obama claims the $82 billion auto bailout “created or saved” one million jobs.  But this is the Administration that claimed the $1 trillion so-called “Stimulus” bill “created or saved” jobs - in non-existent Congressional districts.

Chevy Volt

The administation spent $80 billion on “green jobs” - but couldn’t define what a “green job” was.  And when they finally started defining it - counted things like oil industry lobbyist, bus driver and garbage man. Suffice to say, President Obama and his Democrat cohorts have a long history of being...disingenuous.  And having a great deal of difficulty with math. 

We think the auto bailout rates several mentions - though we’re sure ours won’t come up at the Charlotte, North Carolina Democrat Lie-A-Thon.  Behold:

Taxpayers are poised to lose over $42 billion on the $82 billion auto bailout.  President Obama in late 2009 said we would make money on it.

$26.5 billion of the loss was a straight payoff to the Democrat-apparatchik United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

During the bankruptcy process, President Obama illegally paid off the UAW first and in full - before secured bondholders who should have been made whole before anyone else got a dime.  Which was incredibly disruptive and destructive of the entire bond market. 

President Obama illegally carried forward through the bankruptcy the ridiculously exorbitant UAW contracts, a huge contributing factor to GM going under in the first place - and are again, predictably, helping to wreck the bottom line.

Via Breitbart

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DRUDGE: BIDEN PREPPING STUNT FOR GOP CONVENTION

AP File

Secret Service prepping for Biden to appear at GOP convention, says Drudge

By Alex Pappas, The Daily Caller

 

Vice President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to crash the party next week when Republicans gather in Tampa, Fla., for the GOP convention.

 

The Drudge Report cited sources Tuesday saying that Secret Service agents have been spotted in Tampa telling people that they are doing advance work for Biden’s trip. He’s expected to be in Tampa on Monday or Tuesday, the news website reported.

 

A spokeswoman who answered the phone in the vice president’s office directed questions to the campaign when reached by The Daily Caller. The Obama campaign didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

 

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WaPo: The vice president will be rallying supporters in Tampa on Monday, Aug. 27 — during the Republican National Convention — according to a Democratic source.

Read more here

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Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said the GOP will respond tenfold to any Democratic efforts to upstage the party's national convention, amid reports that Vice President Joe Biden will visit Tampa next week.

"I think it's pretty common among parties to play with each other's conventions, and we'll have a pretty big presence in Charlotte as well," Priebus said. "The nice thing about going first is that whatever they do to us, we can do ten times over to them."

Does that mean that Romney may counter-program the Democratic convention in Charlotte next month? Priebus replied "You never know where we are going to be."

"I'm a big believer in: if they punch us, we put on the brass knuckles and punch back," he added.

Read more at Buzzfeed

Via: Fox News

OBAMA TAKES DIG AT ROMNEY'S UPBRINGING

President Obama portrayed Mitt Romney on Tuesday as an out-of-touch elitist while pitching education reform in front of college students at a campaign event at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.

Obama focused on a comment Romney made earlier this year in which he said if someone wants to go to college or start a business, he or she could just “borrow money if you have to from your parents.”

“When a high school student in Youngstown asked him what he would do to make college more affordable for families like his, Governor Romney didn’t say anything about grants or loan programs that are critical to millions of students to get a college education; nothing about work-study programs, or rising college tuition; he didn't say a word about community colleges, or how important higher education is to America’s economic future,” Obama said. “He said the best thing you can do is shop around.”

“That’s it — that’s his plan. That’s his answer to young people who are trying to figure out to go to college and make sure they don't have a mountain of debt — shop around and borrow money from your parents."

Taking a dig at Romney's wealthy upbringing, Obama added: “Not everybody has parents who have the money to lend."

Via: The Hill

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Obama praised Supreme Court affirmative action ruling in 2003, applauded racial ‘set aside plans’

In a June 25, 2003 interview with the Chicago Defender, an urban newspaper serving the city's African-American community, President Barack Obama praised the U.S. Supreme Court for preserving the practice of affirmative action in U.S. university admissions.

Nine years later, Obama's Department of Justice filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court on Aug. 13, arguing in favor of racial preferences in the admissions department of the University of Texas.

Speaking at Columbia University on Feb. 23, Attorney General Eric Holder said affirmative action may never become obsolete. “The question," Holder said, "is not when does it end, but when does it begin. ... When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?” (RELATED: In Harvard essay, young Michelle Obama argued for race-based faculty hiring)

Obama, a state senator and a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2003, praised the late Maynard Jackson in the Defender interview. Jackson, an African-American mayor of Atlanta, died on the day the high court ruled race could be a factor in college admissions. Mayor Jackson, Obama said, was “the architect among big city mayors of effective affirmative action and set aside plans.”

"He structured it in ways that other mayors across the country ended up emulating," said Obama. "His passing is enormous to all of us, but, it is fitting that on the same day he passed we had a Supreme Court that narrowly did the right thing by affirming the basic principle of affirmative action.”

Gov. Chris Christie: No Chance I’ll Tone It Down During Keynote Address

'It's A Great Opportunity For Me Personally, It's Great Opportunity For Our State'

ASBURY PARK, N.J. (CBSNewYork) –Governor Chris Christie is on his seventh draft of his keynote address for next week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

“I’m not nervous, no. I’m excited. It’s a great opportunity for me personally, it’s a great opportunity for our state,” Christie said on Monday.

WCBS 880′s Peter Haskell reports

Christie told WCBS 880′s Peter Haskell that likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney reached out the day before he announced his running mate.

“I called him and he told me that he had decided to go in a different direction for vice president. [He] asked me if I’d be willing to do the keynote address. I told him that I would be,” Christie told Haskell.

Romney chose Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, but Christie said there are no hard feelings.

“I think it’s about the record we’ve established here and I think Gov. Romney is an admirer of that record and I think that’s why he asked me,” Christie told Haskell.

The famously brash governor said he has no plans to tone it down for the national audience.

“I don’t think they have any expectation nor have they requested that I have a personality-ectomy between now and next Tuesday,” Christie told Haskell. “They know what they’re buying,” Christie added.

The governor said he worked on his speech while he was on vacation last week.

The keynote speech is the highest-profile spot for someone not accepting the party’s presidential or vice presidential nomination. The slot has launched many political figures including President Barack Obama, who was the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Four years later, he won the White House.

The Republican National Convention will kick off from Tampa next Monday and wraps up Thursday, Aug. 30.

How do you think Gov. Christie will do at the Republican National Convention? Do you think he’s a rising national star in the party? Please share your thoughts below…

Via: CBS New York

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Obama Takes On Navy SEALS: 'I Don't Take These Folks Too Seriously'

President Obama said Monday that he isn't too worried about two groups of military veterans running campaign ads against him.

Last week, two groups — Special Operations Speaks and Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund - formed to criticize Obama on national security policy, the Osama bin Laden raid and intelligence leaks.

“I don’t take these folks too seriously. One of their members is a birther who denies I was born here, despite evidence to the contrary," Obama told The Virginian-Pilot. "You’ve got another who was a tea party candidate in a recent election."

"This kind of stuff springs up before election time," Obama said.

The founder of one group, ex-Navy SEAL Larry Bailey, told Foreign Policy magazine last week: "I have to admit that I'm a birther."

In another interview with a Virginia TV station, Obama attacked the latest OPSEC film that accused him of leaking too many details about the bin Laden raid. That group maintains that it is nonpartisan, but its founder Scott Taylor is a former GOP candidate for office.

"My attitude towards leaks and disclosure of our military operations has been to crack down on it," Obama said in an interview with WVEC.

"I've been criticized by some for being too vigorous in going after folks who leak information that impacts our national security. I don't have a lot of tolerance for it," Obama said. 

Last week, the Obama campaign also got Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) — himself the victim of a group of military veterans during his 2004 presidential run — to denounce the attacks in a mass email. "I honor and appreciate the service of my fellow veterans, but a false attack is a false attack -- no matter who's making it," Kerry wrote.

Via: Politico

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Obamacare’s Threat of Centralized Control

I don’t like much about Obamacare. But most urgently, I oppose its imposition of anti-American centralized control–in the sense that it is the antithesis of the Founders’ governing philosophy–and hopeless complexity over a huge sector of the American economy, as much about the seizure of raw power as it is about restraining costs.

That’s the NHS model.  No, not in the method of its funding but the flawed presumption that bureaucrats somehow know best, a point made very well in by Theodore Dalyrimple’s interesting article about the NHS, entitled “Universal Mediocrity” (my emphasis):

In obeying directives not because they are right but because they are directives, doctors lose their self-respect, their probity, and their intellectual honesty. Gogolian absurdity can result—with a hint of Kafkaesque menace and Orwellian linguistic dishonesty. When the British government decreed that every patient arriving in the emergency room should be admitted to a hospital ward within four hours if admission was necessary (and that hospitals would face fines if they failed to adhere to the rule), traffic jams of ambulances formed outside one famous hospital, with their patients prevented from entering the emergency rooms until the hospital could comply with the directive. Other hospitals redesignated their corridors as wards so that they could claim that patients on stretchers had been admitted in time. In a centralized system, the setting of targets will encourage organized deception, as well as distortion of effort.
In the United States, after President Obama’s health-care law proposed fining hospitals that readmitted too many patients within 30 days of discharge, editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine pointed out the dangers posed by that rule. They omitted to say that when giant bureaucracies set targets for others to reach, they intend not so much to procure improvement as to impose control.

They say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We already see some of that. But more primarily, it is also the enemy of excellence and innovation. Deprofessionalizing medicine into a technocracy–already in its early stages–will not make our doctors and hospitals better, but instead, equalize increasingly mediocre results.

Via: First Things

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[UPDATED] Latest Newsweek Cover: “Hit The Road, Barack: Why We Need A New President”…

Niall Ferguson: Obama’s Gotta Go

Why does Paul Ryan scare the president so much? Because Obama has broken his promises, and it’s clear that the GOP ticket’s path to prosperity is our only hope.

I was a good loser four years ago. “In the grand scheme of history,” I wrote the day after Barack Obama’s election as president, “four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the apotheosis of Barack Obama. You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.”

Despite having been—full disclosure—an adviser to John McCain, I acknowledged his opponent’s remarkable qualities: his soaring oratory, his cool, hard-to-ruffle temperament, and his near faultless campaign organization.

Yet the question confronting the country nearly four years later is not who was the better candidate four years ago. It is whether the winner has delivered on his promises. And the sad truth is that he has not.

In his inaugural address, Obama promised “not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth.” He promised to “build the roads and bridges, the electric grids, and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” He promised to “restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” And he promised to “transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.” Unfortunately the president’s scorecard on every single one of those bold pledges is pitiful.

Via: The Daily Beast

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Obamacare’s 18 New Tax Hikes

Not only did the President and his partners in Congress take $716 billion out of Medicare to pay for Obamacare, but they also raise taxes by $836.3 billion to pay for it, with $36.3 billion hitting Americans in 2013 alone. Here’s the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation‘s (JCT) updated cost of the Obamacare tax hikes and penalties.

To read about more of Obamacare’s negative effects, click here.

Bloomberg On Illegal Immigration: “Nobody Has Come Across” U.S.-Mexico “Border In A Long Time”…

GOT TALKING POINTS FROM OBAMA

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week that "nobody" had illegal crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in a "long time."

 Bloomberg also advised that it would be easier for those wishing to illegally immigrate to the United States to simply buy a ticket to fly here and then overstay their visa.

He was speaking in Boston at an Aug. 14 forum on immigration sponsored by the New England Council. He shared the stage for the forum with News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Jerry Seib of The Wall Street Journal, who moderated the event, asked Bloomberg, “... My sister lives in Amarillo, Texas, and they’re very worried about waves coming up north over the border there. What are you going to tell them?”

“Number one nobody has come across the border in a long time,” responded the mayor. “I mean we spend a fortune on technology, and if you want to come to America illegally, don’t waste your time going across the border and through the desert. It’s dangerous. Just get on an airplane, fly here, and overstay your visa. We have absolutely no ability to track who you are and get you back.

“The total number of undocumented in this country has been going down for a long time. How do we solve the problem? We solved the problem by having our economy crater,” he continued. “People don’t come here to put their feet up and collect welfare. They come here to work, and if there’s no jobs, they don’t come here, and if they’re here and they can’t find a job, they go back home, because America is not a very good place to sit around and think the state is going to support you.”

Via: CNSNews

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BOOK: OBAMACARE DESIGNED TO CREATE 21 MILLION UNION JOBS

In an explosive new book revealing the depth of the corrupt dealmaking between unions and the Obama Administration, the insidious plot to use ObamaCare to unionize 21 million healthcare workers in his second term is finally laid completely bare. “Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind” is authored by Mallory Factor, a major power broker who has chaired the Economic Roundtable for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the 2009 Economic Summit for the U.S. House Republican Conference and Policy Committee, served on the Council on Foreign Relations, and co-founded the Monday Meeting, a nationally-recognized gathering of elected officials, journalists, business leaders and conservative authors.

Factor exposes the unions’ illicit alliance with Barack Obama in no uncertain terms. Only 10% of healthcare workers are presently union members, and the scheme for the unions to take over the healthcare system was being hatched as early as late 2008, when Obama was not even president yet and was forming his transition team. Dennis Rivera of the SEIU, who later became Obama’s point man in putting together the coalition to pass ObamaCare, sent a memo to the Obama transition team pledging the unions’ support for passing healthcare legislation.

This begged the question: why would the unions support ObamaCare when most unions negotiate for the super-expensive “Cadillac” plans for their members? In some cases, unions even directly profit by negotiating for contracts that force states to purchase health insurance for government workers from union affiliated insurance companies. In Wisconsin, for example, buying insurance from a union affiliated provider (WEA Trust) cost the state at least $68 million more than the state’s own health care plan for other government workers.

Via: Breitbart

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US taxpayers bail out California homeowners, as banks fail to pay their share

Contrary to what voters were led to believe, California took the unprecedented step this month to give banks and struggling homeowners up to $100,000 in taxpayer funds to reduce underwater mortgages.

Originally, banks and lenders were supposed to pay 50 percent of the cost of reducing the principal for those whose homes are worth less than their mortgage. But when the banks refused, California took the controversial step of paying the entire amount, up to $100,000.

"We thought, you know, 50-50 was much more attractive and we'd have much more traction with lenders, and it just didn't turn out to work as well as we would have liked," said Diane Richardson, legislative director of the California Housing Finance Agency.

The program, known as the Hardest Hit Housing Market fund, is part of a $7.6 billion federal effort to help underwater homeowners in 18 states. California received $2 billion. But when banks and lenders who service loans refused to write down even a small portion of the negative equity loans, California decided to use the taxpayer money to pay 100 percent of the mortgage reduction.

Richard Green, a professor of real estate at the University of Southern California, said it's not what taxpayers signed up for.

"I think taxpayers would be furious at the idea that everybody gets completely off the hook for this," Green said. "There are people that say, look, I've been a renter all these years, I've been paying my mortgage all these years, why am I bailing out these people who made a bad decision? I think the politics of it are very combustible."

Via: Fox News

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Book: Obama Campaign Marginalizes Ineffective Wasserman Schultz

AP File

The campaign has had difficulties with Debbie Wasserman Schultz since her inception as chair, reports Thrush.

But Wasserman Schultz’s most public scrap with the Obama campaign came after a Free Beacon report on photographs posted on Facebook by one of her aides, according to Thrush:

From the start, Wasserman Schultz grated on Chicago. She insisted the DNC hire a handful of her top congressional aides. While she was a tough and effective cable warrior and a serious fundraiser, she tended to do better on MSNBC and struck too harsh a partisan tone when she crossed over to the Sunday shows, they thought.

By the spring, the simmering tensions briefly boiled into public view. GOP researchers discovered an old post from Wasserman Schultz’s liaison to the Jewish community, Danielle “Dani” Gilbert, in which she joking referred to herself as a “Jewbag.”

Obama’s aides demanded the chairwoman immediate fire Gilbert, people close to the situation told me. But Wasserman Schultz defended the twentysomething staffer, who turned out to be the daughter of a top Democratic donor and Florida power broker, Mark Gilbert. She won the skirmish but lost the war–eventually becoming marginalized. Her fate, to be fair, has been shared by many a party chief in an election year, but by spring some in Obama’s orbit were openly speculating about how much better things might have been under Strickland or Villaraigosa. No sooner had that speculation died down than Wasserman Schultz called Chicago to ask why her national TV appearances, especially on Sunday shows, had dropped off.

Via: Fox News

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THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION IS KILLING THE INTERNET

Bad policy after bad policy.  Often illegally imposed. As a result, the Tech Sector – 1/6 of our nation’s economy, as big as health care – is hemorrhaging jobs. Tech Layoffs Hit 3-year High in First Half of 2012

And our Internet service would be better, faster and cheaper were it not for this Administration. 

The damage done by taxes and regulations is often unseen.  The money wasted - either sent to government or spent complying with ridiculous over-regulation - could have instead been invested in improving and expanding existing service, nd hiring people to make it all happen.

The worst gig-and-progress-killing Administration Internet power grab of all was the December 2010 illegal imposition of Network Neutrality. Net Neutrality eviscerates private sector investment in the infrastructure necessary to maintain and continue building the World Wide Web – exactly as ObamaCare does to private sector health care. 

Which ultimately leaves us with the government as our sole Internet Service Provider (ISP) – not at all problematic from a performance or free speech perspective. How do we know this?  Because the Godfather of the Media “Reform” Movement – University of Illinois professor and avowed Marxist (please pardon the redundancy) Robert McChesney – says so:

“At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

Having not to the Media Marxists’ satisfaction done enough damage to the wireless Web, in April 2011 the Administration took a second poisonous bite at the apple. 

Via: Breitbart

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Lamestream coverage leans left

By Howie Carr
Sunday, August 19, 2012 - 
+ Recent Articles

The more the campaign goes on, the more desperate the bowtied bumkissers of the lamestream media become in their attempts to save the failed administration of their hero.

The latest example: A hip-hop expert went on MSNBC (where else?) and claimed that using the word “angry” to describe Barack Obama is racist. Then he threw in the n-word for good measure.

Angry used to be popular with this crowd, at least when describing “angry white men” (Republican voters) or “temper tantrums” (GOP victories).

But now “angry” joins an ever-growing list of moonbat-proscribed words and phrases that have been deemed “racist.”

Also, were you aware that we’re in an economic “recovery”? And that Barack has “created” more than 4 million jobs? 

That’s what his cheerleaders report, day after day, with straight faces, even when they glumly add that the newest numbers are “unexpectedly” bad.

When Obama abruptly changes his position on an issue (think gay marriage), he is said to have evolved. When Mitt does the same (say, on abortion), he flip-flops.

Ann Romney wears a $990 shirt in May, and the Washington Post denounces her as out of touch and “indicative of a tone-deaf campaign.” Last month in London Mooch-elle Obama showed off an embroidered jacket that cost $6,800. The verdict? She “wowed ’em” at Buckingham Palace.

Via: Boston Herald

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