Obama: Some Folks Don't Like Me Because I'm Black

On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per cent—lower than George W. Bush’s in December of 2005, when Bush admitted that the decision to invade Iraq had been based on intelligence that “turned out to be wrong.” Also, Obama said thickly, “I’ve got a fat lip.”

That morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I. headquarters, Obama went up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he got, instead, the sort of humbling reserved for middle-aged men who stubbornly refuse the transition to the elliptical machine and Gentle Healing Yoga. This had happened before. In 2010, after taking a self-described “shellacking” in the midterm elections, Obama caught an elbow in the mouth while playing ball at Fort McNair. He wound up with a dozen stitches. The culprit then was one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Decerega wasn’t invited to play again, though Obama sent him a photograph inscribed “For Rey, the only guy that ever hit the President and didn’t get arrested. Barack.”

This time, the injury was slighter and no assailant was named—“I think it was the ball,” Obama said—but the President needed little assistance in divining the metaphor in this latest insult to his person. The pundits were declaring 2013 the worst year of his Presidency. The Republicans had been sniping at Obamacare since its passage, nearly four years earlier, and HealthCare.gov, a Web site that was undertested and overmatched, was a gift to them. There were other beribboned boxes under the tree: Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency; the failure to get anything passed on gun control or immigration reform; the unseemly waffling over whether the Egyptian coup was a coup; the solidifying wisdom in Washington that the President was “disengaged,” allergic to the forensic and seductive arts of political persuasion. The congressional Republicans quashed nearly all legislation as a matter of principle and shut down the government for sixteen days, before relenting out of sheer tactical confusion and embarrassment—and yet it was the President’s miseries that dominated the year-end summations.

Via: New Yorker

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Millionaire Congresswoman: Income Inequality is 'Existential Threat' to U.S.

(CNSNews.com) - Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who is worth millions of dollars according to her congressional financial disclosure statement, says Congress needs to tackle income inequality because it “poses an existential threat to our nation and our way of life.”

On the House floor last Wednesday DeLauro said, “Every generation of leaders in this institution has faced their own time of testing. Whether it’s an economic panic, Great Depression, slavery, Jim Crow, Civil War, World War, Cold War. There are times when our country is confronted with a crisis that poses an existential threat to our nation and our way of life and Congress needs to stand up and act.”

“The test of our time is inequality,” DeLauro continued.  “It’s not too much to say that inequality threatens the continued existence of the middle class in America and even the American Dream itself.”

“The question before us now is: are we going to continue to be the land of opportunity, social mobility and the nation that forged the largest middle class in human history during the 20th century, or are we going to become a nation of very few haves and millions of have-nots?”

According to her congressional financial disclosure statement for 2012, DeLauro is worth between $5 million and $25 million. (The form’s requirements allow members to state ranges of value for their assets rather than exact values.)

VIA: CNS NEWS

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THE $128 TRILLION RIP-OFF

The biggest theft in world history is occurring right here, right now—literally, right under our feet. It’s a theft of wealth that measures in the 15-digits—wealth that’s being taken away from its rightful owners, the American people, and being sacrificed, in effect, to the Green Gods of Austerity and Sacrifice.

The exact size of the loot? It totals $128 trillion in recoverable oil and natural gas, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Energy Research (IER). To put that $128 trillion sum in perspective, we could use a mere 13 percent of it to pay off the entire US national debt. Indeed, that $128 trillion is almost 35 times greater than federal expenditures for fiscal year 2014, and more than seven times the annual US GDP.

We might note that IER’s $128 trillion estimate includes only oil and gas; no one has any real idea how much more wealth—in the form of coal, rare earth elements, and who knows what else—is to be found in the the 28 percent of land in the US that’s owned by federal government.

At present, there’s no plan whatsoever to do anything to utilize this wealth as the Obama administration is seeking ever-tighter federal regulations, and, beyond the Keystone Pipeline, Republicans hardly ever raise the issue.

In fact, the IER study was released more than a year ago, and nobody seems to have noticed. Since then, we’ve had endless negotiations over some sort of “grand bargain” to raise taxes and cut earned senior entitlements—and in the meantime, we’ve been ignoring the grandest bargain of all: abundance.

Seems more than a little ridiculous, doesn’t it? That is, for the U.S. to be scraping along, fiscally and economically, while leaving fallow such gargantuan natural resources?

Moreover, to get at this wealth, we don’t need to drill in Yosemite or other National Parks; we simply need to access the vast federal lands on and offshore in the "Lower 48," Alaska, and the many overseas U.S. territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

So how did this wealth freeze-out happen? How did so much treasure get locked up and unused? Here’s how: in the early 19th century, the federal government sold off or gave away most of its lands in the east. Then, in 1862, came the first of a series of Homestead Acts, which led to the glorious privatization of much of the Midwest. Yet the mostly arid lands west of the Mississippi were generally not seen as viable property for homesteading, and so Uncle Sam continued to hold title. Then the environmentalists came along and realized that they could gain de facto control of more than a quarter of US territory. Congress repealed the Homestead Act in 1976, and after that, the environmentalists happily proceeded with their no-growth plans. 

However, the Green land-grabbing did provoke a pro-growth backlash in the West, the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion,” dedicated to opposing enviro-liberalism. The Sagebrush Rebels helped Ronald Reagan carry every Western state, save Hawaii, in the 1980 presidential election; the hope was that Reagan would open the West to development. Unfortunately, their point man in Washington, Interior Secretary James G. Watt, turned out to be bit of a kook with a nasty sense of humor; he was forced out of office in 1983, and that was the end of the Sagebrushers as a force.

In the decades since, Green Democrats, joined by more than a few Green Republicans, have banned drilling everywhere they could. The bans on offshore drilling are a nice perk for rich people who treasure their ocean views, but it’s not so great for everyone else who needs money or a job.

Meanwhile, other countries have charged ahead. Norway, for example, eagerly drills in the waters outside of its scenic fjords; that’s why the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund is worth $783 billion—not bad for a country of just five million people. When the oil is gone, the oil wells will be gone, and Norway will still be rich because of all that money in the bank.

Via: Breitbart

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Beating the Income Inequality Drum Dean Kalahar

Over the next two years the drumbeat of income inequality will be repeated more times than Iron Butterfly's "In A Gadda Da Vida." The political aim will be to sway the American voter into believing two things: income inequality in America is immoral, and the Democrats are the only party that can fix it. There is just one problem; it is a fallacy and conservatives better learn the tune if they want to win the next two elections.

This theatre of the absurd has three acts. First, confuse economic worth with self-worth and say that pay rates must be equalized to reflect the "equal worth" of every person. Second, say wealth is distributed unevenly, as if by some grand conspiracy. Third, demonize businesses for manipulating pay and degrading human dignity. As this melodrama gathers steam, the liberal curtain call is made to end the injustice of income inequality.

If we wanted to quickly destroy this fallacy we could look to Simon Kuznets, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on national income accounting. Kuznets' conclusion: "In poor countries economic growth increases the income disparity between rich and poor people; but in wealthier countries economic growth narrowed the difference." Or John Luke Gallop's research in 2012 that showed "a strong tendency for inequality to fall with economic growth at low to middle income levels and a weaker tendency for inequality to rise at middle to high income levels."

Of course Nobel Prize economics rarely influence the gullible so some simple economics is in order.

Economic classes that people are grouped into should not be confused with snobbery. Whether people are grouped into upper, middle, and lower classes or into quintiles, showing for example the top 20% or bottom 20%, classes exist only to the extent they represent the breakdown of incomes by statistical groups. People are not born into and remain entrenched in static castes.

The "have" and "have-nots" are not different people, just people at different stages of their lives. Individuals in the bottom and top 20% are always changing. The top income earners retire while the lower income earners increase their human capital over time and replace those who were once on top of the earning scale.

Social mobility between classes happens with remarkable ease. A Wall Street Journalanalysis of Treasury Department data on 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 to 2005 showed that nearly 58% of filers who were in the lowest income group in 1996 moved into a higher group by 2006. Almost 25% of the bottom income filers moved into the middle or upper income groups and 5.3% made it to the top quintile in ten years.

After factoring in inflation, the median income of all tax filers increased 24% over the same period. Those who were in the bottom quintile in 1996 saw their income increase 90.5% over the ten year period, while those in the top quintile saw only a 10% gain in income. 57% of the top 1% dropped into a lower income bracket over the decade. And only one income group had an absolute decrease in income: the top 1% saw their income decline by 25.8% over the ten-year period.

Differences in family income from the bottom to top are also narrow. 90% of Americans make between $30K and $90K a year. Visualizing "poor" versus "rich" by comparing a homeless person to Warren Buffet may be dramatic, but highlighting the vivid exceptions to the statistical truth does not accurately portray demographic realities of income.

The top 20% are not all multi-millionaires. Focusing on the 1.8% of Americans that make $200,000 or more a year does little to advance reality. Most in the top 20% in America make less than $100,000 a year; and as Thomas Sowell has shown, an absolute majority of Americans in the bottom 20% make it into the top 20% over the course of approximately 17 years.

The bottom 20% does not mean "skid row." Most of the people in the bottom 20% in America do not live on the streets or remain at the bottom for very long. If escaping from poverty is impossible, why do so many risk their lives on rafts or cross deserts to reach America if not to escape poverty?

Culture must be weighed into income data. The poor in America are far richer in real economic terms than the rich in many places around the globe. When the bottom 20% in America has a higher standard of living than the top 20% in many other countries, the cries of income inequality are disingenuous.

Using government data, Nicholas Eberstadt showed that in 1900 2% of homes had electricity and only one out of ten had flush toilets. In addition, fewer people lived in poverty in 1973 than today but in 1973 most poor people did not have a car while 75% of "poor" people today have a car. Today more "poor" homes have cell phones and cable TV than non-poor families had in 1970. One of the biggest problems of the "poor" today is not malnutrition; it is heart disease and diabetes found among obese individuals.

In addition, time, age, wisdom, skills experience, and productivity must also be factored into any analysis of income inequality. And don't forget the laws of supply and demand are also constantly at play. Even equal opportunities differentiate income because not everyone will make the same choices with the freedom they are given. As Walter Williams says: income is "earned, not distributed" and "far more important than income inequality is productivity inequality."

The cry to equalize wages sounds harmless and seems "fair," but it comes at the cost of efficiency. The lost incentives and signals that varying incomes provide to the market provide far more in terms of raising the standard of living for everyone than any moral benefit offered by do-gooders looking to seize power by sounding compassionate.

With the platform of "income inequality," the left is utilizing semantic sleight of hand and emotional rhetoric to create an illusion by confusion. This drumbeat will be struck constantly as a political tool, like hammer and sickle, to gain power.

The goal of progressive theatre is to fly as peaceful as a butterfly in order to mask the true intent of building an iron curtain. Liberals can sing "In A Gadda Da Vida" as long as they want, but there is no Garden of Eden in a world of scarcity. Conservatives better learn quickly to change the tune.

California: High Speed Rail Takes More Punches

If the California high speed rail project were a boxer you’d wonder how it could still be standing. It has been pounded by both left hooks and right jabs.  With the powerful governor of California in its corner it has managed to stay upright in the ring, but it may not be too long before project supporters cry, “No mas.”

Following Judge Michael P. Kenny’s ruling last November that the high speed rail funding plan does not meet the requirements demanded by the bond measure passed by voters, state Senate leader, Darrell Steinberg said that the governor’s budget spending on the proposal would be subject to debate.

The Legislative analyst threw another haymaker at the governor’s bullet train funding proposal saying the $250 million the governor wants to use from the cap and trade fees from business is “legally risky.” The reason: the fees are supposed to reduce greenhouse gases by 2020. The train will not be completed by then and may even add to the greenhouse gases problem. Environmental groups who don’t like the use of cap and trade fees for the train project are applying those left hooks to the project.

The right jabs are coming from Republicans in Congress. The bullet train has relied on federal funds so far but now some influential members are questioning the use of additional federal tax dollars.  At a congressional committee hearing yesterday, warnings were made by Republicans, who hold the majority, that federal funds could be cut off.

Another punch at the bullet train came in the form of a recently filed initiative proposal to ask voters to reconsider the project they barely passed in 2008. Assemblyman Jeff Gorell filed the initiative to stop funding the train project and instead dedicate money designated for the bullet train to educational purposes. How strong a blow against the train this is remains to be seen. Who will fund the initiative? And who will lead the fight as Gorell spends his time running for congress?

Even from across the country the bullet train took a shot a couple of days ago from an editorial columnist in the Washington Post. Charles Lane wrote,  “As it happens, Kenny’s ruling on the California rail plan was almost certainly correct; the Brown and Obama administrations have never plausibly explained where they would get the $68 billion needed to build the whole California system. Even if completed, high-speed rail would not enhance productivity; rather, it would consume subsidies, as it does in other countries. With teleconferencing a reality and driverless cars on the way, bullet trains don’t seem so cutting-edge anymore, anyway.”

Via: California Political Review

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Amnesty: The Next GOP Leadership Betrayal

House Republican leadership is preparing to betray the base. Again. To illustrate the magnitude of the sellout I was going to use a hypothetical analogy with Democrats and their base. Initially I was going to posit that Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Secular) had changed his mind about abortion.

House Republican leadership is preparing to betray the base. Again. To illustrate the magnitude of the sellout I was going to use a hypothetical analogy with Democrats and their base. Initially I was going to posit that Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Secular) had changed his mind about abortion.

For years Kaine has said that although he’s personally opposed to abortion, he is not willing to impose his beliefs on a ‘woman’s right to choose.’ Essentially confessing that his Catholic faith is not strong enough to get in the way of his political ambitions. (In his last campaign he became even more weaselly, saying he didn’t want to stand in the way of a woman exercising her “constitutional choices,” unless the choice involved a handgun.)

In my hypothetical Kaine would announce he had decided that what the Catholic Church teaches and the Bible says is the truth and he will no longer support any abortion unless it is to save the life of the mother. Kaine would also declare that he will no longer vote for any taxpayer dollars to be given to Planned Parenthood since both his beliefs and opinion polls show Americans don’t think tax money should pay for or help support abortion facilities.

It’s a great analogy but it has one problem: No one, but no one would believe it. The Democrat base worships at the altar of abortion. The analogy is too fantastic for even temporary suspension of disbelief. Brent Bozell, chairman of ForAmerica, put it nicely this week: “So what’s the difference between Boehner and Pelosi and McConnell and Reid? Answer: The Democratic leadership honors its promises. Republican leaders have abandoned theirs.”

Via: Canada Free Press

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Feds Release Details of ‘Urgent’ New Healthcare.gov Contract

Newly released documents reveal the anxieties of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about Healthcare.gov, which warn that failure to finish the website puts “the entire health insurance industry at risk.”

The HHS released documents relating to its new contract to maintain the federal health exchange on Wednesday, justifying its reasons to expedite the procurement process because of an “urgent need” for the website to work.

The documents instruct the new contractor, Accenture Federal Services, to build “core functionality” of the website, including software that tracks enrollment and calculates subsidies to pay insurance companies. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officials have admitted that nearly half of the site has yet to be built.

CMS officials said the majority of work remains to be done on back end systems, including the financial management module, which will automate and smooth intersections with third parties including health plans.

HHS warned that if the site is not completed by March 2014, it puts the “entire health insurance industry at risk.”

“CMS must immediately award a contract for these services under the auspices of the aforementioned exception to full and open competition because there is limited time to build this functionality and failure to deliver the functionality above by mid-March 2014 will result in financial harm to the Government,” the “Justification for Other than Full and Open Competition” statement accompanying the contract revealed.

“If this functionality is not complete by mid-March 2014, the government could make erroneous payments to providers and insurers,” it said.

Via: WFB

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NY GOV. CUOMO: PRO-LIFE, PRO-GUN, PRO-MARRIAGE CONSERVATIVES 'HAVE NO PLACE IN THE STATE'

On Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), who has been widely discussed as a possible 2016 presidential candidate,told Susan Arbetter of The Capitol Pressroom that “extreme conservatives” should leave the state. He said that “extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay” have “no place in the state of New York.”

He began by ripping into the Tea Party without naming it:

You have a schism within the Republican Party. … They’re searching to define their soul, that’s what’s going on. Is the Republican party in this state a moderate party or is it an extreme conservative party? That’s what they’re trying to figure out. It’s a mirror of what’s going on in Washington. The gridlock in Washington is less about Democrats and Republicans. It’s more about extreme Republicans versus moderate Republicans.

He then added:

You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

Via: Breitbart

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Rep. Smith Challenges Government Over Giving $364 Million to Liberal Group

Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have be paid to a liberal journalism group, and the agencies responsible don’t seem to want to talk about it. But some in Congress aren’t afraid of the issue. Rep Lamar Smith, R-Texas, addressed the issue on the floor of the House of Representatives on Jan. 13, asking his fellow members of Congress why taxpayers were “subsidizing a liberal news outlet.”

Internews is a liberal journalism nonprofit that has gotten more than $364 million from the U.S. government in the past 10 years, as well as $1.7 million from liberal billionaire George Soros.  It has also founded three liberal journalism outfits: Link TV, the Earth Journalism Network and Climate Commons.

(video after break)

“Mr. Speaker, since 2002, over $362 million dollars in government grants have gone to fund a liberal news organization by the name of Internews,” Rep. Smith said.

“The Business and Media Institute describes Internews as a liberal journalism nonprofit and states that not only does it push a liberal agenda but it also has helped create at least three other liberal organizations. 

“Why are taxpayers’ dollars subsidizing a liberal news outlet? This is a misuse of the public’s money. People need unbiased information so that they can form their own opinions and make educated decisions.

“One of the greatest challenges a democratic America faces today is a biased media.  It is inexcusable and irresponsible for the federal government to give any of the American taxpayers’ dollars to a liberal media organization.”

Rep. Smith earlier told the Business and Media Institute that such funding was “inexcusable and irresponsible.”

The amount of government funding going to Internews is staggering. In 2011 alone, it received $52,350,784 in government grants, according to its 990 tax forms. This makes up 92.4 percent of the $56,644,153 in total reported revenue for that year. And 2011 wasn’t unusual. According to the Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity, “all but $1.6 million of the $26.7 million in revenue it [Internews] reported in 2004 came from the federal government.” 

Via: Newsbusters.org

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