Elk County Forum

With bad news seemingly everywhere, here is something to give hope to conservatives: the Top 10 Reasons Obama Won't Win Reelection.

1. Jobless rate too high: With the latest Labor Department report showing the unemployment rate at 9.1%, jobs will likely remain the No. 1 issue for voters. Well over 2 million jobs have been lost since Obama took office, and he wasted a trillion dollars on a stimulus bill that didn't stimulate. Unfortunately for the American people, his policies will keep the jobless rate high, right up to November 2012.

2. Economy in doldrums: It's not just jobs, but everything about the economy remains snake-bit. With housing slumping and the stock market tanking, all Americans are feeling the impact of the down economy. With the threat of a double-dip recession looming, don't expect a turnaround in time to help Obama's reelection.

3. ObamaCare looms: With health care costs continuing to rise, it is clear that ObamaCare wasn't the answer. As the implementation of the highly unpopular health care measure nears, more workers will be dumped from their employers' health care plans, taxes will rise and fewer doctors will be available—giving voters more reasons to dump its architect.

4. Out-of-control debt and credit downgrade: The debt-ceiling deal did little to fix the long-term debt problem, as the U.S. is still on tap to borrow $7 trillion over the next decade, adding to the $4 trillion Obama has already racked up since taking office. With the S&P downgrade, Obama goes down in history as the first President to lose America's AAA credit rating.

5. Depressed base: Progressives are having buyer's remorse and are trying to convince everyone that Obama is not even much of a liberal. The anti-war left certainly won't be out in force on Election Day. Nor will black turnout match 2008's historical number. More of the young will stay home. The excitement of electing the first black President has worn off and even his staunchest supporters are disappointed that Obama hasn't fulfilled their expectations.

6. Opposition energized: The Tea Party didn't even exist in 2008, and the 2010 midterm elections showed the country rejects the President's big-spending policies. No matter which Republican gains the party's nomination, expect an energized grassroots opposition to Obama's second term.

7. Changes in battleground states: The terrain that Obama faces in his reelection bid will be more difficult to navigate in 2012 than four years ago. He starts out by losing six Electoral College votes from states he carried in 2008 due to population changes registered by the 2010 Census. Then the 2010 midterm elections saw Republicans win governors' races previously held by Democrats in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan—all states Obama won in 2008.

8. Foreign policy mess: From the Libyan war to mixed signals given to Middle East protesters, from the Russian "reset" to China's economic belligerence, there is not much that Obama can tout as a foreign policy success. Now with deficit hawks setting their sights on the Pentagon, Obama is likely to preside over the dismantling of America's superpower status.

9. Media less a adoring: Obama will still have most of the media on his side for his reelection bid, but they certainly won't be getting thrills up their legs, admiring the crease in his pants, or writing how the seagulls were awed. Even Obamaphile Chris Mathhews has turned on the President, saying a recent Obama speech sounded like a Fox News commercial, a harsh epithet coming from the MSNBC host.

10. Aloof, inept: Now that America has seen the President up close for nearly three years, the magic that many believed in during his hope and change odyssey is clearly gone. His aloof personality and scolding partisanship will not endear him to the electorate this time. As his falling approval ratings attest, he increasingly looks pathetically inept and not up to the job he was elected to do.

With the debt-ceiling madhouse resolved (at least for the time being), it would be instructive to look back and see how the so-called "adults" in the Democratic Party and their media sycophants acted during the deliberations. Here are the Top 10 Unhinged Liberal Attacks during the debt talks:

1. Saving life on the planet: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi may have made her all-time silliest statement when she tried explaining what was at stake in the debt battle: "What we're trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We're trying to save life on this planet as we know it today."

2. Satan sandwich: Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D.-Mo.) took to Twitter to denounce the final deal: "This deal is a sugar-coated Satan sandwich. If you lift the bun, you will not like what you see."

3. End of democracy: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the Left's chief cheerleader for massive deficits, had this to say: "What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation's economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can't."

4. Eat your peas: President Obama, before storming off from the debt talks like a petulant child, pretended like he was the adult in the room by scolding the opposition: "It's not going to get easier, it's going to get harder. So we might as well do it now, pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas."

5. Taliban Tea Party: Martin Frost, former chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, compared the Tea Party to the Taliban: "We now have a group of U.S. politicians seeking political purity, who seem to have much in common with the Taliban. They are Tea Party members, and because of blind adherence to smaller government, they seem intent on destroying what American political leaders have constructed in more than two centuries of hard, often painful, work. Like the Taliban, they see compromise as an unacceptable alternative."

6. Extremists lock down Congress: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went wild after House Republicans passed the Boehner debt-ceiling bill: "No, no, no. We cannot be in this battle all the time. Right now the extremists have locked down this Congress. We're doing nothing. The extremists have locked down the White House. They're not able to do their work."

7. Dictatorship to spark panic and chaos: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, told Politico, "Aren't we at the point where the closer we get to chaos, the more concern that there should be about coming to the table and compromising with Democrats? This is not leadership. This is almost like dictatorship. I know they want to force the outcome that ... their extremists would like to impose. But they are getting ready to spark panic and chaos."

8. Absolutists hold economy hostage: Sen. John Kerry told MSNBC: "The Chinese are looking at us right now and they are just gleeful and incredulous at the way in which one of the great competitors is imploding on itself, because a group of absolutists and extremists don't understand the implication of what they are doing, and are prepared to hold the entire economy hostage, and it is unprecedented of anything I have seen in all of the time I have been in public life, and I think it is damaging and dangerous and reckless and irresponsible."

9. Full-blown terrorists: Representing academia on this list is American University law professor Williams Yeomans, a former aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, who made this reasoned discourse, writing in Politico: "It has become commonplace to call the Tea Party faction in the House 'hostage takers.' But they have now become full-blown terrorists. They have joined the villains of American history who have been sufficiently craven to inflict massive harm on innocent victims to achieve their political goals."

10. Sabotage, gargoyles, adamantine nihilists: Few can match the pen of New York Times writer Maureen Dowd, but her screed against the Tea Party set a new high for rhetorical excess: "The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House they were elected to serve in. It turns out they wanted to come inside to get a blueprint of the historic building to sabotage it. Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country's prestige, their party and even their own reelection chances if that's what it takes."

Obuma pledged he would start a clean-energy revolution that would create 5 million green jobs over 10 years.  Of course, when the government tries to intrude in the marketplace, bad things happen.  Such as these: the Top 10 Green Job Fiascoes.

1. Solar debacle: Solyndra Inc., which manufactured solar panels at its plant in Fremont, Calif., received $535 million in Energy Department loans, and President Obama talked glowingly about how the company was "leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future." Instead of creating work for Americans after receiving taxpayer money, the company shipped half its manufacturing jobs to China. In August, Solyndra declared bankruptcy and laid off 1,100 workers.

2. Government Motors: The bailout that General Motors received from the government came with a price: The carmaker was tasked to create the ultimate green vehicle. The result—the Chevy Volt​—is a product with an exorbitant price tag that nobody wants to buy. Despite vast government subsidies, GM only sold 3,200 cars in the first eight months since the electric plug-in vehicles hit the marketplace.

Do you remember when you were a kid and your parents gave you $20 to buy them a Christmas present?  You bought them something worth $3 and pocketed the rest?  That's what GM has just done.

So how the Hell Did GM Pay Back Its Loans in Full And Ahead of Schedule?  

Well, It Didn't:




3. Spanish windmills: Spain's quixotic quest to create a green-jobs economy should have been a lesson for the United States. After Spain went crazy subsidizing windmills and solar farms, the result was higher utility bills for consumers, with a loss of 2.2 jobs in other industries for every green job created. And each green job came at a cost of $774,000 to Spanish taxpayers.

4. Solar debacle II: Evergreen Solar Inc., of Massachusetts, which received $58 million in stimulus money and other government largesse, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August and closed its plant in Midland, Mich. Not being able to compete against the Chinese and their low-wage workers, the company racked up $485 million in debt and cut 800 jobs, with more cuts to come as the company restructures.

5. Weatherizing stupidity: The city of Seattle received $20 million in federal stimulus money to help homeowners make their houses more energy-efficient. Some 16 months later, 14 jobs were created and three homes were weatherized. Most of the money went to a company to train workers to weatherize buildings, but the lack of demand for the service meant those trainees had no work to do.

6. Green (union) jobs: After Obama's stimulus package doled out billions to subsidize the weatherization of homes, the Labor Department delayed the project by seven months while it determined the prevailing-wage standards for those green jobs—a sop to the President's union supporters. That is just one reason why the program turned into a miserable failure. In its first year, the program spent $508 million to create 600 jobs and update 9,000 homes nationwide.

7. Green-car fiasco: Green Vehicles received $500,000 from the city of Salinas, Calif., and another $187,000 from the state of California as it promised to create 70 new jobs making an innovative three-wheel electric car with a $25,000 price tag. Little wonder that company folded without making a single car.

8. Biofuel bust: Before Republicans took back the statehouse in Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell helped support the ethanol producer Bionol Clearfield with $27 million in grants and loans, and by issuing $67 million in tax-free bonds. But even a deal with Getty Oil to buy the fuel couldn't save the venture from going belly-up two years after its founding.

9. Do-nothing government: Johnson Controls​, which manufactures batteries for electric and hybrid cars at its plant in Holland, Mich., received $300 million in taxpayer help and created a grand total of 150 jobs—or $2 million per job. That must qualify as a huge success in the green-job world, as President Obama visited the facility in August, using the trip to attack Republicans and a "do-nothing government." Yes, Mr. President, sometimes doing nothing is preferable to shoveling money into a hole.

10. Almost two jobs created in Vegas: Clark County, Nev., which happens to be the home of the gambling mecca of Las Vegas, received $490,000 in stimulus money from the U.S. Forest Service to plant trees in urban neighborhoods (more palm trees on The Strip?). The stimulus that resulted from the grant to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's home state created 1.7 jobs (one full-time employee and one part time) and 11 temporary jobs. You get a better return for your money at the slot machines.

 

With President Obuma's approval ratings in free fall and 2012 election prospects looking bleak for Democrats, liberals are resorting to vicious attacks, name-calling and hyperbole to paint Republicans in a bad light. 

Here are the Top 10 Examples of Liberal Incivility:

1. Obama's army: Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa unleashed this tirade on Labor Day in Detroit as he rallied the union audience before President Obama addressed the crowd: "President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Everybody here's got to vote. Let's take these sons of bitches out."

2. Hanging on a tree: Rep. Andre Carson (D.-Ind.) suggested that some conservative congressmen want to return to the days of lynching. At a Congressional Black Caucus event Miami in August, Carson delivered this gem of civility: "This is the effort that we are seeing of Jim Crow. Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us as second-class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now with this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me ... hanging on a tree."

3. Biden's barbarians: Vice President Joe Biden​ used an AFL-CIO rally in Cincinnati on Labor Day to mock the political opposition in vile terms. Biden told the union members: "You are the only folks keeping barbarians from the gates."

4. Save the children: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, at a San Francisco fund-raiser, said Republicans were sacrificing their children in their attempt to destroy government: "The Republicans​ right now are using the idea of deficit reduction as an excuse, they're hijacking an idea that has some resonance—we all want to reduce the deficit—in order to not reduce the deficit but to destroy the public space, destroy government. ... You wonder, do their children breathe air? Do they drink water?"

5. Straight to hell: California Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-South Central) revved up her constituents last month, blasting the Tea Party and talking tough. Waters told the crowd: "I am not afraid of anybody. This is a tough game. You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned, the Tea Party can go straight to hell."

6. Global-warming racism: Al Gore​, high priest of the global-warming cult, likened those who question his doctrine to racists: "There came a time when friends or people you work with ... when racist comments would come up in the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, 'Hey, man, why do you talk that way? I mean that is wrong. I don't go for that, so don't talk that way around me. I just don't believe that.' That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won. We have to win the conversation on climate."

7. Stockholm syndrome: Political genius and hack comedienne Janeane Garofalo​ came up with a doozy of a conspiracy theory, positing that the Koch brothers or Karl Rove​ or Grover Norquist​ were paying Herman Cain​ to run for President in order to deflect charges of racism against Republicans. Taking off her tinfoil hat to appear on Al Gore's Current TV, Garofalo said: "Herman Cain, I feel like, is being paid by somebody to be involved and to run for President so that you go, 'Oh, they can't be racist' ... There may be a touch of Stockholm syndrome, because anytime I see a person of color or a female in the Republican Party or the conservative movement or the Tea Party, I wonder how they could be trying to curry favor with the oppressors."

8. To the streets: Keith Olbermann​, the former MSNBC host now working for Al Gore's Current TV, was infuriated by the debt-ceiling deal and called on his viewers to share his anger (luckily for America he has few viewers): Those responsible for the debt-ceiling deal, Olbermann said, "will crush us, because those who created it are organized and unified and hell-bent. And the only response is to be organized and unified and hell-bent in return." Opponents of the deal "must find again the energy and the purpose of the 1960s and early 1970s, and we must protest this deal and all the goddamn deals to come, in the streets."

9. Obama's silence: After his call for civility following the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, President Obama's failure to condemn Hoffa's remark gives tacit approval for more shameful attacks. After sharing the same podium with Hoffa at the Labor Day rally where the labor leader declared war, the President has refused to condemn the remarks, with a presidential spokesman saying the President isn't going to "serve as the speech police of the Democratic Party."

10. Kill GOP zombies: As Democratic bile worsens, abated by President Obama's blinders, it was only time before the culture became infected with violent anti-conservative imagery. The video-game company StarvingEyes has released a new game called "Tea Party Zombies Must Die," where impressionable young minds can score points by killing zombies in the likeness of Sarah Palin​, Michele Bachmann​, Newt Gingrich​ and Fox News​ hosts.

We rarely agree with Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.), the loud-mouth, left-wing congresswoman from South Central Los Angeles, home of the 1992 Rodney King riots. But recently she said, "We're supportive of the President, but we're getting tired. We're getting tired. The unemployment is unconscionable." Yes, Maxine, we are also getting tired of the President. And we are getting tired of you as well, and here's why:

The Top 10 Outrageous Maxine Waters Quotes.

1. Tea Party hell: In remarks earlier this month in Inglewood, Calif., Waters went after the Tea Party, telling a group of her constituents (many wearing purple SEIU T-shirts): "I am not afraid of anybody. This is a tough game. You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned, the Tea Party can go straight to hell."

2. Walk the plank: During her August 2011, "We're getting tired" tirade, Waters also went after the opposition in the debt-ceiling debate: "We were basically held up in raising the debt ceiling until they got all of those budget cuts they demanded. We didn't raise any revenue, and they didn't close any tax loopholes. I believe the Democratic Party and the President of the United States should not have backed down. We should have made them walk the plank."

3. Socializing oil companies: Back in 2008, Waters was lecturing oil company executives at a congressional hearing when she plainly stated her true intentions: "Guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal would be about socializing ... uh, umm. ... Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies."

4. Outrageous flag-waving: After the health care bill was signed in April 2010, Waters denounced flag-waving at a Tea Party rally. "I was amazed. I really was. I didn't say anything to anybody. I just watched—the Republicans were out there—they were having a great time. They were laughing, they were waving the American flag, they were egging them on, and I thought that was outrageous behavior. I really did."

5. No crisis at Fannie Mae: As a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, Waters played a key role in allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's reckless actions that led to the housing meltdown. Here is Waters, at a 2004 congressional hearing, (and yes, that is the same "Frank" Raines that vastly overstated Fannie Mae's earnings in order to receive $90 million in bonuses). "We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Frank Raines."

6. Right to anger: Way back in 1989, Waters was quoted saying how angry she was, and she has been angry ever since. Here are those 1989 remarks: "I have a right to my anger, and I don't want anybody telling me I shouldn't be, that it's not nice to be, and that something's wrong with me because I get angry."

7. White power: Racial politics are always front and center for Waters, as evidenced by this quotation from a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times: "Policy, for the most part, has been made by white people in America, not by people of color. And they have tended to take care of those things that they think are important. Whether it's their agricultural subsidies, or other kinds of expenditures that are certainly not expenditures for poor people or for people of color. And so we have to band together and keep fighting back."

8. Rodney King rebellion: During the "Why can't we all just get along" riots in her congressional district, Waters excused the wonton violence, as her constituents were intent on burning down the city. The Los Angeles Times quoted her saying: "If you call it a riot, it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion."

9. Schedule a meeting: With the financial crisis looming, Waters was mostly worried about a bank that her husband had a financial stake in. Here, she admits that she contacted the Treasury Department on behalf of OneUnited Bank officials, actions which prompted a congressional ethics probe: "I followed up on the association's request by asking Treasury Secretary Paulson to schedule such a meeting."

10. Liar, thief: For those liberals who decry harsh conservative attacks on President Obama, let's hearken back to 2005 and listen to Waters' comments on President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney​: "The President is a liar. Dick Cheney, the chief architect of the Big Lie, is not only a liar, he is a thief."[/font]

President Obama is becoming a veritable Pinocchio by stretching the truth on a regular basis.

Here are the Top 10 Obama Lies:

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1. Americans want higher taxes: During the debate over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama said that 80% of Americans support including higher taxes as part of the deal. But a Rasmussen poll taken the same week showed that only 34% believe a tax hike should be included in a debt-ceiling agreement.

2. Mother denied health insurance: During his presidential campaign, Obama said that his mother died of cancer after being denied coverage for a preexisting condition. He used her image in a campaign ad, repeated the claim in debates, and used the same rhetoric as President when he tried to sell ObamaCare to the American people. But a new book by New York Times reporter Janny Scott says that Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, had health insurance through her employer and was only denied disability insurance.

3. Tax restraint for middle and lower class: Obama pledged during his campaign and throughout his presidency not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000. But ObamaCare's individual mandate will hit many under the $250,000 mark.(Obama's own Justice Department said the mandate was a tax, not a penalty, when it argued its constitutionality.) Not to mention a higher federal cigarette tax and countless other "fees" in the health care law that hit the middle and lower class.

4. Shovel-ready jobs: When Obama was selling his $787 billion stimulus package, he consistently bragged about how shovel-ready construction jobs would be funded across the nation. Even the President later admitted that was a lie, when he told the New York Times: "There's no such thing as shovel-ready projects."

5. Keep your doctor: President Obama repeatedly pledged that under his health care measure, Americans would be able to keep their doctors. However, with rising costs, many employers will dump their health care plans and force workers into the state health care exchanges (unless you belong to one of the unions getting ObamaCare waivers.) A survey by McKinsey & Company found that more than 30% of companies will discontinue coverage for their workers.

6. No lobbyists: During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said: "We have the chance to tell all those corporate lobbyists that the days of them setting the agenda in Washington are over. ... I don't take a dime of their money, and when I am President, they won't find a job in my White House." At least a dozen former lobbyists got top jobs in his administration at the beginning of his presidency, according to Politico, and National Public Radio reported the Obama administration was granting waivers to lobbyists to circumvent the ban.

7. Foreign money in campaigns: During his 2010 State of the Union address, and again during the 2010 midterm elections, Obama railed against foreign money influencing U.S. elections. The only problem was that there was no evidence to support the charge or, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in the State of the Union audience, silently mouthed, "Not true."

8. Arizona immigration law: During the battle over Arizona's immigration law, President Obama said: "Now suddenly if you don't have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you can be harassed, that's something that could potentially happen." Uh, actually, Mr. President, it couldn't. The law would allow law enforcement officials to inquire about immigration status only when there is suspicion of a crime being committed.

9. Transparency: Obama pledged that transparency would be a top priority, but his administration refused to grant one-third of the Freedom of Information Act requests, according to an Associated Press analysis. He also was dishonest about transparency when he said that health-care negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN and that he would wait five days to sign a bill so people would have a chance to read it online.

10. Constitutional oath: During his January 2009 inauguration, Barack Obama pledged to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," yet he has consistently ignored the 10th Amendment giving powers not enumerated in the Constitution to the states. Exhibit No. 1: ObamaCare.

Government in the United States, both federal and local, has enacted laws and regulations that drag down the economy and restrict individual liberty. Some regulations are so broad that they govern entire segments of the economy, while others tell us what we can and cannot do in our own homes. As President Reagan once said, "Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem."

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Here are the Top 10 Most Egregious Government Regulations:

1. ObamaCare overkill: If you think the 2,000-plus-page ObamaCare law is a travesty, wait until you see the regulations it spawned. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is beginning to release regulations based on the health care legislation passed last year. One section on Medicare took up six pages in the original law, yet HHS turned that into 429 pages of new regulations. At that rate, there will be more than a hundred thousand pages of regulations in place for doctors to consider before seeing a patient.

2. EPA's carbon dioxide fixation: Talk about job-killing regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency's decision to regulate carbon dioxide emissions in order to combat "climate change" will raise the cost of energy. Forget about creating jobs. The EPA's regulations will add a new burden on business, increase the cost of material for the construction industry, and hit consumer in the pocketbook, dampening the outlook for economic growth.

3. Lightbulb ban: Unless Congress overturns a 2007 law, the incandescent lightbulb will be phased out in 2012, and fluorescent bulbs will be the only choice for consumers. Instead of being able to buy a 39-cent bulb, Americans will be forced to pay $6 for the energy-efficient alternative, with its harsh bright light. Do we really need Washington nanny-state legislators to decide what is "best" for us, right down to how we light our own homes?

4. TSA abuse: Whoever is writing the regulations for the Transportation Security Administration needs to lighten up. TSA officials think they are making the skies safe by patting down infants and grandmothers in wheelchairs, while giving travelers the option of being subjected to harmful radiation or on the receiving end of sexual abuse. There are plenty of other ways to ensure safety, like profiling young to middle-age male travelers from the Middle East.

5. Union favors: As payback to his Big Labor support, President Obama signed an executive order in February 2009 that tells federal agencies to require "Project Labor Agreements" on federal construction projects, meaning higher labor costs as contractors are forced to use union workers. Now the National Labor Relations Board is seeking to prevent Boeing from building a plant in South Carolina because it is a right-to-work state. By "protecting" workers, fewer jobs are created. Is that what we want?

6. Food crackdown: Federal regulators are tightening regulations on food manufacturers in order to combat childhood obesity. But as usual, the regulators are going overboard, cracking down on breakfast cereal, Girl Scout cookies, and all kinds of snack foods, including nuts, bagels and fruit juice. According to HUMAN EVENTS' Audrey Hudson, the food industry says the government is imposing "multibillions of dollars" of changes, with no evidence it will do anything to help kids stay healthy.

7. Outside smoking ban: The city of New York has made it illegal to smoke in all parks, on beaches, and in pedestrian plazas. This includes, you're hearing right, a smoke-free Times Square. That will be 1,700 parks and 14 miles of public beaches that city officials will have to monitor in case someone lights up. Don't New York's Finest have anything better to do?

8. Trash violations: Beware of what you put in the trash, at least in New York City. The city's Sanitation Department is enforcing a rule that says trash from households or businesses cannot be thrown in receptacles on the street meant for pedestrians. But do the workers really need to ticket elderly residents and fine them $100 for throwing their used newspapers into the trash cans?

9. Illegal garden: Julie Bass decided to grow some vegetables in her front yard because the price of organic food was on the rise. Now, she has been hit with a misdemeanor charge and is facing three months in jail, because Oak Park, Mich., says her garden violated the city code, which requires that front yards consist of "suitable, live, plant material." The city says vegetables aren't "suitable" for a front yard and are going to court to prove their point. Now that's a great use of taxpayer resources.

10. Multicultural doll mandate: The Colorado Department of Human Services is proposing new rules to require all day care centers in the state to have dolls available that represent the three different races. The guideline is part of a 98-page document that sets new rules for child care that include what kids can drink, how long they can watch TV, and mandates for field trips and sunscreen use. One wonders how the state, which has been working on the measure since 2006, will go about enforcing the law.[/font]

California has often been called a trendsetter for the rest of the nation, and if having a government that's going broke is the new reality, then the Golden State is leading once again. Nowhere else better symbolizes the West Coast view that government knows best than the City by the Bay, lovely San Francisco.

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Just hope that these Top 10 Examples of San Francisco Silliness aren't a new trend:


1. Low-flow toilet stink: In the name of water conservation, San Francisco made a big push for citywide use of low-flow toilets. The only problem is that, without that extra push of water, sludge is clogging the sewer lines, causing an unpleasant odor. The city has had to spend $100 million to modernize its pipes and is spending another $14 million for 25 million pounds of bleach to combat the rotten-egg smell near the city's otherwise pristine baseball stadium, AT&T Park, home of the world champion San Francisco Giants.

2. Homeless coddling leads to sitting ban: After it offered generous benefits and an elaborate support system to care for its transient population, San Francisco shouldn't have been surprised when problems with the homeless arose—like the smell of urine permeating the Tenderloin. Voters took care of having to walk around drunken hobos by passing a measure banning sitting or lying on city sidewalks. SFPD officers are reportedly enforcing the law, which can result in $500 fines and jail time for repeat offenses.

3. Sanctuary city violence: San Francisco is a sanctuary city, where illegal immigrants can find safe haven. Since 1989, city police officers have been forbidden from inquiring into an offender's immigration status. As a result, the city has been plagued by violence committed by illegal immigrants who should have been deported for earlier, less serious offenses. Most notable was the 2008 murder of Tony Bologna and his two sons by Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who had previous run-ins with police. Ramos gunned down the family members as they were leaving a picnic because they had blocked his car in traffic.

4. Happy Meal ban: The San Francisco Board of Supervisors last year voted to ban the sale of McDonald's Happy Meals in the city, passing a measure ordering that meals meet certain nutritional guidelines in order to include a toy with the purchase. The meals also must include a serving of vegetables or fruit to warrant a toy giveaway. Now that will be a real driver of traffic to the kids' menu—Brussels sprouts with a cheeseburger.

5. Pension crisis worsens: San Francisco's municipal pension system has an unfunded liability of some $4.4 billion, or $35,000 for every household in the city. Oh, and there is also $4.36 billion in unfunded retiree health care costs. Despite the massive red ink in city obligations, San Francisco last year gave city retirees a $170 million cost-of-living bonus on top on their regular COLA.

6. Bio-Fuel buses cause stink: San Francisco has transformed its 1,500- vehicle city fleet to run on biofuels as a way to combat global warming. Oops, make that climate change. To help power the vehicles, the city's SFGreasecycle program is collecting cooking oils from San Francisco restaurants. The result: Besides clogging the air filters of the diesel-converted buses, city streets often smell like French fries or fried chicken.

7. Mandatory composting: Throw away coffee grounds or a banana peel in the garbage and the City of San Francisco can fine you. When enacting the toughest recycling rules in the nation, city leaders included a mandatory composting law. Trash must be separated into three separate, color-coded bins, one of which is for compost. Fines of $100 for residences and $500 for businesses will be levied only in "egregious case," the city assures.

8. Circumcision ban: San Francisco voters this November will have to decide whether to ban circumcision of male children in the city. Backers of the measure gathered 7,700 signatures to get it on the ballot, saying that the practice is a form of genital mutilation. Opponents say the initiative, which would make circumcision of a minor punishable by a $1,000 fine and one year in jail, is a violation of religious and parental freedom.

9. Cell phone radiation disclosure: The city enacted a law requiring cell phone stores to post the amount of radiation that each of its models emits. The wireless industry filed suit, saying the law misleads consumers, because there is no credible science to back the fears that cell phone radiation causes health problems. The law would require that store owners post how much energy a cell phone user would absorb into his head. Perhaps a Tinfoil Hat Law is next.

10. Animal companion sales ban: San Francisco's Animal Control & Welfare Commission last year held multiple meetings on a proposal to ban the sale of pets, oops, make that animal companions, the preferred politically correct term. After nationwide ridicule in the media, the panel tabled the proposal for future consideration. The measure was pushed to lessen the number of abandoned animals and was cheered by animal-rights activists who believe "owning" a dog is a form of species-ism.

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Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.) has announced that he will not run for reelection, giving conservatives an early Christmas present.  Let's look back on his more than 30 years in office and give thanks that the liberal lawmaker will soon be returning home. 

Here are the Top 10 Barney Frank Offenses:

1.  Fannie and Freddie:  As ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank blocked tightened oversight over Fannie Mae​ and Freddie Mac, saying in 2003, "These two entities ... are not facing any kind of financial crisis," and, "I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing."  More than any other factor, the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by pushing these government-sponsored enterprises to encourage housing loans to risky borrowers.  Thanks a lot, Barney.

2.  Liberal voting record:  Frank never met a liberal cause that he didn't embrace, including backing partial-birth abortions and gay marriage.  Liberal groups such as the ACLU, NAACP and others routinely give him the highest marks for his voting record.  Americans for Democratic Action named Frank one of their "heroes" for his perfect left-wing tally of votes.

3.  Live-in prostitute:  In 1989, the Washington Times reported that Frank allowed his lover at the time, male prostitute Steve Gobie, to live in the basement of his Capitol Hill​ townhouse, where the hooker turned tricks while the openly gay congressman was at work.  The sordid living arrangement led to an official reprimand of Frank by the House of Representatives for using his congressional office to fix parking tickets racked up by the prostitute.

4.  Dodd-Frank:  This misguided attempt to reform the financial sector has added to the problem with its burdensome regulations.  The only benefit from the bill will be the jobs created in the legal and accounting fields needed to comply with its onerous provisions.

5.  Campaign donations:  Frank's interest in allowing free rein at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was not necessarily due to his altruistic motivations for helping poor people buy houses.  He also received more than $40,000 in campaign donations over the years from its top officials.  Other top donors to Frank's campaigns included Fidelity Investments​, J.P. Morgan and the Bank of America​—all institutions that stood to benefit from his position on the House Financial Services Committee.

6.  Lover at Fannie Mae:  Frank's longtime lover Herb Moses worked as a top official responsible for relaxing mortgage standards at Fannie Mae, an enterprise that was subject to oversight authority by the House Financial Services Committee upon which Frank served.  Conflict of interest, anyone?

7.  TARP favor:  Frank inserted a provision in federal bailout legislation that granted $12 million to OneUnited Bank.  Yes, that is the same bank that embroiled Rep. Maxine Waters, Frank's colleague on the House Financial Services Committee, in an ongoing House ethics committee probe for seeking special treatment for the bank where her husband has financial ties.

8.  Airplane freebie:  Liberals love to hurl ethics charges against their conservative opposition, but said little when Frank was caught taking a free trip to the Virgin Islands on the private jet of a billionaire, G. Donald Sussman, head of Paloma Securities, which received $200 million of federal bailout funds.  Imagine the howls if any conservative had done the same.

9.  Rude and insulting:  It is not just that Frank voted as a true-blue liberal that is galling, but also how he expressed his opinions.  Normally described as witty or acerbic by his fans in the mainstream media, Frank was often rude and insulting when pushing his agenda—witness his attack on Bill O'Reilly, telling the Fox host during an interview, "Your stupidity gets in the way of rational discussion."

10.  Disheveled:  Far from upholding the gay stereotype of being meticulously dressed, Frank always looked like he'd slept in his suit.  And considering that his net worth is several million dollars, is there a reason why he can't afford to buy a comb?

Say goodbye and good riddance to 2011.... another tough year for America.  Before we move on to 2012, let us pause to reflect upon the year gone by.

Here then, are the Top 10 Lowlights of 2011:


1. Obama's class warfare: Obama began his re-election bid by attacking bankers, insurance companies, Big Oil, and pharmaceuticals.... while raking in campaign cash from the very same.  This sophomoric and cynical appeal to inflame class warfare in order to win votes ignores the root of America's woes: big government, out-of-control spending and massive debt.

2. Occupy Wall Street: This so-called movement of the 99% that arose in 2011, soon disintegrated into local bands of ruffians, homeless squatters, progressive activists, and aimless youngsters. By blocking workers from earning a living, these so-called "social justice" advocates hurt the very people they claim to represent. Not to mention the public health hazard caused by their filth. Go occupy your parents' basement for awhile and give us a break.

3. Pipeline politics: For a President who assures the nation that he is all about job creation, Obama's delay of the Keystone XL pipeline is the height of hypocrisy.  Choosing political support from environmentalists over tens of thousands of good paying jobs is an insult to unemployed workers.

4. Fast and Furious: Letting guns "walk" into the hands of Mexican drug lords was not a good idea in the first place, but the way that Atty. Gen. Eric Holder​'s Justice Department is covering up "who-knew-what when" is equally criminal.  With pitbull Rep. Darrell Issa on the investigative trail, new revelations will likely keep this one on next year's lowlight list.

5. Solyndra goes belly-up: Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent trying to create "green jobs" and finding alternative sources of energy.  As the bankruptcy of Solyndra proved, those ventures can't compete in the marketplace even when heavily subsidized.  To get real energy jobs, it's time to allow the real development of U.S. energy resources, opening up coastal oil drilling and tapping the vast deposits of natural gas and shale oil in the heartland.

6. Wisconsin union war: Faced with a rollback of their lucrative taxpayer-funded benefits and pension plans, public employees in Wisconsin protested the cuts, with teachers leaving their classrooms, Democratic legislators fleeing the state and unions flooding the state capital building with boisterous members.  How about funding your own 401 (k) like the rest of us?

7. Weiner's Tweets: Rep. Anthony Weiner (D.-N.Y.) broke new ground in political sleaze, bringing congressional indiscretion into the world of Twitter.  Horrified Americans were forced to see a new bulging crotch shot every time they turned on the news, until the humiliation drove Weiner from office.  Good luck with your job search, Tony.

8. Media attack on GOP: No matter which Republican running for President rose in the polls, the media was ready to pounce.   Bachmann was portrayed as a flake; Perry, a dunce; Cain, a molester; Gingrich, as zany.  Interestingly, many of the same reporters now on the attack are the same ones that forgot to vet a certain Democratic candidate in 2008.

9. Do-nothing Senate: The Democratic-led Senate is setting new records for not getting things done.  It's been years since the chamber passed a budget and unless a spending bill has money for a Cowboy Poetry Festival it is unlikely to pass muster with Majority Leader Harry Reid. We say it's time for the Senate to get to work and a good place to start would be the pile of bills already passed by the House of Representatives.

10. Hollywood shenanigans: We had to save a place for Hollywood on the list.  After all, 2011 saw Charlie Sheen go insane, Lindsay Lohan pose for Playboy between court appearances, Kim Kardashian's nano-second marriage, and Alec Baldwin get tossed from a plane for boorish behavior..... and worsed of all, Shawn Penn joining forces with Chavez and denouncing America's capitalistic system.... the same Country that made him a multi-millionaire.

Need we go on?

Top Ten Stories on Politics & Policies for 2012

1. 2012 Presidential Election: Republicans are uniting to defeat President Obama, but they are dissatisfied with the field of 2012 candidates. Will Republicans unite around their nominee in November? Or, will third- party candidates and organizations, working at cross purposes with the Republican part, siphon off just enough of the anti-Obama vote to ensure Obama's re-election? And if Obama's poll numbers plummet, will he or others in the Democratic party play the race card to get minority voters to the polls?

2. ObamaCare Showdown in the Supreme Court: A showdown over the Constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare, will occur in the Supreme Court. Various lower level courts throughout the country have made rulings both for and against ObamaCare, but its fate may rest on the nine judges that comprise the Supreme Court. Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, may have to recuse herself because of  e-mails she wrote that celebrated passage of the law.

3. Control of the Senate in 2012: Republicans need to pick up only four seats to gain control of the Senate.  The odds are looking favorable, at least on paper. Democrats must defend 23 seats; Republicans only 10. Races in Virginia, Montana, and Missouri are worth watching.

4. Payroll Tax Cut Extension: Yes, it's back -- the temporary extension of a payroll tax cut passed by Congress just days ago will have to be decided upon again in early 2012. Questions over the stimulative effect and impact of the tax cut on revenue will be addressed. More money will have to be taken out of the general fund to pay for Social Security if revenues decrease significantly.

5. Can We Have National Constitutional Carry Reciprocity in 2012?  In 2012 the question is whether leading gun rights advocates, such as the National Rifle Association, will press for real gun freedoms, such as the renewed right in America to carry a firearm and travel with it across the country. We expect this debate to come to head in 2012.

6. The Volatile Situation In Iran: The world's premier sponsor of terrorism ended 2011 with naval exercises in the Straits of Hormuz, coupled with ominous saber-rattling about how easily they could shut down fully one-third of the world's seaborne oil transportation.  They've been deeply involved in Iraq all along, and are poised to fill the vacuum left by U.S. departure.  An unhappy combination of autocratic rule and internal power struggles makes them dangerously unpredictable. And, any actions taken by Iranian leaders in 2012 could have a "wild card effect" on candidates in U.S. elections.

7. The Arab Spring, One Year Later: The celebrated democracy uprisings of early 2011 have not been followed, unfortunately, by much democracy, or stability.  Egyptians get to enjoy violent repression from a military junta, until Islamic extremists take over.  The Taliban won't have to hide in the "safe" hills of Pakistan much longer.  Al-Qaeda is scouting franchise opportunities in Libya.  The civilized world made a "statement" against Qaddafi, but chews its lip while Bashar Assad​ guns down the protestors of Syria.

8. Eurozone Debt Crisis Continues: As worries continue to grow over the financing of European sovereign debt from countries such as Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal, investors will be wary over whether or not the Euro currency will survive into an another year as it celebrates its 10th anniversary at the beginning of 2012.  Developments in Europe — such as a recession — will also have reverberations across the global economy, affecting American markets in particular.

9. Volatile Politics in Russia:  Russia has been wracked by its largest protests since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as tension over the exchange of power has reached a tipping point. Vladimir Putin​'s party, the United Russia Party, has had difficulty maintaining power and just narrowly won a highly contested Parliamentary election on December 4. Putin is slated to run for President in what could be a highly contentious election on March 4, 2012.

10. China: Chipped, Cracked not Broken, Yet.  China is in economic trouble. With its manufacturing sector already reeling from the drop off in demand from the cash-poor United States and Europe, the central planners in the People's Republic must negotiate the burst of its real estate bubble. Like residential prices, commercial prices are crating throughout the world's second largest economy, forcing massive private, public projects to halt mid-beam. As the banker of last resort—given that America borrows from China, so we can lend to others—the world will have to contend with a severe constriction of funds on tap. Meanwhile, China, where migrant construction workers live in the building they are building, will have to contend with hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers occupying the exposed bones of its boom.


Bonus!  2012: Anniversaries to Contemplate, Celebrate:  In 2012, we will have cause to pause for significant anniversaries of 100 and 200 years ago, such as the April 10, 1912 sinking of RMS Titanic, the April 20, 1912 opening of Fenway Park, an event at the time competing in the newspapers with stories of hundreds bodies of Titanic victims washing up on the coast of Nova Scotia.

The United Kingdom refused to delay its practice of kidnapping, then forcing American sailors into Royal Navy service, led to our June 18, 1812 declaration of war. The trials of the War of 1812​ rent the young Union. New England states refused to send troops and British troops captured Washington, where they put the torch to the Capitol and the Executive Mansion.

On the political side, the presidential election of 1912 offers a lesson. T. Woodrow Wilson​ won the White House with 6.2 million votes; compared 4.1 million for Theodore Roosevelt​ and William H. Taft's 3.5 million. Taft was Roosevelt's chosen successor in 1908, but TR started to get that old feeling again. Wilson became the first Democratic president since Buchanan's election in 1856 — if you don't count S. Grover Cleveland​'s two terms and the election stolen from Samuel J. Tilden in 1876. Still, if Taft and TR had worked it out, the only Wilsons we would have to learn about in school would be in the Beach Boys​ or sewing baseball gloves.

Billionaire financier George Soros​ voted "the single most destructive leftist demagogue in the country." 
Here are the Top 10 Reasons George Soros Is Dangerous:

1.  Gives billions to left-wing causes:  Soros started the Open Society Institute in 1993 as a way to spread his wealth to progressive causes.  Using Open Society as a conduit, Soros has given more than $7 billion to a who's who of left-wing groups.  This partial list of recipients of Soros' money says it all: ACORN, Apollo Alliance, National Council of La Raza, Tides Foundation, Huffington Post​, Southern Poverty Law Center, Soujourners, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, and the National Organization for Women.

2.  Influence on U.S. elections:  Soros once said that removing President George W. Bush from office in 2004 was the "central focus of my life."  He put his money where his mouth is, giving $23.58 million to various 527 groups dedicated to defeating Bush.  His early financial support helped jump-start Barack Obama's political career.  Soros hosted a 2004 fund-raiser for Obama when he was running for the Illinois Senate and gave the maximum-allowed contribution within hours of Obama's announcement that he was running for President.

3.  Wants to curtail American sovereignty:  Soros would like nothing better than for America to become subservient to international bodies.  He wants more power for groups such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, even while saying the U.S. role in the IMF should be "downsized."  In 1998, he wrote:  "Insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions."

4.  Media Matters:  Soros is a financial backer of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog group that hyperventilates over any conservative view that makes it into the mainstream media.  Now its founder, David Brock, has openly declared war on Fox News​, telling Politico that the group was mounting "guerrilla warfare and sabotage" against the cable news channel, and would try to disrupt the commercial interests of owner Rupert Murdoch​—an odd mission for a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt educational foundation that is barred from participating in partisan political activity.

5.  MoveOn.org:  Soros has been a major funder of MoveOn.org, a progressive advocacy group and political action committee that raises millions for liberal candidates.  This is the group that had on its website an ad comparing President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler and ran the infamous "General Betray Us" ad in the New York Times, disparaging the integrity of Gen. David Petraeus.

6.  Center for American Progress:  Headed by John Podesta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton​, the Center for American Progress has been instrumental in providing progressive talking points and policy positions for the Obama administration.  There has also been a revolving door between the White House and the Soros-funded think tank, with Obama staffing his administration with many CAP officials.

7.  Environmental extremism:  Former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones​ and his leftist environmental ideas have been funded by Soros' money at these groups: the Ella Baker Center, Green For All, the Center for American Progress, and the Apollo Alliance, which was instrumental in getting $110 billion in green initiatives included in Obama's stimulus package.  Soros also funds the Climate Policy Initiative to address global warming and gave Friends of the Earth money to "integrate a climate equity perspective in the presidential transition."

8.  America Coming Together:  Soros gave nearly $20 million to this 527 group with the express purpose of defeating President Bush. A massive get-out-the-vote effort, ACT's door-to-door canvassing teams included numerous felons, its voter registration drives were riddled with fraud, and it handed out incendiary fliers and made misleading taped phone calls to voters.  ACT was fined $775,000 by the Federal Election Commission for violations of various federal campaign finance laws.

9.  Currency manipulation:  A large part of Soros' multibillion-dollar fortune has come from manipulating currencies.  During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad accused him of bringing down the nation's currency through his trading activities, and in Thailand he was called an "economic war criminal."  Known as "The Man who Broke the Bank of England," Soros initiated a British financial crisis by dumping 10 billion sterling, forcing the devaluation of the currency and gaining a billion-dollar profit.

10.  Delusions:  Soros has repeatedly said that he sees himself as a messianic figure.  Who but a megalomaniac would make these comments?  "I admit that I have always harbored an exaggerated view of my self-importance—to put it bluntly, I fancied myself as some kind of god" or "I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise I might end up in the loony bin."  If only the loony bin were an option.  As it is, one of the wealthiest men in the world is using his billions to impose a radical agenda on America.

 

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Eric Holder​ should have never been confirmed as attorney general and that his priorities are dangerous. 

Here are the Top 10 Reasons Eric Holder Should Not Be Attorney General:

1.  Wants special rights for Muslims:  Holder's Justice Department filed suit against the Berkeley School District in Illinois for denying a request for a 19-day leave of absence in the middle of the semester by a Muslim computer lab teacher who wanted to make a pilgrimage to Mecca.  The Justice Department wants a federal court to grant Safoorah Khan back pay with interest, reinstatement, and award damages "to fully compensate her for pain and suffering" caused by the resignation because the school district forced her "to choose between her job and her faith."

2.  Hostile to Second Amendment:  Holder has always been hostile to the Second Amendment, calling for the reinstatement of a ban on assault weapons and joining an amicus brief in D.C. v. Heller urging the Supreme Court to uphold the ban on handguns in Washington, D.C.  The National Rifle Association (NRA) said if Heller was upheld, the individual right to keep and bear arms "will not only be infringed, but effectively abolished."

3.  Weak on terror:  From his ill-advised attempt to hold September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial in Manhattan to his desire to close the facility at Guantanamo Bay housing some of America's worst enemies, Holder doesn't have a clue that jihadist terrorists want to destroy this country.  At a congressional hearing, he even declined to state that there are radical elements within Islam which contribute to terrorist activity around the world.

4.  Arizona immigration suit:  Holder's Justice Department filed suit last summer against Arizona's tough new immigration law, SB 1070, despite the fact that a huge majority of the state's residents favor the measure.  Holder expressed concerns that the law might lead to racial profiling but admitted in testimony during a House Judiciary Committee hearing that he had not read the law.

5.  Refusal to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act:  Even though the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is the law of the land, the Holder Justice Department is refusing to enforce its provisions.  The federal law, which defines marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman, passed with overwhelming majorities in Congress, was signed by President Clinton​, and is similar to referendum or constitutional amendments passed in 28 states.

6.  Opposition to the death penalty:  During his 2008 confirmation hearing, Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that "I am not a proponent of the death penalty, but I will enforce the law as this Congress gives it to us."  Yet on April 5, Federal Judge Nicholas Gagufis ordered prosecutors to obtain a letter from Holder confirming he would seek the death penalty for a cop killer whose fatal sentence was overturned on a technicality.  The Brooklyn judge said he needed the letter "in view of the fact that the attorney general failed to exhaust all appeals and abandoned the appeal of the case."

7.  Voter intimidation case dropped:  The best example of Holder's double standard on racial issues is the Justice Department's handling of the New Black Panthers Party voter intimidation case, where two members of the group stood outside a Philadelphia polling area in paramilitary uniforms, shouting racial insults at whites.  When asked why Justice dropped the case, Holder told a congressional panel, "When you compare what people endured in the South in the '60s to try to get the right to vote for African-Americans, to compare what people subjected to that with what happened in Philadelphia ... I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line for my people."

8.  Civil rights division disarray:  Justice Department official J. Christian Adams, who resigned in protest last year, told Congress that the civil rights division is unwilling to prosecute minorities for civil rights violations (see No. 7).   Adams also testified that although the division hired dozens of new attorneys, the number of cases has declined, and many of its employees spend their time "playing computer Solitaire, watching videos, and venting at the lack of activity."

9.  Clemency for terrorists, pardon for fugitive:  When Holder served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, he backed the President's pardoning of fugitive financier Marc Rich​, a major Democratic campaign donor.  He also advised that Clinton offer clemency to 16 members of the Boricua Popular Army, a Puerto Rican terror group, despite opposition from the FBI, the federal prosecutor, and victims of their violence.

10.  "Nation of cowards":  During a February 2009 Black History Month speech, Holder called America a "nation of cowards" on race issues.  As conservative commentator Michelle Malkin said at the time:  "Holder doesn't want an honest dialogue about race.  In the Age of Obama, 'talking enough with each other about race' means the rest of us shutting up while being subjected to lectures about our insensitivity."

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Liberalism must be a disease that affects the brain.  How else to explain the actions and crazy statements coming from these leading left-wingers, the Top 10 Looniest Liberals?!?:

1.  Barack Obama:  The President is turning left to placate his liberal base with his latest push to soak the "rich" by sharply raising taxes.  A rational thinker would have taken heed the results from the 2010 mid-term election, when the American people resoundingly voted against big government and progressive politics.

2.  Nancy Pelosi:  She left a legacy of debt and out-of-control spending during her four years as House speaker.  The arrogance of the Left has rarely been more transparent than when Pelosi uttered these infamous words about the pending ObamaCare legislation:  "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy."

3.  Michael Moore:  This director has made millions pushing his faux documentaries as serious political films, so his class warfare tactics are patently absurd.  Now he is predicting class violence, recently saying, "The smart rich know they can only build the gate so high.  And sooner or later history proves that people, when they've had enough, aren't going to take it anymore.  And much better to deal with it nonviolently now, through the political system, than what could possibly happen in the future, which nobody wants to see."

4.  Maxine Waters:  The loud-mouth congresswoman from South Central Los Angeles says the most uncivil things while taking liberalism to an extreme.  Like her comments that the "Tea Partiers can go straight to hell" or that Dick Cheney "is not only a liar, he is a thief."  She called the Rodney King​ riots a "rebellion," and told oil company executives, "This liberal will be about socializing."

5.  Al Gore:  The former vice president's global warming alarmism is taking hits as his dire predictions of climate chaos are being debunked (polar bears aren't dying off and killer hurricanes aren't on the rise).  After constructing vast business operations meant to cash in on carbon-emissions trading and green-job ventures, Gore needs to keep the hype on overdrive and is increasing his attacks on the opposition, likening them to racists.

6.  Paul Krugman:  Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman keeps pushing Keynesian solutions in his New York Times columns, saying that all would be rosy if only the nation racked up trillions more in debt.  No thank you, Mr. Krugman.  Just paying the interest on the current projected debt will be a burden to future generations.

7.  Harry Reid:  The Senate majority leader rails against Tea Party Republicans from the Senate floor and wanted to build a high-speed train from Las Vegas to Disneyland.  But a more extreme example of his unabashed liberalism was Reid's impassioned defense of a federally funded cowboy poetry festival in his home state of Nevada at a time when the nation's debt was skyrocketing.

8.  Sean Penn:  The Hollywood actor thinks he is a player on the world stage, going to Iraq as an antiwar activist and cozying up to Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez​.  The sad fact is that he will likely never duplicate in real life the depth that he showed in the role of surfer-stoner Jeff Spicoli in the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

9.  Keith Olbermann​:  Exiled from MSNBC after his political contributions to Democrats surfaced, Keith Olbermann now toils for Al Gore's Current TV, where even fewer people see him.  The insufferable liberal can now interview other liberal idiots in obscurity, surfacing only when his guests say something incredibly stupid.

10.  George Soros:  The Hungarian financier funds nearly every liberal cause from ACORN to Planned Parenthood, and gave Barack Obama's political career a jump-start.  Soros once gave an apt description of his own delusional character that could also be applied to liberalism in general:  "I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise I might end up in the loony bin."

2012 can't be much worse than 2011..... or can it?  Let us look into the crystal ball and see what will happen in the New Year. Here are the Top 10 Predictions for 2012:


1. GOP wins presidency: Despite all the bickering between the Republican presidential candidates, one will emerge to beat President Obama, who will be sunk by the bad economy, high unemployment, out-of-control deficits, and Obamacare. His performance in office has been so terrible that Obama would lose even if his opposition was Ru Paul.

2. GOP wins back Senate: Republicans win back the Senate with room to spare, gaining a 54-46 majority by taking back Democratic seats in Florida, Nebraska, North Dakota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Virginia. Alas, Scott Brown loses in Massachusetts as the Bay State reverts to its liberal ways by electing Elizabeth Warren.

3. Obamacare overturned: The Supreme Court will overturn the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) on a 5-4 vote, declaring the individual mandate unconstitutional. The four votes to uphold the healthcare law came from the two Clinton (Breyer and Ginsburg) and two Obama (Sotomayor and Kagan) appointees. Don't forget to thank former President George W. Bush for appointing John Roberts​ and Samuel Alito​ to the high court.

4. Russia crackdown: Vladimir Putin​ cracks down on Russian protesters, using the military in action reminiscent of Tiananmen Square. The action only inspires unrest throughout the nation and Chechen rebels resume their conflict with a spate of violent activity.

5. Greece defaults: Greece defaults on its financial obligations, sending the Euro into a tailspin. By year's end the entire European Union teeters on collapse as Italy and Spain's balance sheets worsen. The turmoil helps keep U.S. Treasury bills near record lows as investors seek a safe-haven from uncertainty.

6. Arizona immigration law upheld: The Supreme Court unanimously upholds SB 1070, the strict Arizona immigration law. With the constitutionality of the matter finally settled, numerous other states rush to enact similar laws with the resulting political furor aiding Republicans on Election Day.

7. Syria regime change: The second year of the Arab Spring brings regime change to as President Bashar al-Assad flees to neighboring Iran. Unfortunately, anti-Western Islamists seize control of the nation as well as taking over new governments in Egypt and Libya.

8. Inflation kicks in: The Federal Reserve's qualitative easing and the nation's massive budget deficits kick inflation up a notch. Watch for the inflation rate to hit 5% with a rise in prices at the grocery store higher than the official Consumer Price Index.

9. Occupy goes away: 2012 will see the Occupy Wall Street movement fizzle out as winter weather and cities enforcing local ordinances drive the motley crew back to their parents' basement. Good riddance to that group of misfits, ruffians and professional activists.

10. Temperatures stay flat: Global warming continues its hiatus as world temperatures remain flat. Still, Al Gore​ and Hollywood movie stars push their alarmism while UN officials and climatologists gather at a plush conference in an exotic locale to discuss how to handle the fallout from Climategate 2.

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Barack Obama is increasingly becoming the nation's scolder-in-chief—lashing out at friends and foes alike—and placing blame for things gone wrong on everybody but himself and his policies. 

Here are the Top 10 Obama Scolds:

1.  America going soft:  President Obama placed the blame for the nation's woes squarely on the American people when he said this last month:  "This is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn't have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades."  With an election year looming, was insulting the voters a major mishap?

2.  Take slippers off:  The President even scolded his most loyal supporters, telling a gathering of the Congressional Black Caucus, "I expect all of you to march with me and press on.  Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes.  Shake it off.  Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying."  That was too much even for Rep. Maxine Waters (D.-Calif.), of South Central Los Angeles, who said Obama "just got a little bit off the teleprompter."

3.  Bitter clingers:  Obama's most famous put-down of his fellow Americans came during the 2008 presidential election, when he said at a San Francisco fund-raiser:  "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

4.  Eat your peas:  During the summer's debt-ceiling debate, Obama sternly reproached congressional Republicans while rejecting a short-term increase in the borrowing limit.  At a press conference, the President lectured:  "That is not an acceptable approach.  So we might as well do it now.  Pull off the Band-Aid.  Eat our peas."

5.  Do-nothing Congress:  Obama is taking the Truman route, blaming a "do-nothing" Congress for holding up his jobs bill.  In doing so, the President seems to have forgotten that the Senate is still run by Democrats, some of whom aren't enamored of Stimulus II.  Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid is said to be none too pleased with the President's strategy and, according to The Hill, their relationship is "terse."

6.  Cairo apology:  Soon after taking office, Obama felt it necessary to undertake an overseas "apology tour," painting America's past actions in a bad light.  In Cairo, he criticized Bush's war on terror, while continuing most of his anti-terror policies.  Sept. 11, 2001, he said, "was an enormous trauma to our country.  The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our ideals."  What does the antiwar crowd think about drones killing U.S. citizens?

7.  Pay a little more:  The community organizer-in-chief loves the class-warfare game, and never did he play it more audaciously than during the debt-ceiling debate.  Mocking tax breaks for "millionaires and billionaires, oil companies and corporate jet owners," the President lectured:  "If you are a wealthy CEO or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been.  ... You can still ride on your corporate jet.  You're just going to have to pay a little more."

8.  Republicans small:  Obama scolded the entire Republican presidential field, charging them with being silent when a gay soldier was booed during a debate, never mind it was clear the boos were aimed at a specific policy.  "We don't believe in the kind of smallness that says it's okay for a stage full of political leaders—one of whom could end up being the President of the United States—being silent when an American soldier is booed," he told a Human Rights Campaign dinner crowd, where his gay and lesbian supporters cheered robustly.

9.  Tea Party darkness:  Obama fuels the left-wing smear campaign against the Tea Party movement when he makes statements like these, in an interview with Rolling Stone:  "There are probably some aspects of the Tea Party that are a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the President."

10.  Attack watch:  Now Obama wants to turn his supporters into an army of scolds, with his campaign asking them to snitch to the Attack Watch website whenever they hear a smear against the President.  Luckily, the mocking of the site has gone viral, as submissions such as, "There's a new Twitter account making President Obama look like a creepy, authoritarian nut-job," becoming the norm.

As we honor those who fought and died for our country, let's remember some of the key moments in U.S. military history.... battles awash in patriots' blood to secure liberty and freedom for America.                                          
                             (http://cdn.dipity.com/uploads/events/305e097837eb2d9f2e6aacef98829f29_1M.png)

 
                              Here, among many deserving, are the Top 10 U.S. Military Actions:


1. D-Day invasion: The turning point of World War II​ was this massive amphibious invasion on June 6, 1944, of German-occupied Normandy. Over 160,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches at Utah, Omaha and other points along a 50-mile stretch of coastline, resulting in some 10,000 Allied casualties. The assault secured a beachhead on the continent and, with Russia pushing from the East, Hitler's forces began to be squeezed on two fronts. Within a year, the Fuhrer made his final descent into a Berlin bunker.

2. Battle of Gettysburg: Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's attempt to bring the Civil War to the North was halted on the fields of Gettysburg, Pa., in July 1863. After the third day of battle, when 12,500 Confederate infantry troops were repulsed during Pickett's Charge, the casualties on both sides totaled some 50,000. Lee would continue his fight for another two years until the surrender at Appomattox, but, after Gettysburg, he fought mostly on the run.

3. Battle of Trenton: Gen. George Washington​ led his band of 2,400 ragtag Continental Army troops across the icy Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 and routed mercenary German Hessians encamped at Trenton, N.J. The victory gave a morale boost to the colonies after a string of British advances and brought innew recruits for Washington's army, buying much-needed time for the Patriot forces.

4. Battle of Inchon: After invading the South in June 1950, North Korean Peoples' Army forces had seized the capital of Seoul and steadily pushed the opposition nearly off the peninsula before Gen. Douglas MacArthur​'s dramatic sea-invasion at Inchon in September. The lengthy amphibious maneuvering through rough waters allowed a surprise attack on a little-guarded area. The operation involved some 75,000 troops who went on to recapture Seoul two weeks later and was the key to keeping the South from a Communist takeover.

5. Meuse-Argonne offensive: The "Great War​" had been waged in Europe for nearly three years before President Wilson​ sent millions of U.S. troops to the continent. The war was a stalemate until the Allies decided to breach the Central Powers' Hindenburg Line. The United States teamed with French forces to win at Meuse-Argonne as part of the Allies' Hundred Day Offensive, which broke the back of the German forces. The victory came at a high price: The U.S. suffered over 300,000 casualties in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles​, setting conditions for Germany's surrender, laid a path to World War II.

6: Operation Desert Storm: After a month of aerial high-tech bombing of Iraqi military targets in response to Saddam Hussein​'s invasion of Kuwait, the ground-war began Feb. 23, 1991. In a classic military flanking maneuver, U.S. forces surprised Saddam' s vaunted Republican Guards by crossing into the undefended desert before turning East and dislodging the enemy, turning a fleeing convoy of Iraqi forces into the "Highway of Death." After 100 hours of the ground assault, President George H.W. Bush​ declared the liberation of Kuwait but, in many eyes, unfortunately ended the conflict with coalition forces 150 miles from Baghdad.

7. Battle of San Juan Hill: The decisive battle of the Spanish-American War​ saw the Rough Riders, commanded by Theodore Roosevelt​, charge up Cuba's San Juan Hill to secure a key ridge on the island. Americans suffered high casualties in the bloody battle, but the U.S. victory in 1898 effectively ended the Spanish Empire, allowed the independence of Cuba and ceded control of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States.

8. Battle of Iwo Jima​: The Imperial Japanese Army positions on the island of Iwo Jima were heavily fortified and with over 11 miles of underground tunnels. The American forces faced a formidable task when they attempted to take control of the strategic Pacific outpost in February 1945. For a month, the American forces, with cover from extensive naval and air support, bombarded the island, which would prove to be a very strategic outpost to launch attacks later in the War of the Pacific​. By March 11, the Japanese were trapped in an area around Kitano Point, the island's most northerly site. By March 16, the island was declared secure and all resistance had ceased by March 26. Of the more than 18,000 Japanese soldiers present at the beginning of the battle, only 216 remained as prisoners at the end. Iwo Jima was the only U.S. Marine battle in which the overall American casualties exceeded those of the Japanese.

9. Fall of Baghdad: While George W. Bush will forever be haunted by uttering the words "Mission Accomplished" while years of nation-building and terror fighting still were ahead in Iraq, the military action that toppled Saddam was a stunning display of shock and awe. The aerial blitz and invasion by 250,000 U.S. troops along with 50,000 coalition forces began on March 20, 2003. While they initially encountered fierce resistance, by April 9 the march to Baghdad was complete and Saddam Hussein's 24-year rule ended.

10. Osama bin Laden slain: The tracking and slaying of Osama bin Laden was the culmination of years of work by U.S. intelligence agencies and training of U.S.Special Forces. The daring helicopter raid and efficient 40-minute incursion into the Abbottabad compound by Navy SEAL Team Six not only rid the world of its most hideous person, but also provided a treasure trove of intel that will help make possible many future anti-terrorist actions.

Reference to the above No. 2 Battle of Gettsyburg

It was General Robert E. Lee who was defending liberty and freedom.  The Republic was lost at Appomattox.

After the War For Southern Independence, it was both the north and the South which were "re-constructed" against
the founding fathers and the Constitution.

The Union was not preserved, it was changed.  Just look to your Republicans and their Obama with their admiration
of Lincoln and the War.  Is it tyranny what we desire instead of liberty?

There have been debt commissions and super committees trying to figure out how to make government leaner and more efficient.  Here are some good places to start:

The Top 10 Most Needed Government Reforms.

1.  Repeal ObamaCare:  Get rid of this monstrosity before it infects our entire health care system.  Costs keep rising and employers (those unlucky enough not to get waivers from the Obama administration) are starting to dump their workers' health plans.  By the time it is fully implemented in 2014, there will be far more patients and a decrease in the number of doctors.  Expect lengthy waits for reduced care.

2.  Simplify the tax code:  Whether a flat tax or a fair tax, anything that brings simplicity to the tax code will be an improvement over the current Byzantine system in which corporations hire armies of accountants to take advantage of loopholes drafted by high-priced lobbyists.  Tyranny begins when the average citizen can't fill out his own tax form.

3.  Enforce the border:  (http://www.humanevents.com/images/border-patrol-secure-the-border.jpg)  With an invasion of illegal immigrants taking up needed spaces in U.S. schools and hospitals, America needs to take control of its borders.  The cost of illegal immigration, from services provided to criminal behavior, are coming at a time when the country is in dire financial straits.  And millions of unemployed Americans shouldn't have to compete for jobs with those who have no right to be here.



4.  Entitlement reform:  If the major federal entitlement programs aren't reined in, it won't be long before they overwhelm the rest of the federal budget.  Raise the retirement age, slow down the Social Security cost-of-living increase or means-test benefits.  Just do something.  Waiting is no longer a viable option.

5.  Reduce regulations:  America is drowning in red tape, which is choking the entrepreneurial spirit of small businesses and hampering job creation.  The best way to get the economy moving again is to relieve the regulatory burden dumped on the private sector by overbearing federal bureaucrats.  Do we really need the Environmental Protection Agency​ to start regulating workplace dust?

6.  Energy production:  It is far past the time for the federal government to get out of the way and let America's vast energy resources be developed.  With large coastal oil reserves and shale oil potential in the heartland, it is a crime that America can be held hostage for its energy needs by Middle Eastern madmen.  Drill, baby, drill!

7.  Dump federal agencies:  From corporate welfare doled out by the Commerce Department to the Department of Education meddling in local affairs, the federal government has treaded in areas where it has no business being.  It is time to start cutting back entire agencies, beginning with the two listed above, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy.

8.  Balance the budget:  State governments, corporations and the average household all need to balance their budgets, so why not the federal government?  Renew the push for a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget or at least start slashing the deficit by cutting spending in a meaningful way.

9.  Public-sector union reform:  Government is bloated at every level, and public-employee unions have made it worse with their high salaries, expensive health care plans and lucrative pensions.  Why should taxpayers continue to foot the bill for such extravagance?

10.  Get government out of culture:  It may be small potatoes in light of the entire federal budget, but the money spent for National Public Radio​, the National Endowment for the Arts​, et al., is an affront to the Constitution.  Harry Reid's Cowboy Poetry Festival will no doubt be missed, but if it is that wonderful, let it find private-sector funding.

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HUMAN EVENTS is the news source President Reagan called his "favorite newspaper"
and we still hold high the Reaganesque principles of free enterprise, limited government
and, above all, a staunch, unwavering defense of American freedom.
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New York Times​ reporter Jodi Kantor​'s new book, The Obamas, is chock-full of revelations about the First Couple. To save you the time of reading (and the cost of buying) Kantor's account, we have compiled the Top 10 Obama Revelations that are contained in the book.

1. Alice in Wonderland Ball

The first Halloween celebration during the Obama Administration was a 2009 over-the-top costume ball with an Alice-in-Wonderland theme. Actor Johnny Depp came dressed as the Mad Hatter​ and Hollywood director Tim Burton​ decorated the White House "in his signature creepy-comic style," according to the book. "He had turned the room into the Mad Hatter's tea party, with a long table set with antique-looking linens, enormous stuffed animals in chairs, and tiered serving plates with treats like bone-shaped meringue cookies." Also present was the original Star Wars character Chewbacca and fruit punch served in blood vials.

2. Michelle Obama​'s Power

Michelle Obama was said to be the driving force behind a staff shakeup after Republican Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, which cost Democrats their Senate supermajority. Kantor writes that Mrs. Obama​ was furious with both the President and his staff for not better anticipating Brown's stunning victory. The Kantor book portrays the First Lady as being an "unrecognized force" in pushing a political agenda and often pushed her husband to take stands on tough issues like immigration and healthcare.

3. Michelle vs. Rahm

The First Lady clashed with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel​, blaming him for the slow action in getting ObamaCare passed through Congress. "Michelle and Rahm Emanuel had almost no bond. Their relationship was distant and awkward from the beginning," Kantor wrote. Emanuel, who offered his resignation following the First Lady's criticism, also battled with senior aide Valerie Jarrett​, whom he viewed as a spy for the East Wing.

4. Gibbs vs. Jarrett and Michelle

The book describes a particularly heated exchange where press secretary Robert Gibbs​ hurled expletives at adviser Valerie Jarrett after she said the First Lady was unhappy with his response to an international flap. Gibbs response was to curse Michelle Obama as well and storm out of a staff meeting. Gibbs later told Kantor the incident was a misunderstanding and that Jarrett made up the complaint. He "stopped taking her seriously as an adviser to the President" as a result.

5. Alice in Wonderland Ball Cover-up

The White House was so concerned about how the Mad Hatter fete (see No. 1) would be viewed at a time of 10% unemployment that they kept word of the event under wraps. "White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans ... that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton's and Depp's contributions went unacknowledged," Kantor wrote. However, less frivolous White House Halloween festivities for Washington-area children were spoon-fed to the press.

6. Marital Quarrels

The Obama marriage had rough patches and the White House staff was often caught in the middle. "The advisors could feel hopelessly caught between husband and wife," the book said. "The Obama marriage was awkward for everyone: for the aides, for the President ... and for the First Lady."

7. Michelle's Clothes Fetish

Michelle Obama did not relish all the public demands associated with being the First Lady but a stylish wardrobe became her "compensatory pleasure" for putting up with the duties. "If I have to go, I'm getting a new dress out of it," Mrs. Obama told friends, according to the book. She also wanted to appear to be sophisticated in order to dispel negative stereotypes about blacks.

8. Michelle's Washington Hell

Michelle was reluctant to leave Chicago for life in the White House and wanted to stay in the Windy City for at least a few months until the Obama children finished the school year. A squabble between top staffers Robert Gibbs and Valerie Jarrett (see No. 4) stemmed from the White House response to press accounts of Michelle's saying that living in the White House was "hell."

9. Bowling Embarrassment

President Obama was so humiliated by the public ridicule after he scored 37 while bowling—much to the delight of late-night comedians—that he practiced at the White House bowling alley until he won a competition by rolling five consecutive strikes.

10. Barbershop Sanctity

After being contacted by a frantic aide while he was getting a haircut, President Obama gave the white staffer a lesson in black culture. "The relationship between a black man and his barber is sacred," Obama said. "For failing to understand this truth, your punishment is to watch the movie Barbershop. And for further punishment, you will then watch the sequel, Barbershop 2."

America has had another dismal year in 2011, with persistent high unemployment, soaring debt, and little hope for a turnaround from the malaise of the Obama era.  It was tough trying to find some silver linings on the dark clouds, but here they are: the Top 10 Reasons for Conservatives To Be Thankful:

1.  2012 is here:  Conservatives can be hopeful that a frustrated and energetic electorate will rise up during next year's elections and put an end to the Obama administration, no matter who the Republicans nominate to run against the President.  Taking back the Senate would be icing on the cake.

2.  U.S. military continues terror battle:  A list of things to be thankful for would be remiss without remembering the valiant members of the military, who continue to fight to protect Americans' freedoms.  Even as they leave Iraq, brave soldiers and Special Forces continue the battle against terrorists around the world.

3.  House Republicans stand strong in opposition:  Since the 2010 midterm elections, House Republicans have held their ground and stymied President Obama's big-government agenda.  From extending the Bush tax cuts to the battle over the debt ceiling, House GOPers prevailed in standoffs with the opposition.

4.  Talk radio offers alternative:  Herman Cain was the first popular talk-radio host to make a serious run for the presidency.  Conservative radio shows have been the most effective way of circumventing the mainstream media, as Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Neil Boortz, Michael Reagan, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North and others have carried the conservative cause across the airwaves.

5.  Renewed interest in the Constitution:  It is nice to see the renewed attention being paid to the Constitution by the Tea Party and some conservative presidential candidates, most notably Rep. Ron Paul.  Though not a perfect document, the Founding Fathers' blueprint for a republic with checks and balances remains the best way to structure government.

6.  New generation of conservative leaders:  Republicans have attracted a new generation of intelligent, principled and articulate officials who offer a bright future for the party.  With the rise of Republicans such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, conservatives are developing exciting new leaders who stay true to the principles of small government and free markets.

7.  Reagan's legacy:  President Ronald Reagan not only presided over a renewal of the American spirit, he left behind a template for continued success: limited government, low taxes and deregulation.  Some 30 years after his election, Republican candidates are still voicing his policies as a path for the future.

8.  Obama administration investigations:  The House Energy and Commerce Committee is probing loans to the bankrupt solar panel company Solyndra, and Rep. Darrell Issa and the House Oversight Committee are focusing on Attorney General Eric Holder's role in Operation Fast and Furious.  Both panels should keep the pressure on and get to the bottom of these travesties.

9.  ObamaCare on life support:  Now that the Supreme Court has accepted cases challenging ObamaCare, an election-year decision is set up to decide the measure's constitutionality.  Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the proceedings for cheering for its passage when she was Obama's solicitor general.

10.  Occupy protests' fall from grace:  This unruly group of protesters is degenerating into a public health hazard, complete with rapes, drug dealing and dead bodies.  With clashes with police becoming commonplace, the Democrats' early embrace of the motley Occupiers will surely come back to haunt the party.  And that is something to be thankful for.

President Obama is set to trek down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill on Jan. 24 and make the annual State of  the Union address to a joint session of Congress. Rather than wait to hear the bad news, HUMAN EVENTS would like to offer some advice to the President:

The Top 10 Things We Want to Hear in Obama's State of the Union Address (but probably won't).

1. Cut spending

Mr. President: This is the big one. You've run up a century's worth of debt in three years. Tell the American people that you will take an ax to the ever-growing federal-spending and start hacking at areas not meant for Washington's power grab. (While you're at it, read up on the 10th Amendment.)

2. Cut taxes

Now that you've decided to reduce spending, there will be room to cut taxes. Lowering taxes on small businesses and corporations will make it easier for them to create jobs. If you really want a "Recovery Summer," unleash the private sector by lowering the highest corporate tax rate in the world.

3. Drill, baby, drill

Say that you've seen the light on energy policy and pledge a Manhattan-Project-like initiative to develop the nation's resources. Shale oil extraction, off-shore drilling and nuclear power should all be tapped to ensure that America's energy needs are not held hostage by a Middle East madman.

4. Dump ObamaCare

ObamaCare is never going to be fully implemented anyway. It's too expensive and too unwieldy to be efficient. Either the Supreme Court will knock it down or Congress will defund it piecemeal. Beat them to the punch and suggest starting over on healthcare, and borrow some free-market solutions from Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan.

5. Cut regulations and rein in the EPA

Ease the burden on companies that are buried in bureaucratic red tape and promise to roll back oppressive regulations. You can start with the Environmental Protection Agency. Do we really need to regulate workplace dust or prevent citizens from building homes on their own land because of non-existent wetlands?

6. Foreign policy overhaul

From Iran and Israel, to Russia and Eastern Europe, your foreign policy has been a mess. Here's a novel idea: Support our allies and know who our enemies are. And not acknowledging that radical Islam is the enemy in the war of terror is a naïve miscalculation of major proportion.

7. Control government intrusion

It is not just the over spending (No. 2) that's a problem, but how government keeps intruding in our daily lives. The Founders envisioned a small, limited federal government that didn't encroach on our freedoms. Start with the Transportation Safety Administration's groping problem and leave our light bulbs alone.

8. Simplify the tax code

Tax season is upon us and soon we all will be wrestling with 1040s, Schedule As and tax tables. Pledge to the American people that you will ditch the mammoth tax code and start fresh with a new system that sets simplicity and clarity as its guideposts. (Do that and you will see a nice bounce in the polls.)

9. Take your job seriously

With many in America suffering, the country needs to be reassured that its government servants are taking the job seriously. In your speech, say you will cut back on the golf links, forgo a vacation or two and stop the freaky Alice-in Wonderland parties at the White House.

10. 'I RESIGN!!!'

In a 1968 address to the nation, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."  If only Barack Hussein Obuma could take a cue from a fellow Democrat and announce his intention to go away.

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Warph,
No.10 would send shivers down my leg, for sure .

Hollywood stars invariably get involved in the political debate from the left side of the spectrum.  What better way to draw attention to themselves than to testify before Congress about the latest threat to humanity, even if their cause is laughable.  

It was hard to narrow it down to only 10, but here are the Top 10 Most Obnoxious Hollywood Liberals:

                                   (http://www.blogcdn.com/entretenimiento.aollatino.com/media/2010/03/sean-penn-hugo-chavez590-1268245904.jpg)

1.  Sean Penn:  The two-time Academy Award winner has traveled the world to denounce the country that made him rich and famous.  He has been used as a propaganda tool by the Iranian regime, met with Cuban President Raul Castro, and went to Iraq as an antiwar activist.  Penn is so close to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez that the tyrant, in one of his televised speeches, read an open letter Penn wrote to Bush, condemning the Iraq War, calling for the President's impeachment and saying that Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice were "villainously and criminally obscene people."

2.  Michael Moore:  The portly director made hundreds of millions of dollars off of the highly fictional Fahrenheit 9/11, a "documentary" that alleged close links between the Bush clan and Osama bin Laden's family.  Recently he said that private wealth is a "national resource" that belongs to all the people and called for jailing the rich.  Then he called bin Laden's death an "execution."  For a man who made a fortune exploiting 9/11, denouncing wealth, and the action against the al-Qaeda leader, is beyond disingenuous.

3.  Danny Glover:  Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover was a campus radical as a student at San Francisco State University and has been an advocate for left-wing causes ever since.  He chums around with the likes of Hugo Chavez, is a union rabble-rouser and said the Bush administration was composed of "liars and murderers."  After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Glover was quick to blame the tragedy on global warming.

4.  Barbra Streisand:  From her appearance on President Nixon's "enemies list" to her singing performance at a fund-raising gala for Barack Obama, Barbra Streisand has a long history of political involvement.  Most notable is her bankrolling of left-wing causes, with the Streisand Foundation steering millions to groups promoting every liberal fantasy.  Among her favorite causes are women's issues, nuclear disarmament and the environment.  She even donated $1 million to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation to help solve global warming.

                                   (http://hmm-364.org/all-photos/urinal1s.jpg)

5.***  Jane Fonda:  "Hanoi Jane" deserves a lifetime achievement award for left-wing activism.  Between her anti-American radio broadcasts from North Vietnam and appearing at anti-Iraq War rallies, Fonda demonstrated against Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank and supported feminist causes, speaking out against patriarchy.  This is someone who once said, "I would think that if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees, that we would someday become Communists."

6.  Alec Baldwin:  "30 Rock" star Alec Baldwin is an animal-rights advocate, a strong supporter of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and serves on the board of the left-wing People for the American Way.  During the Clinton impeachment, Baldwin publicly fantasized about murdering Rep. Henry Hyde and his family.  If he had only followed through on his threat to leave the country when Bush was reelected.

7.  Susan Sarandon:  From supporting the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s to speaking at a pro-union rally in Wisconsin this year, film star Susan Sarandon is still plugging progressive positions, although no longer with her former longtime companion and political fellow traveler Tim Robbins.  She was an anti-Iraq War activist, protesting the Bush administration with the likes of Jane Fonda and Cindy Sheehan, and is a major donor to the feminist group EMILY's List.

8.  Janeane Garofalo:  This B-list actress and Air America refugee has taken left-wing hate speech to a new level with her rhetorical blasts aimed at the Tea Party.  Here is a sample of her rants:  "It's about hating a black man in the White House.  That is racism straight up.  This is nothing but a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks," and, "The functionally retarded adults, the racists—with their cries of, 'I want my country back.'  What they're really saying is, 'I want my white guy back.' "

9.  Joy Behar:  While on "The View," Joy Behar said there are ways to get information from terrorists other than tough interrogation methods such as waterboarding.  "There are other ways of getting information out of people ... pay them off," Behar said, while suggesting offering a terrorist a "$6 million book deal."  This is the same brainiac who once said, "It is really not easy to make fun of the Obamas, because they're kind of really perfect, aren't they?"

10.  The Sheens:  This father/son duo deserves a mention.  Martin Sheen played the liberal's dream President in "West Wing," and has embraced every left-wing cause, from antiwar and farm-worker activism to protecting seals by attacking fur traders.  His son, Charlie Sheen, was an outspoken Truther, alleging that 9/11 was an inside job, before he became a traveling carnival act with his Tiger Blood and "Torpedo of Truth" tour.



*** Hanoi Jane:>  (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HliWiZ0TUx0/Rtblhvznb3I/AAAAAAAAAXQ/colMAVSZh-8/s320/treason_poster.jpg)

The other night, Jay Leno announced that Jane Fonda and Ted Turner were getting divorced.  He said their relationship was a long one but now, " It was time for Jane to go back to the people who love her...the North Vietnamese."  Then he laughed and said "I thought I'd get that one in for the Veterans".

Submitted by:
   Roy E. Brush, former Sgt. USMC


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Hanoi Jane' Rumors Blend Fact and Fiction
(Quoted from, About.ComTM "Urban Legends and Folklore")
Dateline: 11/03/99

Email rumors blending fact and fiction about Jane Fonda's activities as an  anti-war protester during the 1970s have reopened old wounds for Vietnam veterans and inspired a new round of recriminations for things the actress did long ago, and things she never did.

The rumors center around Fonda's tour of North Vietnam in 1972, during which she cozied up to the enemy, posing for photo ops  with communist troops and broadcasting anti-American propaganda over Radio Hanoi.

During the same trip she participated in a staged press conference with American POWs, the purpose of which was to demonstrate that they were not being mistreated by their captors.  Years later when the released  POWs described the torture and degradation they really did suffer at the hands of the North Vietnamese, Fonda called them "hypocrites and liars."

Those facts are not under dispute.  Fonda's behavior at that time, considered treasonous by some, earned her the nickname "Hanoi Jane" among the veterans and POWs of the Vietnam War, some of whom hate her to this day.

Since the '70s Fonda has revamped her image several times over, rededicating herself to her acting career, becoming a fitness guru in the early '80s, and marrying billionaire Ted Turner in 1991.  In 1988 she delivered a televised apology to Vietnam veterans and their families, a gesture that didn't mollify everyone but established some distance between the new Fonda and old Fonda, whose actions, she finally admitted, had been "thoughtless and careless."

As the '90s progressed Fonda's past was less frequently brought up as an issue and seemed to dwindle in importance – until this year, that is, when Barbara Walters chose to honor the actress in a TV special called "A Celebration: 100 Years of Great Women." The announcement of the program – which aired in April 1999 and did honor Jane Fonda – prompted an instant outcry from veterans and ex-POWs, many of whom vented their indignation via the Internet.  Angry recriminations were posted in newsgroups, published in newsletters and on Web pages, and shared by email.

Apparently bits and pieces of these texts, along with a few shameless fabrications, were cobbled together by persons unknown to create the "Hanoi Jane" diatribe which still circulates today.  Parts of it are true and parts of it are false.

Though we don't know precisely when versions of the "Hanoi Jane" message first began making the rounds (presumably among veterans and military personnel), they found their way into general circulation in early September.  Each of the versions I've seen exhibits slight variations in format and wording, and in some cases added comments and/or deletions.

Jon E. Dougherty, a columnist for WorldNetDaily, saw fit to quote a version of the message verbatim in his September 15 column entitled "Not Saluting Jane Fonda."  Interestingly, Dougherty's piece, complete with his own commentary, was copied and distributed by readers and quickly established itself as another popular variant of the already-circulating text.  [Update: Mr. Dougherty published a correction on Nov. 10.]

Below is a representative example of the basic message.  Bear in mind that only part of what you're about to read is true.

Looks like Hanoi Jane may be honored as of the "100 Women of the Century".  JANE FONDA remembered? Unfortunately many have forgotten and still countless others have never known how Ms. Fonda betrayed not only the idea of our "country" but the men who served and sacrificed during Viet Nam.

There are few things I have strong visceral reactions to, but Jane Fonda's participation in what I believe to be blatant treason, is one of them.  Part of my conviction comes from exposure to those who suffered her attentions. The first  part of this is from an F-4E pilot.  The pilot's name is Jerry Driscoll, a River Rat.  In 1978, the Commandant of the USAF Survival School was a  former POW in Ho Lo Prison-the "Hanoi Hilton".

Dragged from a stinking cesspit of a cell, cleaned, fed, and dressed in clean PJs, he was ordered to describe for a visiting American "Peace Activist" the "lenient and humane treatment" he'd received.  He spat at Ms. Fonda, was clubbed, and dragged away.  During the subsequent beating, he fell forward upon the camp Commandant's feet, accidentally pulling the man's shoe off- which sent that officer berserk.

In '78, the AF Col still suffered from double vision (which permanently ended his flying days)  from the Vietnamese Col's frenzied application of a wooden baton.

From 1983-85, Col Larry Carrigan was the 347FW/DO (F-4Es).  He spent 6 years in the "Hilton" - the  first three of which he was "missing in action".  His wife lived on faith that he was still alive.  His group, too, got the cleaned/fed/clothed routine in preparation for a "peace delegation" visit.  They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they still survived.  Each man secreted a tiny piece of  paper, with his SSN on it, in the palm of his hand.

When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little encouraging snippets like: "Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?" and "Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?"  Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper.  She took them all without missing a beat.  At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge... and handed him the little pile.

Three men died from the subsequent beatings.  Col Carrigan was almost number four.  For years after their release, a group of determined former POWs, including Col Carrigan, tried to bring Ms. Fonda and others up on charges of treason.  I don't know that they used it, but the charge of "Negligent Homicide due to Depraved Indifference" would also seem appropriate.  Her obvious "granting of aid and comfort to the enemy", alone, should've been sufficient for the treason count.

However, to date, Jane Fonda has never been formally charged with anything and continues to enjoy the privileged life of the rich and famous.   I, personally, think that this is shame on us, the American Citizenry.

Part of our shortfall is ignorance: most don't know such actions ever took place.  Thought you might appreciate the knowledge.  Most of you've  probably already seen this by now... only addition I might add to these sentiments is to  remember the satisfaction of relieving myself into the urinal at some airbase or another where "zaps" of Hanoi Jane's face had been applied.

To whom it may concern:
I was a civilian economic development advisor in Viet Nam, and was captured by the North Vietnamese communists in South Viet Nam in 1968, and held for over 5 years.  I spent 27 months in solitary confinement, one year in a cage in Cambodia, and one year in a "black box" in Hanoi.

My North Vietnamese captors deliberately poisoned and murdered a female missionary, a nurse in a leprosarium in Ban me Thuot, South Vietnam, whom I buried in the jungle near the Cambodian border.   At one time, I was weighing approximately 90 lbs. (My normal weight is 170 lbs.)  We were Jane Fonda's "war criminals."

When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with Jane Fonda.  I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POWs were receiving, which was far different  from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as "humane and lenient."

Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky  floor on my knees with outstretched arms with a piece of steel placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane every time my arms dipped.

I had the opportunity to meet with Jane Fonda for a couple of hours after I was released.  I asked her if she would be willing to debate me on TV.  She did not answer me, her former husband, Tom Hayden, answered for her.  She was mind controlled by her husband.  This does not exemplify someone who should be honored as "100 Years of Great Women."

After I was released, I was asked what I thought of Jane Fonda and the anti- war movement.  I said that I held Joan Baez's husband in very high regard, for he thought the war was wrong, burned his draft card and went to prison in protest.  If the other anti-war protesters took this same route, it would have brought our judicial system to a halt and ended the war much earlier, and there wouldn't be as many on that somber black granite wall called the Vietnam Memorial.  This is democracy. This is the American way.

Jane Fonda, on the other hand, chose to be a traitor, and went to Hanoi, wore their uniform, propagandized for the communists, and urged American soldiers to desert.  As we were being tortured, and some of the POWs murdered, she called us liars.  After her heroes -- the North Vietnamese communists -- took over South Vietnam,     they systematically murdered 80,000 South Vietnamese political prisoners.  May their souls rest on her head forever.  Shame!  Shame!  ( History is a heavy sword in the hands of those who refuse to forget it.  Think of this the next time you see Ms. Fonda- Turner at a Braves game).

Please take the time to read and forward to as many people as you possibly can.  It will eventually end up on her computer and she needs to know that "we will never forget".  Lest we  forget... "100 years of great women", Jane Fonda should never be considered.

There's no disputing that Jane Fonda toured North Vietnam, propagandized on behalf of the communists, and participated in an orchestrated "press conference" with American POWs in 1972.  There's no denying that she defamed POWs by whitewashing the Viet Cong's treatment of them and later calling them liars when they spoke out.

But how true are the further allegations in the current email rumors?  Let's examine their veracity point by point, beginning with the most serious:

Claim: Fonda betrayed POWs by turning over slips of paper they gave her to their captors.  POWs were beaten and died as a result.
Status: FALSE.

"It's a figment of somebody's imagination," says Ret. Col. Larry Carrigan,  who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967.  He has no idea why the story was attributed to him.  "I never met Jane Fonda," he told me.  It goes without saying he never handed her a secret message.

He confessed that he did see Fonda once while he was a POW – on film.

He recalled the night when he and the rest of the 80 or so men he was interned with were called out into the prison courtyard, "the first time we'd been outside under the stars in 5 or 6 years."  As they all stood there wondering what was in store for them, a projector started whirring in the background.  Their captors proceeded to show them footage of Jane Fonda's visit to Hanoi.

Claim: A POW spit at Fonda, for which he was brutally beaten.
Status: FALSE.

This story is attributed in the email to former Air Force pilot Jerry Driscoll, who says it's false and did not originate from him.  I wasn't able to speak with Driscoll directly, but Mike McGrath and Paul Galanti, fellow officers of the Nam-POWs organization to which Driscoll belongs, told me he unequivocally disavows the story.

[Update: after this commentary was written I received personal confirmation from Jerry Driscoll that the story is bogus – as he put it, "the product of a very vivid imagination."]

Mike McGrath, currently serving as the president of Nam-POWs, has been trying for more than a month to help Driscoll and Carrigan squelch the false rumors circulating under their names.  "They would like to get their names removed but the story seems to have a life of its own," he told me. "There are a lot of folks out there who would  love to have a story like that to hang their hat and their hate on."

Claim: POWs were beaten for refusing to cooperate or meet with Fonda during her visit.
Status: TRUE.

The final anecdote in the "Hanoi Jane" message recounts the experience of a POW who agreed to meet with Fonda but announced to his captors that he planned on telling her how horrid conditions in North Vietnamese prison camps really were.

"Because of this," the narrative continues, "I spent three days on a rocky floor on my knees with outstretched arms with a piece of steel placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane every time my arms dipped."

Those words were written by Michael Benge, a civilian advisor captured by the Viet Cong in 1968 and held as a POW for 5 years. When I contacted him, he confirmed that the story was indeed his, and true.

Benge's original statement, entitled "Shame on Jane," was published in April by the Advocacy and Intelligence Network for POWs and MIAs.  The nameless, faceless author of the "Hanoi Jane" message evidently picked it up from a Web page or a newsgroup and combined it with fabricated stories to create the forwarded text.  Some versions now circulate with Benge's name appended, others quote his statement anonymously.

"None of us are members of the Jane Fonda Fan Club"

A good cause is never well-served by lies, and that's how all of the ex-POWs I spoke to or corresponded with about the falsehoods in this message felt.  Paul Galanti said: "None of us are members of the Jane Fonda Fan Club, but these fabrications are something she just did not do."

No one had an answer to the question "Who made up these stories and why?" but both Carrigan and McGrath expressed doubt that it was a POW.

"She did enough to place her name in the trash bin of history," McGrath explained.  "None of us need to make up stories on her."

Jane Fonda could not be reached for comment.

Submitted by:
   Ronald A. Knight, GySgt. USMC(Ret)
   Eugene D Atkins, former Cpl. USA

Dimwitted Nancy has taken her arrogance to a new level.  Pelosi charged that an "ugly campaign" is afoot to misrepresent the health care legislation by organized protesters.  Not American citizens, organized zombies is basically what she is saying.

It has been a year now since Nancy Pelosi surrendered her gavel and stepped down as speaker of the House as a result of the Republican mid-term tsunami.  To help ensure that history is not repeated, and to underscore the importance of this year's elections, here's the Top 10 Perils of Pelosi:

1. Piled up trillions in debt

When Nancy Pelosi became speaker in January 2007, the national debt was $8.67 trillion. By the time she was deposed by the Tea Party Republicans four years later, that debt increased 60%, reaching $13.87 trillion. Since appropriation bills must constitutionally originate in the House, it is fair to blame Princess Pelosi and her kingdom of liberal Democratic congressmen for the spending spree.

2. ObamaCare abstinence

Despite the unpopularity of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare), Pelosi used parliamentary maneuvers and partisan arm-twisting to ram the legislation through the House. Her classic statement urging its passage—"We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it"—is an appropriate slogan for her tenure as speaker.

3. Tea Party assault

When the Tea Party arose to counter Pelosi's profligate spending, her response was to smear the movement. She tried to cast doubt on its authenticity, saying, "It's not really a grassroots movement. It's astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America." She later likened Tea Partiers to Nazis, and fiscal-conservative Republicans to terrorists. Of course, the mainstream media followed suit and have attacked the Tea Party ever since.

4. Occupy hypocrisy

Unlike her scorn for the Tea Party, Pelosi was quick to support the Occupy Wall Street crowd and embraced the group's assertion that that the top 1% is unfairly profiting from the 99%. Yet Pelosi is firmly ensconced in the upper reaches of that 1%, with a net worth of some $101 million, making her the sixth wealthiest member of the House. Even as the 99% suffer through hard times, Pelosi saw her net worth soar in the Great Recession.

5. Airplane brouhaha

Flying back and forth between Washington, D.C., and her district in San Francisco proved to be too grueling for the House speaker when the military-provided transport she used had to land for refueling. Pelosi threw a fit and demanded that the Pentagon summon a larger aircraft capable of a non-stop flight—at triple the cost.

6. Special waivers

When the Democrats took over the House in 2007 Pelosi led the charge to raise the federal minimum wage. An exception to the wage mandate in the bill, cosponsored by Pelosi, was made for the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas Islands, where a major employer—StarKist-Tuna—is owned by Del Monte, which is headquartered in Pelosi's congressional district. Oh, and an astounding 20% of the all waivers to ObamaCare approved by the administration last spring were for businesses in Pelosi's district.

7. Insider trading

An average citizen who profits from insider stock trading faces the risk of spending time behind bars. Not so for Pelosi, who took advantage of a loophole for members of Congress and made millions participating in a special Initial Public Offering by VISA at the same time Congress was considering credit-card legislation that would cost the company a bundle.

8. Lied about torture briefing

While Pelosi railed against the Bush Administration for using enhanced interrogation techniques on terror detainees, she seemed to have conveniently forgotten that she was briefed on the use of waterboarding way back in 2002. When news of the briefing became public in 2009, Pelosi charged the CIA with lying, but was refuted by Obama-appointed CIA director Leon Panetta.

9. Taxpayer extravagance

Wealthy Pelosi knows how to live the good-life. Witness her recent vacation in Hawaii where she and her husband stayed in a $10,000-per-night hotel. While we don't begrudge the rich spending their own money, it irks us when they are extravagant at taxpayers' expense. Pelosi's congressional travel expenses for a two-year period exceeded $2 million, including over $100,000 spent on in-flight alcohol and food. Only the best liquor was served—Grey Goose vodka, Courvoisier cognac and Bombay Sapphire gin.

10. Taxpayer-funded Botox

Most healthcare plans don't pay for cosmetic surgery that has no medical rationale. But the very first Omnibus Spending Bill passed in the Nancy Pelosi era made sure that the healthcare plan for members of Congress included taxpayer-funded Botox injections and face-lifts for members of Congress—a measure that the former speaker seems to have taken full advantage of.

Anger against Congress, federal bureaucrats, lobbyists and all that is Washington has been boiling over in America's Heartland—with good reason. The nation's capital spews out toxic solutions to correct non-problems and never ceases to amaze with its hypocrisy. Too harsh?

Here's the proof: The Top 10 ways Washington annoys the Heartland.

1. Budgetary blues

Imagine, if you will, a major corporation trying to run itself without having a budget for three years. Its officials undoubtedly would be hauled into jail for violating Sarbanes-Oxley. Yet that is exactly what Washington is doing, as the Democratic-controlled Senate has bottled up passage of a budget for over 1,000 days—leading to endless battles over omnibus spending bills and continuing resolutions, both convenient vehicles for fiscal mischief.

2. Constitutional contempt

When the President unconstitutionally makes recess appointments with the Senate not in recess, what are the American people to think? In fact, the entire federal behemoth is based, in large part, on a total disregard for the Constitution, as the 9th and 10th Amendments—giving powers to the states—are routinely ignored.

3. Rotten on-the-job behavior

No wonder Americans are fed up—when they hear reports of federal workers who don't pay taxes, Securities and Exchange officials viewing porn at work and Federal Aviation controllers falling asleep on the job. Why do government workers seem to be able to get away with things that would get employees in the private sector fired?

4. Regulatory overkill

The regulatory burden passed on to U.S. businesses and citizens by Washington is astounding. Companies need to hire armies of accountants and human resources' personnel to keep up with the latest directive from the Department of Something. Do we really need Washington bureaucrats to tell a Nevada small businessman how much dust is allowed in his establishment?

5. Chevy Volt wreck

Let us connect the dots: the Obama administration used money from TARP that Congress passed to prevent a collapse of the banking system and bailed out General Motors. With its stake in the company, the government mandates the automaker to produce an electric car: the Chevy Volt. Despite massive government subsidies, Volt sales are virtually non-existent. The government covers up reports of Volt batteries catching fire when idle, long after minor fender-benders. Investigation, Rep. Issa?

6. ObamaCare apocalypse

The war over ObamaCare will forever be seen as the seminal battle between Washington and the Heartland, even with the final chapter yet to be written. The Democrats' shoving their bureaucratic-nightmare-of-a-healthcare system down the throats of the American people helped to spawn the Tea Party and gave impetus to the 2010 Republican Party midterm tsunami. The arrogance of Pelosi's "sign it, so we can know what's in it," and the Cornhusker Kickbacks, and Louisiana Purchases, riled a sleeping giant in the American electorate.

7. Energy nonsense

Politicians and public officials have been warning for some four decades about the United States' dependence on imported oil, yet we are still vulnerable to Middle East nations that would like nothing better than to see America's demise. Still, Washington has walled off much of our own resources from development and has strangled the energy sector with red tape. It's time to tap the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, increase shale-oil and natural gas production and open more nuclear plants.

8. Spending nonsense

The American people understand the need to send some of their hard-earned dollars to Washington to fund the federal government. But when they see their money spent on pure nonsense, they have every reason to fume. Thank you, Sen. Harry Reid, for summing up the problem: The Cowboy Poetry Festival is the perfect example of what is wrong with Congress's spending priorities.

9. Toxic tax code

The tax code has become so complicated that no one really understands it. Try reading the instructions for Form 4562 on Depreciation and Amortization and remain sane. Americans have reason to be indignant over the code's complexity when it masks both corporate loopholes and wealth redistribution (in the form of the Earned Income Tax Credit.) President Reagan was right: Simplify the code, so that a return fits on a postcard.

10. Keystone Pipeline fiasco

The distortions coming from the Obama administration about its decision to disallow the construction of Keystone Pipeline XL are topped only by its hypocrisy. The President blamed Republicans for the pipeline's demise, saying their demand he reach a decision in 60 days was unreasonable—even though the project had been under study for three years. Everyone knows that Obama is doing a favor for the deep-pocketed environmental lobby, at the cost of jobs for the American worker.

Top 10 qualities needed by a GOP Veep

Whoever wins the GOP presidential nod will need a strong vice presidential candidate to beat the formidable, very well-financed Obama-Biden ticket.  Here are some suggestions for the eventual Republican nominee when he chooses his running mate:

1.  Budget expertise
The biggest issues facing the country are the exploding debt, out-of-control spending and heavy tax burdens on businesses and individuals.  The Republican presidential candidate will need someone who knows the budget in and out, and who has innovative ideas about how to fix the problems—someone like Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the architect of the acclaimed Republican budget proposal and the 2011 HUMAN EVENTS "Conservative of the Year."


2.  Appeal to Hispanic voters
Hispanics are the fastest growing demographic group in America and their vote could be up for grabs with the right ticket.  Peel off a few percentage points from the 65% of the Hispanic vote that went for Obama and the GOP can coast to victory.  Luckily, the GOP has in its ranks the inspirational, telegenic and conservative senator from Florida, Marco Rubio.

3.  Inspires the base
The Republican nominee will need someone to inspire the true believers on the right—a candidate who can bring in small-government Tea Partiers.  Someone like former Alaska Gov. and 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin?  (Watching the mainstream media's conniptions were she to be picked again would be particularly entertaining.)

4.  Tough campaigner
Vice presidential candidates often have to take on detractors, while the presidential pick stays above the fray.  Few politicians can match New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's track record in going head to head against entrenched interest groups.  His combative style and public employee union-busting would be a plus to any candidate.  (Imagine, for a second, a Christie-Biden debate.)

5.  Administrative experience
Experience counts and having run an operation with a decent budget and a large number of employees is valuable training for a President or his running mate.  GOP Governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio and Mitch Daniels of Indiana have all had success in trimming government waste.  We've seen what happens when a community organizer takes the reins of the federal government

6.  Appeals to evangelicals
Republicans can't win in November if evangelicals and social conservatives stay home. Adding former Sen. Rick Santorum (if he fails to win the presidential nomination) or Rep. Michele Bachmann to a GOP ticket would send a signal to that critical voting bloc that their concerns would not be ignored.

7.  Innovative approach to healthcare
The nation's healthcare system will need a major overhaul after ObamaCare is dismantled.  If he doesn't get the presidential nod, Newt Gingrich, who founded the Center for Health Transformation, is an innovative thinker who could help solve this critical problem.

8.  Immigration problem solver
The GOP ticket could use someone who knows how important it is to control the borders.  Despite sinking in the polls after his defense of in-state tuition for illegal aliens, Gov. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has spent a decade dealing with the immigration issue.  Another possibility: former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado—a well-known immigration

9.  War on Terror expertise
Despite the pull-out from Iraq and the soon-to-come retreat from Afghanistan, the war on terror is far from over and the world remains a dangerous place.  The presidential nominee may want to look for someone with solid foreign policy expertise (former UN Ambassador John Bolton), someone with 9/11 credentials (former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani) or someone with battlefield experience (CIA Director David Petraeus, who served in the U.S. Army for 37 years, becoming a four-star general.)

10.  Makes black vote more competitive
It is about time that Republicans make progress in loosening the Democratic stranglehold on black voters.  Who better to start a political reexamination by a voting bloc strangled by liberalism than conservative black candidates who have overcome the odds to become successful?  War hero and Florida Rep. Allen West, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and business executive Herman Cain fit the bill nicely.

Excellent information.. for those who what to know the truth of the matter.  :)
Thanks for posting it all.

President Obama's recently released fiscal year 2013 budget is full of gimmicks, half-truths, over-optimistic assumptions and questionable policies. Here is the grim list of the budget travesties:

1. Tax hike mania

President Obama is seeking nearly $2 trillion in new taxes, including doubling the top capital gains and dividend rates, and sharply increasing the estate tax. The White House wants to hit the airline industry with a "takeoff fee," the banking industry with a "financial crisis responsibility fee," and the oil industry with billions of dollars in new hikes. The budget foresees the end of both the temporary payroll- tax cut and the Bush tax cuts—giving a double blow to the economy at the start of 2013.

2. Spendathon

The president continues his out-of-control spending agenda -- $47 trillion over 10 years -- funding frivolous projects, Utopian dreams, and wealth redistribution policies. He wants billions of dollars in new funding for renewable energy programs, unemployment assistance, jobless training, and infrastructure rebuilding. Obama continues his love affair with high-speed rail, asking for billions in new funding. He even wants U.S. taxpayers to pony up $800 million to aid the "Arab Spring."

3. War savings

Somehow the president is counting as budget cuts the almost $1 trillion that he is "saving" in money that won't be spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the same logic, think how much can be "saved" by counting as future budget cuts the money we won't be spending for wars in Germany, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.

4. Over-optimistic forecasting

One way to make a budget look good is to make rosy economic assumptions, as a growing economy brings in revenue and curtails many expenses, such as unemployment benefits and food stamps. While most economists are predicting a 2 percent growth rate at best for the U.S. economy next year, the White House is boldly predicting a 3 percent gain in 2013 and 4.1 percent by 2015. As the Obama tax hikes kick in, watch for any recovery to whither.

5. Deficit inaction

Not content with the trillions of dollars of debt he has already racked up, the president's budget forecasts another $6.7 trillion in deficit spending over the next decade. With no real deficit reduction plan on the table, it won't be long before interest payments on the national debt crowd out much of the funding needed for discretionary spending programs.

6. Entitlement ennui

President Obama doesn't even pretend to deal with the burgeoning entitlement crisis in his budget other than to take a whack at senior's health benefits. The president offered no plan to keep Social Security solvent, even as the two-year payroll tax cut propels the system closer to bankruptcy. His Medicare savings don't come from reforms containing health costs, but by giving power to Washington bureaucrats to deny coverage to senior citizens.

7. Class warfare

President Obama brings his class warfare tirade from the campaign trail to the budget plan as the "wealthy"—generally defined by families with an income of over $250,000—will be hit with multiple tax increases. The end of the Bush cuts will raise the top marginal tax rate to 39.6%, the tax on investment income will rise sharply, there will be a 3.8% surtax imposed by ObamaCare, and a "Buffet rule" requiring a higher minimum tax. Obama even goes after charitable giving and homeowners, limiting the value of itemized deductions for the "wealthy" in those categories.

8. Political document

Rather than offering a serious spending plan, the president's budget is a political roadmap for his 2012 re-election campaign, reinforcing his "tax-the-rich" rhetoric. The phony numbers are so obvious that Senate Democrats aren't even going to bother to take up the measure, extending their streak to four years without producing a budget.

9. Budget ignorance

It is clearly amateur hour at the White House. When Obama's chief of staff, Jack Lew, went on the Sunday talk shows to defend the president's budget, he predictably attacked Republicans for the inability to get a spending plan through the Senate, decrying the 60 vote threshold needed to get something passed in the upper chamber. How is it that the president's key aide doesn't know that Senate rules forbid a filibuster on a budget, meaning that passage requires a simple majority of 51 votes?

10. Bogus savings

The president claims he is cutting $4 trillion in spending over 10 years, but as the House Budget Committee points out, $2 trillion of that comes from measures already enacted into law. Double counting is a tried and true method of accounting sleight of hand. Only in Obamaland, does increasing spending by $7.3 trillion, instead of $9.48 billion, constitute fiscal restraint.

It's happening locally also, no matter what party is in.If not now, you will be "feed" to death. we are starting to see fee creep here also. Just little things here and there but it adds up.

I agree.  Happening here and has for some time

Earlier this summer, New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority announced that it would be rearranging some of its subway signs because they resembled a slightly naughty bit of internet slang.  The signage for the F, M, and L lines read "FML," which savvy web users know as self-deprecating shorthand for "F— My Life."  The double meaning of its signs caught the transit authority off guard, but they've worked quickly to switch around the letters.

New York's subways are hardly the first victims of acronym problems, though. Here are ten other organizations, places, and businesses that have realized a bit too late that their initials meant a little more than they had intended.



1. WTF
In 2009, the Wisconsin Tourism Federation's biggest problem wasn't finding a way to attract more people to the metropolitan Kenosha area; it was the realization that its initials mirrored the slang abbreviation for "What the F—?" The WTF from America's Dairyland has been around since 1979, so it likely predates the vulgar WTF. In the end, though, you can't fight an internet meme. The organization changed its name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin.

The WTF's only consolation must be that it's not alone. In 2008, the North Carolina DMV allowed drivers whose license plates contained "WTF" to swap out their tags free of charge. The DMV also had to change its website; the sample plate pictured on the site was "WTF-5505."

2. DOAIn a move that must have been unsettling for thousands of Iowa's seniors, the state changed the name of its Department of Elder Affairs to the Department on Aging, or DOA, in 2009. Something's telling us that the change hasn't helped Iowa's elderly sleep any easier. The organization now goes by IDA, for Iowa Department on Aging.

3. AIDS
When Joan Woehrmann started her ambulance company in Whittier, CA, in 1955, she hit on a pretty brilliant acronym: AIDS. The letters stood for "attitude, integrity, dependability, and service," which are all great qualities for an ambulance line. The name was also easy to remember in times of crisis.
She didn't foresee the name eventually signifying one of the greatest medical catastrophes of the century, though. By 1985, the LA Times reported that Woehrmann's drivers were being taunted and that the public mistakenly started to think that the line only transported AIDS patients.

Finally, she had enough and changed the line's name to "AME," even giving up the ambulances' customized line of "AIDS 1" and "AIDS 2" license plates.

4. SUX
While FAA identifiers for airports aren't technically acronyms, the three-letter codes can give rise to their own headaches. Just ask the Sioux City Gateway Airport, which the FAA saddled with the unfortunate designator "SUX." Airport authorities petitioned for a new code, and the FAA – and this is not a joke – offered them "GAY" as a nod to the "Gateway" part of the airport's name.

Sioux City decided that switching to GAY probably wouldn't save them much sophomoric taunting, so officials decided to make the best of the SUX situation. Now the airport markets playful t-shirts emblazoned with slogans like "Fly SUX."

SUX might not even be the worst airport code. According to a 2008 LA Times story, Fresno's is FAT, and Perm, Russia's is PEE. The big winner has to be Fukuoka, Japan, though. We'll let you guess how that one gets abbreviated.

5. SLUT
In 2007, Seattle opened a new streetcar line connecting the South Lake Union neighborhood to the city's downtown. While the project was officially called the South Lake Union Streetcar, local residents began ribbing it as the South Lake Union Trolley, or SLUT. Although the city and the line's developers did what they could to dispel the notion that the line had a bawdy name, residents still refer to it as the SLUT; in 2007 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer even reported that a coffeehouse was selling t-shirts that read, "Ride the SLUT."

6. CCRAP
In 2000, delegates of Canada's United Alternative convention needed a name for their newly formed political party. They came up with Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party, which in addition to taking roughly six minutes to pronounce was abbreviated CCRAP. Organizers quickly realized the blunder and changed the party's name to the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance.

7. WPPSS
(http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/WPPSS.jpg)In 1998, the Washington Public Power Supply System chose to change its name to Energy Northwest to discourage people from pronouncing its unfortunate acronym as "Whoops!" The old name left the utility open to quite a bit of taunting in 1983, when the WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion worth of bonds. Whoops indeed.

8. POOF
In 1990, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Florida decided it had heard just about enough kidding about its acronym, POOF, which resembled an old offensive term for a homosexual man. The musicians changed their name to the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra.

9. The C-word
In 2002, Microsoft had to do a little rearranging on the fly. It quickly and quietly changed its ribald "Critical Update Notification Tool" to the more family friendly "Critical Updated Notification Utility."

10. NIC
What's wrong with NIC? In English, nothing. In Arabic, a whole heck of a lot. When the Coalition Provisional Authority began planning new Iraqi armed forces in 2003, they originally called them the New Iraqi Corps. They hit a big snag, though. As ABC News reported, in Arabic "nic" is "a colorful synonym for fornication." The coalition quickly changed the name to the New Iraqi Army.

The United States have a well known history of providing military support to countries in need. But from time to time, the US Government has provided secret forces.  While many are successful, there have also been a number of failures. This is a list of the eighteen top secret armies of the CIA.  Check Wikipedia for a more in-depth view:

1. Ukrainian Partisans
Wikipedia

From 1945 to 1952 the CIA trained and aerially supplied Ukranian partisan units which had originally been organised by he Germans to fight the Soviets during WWII. For seven years, the partisans, operating in the Carpathian Mountains, made sporadic attacks. Finally in 1952, a massive Soviet military force wiped them out.

2. Chinese Brigade in Burma
Wikipedia

After the Communist victory in China, Nationalist Chinese soldiers fled into northern Burma. During the early 1950s, the CIA used these soldiers to create a 12,000 man brigade which made raids into Red China. However, the Nationalist soldiers found it more profitable to monopolise the local opium trade.

3. Guatemalan Rebel Army
Wikipedia

After Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz legalised that country's communist party and expropriated 400,000 acres of United Fruit banana plantations, the CIA decided to overthrow his government. Guatemalan rebels were trained in Honduras and backed up with a CIA air contingent of bombers and fighter planes. This army invaded Guatemala in 1954, promptly toppling Arbenz's regine.

4. Sumatran Rebels
Wikipedia

In an attempt to overthrow Indonesian president Sukarno in 1958, the CIA sent paramilitary experts and radio operators to the island of Sumatra to organise a revolt. With CIA air support, the rebel army attacked but was quickly defeated. The American government denied involvement even after a CIA b-26 was shot down and its CIA pilot, Allen Pope, was captured.

5. Khamba Horsemen
Wikipedia

After the 1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet, the CIA began recruiting Khamba horsemen – fierce warriors who supported Tibet's religious leader, the Dalai Lama – as they escaped into India in 1959. These Khambas were trained in modern warfare at Camp Hale, high in the rocky mountains near Leadville, Colorado. Transported back to Tibet by the CIA operated Air American, the Khambas organised an army number at its peak some 14,000. By the mid-1960s the Khambas had been abandoned by the CIA but they fought on alone until 1970.

6. Bay of Pigs Invasion Force
Wikipedia

In 1960, CIA operatives recruited 1,500 Cuban refugees living in Miami and staged a surprise attack on Fidel Castro's Cuba. Trained at a base in Guatemala, this small army – complete with an air force consisting of B-26 bombers – landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 19, 1961. The ill-conceived, poorly planned operation ended in disaster, since all but 150 men of the force were either killed or captured within three days.

7. L'armee Clandestine
Wikipedia

In 1962, CIA agents recruited Meo tribesmen living in the mountains of Laos to fight as guerrillas against Communist Pathet Lao forces. Called l'armee Clandestine, this unit – paid, trained, and supplied by the CIA – grew into a 30,000 man force. By 1975 the Meos – who had numbers a quarter million in 1962 – had been reduced to 10,000 refugees fleeing into Thailand.

8. Nung Mercenaries
Wikipedia

A Chinese hill people living in Vietname, the Nungs were hired and organised by the CIA as a mercenary force, during the Vietnam war. Fearsome and brutal fighters, the Nungs were employed throughout Vietnam and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Nungs proved costly since they refused to fight unless constantly supplied with beer and prostitutes.

9. Peruvian Regiment
Wikipedia

Unable to quell guerrilla forces in its eastern Amazonian provinces, Peru called on the US for help in the mid-1960s. The CIA responded by establishing a fortified camp in the area and hiring local Peruvians who were trained by Green Beret personnel on loan from the US army. After crushing the guerrillas, the elite unit was disbanded because of fears it might stage a coup against the government.

10. Congo Mercenary Force
Wikipedia

In 1964, during the Congolese Civil War, the CIA established an army in the Congo to back pro-Western leaders Cyril Adoula and Joseph Mobutu. The CIA imported European mercenaries and Cuban pilots – exiles from Cuba – to pilot the CIA air force, composed of transports and B-26 Bombers.

11. The Cambodian Coup
Wikipedia

For over 15 years, the CIA had tried various unsuccessful means of deposing Cambodia's left-leaning Prince Norodom Sihanouk, including assassination attempts. However, in March, 1970, a CIA-backed coup finally did the job. Funded by US tax dollars, armed with US weapons, and trained by American Green Berets, anti-Sihanouk forces called Kampuchea Khmer Krom (KKK) overran the capital of Phnom Penh and took control of the government. With the blessing of the CIA and the Nixon administration, control of Cambodia was placed in the hands of Lon Nol, who would later distinguish himself by dispatching soldiers to butcher tens of thousands of civilians.

12. Kurd Rebels
Wikipedia

During the early 1970s the CIA moved into eastern Iraq to organize and supply the Kurds of that area, who were rebelling against the pro-Soviet Iraqi government. The real purpose behind this action was to help the shah of Iran settle a border dispute with Iraq favourably. After an Iranian-Iraq settlement was reached, the CIA withdrew its support from the Kurds, who were then crushed by the Iraqi Army.

13. Angola Mercenary Force
Wikipedia

In 1975, after years of bloody fighting and civil unrest in Angola, Portugal resolved to relinquish its hold on the last of its African colonies. The transition was to take place on November 11, with control of the country going to whichever political faction controlled the capital city of Luanda on that date. In the months preceding the change, three groups vied for power: the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). By July 1975, the Marxist MPLA had ousted the moderate FNLA and UNITA from Luanda, so the CIA decided to intervene covertly. Over $30 million was spent on the Angolan operation, the bulk of the money going to buy arms and pay French and South African mercenaries, who aided the FNLA and UNITA in their fight. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, US officials categorically denied any involvement in the Angolan conflict. In the end, it was a fruitless military adventure, for the MPLA assumed power and controls Angola to this day.

14. Afghan Mujaheedin
Wikipedia

Covert support for the groups fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began under President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was stepped up during the administration of Ronald Reagan. The operation succeeded in its initial goal, as the Soviets were forced to begin withdrawing their forces in 1987. Unfortunately, once the Soviets left, the US essentially ignored Afghanistan as it collapsed into a five-year civil war followed by the rise of the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban. The Taliban provided a haven for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

15. Salvadoran Death Squads
Wikipedia

As far back as 1964, the CIA helped form ORDEN and ANSESAL, two paramilitary intelligence networks that developed into the Salvadoran death squads. The CIA trained ORDEN leaders in the use of automatic weapons and surveillance techniques, and placed several leaders on the CIA payroll. The CIA also provided detailed intelligence on Salvadoran individuals later murdered by the death squads. During the civil war in El Salvador from 1980 to 1992, the death squads were responsible for 40,000 killings. Even after a public outcry forced President Reagan to denounce the death squads in 1984, CIA support continued.

16. Nicaraguan Contras
Wikipedia

On November 23, 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed a top secret National Security Directive authorising the CIA to spend $19 million to recruit and support the Contras, opponents of Nicaragua's Sandinista government. In supporting the Contras, the CIA carried out several acts of sabotage without the Congressional intelligence committees giving consent – or even being informed beforehand. In response, Congress passed the Boland Amendment, prohibiting the CIA from providing aid to the Contras. Attempts to find alternate sources of funds led to the Iran-Contra scandal. It may also have led the CIA and the Contras to become actively involved in drug smuggling. In 1988, the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism, and International Operations concluded that individuals in the Contra movement engaged in drug trafficking; that known drug traffickers provided assistance to the Contras; and that 'there are some serious questions as to whether or not US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war effort against Nicaragua'.

17. Haitian Coup
Wikipedia

In 1988, the CIA attempted to intervene in Haiti's elections with a 'covert action program' to undermine the campaign of the eventual winner, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Three years later, Aristide was overthrown in a bloody coup that killed more than 4,000 civilians. Many of the leaders of the coup had been on the CIA payroll since the mid-1980s. For example, Emmanuel 'Toto' Constant, the head of FRAPH, a brutal gang of thugs known for murder, torture, and beatings, admitted to being a paid agent of the CIA. Similarly, the CIA-created Haitian National Intelligence Service (NIS), supposedly created to combat drugs, functioned during the coup as a 'political intimidation and assassination squad.' In 1994, an American force of 20,000 was sent to Haiti to allow Aristide to return. Ironically, even after this, the CIA continued working with FRAPH and the NIS. In 2004, Aristide was overthrown once again, with Aristide claiming that US forces had kidnapped him.

18. Venezuelan Coup Attempt
Wikipedia

On April 11, 2002, Venezuelan military leaders attempted to overthrow the country's democratically-elected left-wing president, Hugo Chavez. The coup collapsed after two days as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets and as units of the military joined with the protestors. The administration of George W. Bush was the only democracy in the Western Hemisphere not to condemn the coup attempt. According to intelligence analyst Wayne Madsen, the CIA had actively organised the coup: 'The CIA provided Special Operations Group personnel, headed by a lieutenant colonel on loan from the US Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to help organise the coup against Chavez.

It is not just the federal behemoth that is intrusive in our everyday lives -- state and local governments are just as likely to pass laws and take actions that should be troubling to freedom-loving Americans.

Here they are... the Top 10 outrageous government actions on the state and local level:

1. Save the rats
The District of Columbia City Council included rats in its Wildlife Protection Act, requiring a catch and release of the filthy, disease-spreading rodents. Now residents of the nation's capital will have to capture rats without using glue or snap traps, and relocate them to a natural habitat. No matter that rats already have the run of alleys and restaurant garbage dumpsters from Adams Morgan to Georgetown and occupied Occupy Washington.

2. Library police
Yes, we all know it is wrong to not return library books on time, but was it really necessary to send the police to retrieve an overdue book from a 5-year-old girl? In Charlton, Mass., little Hailey Benoit burst into tears when a police officer stopped by her house to tell her two books needed to be returned to the library or be paid for, according to WBZ-TV. Actually, Hailey got off easy. Under the state's legal code the action was a misdemeanor -- she could have been cuffed and hauled to booking.

3. Gay history mandated
A new law in California requires that public-school history classes, starting in kindergarten, teach about the contributions to society made by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans. If that wasn't enough for an overtaxed school system, the history teachers also must single out the accomplishments of disabled people.

4. Obesity spying
Obese, public-school students are wearing electronic monitors to allow schools to check their physical activity outside the classroom. Schools in Street Louis, South Orange, N.J., and Long Island are measuring the students' heartbeats, sleeping habits, and movements in the hopes to reduce the waistlines of the chubby boys and girls. The constant surveillance was done without the parents' consent or knowledge.

5. Elementary school indoctrination
It was bad enough when cities had to endure the nonsense populated in the Occupy Wall Street encampments, but an elementary school program in Charlottesville, Va., actually had students singing the pro-Occupy song, "Part of the 99," causing a backlash among parents. The Big Government website had it right when it called the song "Marxist rhetoric" and said "to an impressionistic third-grader, it plants poisonous seeds at odds with long egalitarian American traditions that disdain class hatred."

6. Jailed for messy yard
A municipal judge sentenced a woman from Mount Pleasant, S.C., to 10 days in jail for having a messy yard. Linda Ruggles, 53, was imprisoned when she was unable to pay a $480 fine for violating a city ordinance governing lawn care. At the time, Ruggles had other reasons to worry: To keep her home from entering foreclosure, she had resorted to selling blood and volunteering for medical experiments, according to the Post and Courier of Charleston.

7. Lemonade stand crackdown
Police across the nation are cracking down on a new genre of criminality -- the unauthorized lemonade stand. Police in Midway, Ga., shut down a stand run by three girls because they failed to obtain a business license costing $50 a day. Police in Appleton, Wis., told a nine-year that her stand violated a new city ordinance preventing vendors from selling in a two-block radius of an event. Police in Coralville, Iowa, told a 4-year-old girl to close her stand for not getting the approval of a health inspector.

8. Tasered dog walkers
Gary Hesterberg was out taking a walk with his two dogs at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area when he encountered a National Park Service ranger. The Rancho Corral de Tierra section of the park had long been an off-leash spot for dog walkers, but the federal government recently obtained the property and is enforcing leash laws. When Mr. Hesterberg was informed of the new federal regulations, he ignored the ranger and walked away, whereupon the ranger used a stun gun to subdue the offender.

9. Date mandated
A Florida judge sentenced a man to take his wife on a Valentine's date following a scuffle that led to domestic violence charges. Judge John Hurley ordered Joseph Bray, 47, to bring his wife, Sonja,39, flowers and take her bowling and to Red Lobster instead of imposing a bond or ordering his confinement, according to the Sun Sentinel.

10. Frisbee fine
Throw a Frisbee or ball on a beach in Los Angeles County and expect to pay a whopping $1,000 fine. The new rules are in an ordinance passed by the county board of supervisors and are meant to encourage safety. The same measure contains a passage that prohibits digging a hole deeper than 18 inches -- an exception is made for film and TV production companies filming on location.

Rule #10 also includes the throwing of footballs, baseballs, soccer balls, anything that can be thrown in the air.  The reason for this totally necessary law (wait---I'm laughing too hard to type) is that beachgoers are constantly being bombarded by those sportsmen and wannabe pro players who can't seem to throw anything in a straight line.  The irony here is that most of the beachgoers stay close to the shoreline so to enjoy the view, the breeze and the waves.  Many of these avid sportsmen tend to stay back closer to the parking lots where there are less sunbathers. 

Up next, on the agenda of our overworked legislators, will be the banning of flying kites on the beach.  I, for one, am all for this one.  I have a morbid fear of being nailed by a falling kite while laying on the beach.  Besides, I was never good at flying kites anyway.

On the near horizon will be the banning of beach umbrellas as they may injure someone if a gust of wind should blow it over and on to your next door neighbor who is trying to get some zzzz's.

Larryj ::)

No more kites? That's sad.We have beach kite festivals here that are wonderful to see.

With Americans burdened with high taxes, one would hope that the government they pay for would at least be used efficiently and wisely.  These Top 10 Examples of Government Stupidity from around the country would suggest otherwise:

1.  Sensitivity training:  The Omaha, Neb., public school district spent $130,000 in federal stimulus money to buy manuals to instruct teachers and school administrators on how to be culturally sensitive.  The book, The Cultural Proficiency Journey: Moving Beyond Ethical Barriers Toward Profound School Change, says that teachers need to work for social justice in order to overcome a white-privileged society.  The book says racism, sexism, homophobia and ableism are forces of oppression in schools, and that institutions in America "channel wealth and power to white people."

2.  Green car bust:  The city of Salinas, Calif., invested more than $500,000 in Green Vehicles, an electric car venture that failed to produce a single car.  In addition to the city money, the State of California chipped in another $187,000, but the owner of the company said it folded due to a lack of investors.  The city ponied up the money after the company promised it would create 70 new jobs and generate some $700,000 in tax revenue annually for city coffers.  City officials were reportedly irked when they learned of the company's collapse by e-mail.

3.  Don't help the homeless:  The city of Houston shut down a Christian couple's effort to aid the homeless earlier this year because they did not have a permit to distribute free food.  Anyone serving food to the public for any reason must prepare meals in a certified kitchen that has a certified food manager, according to the city's Department of Health and Human Services.  But because the couple gave out food donated and prepared by various stores and volunteers throughout the city, they ran afoul of a city ordinance, leaving the 100 or so recipients of their daily charity out of luck.

4.  Right to View Porn in Jail:  The Washington State Supreme Court ruled that a man awaiting trial for making child pornography videos while raping boys will be allowed to watch the videos of the acts while in jail.  Weldon Marc Gilbert is acting as his own attorney and therefore has the right to review the evidence against him, which includes 28 hours of porn on some 100 videos, the court ruled.

5.  Sex-offender custody:  After Trista Crews Coleman died in a car wreck some four years ago, her one-month-old daughter, Miranda, was raised by her grandmother.  But a Baker County, Fla., judge has given custody of the little girl to Crews Coleman's ex-husband, a registered sex offender who has a history of domestic violence.  The ex-husband, Donald Coleman, divorced Crews Coleman, saying Miranda was fathered by another man, but he still has paternity rights because he was married to her mother when she was born.

6.  Ex-cons protected:  City officials in San Francisco are seeking to make ex-convicts a "protected class," joining blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, the disabled and transgendered, and pregnant women.  Ex-cons already have the special status when applying for city government jobs, but a council of top city officials wants to extend the protection to make it illegal for landlords and private employers to ask about a person's criminal record.

7.  Bee watering fine:   New York City fined Tip Sempliner $2,000 for failing to water his beehive.  There was a beehive waterer two feet from the hive and nearby ponds on his property on Little Neck Bay.  Only after public outcry did the city replace the fine with a "warning."  As Queens Councilman Daniel Halloran told CBS News, "There are criminals who get cases in city criminal court who don't have a $500 fine, let alone a $2,000 ... this is absolutely absurd."

8.  Homeless custody:  A Family Court judge in New York City awarded custody of a teenage boy to his homeless father and chided the boy's mother for criticizing the court and the legal system.  The father, John Jacobs, has lived in storefronts and borrowed rooms for years, yet Judge Bernard Graham ordered the son to live in a shelter with his dad despite his mother's attempt to retain custody.  The mother, who makes $90,000 working as a court clerk for the Manhattan Supreme Court, and father have spent a decade locked in the custody battle.

9.  Massachusetts' Big Brother:  The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is setting up a massive database that tracks drivers via scanners on police cars and stores the information indefinitely.  Thousands of license plate numbers, and the car's location, can be gathered per hour, and data will be made available to local, state and federal law enforcement officials.  The Executive Office of Public Safety is spending some $500,000 for the scanners and will distribute them to local police throughout the state.

10.  Go Gore, not Palin:  The state of Nevada last year denied a request for a vanity license plate that said "GOPALIN" because, in the view of the Department of Motor Vehicles, such a plate was "vulgar or obscene or expressing superiority of political affiliation."  That policy didn't stop the agency from issuing personalized plates that said "AL GORE," "GO OBAMA," "GOGREEN," "DMOCRAT," and "KERRY."  While an administrative law judge rescinded the rejection, the state now faces a lawsuit challenging the policy.

Wonder why gas prices are surging, with the cost at the pump topping $5 per gallon in some parts of the country?  Obuma's anti-energy-producing policies certainly are not helping.  The buck stops in the Oval Office, as this list of the President's energy blunders attest:

(http://media.wkbw.com/images/392*264/gas+prices3.bmp)

1. Keystone kerfuffle
Canadian energy producers want to sell the United States an abundance of oil, if only President Obama gives the go-ahead to build the Keystone Pipeline XL. However, the President has chosen his deep-pocketed environmental backers over U.S. energy needs (and thousands of jobs for American workers). With the Middle East more volatile than ever, developing North American energy resources would help free the United States from being beholden to Islamic fanatics.

2. Volt vanity
After President Obama's bailout of General Motors, the automaker turned its attention to producing the Chevy Volt. Even with the government's help, the electric car is a flop, with few buyers and an exorbitant price. The Volt has trouble staying charged in cold weather and the battery can burst into flames long after being damaged in a minor accident. Obama's fantasy of gasless cars is proving to be among the biggest debacles in automotive history—rivaling Ford's Edsel and Chevrolet's Corvair.

3. Solyndra silliness
President Obama made sure the $787 billion stimulus package was stuffed with initiatives meant to create green jobs by the millions. What the taxpayer got in return was a parade of bankrupt companies, led by Solyndra. The solar-panel producing company got a $535 million loan guarantee, with the promise that 4,000 jobs would be created, but end up filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year. Solyndra became the symbol of Obama's misreading of the marketplace's demand for green energy.

4. Tesla travestyHere's another tragic "green jobs" story. Tesla Motors received $465 million from the Obama administration to produce electric cars. So far the company has created 400 jobs, at a cost of over a million dollars per job, by producing the Tesla Roadster, with a price tag of $100,000 per car. Unfortunately, should the electric car ever become fully discharged, it would cost $40,000 in repairs. Where's Occupy Wall Street on this?

5. Moratorium morass
After the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama imposed a moratorium on deep-water drilling. The action prompted oil rigs to relocate to Brazil, costing jobs in America. Obama then offered technology and support for Brazil to develop its offshore oil production, creating jobs in Brazil. Does this make sense to anyone?

6. Drilling dashed
It is not only the deep-water drilling pull-back that is wrongheaded. The President also refuses to consider drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or along most of America's coastline. And he is not aggressively pushing for shale oil extraction or natural gas drilling on federal lands. There is an abundance of energy in this country if only the President would seek to develop it.

7. Price pandemonium
Of course energy prices are exploding. That's what the President wanted all along. Remember his famous utterance, saying that under his policies, "electricity prices will necessarily skyrocket." Also telling was his selection of Steven Chu as energy secretary. Chu once said that it was important for U.S. gas prices to mirror Europe's sky-high petrol costs. It looks like he may be getting his wish.

8. Cap and trade catatonic
Despite a big push by the environmental lobby, President Obama couldn't get his convoluted cap-and-trade package through the Democratic-controlled Senate. The legislation would have raised energy costs for consumers, while enriching visionary thinkers like Al Gore, who tried to parlay his global warming alarmism into a profitable venture by cashing in on the legislation's emission-credits trading market.

9. Algae acclamation
With enormous areas of shale oil deposits and oil reserves in the U.S. remaining off-limits for development, President Obama has turned his eye to America's algae resources to solve the nation's energy problem. The President claims that by harvesting algae, and turning it into fuel, the nation could replace 17% of the oil it imports. Mr. President, if you want to reduce oil imports, here is some advice: Drill, baby, drill.

10. Energy excess
It takes a village of Secret Service agents and White House aides to accompany Michelle Obama and her husband (sometimes) on vacations to Spain, Martha's Vineyard, Hawaii, etc. With Air Force One gobbling up copious amounts of fuel, even one of the First Couples' date nights to New York could light a town, or even Al Gore's house. With Americans struggling to pay high gas prices, perhaps the first family can set an example for the nation and start cutting back on their excessive energy use.

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TOP TEN - RESEARCH ON YOUNG VOTERS TODAY

1.The Millennial generation already makes up 1/5 of the electorate.  By 2015, they will account for 1/3.  And research shows that young voters with college experience are much more likely to vote than their non-college counterparts.  Although ½ of young Americans ages 18-29 have never enrolled in college, 79% of the young voters on Super Tuesday attended college.

2.Compared to 2000, young voters have more than doubled their turnout in the 2008 primaries and caucuses.  For example, in Texas, the number of 18-29 year old voters grew 301%.

3.In both the 2006 and the 2008 primaries, young voters made the difference in several tight races.  Senator Obama owes his caucus win in Iowa to 18-29 year olds, and a winning margin among the youth vote helped Senator McCain win in California.

4.The 2008 presidential election was the first in decades where candidates were actively and aggressively courting the youth vote.  In the primaries, four candidates from both parties had full-time, national youth outreach directors.

5.Young Latinos are the largest, and fastest-growing ethnic subset of young adults; 50,000 young Latinos turn 18 each month, and Latinos make up 17% of the youth electorate.

6.In comparison to other people of color, young African-Americans voters are more likely to vote regularly, donate money to candidates, and display a campaign button or sign.

7.Since 2004, young women have led the turnout increase witnessed among young adults overall.  In both 2004 and 2006, young women voted at rates seven and three points higher than young men.

8.The majority of young voters identify themselves as Democrat (47%), with 55% of young women classified as Democrats, compared to 38% of men.

9.Overall, 28% of young voters identify as Republicans, with 30% of young men categorizing themselves as Republican, compared to 26% of young women.

10.Republican identification is also highest among Caucasian youth, with 35% identifying as Republican.

Sources:
http://www.rockthevote.com/about/about-young-voters/who-are-young-voters/

http://www.civicyouth.org/research-products/fact-sheets/

http://www.civicyouth.org/quick-facts/235-2/

President Obuma is in need of a new campaign slogan, as his "hope-and-change" mantra from 2008 has been worn threadbare after a dismal first term.  Here is Ten that might work:


1. "Buy now, pay later"
President Obuma has added trillions of dollars to the nation's debt.. more red ink in his first term than was accumulated in America's first 225 years.  Piling up debt has the political advantage that taxpayers are getting a lot of stuff without having to pay for it.  The downside is that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off the balance.  Luckily for the president, that demographic group won't be voting in November.

2. "I am the Great Apologizer"
Obuma has certainly set the standard for the most apologies in presidential history!  In his first interview as president.. to the Saudi-owned al Arabiya... Obuma said, "We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect."   In Turkey, he told students, "America, like every other nation, has made mistakes and has its flaws."   In Cairo, he said the response to 9/11 caused the U.S. "to act contrary to our traditions and our ideas." Recently he apologized when U.S. military personnel burned Korans already defaced by Afghan detainees.  No president in U.S. history has had a stronger record on telling the world about how bad America is.

3. "I am great, like Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela, Jimmy Carter ..."
The Obumanator believes he is among the great figures in history... comparing himself to Lincoln even before taking office and winning the Nobel Peace Prize early in his first term.... like, what, 10 days in?  Lately, he has made references to Gandhi and Nelson Mandela when talking about how hard it is to change things.  His 2008 campaign rhetoric... "We are the ones we've been waiting for," & "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal"... has not quite worked out, but this president is so full of himself that he undoubtedly will keep telling the nation of his greatness. 

4. "Jobs for everyone around the world"
Even if the president doesn't have a very good track record of creating jobs in the United States, he can brag that he has helped boost employment overseas. After he drove off oil producers from the Gulf of Mexico with his deep-water drilling moratorium, Obama offered to help Brazil develop its energy resources. His investments in green energy helped to create jobs in China. Now it turns out that General Motors—owned, in part, by U.S. taxpayers—is buying a $400 million stake in French automaker Peugeot. Vive la France!

5. "Yoohoo.. Vote for me, I'm black"
Obuma recently launched African Americans for Obuma, hoping to re-energize blacks, who were giddy about his first campaign but have yet to benefit from his administration's policies.  The new campaign effort is complete with its own logo, Web site (www.barackobama.com/african-americans), and fundraising appeal.  Imagine the outcry if a "Whites for Romney," or "Caucasians for Santorum," were part of the Republicans' strategy.

6. "Food stamps for economic growth"
Under Obuma's policies, a record 46 million Americans, or one out of every seven, are on food stamps.  While some might consider that a bad thing, Democrats like to brag about how food stamps are an economic engine.  Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once said, "It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance.  The biggest bang for the buck." Actually, Ms. Pelosi, the biggest bang for the economy would be for the government to ease the burden on taxpayers and businesses.  How the hell did she get to be Speaker, anyway?

7. "Gas prices finally catching up to Europe"
High gas prices can be viewed as an accomplishment since the president has long favored increased costs for fossil fuels.  When he was running for office, Obuma said his policies would make electricity prices skyrocket.  His energy secretary, Steven Chu, wanted U.S. gas prices to catch up to Europe's.  Alas, the other side of the energy equation... plowing money into green energy projects... hasn't worked out. (See Solyndra, et al.)

8. "I will call you if you are attacked by right-wing talk-radio hosts"
Ol' Barry showed that he really cares when people are attacked by conservatives by telephoning Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke after Rush Limbaugh called her a "slut" for demanding subsidized contraceptives.  One would think that someone going to a university with a $46,000 annual tuition rate could afford to buy an oral contraceptive at Walmart for $9 per month.  If it polls well, look for the president to robo-call every aggrieved liberal.


9. "Workers of the world unite"
While the fall of the Berlin Wall rendered this slogan from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto obsolete, President Obuma is trying to resurrect it with his class-warfare rants.  In Obumaland, Wall Street is evil, taxes need to be raised on the "rich," and wealth needs to be redistributed out of fairness.  Mr. President Clown: It didn't work in the Soviet Union and it won't work in the United States.

10. "I am just a regular guy"
Forget about the aloofness of the president and how he once said some working-class Americans are bitter and cling to their guns and religion.  He recently disclosed that the First Lady "allows" him to watch Sports Center on EPSN.  Allows him...?  How better to identify with the white working-class male than to point out that he is just as henpecked by his wife as they are.

Top 10 Examples of the "War on Religion"


Don't let the secularists tell you otherwise:
There has been a war against religion being waged for decades by activist judges, artists, academia, liberal groups and the mainstream media. Judges have misinterpreted the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and have tried to force religion from the public square, while a culture that is becoming increasingly decadent does all it can to denigrate, mock and sneer at people of faith.

Find that hard to believe? Here is the evidence:

1. Public prayer ban

Ever since the Supreme Court's ruling in the 1962 Engel v. Vitale case, prayer has been disallowed in public schools. That precedent has spread to include banning prayers at graduation ceremonies and before high school football games. This out-of-control assault on public prayer reached the height of absurdity last year when a federal judge in San Antonio ruled that graduating high school seniors couldn't even say "amen, the word prayer," or ask the audience to bow their heads. And we thought the First Amendment had a free-speech clause.

2. Hollywood's jihad

From Martin Scorsese's 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ—with its depiction of Jesus having sex with Mary Magdalene in a dream—to the 2009 The DaVinci Code—showing a conniving Catholic hierarchy—Hollywood is rarely kind to religious sensibilities. Indeed, characters of faith in movies are invariably portrayed as wild-eyed-fanatics, immoral preachers or judgmental creeps.

3. Violating religious conscience

President Obama's attempt to force religious institutions to provide contraceptive services with their employees' health care benefits justifiably caused a considerable uproar. It wasn't the first time that people of faith have been forced to abandon their conscience or face dire consequences. Pro-lifers have had to fight to enact "conscience clauses," which permit pharmacists and physicians to opt out of giving services that violate their religious faith, such as providing contraception and performing abortions.

4. Crèches censored

The Supreme Court ruled in the 1984 Lynch v. Donnelly case that crèches could be placed in public places only if accompanied by secular holiday symbols. That bizarre ruling was further muddied by the court's 1989 stance in Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, which stated that including a crèche on public property violated the Constitution, while displaying a menorah on the same spot was fine. Still unsettled is exactly how many reindeers, snowmen and Santa Clauses are needed to make a crèche scene legal.

5. Media mocking

The Washington Post once called evangelicals, "poor, uneducated, and easy to lead." That pretty much sums up the media elite's view of religious conservatives. Most any daily newspaper reader can confirm: conservative Christians remain one of the few groups who can be treated with disdain. The sophisticates in New York and Washington newsrooms are much too enlightened to be duped by the opiate of the masses.

6. Pledge of Allegiance challenge

Atheist Michael Newdow went to court in 2002, challenging whether the recitation in public school of the words "under God" contained in the Pledge of Allegiance was a constitutional infringement of his daughter's rights. While unsuccessful, the attempt tied up the courts for some eight years and spawned similar challenges in other states. Newdow also lost a lawsuit aimed at stopping an invocation prayer at George W. Bush's 2005 inauguration.

7. Academia's assault

It will come as no surprise to any recent college student that academia is not particularly friendly to those with religious convictions, with discrimination common in hiring, promoting and admitting people of faith. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that 40 percent of sociologists would be "less likely to hire" an evangelical. An astronomy professor sued University of Kentucky for losing a top job because of his Christian belief. The University of California system discriminated in its enrollment policies against Christian school attendees. And the list goes on.

8. Mojave cross battle

A simple cross in the Mojave Desert, erected in 1934 to honor members of the military killed in World War I, became the target of a decade-long battle by the American Civil Liberties Union. During the ensuing court battles, the cross was boarded up so as not to offend the nearby coyotes. Only after Congress transferred a small area of land containing the cross to a veterans group did the Supreme Court rule in 2010 that the cross was not a constitutional violation. However, within weeks of the ruling, the eight-foot tall cross was stolen by vandals.

9. Artistic antagonism

Artists and musicians think they are being edgy when they mock religious faith. In 1987, Andres Serrano used funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce "Piss Christ"—a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. Madonna's 1989 music video, "Like a Prayer," featured religious symbols, a burning cross, and a dream about having sex with a saint, prompting a condemnation by the Vatican. In 2008, producers of "South Park" brought religious blasphemy to the cartoon world with "The Most Offensive Christmas Song Ever."

10. Motto challenged

Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair dedicated her life trying to force religion out of public life and succeeded in winning a landmark case that resulted in banning the reading of religious texts in the classroom. One case she failed at was her attempt to ban the words, "In God We Trust," on the nation's money and coinage. That phrase was first placed on coins during the Lincoln administration and became the official motto under President Eisenhower. Both presidents turned to God frequently during times of crisis—which is the best evidence against the atheist's crusade to separate religion from the public square.

A panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders were asked to compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated.  A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of the panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc.  Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.
1. The Communist Manifesto

Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848
Score: 74
Summary: Marx and Engels, born in Germany in 1818 and 1820, respectively, were the intellectual godfathers of communism. Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life. In 1848, the two co-authored The Communist Manifesto as a platform for a group they belonged to called the Communist League. The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers' revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established. The Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice.


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2. Mein Kampf

Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26
Score: 41
Summary: Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was initially published in two parts in 1925 and 1926 after Hitler was imprisoned for leading Nazi Brown Shirts in the so-called "Beer Hall Putsch" that tried to overthrow the Bavarian government. Here Hitler explained his racist, anti-Semitic vision for Germany, laying out a Nazi program pointing directly to World War II and the Holocaust. He envisioned the mass murder of Jews, and a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out "lebensraum" ("living room") for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there were 10 million copies in circulation by 1945.


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3. Quotations from Chairman Mao


Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966
Score: 38
Summary: Mao, who died in 1976, was the leader of the Red Army in the fight for control of China against the anti-Communist forces of Chiang Kai-shek before, during and after World War II. Victorious, in 1949, he founded the People's Republic of China, enslaving the world's most populous nation in communism. In 1966, he published Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, otherwise known as The Little Red Book, as a tool in the "Cultural Revolution" he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed. Western leftists were enamored with its Marxist anti-Americanism. "It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppression perpetrated by imperialism, and chiefly by U.S. imperialism," wrote Mao.


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4. The Kinsey Report


Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948
Score: 37
Summary: Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University who, in 1948, published a study called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, commonly known as The Kinsey Report. Five years later, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy. "Kinsey's initial report, released in 1948 . . . stunned the nation by saying that American men were so sexually wild that 95% of them could be accused of some kind of sexual offense under 1940s laws," the Washington Times reported last year when a movie on Kinsey was released. "The report included reports of sexual activity by boys--even babies--and said that 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience. . . . The 1953 book also included reports of sexual activity involving girls younger than age 4, and suggested that sex between adults and children could be beneficial."


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5. Democracy and Education


Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a "progressive" philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.


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6. Das Kapital


Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894
Score: 31
Summary: Marx died after publishing a first volume of this massive book, after which his benefactor Engels edited and published two additional volumes that Marx had drafted. Das Kapital forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx's materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits. Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.


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7. The Feminine Mystique


Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a comfortable concentration camp"--a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that "Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley's radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer."


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8. The Course of Positive Philosophy


Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, "I have naturally ceased to believe in God." Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term "sociology." He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond "theology" (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through "metaphysics" (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries' reliance on abstract assertions of "rights" without a God), to "positivism," in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.


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9. Beyond Good and Evil


Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886
Score: 28
Summary: An oft-scribbled bit of college-campus graffiti says: "'God is dead'--Nietzsche" followed by "'Nietzsche is dead'--God." Nietzsche's profession that "God is dead" appeared in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, but under-girded the basic theme of Beyond Good and Evil, which was published four years later. Here Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral "Will to Power," and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them. "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation," he wrote. The Nazis loved Nietzsche.


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10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money


Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936
Score: 23
Summary: Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.


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Honorable Mention

These books won votes from two or more judges:

The Population Bomb
by Paul Ehrlich
Score: 22

What Is To Be Done
by V.I. Lenin
Score: 20

Authoritarian Personality
by Theodor Adorno
Score: 19

On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Score: 18

Beyond Freedom and Dignity
by B.F. Skinner
Score: 18

Reflections on Violence
by Georges Sorel
Score: 18

The Promise of American Life
by Herbert Croly
Score: 17

The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17

Madness and Civilization
by Michel Foucault
Score: 12

Soviet Communism: A New Civilization
by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Score: 12

Coming of Age in Samoa
by Margaret Mead
Score: 11

Unsafe at Any Speed
by Ralph Nader
Score: 11

Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir
Score: 10

Prison Notebooks
by Antonio Gramsci
Score: 10

Silent Spring
by Rachel Carson
Score: 9

Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Score: 9

Introduction to Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Score: 9

The Greening of America
by Charles Reich
Score: 9

The Limits to Growth
by Club of Rome
Score: 4

Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin
Score: 2


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The Judges

These 15 scholars and public policy leaders served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.

Arnold Beichman
Research Fellow
Hoover Institution

Prof. Brad Birzer
Hillsdale College

Harry Crocker
Vice President & Executive Editor
Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Prof. Marshall DeRosa
Florida Atlantic University

Dr. Don Devine
Second Vice Chairman
American Conservative Union

Prof. Robert George
Princeton University

Prof. Paul Gottfried
Elizabethtown College

Prof. William Anthony Hay
Mississippi State University

Herb London
President
Hudson Institute

Prof. Mark Malvasi
Randolph-Macon College

Douglas Minson
Associate Rector
The Witherspoon Fellowships

Prof. Mark Molesky
Seton Hall University

Prof. Stephen Presser
Northwestern University

Phyllis Schlafly
President
Eagle Forum

Fred Smith
President
Competitive Enterprise Institute

Whoops... sorry guys.  I need to preview from now on when I post something.  

Top 10 reasons to elect anybody but Obama.  While Republicans are locked in a brutal battle over their presidential nomination, let us not forget that anybody the GOP picks will be far superior than the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Not convinced?  Here's the evidence:

1. Mountain of debt

To say that President Obama spends like a drunken sailor is an insult to drunken sailors. From the stimulus bill and auto bailouts to Cash for Clunkers and green jobs, President Obama's spending reached epic proportions with annual trillion-dollar deficits. Any of the remaining Republican nominees would turn off the spigot of red ink.

2. ObamaCare demise

As long as Obama remains President, the Patient Affordability and Protection Act (ObamaCare), has a chance of remaining the law of the land. Not so with a Republican in the Oval Office, as all the candidates would seek an end to the healthcare law. As long as Obama holds a veto pen, he can stymie conservative legislative efforts to reduce its scope.

3. Capitalism reasserted

Despite Gingrich's assault on Bain Capital and Romney's counterattack on Newt's Fannie Mae contract, the Republican candidates are all, to varying degrees, free-market capitalists. Not so with the current White House occupant, who favors picking winners and losers out of "fairness" or "to help the environment." So we sink billions into Solyndra and other bankrupt companies in the Utopian hope that creating green jobs will save the planet. As Chevy Volt sales indicate, consumer engineering is best to be left to the marketplace.

4. Energy myopia

With his Keystone Pipeline XL ruling, Obama showed his true colors, choosing to placate the environmental lobby over jobs for American worker. His deep-water oil-drilling moratorium in the Gulf sent jobs to Brazil. Vast areas in Alaska and off the U.S. coasts remain off-limits for development. He even admitted his policies would dramatically increase electrical prices. Memo to President Obama: Spending billions to create green jobs doesn't substitute for a serious energy policy.

5. Class warfare

A Republican President would cease the insistent class-warfare attacks that Barack Obama wages. The President's constant references to Warren Buffett's secretary would end. We won't hear his repetitive pledge to tax "millionaires and billionaires. " We would no longer need to hear about evil banks, Wall Street traders, Big Oil and insensitive insurance companies.

6. Judicial nominations

President Obama gave us Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor—who for decades will be two reliable liberal votes on the Supreme Court—and he is slowly remaking the entire federal judiciary by advancing activists to the bench. President George W. Bush pushed some bad policies, but he did nominate Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito—two solid conservatives. The next high court vacancy could be critical in tipping its ideological balance.

7. Regulatory overkill

This President is more than happy to see the Environmental Protection Agency enact global-warming regulations by fiat and EPA is now moving on getting the nation's dust in order. The regulations governing ObamaCare are many times longer than the 2,000 pages of the bill itself. Any of the Republicans still in the running would lessen the regulatory burden on small businesses.

8. Union coddling

SEIU (Service Employee International Union) and other union leaders have an open door to the White House, as the mobilization of its thuggish army of workers is critical to Obama's reelection. So we see the president pack the National Labor Relations Board with anti-business zealots who rule that Boeing can't build a plant in non-union South Carolina. So much for that laser focus on jobs.

9. War on terror

The Osama takedown notwithstanding, the President is not fully engaged in fighting the war on terror. He refuses to identify the enemy—radical Islamists—and has advanced their cause by turning against allies in Egypt and Libya. His failed Iranian policy has allowed a new power center of Western hate to flourish.

10. Leadership deficit

Obama often seems disinterested and aloof. He dithers when action is needed. The charismatic campaigner of hope and change has resorted to trotting out trite slogans. His class warfare shtick is wearing thin. These are trying times that the country is facing. America is in need of a leader, and not a teleprompter reader.

Good post, Warph, but it is a little hard to read.

It is of special interest to read the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero regarding the danger of internal subversion. In a speech to the Roman Senate, as recorded by *Sallust, Cicero said:

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious.  But it cannot survive treason from within.  An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city.  But the traitor (Barack Hussein Obuma) moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.  For the traitor (Obuma) appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.  A murderer is less to be feared.  The traitor (Obuma) is the plague."

*Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust (86 BC – c. 35 BC) was a Roman historian, politician, and novus homo from a well-known plebeian family.

Top 10 Obama flimflams

This list of half-truths, sleight-of-hands, and outright lies are a good reason why Obama doesn't deserve a title more ennobling than huckster-in-chief.

1. Unprecedented shorthand:After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on ObamaCare, the President came forth with his thoroughly discredited analysis that it would be "unprecedented" for the high court to overturn a congressional action, perhaps thinking we all forgot about Marbury v. Madison (1803). After the nation's laughter subsided, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained away the fumble, saying "the President was not clearly understood by some people because he is a law professor, he spoke in shorthand."

2. Invoking Reagan:Obama tried citing President Reagan's tax policies as a cover for his own tax-hiking fervor, referring to Reagan as "that wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior." Not even close, Mr. President. We all know that Reagan cut the marginal rates for the top income bracket from 70 percent to 28 percent and reduced the capital gains tax from 28 percent to 20 percent, creating an economic boom.

3. Keystone cop-out:
President Obama was obviously stung by the backlash to his Keystone Pipeline decision, as even his union backers were aghast that he jettisoned a jobs-creating project. Obama tried to change perceptions by taking credit for the Southern leg of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico. But the Pipeline to Nowhere was already in the works before Obama said he green-lighted it and, besides, it will not bring any Canadian oil to the U.S. Market.

4. False Rutherford B. Hayes smear:
Obama's campaign rhetoric reached back to the 19th Century to make a point about Republicans opposing new technology. Obama said, "One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, 'It's a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?' That's why he's not on Mount Rushmore because he's looking backwards." Actually, Hayes was something of a high-tech geek for his era, introducing the first telephone to the White House and hobnobbing with Thomas A. Edison.

5. Weathering budget cuts:
It is a tried and true Democratic tactic to exaggerate proposed Republican budget cuts -- which are usually just slowdowns in future proposed spending. Obama got in on the act, saying that under Paul Ryan's budget, "Our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn't be able to afford to launch new satellites." Hmm, less accurate weather forecasts -- sounds like a prescription for more global warming alarmism.

6. Poisoning children:
Another liberal strategy is to demonize the opposition, making the GOP sound like evil maniacs. Obama recently implied that the Republican vision includes "poisoning our kids" by allowing higher levels of pollution. No, Mr. President -- the problem that our kids will inherit is the crushing debt caused by your out-of-control spending.

7. Buffett gimmick:
Even the President admits that the so-call ed Buffett rule is a gimmick that would do virtually nothing to close the budget deficit. But that hasn't stopped him from repeatedly trotting out the plan to make sure the very rich pay a higher marginal tax rate than their secretaries. Even Obama can't figure out how to do that in real life, as his own tax returns show him paying a 20.5 percent tax rate, lower than his own secretary.

8. Blaming others:
Obama has perfected the blame-game maneuver, saying his dismal record in office was the fault of George Bush, the Japanese, or the Arab Spring. Our favorite Obama excuse was his attempt to deflect attention from his poor job-creation record by saying it was the fault of Automatic Teller Machines putting bank clerks out of business.

9. Rhetorical overkill:
Obama is cranking up the rhetoric, calling Republicans "members of the flat Earth society," mocking Mitt Romney for using the word "marvelous," and calling Paul Ryan's budget a "Trojan Horse" for "social Darwinism." Of course, running a campaign that focused on the issues would require the President to defend his first term's record.

10. War on women:
Obama is attacking Republicans for waging a war against women, which in reality is nothing more than Democratic talking point. Obama tried to show solidarity with female voters by bemoaning higher dry-cleaning bills for women, saying, "We haven't gotten on the dry cleaning thing yet. I mean, I know that is still frustrating. I'm sure." Yes, Mr. Obama, focus your efforts on the dry-cleaning crisis and quit meddling with healthcare and the economy.

Rarely, if ever, has there been a more politicized Justice Department than the one presided over by Attorney General Eric Holder. Ask yourself this: In which administration have there been more egregious miscarriages of justice than the following Top Ten list?

1. Challenges voter ID laws

The Justice Department has challenged state voter ID laws, first in South Carolina and more recently in Texas, the first such actions in 20 years. Apparently requiring a U.S. citizen to bring a driver's license to the voting booth is an onerous infringement on their constitutional rights. Why would the chief law-enforcement office in the nation try to make it easier to engage in voter fraud? Could it be because Barack Hussein Obama is on the ballot this November?

2. Challenges immigration laws

The Justice Department is also challenging immigration laws enacted by states—most notably Arizona's legislation (hasn't Mr. Holder heard of the Constitution's 10th Amendment?) In its brief challenging Arizona's S.B. 1070, the Justice Department said the law interferes with the federal government's authority to enforce immigration policy. We didn't know that the federal government was doing much of anything to control illegal immigration.

3. Fast and Furious outrage

The Justice Department turned a blind-eye to the Fast and Furious gun-running operations, with the weaponry ending up in the hands of deadly Mexican drug gangs, and then obfuscated when Congress reviewed the operation. Allowing guns to cross the border resulted in the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and some 300 deaths in Mexico. New revelations are still coming, such as the news that one of the chief gun traffickers was questioned and released by Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents.

4. New Black Panther Party dismissal

The Justice Department decided to dismiss charges of violating the Voting Rights Act against three members of the New Black Panther Party, who acted menacingly outside a polling station in Philadelphia in 2008, hurling threats, racial slurs, and brandishing a night stick. The action by the Justice Department prompted a probe by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which heard testimony by J. Christian Adams, who resigned from the department over the issue. Adams said he was instructed by his superiors to ignore cases involving black defendants and white victims.

5. Defense of marriage recusal

The Justice Department served notice last year that it would no long defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which states that the federal government defines marriage to be between one man and one woman. The action, in a letter from the attorney general to congressional leaders, said President Obama had decided that the act, signed into law in 1996 by President Clinton, was unconstitutional. Odd, we can't seem to find the spot in the Constitution that allows the President to declare a law unconstitutional.

6. Sen. Ted Stevens case bungled

In its pursuit of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) on charges he failed to report gifts on his financial disclosure forms, the Justice Department concealed evidence from the defense. A report by a special counsel said there was "systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence" by the Justice Department, "which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens' defense." Stevens was found guilty and died in a plane crash before he could be exonerated. Imagine the howls from the mainstream media, if the senator in question had been Ted Kennedy, instead of Ted Stevens.

7. Civilian trials for terror detainees

The Justice Department sought to bring 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial in a civilian New York City courtroom, blocks from the World Trade Center site. The action would have afforded Mohammed all the constitutional guarantees of a fair trial, raising the possibility that Mohammed could go free on a technicality despite confessing to involvement in the 1993 and 2001World Trade Center attacks, the Bali, Indonesia, bombings, the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, and other failed terror plots. The outcry against civilian trials forced Holder to back down, and Mohammed and four co-defendants will now face a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay.

8. CIA probed

Attorney General Holder re-opened a probe of CIA officials involved in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on terror detainees. Holder's action came despite earlier rulings that the interrogations were legally authorized, despite seven former CIA directors asking the probe be shut down, and despite the fact that the interrogations provided valuable intelligence that led to Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideaway. Holder later admitted he hadn't read Justice Department memos that concluded no laws were broken.

9. NYPD probed

When the New York Police Department conducted surveillance operations in the Muslim community—including monitoring members of the Muslim Student Association, which has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood—the Justice Department decided to review the police department. While the NYPD is trying to thwart another 9/11, the Justice Department is siding with Muslim apologists. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had the right response to the Justice Department when he said, "To let our guard down would just be an outrage."

10. Pool fiasco

Justice Department guidelines for compliance with the Americans for Disabilities Act included a requirement for public swimming pools to install a lift that could move the disabled from a wheelchair to the water. As 300,000 public pools faced a March 15 deadline to install the lifts—at a cost of up to $20,000 each—DOJ backed down and issued a 60-day stay of execution in March before allowing lawsuits over the matter. Considering there is not an available number of lifts or installers of the devices for every pool in America, "poolmagedon" will provide the nation's trial lawyers—major supporters of the Democrats—with plenty of new business opportunities.


*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
It is of special interest to read the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero regarding the danger of internal subversion. In a speech to the Roman Senate, as recorded by *Sallust, Cicero said:

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious.  But it cannot survive treason from within.  An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city.  But the traitor (Atty.Gen. Eric Holder) moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.  For the traitor (Holder) appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.  A murderer is less to be feared.  The traitor (Holder) is the plague."

*Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust (86 BC – c. 35 BC) was a Roman historian, politician, and novus homo from a well-known plebeian family.

-- Government Workers Behaving Badly --
Every time you turn on the news, you see reports of government workers behaving badly.  We've rounded up the top 10 -- most recent --  misconducts.

1. GSA parties

Considering the lavish conferences, retreats, and bonuses paid for by the General Services Administration, it is disturbing to think this was the same agency in charge of spending President Obama's fiscally irresponsible stimulus package. While not every federal agency parties like the GSA, multiply waste and unnecessary expenditures across the entire federal government and the rationale of the tea party becomes clear.

2. Secret Service prostitutes

The Colombian romp with prostitutes by Secret Service agents and members of the U.S. military reflected poorly on the nation, just as President Obama was attending the Pan-American summit. We won't go into all the sordid details of the sexcapades at Cartagena's Hotel El Caribe, but let it be said that we expect a higher standard of conduct from the men who protect the life of the president, than we do for the president himself (see Clinton, William Jefferson).

3. Fast and Furious debacle

The Alcohol Tobacco and Firearm officials who approved the Fast and Furious operation allowing high-powered weaponry to fall into the hands of Mexican drug lords acted with reckless disregard for the outcome of their actions. That outcome turned out to be the deaths of hundreds of innocent Mexicans and the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. That the Justice Department won't come clean on the details of the operation, only makes the malfeasance worse.

4. Do-nothing Senate Democrats

The most essential task of just about any professional enterprise is crafting an annual budget. Tell that to the Senate, where the Democratic-controlled chamber hasn't passed a budget in three years. Enjoy your do-nothing fiefdom while you can, Harry Reid. Come November, your title will be minority, not majority, leader.

5. Panetta's pricey trips

No one expects the defense secretary to fly commercial, but was it really necessary for   Leon Panetta to take 27 weekend trips home to California, costing taxpayers some $800,000, or nearly the cost of a GSA convention in Las Vegas? Each round-trip cost taxpayers some $32,000, and Panetta reimbursed the government $630 per jaunt. Sure, it's nice to get out of Washington, but that's three trips every month to spend time on the Panetta walnut farm.

6. Federal tax scofflaws

One good way to tackle the mounting budget deficit would be to collect back taxes from federal employees. A report by the Internal Revenue Service showed that nearly 100,000 federal workers owed a combined $1 billion in back taxes. Some $2 million could be collected just by going after members and employees of the U.S. Senate.

7. Afghan photos

Yes, it is tough being a soldier in a war zone, but still part of their job is not to embarrass their nation or put their fellow warriors in harm's way like the military personnel did by posing with dead Afghan bodies. The worse crime, however, is that the Los Angeles Times would publish the photos.

8. TSA bullies

We are sure that there are many fine employees working for the Transportation Safety Administration, but their overall antics are wearing thin. Reports of juvenile behavior and criminal activity among TSA workers seem routine and their full-body pat-downs of grandmothers and small children are heavy-handed and nonsensical.

9. Anthony Weiner

The former Democratic congressmen was still on the government payroll when he Tweeted racy photos of himself on his government-issued BlackBerry. Weiner tried to fight to keep his job, but ultimately the public embarrassment was too severe to withstand. His resignation opened the door for Republicans to gain a House seat that they hadn't held in over 50 years.

10. Justice for Trayvon

What were Justice Department officials doing stoking racial division following the Trayvon Martin shooting? Members of department's Community Relations Service worked with the mobs protesting the lack of action by the police in the shooting, teaching leaders how to manage the crowd and arranging a police escort for a group of college students marching to demand George Zimmerman's arrest. The only action by the Justice Department in the case should have been to indict the thugs putting a bounty on Zimmerman's head.

In the unlikely event that the Supreme Court allows ObumaCare's individual mandate to survive, be prepared for an onslaught of new rules and regulations that force products upon us in order to advance the liberal agenda... Top 10 products Obuma will force us to buy:

1. Broccoli

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Justice Antonin Scalia advanced the prospect of government-mandated broccoli during the Supreme Court's ObamaCare oral arguments. "Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli," Scalia said. The left has long been obsessed with what we put into our bodies—from transfat and salt, to tobacco and red meat. Be prepared for a Department of Eating Healthily, with Michelle Obama in charge.

2. Chevy Volt

General Motors' Chevy Volt was doomed to fail as consumers did not exactly flock to the showrooms for the overpriced, underperforming vehicle. Production of the Volt has been suspended and the dream of an electric car is endangered. According to the left, oil is evil, therefore the internal combustion engine must go. So be prepared to plug in your government-mandated electric car in order to save the world from global warming.

3. $5 gallon of gas

With Obama placing a good part of America's energy resources off-limits for development, the price of gas at the pump continues to rise. The higher the better, in order to wean us from our dependence on oil. It shouldn't be a surprise to see prices rise under this President, as he essentially promised higher energy costs when he was running for office.

4. Contraceptives

Under ObamaCare, everyone will be paying for contraceptives whether they need them or not. The misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act mandated that contraception be fully covered by health care exchanges, not even costing the recipient a co-pay. That means you will be subsidizing the sexual activity of your neighbors, co-workers, and prostitutes.

5. Inconvenient Truth movie

The left still wants us all to believe that global warming is imperiling the world and would rather not have us dwell on inconvenient inconsistencies in the theory. What with Climategate e-mails, flat temperatures, and scientists speaking out against global warming alarmism, the left is seeing their pet issue peter out. How better to reignite the cause than to require everyone to watch Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth?

6. MSNBC

The Obama administration has virtually declared war on Fox News, taking issue with its hard-hitting coverage. In the past, liberals have flirted with reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, hoping to silence right-wing critics. If emboldened by an Obama re-election victory, attempts to limit Fox and beam MSNBC into everyone's home could be in the works.

7. Solar panels

President Obama is trying his hardest develop a viable green-energy industry in the United States, funneling billions of dollars to solar-panel makers. The problem is that there isn't much of a market for the devices and the companies that the president has chosen haven't done too well—witness the bankruptcy of Solyndra. Get ready for a new push to install the panels in residences throughout America.

8. Union-label goods

Big Labor has Obama in their pocket, witness the GM bailout that was a sweetheart deal for the United Auto Workers and the National Labor Relations Board's ruling against Boeing building a plant in South Carolina. Expect more of the same with union-made goods getting a leg up over their non-union rivals.

9. Algae

Here is yet another ill-fated idea meant to put an end to U.S. oil dependence: Algae is the fuel of the future. According to President Obama, pond-scum can be harvested and turned into energy to power America. Soon, everyone will be scrapping the green algae from the bottom of their fish tanks.

10. Hoodies

As the Trayvon Martin shooting reached a boiling point, the civil rights lobby has turned the hoodie into the latest symbol of resistance to white oppression. One might expect the President to try to rise above the fray and seek to heal the nation. Instead, Obama's re-election campaign sent a Twitter message reminding supporters that they could buy an Obama hoodie. The tweet said, "Let everyone know whose team you're on for 2012 with today's merchandise steal: the college-style hooded sweatshirt."

Taken individually, the items on this list are outrageous enough; but collectively, these Top 10 misguided energy policies show how the current Obuma Gangster Administration puts America's energy needs behind the left's obsession with global warming alarmism:


1. Crucify oil companies

Al Armendariz, administrator of the EPA's Texas regional office, unwittingly let the Obama administration's true intentions be known with comments he made about enforcing environmental regulations on energy companies. "It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean," he said. "They'd go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they'd crucify them." That pretty much sums up the policies of an administration that has done everything it can to combat the oil industry. So it was Bye-Bye, Unwitty Al.
2. Keystone flub

Obama's decision to halt the Keystone Pipeline XL cost the nation jobs, as well as access to energy resources not controlled by Middle East madmen, all to appease his environmental backers and Hollywood activists. His subsequent attempt to take credit for the southern leg of the project—the so-called Pipeline to Nowhere—shows the ridiculousness of his policy.

3. Alternative-fuel fantasies

Obama's over-emphasis on alternative energy production has cost the nation billions of dollars as his administration showered stimulus money on companies like solar-panel producer Solyndra, which ultimately went bankrupt. While the number of failed green-energy projects keeps mounting, the amount of energy saved by such endeavors is minuscule.

4. Undeveloped resources

Vast swatches of energy-rich, federally controlled land in the United States—from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to areas off the East and West coasts—remain off-limits for energy development. Obama's mantra that more oil is being pumped in America than ever before must be tempered by hard facts—increases in production are on private land and are in spite of, not because of, any efforts by the Obama administration.

5. Bungling in the Gulf

The gulf oil spill prompted the Obama adminstration to declare a mortatorium on deepwater drilling, and when oil rigs relocated to Brazil, the president helped to fund that nation's oil production. Meanwhile, communities near the gulf are still suffering from a loss of jobs resulting from Obama's actions.

6. War on coal

The Obama Environmental Protection Agency is waging a war on coal, slowing the permitting process to a crawl and issuing crippling regulations. Candidate Obama signaled as much in 2008, when he said: "When I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."

7. Taxing energy companies

Obama's class-warfare rhetoric routinely focuses on eliminating tax breaks on oil and gas companies, yet most energy tax write-offs go to renewable green-energy ventures that get little bang for the taxpayer's buck. The elimination of certain tax benefits would undoubtedly lead to less exploration for new energy sources and higher prices for consumers.

8. Chevy Volt fiasco

Obama's attempt to leverage the auto bailout by bullying carmakers into making energy-efficient vehicles was a miserable failure. The Chevy Volt cost too much, didn't work very well, and had safety issues. No wonder the American consumer roundly rejected the effort and the automaker had to suspend production of the Volt.

9. Fracking regulations

Techonological advances in fracking are allowing oil and gas companies to extract energy resources at reduced costs, helping rejuventate the economies of states from North Dakota to Texas. So leave it to the EPA to try to stifle the process with new regulations to curb emissions from fracking. The new standards will cost the industry hundreds of millions of dollar, slowing the fracking boom.

10. High gas prices

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar recently called Republican energy plans "fairy tales" and "falsehoods." Salazar, asked at a different event if the cost of gas was headed to $9 per gallon, responded by saying, "Where it all will end, no one knows." What we do know is that Barack Obama and the environmental lobby have long wanted higher gas prices to "save" the planet from global warming. Which party believes in fairy tales, Mr. Salazar?

Top 10 reasons President Obama won't be reelected.  If you have any doubts that Obama will be sent packing from the White House in November, then cast your eyes at this list of reasons Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

           
1. Jobs, jobs, jobs
While the official unemployment rate has inched down to close to 8 percent, that number would be much higher if all the discouraged job hunters who stopped looking for work were included. Obama's record as a job creator is dismal, because the basic tenets of his economic ideology are woefully misguided. Government doesn't create jobs, it just gets in the way of companies that can.

           
2. Health care showdown
With the Supreme Court readying its decision on the president's signature initiative, the Affordable Care Act will be front and center right as the campaign is heating up. No matter how the court rules, the nation will be reminded of the highly unpopular health care overhaul that was enacted with legislative bribes, using arcane congressional rules, and without a shred of bipartisanship.

           
3. Immigration showdown
The high court will also be issuing its decision on Arizona's immigration law, SB 1070, which allows local police to check a person's immigration status. With polls showing a strong majority of Americans favoring the legislation, Obama's suit against the state is highly unpopular.


4. Dismal economy
The economy is not doing well, given the nation is in the midst of the weakest recovery on record and even that is petering out. With so-called Taxmageddon looming after the election when a host of tax hikes are automatically scheduled to take effect, an Obama victory would ensure a continued weak economy because he will gladly allow them to be enacted.


5. Big government run amok
From Obama's fictional "Julia," who can't get through life without a raft of government programs, to his failed stimulus package, this president is all about crafting a big government solution to every problem. The American people are onto the community organizer spreading the wealth around. They would rather have economic freedom than a government handout.

6. Base depressed
The "hope and change" enthusiasm from 2008 is long gone as voter registration is lagging among the young and minorities. Without a fired-up base, Obama will be hard-pressed to match the turnout he enjoyed four years ago. Millions of voters expected this president to deliver more than high unemployment, a weak economy, and lackluster job creation.

7. GOP on fire
Despite a hard-fought primary, conservatives are beginning to coalesce behind Romney, knowing that the real issue is the defeat of Obama's big government agenda. Because turnout is always the key in an election, the fact that conservatives will be fired up to remove Obama from office will make the difference.

8. Misguided energy policy
Obama canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, has kept vast amounts of U.S. energy resources off-limits for development, and, through the Environmental Protection Agency, is regulating the coal industry into oblivion. His energy policy is misguided by a devotion to the global warming alarmism cult. No wonder gas prices have soared since he took office.

9. Foreign policy misadventures
Obama is making a mess with his haphazard foreign policy, angering allies like Israel, resetting relations with Russia in the wrong direction, while doing nothing about Iran's and North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Obama has apologized for the country's actions and handed over decision-making to international bodies. Where America was once respected around the world, it is increasingly being seen as a paper tiger.

10. Scandal-plagued administration
From the Fast and Furious gun-running debacle to the General Services Administration's lavish Las Vegas conferences, from Secret Services officials' romp with Colombian prostitutes to the politically driven decision to dump taxpayer's money on green energy companies like the now-bankrupt Solyndra, this administration is increasingly taking on the look of a scandal-plagued enterprise.

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The Top 10 class warfare attacks by President Obama.  Apparently, "tax the billionaires" is a better rallying cry for his reelection campaign than "look at my record."  Here is the list, not for the faint of heart, of Obama's class warfare attacks:

1. Attacking capitalism
The Obama campaign is trying to make Mitt Romney's work at Bain Capital an issue in the race, bemoaning how jobs were sometimes lost in the restructuring of its acquisitions. But Mr. Obama, that is how capitalism works, and it is exactly what you did during the bailout of General Motors when unprofitable divisions were shut down in order to save the larger company.

2. Tax the rich
Even as Obama spends the nation to oblivion, he is trying to make the case that taxing the wealthy will solve the country's budget crisis. Even Nancy Pelosi is breaking with the president, saying the Bush tax cuts should be extended to those making up to $1 million, instead of Obama's $250,000. When you've lost Pelosi, you've lost the argument.

3. Demonize corporations
No president has ever gone after the corporate world as Obama has, demonizing the banks, the oil companies, pharmaceuticals, and any entity that could actually create a job. His hypocrisy holds no bounds, as he greedily soaks up campaign donations from the same ventures he attacks.

4.Biden, the hit-man
Gaffe-machine Joe Biden apparently doesn't have much to do as the nation's vice president, so why not trot him out as the administration's hit-man, where he can sharpen his boss's anti-wealth attacks. Last Labor Day, he called Obama's opponents barbarians, and more recently, at a rally in Ohio, Biden ranted, "They don't get who we are." Oh yes we do, Mr. Vice President, and that's why we are on the other side.

5. Unleash the unions
Big Labor provides the foot soldiers for Obama's reelection bid and he returns the favor through appointments and policies beneficial to their interests. Union bosses have virtually set up an office in the White House, making hundreds of visits for meetings with top officials. And don't forget the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which deploys an army of thugs to attend left-wing rallies and are not adverse to forcibly bullying its opponents.

6. Promote the Occupy movement
The president has lent his moral support to the Occupy Wall Street movement, even as the protests turned violent and the group became infested with criminal activity. He hitched his ride with the motley activists early on, saying last October the movement was a reflection of a "broad-based frustration about how our financial system works." Spoken like the Alinsky-styled community organizer that he remains at heart.

7. Spread the wealth around
As candidate Obama famously told Joe the Plumber in 2008, he is all about wealth redistribution and since taking office his budgets have piled up trillions of dollars in deficits trying to do just that. Given a second term, this president will increase taxes every which way in order to pay for more social programs for the downtrodden, keeping an increasing number of Americans on the government dole.

8. ObamaCare's 'fairness'
The president's healthcare initiative is one big class warfare gambit as he loads up on tax increases in order to subsidize the uninsured. The problem is that it just won't work. Costs continue to rise, businesses will begin to shed their health plans, and longer waits will become normal at the doctor's office. All out of the misguided notion of "fairness."

9. Double-down
Even as his policies have slowed the economic recovery, created few jobs, added trillions to the national debt, put in roadblocks that curtail U.S. energy production, and destroyed the healthcare system, President Obama continues the same misguided efforts. A true revolutionary never loses sight of the ultimate goal, with the ends justifying the means, and two steps forward, one step back. Look at his annual budget request which is such a joke with its big spending, big government approach that he can't get a single Democrat to vote for it.

10. Overheated rhetoric
No class warfare attack could be complete without resorting to over-the-top rhetoric meant to inflame passions rather than to reach a consensus. President Obama has become a master of that art, blaming "millionaires and billionaires" for all the nation's woes in nearly every speech he gives. He reached his rhetorical zenith when he tried to portray President Reagan as a "wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior."

                                       Top 10 Joe Bidenisms

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Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is a veritable gaffe machine who never ceases to amaze.  It wasn't easy narrowing down his verbal miscues to only 10, but here they are:

The all-time Top 10 Joe Bidenisms.

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1.  Republicans want more rapes:  While trying to sell President Obama's jobs bill, Biden hurled a vicious attack on Republicans blocking the bill, saying that if the bill didn't pass, murders and rapes would increase:  "It's not temporary when that 911 call comes in and a woman's being raped, if a cop shows up in time to prevent the rape.  It's not temporary to that woman.  ... I wish they [Republicans] had some notion of what it was like to be on the other side of a gun, or a 200-pound man standing over you, telling you to submit."

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2.  FDR on TV in 1929:  Rarely has a politician gotten as many historical facts wrong in one sentence as Biden did with this comment in a 2008 interview with Katie Couric:  "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed.  He said, 'Look, here's what happened.' "  Of course FDR wasn't President when the stock market crashed and televisions were not in use at the time.

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3.  Recovery Summer:  Rarely has a politician made a worse prediction than Biden's June 2010 promise of a Recovery Summer in the U.S. economy.  While touting the President's stimulus legislation, Biden said, "Folks, the act is working, more people are going to be put to work this summer.  ... The proof of the pudding is in the eating."  Nearly a year and a half later, America is still waiting for all of those jobs.

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4.  Obama "articulate" and "clean":  During the 2008 presidential election, Biden seemingly discovered that blacks can have sound hygiene.  Imagine the howls of racism if a conservative had uttered this statement:  "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.  I mean, that's a storybook, man."

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5.  Barbarians at the gate:  Even though the President called for increased civility in the public discourse, his vice president couldn't resist attacking the political opposition.  At an AFL-CIO rally on Labor Day in Cincinnati, Biden told the union members:  "You are the only folks keeping the barbarians from the gates."

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6.  Three-letter word:  Former Vice President Dan Quayle was laughed out of town for misspelling "potato," yet Biden took little heat for his inability to count past three.  Back in 2008 on the campaign trail, Biden said:  "Look, John [McCain's] last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the No. 1 job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word:  jobs.  J-O-B-S, jobs."

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7.  Katie's Restaurant:  During his 2008 debate with Sarah Palin, Biden trotted out his working-man sensibilities with this comment:  "Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington, or go to Katie's Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me, where I spend a lot of time, and you ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off."  Oops! Looks like Joseph Robinette hadn't mingled with his working-class cohorts for a while.  Katie's Restaurant had closed down years earlier.

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8.  Indian accent:  Biden perpetuated an ethnic stereotype with remarks in 2006 that indicated only Indian-Americans run convenience stores and doughnut shops.  "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.  ... I'm not joking," Biden said.  Imagine the media outcry if a Republican had said the same thing (witness how former Virginia Gov. George Allen was pilloried for a calling an Indian-American, "macaca"—a non-slur.)

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9.  Big [effing] deal:  During the ObamaCare signing ceremony, Biden resorted to a vulgarism in the East Room of the White House when he whispered into the ear of President Obama:  "This is a big [expletive deleted] deal"—a remark picked up by the microphone for all to hear.

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10.  Don't screw around with me:  Biden sounded more like a Mafia thug than the second-ranking government official when HUMAN EVENTS editor Jason Mattera pressed him on his rape comments (see No. 1).  "I didn't use, no no no.  ... Let's get it straight, guy.  Don't screw around with me," said Biden, who went on confirm his original remarks, saying, "Murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crimes will continue to rise," if the jobs bill isn't passed.

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The all-time Top 10 Joe Bidenisms - Part #2

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In our last list of Bidenisms in November, the veep had just lectured former Human Events editor Jason Mattera, saying, "Let's get it straight, guy. Don't screw around with me." Here, then, are more recent examples of Biden bombs, bungles, and blunders.

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1. Gay marriage surprise
From President Obama's perspective, his second-in-command's biggest goof was endorsing gay marriage, causing the president to change his own "evolving" position in the heat of a reelection campaign. "He probably got out a little over his skis," the president said about Biden's statement coming out in favor of same-sex marriage, while undoubtedly wondering why he chose the Delaware senator in the first place.

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2. Best in 500 years
Biden is known for his penchant to exaggerate but his historical analysis of the Osama bin Laden killing mission was a bit too much for even the fast-talking politician. "You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan," the Delaware Doofus said. Well, Mr. Vice President, how about the World War II D-Day invasion or Gen. Douglas MacArthur's daring Inchon maneuver? Or Robert E. Lee bringing the Civil War to Gettysburg? Or George Washington crossing the Delaware?

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3. Never had a 'real job'
Straight-talkin' Joe can verbally stumble onto deep truths as he prattles. Here, speaking at an April Democratic fundraiser in Chicago, he gives an incredibly insightful and revealing view of his own career: "I never had an interest in being a mayor 'cause that's a real job. You have to produce. That's why I was able to be a senator for 36 years."

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4. 'You pay me a lot of money'
While campaigning in Keene, N.H., last month, Biden explained his unusual personal finance strategy: "I don't have a saving account, don't have any stocks or bonds ... So, I just kept buying up houses. And I have a beautiful home and you pay me a lot of money." Yes, we do, Mr. Vice President. Regrettably so.

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5. Patriotic taxpaying
On the campaign trail in New Hampshire in April, Biden elevated the class-warfare canard as a standard to measure patriotism. "Wealthy people are just as patriotic as middle-class people, as poor people, and they know they should be doing more," Biden said. Of course, that is just another way of saying "income redistribution."

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6. Obama bin Biden
Biden told a group of House Democrats in January that he advised President Obama not to pull the trigger on Osama bin Laden when Special Forces were awaiting approval for the Abbottabad raid. "Mr. President, my suggestion is don't go," Biden said, recalling his counsel to the commander in chief. To his credit, Obama is now apparently employing the "do-the-opposite" rule in regard to advice from his vice president.

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7. Fracking quakes
It is not quite on the same level as actor Danny Glover's blaming the Haiti earthquake on global warming, but the vice president came close by suggesting that fracking causes earthquakes. The really damaging issue is the administration's energy policy and why the Environmental Protection Agency is putting up roadblocks to developing the nation's energy resources, including the fracking boom, which is spurring economic growth in several states.

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8. 'Per se'
The first rule of warfare is to know who the enemy is. Someone should tell that to the vice president. In an interview with Newsweek, Biden said, "Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy." That assertion might come as a surprise to U.S. troops who have been battling the Afghan militants for more than a decade after Sept. 11, 2001.

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9. Totally unprepared
Perhaps the most astute analysis of the vice president's time in office came from none other than Osama bin Laden. Osama sent a letter to an al Qaeda terrorist with a plan to form a hit squad to kill President Obama. But bin Laden said that Biden should be spared because he is "totally unprepared" for the presidency which would "lead the U.S. into a crisis."

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10. Baby talk
While giving a campaign speech, Biden paused to address a crying baby, saying, "You're going to pay for Romney's tax cuts." (Let us look beyond whether bringing a baby to a Biden speech constitutes child abuse.) Even a child should realize that it is so much easier to pay for tax cuts that spur the economy than to continue paying for the out-of-control spending of the Obama/Biden administration.

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Since the GOP is likely to lose Maine (Olympia Snowe's seat... Big, Big RINO) and have competitive races to defend seats in Massachusetts (Scott Brown) and Nevada (Dean Heller), they better hope to pickup five or six Democratic seats. Here are 10 seats currently held by the opposition that Republicans can win.


1. Nebraska (Open)

With the retirement of Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson in a solid red state, Nebraska is ripe for a Republican pick-up. The GOP nominated a relatively fresh face in Deb Fischer, a rancher and state senator since 2004, while Democrats reached back to the far past and are recycling former Nebraska governor and senator Bob Kerrey. A Rasmussen poll has Fischer up by 18 points over Kerrey, whose previous service to the state is mostly remembered for his romance with actress Debra Winger in the 1980s.


2. Wisconsin (Open)

Wisconsin broke hard for the Republicans in 2010, with the defeat of incumbent Sen. Russ Feingold by Ron Johnson and Scott Walker winning the governorship. Now with the drama of the Walker recall effort over, Republicans seemed poised to capitalize on a better political climate for conservatives in what was once a fairly reliable state for Democrats. Former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson should have no trouble dispatching Democratic Rep. Tammy Baldwin in November.


3. Missouri (McCaskill)

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill says she won't be attending the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte—and with good cause, as she is in the fight of her political life. Republicans won't pick her opponent until an August primary but currently three of the candidates running to take on McCaskill are leading her in the latest Rasmussen poll, by margins ranging from 8 to 12 percentage points. Look for State Treasurer Sarah Steelman to win the primary and defeat McCaskill in November.


4. Montana (Tester)

Since defeating incumbent Republican Sen. Conrad Burns in 2006, Rep. Jon Tester has consistently sided with President Obama. He voted for ObamaCare and the stimulus, is pro-choice, and favors global warming legislation—all in a state, which McCain won by 2.2 percentage points. Tester was never that popular in the first place with margin of victory over Burns only 3,562 votes, or 50.4 percent of the total, and now his opponent, Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg, has opened up a modest lead in early polling.


5. North Dakota (Open)

Early polls show a close race between Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, the former state attorney general, and Republican Rep. Rick Berg, to replace retiring five-term Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad. But the state is as red as any, giving John McCain a six-point victory in 2008 over Barack Obama and, in 2010, when North Dakota voted to replace a another long-time retiring Democrat (four-termer Sen. Byron Dorgan), Republican John Hoeven cruised to a 54-point blowout victory.


6. Virginia (Open)

With Democrat Jim Webb stepping down after one term, Republicans have high hopes to retake the Virginia seat and both sides chose political heavyweights to compete. Former governor and former senator Republican George Allen, whose loss to Webb in 2006 was largely due to the Washington Post making a mountain out of macaca, will be facing former governor and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee Tim Kaine.


7. Florida (Nelson)

Likely Republican nominee Rep. Connie Mack IV is taking on two-term Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and has narrowed Nelson's early polling lead to a virtual dead heat. Nelson's support for ObamaCare was highly unpopular among the large senior population, with two-thirds of voters over 65 opposing the measure. It also won't help Nelson's support among Jewish voters that a Muslim Brotherhood activist hosted a fundraiser for the senator last year.


8. Connecticut (Open)

The race for the Connecticut Senate seat of retiring Joseph Lieberman will likely shape up to be between Republican Linda McMahon and Democratic Rep. Chris Murphy. McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, has a fortune to help finance her campaign, spending over $50 million of her own money on a losing 2010 Senate bid. McMahon has momentum at the moment in the latest polling.


9. New Mexico (Open)

Competing for Sen. Jeff Bingaman's seat will be former Republican Rep. Heather Wilson and Democratic Rep. Martin Heinrich. Heinrich has a modest lead at the moment but all bets are off following the Supreme Court's decision on neighboring Arizona's immigration law, making the issue front and center in this border state.


10. Michigan (Stabenow)

Normally Sen. Debbie Stabenow would be a hard incumbent to defeat, she is up by some 12 points in various poll currently. But these are unusual times as Michigan is suddenly a battleground state in the presidential race. After trailing by double-digits earlier in the campaign, Mitt Romney has essentially pulled even with Obama. It will be an uphill a battle, but Romney coattails could bring former Rep. Peter Hoekstra into the Senate.

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Top 10 Obamacare taxes coming your way
7/14/2012 08:40 AM

If you have yet to make up your mind about the Affordable Care Act, this list might help you decide.

1. Individual mandate
Obamacare may have been upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court, but Chief Justice John Roberts' extraordinary opinion clearly labeled the law's individual mandate a tax. Whether the power to enact a penalty for failing to purchase a product derives from the Commerce Clause or Congress' taxing authority makes little difference. Every American will have to purchase health insurance and those who don't will face an IRS-enforced tax that totals 2.5 percent of adjusted growth income in 2016.

2. Employer mandate
At a time when America needs jobs more than anything else, along comes Obamacare and its tax on businesses that don't offer healthcare benefits. Companies with more than 50 employees will have to pay a tax of $3,000 per employee, a sure-fire way to keep companies from hiring new workers. Perversely, this measure will also encourage some employers to drop their health coverage and pay a fine that costs less. In both cases, the measure works against many vulnerable Americans.

3. Investment income surtax
If you make more than $200,000 ($250,000 if married), then you are rich and will be paying for the healthcare of the less fortunate. Obamacare will levy a new 3.8 percent surtax on investment income on those earners. If the Bush tax cuts are not rescinded, another added tax will be added to the same people on the same income and the top rate on dividend income from will hit 43.4 percent— a good reason to invest elsewhere.

4. Limit raised on medical tax deductions
Currently people who have high medical expenses can get a tax break on the amount over 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income when they itemize deductions. Obamacare will raise the threshold to 10 percent, socking those with medical emergencies with an extra cost just when they are least prepared to handle it.

5. Tax on charitable hospitals
Obamacare levies a $50,000 excise tax on charitable hospitals that fail to meet an array of Health and Human Services regulations, including new standards in assessing community health needs and financial assistance requirements. In what universe does this make sense? Here we have the federal government heaping new rules under threat of financial penalty onto entities that function to help others.

6. Capping Flexible Spending Accounts
By capping the amount of money that can be used in a flexible spending account, Obamacare essentially levies a tax on families with 'special -needs children.' The new annual cap of $2,500 doesn't come close to cover the amount that it costs for families to care and educate society's most vulnerable members. Oh, but at least the measure will send an addition $13 billion to Washington.

7. Tax on Cadillac plans
In Obamaland, one size fits all when it comes to healthcare. Under Obamacare, people who have "Cadillac" health plans will be hit with a new excise tax. People paying $10,200 ($27,500 for families) a year in insurance premiums will get hit with a 40 percent tax hike, which will, over time, will reduce the number of top-end plans. But at least Uncle Sam will get another $32 billion in revenue.

8. Medical device tax
Obamacare adds a 2.3 percent excise tax on manufacturers of medical-devices. One doesn't need to be an economist to figure out the outcome of this measure: Companies will either stop hiring or will pass on the cost of the life-saving products on to consumers—adding to the burden of those already saddled with high medical costs.

9. Medicare payroll tax
The "rich" will get hit with yet another tax hike—a Medicare payroll tax increase of 0.9 percent of income above $200,000 ($250,000 if married). Even Nancy Pelosi has called out President Obama on taxing those income levels repeatedly, saying that the threshold should be $1 million in income before taxes on the super-rich kick in.

10. Over-the-counter tax
Obamacare will no longer allow money from health savings or flexible spending accounts to purchase non-prescription, over-the counter drugs—a $5 billion tax on people trying to treat their own medical problems. That is just a prescription to steer people to the doctor's office instead of the pharmacy counter.

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Top 10 questionable tactics from the Obama campaign
By: Human Events
7/21/2012 07:19 AM


The president will say anything to get re-elected and his strategy includes this list of outright falsehoods, distortions, smears and lies:

1. Make wild charges
President Obama's campaign team's incessant attacks on Romney's record at Bain Capital are a textbook example of trying to divert attention by exaggerating and distorting their opponent's record. With the assistance of the mainstream media, President Obama is trying to make Romney look like the second coming of Simon Legree, with his campaign going so far as to accuse Romney of committing felonies.

2. Lie about opponents
At this stage in the race, desperate Democrats are starting to make things up. At a Democratic fundraiser in Seattle, Vice President Joe Biden tried to slip an outright falsehood past the crowd. Citing efforts in several states to cleanse voter rolls of the dead and felonious, Biden said, "Republicans have changed the law so you get arrested if you do vote."

3. Play the blame game
"The buck stops here" is not exactly the motto of the Barack Obama presidency as he continually tries to shift the blame for his poor record to others. The moribund economy and lack of job creation is the result of the Bush tax cuts, the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami, greedy Wall Street bankers, uncooperative Republicans and ATM machines.

4. Class warfare
Even some Democrats are beginning to wonder about the president's incessant class warfare remarks. He demonizes Wall Street, bankers, corporate America and the wealthy—sending record amounts of campaign donations into the coffers of Mitt Romney. But that's all the 'hope and change' candidate from 2008 has left: an appeal to the cynicism of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

5. Deny, deny, deny
One tried-and-true campaign tactic is denial. Take Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's view on the economy. Instead of acknowledging the depth of economic pain that still exists for millions of Americans, Wasserman Schultz said, "I am pretty happy about 28 straight months of job growth in the private sector." Some job growth, with an 8.2 percent unemployment rate that shows no sign of abating.

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6. Pander to special interests
President Obama is the master at appealing to the collection of special interest groups that has become the Democratic Party. Promise to support same-sex marriage for the gay lobby, stop the Keystone pipeline for the environmentalists, give Hispanics immigration relief, use the race card whenever possible to energize blacks, scare women about contraception and give sweetheart deals to Big Labor.

7. Attack the messenger
No better way to deflect from your own lack of accomplishments than to blame the messenger and President Obama's favorite bogeyman is Fox News. Recently on the campaign trail, the president said, "So just in case some of your friends or neighbors or Uncle Jim is a little stubborn, has been watching Fox News, if he thinks that somehow I raised taxes, let's just be clear, we've lowered taxes for middle class families." Not quite.

8. Play the race card
In liberal land, the contempt of Congress vote on Attorney General Eric Holder was really a way for evil Republicans to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act. A new liberal group called "The Message" made a YouTube video, saying that Romney is so white he makes "Wonder Bread look like pumpernickel." The president often aids and abets the divisiveness, even setting up a national campaign organization, "African Americans for Obama."

9. Run against George W. Bush
All through his presidency, President Obama has blamed his predecessor for all that was going wrong during his own administration and loved to tell audiences about the mess he inherited. Now, by linking Romney to Bush, he can run against a more unpopular figure. Vice President Joe Biden opened that door in a speech calling Romney "George Bush on steroids."

10. Create phony issues
In order to scare single women to the voting booth, President Obama and his team wants to pretend that Republicans want to roll back the clock to another era. Republicans "have a social policy right out of the 1950s," says Joe Biden. So the campaign twists its own strong-armed tactics against religious groups into a fake attack by Republicans on contraceptives. Then it makes a campaign ad that lies about Romney's abortion policy and, voila, you suddenly have a "war on women."

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Top 10 most dangerous liberals

We have seen what rampant liberalism can do after these three-and-a-half years of misery. The left pushes an agenda that punishes success in order to spread the wealth around. It is important to know how some on the left operates:

1. President Obama
Give the former community organizer a second term in office and see the havoc that will follow. Unrestrained by political concerns, expect every possible left-wing policy to be enacted by executive order or through agency regulations. He already has taken us half-way to bureaucratic Gomorrah with his Obamacare travesty. The president has fulfilled his promise to transform America by making us more dependent on government.

2. George Soros
Most of the liberal infrastructure has been funded by financier George Soros. He has helped keep afloat such left-wing mainstays as Media Matters, Center for American Progress and Moveon.org., and donated heavily to the National Council of La Raza and Planned Parenthood. Funny how you don't hear the left complain about the political influence of deep-pocketed donors when it comes to the billionaire sugar daddy for progressives.

3. Mainstream media
Led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the mainstream media—which forgot to vet the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008—are making sure that no stone is left unturned when it comes to Mitt Romney. From Romney's high school antics to his wife's equestrian hobby, the supposedly objective media are trying to make scandals out of triviality while shedding no lights on a failed administration.

4. Harry Reid
The Senate majority leader is dangerous because he is virtually inert. The upper chamber passes nothing of consequence while sitting on bills passed by the House. Under his leadership, the Senate has not produced a budget in years—disregarding a statutory duty. Reid's inaction fits right into Obama's strategy of attacking a "do-nothing Congress."

5. Eric Holder
Under siege in the Fast and Furious scandal, the attorney general has dropped all pretenses and is brazenly using the DoJ to pursue a political agenda. The department filed suit against Arizona's immigration law and Texas' voter ID law and Holder continually plays the race card to excuse his power grabs. As the contempt of Congress charge plays out, expect Holder to play hardball and lash out at critics.

6. Hollywood stars
With George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker hosting Obama fundraisers, Hollywood is mobilizing to get Obama reelected. Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, Alec Baldwin and others love to lecture the rest of us about global warming and the evils of Wall Street. How about boycotting a movie with a known progressive as the star?

7. Lisa Jackson
The Environmental Protection Agency, under the direction of Lisa Jackson, is moving to control aspects of daily life in ways never imagined when the agency was formed. From enacting rules to combat global warming to regulating workplace dust, the EPA is pushing an agenda that couldn't get through Congress even when Democrats controlled it.

8. Big Labor
With pro-union Hilda Solis heading the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board stacked in its favor, President Obama has returned the favor for the support Big Labor supplied for his election. He will need the unions even more in order to return for a second term. With the rest of his base lagging in enthusiasm, it will take the dedication of paid-union goons to get out the vote.

9. Janet Napolitano
For all the yapping from progressives about President George W. Bush's disregard for the Constitution and the evils of the PATRIOT Act, there is little being said about the vast expansion of the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Janet Napolitano. From groping Transportation Safety Administration workers to drones monitoring America, the massive agency is increasingly eroding our freedoms while trying to protect them.

10. Nancy Pelosi
It will take years, if not decades, to undo the damage done by the spending spree during Pelosi's tenure as speaker of the House. From 2006 to 2010, the nation racked up trillions of dollars in debt, largely due to spending bills initiated by Pelosi's Democratic House majority. And without her strong-armed tactics, Obamacare never would have become law. Let us make sure in November that there is not a second act for a Speaker Pelosi.

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Top 10 issues where Democrats think Obama has gone too far
By: Human Events
8/4/2012 07:17 AM

It is not only conservatives who think that President Obama has gone too far in pursuing a far-left agenda — his fellow Democrats and progressive fellow travelers are increasingly breaking ranks with their leader as they are unable to stomach his ideological-driven policies. Some tried taking back their comments after being strong-armed by the White House, but the signal is unmistakable.

1. Tax Cuts
The number of Democratic officials uncomfortable with President Obama's signature issue—taxing the rich—is growing. Sens. Charles Schumer and Bob Casey and even House leader Nancy Pelosi say the president's view of who is 'rich' is woefully mischaracterized and want the cut off for tax hikes to start at $1 million, instead of Obama's $250,000.

2. Capitalism
Democrats begin scurrying for the high grass when Obama began his attacks on Romney's record at Bain Capital. Newark Mayor Corey Booker even called the attacks "nauseating" and "crap" before walking back the remarks under White House pressure. Former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford reminded the president that "private equity is not a bad thing."

3. Intelligence Leaks
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein tried taking back her comments after a media firestorm erupted, but the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee sent shock waves through Washington by fingering the White House as the source of damaging leaks of top secret intelligence.

4. Drones
Former President Jimmy Carter sharply criticized the Obama administration for using drones to target individuals for assassination, saying it was in violation of international treaties. Carter is not the only leftist aghast that Obama is personally selecting individuals for extermination. A group of 26 congressmen, the majority from the president's own party, sent Obama a letter questioning the policy's legality.

5. Budget
While Harry Reid's Democratic-controlled Senate has not been able to pass a budget in over three years, it has had no trouble at all in rejecting Obama's attempt at crafting a fiscal blueprint. It has become an annual tradition: Obama proposes a budget, Republicans introduce it on the Senate floor, and it is defeated 99-0.

6. Keystone Pipeline
Some 69 House Democrats voted with Republicans to pass a transportation bill that included a provision to build the Keystone Pipeline. The measure died in the Senate after falling two votes short of overcoming a Democratic filibuster requiring 60 votes, but even after a heavy lobbying by Obama, 11 Democrats broke ranks and voted with the Republicans.

7. Iran Sanctions
As with much of the rest of his foreign policy, the president seems to be "leading from behind" on dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions. Democratic Sens. Robert Menendez (N.J.), Robert Casey (Pa.), Chris Coons (Del.) and Ben Cardin (Md.), along with Rep. Howard Berman (Calif.) have all criticized Obama's go-slow approach on slapping sanctions on Tehran.

8. AIDS
Singer Elton John summed up the left's frustration over Obama's lack of attention to the continent of his forefathers by praising the efforts of his predecessor, George W. Bush, on helping Africa deal with its AIDS epidemic. John's remarks came at the International AIDS Conference being held the United States for the first time in 22 years. Attendees were disappointed when Obama failed to show up—he was too busy holding fundraisers for his reelection.

9. Political Poison
An increasing number of Democrats in tough reelection battles are opting to forego attendance at Obama's re-nomination at the Democratic National Convention, saying they need to keep campaigning. Nancy Pelosi encouraged House members to stay away from Charlotte. Apparently being seen with the president is not a political plus these days.

10. Bill Clinton
The former president gets his own category for his ability to assess Obama's failings on multiple levels. Clinton was the first observer to note how Obama played the race card when the former president was attacked during his wife's 2008 South Carolina primary battle. He also publicly split with Obama over extending the Bush tax cuts (see No. 1) and over the president's attacks on Bain Capital (see No. 2), when he said Romney's "sterling business career crosses the qualification threshold."

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Top 10 Democratic attacks on Mitt Romney
By: Human Events
9/8/2012 06:16 AM

Not able to run on a stellar record, Obama has decided to descend into the mud:

1. Responsible for cancer death
According to an ad by a pro-Obama Super PAC, Priorities USA, Romney was responsible for the cancer death of a worker's wife who lost his job following a Bain Capital restructuring of his employer. The Obama campaign refused to condemn the ad even though the worker's wife died five years after the plant closed, she still had her own health insurance after her husband lost his job, and Romney was no longer at Bain when this all occurred.


2. 'Put y'all back in chains'According to Joe Biden, Mitt Romney is seeking to reintroduce slavery to the nation. In remarks to an audience in Danville, Va., the gaffe-prone Biden let loose with a comment that had people questioning his mental capacity. "Romney wants to let the—he said in the first 100 days, he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules," Biden sputtered. "Unchain Wall Street. They're going to put y'all back in chains."

3. Didn't pay taxes for 10 years
According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) "the word is out" that Romney didn't pay any income taxes for ten years. Reid refused to name his source, saying, "I don't think the burden should be on me. The burden should be on him. He's the one I've alleged has not paid any taxes." He even brought Romney's dead father into his smear, saying, "His poor father must be so embarrassed about his son."

4. Romney is a 'felon'
Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter told reporters in July that Romney likely committed a felony regarding his departure from Bain Capital. "Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony," Cutter said. Considering Romney was running the 2002 Olympics during the time in question, what part of "leave of absence" does Cutter not understand?

5. High school bullying
The Washington Post reached back some 50 years to find examples of Romney being a bully in high school. The media went on a feeding frenzy, as if Romney was guilty of a crime against humanity. Headlines screamed, "Why the Romney bullying story matters" and "Romney's empathy problem." Had the media vetted certain 2008 presidential candidates with the same enthusiasm, we wouldn't be in this mess today.

6. Death squads
The Huffington Post ran a story in early August that Romney founded Bain Capital in 1983 with money from Central American oligarchs who had bankrolled "right-wing death squads." The left has been fantasizing about unsavory ties between Republicans and Latin America "oligarchs" ever since the Iran Contra affair.

7. Bain outsourcing
The day after the Obama campaign charged that Romney that he outsourced jobs while at Bain, the Washington Post came out with a breathless headline: "Romney's Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas." The paper's own fact-checker later walked back the accusation, as any Bain outsourcing came after Romney left the firm.

8. Ann's horse
The media lapped up the revelation that Ann Romney owned a horse that earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic equestrian team as it fit nicely with the theme that Mitt Romney is an out-of-touch elitist. The DNC even used footage of Ann's horse Rafalca prancing in an ad attacking Romney for "dancing around" the release of his tax records. It turned out that Mrs. Romney had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and horseback riding was therapeutic in easing her condition.

9. Mormonism
The media is starting to portray Romney's Mormonism as plain weird. Of course to most of the mainstream media, any display of religious faith is alien. Never mind that the same group of editors and reporters didn't find it newsworthy in 2008 that Barack Obama sat for decades in the pew of a church with an American-hating pastor.

10. Wealth
Romney's wealth fits right into Obama's strategy of turning the race into a class-warfare campaign as he constantly attacks the rich. The Obama campaign is pushing hard for Romney to release his tax records, hoping in his maze of financial records there is something to spin, and is making wild claims about secret Cayman Island accounts. One thing we do know about Romney's tax records: His charitable giving puts the Democratic ticket to shame.

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Human Events Top Ten

Memorable moments of past Democratic Conventions:


1. 1968, Chicago
The 1968 Democratic convention was more notable for what happened on the streets of Chicago than what occurred on the floor of the International Amphitheatre where delegates gathered to nominate the successor to President Lyndon Johnson. Anti-Vietnam War protestors led by the Yippies and members of the radical Students for a Democratic Society tussled with Chicago police outside the convention hall, with the violence on the streets overshadowing the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. The ugly backdrop in a year marked by national tragedies was certainly a factor in his ultimate defeat by Richard M. Nixon.


2. 1980, New York
President Jimmy Carter needed a successful convention to re-energize his re-election bid for a presidency that had been gripped by malaise. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who won 12 primary states but came short of gaining enough delegates to upend the incumbent, challenged Carter in 1980. Kennedy brought the challenge to the convention floor by forcing a vote to free delegates from their commitments to vote for Carter. The maneuver failed and after Carter's acceptance speech (in which he referred to Hubert Humphrey as Hubert Horatio Hornblower), the president was reduced to following Kennedy around the stage, in a failed attempt to secure a unifying handshake with his rival.


3. 1984, San Francisco
As it turned out, it didn't help the Democrats that they chose ultra-liberal San Francisco as their setting for nominating former Vice President Walter Mondale to take on President Reagan. America got to witness the spectacle of gay activists dressed as nuns parading outside the Moscone Center. Later, with UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick leading the way at the GOP convention, Republicans successfully tarred the other party with the actions of the outrageous behavior of the protesters by leveling the toxic label—"San Francisco Democrats." Mondale probably cooked his own goose inside the convention center with his pledge to raise taxes. Democrats also began to reprise their trusty class-warfare gambit with New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's keynote address describing how the nation was becoming a "tale of two cities."


4. 1924, New York
The 1924 Democratic convention saw a record 103 ballots cast and the gathering took over two weeks before the nomination was won. New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith and former Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo were deadlocked for most of the balloting as a resurgent Ku Klux Klan tied up the vote opposing the Catholic Smith and supporting McAdoo. Finally a relative unknown, John W. Davis, former West Virginia congressman, U.S. solicitor general and ambassador to Britain, emerged as a compromise candidate on the 103rd ballot. The left wing of the party bucked the choice of the conservative Davis and bolted to back the third-party bid of Wisconsin Sen. Robert M. La Follette on the Progressive Party ticket. GOP President Calvin Coolidge trounced both opponents in the general election with 54% of the vote.


5. 2008, Denver
Not since the Roman emperors has there been a bigger display of hubris than the Democratic convention in Denver where Barack Obama won the party's nomination for president. Obama's acceptance speech was delivered in the cavernous Denver Stadium with 80,000 in attendance and a stage that featured Greek columns. The palatial setting was more than matched by Obama's self-glorifying rhetoric, as exemplified by this grandiose passage from his acceptance speech:  "Generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless ... this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."


6. 1952, Chicago
Going into the 1952 convention, Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson insisted he was not a candidate for the presidency but after an inspiring address welcoming the delegates, supporters insisted that his name be placed in nomination, joining Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver, Georgia Sen. Richard Russell and diplomat Averell Harriman from New York.  Kefauver led on the first two ballots, but Stevenson overtook him on the third after President Harry S. Truman convinced Harriman to drop out and support the Illinois governor. Southern Democrats extracted revenge by placing Alabama Sen. John Sparkman, a segregationist, on the ticket as Stevenson's vice president. Stevenson went on to lose to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, and tried again in 1956 with Kefauver as his running mate, but lost to Ike a second time.


7. 1896, Chicago
Silver-tongued orator and populist firebrand William Jennings Bryan, a former two-term Nebraska congressman, won the Democratic nomination three times. In 1896, at age 36, Bryan became the youngest presidential nominee in U.S. history, delivering his "Cross of Gold" acceptance speech that excoriated big business for backing the gold standard. Bryan went on to lose twice to Republican William McKinley and a third time to William Howard Taft. Later in life, Bryan had a famed role as the attorney arguing against the teaching of evolution in public schools against famed lawyer Clarence Darrow in the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial.


8. 1988 Atlanta
The 1988 Democratic convention that nominated Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis took a particularly nasty tone against Republican nominee Vice President George H.W. Bush. Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards' keynote address included the line that Bush was "born with a silver foot in his mouth," Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower called Bush "a toothache of a man," and delegates roared during Teddy Kennedy's speech in which he repeatedly intoned:  "Where was George." One speech that didn't go over too well was the debut on the national stage of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, whose 32-minute nominating speech drew cheers when he said, "In conclusion..." The stage in Atlanta was adorned with a large American flag as a backdrop but organizers changed the colors from red, white and blue to salmon, azure and eggshell—hoping the pastel colors looked better on television. Republicans used the flag flap to attack their rivals, saying it proved they were "soft on the issues."


9. 1936, Philadelphia
After the 1924 convention, which took 103 ballots to decide a nominee, Democrats began to overhaul the process and 1936 was the first convention that required a simple majority of the delegates rather than the two-thirds that earlier nominees required. President Franklin Roosevelt gave the second of his eventual four acceptance speeches, telling a nation still mired in the Great Depression despite his New Deal programs, "This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny." The convention was also notable for Sen. Ellison Smith of South Carolina walking out of the hall to protest the invocation given by a black minister.


10. 2000, Los Angeles
Democrats thought they had a winner after Vice President Al Gore planted a long, wet kiss on wife Tipper after receiving the party's nomination. Gore's acceptance speech distanced himself from the president he had served for eight years, mentioning Bill Clinton just once and at one point declaring: "I stand here tonight as my own man." While the vice presidential nominee, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, invoked JFK's New Frontier in his address, Gore stuck to a tedious policy-wonk presentation in his. Fittingly, given the setting near Hollywood, Gore's name was placed in nomination by his college roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones. Ironically, given the 2000 election results against George W. Bush, the state of Florida was given the honor of casting the ballots that clinched the nomination for Gore.


The 12 Most Memorable Convention Speeches
From William Jennings Bryan to Clint Eastwood, words for the ages

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/09/03/the-12-most-memorable-convention-speeches

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Top 10 liberal race cards

By: Human Events
9/15/2012

Liberals are starting to hear the dog-whistles they say conservatives slip into their conversations as racial code words and have discovered an amazing array of such language relating to criticism of President Obama. Be prepared to cut down on your vocabulary after seeing the list of these liberal race cards.


1. Chicago
MSNBC host Chris Matthews put Chicago on the table as a term that conjures up stereotypical images of the inner city. "They keep saying Chicago by the way, have you noticed? They keep saying Chicago. That's another thing that sends that message—this guy's helping the poor people in the bad neighborhoods, screwing us in the 'burbs." On the panel with Matthews, John Heilemann of New York Magazine, then chirped in, "There's a lot of black people in Chicago."


2. Birther jokes
Matthews said that Mitt Romney's joke that "no one's ever asked to see my birth certificate" was part of an "endless ethnic attack" on Obama. "That cheap shot ... was awful," Matthews said to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. "It is an embarrassment to your party to play that card ... you are playing that ethnic card there."


3. Polling
Leave it to noted political scholar and "30 Rock" TV-star Alec Baldwin to put his finger on opinion polling as a hitherto form of virulent racism. Still using electronic devices after the embarrassing voice-mail rant he once sent to his daughter (where he famously called her a "rude thoughtless pig"), Baldwin recently tweeted, "If Obama Was White, He'd Be Up By 17 Points."


4. Golf
When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joked that Obama was "working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour," MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell knew what was really going on: racism. "Well, we know exactly what he's trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the—lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama. ... these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches."


5. Financial reform
Vice President Joe Biden warned a campaign rally in Danville, Va., which included a large number of minorities, that Romney's financial reform efforts would essentially re-introduce slavery to the nation. "In the first hundred days he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules—unchain Wall Street. They're going to put y'all back in chains."


6. Voter ID laws
Republican efforts to rid voter rolls of felons, illegal immigrants, and dead people is really just all about racism, say liberals ranging from MSNBC host Al Sharpton to Attorney General Eric Holder. Sharpton said that voter ID laws were a "deliberate attempt to try to suppress our votes in particularly minority communities that are disproportionately impacted, senior and students," while Holder likened the laws to the Jim Crow era "poll taxes."


7. Eric Holder's contempt charge
Writing in the Huffington Post, Al Sharpton gave a lengthy discourse to a charge that the contempt of Congress charged voted on by the House was similar to New York police's "stop-and-frisk" policy. "Tattered down and publicly humiliated, AG Holder has been mishandled just like the young Black and Latino men (and women) who are demonized on our streets everyday..."


8. Welfare fraud
Matthews went on this soliloquy that blamed any opposition to social anti-poverty programs to deep-rooted racism. "Nothing is more primitive than to beat the drums of tribal grievance," Matthews said. "Welfare cheating, food stamp grabbing are all part of the lingo, along with the old calls for law and order and states rights and all the rest. Say what you want, the message is familiar, deeply redolent of the old demagoguery that stirs up the working white people against the black."


9. Branding analogies
When Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said, "While I would love for Christie to put a hot poker to Obama's butt, I thought he did what he was supposed to do," about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's keynote address at the Republican National Convention, liberal commentators were quick to criticize the remarks, saying Barbour was essentially calling for a branding of the nation's first black president. Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall tweeted, "Archaic klan torture techniques."


10. Anger references
When Mitt Romney said that President Obama should take his "campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago," MSNBC co-host Toure heard a racial diatribe. "He's really trying to use racial coding and access some really deep stereotypes about the angry black man. This is part of the playbook against Obama, the 'otherization,' he's not like us. ... You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we've been trained to fear."

Despite Barack Obama's view that his presidency would repair relations with the Muslim world, America's standing on the Arab street has never been lower.

1. Egypt policy
The administration has been consistently one-step behind events in crafting an Egypt policy. The White House's initial backing of President Hosni Mubarak lost any support it might have gained from the crowds in Tahrir Square. Then the United States shocked its Mideast allies by pulling support from the Egyptian leader. The United States is now faced with a hostile regime in Cairo, where a Muslim Brotherhood-headed government could hardly be bothered to act when a mob tried to overrun the U.S. embassy.

2. Iran nuclear program
During his 2008 campaign, Obama posited that the Iranian leadership was bellicose mostly in reaction to misguided policies of the Bush administration. Unlike his predecessor, he would be willing to sit down and talk with the mullahs, confident that his powers of persuasion would convince them to lay down their nuclear ambitions. Four years later, Obama seems has been more concerned about cutting back our nuclear arsenal than trying to stop Tehran.

3. Diplomatic security
How could a U.S. ambassador be at an unsecured consulate in a hostile location in the Arab world on the anniversary of September 11? Christopher Stevens' murder by a terror mob need could have been avoided if the U.S. heeded the warnings that violence was afoot. The State Department had even issued a travel alert to Americans about going to Libya, yet the consulate had minimal security.

4. Libya explanation
Long after the entire world knew that the strike on the Libyan consulate was a terrorist attack, the Obama administration continued its laughable explanation that the assault was solely the result of a spontaneous mob enraged by an anti-Islamic film. As Sen. John McCain pointed out, protesters don't usually bring rocket-propelled grenades to a political rally.

5. Disdain for Israel
The one ally the United States could always count on in the Middle East—Israel—has consistently gotten the shaft from the White House. Obama has shown nothing if not disdain for the Jewish state, at one point offending Israeli officials by urging a return to 1967 borders. Now Obama can't even find time in his schedule for a face-to-face meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

6. Leading from behind in Libya
Hillary Clinton asked, "How can this happen in a country we helped to liberate?" when the U.S. ambassador was murdered. The answer goes back to the method of liberation—Obama's sanctioning of NATO air strikes. Little regard was given to the make-up of the rebels that finally steamed-rolled to victory who are vying for power.

7. Iran protests
Before the Arab Spring, there were the Iranian protests of 2009, where any assistance from Washington, could have helped to tip the balance of power away from the hard-line Islamist leaders. Instead, Obama was still convinced of his own power to sweet-talk Ahmadinejad and he left the nascent democracy movement out to dry.

8. Syria muddle
That the Syrian uprising has turned into a crisis reminiscent of the Cold War, with Russia and China teaming against the West to support the Assad regime, is a sign that Obama's "reset" with the Kremlin is headed to the dustbin of history. The Obama administration truly is leading from behind in Syria, with no real strategy to influence the outcome, deal with its aftermath or, mostly importantly, advance U.S. interests.

9. Hurt sensibilities
After the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was breached by an unruly mob, the diplomatic staff put out a statement condemning "the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims"—referring to the anti-Muslim film the crowd was protesting. While Obama later distanced himself from the statement, it is not surprising that an embassy under his watch would offer such drivel, as the placating of Muslims seems to be engrained in the administration's DNA.

10. Cairo hubris
The hubris of Barack Obama is astonishing. Who else would actually believe that a speech to the Arab world would somehow persuade Muslims everywhere to set aside their hatred of America? Yet Obama's key strategic initiative in the Middle East was going to Cairo in June 2009, where he sought a "new beginning" with Islam. The speech seems almost quaint today, talking about his own common bond to the faith during his childhood in Indonesia, where now mobs are burning him in effigy.

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Top 10 Obama Anti-Business, Anti-Job Actions

By: Human Events
10/6/2012 05:41 AM

President Obama loves to complain that he inherited an economic mess. That may be true, but his wrong-headed policies have only made matters worse, taking actions that hurt businesses and stunt job growth.


1. Obamacare costs

Obamacare will impose a new cost on many small businesses that currently do not provide health insurance for their employees and will pressure many to shift workers to part-time status to get below the measure's "50-worker" loophole. It also means all companies will have to re-evaluate their health care coverage and make changes to come into compliance with federal guidelines or pay fines of up to $3,000 per worker. The Congressional Budget Office says the bill will lead to 800,000 fewer jobs by 2020.


2. Small business tax hikes

The expiration of the Bush tax cuts for individuals making over $200,000, or families making $250,000, will hit many small business owners, an increase that will hit as those same owners are still trying to dig out of the recession. Considering that small businesses are the main creator of jobs in the nation, every dollar taken from them in tax hikes is that many fewer dollars available for expanding employment.


3. EPA's burdensome regulations

Regulations promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency put a tremendous burden on businesses, making job creation more difficult. The agency's rules on air quality standards are curtailing energy produced from coal-fired electrical plants, causing a rise in electricity prices and making scarce a major resource that is abundant in America.


4. Keystone XL Pipeline postponed

Even Obama's union supporters expressed outrage over his decision to indefinitely postpone construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would transport oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. The president's decision cost thousands of jobs and lost a possible source of energy from North America, as China was soon knocking on Canada's door. But at least Obama's Hollywood environmental backers were placated.


5. Boeing battle

When Boeing wanted to build a new $750 million assembly plant in South Carolina, creating thousand of jobs in the process, the National Labor Relations board stepped in, saying the move violated federal law because S.C. is a right-to-work state. The board, whose balance tipped toward labor with Obama appointees, finally dropped the case after the union representing Boeing workers withdrew its objections.


6. Capital-gains 'fairness'

When he was running for president in 2008, Obama said he would increase the capital gains rate, even if it meant bringing in less tax revenue for the government, out of the notion of "fairness." He is still on the same quest as the expiration of the Bush tax cuts would increase the capital gains tax rate by 33 percent. This time "fairness" will likely mean hurting the middle class, as the hike looms in January as part of the so-called taxmaggedon that could tip the economy back into a recession.


7. Off-shore drilling moratorium

After the BP oil spill in 2010, Obama placed a moratorium on deep-water drilling, devastating the off-shore oil and gas industry in the gulf coast states. While Obama seems to constantly throw up road blocks that inhibit development of U.S. energy resources—including slowing the permit process for new oil drilling sites—after his moratorium, he gave assistance to off-shore drilling efforts in Brazil, creating jobs there, not here


8. Dodd-Frank 'financial reform'

By signing the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" measure into law, Obama placed yet another heavy cost on the business community. Passed in 2010 without a single Republican vote in the House, the measure mandates, among many requirements, an enormous paperwork burden that will mainly help employ accountants and lawyers.

Interesting that the politicians with their names attached to this bill did as much as any to protect and encourage Fannie Mae's contribution to the 2008 financial meltdown.


9. Anti-business rhetoric

Obama's "You-didn't-build-that" mentality diminishes the accomplishments of business entrepreneurs while exalting the role of government. His class-warfare political strategy includes demonizing Wall Street, insurance companies, bankers, pharmaceuticals, Big Oil, and "millionaires and billionaires." The presidency is a "Bully Pulpit" and Obama's misuse of it only gives ammunition to the anti-capitalist Occupy crowd.


10. Business climate uncertainty

U.S. companies are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash but are not spending it to expand business or hire new workers because of the uncertainty about what government is going to do next. With tax hikes looming, along with rising health care costs associated with Obamacare, and the constant strangulation by bureaucratic red tape, corporations are in a waiting mode before opening their spigot of cash—waiting until we get a new president.

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Top 10 examples of media malpractice

By: Human Events
10/13/2012 06:00 AM


1. Giving Obama a pass on Libya
The attack on the American consulate in Benghazi was the first successful terror action directly against United States' interests since 9/11. The media hardly noticed that the president had been skipping national security briefings before the attack, or that he flew off the next day for a Las Vegas fundraiser. By the time U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's laughable assertion that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim film was discredited, and reports surfaced of previous security issues at the consulate, including ignored warnings, the media had moved on to more important things.


2. Economic unreality
Suddenly, the mainstream media are reporting that the country is becoming more optimistic as the economy gains strength. The problem with that meme is that it is based on a falsehood. The reality remains dire as a record number of Americans are not participating in the labor force, income levels have dropped, gas prices are up sharply, and economic growth is anemic and further weakening. With the same data under a Republican administration, the media would doing stories on the homeless crisis and impoverished children.


3. Fixation on Romney's embassy statement
The media went apoplectic when the Romney campaign criticized a statement released by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo after a mob breached its security. The statement, deploring insults against Islam, was later rejected by the White House but the storyline was set in stone—Romney gaffed. The big three TV networks spent 20 times the amount of air-time that day on Romney's statement than the combined coverage of Obama's Mideast policy, the death of a U.S. ambassador, security in Benghazi, and mobs protesting America around the world.


4. Creating racism meme
MSNBC hosts are taking in the lead in creating the impression that Republicans are so racist that they merely need to say certain "dog whistles" that their followers will know are coded terms. So we are informed that saying "Chicago," referring to the president playing "golf," opposing the explosion of "food stamps," or being concerned about "welfare fraud," are really sly reminders to the party faithful that Barack Obama is black. So insidious are these dog-whistles, that the president, according to one MSNBC host, fell victim during the first debate when he refused to come out swinging because he feared he would be labeled an "angry black man."


5. Vetting differential
The media are leaving no stone unturned in its vetting of Mitt Romney, probing his high-school antics and his wife's horse therapy, fixating on his Bain Capital success, and turning the hunt for his tax records into a search for the Holy Grail. After four years in office, Obama remains a man of mystery as the media meekly accepted the narrative in his own autobiographies and then failed to follow up even on obvious stories. Who paid for his pricey schools? What about his school transcripts? How much cocaine did he use?


6. Debate 'lies'
After Romney demolished Obama in the first debate, the media exchanged talking points with the president's campaign and decided to go with the "Romney-lied" explanation of why their favored candidate tanked. While Obama seemed genuinely flummoxed when Romney insisted he did not have a $5 trillion tax cut plan, the media declared that and every other assertion made by Romney during the debate as untruthful.


7. Silent on U.N. rebuff
Obama decided to ignore pleas for bilateral meetings from world leaders gathered in New York for the annual United Nations gathering and instead booked an appearance on "The View." Obama even rebuffed Benjamin Netanyahu's urgent request for talks as Iran nears the final stage of its nuclear quest, while declaring himself "eye candy" for the ladies on the show. Imagine the howls in the press if it had been President Bush. But Obama's outrageous foreign policy blunder received tame media attention.


8. Romney's foreign trip 'gaffes'
During Romney's summer trip overseas, the media was all about finding gaffes even when none existed. His statement in London that Olympic security was "disconcerting"
was treated as the gaffe of the century, even though British newspapers were full of stories expressing the same concerns. In Israel, his "gaffe" was offending Palestinians by correctly saying their culture contributed to their problems. By the time he got to Poland, reporters were shouting "What about your gaffes?" during a solemn ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider.


9. Gaffes differential
The same media outlets that ran Dan Quayle out of town for misspelling potato and turned every George W. Bush verbal misque into grounds for impeachment turn a blind eye to the gaffes that tumble out of the Democratic ticket. Biden is treated as like an endearing uncle, whose embarrassing statements are met with affectionate understanding. And any Obama rogue remark is usually conveniently ignored.

10. Mythical Obama
Ever since Obama burst on the scene, the media has portrayed him as a wonderful orator and a brilliant thinker. Aided by his trusty teleprompter and the lapdog mainstream media, he was able to keep up the charade throughout his presidency. That is until the first debate, when he stammered his way through ponderous answers and the nation finally saw what conservatives already knew—this president is a lightweight.

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Top 10 reasons to vote Obama out of office

By: Human Events
10/27/2012 05:58 AM


Bring this list to the attention of undecided voters to help them make up their mind that it is, indeed, time for a change. Any doubts - watch this video:




1. Jobs not being created
Don't let the official 7.8 percent unemployment rate for September fool you; work-force participation is at a record low and 23 million American are looking for work. Ten times as many people have dropped out of the work force during Obama's term than have found a job. His last attempt at helping the unemployed—the 2009 stimulus package—cost nearly a trillion dollars with minimal impact on creating actual jobs.


2. Debt crisis spiraling
Under Obama, the nation has accumulated nearly $6 trillion in debt over four years and a second term would likely add more. The cost of financing the national debt will quickly skyrocket as interest rates rise. Obama's only plan to staunch the bleeding is to tax the rich. But even if he succeeds in letting the Bush tax cuts expire for families with incomes over $250,000, the annual deficit of $1.2 trillion would only fall to $1.12 trillion.


3. Obamacare outrages
Obama's signature achievement—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—is more unpopular today than it was when he signed it into law. Obamacare adds to the deficit, while raising taxes on Americans of all stripes, even while harming job creation. Many families will lose their current health care coverage and surveys of doctors show many will flee the profession.


4. Foreign Policy Unraveling (Big Time)
The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi—and the administration's incompetence after—is a dramatic example of the unraveling of Obama's entire approach to foreign policy. Now Muslim mobs are protesting the United States around the world, apparently unswayed by Obama's Cairo outreach. Add his ill-fated Russia "reset," and his snub of world leaders at the United Nations and the result is a foreign policy with not a single positive achievement.


5. Economic anemia
We didn't expect a rapid recovery after the recession, but we're past a point where the economy should have begun to show steady growth as businesses become more confident, hire workers and consumer spending increases. But growth this year is under 2 percent. With crushing burdens and uncertainties heaped onto businesses—from Dodd-Frank and Obamacare to EPA regulations and tax hikes—Obama has managed to defy the business cycle.


6. Class warfare rhetoric
Obama has taken class warfare to a new level, attacking the successful as being greedy and heartless for not paying their fare share. He demonizes bankers, Wall Street and demands that the "millionaires and billionaires" be taxed at higher rates. The irony of it all is that his policies will do the most harm to the middle class, with his job killing programs, and small businesses, by hiking their taxes.


7. Partisan Politics
Unlike Presidents Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, and G.W. Bush who all reached across the aisle to secure legislation with bipartisan support, Obama has tried to ram through his agenda without any help, as many of his major initiatives failed to attract a single GOP vote. For a president who promised change, he has only increased its harshness by constantly attacking the opposition.


8. No more Biden
After his debate with Paul Ryan, Vice President Joe Biden's "regular-guy" schtick is wearing thin. His smirking and laughing, when the nation wanted to hear a serious debate on the issues, was demeaning to the office, and makes the idea of "Crazy Joe" being a heartbeat away from the presidency a sobering thought. We can only hope that with a Romney-Ryan victory, Biden will go ahead and get a one-way Amtrak ticket back to Delaware, or better yet, Scranton, Pa.


9. Clean house of incompetents
It's not only the anticipation of Biden's departure from office that gives cheer, but finally the nation can get rid of the whole gang that couldn't shoot straight. From White House spokesman Jay Carney and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's cloudy account of the Libya attack to Attorney General Eric Holder's outrageous obfuscation on Fast and Furious, we've seen quite enough of Chicago-style politics.


10. No plan for future
Just as Obama has found it hard to run on his record, his constant attacks on Romney mask the fact that he doesn't have much of a plan to turn things around. A president's normal route for pushing an agenda is often contained in his annual budget request to Congress. Obama's spending blueprint is such a joke that every year it is the Republicans that introduce it as a bill and then both sides of the aisle unanimously vote against it. His only plan is to tax and spend the U.S. into oblivion, with future generations crushed by a mountain of debt.[/font][/size]

TOP TEN

By: Human Events
11/3/2012 04:48 AM

Election Day finally arriving, we offer this list of reasons to vote for Mitt Romney.


1. Job creation

With 23 million Americans looking for work, job creation is the key to get the economy moving again. Romney will ease regulatory and tax burdens that inhibit businesses from hiring new workers.  His experience in the business world where budgets are met—as opposed to Obama's community organizing background—makes him the kind of chief executive that can get the job done.


2. Lower taxes

A second Obama term will bring higher taxes rates for all Americans, increases in capital gains rates, tax deduction limitations, and scores of taxes associated with Obamacare—precisely the prescription for a double-digit recession. In contrast, Romney's plan to reduce rates, while closing loopholes, will help boost economic growth.


3. Economic growth

A Romney win will go a long way to reassure businesses, which are sitting on a trillion dollars in cash reserves, that it is safe to make investments and expand their operations without Big Government stepping in. His policies on energy and trade will help boost economic growth. By contrast, just the enactment of Obama's crushing tax increases will snuff out any hope that the United States sees a robust recovery.


4. Entitlement reform

Romney's selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate signaled that he was ready for a serious discussion about saving entitlement programs, where costs are spiraling out of control. Obama never offered a plan during his four years, ignored his own debt commission's recommendations, and added another costly entitlement program with Obamacare. Social Security and Medicare are at risk unless a bold, daring approach is tried—like the Ryan plan.


5. Apppointments

As bad as Obama's Cabinet has been during his first term (exhibit No. 1 and 2: Energy Secretary Steven Chu and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson), a second-term will only get worse as officials begin to flee and Democratic hacks and retreads are called upon (think Secretary of State John Kerry). Imagine instead a Cabinet with successful businessmen and governors, with track records of creating jobs and successfully living within a budget.


6. Repeal Obamacare

Romney has promised to do all he can to prevent the implementation of Obamacare. If the measure continues to be enacted, families will lose health coverage, doctors will flee the profession, taxes will go up, jobs will be lost, and the national debt will climb. It is a bill that the American people never wanted and this election is likely their last chance to stop its encroachment.


7. Military

The agreement to avert the debt ceiling crisis last year included an automatic sequestration of hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon funding that will endanger America's national security by crippling the readiness of the armed forces. Democrats have long eyed the military budget and would like nothing better than to cut it down to size in order to have funding available for social programs and wealth redistribution.


8. Foreign affairs

Obama's foreign policy is unraveling, with his outreach to the Muslim world disintegrating into an anti-American frenzy, as Iran marches steadily toward nuclear capability, and with allies snubbed and enemies emboldened. Romney will make sure that America is respected throughout the world and pursue a foreign policy that is in sync with the United States' national interest rather than the dream of a new world order.


9. Bipartisanship

Obama promised a new era of bipartisanship when he ran for office in 2008, but advanced legislation without reaching across the aisle to include Republicans and added to Washington's caustic tone with the constant demonization of his opponents. By contrast, Romney had a track record during his tenure as Massachusetts governor of working with a Democratic legislature to advance measures with votes from both parties.


10. Not Obama

The nation is weary after the four years of ideologically driven incompetence that was evident throughout Obama's first term. With Obama having no plan other than more of the same—more taxes, more spending, more regulations, more government—we know what a second term will look like. While Romney is worthy of the presidency based on his background and demeanor, the best thing he has going for him is that he is not Barack Obama.

18,000 jobs lost because of this crappy Bakers Union!!!

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          Top 10 Election Bright Spots

By: Human Events
11/17/2012 06:00 AM


1. House still in GOP hands
Republicans held onto most of the gains made in the 2010 midterm elections, enabling conservatives to keep Obama from imposing a radical agenda on the nation in his second term. House Speaker John Boehner signaled as much, saying on election night that Americans sent a clear message by keeping the House in GOP hands. "With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates," Boehner said.

2. Popular vote still close
With a 50.5 percent to 48 percent popular vote deficit, Romney outperformed McCain's percentage in 2008 by several points. America is still close to a 50-50 nation, at least keeping Republicans in the ball-game. After four more years of liberalism, it shouldn't be hard to find more recruits to switch sides.

3. Ballot initiatives
Voters backed conservative-oriented ballot initiatives in states across the nation, denying race-based policies in Oklahoma, turning down benefits to illegal immigrants in Montana, rejecting assisted suicide in Massachusetts, defeating tax increase measures in Washington, Missouri, South Dakota and Arizona, and backing parental notification for abortions in Montana.

4. Union setback
Voters in Michigan rejected a ballot initiative that would have enshrined collective-bargaining as a constitutional right for unions. The amendment would have blocked right-to-work laws, which declare union membership cannot be required as a condition for employment. Coming after recent defeats for public sector unions in Wisconsin, labor had hoped to use the Michigan measure to regain momentum.

5. Nebraska Senate pickup
The only Democratic Senate seat gained by Republicans was in Nebraska where state Sen. Deb Fischer defeated former senator and governor Bob Kerrey for the seat vacated by retiring Sen. Ben Nelson. While Nebraska should be a reliably red state, Fischer was a surprise winner in the GOP primary, defeating better-known candidates with the help of a Sarah Palin endorsement, and Kerrey was trying to make a political comeback after a decade out of office.

6. North Carolina governor
Former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory handily defeated Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton, 55 percent to 43 percent, to become the first Republican governor in North Carolina in 24 years. With the Tar Heel State pickup, Republicans now control gubernatorial seats in 30 states, the highest number for either party in 12 years. North Carolina Republicans also made gains in Congress and took control of the state's general assembly.

7. State legislature victories
Conservatives made significant advances on the state level, extending gains from the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans won back control of the state legislature in Wisconsin, won supermajorities in Tennessee, made gains in the Kansas legislature, and won control of the Arkansas state house for the first time since Reconstruction.

8. Rep. Pete Stark defeated
Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) was a victim of California's new system of pitting the top two primary vote-getters as general election opponents regardless of party, losing to a fellow Democrat after 40 years in the House. Stark wielded power from his perch on the House Ways and Means Committee and was instrumental in crafting Obamacare. He was also a reliable liberal, belonging to the Congressional Progressive Caucus and was the first openly atheist member of Congress. He was among the more boorish members of the House, committing a lengthy list of gaffes and outrageous statements. Good riddance.

9. Sheriff Joe re-elected
Residents of Maricopa County, Ariz., declared what they thought about the Justice Department's crusade against Joe Arpaio, voting the "Toughest Sheriff in America" to office for the sixth time. Arpaio, 80, handily defeated Phoenix police veteran Paul Penzone, who had strong support from the state's Latino community which opposes Arpaio's tough stance against illegal immigration.   

10. Youth vote slippage
There is a glimmer of hope in how the nation's youth voted. Voters aged 18 to 29 defied projections and turned out in waves equal to their support of Obama in 2008, and once again help to propel him into the White House. But look at the numbers. Whereas in 2008, Obama received 66 percent of the youth vote, in 2012 that had slipped to 60 percent—a hopeful sign that the nation's youth are slowly catching on that the president's policies will keep them jobless and burdened with debt.

Guns & Patriots - Top 10 Concealed Carry Guns

By: Mark Walters
12/7/2010 03:01 AM
http://www.humanevents.com/2010/12/07/top-10-concealed-carry-guns/

This article is sure to generate a ton of emotion and that is a good thing.  A "top ten" list of anything is going to be helpful to some, controversial to many and just plain flat out wrong to others.  No matter what I put on the list or where I may rank it, someone is certain to tell me I'm right just as someone else is certain to tell me I'm wrong.  (That's what makes America great)!

So, here we go.

As far as I'm concerned, in order for a concealed carry gun to be effective it must meet certain criteria.  A CCW gun must:

4.     Be simple to use.  Point and click, squeeze and bang.  No levers, locks, bells or whistles.  Nothing that makes you think beyond pulling a trigger.  This is a gun.  It should be simple and you should not have to worry about running a "system" when your life or the lives of your loved ones are on the line and immediate action is required.

3.    Power.  All guns are powerful.  Don't believe me?  Stand in front of your little 22 LR and have someone pull the trigger.  What?  I didn't think so.  This is one area where I will challenge conventional wisdom.  No one wants to get shot...by ANY gun of ANY caliber, especially criminals.  Yes, you should always carry the largest and most powerful caliber that you can comfortably carry and shoot...if that happens to be a .22, good for you and BAD for whoever is on the receiving end!

2.    Reliability.  You can carry the coolest custom gun in the world but if your choice of handgun doesn't go POW when your booger hook squeezes the bang switch or the shot goes wide left like a pee-wee football field goal attempt, it is worthless.  Your gun MUST be reliable and by reliable I mean reliable right out of the box!

1.    Comfort.   This is another area where I will also challenge conventional wisdom.  We've all heard the words that a gun isn't meant to be comfortable, it is meant to be comforting.  That is old school.  Nowadays, it can be both.   It is no longer necessary to lug around a 2 lb. hunk of steel with only 7 rounds.  (Unless you want to)

Here's my personal list of top ten favorites:

10.    Glock Model 36
I used to carry this gun religiously.  In fact I pulled it on two miscreants who tried to approach my vehicle at an intersection in November of 2002 on a balmy Tampa, Florida morning at 6:20 am.   I never had to fire a shot.  Thank God.  Slim and sleek, the 36 makes carrying the .45 ACP just a tad bit more comfortable.


9.    Kel-Tec P3AT
The 380 is not my optimum choice of self-defense caliber.  Having said that and following the criteria above (#3 in particular), the Kel-Tec P3AT is an excellent choice for meeting all 4 criteria and I have carried it on and off over the years.  Why is the Ruger LCP or Taurus TCP not on this list?  They are, you just can't see them because the Kel-Tec P3AT is kind of like the grandfather of the .380 craze.  Consider it to represent all of the above in the small framed, polymer 380's.


8.    Kahr PM9
The Kahr PM9 is a great little shooter, has perfect weight and balance and it's a Kahr, for crying out loud.  It's as reliable as the day is long, doesn't need any fluff and buff and it feels good in my hand.  Maybe it doesn't fit in yours.  If not, replace number 9 here with whatever you think works best!


7.    Glock Model 19
Sticking with the 9mm as we work our way through the list, the Glock 19 is a perfect fit of beautiful, ugly, fit and balance.  This 9mm is a wonderful shooter with easily manageable recoil and excellent shot follow-up.  No wonder it's one of the most popular CCW guns in the world.


6.    Springfield XD Compact .45
I like this gun.  Smaller frames can make the .45 ACP feel like a real bull coming out of the gate but to me this gun handles the power of the formidable .45 cartridges very well.  It's a great match of balance and power in a medium package that is extremely accurate outside the normal defensive range of 7-10 feet.


5.    Smith and Wesson M&P full size .40 S&W
I LOVE these S&W M&P's.  I've owned and carried the 9mm and the .40 in both compact and full size frames and I gotta tell ya...the reason this gun outshines other manufacturers of similar size and caliber is the grip.  The interchangeable back-straps on a gun this size, for someone like me with smaller hands make shooting this gun a joy!  It's a natural pointer and it just plain fits my hand.


4.    Glock Model 22 Gen4
Not a small gun by any stretch but the new Gen 4 grip fits my hand perfectly.  This gun rides with me whenever I am able to carry a full size handgun.  Today's holster designs enable carry of this (or any other) larger frame gun quite comfortably either inside or outside the waistband.   The proven stopping power of the .40 cal make this a great choice for a full size CCW gun.


3.    Glock Model 23
Slightly smaller than the model 22, the Glock 23 is a "hands down" winner in my opinion.  Not to mention it has that loveable Glock "pretty and ugly" thing going on that I like so much and for me is a perfect fit for "anytime" carry.


2.    Smith and Wesson Model M&P 340 CT revolver (.357/.38 Special +P)
I have carried this gun for two years.  This little snub-nosed revolver is the finest J-Frame ever made.  357 Magnum or .38 S&W Special +P, the choice is yours.  For me, the .357 is brutal and flat out no fun to shoot.  Even in the .38 this gun bites BUT it is manageable, accurate to some distance with a little practice and enough of a deterrent to stop a threat.  Scandium Alloy frame and Crimson Trace grips with the XS Tritium sights make this gun an absolute "must have".  Pricey, but worth saving for!


1.    North American Arms NAA .22 Magnum Mini-Revolver
What, are you serious?  You bet I am.  A concealed carry handgun does you absolutely NO good if it isn't carried!  The NAA .22 Magnum Mini-revolvers eliminate every possible excuse you can think of for not carrying some type of personal defense gun on your person at all times.  It fits ALL possible attire from a bathing suit to full winter garb.  No, the .22 magnum is not my favorite choice of defensive caliber however the NAA .22 Magnum Mini in my pocket under ANY possible scenario certainly beats the hell out of my main carry gun in the glove box or safe.  In fact, this gun should be on your person even when you ARE carrying your main gun.  Never again do you have an excuse to be unarmed...ever.  Everyone should own one of these.

So there you have it.  As I've mentioned on the air many times...I don't want to get shot with ANY caliber and logic dictates that any caliber in your pocket is better than NO caliber in your pocket.

Rule number one to carrying a gun for self-defense is to carry a gun. Whatever method of carry you choose, for whatever lifestyle you lead, you have a responsibility to your community, your loved ones and yourself to be armed and capable of defending yourself and your family.

Whatever you choose to carry, remember to carry on, carry often and carry everywhere!

This what I carry most of the time... Warph
(http://www.ruger.com/products/sr22PistolDE/images/3601.jpg)

Catalog Number: SR22-CT | Model Number: 3601 | Caliber: 22 LR

Slide Material: Aluminum Slide
Finish: Black Anodize
Grip Frame: Black Polymer
Sights: Adjustable 3-Dot
Barrel Length: 3.50"
Overall Length: 6.40"
Height: 4.90"
Width: 1.29"
Weight: 18.25 oz. Capacity: 10
Twist: 1:16" RH Grooves: 6
MA Approved & Certified: No CA Approved: No
Feature: Crimson Trace® Rail Master™ Laser      

      What's wrong with my Browning Hi-power?

Quote from: Bullwinkle on December 28, 2012, 09:15:02 AM
      What's wrong with my Browning Hi-power?

If it's a 9 mm, I've handled a few Hi-Powers and liked the way they felt in the hand, not big square and blocky like most hi-cap nines.  They have a very elegant style and look... sweet handgun.  I'd take a Hi-Power over a big fugly-ugly Glock anyday.  The only con I remember is the trigger-pull tho' I imagine a good 'smith could fix that.  I wouldn't recommend +p ammo tho'... too much recoil, more muzzle flip, more flash and in the long run, it will wear out your handgun with regular use.  Bullets will also penetrate bystanders on the other side of the wall after exiting your target.  Ambitious lawyers will use your choice of overpressure rounds to profile you as a reckless murderous mall ninja.

Now, if its a .40 Hi-Power.... sorry, don't like it much.  Doesn't have the balance of the 9mm, kicks more than my old .45 1911.

       It is a 9mm, and I agree with you as to it's style vs. the Glocks. It does need to be cleaned more often to operate smoothly. I keep a clip of hollow points and one of full metal jackets with it at all times.

As the nation reeled from the Dec. 14 killing of 20 first graders and six adults in Newtown, Conn., religious leaders sought to console a stunned public and to discern religion's role in future debates about mental health and gun control. The No. 1 U.S. religion story in December 2012 was, without a doubt, the school attack and the mournful search for meaning that follows. However, before the shooting, professional journalists who cover religion voted on the year's other significant religious events.

The U.S. Catholic bishops' opposition to national health care legislation mandating contraception coverage was ranked the No. 1 religion story of 2012 by members of the Religion Newswriters Association.

Related to the top story, the top religion newsmaker was Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who became the point man for Catholic objections to required coverage of contraception, sterilization and morning after drugs in Obamacare.

http://planetprinceton.com/


Religion journalists selected the top ten religion stories of the year:

(via Journalists Vote for Contraception Fight as Top 2012 U.S. Religion Story)

1. U.S. Catholic bishops lead opposition to Obamacare requirement that insurance coverage for contraception be provided for employees. The government backs down a bit, but not enough to satisfy the opposition.

2. A Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey shows that "nones" is the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, rising to 19.6 percent of the population.

3. The circulation of an anti-Islam film trailer, "Innocence of Muslims," causes unrest in several countries, leading to claims that it inspired the fatal attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya. President Obama, at the U.N., calls for toleration. . .  of blasphemy, and respect as a two-way street.

4. Mitt Romney's Mormon faith turns out to be a virtual non-issue for white evangelical voters, who support him more strongly than they did John McCain, in the U.S. presidential race.

5. Monsignor William Lynn of Philadelphia becomes the first senior Catholic official in the U.S. to be found guilty of covering up priestly child abuse; later Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Mo., becomes the first bishop to be found guilty of it.

6. The Vatican criticizes the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group of U.S. nuns, alleging they haven't supported church teaching on abortion, sexuality or women's ordination.

7. Voters OK same-sex marriage in Maine, Maryland and Washington, bringing the total approving to nine states and the District of Columbia. Also, Minnesota defeats a ban on same-sex marriage after North Carolina approves one.

8. The Episcopal Church overwhelmingly adopts a trial ritual for blessing same-sex couples. Earlier, the United Methodists fail to vote on approving gay clergy, and the Presbyterians (USA) vote to study, rather than sanction same-sex marriage ceremonies.

9. Six people are killed and three wounded at worship in a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee. The shooter, an Army veteran killed by police, is described as a neo-Nazi.

10. Southern Baptist Convention elects without opposition its first black president, the Rev. Fred Luter of New Orleans.



Votes for the 2012 Religion Newsmaker of the Year ranked the five potential candidates in this order:

1. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York becames a point man for Catholic objections to required coverage of contraception, sterilization and morning after drugs in Obamacare. But Dolan also took heat from the right when he invites the President to the traditional Al Smith Dinner in New York.

2. Fred Luter, first black president of the sprawling Southern Baptist Convention, who is expected to help the SBC become more racially diverse.

3. Mark Basseley Youssef, an Egypt-born Christian whose work has been condemned by the Coptic Church, provoked rioting in the Muslim world with his film trailer "Innocence of Muslims." He was jailed in California on probation violations.

4. Mormon voters, who enthusiastically backed one of their own for president, acted in ways that helped overcome suspicions of them by other faiths.

5. Pro football quarterback Tim Tebow, whose book about his faith was on the best-seller list, inspired the term "Tebowing" for kneeling in prayer and led to polarized discussions about the role of faith in sports.

The Top 10 poll of Religion Newswriters Association members took place Dec. 11- 15, 2012, in a confidential, online ballot. More than 100 members of the organization responded. RNA has conducted the poll for nearly 40 years.

The Religion Newswriters Association is the world's oldest and largest professional association for journalists who write about religion. Through an Annual Convention, contests, and the world's most extensive list of resources, RNA remains the global leader in helping journalists cover religion with balance, accuracy and insight. RNA is housed at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.


What can you conclude about the state of American religion from this list?  What does it leave out?  What do you think are the most significant religious or spiritual developments of 2012?

....Warph