President Obama’s Allies do More Damage in Days Than GOP Did in Four Years

In a matter of days, the Obama administration has done something that the president’s political opponents have failed to do over four and a half years: inflicted serious damage to President Obama’s public standing.

Obama has throughout his presidency aggressively combated GOP criticism — on issues large and small — mocking the attacks as political theater short on facts.

But with his own administration now embroiled in a flurry of controversies, including IRS mistreatment of conservative groups and the Justice Department’s secret monitoring of journalists’ phones, the president is coming across not as a forceful defender but as a bystander who claims he didn’t know what the people who work for him were doing. That posture, analysts said, will fuel public cynicism toward government and stoke fears of a White House in crisis.

“The Benghazi, IRS and Associated Press stories have a common thread: They deal with how policy is administered,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who focuses on White House communication. “Management has been a weak point for the president from early in his administration. That is why these stories hit so hard. He has not been ahead of events but rather has had to rely on news organizations to inform him of what is going on in his own administration.”

But administration officials on Wednesday were still trying to deflect blame from the president, despite a battering in the media and on Capitol Hill.

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Backlash Against Common Core

Photo Credit: James SarmientoCommon Core means government agencies will gather and store all sorts of private information on every schoolchild into a longitudinal database from birth through all levels of schooling, plus giving government the right to share and exchange this nosy information with other government and private agencies, thus negating the federal law that now prohibits that. This type of surveillance and control of individuals is the mark of a totalitarian government.

Common Core reminds us of how Communist China gathered nosy information on all its schoolchildren, stored it in manila folders called dangans and then turned the file over to the kid’s employer when he left school.

The New York Times once published a picture of a giant Chinese warehouse containing hundreds of thousands of these folders. That was in the pre-Internet era when information was stored on paper; now data collection and storage are efficiently managed on computers in a greater invasion of privacy.

Common Core is encrusted with lies. It is not, as advertised, “state” written; it is a national project created in secret without any input from teachers or state legislatures. It is not “internationally benchmarked”; that never happened.

The readings assigned in the CC English standards are 50 percent “informational” texts instead of great American and English literature and classics. The result is that CC standards are very political.

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The Grand Old Poseurs

Last week, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ostentatiously announced their intention to fight implementation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). They sent a letter to the President decrying the way IPAB will “impact America’s seniors … in the absence of the democratic process.” Sadly, the exercise was a charade. McConnell and Boehner know perfectly well that Obama has no intention of setting up this controversial rationing board until after 2015.

IPAB, as you will recall, was created by the authors of Obamacare to do the dirty work of cutting Medicare costs. It will be, for all intents and purposes, a death panel composed of 15 unelected apparatchiks whose method of “cost control” will be old-fashioned government rationing. It will simply deny payment for expensive medical procedures without which the lives of many seniors will be forfeit. However, as David Hogberg pointed out last month, the President has made no move to implement this integral component of “reform.”

Why not? Well, IPAB comes into play only if Medicare costs increase at a certain rate above the Consumer Price Index. Perhaps Obama had a presentiment that the program’s costs, which have been out of control for decades, would miraculously stop increasing at their usual rate. As it happens, that is precisely what his new CMS actuary has reported. On April 30, acting actuary Paul Spitalnic advised his boss that “the projected 5-year Medicare per capita growth rate” won’t hit the trigger amount that would require the intervention of IPAB.

This memo was sent 9 days before Boehner and McConnell sent their meaningless missive. They have no doubt been planning for some time to make IPAB an issue in the 2014 midterms, and were caught flat-footed when our wily President and his creatures at HHS contrived to put off implementation until after those crucial elections. In other words, these two Republican “leaders” have once again been outmaneuvered by President Obama and are now attempting to obscure that pathetic reality with empty words and impotent posturing.

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Obama’s Missile Defense Giveaway Feeding Impeachment Movement

As many Restoring Liberty readers will remember, in March of last year Obama was caught on a hot mic promising Putin stooge Dmitry Medvedev that after his “last election,” he would have far more flexibility on missile defense issues. Medvedev obediently responded that he’d “transmit this information to Vladmimir.”

At the time, Charles Hurt, of the Washington Times, observed – tongue in cheek – that this proved Obama was not “Kenyan after all. He’s KGB.” Hurt went on to note – more seriously – that the hot mic event revealed Obama “plotting with the leader of one of our oldest adversaries to thwart the will of American voters and advance the interests of enemies who want to see the world’s last remaining beacon of freedom finally destroyed.”

And what exactly did Obama promise Russia? Obama whispered, “On these issues — but particularly missile defense — this can be solved.”

Fast forward to May 2013. Obama has gone through his “last election.” Apparently, he’s now making good on his 2012 “secret” promise to the Russians. According to the Associated Press, the “head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency says that the Obama administration has discussed declassifying key data on U.S. missile defense in order to provide it to Russia.”

Why? Purportedly, Obama is “exploring how to ease Russian concerns that the U.S. missile defense shield is aimed at countering Russia’s nuclear arsenal.”

So the plan is to give away critical missile defense data to a nuclear power that is in bed with Iran’s Ahmadinejad as well as other radical US enemies throughout the world.

This is insanity.

The GOP-controlled house should add this to its myriad of reasons to seek Obama’s impeachment.

The Dollar – and the USA – are Toast

Photo Credit: WNDObama has done it. He has brought America down. It only took him just over four years. The Republicans could have stopped him. They didn’t.

How did the nihilistic left succeed in destroying America? Simple. They learned just a little of the capitalism they hate, and they drove your nation into outright bankruptcy.

And here is what the GOP has to say about it: just about nothing.

The once-mighty United States is now the most indebted nation on Earth. In round numbers, here are just some of the vital statistics as the patient dies:

National debt: $17 trillion, or $50,000 per man, woman and child, or $150,000 per taxpayer. Annual federal deficit: $1 trillion. Medicare/Medicaid/Obama”care”: $1 trillion a year. Social Security: another $1 trillion a year. Defense: two-thirds of a trillion. Unemployment handouts: $2 billion per working day. Debt interest: $1 billion per working day. Federal pensions, ditto.

Now for the big numbers. Your government’s Social Security liability is as big as the national debt: $17 trillion. Its prescription drug liability is $22 trillion. Then there’s the Medicare liability of $86 trillion. Total unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government are $125 trillion.

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IRS Mess

Photo Credit: APThe Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups is outrageous. Those who did this should be fired immediately. That’s obvious.

It continues a slovenly week for Barack Obama. The President has been very proud of the absence of scandal in his administration, and rightly so. The inability of his opponents to find any significant corruption in the historic $800 billion stimulus package was a real achievement, given the speed of the payout. None of his top aides have been caught up in taking bribes while in office–although their race through the revolving door into lucrative private sector positions is well beyond nauseating.

As in most presidencies, there have been an awful lot of political hacks populating the mid-reaches of this Administration. In the Obama instance, these have shown an anachronistic, pre-Clinton liberal bias when it comes to the rules and regulations governing many of our safety net programs, like social security disability. And now they have violated one of the more sacred rules of our democracy: you do not use the tax code to punish your opponents.

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The Benghazi Lie

Photo Credit: National Review Shortly before last November’s election I took part in a Fox News documentary on Benghazi, whose other participants included the former governor of New Hampshire John Sununu. Making chit-chat while the camera crew were setting up, Governor Sununu said to me that in his view Benghazi mattered because it was “a question of character.” That’s correct. On a question of foreign policy or counterterrorism strategy, men of good faith can make the wrong decisions. But a failure of character corrodes the integrity of the state.

That’s why career diplomat Gregory Hicks’s testimony was so damning — not so much for the new facts as for what those facts revealed about the leaders of this republic. In this space in January, I noted that Hillary Clinton had denied ever seeing Ambassador Stevens’s warnings about deteriorating security in Libya on the grounds that “1.43 million cables come to my office” — and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any. Once Ambassador Stevens was in his flag-draped coffin listening to her eulogy for him at Andrews Air Force Base, he was her bestest friend in the world — it was all “Chris this” and “Chris that,” as if they’d known each other since third grade. But up till that point he was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends of Hillary trying in vain to get her ear.

Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m. call? Four years later, the phone rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.

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Jodi Arias is Guilty; So Are We

Photo Credit: Bernard GoldbergThere are times, not many thankfully, when I get depressed, brought down by the sorry evidence that we live in a country fixated on shiny objects. This is one of those times.

A jury in Phoenix has found Jodi Arias guilty of first-degree murder. That’s not what gets me down. What I find so depressing is our collective fascination with trivia, with anything that we can follow without having to actually think.

No one ever heard of Jodi Arias until cable TV made her famous. No one ever heard of the boyfriend she killed, you know, what’s his name. The Arias murder trial tells us nothing about anything bigger than Jodi Arias. She wasn’t famous like O.J. Simpson before she was arrested. This wasn’t Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Those trials had implications. The Arias trial had none.

When it became known that the jury had reached a verdict, cable news went wall-to-wall with Jodi Arias. It would be 90 minutes before the verdict was announced in court, so anchors and pundits spent the time saying nothing – nothing that mattered anyway. But this is a small point. Saying nothing about Jodi Arias gets you more viewers than saying something about the national debt.

But you can’t blame cable TV news, not entirely anyway, because television is a business that gives the people what they want. And if they want Jodi, TV executives will give them Jodi for hours on end. Hell, if she had been found not guilty they might have even given her a show.

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Coulter: Liberal Media Lying Again About Evangelical Support for Amnesty

Photo Credit: Daily Caller Every few months since at least 2006, The New York Times has taken time out from brow-beating Evangelicals to praise them for supporting amnesty for illegal aliens.

Most of the “Evangelicals” the Times cites are liberal frauds, far from “unlikely allies” in amnesty, as alleged. It is a specialty of the left to pose as something they’re not in order to create the impression of a zeitgeist. The only one I haven’t seen quoted yet is the ACLU’s minister, Barry Lynn.

The Times keeps touting Evangelicals for Amnesty as evidence of a “shift,” a “change of heart” and a “secret weapon.” Breaking the same news story every two months since 2006 isn’t a shift; it’s propaganda.

Any Evangelical promoting the McCain-Rubio amnesty plan has the moral framework of Planned Parenthood. Like the abortion lobby, they have boundless compassion for the people they can see, but none for those they can’t see.

One Evangelical after another told the Times that they no longer believe Americans should have control over who immigrates here on the basis of having met illegal aliens in their pews. The millions harmed by illegal immigration are left out of the equation. They don’t go to church here.

Read more from this story HERE.

7 Things We Learned from the Benghazi Whistleblowers’ Hearing

Photo Credit: شبكة برق | B.R.QThe Republicans mishandled the Benghazi whistleblowers’ hearing. What should have been stretched across several days to give the nation time to digest it all, was instead packed into a single day filled with an overwhelming amount of information. The media’s attention span is not that long. The verdict in the Jodi Arias trial came along in the afternoon and blew Benghazi off the networks, most of which didn’t want to cover it at all. Even Fox joined the drive-by media, taking Benghazi off the air in favor of the irrelevant Arias trial. Following the announcement of the Arias verdict, charges were read in the Cleveland kidnapping case. Those were aired live as well, relegating Benghazi again.

Nevertheless, for those who slogged through the entire day of hearings and ignored local crime stories, new information was there to be learned.

1. There were multiple stand-down orders, not just one. Special operations forces were told, twice, by their chain of command not to board aircraft to Benghazi to rescue the Americans then under attack. The U.S. deputy diplomat, Greg Hicks, testified that the military commander, Lt. Col. Gibson, had his team ready to go twice. They were on the runway about to board a flight to Benghazi in the middle of the attack. They were ordered to stand down and remain in Tripoli to receive wounded who would be coming out of Benghazi. One of the orders came in the middle of the attack, the other came toward the end after Hicks’ team had traveled from Tripoli to Benghazi. The fact that Hicks’ team was able get to Benghazi before the end of the assault strongly suggests that the special operations team could have made a real difference.

At the same time, the State Department’s commander on the scene, Hicks, ordered his personnel into Benghazi and went there himself. Hicks testified that Gibson never told him who issued the stand-down orders. He commented that Gibson told him that the military stand-down was a shock: “This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than someone in the military.”

Hicks also testified that the U.S. government never even requested military overflight to support the Americans in Benghazi. The U.S. had an unarmed drone overhead and could have gotten permission to fly fighters over the scene, at least, but never asked.

Read more from this story HERE including discussion of these additional six points:

2. Ambassador SteveDemocrats were uninterested in getting at most of the facts, but were very interested in destroying Mark Thompsons’ reason for going to Benghazi has been cleared up.

3. Clinton was briefed at 2 am on the night of the attack, was never told that a movie had anything to do with the attack by those on the ground in Libya, yet blamed the movie anyway.

4. Whistleblowers were intimidated into silence.

5. “The YouTube movie was a non-event in Libya.”

6. Democrats were uninterested in getting at most of the facts, but were very interested in destroying Mark Thompson.

7. House hearings are a poor way to determine who did what and why during and after the attack.