Report: GOP Spends $9.7 Million to Attack Republicans – But Only $3.7 Million to Attack Democrats

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Photo Credit: TeaPartyUpdate.comIf you needed more proof that the Establishment is hell-bent on attacking Tea Party candidate, a report on campaign expenditures confirms it. Or as comedian Bill Engvall says, “Here’s your sign.”

A recent study by the Center For Public Integrity revealed that from January 1 through May 6, Republican PACs and outside groups have spent about $9.7 million attacking Republican candidates in advertisements and other communications, and only around $3.7 million to attack Democrats. Democratic groups have only spent $67,000 attacking other Democrats.

What’s caused this turbocharged increase in campaign spending? Political animosity between the Tea Party and GOP Establishment and a Supreme Court decision. In January 2010, the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling allowed corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on ads and other communication to advocate for the election (or defeat) of a political candidate. Campaign spending was ruled to be a form of speech, protected by the Constitution for both individuals and corporations.

The decision didn’t affect contributions, as it’s still illegal for unions and corporations to make direct contributions to candidates for federal office. However, it’s opened the financial floodgates for SuperPACs and other groups to raise money and make independent expenditures for federal races across the country.

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Study: All Employment Growth Since 2000 Went to Immigrants

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Photo Credit: David McNewBy NRO Staff.

According to a major new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), net employment growth in the United States since 2000 has gone entirely to immigrants, legal and illegal. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CIS scholars Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler found that there were 127,000 fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level…

Other significant findings include:

Because the native-born population grew significantly, but the number working actually fell, there were 17 million more working-age natives not working in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000.

The share of natives working or looking for work, referred to as labor force participation, shows the same decline as the employment rate. In fact, labor force participation has continued to decline for working-age natives even after the jobs recovery began in 2010.

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Patriots Hotline Founder: We’re Forming a Human Chain to Stop Illegals

By Sean Piccoli.

Militia members and other concerned U.S. citizens are converging on the border town of Laredo, Texas, on Friday to create a blockade against illegal immigrants crossing into the United States, the organizer of the human chain and protest said on Newsmax TV’s “MidPoint.”

“This will continue for days and weeks to come” and spread “to other points” along the U.S.-Mexico frontier, Barbie Rogers, founder of the Patriots Information Hotline, said in a telephone interview.

Rogers declined to give an exact head count beyond “more than 50 people” or reveal whether participants are armed, citing worries about their security.

But she said blockaders will follow the same rules of engagement as protesters in an April standoff between federal officials and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.

“Just like at the Bundy ranch, there will be no patriot out there on that line that will fire first,” Rogers said.

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Government Watchdog Group Takes Legal Action Against IRS Over Lost Emails (+video)

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Photo Credit: APThe government accountability group Judicial Watch filed a legal motion Friday that threatens to drag the Obama administration into federal court to answer questions about the lost emails of ex-IRS official Lois Learner and others implicated in the tea party targeting scandal.

Judicial Watch, which was at the forefront of exposing the targeting scandal, had filed a Freedom of Information Act request in May 2013 for emails of Ms. Lerner and other officials. But the IRS did not inform the group of the lost emails, even as it told the court that it was cooperating with the FOIA request.

“The IRS is clearly in full cover-up mode,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is well past time for the Obama administration to answer to a federal court about its cover-up and destruction of records.”

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ATF Backs Down on Gun Sale Reports

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesFor nearly three years, federally-licensed firearms dealers (“FFLs”) in southern border states have been badgered by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (“ATF”) to report sales of two or more rifles to the same person during any consecutive five-day period. Purporting to need this information to stop arms trafficking in and out of Mexico, ATF issued so-called “demand letters” to require indefinite reporting of multiple rifle sales by thousands of dealers, treating the independent FFL businessmen as though they were government employees.

ATF has no authority to require these reports. Although the Gun Control Act of 1968 authorizes ATF to issue demand letters, these were to be issued only when ATF is investigating certain specific buyers or specific FFLs, and this is how they were used for many years. They were not designed to impose a new permanent reporting requirement on dealers.

Moreover, in the Gun Control Act, Congress decided to require reporting only of multiple handgun sales, but not rifle sales. However, instead of taking its case to Congress to change the law and enact legislation requiring reporting on rifle sales, ATF took the law into its own hands.

In 2010, alleging that many of the guns sold by FFLs in the border states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California were being seized in Mexico, ATF required that every FFL in the border states report all multiple sales of rifles. ATF was challenged on this in court, but the courts sided with the ATF.

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The Eternal Dictator

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Photo Credit: National Review I’m 41 years old, which doesn’t feel that old to me (most days), but history is short. With the exception of those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, the world as I have known it has been remarkably free and prosperous, and it is getting more free and more prosperous. But it is also a fact that, within my lifetime, there have been dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, India, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, and half of Germany — and lots of other places, too, to be sure, but you sort of expect them in Cameroon and Russia. If I were only a few years older, I could add France to that list. (You know how you can tell that Charles de Gaulle was a pretty good dictator? He’s almost never described as a “dictator.”) There have been three attempted coups d’état in Spain during my life. Take the span of my father’s life and you’ll find dictatorships and coups and generalissimos rampant in practically every country, even the nice ones, like Norway.

That democratic self-governance is a historical anomaly is easy to forget for those of us in the Anglosphere — we haven’t really endured a dictator since Oliver Cromwell. The United States came close, first under Woodrow Wilson and then during the very long presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Both men were surrounded by advisers who admired various aspects of authoritarian models then fashionable in Europe. Rexford Tugwell, a key figure in Roosevelt’s so-called brain trust, was particularly keen on the Italian fascist model, which he described as “the cleanest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen…”

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Krauthammer: If Obama Were A Republican, He Would’ve Been Impeached Over These Abuses (+video)

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Look, he is not a natural politician. I don’t think he even likes politics, which is odd for a man who is president. He clearly has completely failed at doing what the president has to do, which is work with the other side. But the worst part of it is he doesn’t care about the constitution.

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Florida Moves to Protect Unborn Children

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Photo Credit: Chris BrookerFlorida Governor Rick Scott signed H.B. 59, the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act,” into law last week. With the bill’s passage, Florida joins twenty-nine other states with laws that criminalize the deliberate harm or murder of an unborn child.

Previously, Florida’s statute of limitations reserved criminal charges until a child reached viability outside of the womb, usually between 18 and 22 weeks.

Now any deliberate wrongful harm that comes to an unborn child throughout the entirety of pregnancy is punishable as a criminal offense.

“There is no timeline anymore for justice for an unborn child of a pregnant woman,” explained the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Larry Ahern, R–Fl. Abortion advocates remain unconvinced.

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Two Years After Syrian ‘Red Line’ Comment, Obama Takes Action by Proposing a $1.5 Billion Check

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Photo Credit: IJ Review The President said in August of 2012 that his administration had made things very clear to Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad by saying:

…that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. It would change my calculus. That would change my equation.

They then used chemical weapons multiple times.

The President revised his statement in September of 2013 by saying:

I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.

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Mexican Military Chopper Crosses Into US, Shoots At Border Agents

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Photo Credit: MARK RALSTON / AFP / Getty ImagesBorder Patrol agents in Arizona were reportedly fired upon by a Mexican military helicopter that traveled across the border.

Mexican authorities were conducting a drug interdiction operation when the incident happened early Thursday morning on the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation. The Mexican chopper fired at the agents and then flew back into Mexico.

However, Mexican authorities have denied shooting at agents and say they were under attack during a mission to find smugglers on the border.

Tomás Zerón, the director of the Mexican attorney general’s office investigative office, said that Mexican military and federal police who were conducting an operation on a ranch in Altar, Sonora, were shot at by criminals. Mexican authorities never fired any weapons and in fact never crossed into the U.S. side of the border, he said.

Art Del Cueto, Border Patrol Tucson Sector union president, tells KVOA-TV, though, that they called and apologized for the incident.

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The Merger of the Party and the State (+video)

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Photo Credit: Steyn OnlineHere at SteynOnline every cutting-edge pop culture reference has to be at least three-quarters of a century old. So, watching the IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, I found him a dead ringer for Guy Kibbee, the beaming befuddled sugar daddy who was a mainstay at Warner Brothers in the early Thirties. Mr Koskinen is a Democrat sugar daddy who has given generously to his party since the Seventies: He’s not the kind of sober civil servant you’d appoint if you were looking to signal to America that King Barack’s revenue collectors are cleaning house and returning, chastened, to their previous role as a boringly non-partisan nest of punitive auditors. If you suspected that the Administration’s plan was to stonewall until things die down and it was safe to resume ruining the lives of its opponents, Koskinen’s performance in recent days would have more or less confirmed it.

On his previous appearance before Congress, the IRS Commissioner gave false testimony. As he has now conceded, he has known since February that Lois Lerner’s and other officials’ emails were “lost” and “irretrievable”. Gone, forever, and the hard drives destroyed. Yet the following month he was asked by Trey Gowdy why the IRS was taking so long to cough up the requested emails, and said that it was because they had to be “screened”.

That was a lie. He knew as he said those words that “the problem wasn’t that the IRS needed more time to screen emails; the problem was that IRS didn’t have the emails”.

That false testimony may partially explain why Congressman Gowdy wasn’t in the mood for a repeat performance yesterday. Click and enjoy:

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