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The advertisements attacked Mississippi State Senator Chris McDaniel and painted conservative Republicans and tea party activists as racists…
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People say the meanest things about Our Glorious Lead, Oops I mean President Barack Obama. They accuse him of golfing too much and caring too little. Some have even suggested that he has checked out 2 ½ years before he’s supposed to relinquish the Presidency. Today he had a chance to change all that. A Malaysian Airliner was shot down over Ukrainian airspace and it is more than just possible that Russia played a starring role in the carnage. 295 people are presumed dead. Twenty-three are Americans. This was as tough as President Obama was willing to get.
‘Before I begin, obviously the world is watching reports of a downed passenger jet near the Russia-Ukraine border. And it looks like it may be a terrible tragedy. Right now we’re working to determine whether there were American citizens on board. That is our first priority.’ ‘And I’ve directed my national security team to stay in close contact with the Ukrainian government. The United States will offer any assistance we can to help determine what happened and why. And as a country, our thoughts and prayers are with all the families and passengers, wherever they call home. (HT: Daily Mail)
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“We have the legislation to do it that dares to disclose who is this money coming from and amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United,” Pelosi said when speaking Wednesday at the Make Progress Conference, sponsored by the Center for American Progress. “This special interest money is suffocating the airwaves, causing confusion.”
The Democratically-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee recently voted to send a bill to the floor to amend the Constitution to allow Congress and state legislatures to put spending limits on political campaigns.
The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 in the 2010 Citizens United ruling and this year in the McCutcheon ruling that political spending is speech and caps by government violated the First Amendment.
“In order to take back our politics, we must reduce the role of money in politics and increase the level of civility,” Pelosi said. “I guarantee you, if we increase the level of civility and reduce the role of money, we will allow more women, more minorities, more young people to elective office.”
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In a subsequent report for the Secure World Foundation, the space policy think tank where he works, Weeden concluded that the Chinese launch was more likely a test of a mobile rocket booster for an antisatellite (ASAT) weapon that could reach targets in geostationary orbit about 22,236 miles above the equator. That’s the stomping grounds of expensive U.S. spacecraft that monitor battlefield movements, detect heat from the early stages of missile launches, and help orchestrate drone fleets. “This is the stuff the U.S. really cares about,” Weeden says.
The Pentagon never commented in detail on last year’s launch—and the Chinese have stuck to their story. U.S. and Japanese analysts say China has the most aggressive satellite attack program in the world. It has staged at least six ASAT missile tests over the past nine years, including the destruction of a defunct Chinese weather satellite in 2007. “It’s part of a Chinese bid for hegemony, which is not just about controlling the oceans but airspace and, as an extension of that, outer space,” says Minoru Terada, deputy secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
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It is alleged—and not by libertarians—that the current American era is increasingly defined by a “libertarian moment.” Although some chatter did begin within the liberty movement, as libertarian lawyers found themselves gaining traction at last within the courts, the dominant sense is broader, more nervous, and even hostile. Libertarianism has long been negatively associated with personal recklessness and irresponsibility; now, thinkers Right and Left are shuffling toward a strange new consensus about the culture of irresponsibility that seems to characterize not just our fellow Americans, but our regime itself.
In a searching, pained essay at The New Republic, for instance, Mark Lilla warns that a libertarianism of radical self-entitlement now defines our age. “That is not because democracy is on the march,” he says, “(it is regressing in many places), or because the bounty of the free market has reached everyone (we have a new class of paupers), or because we are now all free to do as we wish (since wishes inevitably conflict).”
No, ours is a libertarian age by default: whatever ideas or beliefs or feelings muted the demand for individual autonomy in the past have atrophied. There were no public debates on this and no votes were taken. Since the cold war ended we have simply found ourselves in a world in which every advance of the principle of freedom in one sphere advances it in the others, whether we wish it to or not.
Lilla correctly intuits that something seemingly virtuous about democracy has led toward something vicious. He also senses that the relationship between the city and the soul, as Plato’s Socrates put it, might well be key to grasping how and why. (In the Republic, Socrates offers several different theories as to how a regime and the individuals within it mirror or pattern themselves upon one another.) Yet Lilla unaccountably downplays the massive contradiction at the center of our inexorable march toward autonomy. It is, of course, the state’s own march toward its own ever-greater—one might say tyrannical—autonomy. For decades, some theorists have fretted that history reveals humans endlessly hunger for more-autonomous conduct. Others have cheered the prospect! Either way, it is time to consider anew that political history reveals a related, inexorable hunger within the regime that rules us all.
The Latitude to Destroy Liberty
That creates obvious problems for libertarianism as a term to describe the age. We, like our government, take broader and broader latitudes. But almost as a rule, we do so at the expense of liberty—at the expense of the political freedom that has atrophied so dramatically under the past two administrations. Oscar Wilde once remarked that socialism would be wonderful, but it took up too much time on a Friday night. Today, millions upon millions of Americans live out a similar feeling toward civic republicanism (with no interest in being witty, or even self-conscious, about it).
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Weiner told KTVU in San Francisco that the city has to make a statement to the FDA that times and technology are changing. He charged, “It’s discriminatory, it has no basis in public health. All donated blood is heavily tested, and it’s depriving our country of a lot of blood that could be donated to help save peoples’ lives.”
A lesbian who has been donating blood for thirty years snapped to KTVU, “I think it’s time for the government to take its regulatory self and shove it, to tell you the truth. If the blood is clean, we need it. Use it.”
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“My inclination is to remember what happened when a ship full of Jewish children tried to come to the United States in 1939 and the United States turned them away, and many of them went to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps,” Patrick told a group of reporters, the Boston Herald reports.
Patrick is a close friend and ally of President Obama and a former Clinton administration official.
President Obama has leaned on Patrick and other Democrats, including Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, to help provide housing for some of the estimated 57,000 unaccompanied children and 39,000 mothers with children — mostly from Central America — who have been apprehended at the southern U.S. border.
The Obama administration has had little luck finding municipalities and states that are willing to alleviate the surge. While several federal military bases are being used to house some unaccompanied children, more housing is needed.
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The Department of Veterans Affairs needs $17.6 billion in additional funds over the next three years to meet patients’ needs and fix the troubled agency’s problems, its acting director said Wednesday.
Testifying for the first time on Capitol Hill, interim VA Secretary Sloan Gibson told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that the money would help VA medical centers decrease appointment waiting times and hire more doctors.
You perhaps won’t be surprised to find this request is a-ok with Democrats while Republicans wonder how more money is going to solve this problem when the increasing backlog and problems at the Veterans Administration correlated with a rapidly increasing budget. And, in the case of the aforementioned bonuses, more money actually caused the problems.
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Photo Credit: Hotel Palm Aire
A plan to house hundreds of illegal immigrant children at a multimillion-dollar hotel complex in Texas was scuttled after the prospect of taxpayers footing the bill for luxury lodging proved too much of a public relations obstacle.
BCFS, previously known as Baptist Child and Family Services, which has a contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to run camps at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio and Fort Sill in Oklahoma, had a deal to buy the Palm Aire Hotel in Weslaco, Texas, for $3.8 million. The hotel was built in the 1980s and includes three swimming pools, tennis courts and an exercise room.
“This proposal sought to find a solution for providing safe, humane care for the children flooding across the border and overwhelming U.S. Border Patrol and communities,” BCSF said in a statement announcing the deal was scrapped. “BCFS is thankful to the City of Weslaco for their consideration and support, and is disappointed that misinformation has fueled so much negativity against this effort that its success is likely jeopardized.”
Officials said the project never reached the point of submitting a proposal to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, but one of the hotel’s current owners confirmed that a sales agreement with BCSF had been in place.
The deal died Wednesday afternoon, hours after FoxNews.com reported that as many as 600 children between the ages of 12-17 could be placed at the Palm Aire, where BCFS would also provide medical and mental health care and educational and recreational programs under a contract that sources said could total as much as $50 million.
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By Michelle Malkin.
They’ve blown it again, big time. They just can’t help themselves.
During the Bush years, the open-borders movement won over bleeding hearts in the White House but alienated the American public with radical displays of La Raza (“The Race”) militancy, desecrated American flags, and Che Guevara–shirt-wearing, fist-thrusting marches across the country.
Left-wing public-relations consultants taught the amnesty mob to tone it down, turn the flags right-side up, and stop threatening Reconquista. But the phony red-white-and-blue dye job didn’t last. The movement’s true extremist entitled roots can’t be concealed for long.
On Monday, leading illegal-alien journalist-turned-activist Jose Antonio Vargas engaged in a foolish stunt that will backfire on him and his allies in the media and Hollywood and on Capitol Hill. An openly defiant lawbreaker who proudly calls himself “the most privileged undocumented immigrant in the country,” Vargas traveled to Texas with a film crew to commune with illegal aliens surging across the border.
But on his way out of the Rio Grande Valley, the former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner was detained at the McAllen, Texas, airport by Customs and Border Patrol. He was attempting to clear security and board a flight without legally required U.S. identification. No surprise: Vargas initially made it past the buffoons at the TSA.
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This “map” of “statistics” has been going around Facebook for a while, and recently made a bit of a resurgence. The map purports to show a correlation between areas of high crime and votes for Obama in 2012. There’s one problem—it’s a hoax.
From a quick glance at the map, several problems immediately jump out:
1. Vermont had seven (7) murders for all of 2012, leading to a murder rate of 0.01 per 1,000 people, yet is dark blue on the supposed “gun violence” map.
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