Members of ’72 Dolphins Refuse White House Invite, “Diametrically Opposed” to Obama

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Photo Credit: USATSI

Photo Credit: USATSI

Good news: On Tuesday, the White House will honor the 1972 Dolphins, the NFL’s last undefeated team, because, really, that group doesn’t get enough attention.

Bad news: At least three members of the ’72 squad won’t attend the ceremony in the nation’s capital because they oppose the views of President Barack Obama.

“We’ve got some real moral compass issues in Washington,” Hall of Fame center Jim Langer told the Sun-Sentinel’s David Hyde. “I don’t want to be in a room with those people and pretend I’m having a good time. I can’t do that. If that [angers] people, so be it.”

“I’ll just say my views are diametrically opposed to the President’s,” Manny Fernandez said. “Enough said. Let’s leave it at that. I hope everyone enjoys the trip who goes.”

Read more from this story HERE.

MSNBC Pundit: Opposition to Gun Control is Neo-Confederate (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

Photo Credit: YouTube

Supporters of Second Amendment rights are motivated by neo-Confederate beliefs, according to MNSBC contributor Joy Reid.

“There’s this sort of neo-Confederate thread that runs through this pro-gun movement and NRA movement,” she said this afternoon while discussing the recall elections for Democratic state lawmakers in Colorado that were spurred by their support for gun-control legislation…

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How Does ‘Hope and Change’ Look Five Years Later? Here’s Chris Matthew’s Surprising Answer (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was cornered into admitting that President Barack Obama does indeed have his shortcomings. The TV host, who has previously referred to the president as the “perfect” American, father and husband, was asked by a GOP strategist on Tuesday morning: How does “hope and change” look five years later?

“What people signed up for, what people voted for, was the hope and change,” former John McCain aide Nicolle Wallace said. “How’s it look on the table five years later?”

After being evasive at first and talking about past presidents, Matthews ultimately addressed Obama’s “shortcoming.” He also acknowledged that he had been duped by politicians and been let down in the past.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fed-Up Restaurant Owner Foils Armed Robbery in One of the Best Ways: ‘I Couldn’t Just Stand Here and Watch Him Take My Money’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: dawhitfield

Photo Credit: dawhitfield

They say “don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” — so this restaurant owner didn’t. Instead, he armed himself with a pot of scalding hot oil.

On Monday afternoon, the owner of a local corner deli foiled a robbery by hurling a pot of burning oil at an armed robber as the thief attempted to open the cash register, according to NJ.com.

The owner, who reportedly asked not to be identified, said he had often thought of weaponizing cooking oil in such a situation.

“Frankly speaking, I did think, ‘If anything happens, I’ll throw hot oil on somebody,’” he reportedly said, with a laugh. “But I never thought it would really happen.”

Watch a local news clip, courtesy of WABC-TV:

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DeMint: Republicans Unwilling to Defund ObamaCare ‘Need to be Replaced’

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Jim DeMintFormer Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Monday night urged voters to replace any Republican lawmaker unwilling to vote to defund ObamaCare during next month’s budget showdown.

DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, dismissed fears that Republicans would be blamed for a government shutdown, as they were in the 1990s.

“The risk of that is so much less than the risk to our country if we implement ObamaCare, and so I’m not as interested in the political futures of folks who think they might lose a showdown with the president,” DeMint said at a town-hall meeting hosted by Heritage Action, the think tank’s political arm, in Fayetteville, Ark., the first stop on a nine-city tour.

DeMint said President Obama believes he has the upper hand in the coming fight.

“I think he knows that Republicans are afraid, and if they are, they need to be replaced,” DeMint told NPR in an interview after the event.

Read more from this story HERE.

California Wants Small-Business Owners To Pay Back $120 Million In Tax Breaks (+video)

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Photo Credit: Prayitno

Photo Credit: Prayitno

Small-business investors in California were promised big breaks five years ago, but now they’re being told to pay up, instead after a court ruling.

After following the law, many of them are getting hit with tax bills as high as $250,000.

“When we make a promise, we have to uphold it,” said Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Redondo Beach.

But that is not what the state government appears to be doing. Small-business owners are getting hefty tax breaks for tax credits they already got five years ago.

“They relied on California law as it was written, that they would get a tax break if they invested in certain kinds of businesses,” Lieu said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Clinton Dramas: Here We Go Again

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By Maggie Haberman.

Tabloid headlines. Personal dramas. Organizational disarray. Score-settling between rival factions documented in news accounts like a soap opera.

Does this have a familiar ring?

No one — or mostly no one — truly believes the swirl of headlines surrounding Bill and Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2013 should lead to a grand conclusion about whether another iteration of a Clinton campaign can be run effectively, free of the internecine warfare and incessant drama that marked her 2008 bid.

But if Clinton and her supporters were hoping to allay those doubts well ahead of a possible 2016 run, the past few months have not been helpful.

Clinton supporters would point out, fairly, that much of what has happened to them this summer — the steady stream of unseemly stories about Anthony Weiner’s continued virtual liaisons, his wife and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s very public decision to stand by him, and reports of mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation — has been beyond their control.

Read more from this story HERE.

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David Brock accuses N.Y. Times of anti-Clinton bias

By Dylan Byers.

David Brock, the chairman of both Media Matters for America and American Bridge super PAC, has written an open letter to The New York TImes expressing his “concern about a recent string of reports and columns … that have done nothing but use false pretenses to cast a shadow on Bill and Hillary Clinton.”

Brock highlights the Times’ Aug. 13 report on “unease” over finances and management at the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation (“an exercise in evidence-free speculation,” according to Brock) and two recent columns from Maureen Dowd that Brock says “reinforce her long pattern of using hollow caricatures to attack the Clintons (and the former first family in general).”

Brock then calls on the Times to: “Correct the record regarding errors of fact and context in the Foundation news story … Refrain from negatively pre-judging the Clintons in the manner of your political editor … Correct the anti-Clinton animus consistently exhibited by one of your columnists; and … Resist the temptation to create purely speculative news in your new Clinton ‘beat.'”

Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Levin’s Game Changer: Using the Constitution to Arrest Federal Drift

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Photo Credit: Forbes

Photo Credit: Forbes

Two Marks, Levin and Meckler, notably and nobly are proposing to change the rules of modern politics and governance.

Debuting at Amazon Number One (for all, not merely political, books) is syndicated radio talk show host Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic. Sporting an average of 4.7 stars from, at the time of this writing, 153 reviews on Amazon, Levin calls for a populist suite of Constitutional amendments to be initiated by the States.

Levin proposes to reform the federal government from its degenerate, bloated, imperial structure back to its (small r) republican roots. Even more interesting than his specific proposals is the mechanism.

There is a little-known “emergency cord” built into the Constitution by the Founders. Find it in Article V. It allows for the States, rather than just the Congress, to propose Constitutional amendments. It is obscure yet entirely legitimate — and invaluable. It was extolled by James Madison in The Federalist No. 43.

Meanwhile, on August 15th, on the ground and the Web, a civic “Seal Team Six” — of operatives and activists — has constituted itself as ConventionOfStates.com. (This columnist has there enlisted as a foot soldier.) Its purpose? “COS seeks to call a Convention of States for a particular subject—limiting the jurisdiction and power of the federal government. This strategy would allow the states to formally consider almost all of Mark Levin’s ‘Liberty Amendments,’ giving delegates the freedom to propose the necessary amendments to stop the runaway power of Washington, D.C.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Fight Like a Democrat

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Photo Credit: TownHall

Photo Credit: TownHall

I get a lot of press releases in my inbox. My method for opening them is akin to playing roulette—in other words, no method.

But I opened one the other day about Alieta Eck, then a Republican Senate candidate in New Jersey. I read the article embedded in the press release with growing interest, as Eck presented a compelling figure. Then I came to this paragraph:

“Meeting on Wednesday with the Inquirer Editorial Board, she [Eck] expressed views on a range of other issues, hewing to the far right of her party on most, including questioning climate change. On abortion, however, Eck said while she is ‘pro-life,’ a federal overhaul of Roe v. Wade would be ‘impossible to implement.’”

Oh.

I am an issues voter, and where a candidate not only stands on life, but votes on life, is important to me. This made it slightly unclear whether Eck ascribed to the Joe Biden method of pay-lip-service- to-pro-life-views-but-never-vote-that-way (which is totally contrary to Democrats’ normal view of using legislation to impose their personal beliefs on how they think you should live your life). Or Eck could be a staunch vote for pro-life causes in the Senate, and the paper simply didn’t bother to print more of the discussion.

But what bothered me regardless—and should bother all Republicans no matter where they fall on the abortion issue—was the passiveness in “impossible to implement.”

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Wow, Wisdom From Hollywood! (+video)

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Photo Credit: Western Journalism

Photo Credit: Western Journalism

When something substantive emanates from Hollywood, it’s worth taking note of. While so much of the celebrity world, and the pop-culture media, is egocentric, self-aggrandizing, and self-absorbed, infrequently does someone from that environment offer something visionary, insightful, inspiring, and non-hypocritical. Yet Ashton Kutcher did just that as he proffered some wisdom and hope to a youthful crowd this week.

Last Sunday evening at the Teen Choice Awards, Kutcher was presented the Ultimate Choice Award. His take on the significance of the award may have been implied by his joke about it, as he referred to it as the “old guy award.”

He then said that he wanted to share three things that he thought were important for his young audience. And frankly, in retrospect, they’re three important concepts for people of any age.

His first point was, “I believe that opportunity looks a lot like work.” He described the various jobs that he’d had before he succeeded in acting, including helping his dad carry shingles for roofing jobs, a dishwasher at a restaurant, working in a deli at a grocery store, and sweeping the floors of a factory. He continued, “I never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. Every job I had was a stepping stone to my next job and I never quit my job before I had my next job.”

There are so many of all ages today who believe that certain jobs are beneath their dignity; so they choose to not work at all, refuse to accept responsibility for their own lives, and subsist in a state of dependency. But especially with those of Generation Y, there seems to be the pervasive expectation of entitlement. They feel entitled to all the comforts their parents worked for years to acquire, but they want it now and are convinced they’re entitled. Those of Generation Y, especially, must come to realize the self-worth and satisfaction that comes from hard work, and what it does to build character as well as provide for needs and wants, and that there is no job that is “beneath” them, and no perks to which they are entitled.

Read more from this story HERE.