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.

Millions Of Millenials Live At Home and Support the Policies That Keep Them There

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Photo Credit: marklarson

Photo Credit: marklarson

In Man’s Search For Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl discusses the “existential vacuum.” It is an internal emptiness and lack of purpose. In a life with logos or meaning, anything can be endured. Without it, a person is lost. Frankl watched men in the German camps succumb who might otherwise have survived simply because they had nothing to hold onto.

When the greatest excitement today for twenty-somethings are hybrid baked goods, a list of 37 random tokens of nostalgia, or going on an endless string of meaningless Internet-facilitated dates, I have found myself surrounded by nihilists.

Those who are married or finished medical school already may exempt themselves. Anyone with a legal partner or a life in service of others may wait until middle-age to experience the solitary struggle of a crisis of meaning. The lost ones instead are those approaching thirty with no savings, no interest in anything but the near-term future, and no profitable outlet for creativity besides solipsistic online forums.

The lost ones are smart. They pay attention to what goes on in the world. They read the news along with the lists of 37 GIFs. Yet what can they do? They have minimal discretionary income and their free time is spent unwinding from occupations that force them to look at backlit words for eight hours or deal with whining strangers. They are fully adults and can’t boast of anything their parents had at this age besides better means of communication, which many are horrible at maintaining.

I hear my peers say, “I’m lost.” I say, “Yes, of course.” Almost 22 million twenty-somethings live with their parents, myself for the second time currently included, though economists tell us that this is technically a “recovery” from a “recession” and not just one long, dragging depression of next-to-no growth for our country and for the development of individuals who thought for sure they could have had an apartment by now. I went to a party recently where someone was bashful to admit that he bought his own place. A room full of renters were ready to give him grief for having the means to pay a mortgage or the certitude and resolve to put down roots in one place.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Skips the Kennedy Tax Cuts

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

After delivering a number of “economic growth” speeches this summer, President Obama has failed to inspire any confidence, falling all the way back to square one in a recent Gallup poll. Actually, make that less than square one. Gallup reported that Obama’s approval rating on the economy has sunk to 35 percent in August from 42 percent in early June.

Why should we be surprised?

The actual economy shows real GDP falling well below 2 percent. This so-called recovery remains the worst in modern history dating back to 1947.

And as far as solutions go, Obama keeps giving us the same old, same old: End the spending-cut sequester, lower tax deductions, and raise taxes on the rich, all to free up money for infrastructure, green energy, “manufacturing innovation initiatives,” and the teachers’ unions.

Of course, this would all come on top of Obamacare, which if it doesn’t fall of its own weight, will add so many new taxes and regulations that it will sink the economy even more.

Read more from this story HERE.

39 Percent of Unemployed Workers Have Been Out of Work Longer than 27 Weeks

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Of the 12.2 million Americans who were unemployed as of December 2012, 39 percent (4.7 million) had been out of work for 27 weeks or more, according to a new report from the Urban Institute.

These 4.7 million workers are known as the long-term unemployed, and are among the worst consequences of the Great Recession of 2008.

Report author Josh Mitchell noted that “relative to currently employed workers, the long-term unemployed tend to be less educated and are more likely to be nonwhite, unmarried, disabled, impoverished and to have worked previously in the construction industry and construction occupations.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Man who Hacked Zuckerberg’s Facebook Account to Get Cash Reward … but not from Facebook

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

A man who hacked into Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page to expose a software bug is getting donations from hackers around the world after the company declined to pay him under a program that normally rewards people who report flaws.

Khalil Shreateh discovered and reported the flaw but was initially dismissed by the company’s security team. He then posted a message on the billionaire’s wall to prove the bug’s existence.

Now, Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm BeyondTrust, is trying to mobilize fellow hackers to raise a $10,000 reward for Shreateh after Facebook refused to compensate him.

Maiffret, a high school dropout and self-taught hacker, said Tuesday he has raised about $9,000 so far, including the $2,000 he initially contributed.

He and other hackers say Facebook unfairly denied Shreateh, a Palestinian, a payment under its “Bug Bounty” program. It doles out at least $500 to individuals who bring software bugs to the company’s attention.

Read more from this story HERE.