Purged Reps Speak Out: ‘Petty’ ‘Vindictive’ Establishment Punishing Members for Voting Conservative

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A day after learning he was yanked from from the Agriculture Committee, Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp lit into GOP leaders Tuesday, charging that conservative Republicans are punished for not toeing Speaker John Boehner’s line.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Huelskamp said at a Heritage Foundation event. “We were not notified about what might occur but it confirms in my mind the deepest suspicions that most Americans have about Washington D.C: it’s petty, it’s vindictive, and if you have conservative principles you will be punished.”

Huelskamp spoke at the briefing with Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who was booted from the Budget Committee as part of a series of committee moves by Republican leaders that drew criticism from the right. Amash said he still hadn’t been contacted by leadership about what happened, and neither man has been told which committees they’ll be appointed to in the next Congress.

Huelskamp said that when the Republican freshman class of 2010 came in, they were told they had to fundraise for the party and notify leadership how they would vote but could otherwise “vote their conscience and their district.”

His removal, the congressman said, was “not about principle, it was about obedience.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Levin “Goes Nuclear” on Boehner, DeMint Criticizes Him For Wanting to Destroy Jobs

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DeMint Criticizes Boehner’s Deficit-Cut Plan

By Kathleen Hunter and Richard Rubin. House Speaker John Boehner’s proposal to generate $800 billion in new revenue “will destroy American jobs” and Republicans should oppose it, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina said today.

The comments from DeMint, co-founder of the Senate’s anti- tax Tea Party caucus, represent a strong indictment of Boehner’s plan from a fellow Republican lawmaker and highlight a divide within the party. Boehner yesterday proposed a $2.2 trillion deficit-cutting proposal that seeks $800 billion in revenue in the next decade from an overhaul of the tax code that would curb some breaks.

“Speaker Boehner’s $800 billion tax hike will destroy American jobs and allow politicians in Washington to spend even more, while not reducing our $16 trillion debt by a single penny,” DeMint said in a statement. “Republicans must oppose tax increases and insist on real spending reductions that shrink the size of government and allow Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money.”

The remarks signify that Boehner will have to tamp down opposition from the anti-spending wing of his conference — and probably rely on some Democratic votes — to advance legislation to avert the so-called fiscal cliff through the House. Unless Congress acts, more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending reductions will begin in January.

“Is John Boehner prepared to bring this measure to a vote with the understanding that it will pass with a bipartisan majority? If he is, let’s press forward in negotiations,” the Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Richard Durbin of Illinois, said today in an interview. “But if this is just a negotiation to win over the Tea Party Republicans, I am not very hopeful.” Read more from this story HERE.

Mark Levin Goes Nuclear on Boehner

By the Right Scoop. Mark Levin has had enough, saying that Huelskamp was elected by American citizens in his district who sent him there to vote the way he pledged to them he’d vote, and now Huelskamp is being treated like crap from Speaker Boehner because he’s not falling in line? Levin asks “who the hell does Speaker Boehner think he is?” Listen to the audio HERE.

That’s Indoctrination!

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Next week, fourth-grade students at Penn Valley Elementary School in the gilded Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion will spend part of their school day watching and discussing a very clever piece of cinematic propaganda courtesy of organized homosexuality. The film is called That’s a Family!, and it is endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign along with other homosexual activist groups.

As a fellow practitioner of the occult arts of persuasion, I must confess my admiration for That’s a Family! The film clearly is a product of the institutional wing of the gay-rights movement, and the filmmaker’s earlier efforts include many examples of the Left’s garden-variety sex and sexuality obsessions: It’s Elementary — Talking about Gay Issues in School, One Wedding and a Revolution (“contains now-historic footage of the tearful exchange of vows between long-time lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who, celebrating their 51st anniversary, were the first couple to tie the knot”), Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up. The ingenious thing about That’s a Family! is that it does not present itself as a straightforward piece of gay agitprop. Though the same-sex couples are clearly at the center of filmmaker Debra Chasnoff’s agenda, she deftly mixes them in with other kinds of “different” families: children with divorced parents, children being raised by guardians other than their parents, adopted children, etc. Crucially, there is a racial-ethnic angle: Families that speak Spanish at home and mixed-race families, here amusingly enough represented by an adorable little girl who explains: “My dad’s Chinese-American and my mom’s German-American. My parents aren’t the same race, but they can still be married,” a statement that obviously is not directed at the imaginary cabal of bigots protesting Sino-Germanic romances.

Which is to say, That’s a Family! is an extended exercise in intentionally begging the question: Moral reservations about homosexuality extending to questions related to marriage and childrearing are indistinguishable from prejudices against mixed-race marriages or discounting the value of adopted families. Question the gay-rights program and you may as well be a member of the Klan — and not the kind of Klansman that Democrats send to the Senate, either. The identification of moral objections to homosexuality with racism is the holy grail of gay-rights rhetoric. As I used to tell my persuasive-writing students, begging the question may be a logical fallacy, but it often is an extraordinarily effective rhetorical tool: Most people are not intellectually sophisticated enough to understand how they have been manipulated. (Me, cynical? In an age of “hope and change” political rhetoric, it is impossible to set the bar too low.)

Most newspaper-reading adult voters do not understand the logical fallacy of begging the question, and I am entirely confident that Lower Merion’s fourth-graders do not, either, high-achieving kids though they may be.

I lived for many years in Lower Merion, where I was the editor of the local newspaper. The township has government schools that are both excellent and shockingly expensive. (I was endlessly entertained by the fact that the local schools’ million-dollar boss styled himself: “Dr. Jamie P. Savedoff, Ph.D.” — Dr. and Ph.D., the guy’s got you coming and going.) Though once a Republican stronghold, the place is not exactly a hotbed of social conservatism, unless by conservatism you mean “serve from the left and clear from the right.” Nonetheless, there are a fair number of Catholics and a few of the old Main Line WASPs who may not be entirely on board with the mandatory celebration of homosexual parenting, and they must of course be suffocated by the very government agency into whose care they are compelled by law to entrust their children for more than a decade.

Read more from this article HERE.

U.S. and British Counter-Terrorism Intelligence May Have Been Compromised By Swiss Spy Agency

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photo credit: malias

ZURICH (Reuters) – Secret information on counter-terrorism shared by foreign governments may have been compromised by a massive data theft by a senior IT technician for the NDB, Switzerland’s intelligence service, European national security sources said.

Intelligence agencies in the United States and Britain are among those who were warned by Swiss authorities that their data could have been put in jeopardy, said one of the sources, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.

Swiss authorities arrested the technician suspected in the data theft last summer amid signs he was acting suspiciously. He later was released from prison while a criminal investigation by the office of Switzerland’s Federal Attorney General continues, according to two sources familiar with the case.

The suspect’s name was not made public. Swiss authorities believe he intended to sell the stolen data to foreign officials or commercial buyers.

A European security source said investigators now believe the suspect became disgruntled because he felt he was being ignored and his advice on operating the data systems was not being taken seriously.

Read more from this story HERE.

Senate Democrats Want to Take Guns Away From Returning War Vets

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photo credit: jsmjr

A major defense-spending bill hit an unexpected bump on its journey through the U.S. Senate over an amendment on veterans’ gun rights, which devolved into a heated floor debate and foreshadows a potential battle over Democrats’ vows to tweak the filibuster rules in the clubby, traditionally collegial body.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, wants veterans who have been deemed “mentally incompetent” to have their cases adjudicated by a judge — rather than the Department of Veterans Affairs, as happens currently — and argued that veterans who simply cannot support themselves financially are needlessly given the label and, as such, cannot buy or possess firearms.

“We’re not asking for anything big,” Mr. Coburn said Thursday evening on the Senate floor. “We’re just saying that if you’re going to take away the Second Amendment rights … they ought to have it adjudicated, rather than mandated by someone who’s unqualified to state that they should lose their rights.”

The late-night tussle served to pick at the scab of the ongoing debate over Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bid to reform the chamber’s filibuster rules to place limits on the minority party’s ability to hold up debate on legislation, however.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, objected to Mr. Coburn’s proposal once he found out it was part of a package of amendments to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act the body was to vote on.

Read more from this story HERE.

Palin to GOP: ‘This Won’t Be Forgotten Come 2014’

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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Tuesday that she thinks House Speaker John Boehner’s purge of conservatives from powerful committees is a sign the GOP establishment is out of touch with America.

“We send good conservatives to D.C. to fulfill the promises they made to the electorate, and yet when they stay true to their word the permanent political class in their own party punishes them,” Palin said in a Facebook comment. “This won’t be forgotten come 2014. Right now the GOP establishment is more concerned about the opinion of the media and the Georgetown cocktail circuit than they are ‘we the people’ who hired them. For all this new talk of how the GOP needs a ‘populist movement,’ it would do them good to remember they already have one; it’s called the Tea Party movement, and it won for them the majority they now enjoy in the House.”

On Monday, Boehner pulled conservative GOP Reps. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas and Justin Amash of Michigan from the House Budget Committee. The Speaker also removed conservative Republican Reps. David Schweikert of Arizona and Walter Jones of North Carolina from the House Financial Services Committee.

The members believe they were pulled from those committee assignments – from which they would be able to influence fiscal policy – because they have solid conservative voting records.

Read more from this story HERE.

Senate Rejects U.N. Disabilities Treaty

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Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked ratification of a U.N. treaty that promotes equal rights for disabled people, saying the measure shouldn’t be brought up in the lame-duck session and could cede U.S. sovereignty to the global body.

Supporters of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities said the treaty is nonbinding and wouldn’t change or challenge U.S. law. They said the international pact is based on the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and would help protect disabled Americans abroad.

But a 61-38 vote in favor of the treaty fell five votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to pass all treaties. Eight Republicans and two independents supported the measure, while not one Democrat voted against the treaty.

The United Nations adopted the treaty in 2006. President Obama signed it in 2009, though it failed to move through the Senate — which must ratify all treaties — until this year. It has been signed by 154 nations and ratified by 126.

Critics fear the treaty could strip Americans of fundamental rights, such as denying parents the ability to home-school a child with disabilities if the U.N. committee — or another body carrying out its recommendations — determined it would be in the best interests of the child. Some also worry that language calling for the disabled to have equal rights to reproductive health services could lead to abortions.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama: The Communist Candidate

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No. Really.

Erwin Marquit, a member of the International Department of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), recently told a conference of communist political parties from around the world that communists in the U.S did not run their own candidate for president on November 6 because they worked within the Democratic Party for the reelection of Barack Obama and the victories of “progressive” Democrats to Congress.

“The Communist Party USA not only welcomes the reelection of President Barack Obama, but actively engaged in the electoral campaign for his reelection and for the election of many Democratic Party congressional candidates,” Marquit declared at the conference, hosted by the Lebanese Communist Party.

Under Obama, he said, “…we have been forming Party clubs in states in which we previously had very few or even no members. This influx of new members led us to have a national Party school earlier this year to acquaint new members with the Marxist-Leninist orientation of the Party.”

The question here is whether the Communists have come around to supporting Democrats, or whether Democrats have come around to supporting Communists, and how much difference is there anymore?

Read more from this story HERE.

Workplace Freedom States Soared While Ohio and Michigan Economies Crashed

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Job creation in Ohio lagged far behind all 22 workplace freedom states from 1991 to 2011, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) records. Without cherry-picking data as union bosses must in order to defend forced unionism, total seasonally adjusted non-farm employment growth shows a huge advantage for residents of right to work states.

With the exception of Indiana, which passed a right to work law in February 2012, Ohio and each of its neighbors – Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky – allow unions to force workers to pay dues as a condition of employment.

During the two decades from 1991-2011, no workplace freedom state had a lower job creation rate than Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Michigan.

Of the 22 states which protected the right of employees in unionized workplaces to choose whether to pay a union boss, 17 had job growth rates better than Ohio and all five of Ohio’s forced-unionism neighbors.

While varying demographics, geography, and innumerable government regulations affect businesses’ ability to create new jobs, the past 20 years have been marked by anemic growth in Ohio compared to every workplace freedom state.

Read more from this story HERE.

Students Don’t Know Where Electricity Comes But Are Being Indoctrinated in Global Warming

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When I went to grade school, one of the first field trips our class made, was to a hydro electric dam.

After the hour ride, the bus parked and we were taken for a guided tour through a maze of machinery, deep inside the main power generating operations of a massive hydro electric dam.

I never forgot that day, as the manager of the complex proudly explained how electricity was produced by water turning the blades of the huge generators and how it flowed through power lines to everyone in the community

This education was provided at an early impressionable age and gave me the basic knowledge of how power is produced and relayed to every home and factory in America. We went on to learn, with coal, oil, gas, or nuclear; the principle was the same…Produce energy at an affordable price to power our modern society.

We also learned that protecting the environment was important, as stringent controls were put on our power producing facilities. Soon the skies of our cities were clear as those laws took effect. We all breathed easier.

But something happened in intervening years and a new message has come out to our children. Instead of taking a field trip to a local power generating plant to see how wonderful modern power is for our country, children were treated to an Al Gore movie. His movie, “The Inconvenient Truth,” shows the earth is on the edge of an environmental disaster caused by the very fuels that power our society.

Although Al Gore has been preaching disaster for many years and claimed his version of climate science is settled “science,” thousands of scientists, physicists, phd’s, meteorologists, and others very much disagree with his facts.

So why did many of our public schools decide to force our young children to watch the Al Gore climate movie without first questioning the truth of his science? That’s a good question and needs to be answered. What is the agenda?

Since the Gore movie was released in 2006, it has been shown to millions of school age children and portrayed as scientific fact. It has scared them. It leads them to believe that fossil energy is evil and the use of it will mean the destruction of the earth.

Along with the anti fossil fuel message; a line of thought set on the destruction of many of our hydro electric dams is starting to creep in. The dam destruction is done in the name of restoring our environment to its original condition…before the presence of modern man spoiled it.

Of course nuclear power has been maligned so long it will never get over the stigma of being non earth friendly.

That leaves us with wind/solar/bio fuels and unicorn dust to power our modern society. Which if past performance and present technology demonstrate, there is a dark and bankrupt future in store for our country.

An interesting video was sent my way a few days ago. These are University of Chicago students who are speaking about having their school and other institutions divest themselves of fossil energy investments.

As you can see, they lack an understanding of what comes next. What approved method of power will take the place of our carbon based energy they are so fearful of?

These kids were freshmen in high school when they first viewed the Al Gore film and it seems they never got an alternate message to it. I’ll also suppose they never were able to take a field trip to a local power generating facility to see exactly what it takes to turn on the lights and heat their homes.

Perhaps it’s time to revise our school curriculum’s, to be more rounded and show the other side of the war on our energy sector…Just what the consequences will be if our country “divests itself” of our fossil energy.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.