Rep. Darrell Issa: Senators Who Voted For ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Compromise Were Drunk (+videos)

By Igor Volsky. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), who is joining a growing number of Republicans trying to add more spending cuts to the last-minute fiscal cliff deal and send it back to the Senate, joked that Senators may have been drunk when they passed the measure in the early hours of Jan 1.

Responding to a question on CNN’s The Situation Room about why fiscal hawks like Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) supported the measure in the Senate, Issa implied that the 89 senators voted for the compromise because of the late night partying in celebration of the New Year. Read more from this story HERE.

According to this pundit, Senators could point accusatory fingers directly back at house leadership on the drinking issue:

Boehner to Reid: ‘Go F*** Yourself’

House Speaker John Boehner couldn’t hold back when he spotted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the White House lobby last Friday.

It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal.

“Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present.

Reid, a bit startled, replied: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner repeated: “Go f— yourself.”

The harsh exchange just a few steps from the Oval Office — which Boehner later bragged about to fellow Republicans…

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Ruling Class on Track to Destroy Middle America in 2013

It’s time for us in the middle class to get smart – the debt is going to destroy us. And both parties are making sure of this.

I met with Senator Tom Coburn two weeks ago. He suggests that the American experiment could collapse within the next two years. Why? Because the debt bomb is going to explode and destroy every dollar you and I own.

Who suffers? The middle class. We will be destroyed and along with us, the Republic.

Will our millionaire federal masters get real in 2013? Probably not.

Anchorage Daily News Fears Miller Run in 2014? Columnist Starts the Lies All Over Again

This weekend, longtime Anchorage Daily News (ADN) columnist and mouth piece of Alaska’s corrupt political establishment, Paul Jenkins, wrote a piece on the potential contenders for Alaska’s 2014 Senate race.

Besides a gratuitous, but hardly unexpected hit on Sarah Palin, much of the column was the typical ADN gushing about candidates likely to perpetuate the big government handouts for Alaska’s ruling class.

One candidate is described as the chairman of a “prestigious” federal commission, another one is praised as “almost too good to be true,” still another is declared a successful city manager.

Jenkins, of course, reserves most of his establishment-vitriol for 2010 Republican Senate nominee Joe Miller.

It would have been bad enough had he resurrected any one of the numerous fabricated stories from 2010 to justify his suggestion that Joe is at the “bottom of the [2014] barrel.” But he didn’t do that. Instead, he made up an entirely new lie stating that a “few days back, [Joe] trashed the National Rifle Association as a threat to gun liberty and called its top executive a charlatan.”

Never mind the well-known fact that Joe has been a life member of the NRA for his entire adult life. Or that he and his wife have given thousands of dollars to the organization and are currently NRA Benefactors, the highest level of NRA membership. We’re quite sure it wouldn’t matter to Jenkins either that Joe also received an “A” rating from the NRA as a legislative candidate.

That doesn’t mean that Restoring Liberty agrees with everything the NRA does, such as its endorsement of many big-government incumbents, and its failure to get behind constitutional conservatives. But Joe has never described the organization as a “threat to gun liberty” or its top exec as a “charlatan.” On the contrary, Joe has been a strong supporter of the NRA.

What Jenkins is apparently referring to is an article that appeared HERE at Restoring Liberty, authored by Adam Bates. Bates had some harsh comments about the NRA’s response to the Newtown massacre that has generated a healthy debate at Restoring Liberty.

Obviously, the fact a story appears at Restoring Liberty does not mean that Joe Miller endorses its contents. Rather, the intent is to post stories that inform and encourage thought, especially stories we are unlikely to see in the mainstream press. And as our readers are undoubtedly aware, Restoring Liberty doesn’t shy away from articles critical of anyone who may be straying from constitutional principles.

So either Jenkins is ignorant, or he’s just plain lying.

Fortunately, Alaskans are on to the establishment goons in the Alaska press. And that’s why Alaska’s conventional media is being abandoned in favor of sites like Restoring Liberty, the second-most read Alaskan Internet news site.

Bait and Switch: In Face of Fiscal Cliff, Obama Demands Spending Boost for 2013

President Barack Obama smashed a completed fiscal-cliff deal with a last-minute demand for increased spending in 2013, according to an e-mail from the GOP’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.

Under the deal, planned tax increases on middle-class Americans would be cancelled, but Obama insisted on raising tax rates on Americans earning more than $400,000 per year.

“They’re holding that [deal] hostage” to boost 2013 spending, GOP Sen. Bob Corker said shortly after Obama lauded the pending agreement.

“The tax piece is complete and done as of last evening at 1:45 a.m. I thought the entire deal was sealed. Early this morning, the White House called demanding that we also turn off the sequester,” said the email, signed “Mitch.”

The sequester refers to scheduled cuts in spending during the first nine months of 2013. Half of the $109 billion in cuts are to be imposed on the Pentagon.

Read more from this story HERE.

Happy New Year?

The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back — and depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too much of the future.

If there are any awards to be given to anyone for what they did in 2012, one of those rewards should be for prophecy, if only because prophecies that turn out to be right are so rare.

With that in mind, my choice for the prediction of the year award goes to Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal for his column of January 24, 2012 titled: “The GOP Deserves to Lose.”

Despite reciting a litany of reasons why President Obama deserved to be booted out of the White House, Stephens said, “Let’s just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose.”

To me, the Republican establishment is the 8th wonder of the world. How they can keep repeating the same mistakes for decades on end is beyond my ability to explain.

Read more from this article HERE.

Nuclear Option Destroys the Senate

During the contentious Cold War era, the United States and the former Soviet Union operated on a theory of Mutually Assured Destruction. The Soviets were deterred from launching a first strike against the U.S., the thinking went, because they knew that the response would be immediate and devastating. We are facing a similar situation today in the United States Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) is threatening to launch a first strike against the core of the Senate’s standing rules – the filibuster.

If Reid fires that first shot, I promise to respond with my own rules change ideas that will expand the rights of all Senators to participate in the legislative process.

The Senate has long been a body that respects the rights of each individual Senator by allowing them to participate fully in extended debate and a free amendment process, regardless of whether they were in the majority or the minority.

Over the past few years, Senator Reid has used his power as Majority Leader to suffocate those two important traditions. He has routinely taken actions to prevent rank-and-file members of the Senate from offering amendments to legislation; now, he is promising to attack the right of Senators to engage in extended debate by pushing a version of so-called “filibuster reform.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Egyptian Democracy Activist Says ‘President Obama Needs to Stop Supporting the Muslim Brotherhood’

Egyptian democracy activist Michael Meunier says President Barack Obama needs to stand up to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Meunier, a Coptic Christian, is head of the Al Haya Party in Egypt and leader of the U.S. Copts Association. After spending many years studying and working in the United States, Meunier returned to Egypt in 2007 and ultimately participated in the Tahrir Square protests that brought down the regime of Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

On Dec. 19, in between round one and two of voting on Egypt’s recently passed constitution, Meunier visited The Daily Caller to discuss what he sees going on in the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt.

“What we have now is a fascist, Islamist regime that has no respect human rights, no respect for international opinion. Mubarak at least respected international opinion,” he said. “Under Mubarak there was a lot of corruption, but there was no religious fascism … [There was a] difficult life for Christians in Egypt as well, but there was law and order.”

Read more from this article HERE.

Iran Test-Fires Missiles Near Strait of Hormuz

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s navy said Monday it test-fired a range of weapons during ongoing maneuvers near the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.

IRNA quoted Adm. Amir Rastgari, spokesman for the exercise, as saying the Iranian-made air defense system Raad, or Thunder, was among the weapons tested, along with various torpedoes and underwater and surface-to-surface rockets as well as anti-ship missiles. The Islamic Republic said it also deployed domestically-made hovercraft during the operation.

The Raad system was on show during a military parade in Tehran in September for the first time. Iran says is more advanced than its Russian predecessor and is designed to confront fighter jets, cruise missiles, smart bombs, helicopters and drones. Iran said the system fires missiles with a range of 50 kilometers (30 miles), capable of hitting targets at 22,000 meters (75,000 feet).

Tehran has tried to build a self-sufficient military program since 1992. It frequently announces technological breakthroughs, most of which cannot be confirmed independently.

Read more from this story HERE.

Georgetown Law Professor: US Constitution ‘Archaic, Idiosyncratic and Downright Evil’

With hours to go before nation heads off the fiscal cliff, Georgetown Law professor Louis Michael Seidman writes that the time has come to scrap the Constitution.

In an op-ed published in the New York Times Monday, Seidman, a constitutional law professor, claimed that the nation’s foundational document is the real impediment to progress and solutions to America’s troubles.

“As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken,” Seidman wrote. “But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.”

According to Seidman, the country’s insistence that it maintain the will of a centuries-old document “has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public.”

Seidman, author of the forthcoming book “On Constitutional Disobedience,” explained that adherence to constitutional law, which he has taught for over 40 years, is just “bizarre.”

Read more from this story HERE.