Industry Protests Obama’s Plan for Alaskan Oil Reserves

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Photo credit: roger4336

A new proposal by the Obama administration to expand drilling to half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A) has attracted criticism from the oil industry, as the plan still leaves a broad area off limits to new oil development. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said new development will be permitted in an 11.8 million-acre geographical area, which purportedly holds about 549 million barrels of oil, while coastal regions such as Kasegaluk Lagoon and Peard Bay — where there is a higher concentration of seals and polar bears — will receive “special protection.”

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the entire reserve harbors about 900 million barrels of oil, a region west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge approximately the size of Indiana. Opening up only half of this area to leasing is disappointing, says Erik Milito, a director at the American Petroleum Institute (API). “This falls short of where we need to be.”

In a conference call on Tuesday, API president and CEO Jack Gerard disputed President Obama’s so-called “all of the above” energy policy. “Today, we’re sending a letter to the White House to urge the president and his agencies to do more than merely talk about ‘all-of-the-above’ while they pursue policies that include ‘none-of- the-below,’” Gerard charged.

Gerard protested that the Obama administration’s plan to restrict this vast opportunity for oil development is unacceptable, and that it will further depress the nation’s capabilities to become more energy independent. “One half of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, it was announced just yesterday [August 13], has been taken off limits,” Gerard affirmed. “This is an area by law dating back to the 1920s, [which] was specifically set aside in Alaska for oil and natural gas development. The announcement yesterday by Secretary [Ken] Salazar was essentially an announcement that we’re going to take everything that was legislatively set aside and we’re placing them off-limits.”

President Warren Harding established the NPR-A in 1923 as a resource for the U.S. Navy during a period when its ships were transferring over from coal to oil power. In 1976, the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act handed 23.5 million acres over to the Department of the Interior. Then in 1980, the Interior Department Appropriations Act appointed the agency’s Bureau of Land Management to administer oil leasing on the Alaskan land.

Read more from this story HERE.

Arrested Marine Vet: Patriot or Nutcase Revolutionary? See the Facebook posts here

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On Thursday, Marine veteran Brandon Raub was apparently taken into custody by local law enforcement in conjunction with several federal agencies. Mr. Raub’s mother maintains that her son was arrested because of his “patriotic Facebook postings.”

As of the writing of this column, the agencies responsible for his arrest have still not publicized a charging document explaining why Mr. Raub was arrested. Consequently, much of what we know about this case is from a radio interview with Mr. Raub’s mother as well as an apparent video taken of the actual arrest itself.

So what exactly happened with Mr. Raub? Because the FBI and Secret Service were allegedly involved in his arrest, it’s my guess that the feds will allege that he (1) threatened the President and/or Vice-President, and/or (2) advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government.

The two federal laws at issue include 18 United States Code Section 871 and 18 United States Code Section 2385. The first, 18 USC 871, criminalizes “any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect.” So, in layman’s terms, if you threaten to hurt the President or his successor, you may get to spend some time in the federal pen.

The second, 18 USC 2385, makes a federal felon out of anyone who advocates the “propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government.” In other words, never threaten to overthrow the government through any violent act.  Using a ballot box revolution, however, is perfectly acceptable.

Did the Marine vet cross the line with respect to these laws? Let’s take a look at the only information currently available outside of his mother’s interview and video, Brandon Raub’s Facebook page.  Continue to Part II, Raub Facebook posts HERE.

Video: Marine Vet Arrested by FBI allegedly “for Patriotic Posts on Facebook”

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According to his mother, Marine Veteran Brandon J Raub, discharged just this past year, was arrested yesterday by local law enforcement, apparently with the FBI and Secret Service standing by. His mother also notes that he was taken into custody simply because of his patriotic Facebook postings. Listen to this compelling interview with the Marine’s mother. Additionally, for an apparent video of the actual arrest, follow this link HERE.

Video: Obama-Planned Parenthood Protester Spits on Romney Supporter

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An Obama protester, after asking a question about Planned Parenthood and indicating her support for taxpayer-funded abortion, spits on a Romney supporter at about :25 of this video.

Serious Problems Mount for Biden (+video)

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Biden’s ‘good friend,’ donor receives $20M federal loan to open foreign luxury car dealership in Ukraine

By Christopher Bedford. In late July, John Hynansky — a longtime friend of Vice President Joe Biden, and a major donor to Biden’s campaigns as well as President Barack Obama’s — was awarded a $20 million taxpayer loan to build a foreign-car dealership in Ukraine.

According to a public summary document, the loan, from the federal government’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation, is for “[u]p to $20.0 million,” and is designed to “expand Winner Import Ukraine’s automobile business, [and] construct and operate ‘Winner Autocity,’ which will have two new, state-of-the-art dealership facilities for Porsche and Land Rover/Jaguar automobiles.”

Porsche is a German-made luxury and sports car, and Jaguar Land Rover is a British luxury and sports car company owned by an Indian subsidiary.

Under “U.S. Economic Impact,” the summary document says, “This project will have a positive developmental impact on the host country, Ukraine. The project will generate a significant number of new local jobs. Running a dealership for premium automobile brands requires a highly trained sales force, mechanics, accountants, communications and advertising specialists, IT specialists, service personnel, warehouse managers, and customer relations specialists.”

Along with his family, Hynansky also owns car dealerships in Pennsylvania and Biden’s home state of Delaware. Read more from this story HERE.

Biden sent home to Delaware to start weekend early

By Neil Munro. The updated White House calendar for Aug. 17 reports that “in the morning, the Vice President will meet with senior advisers. Later, the Vice President will be in Wilmington, Delaware.”

“There are no public events scheduled,” said the 5:36 p.m. White House announcement, titled “Daily Guidance for the Vice President.”

Biden’s retreat home during the increasingly frenetic 2012 race comes amid increased criticism for his campaign-trail performance.

Biden was slated to share an uncomfortable lunch with President Barack Obama on Thursday, following his disastrous week on the campaign trail, which culminated with a racially inflammatory warning to African-American supporters that Mitt Romney will “put y’all back in chains.”

The flubs revived chatter about whether the president will drop Biden, and seek a substitute vice president to win the tough 2012 race.  Read more from this story HERE.

New Video Regarding Biden Unveiled After Obama Voices “Confidence” in Biden:

Progressive Insurance Chair donates millions to leftist causes & other bad news for liberal insurer

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Photo credit: Granite Mountain Insurance

The recent actions of Progressive Insurance Chairman Peter Lewis in donating millions of dollars to leftist causes give new meaning to the word “Progressive” in Progressive Insurance.  WND reports:

Word started to leak out earlier this year, when Forbes reported that the “left-leaning billionaire Peter Lewis,” Progressive’s chairman, got involved in the 2012 election with a $200,000 donation to American Bridge 21st Century, a “liberal upper PAC founded by David Brock of Fox News watchdog Media Matters for America.”

Forbes also reported “Lewis has been bankrolling the effort to legalize marijuana across multiple states for years.”

The Boston Business Journal confirmed the report, noting Lewis donated $525,000 in July for an effort to give voters a ballot question on medical marijuana.

Lewis’ leftist goals have been blasted in a commentary on the Daily Paul website, which criticized Lewis as “your typical rich spoiled kid who took over the company from his father and apparently feels guilty for his success.”

“Between 2001 and 2003, Lewis funneled $15 million to the ACLU, the group most responsible for destroying what’s left of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage. … One of the ACLU projects he earmarked his funds for was an effort to sue school districts who have drug testing policies.”

Columnist Michelle Malkin detailed Lewis’ “progressive interests” over the years, noting in 2000 that Lewis was one the “leftist billionaires, union bosses, and partisan community organizers pushing the socialized medicine agenda.” [Read more from this story HERE]

And it just gets worse for Progressive.  A blog posting entitled My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court by the brother of a Progressive-insured woman who was killed in a car accident is going viral:

 I’ve been sending out some impertinent tweets about Progressive Insurance lately, but I haven’t explained how they pissed me off. So I will do that here as succinctly as possible. There’s a general understanding that says, “insurance companies— oh they’re awful,” but since Progressive turned their shit hose on my late sister and my parents, I’ve learned some things that really surprised me.

I’ll try to cleave to the facts. On June 19, 2010, my sister was driving in Baltimore when her car was struck by another car and she was killed. The other driver had run a red light and hit my sister as she crossed the intersection on the green light.

Now, I don’t discount the possibility that Katie was at fault in the accident, but it never really looked that way. The only witness who gave a statement on the day said that Katie had the light, etc. The totality of the evidence left some room for argument, but that will be the case any time there’s a catastrophic car accident that doesn’t happen underneath an array of video cameras.

One indication that the case was pretty open-and-shut was that the other guy’s insurance company looked at the situation and settled with my sister’s estate basically immediately. Now, because the other driver was underinsured, that payment didn’t amount to much, but my sister carried a policy with Progressive against the possibility of an accident with an underinsured driver. So Progressive was now on the hook for the difference between the other guy’s insurance and the value of Katie’s policy.

At which point we learned the first surprising thing about Progressive: Carrying Progressive insurance and getting into an accident does not entitle you to the value of your insurance policy. It just pisses off Progressive’s lawyers. Here I address you, Prospective Progressive Insurance Customer: someday when you have your accident, I promise that there will be enough wiggle room for Progressive’s bottomless stack of in-house attorneys to make a court case out of it and to hammer at that court case until you or your surviving loved ones run out of money. [Read more from this story HERE]

 

Cared for family by 21 years, women beaten into coma by illegal alien husband dies

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A mother-of-three has died, 21 years after her drunken husband beat her into a coma, from which she never woke up. Bernadette Jones was kept alive by her distraught family in a specially designed basement room at their Buffalo house.

They brought her comatose body home from hospital eight months after the attack by her spouse, Patrick Guiteau, vowing not to give up on her life.

That first night her children climbed into bed with her and for the next two decades relatives would face court to fight for health care coverage and for Guiteau’s deportation.

Researching the Haiti-born husband’s citizen status, Ms Jones’ family discovered that he was an illegal alien, which led to his deportation.

In her unconscious state Ms Jones fought countless infections that plagued her vulnerable body before finally succumbing to pneumonia on Sunday, aged 51.

Read more from this story HERE.

This Is Not “Let’s Make A Deal” and David Axelrod is Not Monty Hall

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The White House re-election campaign wants to make a deal. In exchange for GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney releasing five years of tax returns, they will stop criticizing him for not releasing more. While hiding behind the skirt of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the White House campaign alleges there may be as many as ten years when Romney evaded paying income taxes.

Romney says that over the past decade he has paid at least 13 percent in federal income taxes. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, a non-partisan group, middle income families average paying 12.8 percent in federal income tax.

Critics complain that Romney pays too few taxes. At his income level, Romney pays plenty of taxes. Romney made every penny he has. Hence every dime he uses to make investments has already been taxed at wage income rates. Romney pays a lower tax rate than wage earners because a majority of his income comes from investments, which are taxed at a lower rate than wages. Investment income is taxed at a lower rate because, unlike wages, investments are at risk.

If Romney was guilty of income tax evasion, the IRS would already be after him and his campaign for the White House would long be over. The IRS falls within the Department of Treasury. At the behest of the White House, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the IRS would be all over Romney like a ravenous pack of hyenas.

Romney has released his 2010 tax records and vowed to release his 2011 returns. That matches the number of returns released in 2008 by Senator John McCain when he was the GOP candidate. The number of tax returns released by McCain was never an issue.
This is not Let’s Make A Deal, and David Axelrod is not Monty Hall. For Mitt Romney, only a booby prize or worse waits behind curtain number three.

This bait and switch by the White House and their “progressive” co-conspirators is more than simply a distraction from the issues.
Throughout a shadowy, veiled, mystery shrouded political career where his own past has been intentionally concealed, obtaining confidential information about political opponents and distorting that information to smear them has been the signature move of this candidate.

Remember, the current Oval Office occupier is the same clandestine, shadowy figure caught in an open-mic moment with then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev saying that after his re-election he would have “more flexibility.”

Flexibility for … ?

Three members of a Russian punk band were found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail for protesting against Russian president Vladamir Putin. The band members were arrested on March 3rd and charged with “hooliganism”. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30 have been in jail ever since.

What kind of flexibility is this secretive, anti-business, hostile to constitutionally protected individual Liberty White House promising to a Russian president who imprisons people for free speech?

Is this flexibility related to non-military federal agencies purchasing millions of rounds of hollow point bullets?

Could this flexibility include plans to tighten the iron grip of power by imposing Martial Law and suspending elections to ensure he can finish the “fundamental transformation” of America through the imposition of a form of government completely foreign to every principle espoused by its Founding Fathers?

By agreeing to release any additional tax returns, Mitt Romney would be making a crucial mistake. Let the White House re-election campaign go into grand mal seizure. Let them scream like banshees and howl at the moon. Let them cry like babies. Let them wet themselves. Let them posture, threaten, intimidate and bully. You can bet your underwater sub-prime mortgage they will do anything, be it lie, cheat and steal to win this election.

To borrow a phrase from another popular television game show:  No deal.

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Michael Fell is a former MCA recording artist from the seminal punk rock era who toured America from coast to coast. Today, he’s a leading voice in the L.A. Tea Party movement, active since the February 2009 inception. Mr. Fell currently chairs the Westwood Tea Party, is a founding member of the L.A. Metro Tea Party Coalition, serves as the Vice Chairman of the Westside Republicans Club in L.A. CA, and is an elected Republican delegate to the L.A. 47th AD Central Committee. He’s been Campaign Manager for a primary winning Congressional candidate, as well as Santa Monica and L.A. City Council candidates. Mr. Fell is a contributing writer for https://conservativedailynews.com/, https://rightwingnews.com/, https://www.hollywoodrepublican.net/, https://beforeitsnews.com, https://www.redcounty.com/, https://www.uspatriotpac.com and, https://westsiderepublicans.com/. His opinions on today’s news events and political climate can be found on his blog: https://mjfellright.wordpress.com/

Iran: Jewish state is a “cancerous tumor” that will soon be excised

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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told an annual anti-Israel protest in Tehran on Friday that the Jewish state was a “cancerous tumor” that will soon be excised, drawing Western rebukes.

Washington said Ahmadinejad’s statements were “reprehensible”, while Paris viewed them as “outrageous.”

Ahmadinejad’s diatribe against Israel in his Quds (Jerusalem) Day address was the latest in a long line to have drawn criticism from Western governments.

“The Zionist regime and the Zionists are a cancerous tumour,” he said. “The nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists in the Palestinian land…. A new Middle East will definitely be formed. With the grace of God and help of the nations, in the new Middle East there will be no trace of the Americans and Zionists,” he said.

The diatribe took place amid heightened tensions between Israel and Iran over Tehran’s controversial nuclear program. The Jewish state has in recent weeks intensified its threats to possibly bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent it having the capability to produce atomic weapons.

Read more from this story HERE.

Baker overwhelmed with business after refusing VP Biden service

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One man in Radford is being called the next “Joe the Plumber.”

He owns a bakery, but he’s becoming known fast as the man who said “no” to the Vice President.

Since saying ‘no to Joe,’ “Chris the Baker” is baking like a crazy man.

It’s been 24 hours since Chris McMurray said “no” to a photo op with Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

And his Radford bakery, “Crumb and Get It” has been slammed ever since.

“It’s been a great response,” McMurray said from his store Thursday. “The overwhelming majority of people have been supportive and calls from Texas and Chicago and California. Ordering cookies and telling us to send ‘em to veterans and homeless shelters. It’s been incredible.”

McMurray’s been in business only three months. Saying “no” to Joe, may have been the best business decision he’s ever made.

Read more from this story HERE.