Economic stagnation: Obama’s baby

Today the American unemployment rate remains unchanged at 8.2 percent. The economy is still five million jobs shy of the breakeven point as America continues to drown in a sea of growing government red ink while struggling to tread water under the overburden of oppressive big government regulations.

Since the start of the seemingly never ending “great recession”, the nation has lost 8.8 million jobs. It has regained only 3.8 million, less than 44 percent. According to the most recent Labor Department report, employers added only 80,000 jobs in June. The economy averaged 75,000 jobs a month in the second quarter, one-third the pace of the first quarter. This marks the third straight month of weak hiring, clearly showing that the economy is still struggling under the weight of the current administration’s failed economic policies.

Thanks to the brilliance of Obama’s economic plan, over the course of the past two years, America’s alleged recovery has gone from adding an average of 161,000 jobs per month to 150,000 per month, and now to 75,000 per month. If a recovery was actually taking place, those numbers would be going up instead of down, right? Instead, a sinkhole is swallowing up hope for millions of Americans of finding a job.

Was there not a pledge made in 2009 by the self-imagined, self-appointed intellectual elites working in the White House that if American taxpayers funded the $878 billion “stimulus” package, unemployment would not go above 8 percent? Was there not a promise that the “stimulus” would have unemployment down to 5.5 percent by now? As it turns out the “stimulus” wasted taxpayer dollars, making little dent in the jobless rate.  But it did reward the White House’s political cronies within the inefficient, unproductive, largely imaginary “green energy industry.”  Obama’s claims that millions of jobs were “created or saved by the stimulus” must be met with severe skepticism. The unemployment numbers have never reflected that.

There are far too many people who know the real story because they are living it. Claims made to the contrary by the Obama re-election campaign don’t matter as they fail to reflect the reality people are living. Regardless of what is loaded on the teleprompter, reality cannot and will not be explained away. In short, people living in the real world are not buying the administration’s theoretical “cash for clunkers” economics approach. Taxing successful businesses, taking a cut for DC, then sending the remainder back to your favorite campaign bundlers running phony business fronts is not an economic recovery plan.  That’s money laundering, Chicago style.

How long is it going to be before the current White House occupant and/or his surrogates start popping up like Whack-a-Moles on the Sunday morning political talk shows blaming all of this on George W. Bush?

Did someone say this Sunday?

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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/

Video: Congressman says US schools should adopt Koran, model Islamic Madrassas

The Muslim congressman who once said that the Tea Party would “love” to see black Americans “hanging on a tree,” made another controversial statement recently. This time, Congressman Carson told the audience that American schools should be modeled after Islamic Madrassas and touted the benefits of schools that use the Koran as their “foundation.”

Photo Credit: KPI

Forget Justice Roberts; It’s the Economy, Stupid!

Forget the calls to waterboard Chief Justice Roberts until he confesses to committing high crimes and misdemeanors over the Obamacare “tax.”  It is time to move on to what really matters to American voters. The strategy must now be for the GOP presidential candidate to switch focus from the Obamacare tax controversy to America’s tepid economic recovery.

Recent official figures show that the U.S. economy grew by 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2012, less than the 2.2 percent originally reported. According to the annual report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this year’s growth forecast for the U.S. economy has been lowered to 2 percent. The IMF also lowered its forecast for 2013 from 2.4 percent to 2.25 percent. It also warned of the fiscal cliff known as taxmageddon, the $4 trillion tax increases and defense spending cuts that are due at the end of 2012.

The U.S. Gross Domestic Product growth rate in the first three months was slower than originally announced. This news was accompanied by a downward revision in consumer spending. After-tax corporate profits experienced their biggest fall since the last three months of 2008.

Meanwhile, U.S. employment rose only slightly in April. The Labor Department reported claims for jobless benefits were higher last week, suggesting a slowdown in job creation.

US retail sales fell for the second straight month in May, indicating that growth in the economy is still sluggish. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, retail sales fell by 0.2 percent.

The Institute for Supply Management said Monday that U.S. manufacturing shrank in June for the first time in nearly three years. The manufacturing activity index fell from 53.5 percent to 49.7 percent, the lowest reading since July 2009. Readings below 50 indicate contraction.

The Federal Reserve cut its forecast for 2012 growth to between 1.9 percent and 2.4 percent. That’s half a percentage point lower than April’s estimate.

With facts and figures like these, it is time for the GOP to go aggressively back on the offensive against the failed economic policies of the current administration. That the economy is tanking and employment prospects remain grim need not be explained to voters living that reality.

Give no quarter to the “progressive” campaign. Do not let them off the mat. While they are down, kick them as hard and as long as possible. Rest assured, given half a chance, “progressives” kick with glee…without hesitation.

The survival of America and the principles upon which it was founded are facing an existential threat.  Don’t be stupid.

 

 

Photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Morgan Freeman: “Obama’s not black!”

Since he burst on the national political scene, Barack Obama has faced questions about everything from his place of birth to his college transcripts — but his race?

Oddly, apparent doubts about the president’s racial identification now are being raised not by his critics but by one of his strongest supporters: Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman. He told a surprised NPR interviewer this week that the United States has yet to see its “first black president.”

Freeman was trying to make a point that some people oppose Obama because of his race, when in fact, the actor argued, Obama is “mixed race” and not African-American.

“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president,” he said “is that all of the people who are setting up this [racial] barrier for him … they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America. There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president, he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Traditionally, Americans of mixed racial heritage are allowed to decide for themselves which, if either, of their parental communities with which to identify. Obama has self-identified as an African-American from an early age.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: Cesar Mascarenhas

UN calls for international tax on billionaires to transfer wealth to poor

The United Nations on Thursday called for a tax on billionaires to help raise more than $400 billion a year for poor countries.

An annual lump sum payment by the super-rich is one of a host of measures including a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, currency exchanges or financial transactions proposed in a UN report that accuses wealthy nations of breaking promises to step up aid for the less fortunate.

The annual World Economic and Social Survey says it is critical to find new ways to help the world’s poor as pledged cash fails to flow.

The report estimates that the number of people around the globe worth at least $1 billion rose to 1,226 in 2012.

There are an estimated 425 billionaires in the United States, 315 in the Asia-Pacific region, 310 in Europe, 90 in other North and South American countries and 86 in Africa and the Middle East.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: Jorbasa

Ron Paul’s New Mission: Internet Freedom

For months we’ve been speculating about how Ron Paul might spend the political capital he’s amassed accumulating all those delegate votes through the primary season. Now it looks like we have our answer.

A new document from Ron Paul and his son Rand called “The Technology Revolution” lays out the Pauls’ roadmap for where they’ll focus their agenda moving forward: Internet freedom.

The document makes a case against the largely GOP-motivated legislation to regulate the internet that’s been proposed over the last year—acts like SOPA, PIPA, etc. It also makes a case against the dominant voices resisting internet regulation—the tech companies and political progressives who protested SOPA and who last week released their own manifesto called the Declaration of Internet Freedom.

The Pauls argue that both approaches from the left and the right seek to impose harmful controls on an internet that should be left totally unregulated. In the Pauls’ view, the left’s anti-trust concerns and advocacy for “Net Neutrality,” which would prevent telecoms from divvying up their bandwidth and charging sites for quick load times, are as misguided and anti-free-market as the right’s push for tighter copyright controls with SOPA. Government regulation in the interest of openness and consumer fairness is neither open nor fair, they say.

Instead, the Pauls want to see the internet totally unregulated, with corporations and individuals behaving in the ecosystem however the market will motivate them to.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit:  everett taasevigen

China’s controversial Three Gorges dam now online, world’s largest hydro project

The final turbine of China’s massive Three Gorges dam has been connected to the power grid, marking the completion of a controversial hydropower project that cost the country more than £38bn and displaced at least 1.3 million people.

The installation of the project’s 32nd 700-megawatt unit on Wednesday brought total capacity up to 22.5 gigawatts (GW), accounting for 11% of the country’s total hydroelectric capacity. Britain’s largest power station, Drax, produces 4GW.

“The complete operation of all the generators makes the Three Gorges dam the world’s largest hydropower project, and the largest base for clean energy,” Zhang Cheng, general manager of the project’s operator, China Yangtze Power, told a ceremony.

The construction of the world’s biggest hydropower plant began in 1994 and its first generating unit was connected to the grid in July 2003.

The official state news agency Xinhua said the dam had already generated a total of 564.8bn kilowatt-hours, saving nearly 200m tonnes of coal a year.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: hughrocks

The Worst Ruling Since Dred Scott

Last week Chief Justice John Roberts blatantly ignored the Constitution and the law and purposefully rewrote Obamacare in order to rule it legal. He called Obamacare a “tax” instead of an individual mandate; he then proceeded to blithely expand the government’s power to tax to encompass a tax on breathing, which is what Obamacare is.

Now I had warned conservatives years ago that Roberts was a rotten pick for the Supreme Court. “Roberts is not an originalist,” I wrote in 2005. “There is nothing in his very short jurisprudential record to indicate that his judicial philosophy involves strict fidelity to the original meaning of the Constitution.”

Nonetheless, Roberts’ decision was stunning.

It was stunning because the Obamacare decision represented the greatest single judicial limitation on American liberty since Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court ruled that under the Constitution, blacks were not human beings. Dred Scott is the judicial benchmark for evil decisions, and far surpasses the Obamacare decision in its legal flaws and moral emptiness. And there are many other evil and disgusting Supreme Court decisions that threatened American liberty: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), allowing states to segregate by race; Buck v. Bell (1927), allowing states to forcibly sterilize the mentally retarded; Korematsu v. United States (1944), allowing the federal government to order Japanese Americans into internment camps based on the need to prevent espionage.

All of these decisions were wrong, both legally and morally. But Obamacare surpasses all but Dred Scott in its violation of profound foundational American principles.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: RasMarley

Video: Living in a surveillance state; NSA collects daily “billions of phone calls, emails”

Many Americans are unaware of that our government is collecting and storing billions of emails and phone calls on a daily basis. “Zero question we live in a surveillance state.”

Photo credit: SwissDave

Calif. Lawmakers Want to Radically Change Legal Definition of “Parents”

California lawmakers are considering an unusual bill that would legalize, in certain cases, more than two parents for a child.

The bill – SB 1476 – proposed by state Sen. Mark Leno, San Francisco Democrat, has passed the Senate but has not come up for a vote in the Assembly.

The bill would allow judges to recognize more than two individuals as parents when separation and custody battles arise in court.

Mr. Leno hopes to override a California appellate court ruling that limited parenthood to two individuals.

That case involved a lesbian couple and their child’s biological father. With one mother hospitalized and the other incarcerated, the biological father wished to gain custody to remove the child from California’s foster care system.

Read more from this story HERE.