Boehner: GOP will be voting against Obama rather than for Romney

When House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, endorsed Mitt Romney for president in April, he pledged to do “everything I can to help him win.”

In his words, however, the one thing he can’t do is make voters “fall in love” with the candidate.

Speaking last week at a fundraiser in Wheeling, W.Va., Boehner was surprisingly candid in his characterization of Romney’s candidacy when asked, in a question-and-answer session: “Can you make me love Mitt Romney?”

“No,” he answered, as first reported by Roll Call. “Listen, we’re just politicians. I wasn’t elected to play God. The American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney.”

He added that the presumptive Republican nominee had “some friends, relatives, and fellow Mormons… some people that are going to vote for him,” but suggested that at the end of the day, Republicans would be voting against President Obama rather than for Romney.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Transparency Ends at the White House Door

On his first day in office, President Obama vowed to create “a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America’s citizens.” But the president has not lived up to his transparency rhetoric – and now even the left is taking note.

Liberal magazine Mother Jones laments this week that the Obama administration spent a record-high $12 billion in 2011 to keep government information classified. Since the process of classifying documents is itself classified, it’s impossible to determine the individual merits of those decisions. But it’s instructive to consider the government’s sweeping classification mandate with Obama’s initial pledge that transparency would be one of the “touchstones” of his administration. As he said back in January 2009:

The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, that it should not be disclosed. That era is now over.

Except, plainly, it’s not. And it’s not just the “American people” who are being denied access to government-related information. The president’s cheerleaders in the establishment media have been similarly rebuffed. In June, that frustration led Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times – hardly a right-wing tribune — to blast the administration for its hostility to media coverage and its tightfisted control over information, especially on national security. Abramson revealed that Times reporters who had covered national security issues for several decades had confided in her that “the environment has never been tougher or information harder to dislodge. One Times reporter told me, ‘The environment in Washington has never been more hostile to reporting.’” So much for a new era of accountability.

Obama’s broken promises on transparency are also evident in the administration’s aggressive pursuit of leakers, on whom journalists rely for scoops and inside information. That may seem unlikely, particularly in light of the recent spate of national security leaks from the administration. But those leaks, highlighting the administration’s national security successes — such as the drone program and the foiling of a terror plot through an audacious undercover operation — have largely served to bolster the administration’s public image. By contrast, the administration has come down hard on leakers it sees as damaging to its cause. In its first term, the administration has launched six prosecutions involving such whistleblowers – double the number under all previous administrations combined. Although most of these whistleblowers have leaked information to the media rather than to a foreign government, it speaks to the severity of the administration’s position on leaks that it has gone after them under the 1917 Espionage Act. The message is clear: Transparency ends at the White House door.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo Credit: Saint_727

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

Brad Pitt’s Mom Pens Anti-Gay, Anti-Obama Letter to Local Newspaper

An anti-gay letter urging Christians to vote for Mitt Romney that was printed today in The Springfield News-Leader has been confirmed by the newspaper as having been penned by Jane Pitt, mother of Brad Pitt.

The verification comes amid some confusion, as the Missouri newspaper first printed an editor’s note denying any relation between the letter writer and movie star. That was later replaced with a second editor’s note, reading, “To clear up earlier confusion, the News-Leader has verified the letter writer is the mother of actor Brad Pitt and local businessman Doug Pitt.”

The letter — itself a response to another opinion piece in the newspaper justifying Christians’ rights to refuse to vote for Romney because he is a Mormon — identifies Mrs. Pitt as “a Christian [who differs] with the Mormon religion.”

But, Pitt continues, “any Christian should spend much time in prayer before refusing to vote for a family man with high morals, business experience, who is against abortion, and shares Christian conviction concerning homosexuality just because he is a Mormon.”

Pitt goes on to write that “any Christian who does not vote or writes in a name is casting a vote for Romney’s opponent, Barack Hussein Obama — a man who sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for years, did not hold a public ceremony to mark the National Day of Prayer, and is a liberal who supports the killing of unborn babies and same-sex marriage.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Obama is going to impose gun control by treaty . . . on July 27?

Without any national debate — and after secret negotiations — Obama is going to sign the Arms Trade Treaty which will lead to UN imposed gun control.

Video: Allen West- Arrogant Obama Presidency Like King George III

Allen West appeared on Laura Ingraham’s radio show yesterday and responded to Obama’s new immigration policy again.

Photo Credit: Donkey-Hotey

Obama: al-Qaida terrorizes because of “poverty & ignorance, helplessness & despair”

The 9-11 attacks were carried out because of a lack of “empathy” for others’ suffering on the part of al-Qaida, whose terrorist ideology “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair,” President Obama once explained in largely unreported comments eight days after the mega-terror attacks that rocked the nation.

Obama went on to imply the September 11th attacks were in part a result of U.S. policy, lecturing the American military to minimize civilian casualties in the Middle East and urging action opposing “bigotry or discrimination directed against neighbors and friends of Middle-Eastern descent.”

“Even as I hope for some measure of peace and comfort to the bereaved families, I must also hope that we, as a nation, draw some measure of wisdom from this tragedy,” Obama wrote in a piece about 9-11 published on Sept. 19, 2001, in Chicago’s Hyde Park Herald.

The politician continued: “Certain immediate lessons are clear, and we must act upon those lessons decisively. We need to step up security at our airports. We must re-examine the effectiveness of our intelligence networks and we must be resolute in identifying the perpetrators of these heinous acts and dismantling their organizations of destruction,” wrote Obama.

“We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity or suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, it may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics.

Read More at Klein Online.

 

How Saul Alinsky Taught Obama to Say One Thing and Do the Opposite



For those who have paid attention, President Obama has a knack for saying one thing and doing another altogether: a knack for claiming one position while actually occupying another. We first saw this when this when he was campaigning for president in 2008 and the Supreme Court struck down DC’s gun ban via the Heller decision. At the time, he claimed to mutually support the gun ban and the 2nd Amendment. (Proving this wasn’t a fluke, when Chicago’s gun ban was struck down 2 years later via the McDonald decision, he again claimed he supported both the gun ban and the 2nd Amendment.)

Perhaps his position on a mandate by which government forces citizens to buy healthcare is an even clearer example. When campaigning for the Democrat nomination for president in 2008, he differentiated between himself and fellow candidate Hillary Clinton by criticizing her plan to use a mandate as an “enforcement mechanism” to “charge people who…don’t have healthcare.” He claimed the use of a mandate for those purposes was something he couldn’t go along with, something that demonstrated a “genuine difference” between himself and Clinton.

However, on April 4, 2012, Obama urged the Supreme Court not to rule against the mandate in ObamaCare because his healthcare reforms cannot survive “in the absence of an individual mandate.”

It’s arguable that there isn’t anything that demonstrates Saul Alinsky’s impact on Obama better than these flip flops and duplicitous positions. For it was Alinsky who spent his life teaching would-be radicals (like Obama) that you can say what you have to say to get over the hump, but once you’re over the hump, you do whatever you want to do. In other words, it’s okay to present yourself as something moderate, even centrist, for the purposes of securing power, and once you’ve secured that power it is perfectly acceptable to revert to who (and what) you really are.

In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky demonstrates this with a look at how Vladimir Lenin was able to overthrow the government in pre-communist Russia:

[Lenin said, “The government has] the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns it will be through the bullet.” And so it was.

Read More at Breitbart. By AWR Hawkins

Will the Constitution make it past 2012 ?

Today was the final day for arguments at the Supreme Court for Obamacare, laughably officially known as the “Affordable Care Act”. But it is the signature strike of Obama and the left at the Constitution, which will literally be a historical document with little contemporary influence if Obamacare is ruled Constitutional.

As Bob Thompson writes at The American Thinker,

this case will determine whether there are any meaningful limitations on Congress’ power to mandate an individual’s life choices.

This should give all of us pause for concern, as states’ power will be forever subsumed under the “statist” power that the federal government will wield if Obamacare is ruled Constitutional. More from Thompson:

When Congress’ power under Article I, Section 8 — power to “regulate commerce … among the several states” (Clause 3) — has been paired with Congress’ power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into executing the foregoing powers” (Clause 18), the result has been the virtually unlimited power of Congress to dominate the everyday behavior of the American people, in direct conflict with the plain language of the Tenth Amendment reserving such powers to the state and to the people.

A linchpin of the government’s case is a 1942 ruling where interstate commerce was somehow invoked for a farmer who grew wheat for his family and livestock, yet the wheat never left the state:

the government relies heavily on the properly ridiculed 1942 Supreme Court case of Wickard v. Filburn, which upheld a bureaucratic decision dictating the amount of wheat that a farmer grew for his family and his livestock, even though the wheat never traveled in or had any connection to interstate commerce.

Thompson is optimistic that the court will actually look to the Constitution to determine its decision, rather than the bending road of following precedent in case upon case:
In the 2008 case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court re-examined the “prevailing wisdom” that the Second Amendment protected only a “collective right” which protected state Guards, and not a right that individuals enjoyed.  After an extensive textual and contextual analysis, the Court reached a decision consistent with the Founders, even if inconsistent with prior Court decisions.  In the Antoine Jonescase in January 2012, the Supreme Court re-examined over 40 years of Supreme Court jurisprudence that transformed the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” into a judicially invented right to privacy, and returned the Fourth Amendment to its property foundation.  These were brave, principled decisions.
This has been a fascinating case from a legal and constitutional perspective, and the focus on the issues will only help conservatives, because it highlights the issues and educates a huge number of average Americans on what is happening to our great nation.

Reason.tv (via HotAir.com with excellent commentary by Ed Morrissey) lists three disturbing results if Obamacare is upheld:
a. it represents the end of limited government
b. the price tag is ballooning ($1.8 TRILLION), almost double the original projection
c. it’s not going to make us healthier

As conservatives, we will wait patiently but nervously for the Courts decision, but I will also pray for the Court  to clearly see the issues and rule appropriately.

Thompson’s entire article is worth your time