Bradley Manning to Request Pardon from Obama Over 35-Year Jail Sentence

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Bradley Manning will send a personal plea to Barack Obama next week for a presidential pardon after he was sentenced on Wednesday to 35 years in prison for passing hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks.

The sentence was more severe than many observers expected, and is much longer than any punishment given to previous US government officials who have leaked information to the media.

Manning showed no emotion, neither when the sentence was delivered, nor after being escorted into a side room, where his lawyers and members of his family were waiting, some of them in tears.

“Everyone in his defence team was emotional, including myself,” his lawyer, David Coombs, told the Guardian. “The only person that wasn’t emotional was Brad. He looked to us and said: ‘It’s OK. I’m going to move forward and I’m going to be all right’.”

Coombs told a press conference that next week he will formally submit the request for a pardon, “or at the very least commute his sentence to time served”. That request will contain a personal appeal from Manning to Obama, which his lawyer read out.

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‘North Colorado’ Secession Movement Inches Forward

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Voters in Weld County will vote on whether to secede from Colorado after commissioners this week unanimously agreed to put the question on November’s ballot.

Weld County, the largest of several that have been seriously discussing breaking away to form their own state, joins three other counties in putting the question to its citizens. Several others are also considering referring the measure to voters or waiting to see if citizen initiatives show support for the idea.

The so-called 51st State Initiative is a result of rural Coloradans feeling abandoned by politicians in Denver. The last legislative session, which was controlled by Democratic majorities in both chambers, saw the passage of numerous controversial laws, many of which thumb their noses at rural values, commissioners in the plains counties have said.

Chief among them was a controversial bill requiring rural electricity cooperatives to double the amount of renewable energy they offer by 2020, a mandate that doesn’t apply to city utilities and which opponents have said will raise electricity rates on rural customers.

County leaders have also been alarmed at attempts to strengthen regulations on oil and gas developers, which are heavily invested in rural counties. And they’ve also been riled by tough new gun laws that limit the size of ammunition magazines and require universal background checks for all firearms transfers.

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Cruz: Ignore Media, GOP ‘Can Win’ Defunding Obamacare Argument

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ted cruz immigrationAt a spirited town hall today, Senator Ted Cruz pushed for Obamacare to be defunded in the upcoming spending bill.

“Our friends in the media like to tell us this is not a fight we can win,” Cruz told attendees at the event which was sponsored by Heritage Action. “Let me tell you how we win this fight. The house of representatives will pass a continuing resolution that funds everything, everything in its entirety, except Obamacare.”

“What happens next is President Obama and Harry Reid are going to scream and yell ‘Those mean nasty Republicans are threatening to shut down the federal government,’” Cruz continued. “What has to happen after that is we’ve got to do something conservatives haven’t done in a long time. We’ve got to stand up and win the argument.”

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Pollster: Ken Buck Leads ‘Thin’ GOP Field to Unseat Mark Udall

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Republican Ken Buck holds the early lead over what a Denver pollster called a “strange” field of GOP contenders hoping to unseat Colorado Democratic Sen. Mark Udall.

But in order to stay there the pollster said,, he must avoid a repeat of his “mistake-prone 2010 race” against Sen. Michael Bennet.

Floyd Ciruli, a respected Colorado pollster with Ciruli Associates, wrote in a recent blog that Buck is the “least controversial and most competent” of those vying for the GOP nomination.

“Unless someone else gets into the race, neither State Senators Owen Hill nor Randy Baumgardner have the resources or network, at least at this stage, to be competitive,” he wrote.

During his last run for Senate, Buck went from being an underfunded dark horse who won the primary against an opponent with much stronger name recognition and a bigger war chest.

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Study: Welfare Pays More than Work in Most States

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Looking for a good paying job? Well, look no further.

No, really, stop looking. In 35 states, welfare benefits pay more than a minimum wage job, according to a new study by the libertarian Cato Institute, and in 13 states welfare pays more than $15 per hour.

“One of the single best ways to climb out of poverty is taking a job, but as long as welfare provides a better standard of living than an entry-level job, recipients will continue to choose it over work,” said Michael Tanner, senior policy analyst and co-author of the study.

The study is an updated version of one Tanner put out in 1995 that estimated the full value of welfare benefits packages across the states. The 1995 study found that such tax-free welfare benefits greatly exceeded the poverty level and “their dollar value was greater than the amount of take-home income a worker would receive from an entry-level job.”

Despite efforts to curb welfare spending, many welfare programs and benefits have continued to outpace the income that many workers can receive for working an entry-level job, which disincentivizes work, according to the study.

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Members of ’72 Dolphins Refuse White House Invite, “Diametrically Opposed” to Obama

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Photo Credit: USATSI

Photo Credit: USATSI

Good news: On Tuesday, the White House will honor the 1972 Dolphins, the NFL’s last undefeated team, because, really, that group doesn’t get enough attention.

Bad news: At least three members of the ’72 squad won’t attend the ceremony in the nation’s capital because they oppose the views of President Barack Obama.

“We’ve got some real moral compass issues in Washington,” Hall of Fame center Jim Langer told the Sun-Sentinel’s David Hyde. “I don’t want to be in a room with those people and pretend I’m having a good time. I can’t do that. If that [angers] people, so be it.”

“I’ll just say my views are diametrically opposed to the President’s,” Manny Fernandez said. “Enough said. Let’s leave it at that. I hope everyone enjoys the trip who goes.”

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DeMint: Republicans Unwilling to Defund ObamaCare ‘Need to be Replaced’

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Jim DeMintFormer Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Monday night urged voters to replace any Republican lawmaker unwilling to vote to defund ObamaCare during next month’s budget showdown.

DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, dismissed fears that Republicans would be blamed for a government shutdown, as they were in the 1990s.

“The risk of that is so much less than the risk to our country if we implement ObamaCare, and so I’m not as interested in the political futures of folks who think they might lose a showdown with the president,” DeMint said at a town-hall meeting hosted by Heritage Action, the think tank’s political arm, in Fayetteville, Ark., the first stop on a nine-city tour.

DeMint said President Obama believes he has the upper hand in the coming fight.

“I think he knows that Republicans are afraid, and if they are, they need to be replaced,” DeMint told NPR in an interview after the event.

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Clinton Dramas: Here We Go Again

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By Maggie Haberman.

Tabloid headlines. Personal dramas. Organizational disarray. Score-settling between rival factions documented in news accounts like a soap opera.

Does this have a familiar ring?

No one — or mostly no one — truly believes the swirl of headlines surrounding Bill and Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2013 should lead to a grand conclusion about whether another iteration of a Clinton campaign can be run effectively, free of the internecine warfare and incessant drama that marked her 2008 bid.

But if Clinton and her supporters were hoping to allay those doubts well ahead of a possible 2016 run, the past few months have not been helpful.

Clinton supporters would point out, fairly, that much of what has happened to them this summer — the steady stream of unseemly stories about Anthony Weiner’s continued virtual liaisons, his wife and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s very public decision to stand by him, and reports of mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation — has been beyond their control.

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David Brock accuses N.Y. Times of anti-Clinton bias

By Dylan Byers.

David Brock, the chairman of both Media Matters for America and American Bridge super PAC, has written an open letter to The New York TImes expressing his “concern about a recent string of reports and columns … that have done nothing but use false pretenses to cast a shadow on Bill and Hillary Clinton.”

Brock highlights the Times’ Aug. 13 report on “unease” over finances and management at the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation (“an exercise in evidence-free speculation,” according to Brock) and two recent columns from Maureen Dowd that Brock says “reinforce her long pattern of using hollow caricatures to attack the Clintons (and the former first family in general).”

Brock then calls on the Times to: “Correct the record regarding errors of fact and context in the Foundation news story … Refrain from negatively pre-judging the Clintons in the manner of your political editor … Correct the anti-Clinton animus consistently exhibited by one of your columnists; and … Resist the temptation to create purely speculative news in your new Clinton ‘beat.'”

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Mark Levin’s Game Changer: Using the Constitution to Arrest Federal Drift

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Photo Credit: Forbes

Photo Credit: Forbes

Two Marks, Levin and Meckler, notably and nobly are proposing to change the rules of modern politics and governance.

Debuting at Amazon Number One (for all, not merely political, books) is syndicated radio talk show host Mark Levin’s The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic. Sporting an average of 4.7 stars from, at the time of this writing, 153 reviews on Amazon, Levin calls for a populist suite of Constitutional amendments to be initiated by the States.

Levin proposes to reform the federal government from its degenerate, bloated, imperial structure back to its (small r) republican roots. Even more interesting than his specific proposals is the mechanism.

There is a little-known “emergency cord” built into the Constitution by the Founders. Find it in Article V. It allows for the States, rather than just the Congress, to propose Constitutional amendments. It is obscure yet entirely legitimate — and invaluable. It was extolled by James Madison in The Federalist No. 43.

Meanwhile, on August 15th, on the ground and the Web, a civic “Seal Team Six” — of operatives and activists — has constituted itself as ConventionOfStates.com. (This columnist has there enlisted as a foot soldier.) Its purpose? “COS seeks to call a Convention of States for a particular subject—limiting the jurisdiction and power of the federal government. This strategy would allow the states to formally consider almost all of Mark Levin’s ‘Liberty Amendments,’ giving delegates the freedom to propose the necessary amendments to stop the runaway power of Washington, D.C.”

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Obama Skips the Kennedy Tax Cuts

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

After delivering a number of “economic growth” speeches this summer, President Obama has failed to inspire any confidence, falling all the way back to square one in a recent Gallup poll. Actually, make that less than square one. Gallup reported that Obama’s approval rating on the economy has sunk to 35 percent in August from 42 percent in early June.

Why should we be surprised?

The actual economy shows real GDP falling well below 2 percent. This so-called recovery remains the worst in modern history dating back to 1947.

And as far as solutions go, Obama keeps giving us the same old, same old: End the spending-cut sequester, lower tax deductions, and raise taxes on the rich, all to free up money for infrastructure, green energy, “manufacturing innovation initiatives,” and the teachers’ unions.

Of course, this would all come on top of Obamacare, which if it doesn’t fall of its own weight, will add so many new taxes and regulations that it will sink the economy even more.

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