Dems Resume ‘Nuclear Option’ Threats to Bypass GOP, Confirm Obama Nominees

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Photo Credit: Susan Walsh/APSome Senate Democrats resumed calls for the so-called “nuclear option” Thursday after Senate Republicans blocked two presidential nominees.

Republicans have blocked the nomination of Democratic Rep. Mel Watt to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the nomination of Patricia Millett to the U.S. Appeals Court for the Washington, D.C. Circuit by voting against cloture, effectively filibustering the nominations.

If invoked, the nuclear option would allow Democrats to push through presidential nominations without any support from Senate Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell struck a deal in January to avert the nuclear option. In July, the two again negotiated on a “new normal,” in Reid’s words, to streamline the process for confirming presidential nominees. The deal, Reid said at the time, was that “Qualified executive nominees must not be blocked on a procedural supermajority vote.” An exception was made for “extraordinary circumstances.”

But after the Watt and Millett votes, the nuclear option is back on the table, some Democrats have declared.

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Privacy Becomes a Conservative Cause

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Photo Credit: APAs Congress takes a closer look at Internet privacy with this week’s Federal Trade Commission oversight hearing in the House, conservatives have a unique opportunity.

Privacy used to be a dirty word among many conservatives because the liberal Warren Court of the 1960s used concepts such as “penumbras” – words not expressly found in the Constitution — to overturn state laws that protected traditional moral precepts or valid law enforcement.

In recent years, however, beginning with the passage of the USA Patriot Act during the George W. Bush years, but expanded seemingly without limit under Barack Obama, conservatives have awakened to the threat of the massive surveillance state.

Some of the leading Republican presidential prospects are taking a hatchet to the Obama administration over the scandal. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has introduced a bill to rein in the National Security Agency’s sweeping powers, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) recently knocked President Obama for allowing an “unprecedented and intrusive surveillance system” to take hold, eroding Americans’ privacy rights.

House conservatives have joined the fight, too. An amendment to shut down the NSA’s sweeping Internet and phone data collection programs sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) was narrowly defeated after leadership stepped in to vote it down. And just recently, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), a Tea Party favorite, resumed a series of briefings focused on the growing threats to privacy and the collection of personal data.

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Rand Paul on NSA: “They Could Well Be Spying on the President, For All I Know”

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Photo Credit: National Review In light of a recent report, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) fears the National Security Agency may be spying on President Barack Obama. “They could well be spying on the president, for all I know,” Paul says, in an interview with National Review Online. “He has a cell phone, and, in fact, my guess is that they have collected data on the president’s phone.”

Paul also believes the federal government may be tracking Pope Francis. “The most important question we need to ask the NSA is, ‘Are you telling us you’re collecting no data on the pope?’ And, ‘Did you collect any information on him when he was the archbishop, while staying in a certain residence in Rome at the time of the election?’ I don’t think they’re telling the truth.”

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Americans Packing Up In Search of Lower Taxes, Housing Costs

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Photo Credit: ThinkstockWhere are Americans moving, and why? Timothy Noah, writing in the Washington Monthly, professes to be puzzled. He points out that people have been moving out of states with high per capita incomes — Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland — to states with lower income levels.

“Why are Americans by and large moving away from economic opportunity rather than toward it?” he asks.

Actually, it’s not puzzling at all. The movement from high-tax, high-housing-cost states to low-tax, low-housing-cost states has been going on for more than 40 years, as I note in my new book Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics.

Between 1970 and 2010 the population of New York state increased from 18 million to 19 million. In that same period, the population of Texas increased from 11 million to 25 million.

The picture is even starker if you look at major metro areas. The New York metropolitan area, including counties in New Jersey and Connecticut, increased from 17.8 million in 1970 to 19.2 million in 2010 — up 8 percent. During that time the nation grew 52 percent.

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Military Training Manual: “Healthy, White, Heterosexual, Christian” Men Hold an Unfair Advantage Over Other Races

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Photo Credit: ARMY.MILA controversial 600-plus page manual used by the military to train its Equal Opportunity officers teaches that “healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian” men hold an unfair advantage over other races, and warns in great detail about a so-called “White Male Club.”

“Simply put, a healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian male receives many unearned advantages of social privilege, whereas a black, homosexual, atheist female in poor health receives many unearned disadvantages of social privilege,” reads a statement in the manual created by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI).

The manual, which was obtained by Fox News, also instructs troops to “support the leadership of people of color. Do this consistently, but not uncritically,” the manual states.

The Equal Opportunity Advisor Student Guide is the textbook used during a three month DEOMI course taught at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Individuals who attend the training lead Equal Opportunity briefings on military installations around the nation.

The 637-page manual covers a wide range of issues from racism and religious diversity to cultural awareness, extremism and white privilege.

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The Obama Facade Cracks at Last

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerOnly now — five years into his presidency — are we seeing some cracks in the protective shield surrounding President Obama, and then only after the abuse of reporters’ privacy has been threatened. Mainstream journalists have not scrutinized his controversial policies, nor have they held him accountable for questionable actions that have caused outrage among fair-minded critics and produced irreparable harm to the nation.

Some facts are irrefutable, but the president has, by and large, deflected all blame and few in the media have dared question his policies and actions. Investor’s Business Daily reports that we are becoming a welfare state. The Census Department reported this week that almost half (49 percent) of Americans (151 million) are on federal aid. The U.S. has spent nearly $4 trillion ($3.7) on welfare over the past five years — that is five times greater than the money spent on transportation, education, and NASA, combined. Further, more than 70 percent of all federal spending goes to assistance programs, and the Congressional Budget Office projects that welfare spending will rise 80 percent over the next decade. Even with all that spending, though, 46.5 million Americans live in poverty and nearly half of all Americans pay absolutely no federal income tax. It doesn’t take an economics genius to realize that with the nation’s debt at $17 trillion and with more than $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities, we are in deep economic trouble. In short, the buck stops with President Obama when it comes to assessing blame for “the weakest recovery from a recession in modern American history.”

In the face of such dire statistics, it is instructive to review the president’s economic performance to date. President Obama has been late in turning in a budget to Congress in four of the past five years. Current “solutions” to the fiscal crisis are to print more money, raise taxes, and, in the process, weakened the American dollar, threatening its status as the sole world reserve currency.

The president’s signature legislation — his legacy, if you will — is ObamaCare. This massive health insurance legislation, taking over one-sixth of the American economy, was forced on the nation through a straight party-line vote. While the president constantly chided the Congress for not “negotiating” or being unwilling to be “bipartisan,” President Obama himself was unwilling to talk with Republicans and repeatedly stated that “He Won” the election and “shouldn’t have to offer anything.”

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Senior Homeland Security Advisor: America is an “Islamic Country”

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Photo Credit: Mohamed Elibiary/TwitterA senior advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, Mohamed Elibiary, says that America is “an Islamic country” and continues to argue that the Muslim Brotherhood is comparable to Christian evangelicals.

Elibiary is a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and was promoted in September. He also served on the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism Working Group and the Faith-based Security and Communications Advisory Committee.

He is also a long-time Texas Republican Party official and was a delegate for Senator John McCain in 2008.

On October 31, Elibiary tweeted that he believes the U.S. “is an Islamic country.”…

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IRS’ Lois Lerner Gave Confidential Tea Party Tax Info to FEC, Violating Law

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Photo Credit: AP The Internal Revenue Service shared highly confidential tax information of several Tea Party groups in the IRS scandal with the Federal Election Commission, a clear violation of federal law, according to newly obtained emails.

The public watchdog group Judicial Watch told Secrets Thursday that it was former scandal boss Lois Lerner who shared the information on groups including the American Future Fund and the American Issues Project.

The emails obtained by Judicial Watch show that the IRS, which was considering the tax status of the groups, gave the FEC the tax returns of the groups, including income, expenditures and staff pay. The emails also revealed the exact working of the prying political questions the IRS wanted the groups to reveal, such as their goals and the requests for brochures and ads.

The information, sent via email, to the FEC came in response to the organization’s questions about whether the IRS had granted tax-exempt status to the Tea Party groups. It is unclear how the information the IRS sent was going to help the FEC, since the IRS hadn’t determined the tax status of the groups yet.

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G.O.P. Filibuster of 2 Obama Picks Sets Up Fight

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Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/APSenate Republicans on Thursday thwarted the confirmation of two of President Obama’s nominees, one to a powerful appeals court and another to a home-lending oversight post, setting up a confrontation with Democrats that could escalate into a larger fight over limiting the filibuster and restrict how far the minority party can go to block a president’s agenda.

In a series of swift back-to-back votes, Republicans first blocked the nomination of Representative Melvin Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, to become the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a rare affront to a sitting member of Congress who has an extensive record of public service.

Next Republicans, who have accused the president of trying to tip the court’s ideological balance in Democrats’ favor, quickly dispensed with the nomination of Patricia Ann Millett to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A former government lawyer whose husband serves in the military, she has worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations. The White House chose her as a test of how far Republicans would go to derail a qualified nominee.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a longtime member of the Senate and a fierce protector of its arcane institutions, said he believed the rejection of the two nominees was grounds to re-examine the filibuster rules, which some senior Senate Democrats have advocated.

“I think it’s time for some common sense on confirmations,” said Mr. Biden, who was in the Capitol to swear in Cory Booker, a Democrat, as New Jersey’s newest senator. He called the loss a “gigantic disappointment.”

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Watchdogs: Government Paid Millions in Medicare to Deceased, Illegal Immigrants

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Photo Credit: APThe federal government has paid tens of millions of dollars in Medicare benefits to dead people and illegal immigrants, according to a pair of reports from federal watchdogs released on Thursday.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services paid out $23 million to beneficiaries after their deaths in 2011, according to one report from HHS’ inspector general.

Another report tallied more than $28 million in payments from 2009 to 2011 to individuals who were in the country illegally.

In all, CMS paid Medicare benefits to 4,139 illegal immigrants and 17,403 deceased people, according to the two reports.

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