Senate Votes To Keep White House Closed, Slaughterhouses Open

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Photo Credit: Damian Dovarganes

Senators voted Wednesday to make the first significant changes to the budget sequesters, shifting money to keep slaughterhouse inspectors on the job full time but refusing to rearrange money to reopen the White House for public tours.

The votes came as the Senate debated and passed a bill to fund the government through the rest of the fiscal year — sending it back to the House for final expected approval later this week and averting a government shutdown.

“This is indeed a very important moment,” said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat and chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee who shepherded the bill through the floor. “We didn’t want brinkmanship, we didn’t want ultimatum politics.”

The 73-26 vote also signals a growing sense in Congress that the shutdown showdowns of the past two years didn’t help either party. The bill funds basic operations through Sept. 30. It does not undo the level of sequester cuts, but it did begin to rewrite a few priorities, including restoring the military’s tuition assistance programs and restoring the money for food inspections.

Without that addition money, federal inspectors were going to have to be furloughed, and meat-packing plants can’t operate without inspectors on site. That would have made a serious dent in U.S. meat production.

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Bernanke: ‘Too Big To Fail’ Remains A Problem

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Photo Credit: Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday that he still views “too big to fail” banks as a “major issue” that must be addressed.

Bernanke told reporters that the lingering concern about whether the nation’s biggest financial institutions are perceived as enjoying a government lifeline is still a challenge for regulators. He added that while new tools created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law are aimed at addressing the issue, further action may be needed to put the matter fully to bed.

“I don’t think ‘too big to fail’ is solved now. We’re doing a number of things which I think will help,” he said. “If we don’t achieve the goal, I think we’ll have to do additional steps … it’s not just something we can forget about.”

Bernanke and other regulators have been pressed by lawmakers in both parties about whether big banks still enjoy the implicit backing of the U.S. government since the financial crisis. And while regulators and Dodd-Frank backers insist the law provides the tools to prevent future bailouts, Bernanke acknowledged that the perception has persisted to some degree.

“Too big to fail was a major source of the crisis, and we will not have successfully responded to the crisis if we do not address that issue successfully,” he said.

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A Week Before Sandy Hook Shooting, Connecticut Asked AR-15 Maker To Move Into State

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Photo Credit: crazyad0boy

Connecticut government officials tried to coax the maker of the Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle into choosing the state as their home base, but they rescinded the offer days later in response to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

“It was a significant tragedy that was fresh on everybody’s mind,” state Department of Economic and Community Development deputy commissioner Ronald Angelo told The Hartford Courant to explain why Connecticut decided not to give the maker of the AR-15 a $1 million loan. The state offered the loan eight days before the Sandy Hook shooting and pulled it four days later.

Angelo also pointed out that FreedomGroup, which owns Bushmaster, was changing hands. “If you take that [shooting] into account along with the very unknown structure and unknown condition of the Freedom Group because of the [announced] sale of that entity by its parent, it’s too much of an unknown,” he said.

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Defense Team In ‘House Of Horrors’ Abortion Doctor Trial Charges Racism

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Photo Credit: DrGBB

Racism motivates the prosecution of an abortion doctor accused of murdering a woman and seven babies at his “house of horrors”, according to his defense attorney, who likened the prosecution to “a lynching.”…

“This is a targeted, elitist and racist prosecution of a doctor who’s done nothing but give (back) to the poor and the people of West Philadelphia,” attorney Jack McMahon told the jury yesterday, per the local ABC affiliate. “It’s a prosecutorial lynching of Dr. Kermit Gosnell.”

Gosnell is accused of killing babies after they were born alive, sometimes using scissors to cut the spinal cords of the viable infants.

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Democrats Throw In Towel On Assault Weapons Ban

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has significantly weakened gun control legislation, stripping a provision that would have banned assault-style weapons and high-capacity gun clips.

The move will make it easier for the Senate to pass a milder gun control bill that deals mostly with controlling who can purchase a gun. It also spares red-state Senate Democrats running in 2014 from having to vote on a bill that could cost them re-election.

“An assault weapons ban was always a poison bill that was great for the White House to talk about but politically damaging for those vulnerable Democrats representing red states to support,” Ron Bonjean, a Republican political strategist and former House and Senate leadership aide, told The Washington Examiner.

The Senate will vote on a gun control bill measure in April, but it won’t include a proposal authored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would have made it illegal to purchase military-style assault weapons and gun clips that can hold more than 10 rounds.

Feinstein announced the provision in the weeks following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, standing with shooting victims and law enforcement agents near a wall displaying some of the 157 assault-style weapons she hoped to make illegal. Feinstein’s measure cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee last week with the support of the panel’s Democratic majority, but no Republicans voted for it. Beyond the committee, some Democrats from pro-gun states were against it.

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Barack Obama’s Surveillance Society (+video)

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Photo Credit: YouTube

After 9/11, Barack Obama and his leftist base were livid that George W. Bush under the Patriot Act was engaged in warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls and email. We all remember them foaming at the mouth, marching in the streets with their idiotic swastikas and photos of Bush as Hitler.

The Left, proclaiming Barack Obama lord and savior, are eerily quiet now that Obama has taken Bush’s Patriot Act to an unimaginable, Orwellian level.

Obama has embraced Total Information Awareness—TIA for short—which refers to the government’s ability to compile a massive, searchable database, comprised of every type of electronic communication and information imaginable. We’re not just talking about phone calls and emails anymore. Barry Obama has already been compiling literally billions of phone and email records since ascending the throne. Now he’s out for bigger fish.

In September, the National Security Agency will open a one million square foot mega-database facility, built by an army of ten thousand construction workers. Located in Bluffdale, Utah—an area known more for polygamists than Orwellian databases—the Utah Data Center will store information in the yottabytes. A yottabyte—10 with 24 zeros after it—makes a terabyte look like small potatoes. It will take 200 megawatts—enough to power 200,000 homes—to feed this behemoth and will use an air conditioning system larger than what was used for the World Trade Centers—combined. So much for “Green” energy.

What kind of data is Big Brother Obama gathering?

Watch video here:

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TSA Agents ‘Humiliated’ Marine Who Lost Both Legs To An IED

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Photo Credit: Jim Urquhart

Transportation Security Administration officers “humiliated” a Marine who lost both legs to an Improvised Explosive Device by requiring the wheelchair-bound Marine to stand and walk. They also had him remove both his prosthetic legs, according to a letter from Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-California).

In his complaint to TSA Administrator John Pistole, Hunter described the Marine as being “humiliated” by the TSA’s actions, based on accounts of the incident last week in Phoenix, Arizona.

“The individual escorting this Marine asked the TSA officer which of the two checkpoints to enter and received the response, ‘either one,’ only to be told moments later they should have entered a different way. As a result, a TSA officer asked the Marine to stand and walk to an alternate area, despite the fact that he physically could not stand or walk on his own,” Hunter explained in his letter.

“With numerous TSA officers sitting and unwilling to assist, an officer then made him remove his legs, then put them back on,” Hunter continued, “only to advance to a secondary screening location where he was asked again to stand, with extraordinary difficulty, while his wheelchair was examined for explosives.”

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Tea Partiers Express Concern Over RNC ‘Autopsy’ Report

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Photo Credit: AP

After the Republican National Committee released its “autopsy” report highlighting the path forward for the GOP on Monday, conservatives blasted the RNC for proposing changes they feel would blunt the ability of grassroots conservatives to beat establishment candidates at the presidential level.

The report proposes shortening the primary calendar for the next presidential cycle and holding a series of regional primaries that would be a series of “super primaries.” Critics claim it is heavy on process, metrics, and outreach to celebrities and minorities while being short on conservative substance—which, they fear, would ensure more Mitt Romneys are nominated over insurgent Tea Party and grassroots candidates like Ted Cruz.

Brent Bozell, chairman of ForAmerica, said there was not much that excited him about the report and accused the Republican establishment of being “obsessed with identifying problems and solutions from the top-down instead of from the bottom-up.”

“It’s the exact same thing as (GOP strategist) Karl Rove saying they’re going to pick candidates. That ensures that establishment candidates are the only ones with a chance,” Bozell told The Hill.

Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots said the RNC fails to understand that Republicans lost because they “failed to promote our principles,” and the party does not need to wait on the “RNC to promote our winning principles at places like CPAC, and across the country.”

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House GOP Witness: Reading Bible Can Cause Violence

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This morning, VA Rep. Frank Wolf convened a hearing of the Commerce Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee he chairs. The subject of the hearing was youth violence and, specifically, the role video games play in encouraging violent behavior. A star witness, however, Psychologist Brad J. Bushman, has a tendency to see lots of things contributing to violence. One paper he wrote a few years ago even found that exposure to Biblical stories caused an increase in violent behavior, especially among believers.

Psychologist Brad J. Bushman has made a career of out preconceived notions and sweeping generalizations. Bushman is best known co-authoring an article with Brigham Young Professor Robert Ridge entitled, “When God Sanctions Killing” which appeared in the March 2007 issue of Psychological Science magazine. The study found “compelling evidence that exposure to a scriptural depiction of violence or to violence authorized by deity can cause readers to behave more aggressively.”

Even though in the study Bushman et al even acknowledge a variety of factors could mitigate or cause violence, they persist with their conclusion. The Bible is the best-selling book of all times and more recently, a top TV show. So nearly everyone has been exposed to the Bible, so it has to be a factor.

The authors were quick to point out their study was not meant as Bible-bashing yet they compared followers to terrorists noting, “when you think about terrorists and they say, ‘God will sit in judgment,’ and they sometimes refer to a scripture, our question was, ‘Could that really make a person behave more aggressively?’ And the answer is, yes, it could.'”

If Mathew, Mark, Luke and John can cause violence, according to the logic of Dr. Bushman, it makes sense to believe that can “Call of Duty” can, as well.

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Palin Is Right: To Win, GOP Must Adopt Tea Party Populism

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

The establishment Republican Party leaders and their sometime abettors in the establishment media would like to forget that the Tea Party uprising of 2009 and 2010 was as much a revolt against the entrenched GOP leadership as it was a rebellion against Barack Obama and his liberal agenda.

Tea Partiers and grassroots conservatives frustrated by the slow pace of change in the GOP or its tendency to equate change with lurching to the left were therefore delighted when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin took to the stage at CPAC and delivered a stinging rebuke to the advocates of big government Republicanism and the abandonment of the Republican Party’s support for traditional marriage and other elements of the traditional values agenda.

Most of the media coverage of Sarah Palin’s CPAC speech centered on her humorous tweaking of Karl Rove and America’s nanny-in-chief New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. However, those who stop there in their analysis of Governor Palin’s remarks are missing the most important element of her CPAC speech: her celebration of the populist elements of the Tea Party agenda and a call for the Republican Party to embrace them.

In the first of two key points in the speech, Palin invoked the wisdom of Lady Margaret Thatcher to remind Republicans that the way forward after the 2012 election disaster was not to be more like the Democrats, saying, “The permanent political class is in permanent political mode so where do we go from here? One of my idols, Lady Margaret Thatcher, she offered this advice after her party lost at the polls. She told fellow conservatives not to get lost in abstract debates and green-eye-shade accounting. Mrs. Thatcher advised conservatives to focus their concerns first and foremost on the people. She said; look at every problem from the grassroots, not from the top down. She also cautioned Conservatives not to go wobbly on their beliefs…”

Governor Palin also gave a good analysis of the disaster Obamanomics has wreaked upon America’s middle class. These facts are important, and should get more media coverage whenever the White House says the economy is improving and the recession is over — but pointing them out is not unique to Sarah Palin. What is unique and important is her analysis of how they relate to the growth of government and the growing divide between Washington and “heartland country” as Palin calls it.

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