Tom Coburn To White House: With Cuts On Way, Why A 100-City Spending Tour?

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Photo Credit: Medill DCWith sequestration budget cuts set to take effect in less than a week, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn has sent a letter to the White House asking for more information about a new initiative to help cities receive federal grants and other aid. The initiative involves White House and administration officials traveling to 100 cities around the country, helping local governments apply for federal money.

Given the president’s warning about dire effects from the coming cuts, Coburn wrote to Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Jeffrey Zients, “It is somewhat surprising, therefore, for the White House to be headlining a 100 city government spending tour, transporting representatives from multiple departments and various agencies around the country to promote federal largess. If Washington is truly cutting spending on missions many consider vital, how can we at the same time promise and promote more financial assistance, much less afford this mammoth 100 city cross country tour?”

The White House has not announced the tour. Coburn relied on a news report from the first stop, February 14 in Beaverton, Oregon. “The city will host the feds at a daylong symposium to discuss how government agencies, nonprofits and businesses can help the city,” the Oregonian reported. “The event is the first in a new White House ‘Connecting Your Community’ program, in which national leaders plan to meet with representatives of 100 cities to pair federal programs with local needs.”

The Oregonian reported that officials from the White House, Environmental Protection Agency, Housing Department, Highway Administration, and other agencies traveled to Oregon for the event. The city of Beaverton has hired a consultant to help it win more federal grants, the paper said, looking for more federal dollars to add to millions in current grants from HUD, the CDC, the EPA, and others. The paper said the remaining 99 cities on the federal spending tour have not been announced.

“If Washington is truly cutting spending on missions many consider vital, how can we at the same time promise and promote more financial assistance, much less afford this mammoth 100 city cross country tour?” wrote Coburn. “While well intentioned, I urge you to cancel the 100 city government spending tour.”

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Obama, The Puppet Master, Weaves his Tales with the Mastery of Technology

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Photo Credit: Pete SouzaPresident Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.

Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated.

Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.

The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”

McCurry and his colleagues in the Clinton White House were hardly above putting their boss in front of gentle questions: Clinton and Vice President Al Gore often preferred the safety of “Larry King Live” to the rhetorical combat of the briefing room. But Obama and his aides have raised it to an art form: The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on “The View”?

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Limbaugh: ‘For the First Time in My Life, I Am Ashamed of My Country’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Rush Limbaugh RUSH: Folks, I’m sorry here. I can’t help but think that we are all being played for a bunch of fools, a bunch of suckers on this sequester business. I don’t know. Are you like me? Do you really think 800,000 people are gonna lose their jobs in the Pentagon because we cut $22 billion? Do you really think air traffic control’s gonna shut down? Do you really think there aren’t gonna be any meat inspectors? Do you really think that all of these horror stories are going to happen? I don’t.

I feel like I’ve been here. This is deja vu all over again. I remember the 1995 budget battle. That involved a legitimate government shut down. That wasn’t just $22 billion we were not gonna spend. We’re still gonna spend $3.5 trillion. We’re just not gonna spend $22 billion, if it happens.

Now, the government shutdown in 1995, yeah, we were gonna starve kids. That was the plan then. I’m just kidding. Snerdley I’m sorry, it’s all ridiculous to me. Every bit of this. I’ve been doing this — you get new perspective. I’m into my 25th year, and I think I mentioned to you last week and maybe the week before, I’ve been doing this long enough now to start seeing the repeat cycles on everything. I don’t care whether it’s the debt limit or the fiscal cliff or continuing resolution or the budget crisis of 2008 or TARP or the auto bailouts, and now the sequester, it’s the same playbook.

It is the same threats. It’s the same danger. It’s the same crisis. It’s identical. There’s nothing about it that changes, over and over. And everybody gets sucked into it. I try to escape, I try to get out of it, I try to leave it aside, I try to move on, but it just sucks me back in, too, until I realize that I have been sucked back in. And then there’s a part of me that says, “Well, wait a minute now.” You got not just Panetta, but now a uniformed military general, General Odierno, saying that he could lose 600,000 uniformed people, and the common sense of this doesn’t add up. Now we’ve got a guy comparing this to the Oklahoma City bombing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Everything gets repeated. The cycle, the claims, the threats, the crisis, Armageddon, it’s the same. And we’re talking $22 billion. It’s not as though we’re not gonna spend anything. If the sequester happens, the first year is $44 billion. Half of that’s defense. We’re still going to spend $3.5 trillion or $3.3 trillion, even if we don’t spend the $22 billion. Then there’s this guy who draws an analogy to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Watch video here:

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Ammo Prices Have Doubled Since December At ‘America’s Largest Gun Shop’

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photo credit: KOMUnewsThe price of his store’s ammunition has more than doubled since mid-December, says Larry Hyatt, owner of Hyatt Gun Shop in Charlotte, N.C., which bills itself “America’s Largest Gun Shop.”

I spoke to Mr. Hyatt today about the increase in the price of ammunition since mid-December (when the gun control debate began to heat up). Hyatt said that the ammo market is “very volatile” and that he “doesn’t know when the next shipment will be.”

His best seller right now is .22LR caliber. Gun owners like to shoot this caliber because it is typically a cheaper round and also optimal for target shooting, known as “plinking”

A box containing 500 rounds of .22LR was selling for approximately $20/box back in December. Today, Mr. Hyatt tells me he is selling the same box for $49. This represents a 145 percent increase in price.

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Poll: Majority of U.S. Citizens Say Illegal Immigrants Should Be Deported

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(Reuters) – More than half of U.S. citizens believe that most or all of the country’s 11 million illegal immigrants should be deported, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday that highlights the difficulties facing lawmakers trying to reform the U.S. immigration system.

The online survey shows resistance to easing immigration laws despite the biggest push for reform in Congress since 2007.

Thirty percent of those polled think that most illegal immigrants, with some exceptions, should be deported, while 23 percent believe all illegal immigrants should be deported.

Only 5 percent believe all illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the United States legally, and 31 percent want most illegal immigrants to stay.

These results are in line with other polls in recent years, suggesting that people’s views on immigration have not changed dramatically since the immigration debate reignited in Congress last month, according to Ipsos pollster Julia Clark.

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Democrats Hope To Ride Gun Control, Minimum Wage To 2014 Victory

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Photo Credit: Chuck Burton/APDon’t expect President Obama’s Gun Control plans and calls for a federal Minimum Wage hike to go away anytime soon.

Democrats believe they have a chance to use those both issues to “campaign aggressively” in the 2014 midterms.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has the details from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:

In an interview today, DCCC chair Steve Israel told me the party’s House candidates will be running aggressively on Obama’s proposals to reduce gun violence and raise the minimum wage. Both will be incorporated into a broader indictment of the GOP as so imprisoned by ideological extremism that the party has been rendered incapable of tackling the major challenges facing the country.

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New York’s Cardinal Dolan in the Running for Pope

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Predicting who will be elected the next pope when the College of Cardinals convenes in a papal conclave in early March is far more difficult than predicting the next President. That hasn’t stopped American media pundits from speculating that New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s early departure for the Vatican on Wednesday signals that he may be at the front of the line to become the next pontiff.

The process by which the 117 members of the College of Cardinals eligible to participate in the papal conclave (those under the age of 80) elect the leader of the world’s estimated 1.2 billion Roman Catholics remains shrouded in mystery. While it is known that the participating cardinals vote in successive rounds of balloting, and that a two-thirds super majority is required to elect the next pope, the content of the internal debates on the merits of the different candidates is kept behind closed doors.

From the moment the 117 cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel to begin the papal conclave, the deliberations are unknown to the outside world. The only communications about the proceedings come when the results of each ballot are signaled through the color of smoke emitted from the chapel’s chimney. Black smoke means no new pope. White smoke means a new pope has been elected. This is the manner in which the new pope, the apostolic successor of St. Peter, has been selected for centuries.

The last papal conclave was held more than seven years ago in 2005 upon the death of Pope John Paul II. It took two days and four ballots of that papal conclave to elect German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. It marked the first papal conclave in 27 years, since 1978, when the College of Cardinals convened twice.

In August of that year they took two days and four ballots to elect Italian Cardinal Albino Luciani as Pope John Paul I after the death of Pope Paul VI. Then, after Pope John Paul I died a mere 33 days into office, the papal conclave took two days and eight ballots to elect Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II that October.

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Rand Paul Returns Money From Office Account To Treasury

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Photo Credit: Political TickerSen. Rand Paul cut another six-figure check to the United States Treasury Wednesday, taking the money he said he didn’t need from his office’s budget to make a tiny dent in the nation’s massive federal debt.

“We watch every purchase,” Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, said at an event next to an oversized check for $600,000. “We watch what computers we buy, what paper we buy, the ink cartridges. We treat the money like it’s our money, or your money, and we look at every expenditure.”

The $600,000 reflects more than 20% of Paul’s annual office budget, according to a press release. Another GOP lawmaker, Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, said he would return $160,000 to the federal government, or 12% of his office budget.

“At a time when Americans are tightening their budgets, I have made an effort to do the same with my Congressional office budget,” Mulvaney wrote in a statement. “‘My office has found ways to save money while continuing to provide necessary services to the constituents of the Fifth District. As requested when I returned over $160,000 last year, I ask that Speaker Boehner use this money to pay down the national debt.”

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Tebow Cancels Church Appearance After Media Firestorm

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Photo Credit: Jeffrey BeallTim Tebow announced on Twitter that he will no longer appear at First Baptist Church of Dallas after it caused a national uproar among journalists and gay marriage supporters. The announcement blindsided church officials and led some Christian leaders to wonder if Tebow was appeasing those who don’t support the biblical definition of marriage.

“While I was looking forward to sharing a message of hope and Christ’s unconditional love with the faithful members of the historic First Baptist Church of Dallas in April, due to new information that has been brought to my attention, I have decided to cancel my upcoming appearance,” Tebow wrote in a series of tweets Thursday morning. “I will continue to use the platform God has blessed me with to bring Faith, Hope and love to all those needing a brighter day. Thank you for all of your love and support. God Bless!”

Tebow did not elaborate on what that “new information” might have been. But sources close to First Baptist Church tell Fox News the NFL quarterback cancelled his appearance in part over the uproar surrounding the church’s position on traditional marriage.

Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church, has been an outspoken leader in the nation’s culture wars – affirming from the pulpit traditional marriage and salvation through Jesus Christ.

The national media labeled Jeffress as anti-gay and anti-Semitic – charges that were vehemently denied by the pastor, the church and many national religious leaders. Tebow’s decision has been met with praise among the nation’s gay and lesbian community.

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Mother Sues Planned Parenthood Over Forced, Botched Abortion

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Photo Credit: mobeansWhen Ayanna Byer scheduled an appointment at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains to take an abortion pill to end her pregnancy, there was no way for her to foresee the horrors ahead of her. Earlier this month, Byer, through the assistance of the attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom, brought a lawsuit to hold Planned Parenthood liable for the botched abortion that she did not consent to.

According to that complaint, when Byer arrived at the Planned Parenthood clinic, it was determined that her pregnancy was too far along to be terminated through the use of a pill, therefore a surgical abortion was recommended. Ms. Byer agreed upon the condition that she would receive IV anesthesia, for which she would be charged extra. Although the employees could not get the IV started, the doctor came to start the procedure anyway.

The complaint states:

At this time, Plaintiff immediately told the Planned Parenthood Doctor to stop and that she did not want to go through with the abortion procedure because she had not received any anesthetic. Plaintiff also informed Planned Parenthood Doctor and agents or employees of Planned Parenthood Defendants that she believed this to be a sign she should not go through with the abortion. The Planned Parenthood Doctor did not stop despite Plaintiff’s request, and assured Plaintiff the I.V. would be administered and the procedure would only take a few minutes.

At this time, the Planned Parenthood Doctor turned on the vacuum machines and told Plaintiff it was too late to stop.

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