Governor Rick Perry: ‘Disgusted’ By President’s Use of Child Massacre ‘To Advance a Pre-Existing Political Agenda’

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Gov. Rick Perry released the following statement regarding President Obama’s executive actions:

“The Vice President’s committee was appointed in response to the tragedy at Newtown, but very few of his recommendations have anything to do with what happened there.

“Guns require a finger to pull the trigger. The sad young man who did that in Newtown was clearly haunted by demons and no gun law could have saved the children in Sandy Hook Elementary from his terror.

“There is evil prowling in the world – it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds. As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.

“In fact, the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally. The second amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president.”

Visit the Governor’s website HERE.

Obama Unveils $500 Million Gun Control Package

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Braced for a fight, President Barack Obama on Wednesday unveiled the most sweeping proposals for curbing gun violence in two decades, pressing a reluctant Congress to pass universal background checks and bans on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

A month after that horrific massacre, Obama also used his presidential powers to enact 23 measures that don’t require the backing of lawmakers. The president’s executive actions include ordering federal agencies to make more data available for background checks, appointing a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and directing the Centers for Disease Control to research gun violence.

But the president, speaking at White House ceremony, focused his attention on the divided Congress, saying only lawmakers could enact the most effective measures for preventing more mass shootings.

“To make a real and lasting difference, Congress must act,” Obama said. “And Congress must act soon.”

The president vowed to use “whatever weight this office holds” to press lawmakers into action on his $500 million plan. He is also calling for improvements in school safety, including putting 1,000 police officers in schools and bolstering mental health care by training more health professionals to deal with young people who may be at risk.

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Liberal Paranoia Reigns in New York As Police Lock Down School, Search for Nerf Toy (+video)

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NEW YORK- A lime-green Nerf toy gun caused an hours-long lock-down at a Long Island school on Tuesday.

A 911 caller told Nassau County Police she saw a suspicious teen at about 7:38 a.m. Tuesday wearing a black jacket and carrying a black backpack at Elmont Memorial high School in Elmont.

The caller said he was also carrying a lime green gun.

A SWAT team searched the school room by room.

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Gohmert: Fast and Furious Proves Gun Control Should Start with Administration

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Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Tuesday that if the President Obama wants to impose new restrictions on gun ownership, he should start with his own administration, given how it handled the Fast and Furious gun-walking operation.

“[W]e have a president who makes speeches and an attorney general that makes speeches about how they’re going to go after illegal gun sales, and yet there is blood on the hands of people in this administration, and we can’t even find out who they are,” Gohmert said on the House floor Tuesday night.

Gohmert referenced the Fast and Furious operation indirectly, by noting that the Obama administration instructed gun dealers to sell guns to illegally, and promised to track those guns as they made their way to criminals. Some of the guns that were “walked” were eventually found where U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010.

“The guns were not followed,” he said. “They made their way into criminals’ hands, as was intended, but they weren’t followed.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Recruits Children to Push Gun Bans: Will Act On His Own, Prod Congress (+video)

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Acting just a month after the Connecticut school shootings, President Obama will unveil a sweeping package of gun controls Wednesday and will challenge Congress to ban high-capacity magazines and military-style semi-automatic rifles involved in recent shooting rampages.

Mr. Obama, who will make his announcement surrounded by children who wrote letters to him about gun violence, is expected to propose some moves he can take on his own. He also will demand that Congress break a decades-long refusal and enact the first new controls on firearms and ammunition since the early 1990s.

States are acting already.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday signed into law the strictest gun-control measures in the country, which will ban assault weapons, restrict ammunition and move to prevent the mentally ill from obtaining firearms . . .

Similar proposals are likely to meet stiff resistance on Capitol Hill, where the Senate’s top Democrat has said the ban on semi-automatic “assault weapons” has little chance of passing. Lawmakers have jealously guarded their powers when it comes to action on gun regulations.

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Trump: If GOP Doesn’t Hold Firm ‘Country Will Go To Hell’

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It’s fair to say that Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been impressed with the GOP’s competence at the negotiating table. In a tweet sent out after Congressional Republicans and President Barack Obama averted the fiscal cliff, the author of The Art of the Deal and Time to Get Tough noted that Republicans may well be the “worst negotiators in history.”

Human Events caught up with Trump and asked him if he had any advice for the GOP moving forward.

When Republicans and Barack Obama came to an agreement on the fiscal cliff, you claimed that the Republicans might be the worst negotiators in history. Is this due to having the wrong people in place, or do they lack leverage to get it done?

Well, I like John Boehner very much and I respect him very much, so I don’t understand the reasoning behind the last negotiation. Republicans were in an incredibly strong position. They got nothing and they gave up their most powerful card. Republicans just didn’t seem to have the ability to deal with this issue.

[Trump Tweet] “Obama and the Democrats are laughing at the deal they just made…the Republicans got nothing!”

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Fitch May Downgrade U.S. Credit Rating

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LONDON (AP) — The United States could lose its top credit rating for the second time from a leading credit agency if there’s a delay in raising the country’s debt ceiling, Fitch Ratings warned Tuesday.

Congress has to increase the country’s debt limit, which effectively rules how much debt the U.S. can have, by March 1 or face a potential default. There are fears that the debate will deteriorate into the squabbling and political brinkmanship that marked the last effort to raise the ceiling in the summer of 2011. The U.S. Treasury Department warned then that it had nearly reached a point where it would be unable “to meet our commitments securely.”

If Fitch does move to downgrade the US, it will join Standard & Poor’s, which was so concerned by the dysfunctional 2011 debate that it stripped the U.S. of its triple A rating for the first time in the country’s history. Another major ratings agency, Moody’s, also has a negative view on the U.S. outlook.

“The pressure on the U.S. rating, if anything, is increasing,” David Riley, managing director of Fitch Ratings’ global sovereigns division said at a London conference. “We thought the 2011 crisis was a one-off event …. if we have a repeat we will place the U.S. rating under review.”

If that happens, Riley said there was “a material risk” of the rating coming down.

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Former Obama Staff Complain Of Cold Inaugural Shoulder

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WASHINGTON — In a sour footnote to President Barack Obama’s sweeping electoral victory last November, many of his campaign staffers have been shut out of the inaugural festivities, more than a dozen of them complained to BuzzFeed Monday.

“We worked our butts off, and I’m going to watch it on TV instead of being there,” said one former staffer. “It’s a huge bummer.”

Former staffers — who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition of anonymity to preserve their relationships, and possible jobs, in Obama’s second term — say they have grown frustrated by what they see as inadequate communication from the Presidential Inaugural Committee, the group responsible for the inaugural balls, and in particular by its restrictions on access to the official events.

“I didn’t hear anything from PIC until a little more than a week ago,” said another staffer. “They knew this was happening. Instead of giving us details [of what we could attend] on November 7th, we found out so late that it would cost me $2,000 to go to Washington for a weekend as opposed to $1,000 or less if I booked two months ago.”

More than 35,000 attendees are expected at Obama’s consolidated formal Inaugural Ball Monday night, which replaces nearly a dozen separate balls. Many staffers complain that after the hard work of getting Obama re-elected they still couldn’t snag tickets to the event — only a small number were made available to staffers. PIC outsourced the ticketing to Ticketmaster, whose system bungled the public distribution earlier this month.

Read more from this story HERE.

Biden: W.H. Readies 19 Executive Actions On Gun Control

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The White House has identified 19 executive actions for President Barack Obama to move unilaterally on gun control, Vice President Joe Biden told a group of House Democrats on Monday, the administration’s first definitive statements about its response to last month’s mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Later this week, Obama will formally announce his proposals to reduce gun violence, which are expected to include renewal of the assault weapons ban, universal background checks and prohibition of high-capacity magazine clips. But Biden, who has been leading Obama’s task force on the response, spent two hours briefing a small group of sympathetic House Democrats on the road ahead in the latest White House outreach to invested groups.

The focus on executive orders is the result of the White House and other Democrats acknowledging the political difficulty of enacting any new gun legislation, a topic Biden did not address in Monday’s meeting.

The executive actions could include giving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authority to conduct national research on guns, more aggressive enforcement of existing gun laws and pushing for wider sharing of existing gun databases among federal and state agencies, members of Congress in the meeting said.

“It was all focusing on enforcing existing law, administering things like improving the background database, things like that that do not involve a change in the law but enforcing and making sure that the present law is administered as well as possible,” said Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.).

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Competitive Enterprise Institute: EPA Email Release “Gravely Compounded Unlawful Activity We Have Exposed”

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photo credit: us dept. of labor

Washington, D.C., January 14, 2013 – At about 4:55 p.m. on Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency finally complied with a court order to deliver the first of four sets of emails in response to a lawsuit filed by Christopher Horner, a senior fellow in the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Here is Horner’s statement on the emails:

Where in the World is Richard Windsor?

EPA’s Court-Ordered Email Production Proves Agency Has “Gone Bunker”

Just before 5 pm on this deadline date for producing records, I received a hand-delivered CD and cover letter from the EPA in response to CEI v. EPA, now best known as the “Richard Windsor” suit. The delivery came under order of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. In short, this response is deeply troubling and seems to have gravely compounded the unlawful activity we have exposed involving a false identity assumed for federal recordkeeping purposes.

Problems begin with the cover letter, which states not the promised (to the court) first delivery of “approximately 3,000” but “more than 2,100 emails received or sent” by Jackson, on what EPA insists is her one non-public account.

“Waiter, the food was terrible, and the portions too small!”

First, 2,100 is two-thirds of the way to the agency’s commitment (possibly the agency also will determine two-thirds of 12,000 is sufficient, although we have our doubts). Perhaps seeking to take the air out of a growing scandal, EPA’s defective compilation boasts an impressively anemic content-to-volume ratio. It starts with Washington Post daily news briefs, then follows with Google alerts for “Lisa Jackson EPA” (none for “Richard Windsor”). Then EPA HQ national news clips. And so on. Rope a dope. Clever. Maybe too much so.

It seems EPA simply decided it had to produce a lot of something. Desperate to produce nothing at the same time, it came up with this. But in the details, the desperation shows through.

A big red flag in the cover letter is the claim that, “As you are aware” — with no support for how we know this, which we do not — “the Administrator uses one secondary official account to conduct EPA business,” then states these emails come from that one account.

Read more from this story HERE.