So Who Else is Running for President?

/3 Comments/in , /by

Mainstream media coverage of the presidential election has focused almost entirely on President Obama and Mitt Romney, the only two candidates who polls suggest have a legitimate chance of victory in November. But among the 415 people who have filed statements of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission are a handful of lesser-known candidates who are fighting hard to make their case to the American people.

Four of those candidates will face off next Tuesday in a Larry King-moderated debate hosted by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, which describes itself as dedicated to creating “a climate where all voices are heard regardless of political party or persuasion.”

Below is an introduction to those four candidates: Libertarian Party candidate and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Justice Party candidate and former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, and Constitution Party candidate and former Congressman Virgil Goode.

Gary Johnson. Johnson, who served two terms as the Republican governor of New Mexico, wants to cut government spending across the board by 43 percent in order to balance the budget, including a 43 percent cut to the military budget. He would make massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and either raise the Social Security retirement age or institute means testing. Johnson would not raise taxes, though he would replace the tax code with the national sales tax known as the “FairTax.” [Read more HERE about his pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, and pro-drug legalization views].

Virgil Goode. Goode, a Democrat-turned-Republican former six-term Congressman from Virginia who says he would like to personally see Mr. Obama’s original birth certificate, is known primarily as an immigration hardliner: He argues for a fence along the Southern border, says “we must end the anchor baby situation,” and argues that “[w]e need to utilize troops, fences, and other measures to stop the invasion from Mexico.” He says he would put a near-moratorium on green cards until the unemployment rate drops below 5 percent, wants English as the official language of the United States, and calls the Arizona immigration law a model for the nation. [Read more HERE about his anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, and anti-gun control views].

Read more about the other candidates HERE.

Obama: The Best Thing That Ever Happened to the US Gun Industry

/0 Comments/in , /by

President Obama has presided over a heyday for the gun industry despite predictions by the powerful U.S. gun lobby four years ago that he would be the “most anti-gun president in American history.” Gun buyers fear that Mr. Obama wants to restrict their purchases, especially if he were re-elected.

An analysis by The Associated Press of data tracking the health of the gun industry shows that sales are on the rise, so much that some gun manufacturers cannot make enough guns fast enough. Major gun company stock prices are up. The number of federally licensed, retail gun dealers is increasing for the first time in nearly 20 years.

The lobby, the National Rifle Association, a gun advocacy group, is bursting with cash and political clout. And Washington has expressed little interest in passing new gun laws, despite renewed calls to do so after recent deadly shootings in the states of Colorado and Wisconsin.

Mr. Obama has made no promises to impose new gun control legislation and does not have the support in Congress or among voters even if he did. During this week’s presidential debate, Mr. Obama suggested renewing a U.S. ban on assault weapons and coming up with an overall strategy to reduce violence, but both Mr. Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said the government needs to enforce gun laws already on the books.

“The driver is President Obama. He is the best thing that ever happened to the firearm industry,” said Jim Barrett, an industry analyst at C.L. King & Associates Inc. in New York.

Read more from this story HERE.

Report: Obama Ally Gloria Allred Preparing Damaging “Romney Revelation”?

/47 Comments/in , /by

Republicans are bracing themselves for Gloria Allred to make a potentially damaging revelation about Mitt Romney, just weeks before the election.

The pro-President Obama lawyer is rumoured to be preparing for her so-called ‘October surprise’ in which she will strike the Republican presidential hopeful’s chances by unearthing some sort of secret or scandal.

Ms Allred has refused to comment on the rumours, which first surfaced in a tweet by the Drudge Report’s Matt Drudge on Thursday.

‘Here she comes. Hearing Gloria Allred out there again, about to make a move. After all, it’s her time of the campaign. Team O at the ready!!’ Mr Drudge wrote on Twitter.

According to RadarOnline.com, Ms Allred launched a last minute strike on GOP Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor of California by representing a disgruntled former housekeeper.

Read more from this story HERE.

US Economy in Shambles: 40% of Americans Have Less Than $500 in Savings

/1 Comment/in , /by

A survey of about 1,100 Americans finds that more than 4-in-10 respondents admit they don’t have more than $500 in readily accessible savings.

The survey is a kind of departure for CreditDonkey.com, a website that compares credit card deals. Not respondents all were poor. Some had big houses, big mortgages or 401(k)s, but still no more than five Benjamins to rub together right now.

Jill Michal, president and CEO of the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey, reacts to the lack of liquid assets.

“It doesn’t shock me, but it does scare me. You know, we often say that the reason so many people fall off the edge in a tough economy is that they’re standing way too close to it, and I think this is a perfect demonstration of that.”

Michal says there’s a lack of training in personal finances.

Read more from this story HERE.

House Investigating Obama’s $8.3 Billion Slush Fund Created to Hide Impacts of Obamacare on Medicare Prior to Election

/2 Comments/in , /by

President Obama had a big political problem: Obamacare destroys the popular Medicare Advantage program, which offers private insurance plans to supplement Medicare. Something like a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries use this program. (It’s funny how free-market competition is both popular and effective when it’s actually tried, isn’t it?)

Obamacare sucks over $200 billion out of Medicare Advantage, something that would have been very noticeable through price increases and benefit reductions during open enrollment… which began in October, right before the election.

If you’re Barack Obama, you solve a problem like that by throwing huge amounts of other peoples’ money at it. So it was that a little “demonstration project” to reward the most effective Medicare Advantage plans was suddenly inflated into a titanic $8.3 billion slush fund – bigger than the 85 previous demonstration projects combined – in order to delay the pain of Medicare Advantage cuts until after the election. The standards for receiving payouts from this “incentive” program were lowered so much that even mediocre plans could receive a “reward.” It wouldn’t do to have seniors opening envelopes that say their premiums have skyrocketed or some of their favorite benefits have been dropped, right before the election!

The House Oversight Committee began investigating this jumbo Slurpee of slush in May, and ran into a Health and Human Services stonewall so obvious that it’s comical. A request for documents on May 23 was ignored by HHS. It was repeated on August 1, and ignored again. House Oversight fired off emails to a couple of HHS staffers, and didn’t get a response for weeks… at which point the HHS Deputy Director for Oversight and Investigation said, “I’m checking on the status and will get back to you,” but never got back to anybody.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jobs Report Corrected: Unemployment Claims Explode

/3 Comments/in , /by

Obama and his defenders championed the supposed reduction in unemployment to 7.8% this week. Romney attacked the number as not reflecting reality. Some suggested that the Department of Labor was playing games with the unemployment numbers.

Well, not exactly. According to Human Events, there was data left out from the jobs report – because it wasn’t received in time – that just about every media outlet ignored:

Nothing was mischievously “suppressed” in the last report. It was a paperwork glitch, not a dirty trick. Information simply was not received on time. It’s happened before. The strange thing about this particular report was how BLS undersold its incomplete nature, and how virtually every major media outlet simply failed to note that a big fat asterisk belong[ed] next to the number. Instead, it was uncritically presented as proof that after all these years, Obamanomics was finally starting to pump out some jobs.

Well, a new week is upon us, all of the data was evidently received on time, and what do you know? Initial jobless claims are up by 46,000, to a seasonally adjusted 388,000. That would technically make it the biggest one-week percentage increase in jobless claims over the last five years. Of course, a great deal of the percentage increase is due to adjustments correcting last week’s inaccurate numbers.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, even with those adjustments factored in, this week’s claims are well above analyst expectations of 365,000 claims. That’s impossible to square with the utterly delusional September jobs report, and its ostensible reduction of the headline unemployment rate to 7.8 percent. A boatload of people got hired in September, but now they’re all filing for unemployment benefits? There is no “Obama recovery.”

Federal Welfare Spending Up an Amazing 32% Under Obama

/0 Comments/in , /by

Federal welfare spending has grown by 32 percent over the past four years, fattened by President Obama’s stimulus spending and swelled by a growing number of Americans whose recession-depleted incomes now qualify them for public assistance, according to numbers released Thursday.

Federal spending on more than 80 low-income assistance programs reached $746 billion in 2011, and state spending on those programs brought the total to $1.03 trillion, according to figures from the Congressional Research Service and the Senate Budget Committee.

That makes welfare the single biggest chunk of federal spending — topping Social Security and basic defense spending.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee who requested the Congressional Research Service report, said the numbers underscore a fundamental shift in welfare, which he said has moved from being a Band-Aid and toward a more permanent crutch.

“No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty,” the Alabama conservative said. “Welfare assistance should be seen as temporary whenever possible, and the goal must be to help more of our fellow citizens attain gainful employment and financial independence.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Perfect Response to Obama’s Claim Regarding Pipeline Encircling Earth: “You Didn’t Build That!”

/0 Comments/in , /by

Leases and production are down on federal lands, the EPA is waging war on coal, and as for building enough pipelines to encircle the earth, we’d settle for just one from Canada to the Gulf.

When President Obama, in responding Tuesday to Mitt Romney’s chiding about failing to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, claimed that his administration has added enough new oil and gas pipelines to “encircle the Earth and then some,” we felt a perfect response from Romney would have been, “You didn’t build that.”

In fact, energy companies have built some 55,000 miles of pipeline, including one from Canada, mostly requiring only state and local permits, and they have operated with an admirable safety record.

Keystone XL would be just as safe, creating 20,000 jobs up front. But Obama’s blockage has been about catering to his environmentalist base, not reducing gas prices or creating jobs.

Keystone XL is part of Romney’s plan for North American energy independence. As the Institute for Energy Research points out, Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures released last week reveal that the U.S. buys an average of 869,000 barrels a day of oil from the Venezuela of thuggish President Hugo Chavez.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Wrong Again: Tax Cuts Do Increase Government Revenue, Deficits Due to Spending

/1 Comment/in , /by

By Paul Sperry. The historical tables in the back of the latest “Economic Report of the President” show that the Bush tax cuts generated more, not less, federal revenues — a phenomenon that also held true for Presidents Clinton, Reagan and Kennedy.

All four leaders, two Republicans and two Democrats, slashed taxes for top individual earners or investors. And once these rate reductions took effect and began stimulating economic activity, record individual income-tax receipts poured into the U.S. Treasury. (See the charts above.) Revenues increased even after adjusting for inflation and population growth.

Kennedy’s major tax cut, which included chopping the top marginal rate to 70% from 91%, became law in early 1964, after his untimely death. It promised to grow the economy and close the budget gap.

“Coming at a time of substantial deficit in the federal budget, this was a startling proposal to many observers,” said New York University economist Richard Sylla, co-author of “The Evolution of the American Economy.”

To the shock of many naysaying Democrats, the plan worked. The economy grew at an average 5.5% clip, and unemployment fell to 3.8%. In turn, the annual deficit shrank to $1 billion from $7 billion as individual income-tax receipts nearly doubled. (See the chart.) Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Spending, Not Bush Tax Cuts, Drives Deficit

By John Merline. President Obama often talks about the need for a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, by which he means tax hikes in addition to spending cuts.

At the recent presidential debate, for example, he said, “We’ve got to reduce our deficit, but we’ve got to do it in a balanced way — asking the wealthy to pay a little bit more along with cuts.”

The only problem with this approach is that the massive projected deficits over the next 10 years aren’t the result of too few taxes. They are entirely the result of too much spending.

Here’s the proof: According to the latest budget forecast from the Congressional Budget Office, even if every expiring tax cut were kept in place permanently — including all the Bush tax cuts and various other expiring cuts from last year and this year — and even if the alternative minimum tax were permanently indexed to inflation, federal revenues would still rise to 18.6% of GDP by 2022.

To put that figure in perspective, from 1948 and 2008, federal revenues averaged 18% of GDP. Read more from this story HERE.

Senate Hopeful Todd Akin Gets Another Boost: McCaskill’s Husband Allegedly Cut Business Deals in Senate Dining Room

/0 Comments/in , /by

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill’s husband used the U.S. Senate Dining Room to cut business deals selling tax credits tied to stimulus money, a whistle-blowing executive inside his company alleged on an audio recording exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller.

“The thing that irritated me about this was he [McCaskill’s husband Joseph Shepard] entertained these outside investors in the Senate Dining Room,” the whistle-blower said. “That’s where he closed the deal.”

The whistle-blower, Craig Woods, was a longtime high-ranking official within Shepard’s business empire, serving first as chief financial officer and then as vice president and chief underwriter for Missouri Equity Investors LLC and JA Shepard Companies.

His LinkedIn page indicates he left the company in January 2011, a few months before debriefing a Republican operative who made the recording.

According to the McCaskill campaign, Woods pled guilty in the 1990s in two different cases of felony larceny and spent some time in prison after that.

Read more from this story HERE.