Huge US Defense Contractor Illegally Helped China Produce Advanced Attack Helicopter

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The Canadian arm of the aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt and Whitney closed a six-year U.S. government probe last week by admitting that it helped China produce its first modern attack helicopter, a serious violation of U.S. export laws that drew a multimillion dollar fine.

At the same time it was helping China, the company was separately earning huge fees from contracts with the Pentagon, including some in which it was building weapons meant to ensure that America can maintain decisive military superiority over China’s rising military might.

The Chinese helicopter that benefited from Pratt’s engines and related computer software, now in production, comes outfitted with 30 mm cannons, anti-tank guided missiles, air-to-air missiles and unguided rockets. “This case is a clear example of how the illegal export of sensitive technology reduces the advantages our military currently possesses,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton said in a statement released on June 28.

The events are once again raising questions about the circumstances under which major defense contractors might be barred from government work. Independent watchdogs have long complained that few such firms have been barred or suspended, even for egregious lawbreaking, such as supplying armaments or related equipment to a hypothetical adversary.

Nothing in the settlement agreement, in which Pratt and Whitney and two related companies, United Technologies and Hamilton Sundstrand agreed to pay a total of $75 million for multiple violations of export rules, directly threatens Pratt’s existing or future government contracting.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: ebrkut

Economic stagnation: Obama’s baby

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Today the American unemployment rate remains unchanged at 8.2 percent. The economy is still five million jobs shy of the breakeven point as America continues to drown in a sea of growing government red ink while struggling to tread water under the overburden of oppressive big government regulations.

Since the start of the seemingly never ending “great recession”, the nation has lost 8.8 million jobs. It has regained only 3.8 million, less than 44 percent. According to the most recent Labor Department report, employers added only 80,000 jobs in June. The economy averaged 75,000 jobs a month in the second quarter, one-third the pace of the first quarter. This marks the third straight month of weak hiring, clearly showing that the economy is still struggling under the weight of the current administration’s failed economic policies.

Thanks to the brilliance of Obama’s economic plan, over the course of the past two years, America’s alleged recovery has gone from adding an average of 161,000 jobs per month to 150,000 per month, and now to 75,000 per month. If a recovery was actually taking place, those numbers would be going up instead of down, right? Instead, a sinkhole is swallowing up hope for millions of Americans of finding a job.

Was there not a pledge made in 2009 by the self-imagined, self-appointed intellectual elites working in the White House that if American taxpayers funded the $878 billion “stimulus” package, unemployment would not go above 8 percent? Was there not a promise that the “stimulus” would have unemployment down to 5.5 percent by now? As it turns out the “stimulus” wasted taxpayer dollars, making little dent in the jobless rate.  But it did reward the White House’s political cronies within the inefficient, unproductive, largely imaginary “green energy industry.”  Obama’s claims that millions of jobs were “created or saved by the stimulus” must be met with severe skepticism. The unemployment numbers have never reflected that.

There are far too many people who know the real story because they are living it. Claims made to the contrary by the Obama re-election campaign don’t matter as they fail to reflect the reality people are living. Regardless of what is loaded on the teleprompter, reality cannot and will not be explained away. In short, people living in the real world are not buying the administration’s theoretical “cash for clunkers” economics approach. Taxing successful businesses, taking a cut for DC, then sending the remainder back to your favorite campaign bundlers running phony business fronts is not an economic recovery plan.  That’s money laundering, Chicago style.

How long is it going to be before the current White House occupant and/or his surrogates start popping up like Whack-a-Moles on the Sunday morning political talk shows blaming all of this on George W. Bush?

Did someone say this Sunday?

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Michael Fell is a former MCA recording artist from the seminal punk rock era who toured America from coast to coast. Today, he’s a leading voice in the L.A. Tea Party movement, active since the February 2009 inception. Mr. Fell currently chairs the Westwood Tea Party, is a founding member of the L.A. Metro Tea Party Coalition, serves as the Vice Chairman of the Westside Republicans Club in L.A. CA, and is an elected Republican delegate to the L.A. 47th AD Central Committee. He’s been Campaign Manager for a primary winning Congressional candidate, as well as Santa Monica and L.A. City Council candidates.  Mr. Fell is a contributing writer for https://conservativedailynews.com/, https://rightwingnews.com/, https://www.hollywoodrepublican.net/, https://beforeitsnews.com, https://www.redcounty.com/, https://www.uspatriotpac.com and, https://westsiderepublicans.com/.  His opinions on today’s news events and political climate can be found on his blog: https://mjfellright.wordpress.com/

Forget Justice Roberts; It’s the Economy, Stupid!

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Forget the calls to waterboard Chief Justice Roberts until he confesses to committing high crimes and misdemeanors over the Obamacare “tax.”  It is time to move on to what really matters to American voters. The strategy must now be for the GOP presidential candidate to switch focus from the Obamacare tax controversy to America’s tepid economic recovery.

Recent official figures show that the U.S. economy grew by 1.9 percent in the first quarter of 2012, less than the 2.2 percent originally reported. According to the annual report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this year’s growth forecast for the U.S. economy has been lowered to 2 percent. The IMF also lowered its forecast for 2013 from 2.4 percent to 2.25 percent. It also warned of the fiscal cliff known as taxmageddon, the $4 trillion tax increases and defense spending cuts that are due at the end of 2012.

The U.S. Gross Domestic Product growth rate in the first three months was slower than originally announced. This news was accompanied by a downward revision in consumer spending. After-tax corporate profits experienced their biggest fall since the last three months of 2008.

Meanwhile, U.S. employment rose only slightly in April. The Labor Department reported claims for jobless benefits were higher last week, suggesting a slowdown in job creation.

US retail sales fell for the second straight month in May, indicating that growth in the economy is still sluggish. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, retail sales fell by 0.2 percent.

The Institute for Supply Management said Monday that U.S. manufacturing shrank in June for the first time in nearly three years. The manufacturing activity index fell from 53.5 percent to 49.7 percent, the lowest reading since July 2009. Readings below 50 indicate contraction.

The Federal Reserve cut its forecast for 2012 growth to between 1.9 percent and 2.4 percent. That’s half a percentage point lower than April’s estimate.

With facts and figures like these, it is time for the GOP to go aggressively back on the offensive against the failed economic policies of the current administration. That the economy is tanking and employment prospects remain grim need not be explained to voters living that reality.

Give no quarter to the “progressive” campaign. Do not let them off the mat. While they are down, kick them as hard and as long as possible. Rest assured, given half a chance, “progressives” kick with glee…without hesitation.

The survival of America and the principles upon which it was founded are facing an existential threat.  Don’t be stupid.

 

 

Photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Morgan Freeman: “Obama’s not black!”

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Since he burst on the national political scene, Barack Obama has faced questions about everything from his place of birth to his college transcripts — but his race?

Oddly, apparent doubts about the president’s racial identification now are being raised not by his critics but by one of his strongest supporters: Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman. He told a surprised NPR interviewer this week that the United States has yet to see its “first black president.”

Freeman was trying to make a point that some people oppose Obama because of his race, when in fact, the actor argued, Obama is “mixed race” and not African-American.

“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president,” he said “is that all of the people who are setting up this [racial] barrier for him … they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America. There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president, he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Traditionally, Americans of mixed racial heritage are allowed to decide for themselves which, if either, of their parental communities with which to identify. Obama has self-identified as an African-American from an early age.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: Cesar Mascarenhas

Ron Paul’s New Mission: Internet Freedom

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For months we’ve been speculating about how Ron Paul might spend the political capital he’s amassed accumulating all those delegate votes through the primary season. Now it looks like we have our answer.

A new document from Ron Paul and his son Rand called “The Technology Revolution” lays out the Pauls’ roadmap for where they’ll focus their agenda moving forward: Internet freedom.

The document makes a case against the largely GOP-motivated legislation to regulate the internet that’s been proposed over the last year—acts like SOPA, PIPA, etc. It also makes a case against the dominant voices resisting internet regulation—the tech companies and political progressives who protested SOPA and who last week released their own manifesto called the Declaration of Internet Freedom.

The Pauls argue that both approaches from the left and the right seek to impose harmful controls on an internet that should be left totally unregulated. In the Pauls’ view, the left’s anti-trust concerns and advocacy for “Net Neutrality,” which would prevent telecoms from divvying up their bandwidth and charging sites for quick load times, are as misguided and anti-free-market as the right’s push for tighter copyright controls with SOPA. Government regulation in the interest of openness and consumer fairness is neither open nor fair, they say.

Instead, the Pauls want to see the internet totally unregulated, with corporations and individuals behaving in the ecosystem however the market will motivate them to.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit:  everett taasevigen

The Worst Ruling Since Dred Scott

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Last week Chief Justice John Roberts blatantly ignored the Constitution and the law and purposefully rewrote Obamacare in order to rule it legal. He called Obamacare a “tax” instead of an individual mandate; he then proceeded to blithely expand the government’s power to tax to encompass a tax on breathing, which is what Obamacare is.

Now I had warned conservatives years ago that Roberts was a rotten pick for the Supreme Court. “Roberts is not an originalist,” I wrote in 2005. “There is nothing in his very short jurisprudential record to indicate that his judicial philosophy involves strict fidelity to the original meaning of the Constitution.”

Nonetheless, Roberts’ decision was stunning.

It was stunning because the Obamacare decision represented the greatest single judicial limitation on American liberty since Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court ruled that under the Constitution, blacks were not human beings. Dred Scott is the judicial benchmark for evil decisions, and far surpasses the Obamacare decision in its legal flaws and moral emptiness. And there are many other evil and disgusting Supreme Court decisions that threatened American liberty: Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), allowing states to segregate by race; Buck v. Bell (1927), allowing states to forcibly sterilize the mentally retarded; Korematsu v. United States (1944), allowing the federal government to order Japanese Americans into internment camps based on the need to prevent espionage.

All of these decisions were wrong, both legally and morally. But Obamacare surpasses all but Dred Scott in its violation of profound foundational American principles.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: RasMarley

Calif. Lawmakers Want to Radically Change Legal Definition of “Parents”

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California lawmakers are considering an unusual bill that would legalize, in certain cases, more than two parents for a child.

The bill – SB 1476 – proposed by state Sen. Mark Leno, San Francisco Democrat, has passed the Senate but has not come up for a vote in the Assembly.

The bill would allow judges to recognize more than two individuals as parents when separation and custody battles arise in court.

Mr. Leno hopes to override a California appellate court ruling that limited parenthood to two individuals.

That case involved a lesbian couple and their child’s biological father. With one mother hospitalized and the other incarcerated, the biological father wished to gain custody to remove the child from California’s foster care system.

Read more from this story HERE.

Iran Threatens to Destroy US Bases Across Middle East, Israel if Attacked

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Iran has threatened to destroy U.S. military bases across the Middle East and target Israel within minutes of being attacked, Iranian media reported on Wednesday, as Revolutionary Guards extended test-firing of ballistic missiles into a third day.

Israel has hinted it may attack Iran if diplomacy fails to secure a halt to its disputed nuclear energy program. The United States also has mooted military action as a last-resort option but has frequently nudged the Israelis to give time for intensified economic sanctions to work against Iran.

“These bases are all in range of our missiles, and the occupied lands (Israel) are also good targets for us,” Amir Ali Haji Zadeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, was quoted by Fars news agency as saying.

Haji Zadeh said 35 U.S. bases were within reach of Iran’s ballistic missiles, the most advanced of which commanders have said could hit targets 2,000 km (1,300 miles) away.

“We have thought of measures to set up bases and deploy missiles to destroy all these bases in the early minutes after an attack,” he added.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit:  Futureatlas.com

Obama the Tyrant

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Since the ruling by the United States Supreme Court on June 28, 2012, the big news in America has been how the Obama Administration, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid misrepresented the legislation to Congress, the Senate and the public.

It was consistently presented as a cost saving measure that would reduce the size of U.S. national deficits, thus helping pay down the debt, while improving the quality and lowering the costs of healthcare. Insurance premiums would be reduced. It would provide coverage for uninsured millions. If you liked the doctor and healthcare plan you had, you would be able to keep them.

Regrettably for American Citizens, with the exception of covering additional people, none of the rest was ever true. It will add to the deficit and to the debt. The quality and availability of healthcare will go down. Existing doctors will retire and fewer prospective doctors will enter medical practice since the rewards will be outstripped by the costs of a medical education. Insurance premiums have been will continue to rise, leading employers to drop coverage for employees, thereby adding to the likelihood that both your doctor and your plan will change.

It was never explained how a system cited as being too expensive was going to fund a new federal bureaucracy, start covering more people with the same number of facilities and personnel at a lower cost, while saving the nation trillions of dollars.

Now, we know: Obama, Pelosi, Reid and company all lied.

Especially Obama, who repeatedly pledged to Americans making less than $250,000 that their taxes would never go up. Not their income tax, not their payroll tax, not their capital gains tax. None of those taxes would go up, not by one single dime, ever.

But the truth is now revealed.  See Obamacare: Seven New Taxes on Citizens Earning Less than $250,000

It doesn’t stop there. Attacks have been made on religious liberties.  See Healthcare Mandate on Contraception in Rreligious Affiliated Institutions

There have been assaults on freedom of the press.  See White House and Media Matters coordinate attacks on FOX News

Egregious though these examples may be, in the big picture they are only the tip of the iceberg:

•Obama has violated the individual liberties of all Americans by imposing forced participation in a government healthcare regulatory system without their consent.

•Obama has collaborated with his Attorney General to ignore equal protection under the law in favor of selective protections based upon arbitrary factors.

•Obama has violated American bankruptcy laws by willfully denying secured bond holders first payment, in favor of unsecured political supporters.

•Obama has violated the Constitution by accepting the position of Chairmanship of the UN Security Council.

•Obama has ignored the Constitutional separation of power by appointing “czars” to oversee matters that are intended to be handled by the legislative branch of the government.

•Obama has violated the First Amendment right to freedom of the press, by attacking television and radio networks, stations and broadcasters while attempting censorship.

•Obama has violated the individual’s right to free speech through creation of an email address to report Citizens in a blatant attempt to silence dissent through intimidation.

•Obama has violated the Law by ignoring the War Powers Act and engaging the United States military in overseas hostilities without the consent of Congress.

•Obama has violated the First Amendment by attempting to impose restrictions on free speech through implementation of Net Neutrality by the FCC.

•Obama has endeavored to interfere in the free market through the imposition of The Clean Energy and Security Act, which mandates carbon emissions be reduced to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, 42 percent by 2030, and 84 percent by 2050. By 2020, this tax will extract an estimated $160 billion from the economy, or an average $1,870 per family.

•Obama has violated the Constitution by having the government offer $4,500 rebates to people for turning in older motor vehicles for newer vehicles

•Obama has interfered in America’s free market by having the National Labor Relations Board sue a privately owned company for planning to open for business in a State that protects an employee’s ability to work free of forced union membership.

•Obama has interfered in the free market by imposing restrictions and regulations on petroleum, natural gas and coal production in the United States.

•Obama has abandoned enforcing the security of American borders and protected illegal immigrants from prosecution for violation of immigration laws.

•Obama has abandoned and insulted our most enduring and faithful allies through speech and action, the most glaring among these being placing the State of Israel on the list of nations that foster terrorism.

•Obama has sought to impose additional taxes on America without the people’s Consent.

•Obama has deprived American Citizens in some cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.

•Obama has transferred billions of dollars to enemies of the United States through Foreign Aid.

•Obama has ignored the Constitutional separation of powers by publicly attacking the Supreme Court of the United States.

•Obama has attacked America’s bedrock family values by ordering the Department of Justice to not defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act.

•Obama has repeatedly attacked America’s Christian foundation.

•Obama has repeatedly slandered American Citizens with false accusations of racism, violent tendencies and hatred.

•Obama has grossly accelerated the amount of America’s debt through passage of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, which had negligible effect on unemployment, sent billions of dollars overseas and wasted billions domestically by lining the pockets of political cronies while bailing out States guilty of practicing irresponsible budgetary policies.

•Obama has put America and America’s allies at greater risk through cancellation of missile defense systems.

•Obama has expanded the need for enormous increases in government borrowing,

•Obama has collaborated with his Attorney General to try enemy combatants in civilian Courts.

•Obama has collaborated with his Attorney General and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the implementation of operation Fast and Furious, which has been implicated in the murder of American Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

•Obama has devalued America’s currency by engaging in the practice of Quantitative Easing, allowing the Federal Reserve to purchase trillions of dollars of our national debt.

The list could continue.

A president, whose character is thus marked by acts which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to govern a free people.

Remember.

Allen West: The Balkanized States of America

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The 56 rebels knew they very well might be hanged for what they were about to do. As lawyers, merchants, farmers and landowners, they had plenty to lose. Fighting against an imperial ruler, they had everything to gain.

They were embarking on an adventure – not only because they were revolting against their own government and fighting outmanned and outgunned against a superior military – but because they were creating a radical approach to self-governance.

The 56 men who signed our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, knew the only way they ever would be successful in their audacious plan was if they stood together. As Benjamin Franklin said at the signing, “if we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.”

Our founders shared a unified vision for our nation. They understood that unity of the many was necessary to uphold the sovereignty of the individual and the fundamental, unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To ensure the sovereignty of each individual American, our Founding Fathers knew the country would have to be unified on certain principles and values: a limited constitutional government, a free market, a respect for “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and a strong national defense.

Read more HERE.

Photo credit: Richard Loyal French