Impeachment Warning to Obama (+video)

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Congressman Walter B. Jones (R-NC) held a press conference, Sept. 21, in Rayburn B-318, to discuss House Concurrent Resolution 107. Rep. Jones was joined by a group of senior retired military officials, constitutional lawyers, and congressional co-sponsors, to discuss HCR 107 (the bill to send an impeachment warning to Obama), which currently has 11 cosponsors.

This bi-partisan resolution, introduced in March of this year, reasserts the power of Congress to declare war, and states that any President who circumvents Congress, unless the United States is attacked, will face an article of impeachment.

Read more from this story HERE.

Prisoners Sue for $500 Million Because They Don’t Have Dental Floss

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Some jail inmates are trying to put a $500 million bite on a suburban New York county in a lawsuit demanding access to dental floss.

Eleven inmates in the Westchester County jail in Valhalla say in a federal civil rights lawsuit that they are losing their teeth and suffering pain because they aren’t allowed dental floss.

Several say in the complaint that they brush three times a day, ‘tongue and gums included,’ but still get cavities and suffer bleeding gums, constant dental work for temporary fillings, and mental anguish.

The Journal News first reported on the lawsuit.

Deputy Correction Commissioner Justin Pruyne defended the ban, saying that dental floss ‘potentially can be used as a weapon.’

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Lying for Hispanic Votes: Claims at Univision Forum that Fast & Furious was Started by Bush

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Asked about the Fast and Furious program at the Univision forum on Thursday, President Obama falsely claimed that the program began under President George W. Bush.

“I think it’s important for us to understand that the Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration,” the president said. “When Eric Holder found out about it, he discontinued it. We assigned a inspector general to do a thorough report that was just issued, confirming that in fact Eric Holder did not know about this, that he took prompt action and the people who did initiate this were held accountable.”

In actuality, the Fast and Furious program was started in October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency.

Previous programs involving ATF agents allowing guns to “walk” across the border so as to trace them were run during the Bush presidency, but not this particular “field-initiated program.”

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment after the falsehood was pointed out to them.

Read more from this story HERE.

100 Days Until Taxmageddon

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Photo credit: AllenWestForCongress

Sunday will mark the start of the 100-day countdown to “Taxmageddon” – the date the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2013:

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief. In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for small business owners, families, and investors (later re-upped by President Obama and Democrat Congress in 2010). The following tax hikes will occur on January 1, 2013:

Personal income tax rates will rise on January 1, 2013. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which the majority of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates.

Higher taxes on marriage and family coming on January 1, 2013. The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of taxable income. The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child. The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level.

Middle Class Death Tax returns on January 1, 2013. The death tax is currently 35% with an exemption of $5 million ($10 million for married couples). For those dying on or after January 1 2013, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones.

Higher tax rates on savers and investors on January 1, 2013. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 23.8 percent in 2013. The top dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 43.4 percent in 2013. This is because of scheduled rate hikes plus Obamacare’s investment surtax.

Read more from this story detailing the Second Wave (20+ new Obamacare taxes) and the Third Wave (AMT Increases and Employer Tax Hikes).

House: No Ethics Charges for Rep. Maxine Waters

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California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters won’t be charged with ethics violations following allegations she steered a $12 million federal bailout to a bank where her husband owns stock.

House Ethics Committee members said Friday at a hearing their investigation found no violation by Waters, a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee.

However, the committee said Waters’ chief of staff, Mikael Moore, did take actions in Congress in an attempt to help the bank and violated House standards of conduct. Moore likely will receive a letter admonishing him for his conduct but will not face more severe punishment, such as a reprimand, by the full House.

Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, acting chairman of the panel, announced the tentative findings at the hearing but noted the committee had not issued a final report.

Goodlatte said the committee was convinced that when Waters asked for a meeting at the Treasury Department to discuss financial help for minority banks, she believed she did so on behalf of all minority banks — not just OneUnited, where her husband owns stock. Goodlatte said the committee agreed with Waters’ assertion.

Read more from this story HERE.

Americans’ Distrust of Media Highest in History

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Americans’ distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60% saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Distrust is up from the past few years, when Americans were already more negative about the media than they had been in years prior to 2004.

The record distrust in the media, based on a survey conducted Sept. 6-9, 2012, also means that negativity toward the media is at an all-time high for a presidential election year. This reflects the continuation of a pattern in which negativity increases every election year compared with the year prior. The current gap between negative and positive views — 20 percentage points — is by far the highest Gallup has recorded since it began regularly asking the question in the 1990s. Trust in the media was much higher, and more positive than negative, in the years prior to 2004 — as high as 72% when Gallup asked this question three times in the 1970s.

This year’s decline in media trust is driven by independents and Republicans. The 31% and 26%, respectively, who express a great deal or fair amount of trust are record lows and are down significantly from last year. Republicans’ level of trust this year is similar to what they expressed in the fall of 2008, implying that they are especially critical of election coverage.

Independents are sharply more negative compared with 2008, suggesting the group that is most closely divided between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney is quite dissatisfied with its ability to get fair and accurate news coverage of this election.

More broadly, Republicans continue to express the least trust in the media, while Democrats express the most. Independents’ trust fell below the majority level in 2004 and has continued to steadily decline.

Read more from this story HERE.

DNC Literally in Hock to SEIU

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The Democratic National Committee (DNC) owes at least $8 million to a bank owned by one of the largest unions in the country, according to the committee’s most recent financial report.

The DNC initiated an $8 million loan with the Amalgamated Bank of New York on Aug. 10, the report shows, accounting for the majority of the committee’s overall debt of $11 million.

Amalgamated Bank, often described as “America’s Labor Bank,” is a national entity, the majority of which is owned by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a politically active union with deep ties to the Democratic Party. The SEIU is also involved with the Democracy Alliance, a shadowy group of wealthy left-wing donors founded by billionaire investor George Soros.

The bank announced in an August press release that the DNC had “moved its primary banking relationship” to Amalgamated Bank, which would handle the committee’s “day-to-day banking needs.”

The DNC had previously done most of its banking with Bank of America, which helped finance the Democratic convention in Charlotte.

Read more from this story HERE.

Department of Homeland Security Ammo Acquisition Grows to 1.4 Billion Rounds (+video)

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According to American Thinker, the Department of Homeland Security’s ammunition acquisition has now soared to 1.4 billion rounds over the last six months.

Until now, Restoring Liberty has avoided posting articles regarding the various federal agencies’ ammunition procurements as earlier numbers seemed to be within the parameters of what could be expected for routine practice and training. However, at 1.4 billion, every employee of DHS (not just those with federal law enforcement authority) would have hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition each.

It’s also disturbing that hundreds of millions of these rounds are hollow-points, prohibited by the Geneva Convention.

Here’s how the American Thinker describes the volume of DHS’s ammunition purchase:

Let’s put these DHS numbers in perspective. An Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer displaces (weighs) 9,300 tons. 1.4 billion rounds weigh around 28,000 tons, three destroyers’ worth, so to speak. It takes over 1,200 18-wheel trucks to move that much ammunition. That’s the equivalent to a line of single trailer trucks, parked end to end, almost 14 miles long.

There are 314 million Americans, men, women and children living in the United States this morning. This year alone, DHS has purchased four rounds for each and every American. We don’t know how much more ammo the DHS may have accumulated during the preceding 36 months of the Obama Administration. This enormous DHS stockpile supplements the ammunition already held by the US Armed Forces, the National Guard, hundreds of local and state police departments, plus other Federal law enforcement agencies such as the ATF, Secret Service, FBI, TSA and the US Marshals Service.

Why did DHS purchase 28,000 tons of ammunition? Why did DHS purchase almost half a billion rounds of hollow point ammunition, banned by the Hague Convention of 1899 for use in international warfare, that is carefully designed to kill it intended targets? Americans have no good answers to these questions since the DHS is now refusing to respond to media inquires on the subject. Pull back the curtain of silence by asking your Congressmen and Senators these questions.

These huge inventories are extremely troubling from the standpoint of a free society. DHS and other Federal governmental agencies will be much less inclined to ever use this ammunition as long as Americans citizens stand firm in supporting our Second Amendment rights to bear arms. We must never forget that tyrants throughout modern history (Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin and Mao) always disarmed their opponents before rounding them up and sending them to the killing fields.

Here’s a video that was put together by a concerned citizen that asks the question that Restoring Liberty would like answered: Why?

Buffet Bill Moves to the Senate; Allows Buffet to “Put His Money Where His Mouth Is”

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The House on Wednesday passed Republicans’ own version of the Buffett Rule, which allows wealthy Americans to voluntarily pony up to reduce the deficit.

The bill, labeled the Buffett Rule Act, passed by voice vote, meaning Democrats and Republicans agreed with it. Under the legislation, which would still need Senate approval, taxpayers could check a box on their taxes and send in a check for more than they owe to the IRS.

“If Warren Buffett and others like him truly feel they’re not paying enough in taxes, they can use the Buffett Rule Act to put their money where their mouth is and voluntarily send in more to pay down the national debt, rather than changing the entire tax code to inflict more job-killing tax hikes on hard-working Americans,” said Rep. Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who wrote the bill.

President Obama and Democrats had proposed a Buffett Rule tax, based on billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s statement that he shouldn’t pay a lower rate on his income than his secretary.

Investments are taxed at a lower rate than salary or wage income under the theory that they are spurring economic growth, so wealthy investors usually pay less as a percentage, though they end up paying far more in real dollar terms.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department Considered Sending Marines to Libya “Sometime in Next 5 Years”

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Photo Credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office Creative Commons

Prior to the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, the State Department and the Marines Corps had been discussing deploying Marines to guard the U.S. Embassy in the Libyan capital Tripoli “sometime in the next five years,” according to the Marine Corps.

The issue of security at U.S. diplomatic outposts in Libya has been front and center as Congress and others begin to investigate whether or not those facilities were sufficiently protected before the attacks that killed Amb. Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

The State Department won’t discuss the specifics of its security posture in Libya before the attack, but the Marine Corps has briefed congressional staffers on the issue, for example in a Sept. 13 email obtained by The Cable.

“Typically, when a new embassy is established, it takes time to grow a new [Marine Corps Embassy Security Group] detachment,” wrote Col. Harold Van Opdorp, director of the Marine Senate Liaison office, in the e-mail. “[In conjunction with] the State Department, there is discussion about establishing a detachment in Tripoli sometime in the next five years.”

The State Department did not respond to questions about how high the discussion of deploying Marines to Libya reached, whether that discussion amounted to a recognition that Marines were needed there, or why it might take five years to set it up. A Marine Corps FAST team was deployed to protect the embassy on Sept. 12 after the attack and could stay there indefinitely.

Read more from this story HERE.