The Bizarre White House Reaction to John Bryson News

On Monday morning, Washington awoke to learn that Commerce Secretary John Bryson had been involved in a series of auto accidents in southern California on Saturday evening, and cited with a felony hit-and-run by responding police. This news was of course shocking.

For several hours, the White House and the Commerce Department declined comment. In this vacuum, the rumors took a life of their own. Some speculated there was alcohol involved, despite initial police accounts that this was not the case. After official statements reported seizures were the cause of the accidents, the ire turned on that initial speculation, blaming the sardonic culture of Twitter.

But the entirety of blame did not lie with those on the social network. Nobody can deny that Twitter is not a forgiving place absent of (sometimes inappropriate) snark and vitriol, but it is also a venue for compassion, which is evidenced any time a notable figure passes away and the timeline becomes a place for remembrance and prayer. Some rightly issued apologies for inappropriate remarks, and the discussion largely fell silent.

Part of the blame surely lay at the feet of an inept White House communications operation, unable to provide the general public with any answers to the health and well-being of a cabinet secretary. This media stonewall continued in Press Secretary Jay Carney’s daily briefing.

In Carney’s first answer, we learned that President Obama had not spoken with Secretary Bryson. This seemed odd. A cabinet secretary is hospitalized following serious traffic incidents and a police citation and the president does not pick up the phone to check on his welfare?

 Read More at heritage.org. By Rory Cooper.

Exposed: The Convicted Bomber Harassing Conservative Bloggers

Liar, killer, and convicted 1978 “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin is engaged in a part-time career of using police to harass, intimidate, and even facilitate the death of conservative bloggers across the nation. In what has come to be called “SWAT-ing,” Kimberlin and a number of suspected associates make bogus calls to 911 in order to report a serious domestic crime–in one instance, masquerading as a husband who admits to the brutal murder of his wife. Police respond with the dispatch of a SWAT team to the address provided in the call only to find, after breaking down the door and training nervous sights on the first male in view, that the whole thing is a hoax. By choosing prominent conservative bloggers as victims of this life-threatening scheme and other criminal escapades, Kimberlin hopes to intimidate into silence those who have reported to the American public the odious past and current criminal exploits of this George Soros dependent and devotee.

In 1978, Kimberlin engaged in an 8 day bombing spree in Speedway, Indiana–bombings which resulted in widespread panic and the death of one man. It has been suggested that Kimberlin began the Speedway crime wave in order to divert attention from the fact that the grandmother of an underage girl with whom he had started a “relationship” was found murdered in her garage. It seems the disapproving grandmother had attempted to remove the young girl from Kimberlin’s clutches.  It is altogether possible that she paid for that insolence with her life.

A short time later, Kimberlin was arrested and served some 17 years in prison for a number of offenses, including participation in a marijuana ring that supplied 4 states with the drug. Like many other incarcerated losers, Kimberlin studied law while in jail. Nothing serious, of course, just enough to assist in the filing of fraudulent, nuisance suits against anyone with sufficient resources to finance Kimberlin’s way through the remainder of his psychopathic existence.

In the most recent of these adventures, Kimberlin falsely accused “Allergic to Bull” blogger Aaron Walker of assault. Kimberlin then won a restraining order in the Maryland District Courtroom of Judge C.J. Vaughey, a low-grade moron who literally told Walker—a Yale educated, practicing attorney—to “forget” the Supreme Court’s decision in Brandenburg V. Ohio (a seminal First Amendment case.) Rather than rule according to Supreme Court precedent, Vaughey decided his court would “go by Vaughey right now.” And in the judge’s twisted mind, that meant REVERSING the Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg in order to trample Walker’s first Amendment rights by ruling he would NO LONGER BE PERMITTED to blog the truth about Kimberlin! Adding insult to injury, as a result of Kimberlin’s persistent harassment of Walker and fearful of the sociopath’s vicious past, Walker’s employer terminated both the attorney and his wife.

Read More at The Western Journalism. By Doug Book.

 

Obama not feeling the love from overseas anymore

There was a time when President Obama could have run for president of the world. He had sky high approval ratings just about everywhere but in Muslim countries.

But three years of incompetence in foreign affairs has sapped his approval ratings until now, solid majorities in many countries overseas don’t think much of our Lightworker.

Politico:
Approval of Obama’s international policies has dropped from 78 percent to 63 percent in Europe; from 34 percent to 15 percent in Muslim countries; from 40 percent to 22 percent in Russia; and from 57 percent to 27 percent in China, reports the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

The study suggests that U.S. foreign policy unilateralism and the Obama administration’s aggressive use of drone strikes are partly to blame for the surging global discontentment for Obama’s foreign affairs approach.

In 17 of 20 countries, a majority oppose U.S. drone attacks in nations such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Outside of the United States, no plurality exists in support of this policy.

Read More at American Thinker. By Rick Moran.

Obama Regulators Stifle Hiring

Whatever else he said in his news conference on the economy last week, President Obama did acknowledge that the government must take care to avoid any policy that “further crimps the desire of companies to hire more people.” If the president really wants to end anti-employment policies, the best place to start would be his own Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The EEOC exists to guard against discrimination in the workplace. As Justice Clarence Thomas, a former EEOC chairman, once said, “In a perfect world, you don’t need EEOC [but] this is not a perfect world.” Of all the federal agencies that deserve our support, “EEOC is at the top of that list.”

Unfortunately, a recent memo released by the EEOC raises serious doubts about the agency’s current policies. According to its attorneys, companies risk federal prosecution under the Americans with Disabilities Act if they seek out job applicants with high-school diplomas.

More specifically, the EEOC attorneys assert that a company should not screen out applicants without high school diplomas, unless the company is ready to prove that the diploma requirement is consistent with “business necessity.” And even then, the company also must prove that an applicant without a diploma actually lacks the skills necessary to carry out the job’s “essential functions.” The legal problem, the EEOC says, is discrimination against people with learning disabilities.

This astonishing requirement places an enormous burden on employers, who would either have to stop screening on the basis of diplomas, or go to great pains to prove that each applicant without a diploma is unqualified.

Read More at The Washington Times. C. Boyden Gray.

Photo Credit: The US Army Creative Commons

GOP senator questions whether excessive media contact led to leaks

Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) on Tuesday said members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are working closely to develop legislation aimed at reducing the incidence of security leaks, and said he has several questions about the contacts Obama administration officials have had with various media outlets, and whether those contacts led to the leaks.

In remarks on the Senate floor, Coats said he takes the administration at its word that these leaks were not intentional, but said the leaks are nontheless “inexcusable” if former or current officials were involved in any way.

“Whether these officials are intentionally leaking classified information is not the main point,” Coats said on the Senate floor. “If they put themselves in situations where they are discussing or confirming classified information, they must also be held accountable.”

A prime example, he said, is the administration’s decision to share information about the bin Laden raid to filmmakers. He said this decision appears to be politically motivated, and said the release of that film before the November election would reinforce this appearance.

“We can be sure that any release before prior to the November presidential election will fuel a firestorm of accusations of political motives,” he said.

Read More at The Hill. By Pete Kasperowicz.

Maxine Waters Ethics Case To Go Forward

It was in August of 2010 that the House Ethics Committee decided to proceed with charges against California Congresswoman Maxine Waters for contriving to procure “special favors” for the Massachusetts-based OneUnited Bank. And although “Waters has done her damnedest during [these] three years to exploit as many legal technicalities as possible to try to get the investigation halted…” it now looks as though the jig might finally be up.

In 2008, Representative Waters set up a meeting between officials of the Treasury Department and members of a “trade association” of minority-owned banks. The meeting, however, consisted almost exclusively of OneUnited Bank executives who, to the surprise of the Treasury people, asked them for a $50 million dollar loan!

It seems the minority-owned OneUnited was in trouble. It also seems Maxine Waters’ husband, Sidney Williams, was on the board of OneUnited and owned $350,000 worth of the bank’s stock–stock that would have been worthless if the bank failed. The Congresswoman forgot to mention this minor point to Treasury when arranging the get-together.

Now who came to Waters’ assistance but Rush Limbaugh’s “Banking Queen,” Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank? Advising the congresswoman that her involvement in the affair might not look so hot to the House Ethics Committee, Frank offered to do the dirty work for her as OneUnited Bank was, after all, in his district. Frank later told the Committee:

“I said, look, it’s a Boston institution. You should stay out of it. It’s a legitimate constituency thing for me. You should stay away from this. It’s a legitimate thing for me to do, and you shouldn’t be involved,” Frank told the Globe, recounting his conversations with Waters.

Although it is against House rules to “use one’s power as a member for personal financial gain,” it’s apparently just FINE if one of your House colleagues does it FOR you.

At this point, Waters’ Chief of Staff—and grandson—Mikael Moore decided to lend a hand. He addressed numerous emails to the House Financial Services Committee, “…discussing with committee members details of a bank bailout bill apparently after Ms. Waters agreed to refrain from advocating on the bank’s behalf. The bailout bill had provisions that ultimately benefited OneUnited…” 

Read More at Western Journalism. By Doug Book.

President Obama on Why He Didn’t Campaign in Wisconsin Recall Election: ‘I’ve Got a Lot of Responsibilities’

Although President Obama declined to comment on the recall election between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett during last Friday’s news conference, he didn’t mind talking about it yesterday with a reporter from ABC’s Green Bay, Wis., affiliate WBAY.

“I‘d like to ask you about Wisconsin’s recall election. There are a lot of Democrats that are upset you didn’t campaign for Tom Barrett,” reporter Matt Smith asked in reference to the fact that the only piece of endorsement Barrett received from the president was a 112-character Tweet.

“The truth of the matter is that as President of The United States, I’ve got a lot of responsibilities,” President Obama responded.

“I was supportive of Tom and have been supportive of Tom. Obviously, I would have loved to see a different result. But the broader principle is that we want an economy that is not focused on a few at the top but is a broad-based economy that invests in our future, that makes sure we’ve got a strong education system that is thinking about workers and their ability to pay their bills, is something in everything I do,” he added.

See the WBAY interview here [starts at the 0:46 mark]:

 

Did he just say he was too busy to campaign for Barrett?

Read More at the Blaze.

This latest euro fix will come apart in less than a month

Only this one may not even succeed in buying time – I give it less than a month before some such other piece of bad news comes along to fire the crisis anew. Like all the others, the latest fix seems to create as many problems as it solves. The euphoria in markets at Spain’s rescue lasted all of a few hours; having bounded away at the opening, they ended broadly flat.

But please don’t call it a bail-out. It may walk, talk and look like a bail-out, but to the Spanish premier, Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s handout is completely different to the three rescues we’ve already seen, even though at €100bn (£81bn)– or some 10pc of Spanish GDP – it’s quite a bit larger than that of Ireland and Portugal.

No doubt mindful of the fact that every political leader who has agreed on a bailout to date has been defenestrated soon afterwards, Mr Rajoy has attempted to snatch victory from the jaws of humiliation by proclaiming the €100bn of aid an unparalleled triumph. Don Quixote himself would have struggled to see such majesty in all too self evident defeat.

To Mr Rajoy, however, the Spanish aid is no more than “the opening of a line of credit for our financial system”, which because Spain has been such an exemplary to others in accepting austerity without complaint, has been offered more or less unconditionally. I suspect Mr Rajoy is in for a bit of a shock once he sees the fine print, but for him, the important thing is getting it across to his electorate that Spain is not being bailed out. Honour has to be seen to be maintained.

Unfortunately, the reality is altogether different. This is not a direct line of credit to the Spanish banking system, but a sovereign loan which expands the national debt by getting on for 20pc. The fact that all of it is going to be used to prop up the banking sector is no more than cosmetic for an underlying truth – that it is Spanish taxpayers who are left with the liability. Spain is being forced to borrow from Europe to bailout its banks because markets won’t provide the money directly to Spain.

Read More at The Telegraph. By Jeremy Warner.

Is Obama committing political suicide?

While President Obama has been especially adroit at destroying the values and Religious underpinnings of Americans, and tearing down individual freedom’s funding apparatus, Capitalism, I never thought I would see him turn his purposely harmful tactics unto his own election campaign.

Are we watching a political suicide in the making?

Can anyone believe the smartest President of modern times, the Harvard professor, is really trying to get re-elected?

After Friday’s speech where he said the “private sector is fine,” and then had to address and walk back that statement? – I have to wonder about his real intentions.

I want to address the unnoticed head shot Obama inflicted upon himself, with no prodding or goading from anyone!

Read More at Western Journalism. By Ron Reale

Family Breakdown Behind America’s Struggles

When Charles Murray’s best-selling Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 appeared a few months ago, the book’s fictional working-class neighborhood, Fishtown, became one more battleground in America’s 50-year-old culture war. Fishtown was representative, Murray argued, of a new white underclass in America—one produced by cultural decline, especially the collapse of marriage. Critics objected that the real source of misery in the nation’s Fishtowns wasn’t a lack of marriages; it was the extinction of manufacturing jobs. The disagreement was familiar to culture-war veterans: conservatives versus liberals, family breakdown versus dearth of good jobs, culture versus economics, David Brooks versus Paul Krugman.

Murray might have done more to acknowledge that globalization, technology, and the knowledge economy have wrenchingly changed the working-class world. Still, Coming Apart is correct: you can’t grasp what’s happening at the lower end of the income scale without talking about family breakdown. In fact, the single-mother revolution, as I’ll call it, takes us a long way toward understanding the socioeconomic problems on everyone’s mind these days: poverty, inequality, and the inability of those at the bottom to move up.

The single-mother revolution shouldn’t need much introduction. It started in the 1960s, when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons for the revolution were many, including the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism, and a superbug of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and ’70s.

The first public sign that the single-mother revolution had arrived came in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his controversial report on the black family. As a young assistant secretary of labor, Moynihan had stumbled across data showing that the percentage of black mothers who were unmarried at the time of their children’s birth was rising, reaching a then-staggering 24 percent, even while black male unemployment was falling. This puzzled Moynihan: Shouldn’t more male paychecks mean fewer single mothers? Moynihan realized that he was uncovering a new cultural phenomenon—voluntary single motherhood—and concluded that it would impede blacks’ economic progress.

After 1965 came the deluge. Other minorities and then whites joined the revolution, and it found plenty of extra recruits among the rapidly increasing number of women made single through divorce. In its broad outlines, the story is familiar by now. When Moynihan was writing, 93 percent of all American births were to women with marriage licenses. Sure, lots of these women might have married just before the baby bump, as had long been the case—but they nevertheless had husbands, with whom they formed a unit responsible for the coming baby. Over the next few decades, however, the percentage of babies with no father around rose steadily. As of 1970, 11 percent of births were to unmarried mothers; by 1990, that number had risen to 28 percent. Today, 41 percent of all births are nonmarital. And for mothers under 30, the number is 53 percent.

Read More at city-journal.org. By Kay S. Hymowitz.