Bachmann on Boehner Debt-Ceiling Plan: ‘I Will Not Be Casting My Vote for That Bill’

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At the National Press Club on Thursday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who is running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, said she would not support House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) plan to raise the debt ceiling or any other proposal that increases the debt limit, which is currently set at $14.29 trillion.

“John Boehner now has a second alternative as you have heard of,” said Bachmann. “I will not be casting my vote for that bill and we [the House] will be casting our votes later this afternoon. I cannot. I am committed to not raising the debt ceiling. My colleagues may give the Speaker that vote today.”

She went on to dismiss the fiscal year 2012 spending cuts in Boehner’s plan as minimal.

“If this bill goes through today, that’s a cut of approximately $22 billion in spending,” she said. “We all know the numbers — that’s perhaps one estimate says two-and-a-half days of spending. Let’s get serious. Let’s get serious.”

Boehner’s plan raises the debt limit but also reportedly cuts and caps spending by $917 billion over next decade – $22 billion in FY2012 alone, according to an analysis by the House Budget Committee.

Read More at CNS News By Edwin Mora, CNSNews.com

Did Palin Urge Freshmen to Vote Against Boehner Plan?

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Is Sarah Palin swaying tea party conservatives to vote against House Speaker John Boehner’s debt plan?

The former Republican vice presidential nominee put an enigmatic comment on her Facebook page Thursday afternoon that seemed to warn freshman Republicans in the House that they just might face primary opposition if they cave in to demands by their party to raise the debt ceiling, The New York Times theorized.

“All my best to you, GOP Freshmen, from up here in the Last Frontier. Sincerely, Sarah Palin,” she wrote. “P.S. Everyone I talk to still believes in contested primaries.”

Just two hours later, House Republican leaders were forced to postpone the vote on their proposal to increase the debt ceiling at the last minute, apparently facing a revolt among some of those very members.

In her 4:03 p.m. Facebook posting, Palin wrote that “I respectfully ask these GOP Freshman to re-read this letter and remember us “little people” who believed in them, donated to their campaigns, spent hours tirelessly volunteering for them, and trusted them with our votes. This new wave of public servants may recall that they were sent to D.C. for such a time as this.”

Read More at NewsMax Newsmax.com

Angle to McCain: Wait a minute, you campaigned for me in 2010. Now you’re insulting me and the Tea Party?

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Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, blasted opponents of the Boehner plan yesterday, borrowing a phrase from a Wall Street Journal editorial that described such opposition as representing “the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees.”

Angle has now released a response, which, among much else, reminds McCain that in the end the Hobbits actually won the day and saved the world. The former Nevada GOP senate nominee called herself a “TEA Party Hobbit.” This could be the start of a new branding movement among Tea Partiers:

“One man in Washington, who chose Sarah Palin to be his VP running-mate and came to Nevada to campaign for me last year in the Senate race against Harry Reid, is now promoting attacks against TEA Party activists, ordinary American citizens, and fiscally conservative members of Congress – all of whom are adamantly opposed to continuing the deficit-spending strategies proposed by some congressional members and the president.

“Ironically, this man campaigned for TEA Party support in his last re-election, but now throws Christine O’Donnell and I into the harbor with Sarah Palin. As in the fable, it is the hobbits who are the heroes and save the land. This Lord of the TARP actually ought to read to the end of the story and join forces with the TEA Party, not criticize it.

It is regrettable that a man seeking dialogue, action and cooperation for votes on the floor of the United States Senate has only one strategy to achieve that effort: name-calling. Nice.

Read More at the Washington Examiner By Mark Tapscott, The Washington Examiner

Concealed Carry Would Have Kept Norway Safe

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How long would the Norway gunman have lasted in Texas or any state where concealed-carry laws are on the books? I ran a survey while on a cruise: in Texas, 3 minutes; in Montana, 7 to 8 minutes; in Arizona, 2 minutes; and in Nevada, 3 to 5 minutes.

Had Norway not surrendered to the anti-self-defense nuts, and allowed Norwegians to protect themselves by legally carrying guns, the massacre might well have been prevented. There’s a lot of truth in the old adage that if guns are outlawed only outlaws will carry guns.

That was certainly true in Norway where Anders Breivik, a lone gunman, launched his assault on youth campers of Utoya Island. According to press reports he fully expected Norway’s special forces to swoop down and stop him at any minute. It didn’t happen. Faced with unarmed victims he was given plenty of time to kill 68 innocent people who could not defend themselves. Had just one of them been armed, Breivik could have been stopped dead and lives would have been spared.

Moreover, if anyone had paid attention to Breivik’s rants they would not have been surprised when he acted on them, especially since Breivik had preceded his attack by setting off a car bomb in the heart of Oslo.

Tragically, Norway’s anti-gun hysteria resulted in laws restricting gun ownership by law-abiding citizens, leaving them exposed to gun violence at the hands of criminals such as Breivik, who simply ignore anti-gun ownership laws. Despite the Second Amendment, which protects American citizens’ rights to access to guns for self-protection, the Constitutional right of citizens to bear arms is under constant assault.

Read More at Floyd Reports By Michael Reagan, Floyd Reports

Why the Tea Party is unyielding on the debt ceiling

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The liberal media have gone to warp speed in their defense of President Obama and their attacks on the Tea Party. We are “extreme” and “dangerous.” Republicans are “afraid of” the Tea Party. And more.

The narrative in the media is that Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner were close to a deal last week that would have resolved the debt-ceiling crisis. It would have allowed for continued borrowing and more “revenue,” the euphemism of the day for tax increases. And the Tea Party said no.

The Tea Party did say no. Unfortunately, Boehner is not listening to those who elected him and is now pushing a plan with almost nonexistent budget cuts.

Why is the Tea Party intransigent on the debt ceiling? Why is the Tea Party pushing congressional Republicans so hard that we have a crisis?

As the founder of Tea Party Nation, I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.

Read More at The Washington Post By Judson Phillips, The Washington Post

Republicans: Don’t fall for elites’ fear mongering

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The playbook of the Washington establishment is getting old and almost boring.

Play No. 1 is this: Pass billions in unfunded new programs. Tell everyone we will take care of them from cradle to grave. Subsidized food, medical care, housing, and if your employer goes broke like General Motors or AIG, we will step in with a safety net to rescue the businesses with government loans and grants. The criterion for help and rescue is: Does your support come our way at election time?

Play No. 2 is this: If the American people rebel and say we don’t want to pay anymore for Congress’ wasteful government spending, tell Americans that if they don’t capitulate, the end of the world is upon us. And give “destruction day” a specific deadline for added fright power. This time the date is Aug. 2, 2011 – the day the world will end unless you support our out-of-control foolish spending.

Then the theatrics begin. The media are mesmerized and cued to play their well-honed part in the playbook. Weeks of reporting commence on all of the terrible results from failing to fully fund the government elite’s pet programs. Here are some of the outcomes we have heard referenced resulting from a failure to raise the debt ceiling: Unemployment will skyrocket. Thousands of businesses will shut down. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan will be abandoned without ammunition, pay or a way home. Your credit-card interest rate will double or triple. Your mom won’t get her Social Security check. Your local hospital will close. All stocks on the NYSE will suddenly fall to zero with massive bankruptcies filling the courts. Farmers will stop planting crops. The supermarket shelves are soon empty. One pundit even predicted mass psychosis if Los Angeles doesn’t get its monthly shipment of anti-depressants. He claims one-third of the population is on the government-subsidized pills.

Wow, no wonder John Boehner and the Republicans roll over and fund everything the Washington establishment desires. They would be personally responsible for the end of America, the starvation of 300 million people and the shutdown of your cable TV.

Read More at WorldNetDaily by Floyd and Mary Beth Brown, WorldNetDaily

Going Galt without even knowing it

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A blogger named David McElroy recently wrote of a Birmingham (Alabama) businessman who,after listening to a room full of moochers and leeches piss whine and moan about the evils of business, publicly threw in the towel regarding his attempt to open a new coal mine.

David compared what happened to a scene right out of “Atlas Shrugged” and then mused,“But I wonder how long it’s going to be before businesspeople really do start walking away and deciding it’s not worth doing business in America today. Or is it already happening and we just don’t know it?”

Well,David,it’s going on right now all around us and we do in fact know all about it. I have a good friend from high school who was drafted in the Vietnam era,then earned his civil engineering Bachelor of Science degree afterward at N.C. State via the GI Bill. He started his own construction company, and has run it ever since, directly employing dozens of people and spending millions annually on equipment and materials, thereby employing countless others. Until now; until Obama was elected.

The bottom fell out of the economy under Obammunist economic policies,and then Obamacare de-exempted small construction companies from the 50-employee exemption as demanded by the unions so they could kill all non-union construction companies. Well it worked.

My friend said he was finally fed up and was finally able to say what Obama has demanded that all productive people must say, namely,“I have enough money”. He said he figured he had worked hard all his life, saved his earnings, and it was finally it was time to enjoy his savings. My friend fired all his employees,gave away all his equipment (which was fundamentally worthless anyway since everyone else was dumping their equipment too) and retired. Like many who enjoy the work they do,he probably would otherwise have died with his boots on,contributing to society right until the end. But Obammunism forced his hand,and for him personally it was a good thing because he is developing health problems,and in the not-too-distant future would have eventually been unable to enjoy his hard-earned savings.

Read More at Coach is Right  By Basil Irwin, Coach is Right

Congressman: Only ‘theft’ would detour Social Security checks

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Did Barack Obama have one of those unwelcome political moments when the harsh reality of truth accidentally spills out when he said he couldn’t assure Social Security recipients that their checks would be mailed in August unless he got the debt ceiling increase he wanted?

Possibly.

Because, the facts are that although there is a specific Social Security trust fund in which Social Security taxes are tabulated, and the government reports there is a $2.7 trillion balance in that account, the taxes go into and the retirement and disability checks come straight out of the nation’s general fund.

That circumstance has prompted U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., to propose, along with half a dozen other House members, legislation that would make certain the payments to senior citizens are made in a timely manner.

The president’s comment came during an appearance recently on CBS.

Read More at WorldNetDaily By Bob Unruh, WorldNetDaily

Complexity and Collapse

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The most obvious features of recent political and financial “solutions” are their staggering complexity and their failure to fix what’s broken. The first leads to the second. Consider the healthcare “reform,” thousands of pages of mind-numbing complexity which slathers on thick layers of bureaucratic control on a system which already costs twice as much per capita as competing developed-world systems.

Sadly, the “reform” simply solidifies the Status Quo fiefdoms and cartels that control the U.S. sickcare system.

The healthcare reform fixes nothing, while further burdening the nation with useless complexity and cost. The same can be said of the Dodd-Frank “reforms” of the embezzlement-based U.S. financial system. The original Glass–Steagall Act separating investment banking from depository banking was a few pages in length; by one count, Dodd-Frank requires that regulators create 243 rules, conduct 67 studies, and issue 22 periodic reports.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the Financial Elites of Wall Street and the “too big to fail” banks still have the nation (and Europe) by the throat.

Complexity is itself a tax; the maintenance cost of complexity is high, and can only be justified when the added complexity solves a critical problem of the society as a whole.

Read More at Charles Hugh Smith’s BlogSpot  By Charles Hugh Smith

The ‘economic conservative’ compromise

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After more than 30 years of observing and covering politics, I wrote in “The Tea Party Manifesto” that there is a major misconception about a “divide” in the movement between so-called “social conservatives” and so-called “economic conservatives.”

What I found was that these labels are not only terribly misleading, but virtually meaningless if one’s goal is to understand the dynamics at work with the conservative movement.

In short and in broad strokes, so-called “economic conservatives” are not all that economically conservative when push comes to shove. And “social conservatives,” as they are wrongly dubbed, tend to be more economically conservative than the supposed “economic conservatives.”

There’s a great living, breathing illustration of this phenomenon for all to see right now. His name is Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the long-time president of Americans for Tax Reform. He has spent his activist career in Washington building relationships and alliances that have made him a powerful force in conservative politics. This despite his seemingly contradictory support from and for Muslim Brotherhood interests and a newer cozy relationship with the Republican homosexual special-interest group GOProud, for which he serves as a member of the board of advisers.

Read More at WND   By Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily