Buchanan: The Beltway Lies of the ObamaCare War

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Photo Credit: Human Events

Photo Credit: Human Events

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,” said Winston Churchill.

What is the truth behind the Beltway lies about these crazy Republicans crashing our government?

Twice in the last week House Republicans have voted unanimously to fund the U.S. government.

If national polls are to be believed, those House Republicans are doing exactly what America wants. A majority of Americans oppose a government shutdown. And a majority oppose Obamacare.

Who, then, is preventing the government from being funded?

Read more from this story HERE.

Dear President Obama-Negotiate Doesn’t Mean “My Way or the Highway”

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Photo Credit: Irish Central

Photo Credit: Irish Central

Usually there is some give and take if there is a genuine willingness between individuals to find an agreement.

As the US careens towards a government shut down there has been no indication from Senate leader Harry Reid, or President Obama, of any willingness to find common ground with the House of Representatives (the people’s house) on moving forward with a “Continuing Resolution” to keep the government running.

Even the use of a “Continuing Resolution” in lieu of a regular budget is a failure of executive leadership to find ways to work together.

In the past, it has worked in the Presidents favor to pretend he is an outsider in the process and point his finger at those “anarchist/terrorist” Republicans in the House who just fail to act reasonably….By doing it his way.

The usual suspects in the main stream media are starting with the drumbeat of blaming the Republicans for this latest impasse.

But this time there is a huge elephant in the living room and many folks have started to notice it.

Fresh on the heels of President Obamas eagerness to negotiate with two known terrorist states, Syria and Iran, as well as his high profile acquiescence to Russias President Putin in averting a violent confrontation in the Mideast…Has many questioning why he won’t even sit down and negotiate with fellow Americans of another political party to find a budget solution.

President Obama’s decree that the House of Representatives need to do their job…In other words, sit down, shut up and rubber stamp what President Obama and Harry Reid want.

In the face of the urgency, President Obama spent a leisurely weekend golfing and attending parties. Over the weekend, Harry Reid let the Senate go home and enjoy family time…..The House of Representatives stayed on the job throughout the weekend offering alternatives, trying to find a way to get an agreement.

The main bone of contention has been the implementation of the heavily flawed Obamacare legislation. The bill has so many defects, that President Obama himself has made exceptions, carve outs and delays to many of his supporters….This in itself is an admission the law is not ready to be enacted on the rest of the country. This is also an unlawful way to re write legislation.

But perhaps the most insulting part of the law is that President Obama, Congress political appointees and their staffs are exempted or specially subsidized from it….and that is creating a lot of resentment.

The latest rumored proposal from the House is that they want to delay the individual mandate for Obamacare for one year, just like what President Obama gave to corporations. Additionally, a demand that all political leaders in Washington be subject to Obamacare. All other provisions of the “Continuing Resolution” would be funded.

All indications from Harry Reid and President Obama are that they will accept no changes to their demands and want the budget resolution bill passed intact with Obamacare untouched.

If anything comes out of this, it will magnify the Presidents unwillingness to negotiate with Republicans on almost any level, yet he seems eager to negotiate with terror states and repressive regimes.

It is also high time for the politicians that pass laws for the American people, be subject to those same laws…..America went through a revolution to rid themselves of royal decrees 237 years ago and Obamacare is starting to smell like a royal decree.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

The Fed has Become a Creature of Politics

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Photo Credit: Tim Evanson

Photo Credit: Tim Evanson

Because Ben Bernanke’s public persona is as mild as milk, the transformation in American governance in which he has participated is imperfectly understood and hence insufficiently deplored. The change is dramatized by two recent developments.

One was the campaigning by several constituencies for and against what supposedly were the two leading candidates — Larry Summers and Janet Yellen — to replace Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The Fed can no longer be considered separated from politics.

The second, and related, development is the semantic infiltration of journalism by language that ratifies the Fed’s increasingly grandiose role. A Financial Times column on Yellen, now Bernanke’s presumptive successor, described her as “poised to take the tiller of the US economy.” Oh? The economy has a tiller? And with it the Fed chairman can steer the economy? Who knew? On the Atlantic’s Web site, a columnist defends the Fed’s recent decision not to follow through on earlier intimations about reducing its monthly purchases of $85 billion in mortgage and treasury bonds. This, the columnist said, illustrates the Fed’s admirable “nimbleness.” A touch on the tiller here, a nimble reversal there — these express the fatal conceit of an institution that considers itself capable of, and responsible for, fine-tuning the nation’s $15.7 trillion economy.

Slowing the Fed’s bond purchases is called “tapering,” which means more modest “quantitative easing.” This is how governments talk when trying not to be understood. By continuing the pace of “easing” — printing money — the Fed has acknowledged that its fine-tuning has failed. The nimble, tiller-touching Fed assumed it would be more successful at reducing unemployment.

Read more from this story HERE.

Worse Is the New Normal

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

A few years ago, after the publication of my book America Alone, an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies are wasted on pointless hyper-regulation for the business class and multigenerational welfare for the dependency class and Transgender and Colonialism Studies for our glittering youth, we can afford it, and the central fact of our wealth will ensure that our fortunes do not change. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, we have been less rich, and our stupidity ought in theory to be less affordable. Instead, it’s been supersized. To take only the most obvious example, President Obama has added six-and-a-half trillion bucks to the national debt, and has nothing to show for it. As Churchill would say, had his bust not been bounced from the Oval Office, never in the field of human spending has so much been owed by so many for so little.

The West’s rivals do not think like this. China is now the second-biggest economy on the planet, but it has immense structural problems: As I’ve been saying for years, it will get old before it gets rich. Thanks to its grotesque “one-child” policy, it has the most male-heavy demographic cohort in history — no chicks and millions of guys who can’t get any action, which is not normally a recipe for social stability. Despite being extremely large, the country is resource-poor. But you can’t say it’s not thinking outside the box. The Daily Telegraph in London reported this week that the Chinese have just signed a deal to lease five percent of Ukraine (or an area about the size of Belgium) to grow crops and raise pigs on. And I’d doubt it will stop with post-Soviet republics on the Euro-fringe: It’s not impossible to imagine China buying, say, the Greek islands. Beijing thinks the half-millennium blip of Euro-American dominance is coming to an end and the world is returning to its natural state of Chinese preeminence. The West assumes it can endure as a kind of upscale boutique unaffected by the changes beyond. Like, say, the frozen-yogurt shop at the Westgate mall in Nairobi — until last weekend.

China’s Ukraine deal may sound kinda wacky, but the People’s Republic consumes about 20 percent of the world’s food yet has (thanks to rapid industrialization) only 9 percent of its farmland. As Big Government solutions go, renting 5 percent of a sovereign nation to use as your vegetable garden and pig farm is a comparatively straightforward answer to the problem at hand. By contrast, try explaining American “health” “care” “reform” to the Chinese: You could rent the entire Ukraine for about 3 percent of the cost of Obamacare, and what does it solve? My colleague Michelle Malkin revealed this week that her family has now joined the massed ranks of Obamacare victims: Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield sent her a “Dear John” letter explaining why they’d be seeing less of each other. “To meet the requirements of the new laws, your current plan can no longer be continued beyond your 2014 renewal date.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Has Dismantled America

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness? Ask the huddled masses who are yearning to be free. America was once thought of as a light unto nations. Obama has single-handedly extinguished that light.

I saw it all coming. In my 2010 book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, I noted that one student who was interviewed after an Obama town hall meeting during his first presidential trip to Europe in 2009 said happily: “He sounds just like a European.” That is, not like an American president who loves his country. And he doesn’t: asked during that visit to Europe about American exceptionalism, Obama answered: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, he didn’t believe in American exceptionalism at all. In a seminal moment for modern historians and active political observers like myself, a snapshot came across the newswires in May 2008, showing candidate Obama crossing an airplane tarmac, mid-gait, and holding Fareed Zakaria’s American epitaph, The Post-American World. In the photo, Obama is holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn’t dare put it down and wanted to dive back into it as soon as he could.

The vicious Zakaria describes his book this way: “This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” In it, he details the era he hopes we are entering now — a world in which the United States would “no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures.” He asserts that the “rise of the rest” is the “great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.”

Obama seems bound and determined to drive America over a cliff and make Zakaria’s vision of the future a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria’s wishful thinking about America’s decline a reality. As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees. Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world’s only remaining superpower. He turned against our allies (particularly Israel) and showed them that America could not be relied on. He taxed us into poverty and stirred up racial strife to make us all less safe. He has enabled Russia to re-emerge as a world power, and the Islamic jihadists are bolder than ever.

Read more from this story HERE.

Creepy Trolls at Alaska Dispatch Cyber-Stalk Joe Miller’s Pregnant Daughter

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biased_media_lies_Ak Dispatch

[UPDATE: After receiving numerous untoward comments on her own web page from Alaska Dispatch readers, Kelsey Miller wrote her own response to this unwelcome intrusion on her and her husband’s privacy. You can read it HERE.]

Just when you think the media can’t go any lower, along comes online news blog Alaska Dispatch to put the ‘ass’ in class. These folks are proving to be the kind of ‘journalists’ that have to look up to the supermarket tabloids.

On Wednesday an anonymous editor reported a post on Joe Miller’s personal Facebook page (not his political Facebook page) to raise funds for his daughter and son-in-law who are serving as Christian missionaries in Mexico.

Along with a description, replete with false juxtaposition of Joe Miller’s political views on limited government and personal responsibility, Alaska Dispatch also provided a link to the couple’s personal blog, and a picture. They are expecting their first child and, due to their status as full-time missionaries, solicited funds from their network of friends and donors to cover the cost of her maternity, as well as funds for a reliable vehicle.

Alaska Dispatch was obviously trying to score cheap political points, but anyone familiar with the evangelical missionary movement knows that fund-raising of this type is standard operating procedure. In fact, some mission organizations require deputation to raise a support team of regular donors and prayer partners.

Dispatch_Kelsey_Page_1

Not only is this type of trolling by putative news organizations inappropriate, it could come with significant liability should it expose anyone to harm.

Children of politicians have always been considered off-limits, at least until Sarah Palin came on the scene. Now it appears the Alaska media is gearing up to give Joe Miller ‘the Sarah Palin treatment.’

Apparently the Alaska Dispatch’s hatred for Joe Miller cannot be satiated by lies and gratuitous smears. Now they stoop to attack his children. Have they no shame?

It’s a rhetorical question. There is no sewer these people won’t plumb in an attempt to get someone else dirty. They are cellar-dwellers.

The Alaska Dispatch appears to be a mere political mouthpiece that owner/publisher Alice Rogoff-Rubenstein is funding to protect her husband’s multi-billion-dollar empire, a massive recipient of corporate welfare. The Carlyle Group largely subsists off of federal contracting and ANC tax offsets.

FEC reports indicate that Ms. Rogoff-Rubenstein has given political donations to both Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich. Enough said.

Alaska Dispatch should remove said post, and offer a public apology. If you agree, you can contact Alaska Dispatch at (907) 743-0744.

Also, as the currency of an online publication is the traffic to its blog, I encourage you to NOT go to their website or click on ANY of their stories.

To ensure that Alice Rogoff-Rubenstein ends her political meddling in Alaska, she needs to understand that most Alaskans see through her media-charade and recognize it as nothing more than a tool to perpetuate crony capitalism.

(As of tonight, Sept. 26, 2013, Joe Miller is discontinuing his personal Facebook page. If you would like to connect with Joe on Facebook, please like his political page.)

[UPDATE: After receiving numerous untoward comments on her own web page from Alaska Dispatch readers, Kelsey Miller wrote her own response to this unwelcome intrusion on her and her husband’s privacy. You can read it HERE.]

Islamist War on Christians

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

I’m waiting. I am a Lebanese Christian, and I am waiting. Waiting for CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, or Time magazine to really tell the story. To finally run this headline: “War on Christians Being Waged by Islamists.”

I’m waiting for someone in the mainstream media to admit the facts.

Matt Lauer and NBC News made headlines when they declared there was a civil war in Iraq in 2006, putting them at odds with the narrative coming from the Bush White House.

Islamists are persecuting and murdering Christians all over the world. Where in the world are Matt Lauer and NBC News? Do they not want to be at odds with the narrative coming from the current occupants of the White House, which downplays the atrocities being perpetrated by Muslims against Christians? Or to be at odds with Muslim groups like CAIR, which might accuse NBC of some kind of bias?

It is not an accident, the persecution and mass murder of Christians by Muslims. It is not episodic. It is by design. It is part of a master plan to destroy any competing narrative about God. To bully, threaten, and intimidate Christians into submission, or mass evacuation.

Read more from this story HERE.

New York Times Corrects AR-15 Navy Yard Story, Still Misses the Mark

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Photo Credit: Washington Times

Photo Credit: Washington Times

After two days, the New York Times finally corrected its story claiming Virginia state law blocked Aaron Alexis from buying an AR-15 rifle before his rampage at the Navy Yard. The article, however, still is not accurate.

On Tuesday, I wrote that the Times was part of the widespread effort in the liberal media to tie the AR-15 rifle to the mass murder or 12 innocent people in Washington on Monday.

The headline was — and is — “State Law Stopped Gunman From Buying Rifle, Officials Say.”

It said that the gunman was stopped from buying an AR-15 “because state law there prohibits the sale of such weapons to out-of-state buyers, according to two senior law enforcement officials.”

In fact, there is no residency requirement in federal or state law for purchase of shotguns or rifles.

Read more from this story HERE.

Steyn: American Banana Republic

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Photo Credit:spdracerkmw

Photo Credit:spdracerkmw

“This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”

He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.

Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own — i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, “Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling “has been done over a hundred times” does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque.

Is all this spending necessary? Every day, the foot-of-page-37 news stories reveal government programs it would never occur to your dimestore caudillo to blow money on. On Thursday, it was the Food and Drug Administration blowing just shy of $200 grand to find out whether its Twitter and Facebook presence is “well-received.” A fifth of a million dollars isn’t even a rounding error in most departmental budgets, so nobody cares. But the FDA is one of those sclerotic American institutions that has near to entirely seized up. In October 1920, it occurred to an Ontario doctor called Frederick Banting that insulin might be isolated and purified and used to treat diabetes; by January 1923, Eli Lilly & Co were selling insulin to American pharmacies: A little over two years from concept to market. Now the FDA adds at least half-a-decade to the process, and your chances of making it through are far slimmer: As recently as the late Nineties, they were approving 157 new drugs per half-decade. Today it’s less than half that.

But they’ve got $182,000 to splash around on finding out whether people really like them on Facebook, or they’re just saying that. So they’ve given the dough to a company run by Dan Beckmann, a former “new media aide” to President Obama. That has the whiff of the banana republic about it, too.

Read more from this story HERE.

When did Military Bases Become ‘Gun-Free Zones’?

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

It hasn’t always been the case that only MPs can carry firearms on U.S. military bases. A mere twenty years ago, “gun free zones” made their way to these facilities under the watch of President Bill Clinton.

According to a Washington Times editorial written days after the Nov. 5, 2009 attack on soldiers at Fort Hood, one of Clinton’s “first acts upon taking office… was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases.”

Clinton’s actions birthed Army regulations “forbidding military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for personal protection.”

Read more from this story HERE.