Mitch McConnell Declares Surrender On Obamacare

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Joining Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell is declaring surrender on Obamacare. He will no longer fight it.

You’d never know that if you paid attention to his preferred words about Obamacare at CPAC. McConnell told the crowd that “Obamacare should be repealed root and branch.” He also told the crowd that those who think he’s given up the fight are wrong. He pledged to continue to fight. I call bull.

The part of his speech that McConnell hopes you ignore is him saying, “When it came to Obamacare, we gave it everything we have, everything we have, and we just lost.” He’s also signaling that the Senate Republicans will neither filibuster the continuing resolution nor shut down the government.

The continuing resolution is the best vehicle to use as a fight to defund Obamacare. Republicans will not, despite their rhetoric right now, fight on the debt ceiling to undermine Obamacare. This is the fight.

McConnell has a history of throwing red meat to the crowd then turning his back on them. Last February, Jim DeMint offered an amendment to defund Obamacare. McConnell refused to offer it up as a Republican amendment in the Senate because he did not want to anger Harry Reid. The backlash caused McConnell to promise a month long PR campaign about Obamacare the following month.

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Is Speaker Boehner Deliberately Throwing The House To Pelosi In 2014?

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

With all of the corruption inside Washington D. C., one shouldn’t be too surprised when the previously unthinkable becomes thinkable, if not a reality. As Boehner’s capos, Cantor and McCarthy, stun Republicans with their Democrat-like abuse of fellow Republicans within the House of Representatives, one is compelled to ask, ‘Is Speaker Boehner deliberately throwing the House to Pelosi in 2014?’

It is no secret that our Agitator-in-Chief covets having total control of the all four branches of the Federal government (including his propaganda machine in the media). To achieve this seizure, he needs hatchet-lady Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

Currently, the House of Representatives serves as the only thread of defense of our constitution, rights and freedoms against the destructive agenda of the Socialist/Fascist/Communist hood rat illuminati and their pawns inside both parties in Congress, and the GOP leaders are doing little to halt the blitzkrieg. The GOP leaders in the House of Representatives have done zero, zilch, nada to defund Benghazi Care, or do much of anything they campaigned upon to be returned to their posts of power inside their den of inequity.

Why refer to the oxymoronic ‘Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’ as Benghazi Care? One reason is to do what the puppeteer media won’t do; keeping the Benghazi massacre front-and-center in the American dialogue. Secondly, this legislation is designed to abandon those most in need of healthcare, just as Obama, Panetta, Hillary and the rest of the gutless hood rats abandoned Ambassador Stevens, former SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, and Information Officer Sean Smith as they were massacred in Benghazi. One of the most offensive comments that Boehner and his capos utter about Benghazi Care is that ‘it is the law of the land’. Who are Boehner and his capos ‘representing’? It certainly isn’t the U. S. citizen/taxpayer!

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Senate Democrats Would Increase Taxes — And The National Debt

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Photo Credit: Cliff Owen

Before Wednesday it had been more than 1,400 days since Senate Democrats had produced a federal budget. After only a few hours of Senate Budget Committee testimony, it quickly became apparent why they waited so long.

Now that Obamacare has become law, it is impossible for Democrats to put together a tax-and-spending plan that does not increase taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars yet still add trillions to the national debt.

The Democrats are so eager to raise both taxes and spending that the budget plan they submitted yesterday for the next fiscal year increases spending this year by $46 billion. Then they hike spending another $116 billion next year on their way to a 60 percent increase over the next 10 years.

To put that in perspective, the budget submitted Tuesday by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., increases spending by just 40 percent over that same time frame. The Ryan budget, which returns federal spending to its post-World War II historical average, calls for outlays of $41.5 trillion over 10 years. That’s $4.9 trillion less than the Democratic total of $46.4 trillion.

In addition to historically high government spending, the Democratic budget also raises taxes by $1 trillion starting immediately. Thanks to the weakest economic recovery since World War II, federal taxes as a percentage of GDP are still below historic norms. But as the economy improves, Democrats steadily ramp up the government tax burden, reaching a high of 19.8 percent in 2023. Only once since World War II — right before the tech bubble collapsed in 2000 — has the nation’s tax burden ever been that high.

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The Axis of Torpor: Against Waging War as an NGO.

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Photo Credit: National Review

I greatly enjoy the new Hollywood genre in which dysfunctional American families fly to a foreign city and slaughter large numbers of the inhabitants as a kind of bonding experience. Liam Neeson takes his estranged wife and their teenage daughter for just such a vacation in Taken 2, in which the spectacular mountain of corpses in Istanbul brings the family back together again and ends with them (spoiler alert) enjoying a chocolate malt back at the soda fountain in California and getting to know the daughter’s new boyfriend. “Don’t shoot this one, Dad,” she cautions. “I really like him.” And they all have a good chuckle over it. In Die Hard 5 or whatever we’re up to, Bruce Willis and his estranged son fly to Moscow and do to the Russians what Neeson does to the Turks and Albanians. I gather that in the forthcoming Finding Nemo 2 Marlin and Dory’s marriage is going through a rocky patch until Nemo is kidnapped by a Ukrainian sex cartel and Marlin and Dory swim up the Dnieper River and gun down every pimp in Kiev.

Alas, outside Hollywood, foreigners are somewhat less pliable than the body count of Liam Neeson’s and Bruce Willis’s obliging extras would suggest. The funniest line in Taken 2 was Neeson’s advice to his daughter in an emergency: “Go to the U.S. embassy. You’ll be safe there.” It opened a couple of weeks after Benghazi.

There are drones, of course, which offer the consolations of technological badassery, as if Liam Neeson could take out all the Albanians from the X-Box in his basement. But don’t worry. According to Politico, at a recent meeting with Senate Democrats, President Obama assured them that they had no need to worry about his awesome power to rain down death from the skies because, as he put it, he’s not Dick Cheney.

Meanwhile, back at the GOP, Senator Rand Paul is no Dick Cheney either: At CPAC this week, the narrow bounds of his smash-hit filibuster — questioning drone assassinations on Americans in America — broadened somewhat, not just to questioning drone assassinations on Americans anywhere, nor to questioning drone assassinations on anyone, nor even to questioning the “war on terror” or war in general, but to questioning the very assumptions of American global order, starting with our bankrolling of Mohamed Morsi in Cairo. The Egyptians send mobs to torch the U.S. embassy, the Saudis wage ideological warfare against Western civilization, the Turks call Israel a “crime against humanity” and threaten a cultural and demographic takeover of Europe, the Pakistanis are ramping up nuke production to sell to any loon in town — and those are just our “allies.” With friends like these, who needs foreign policy? There are fewer and fewer takers for the burdens of global superpower, and whoever wins the nomination in 2016 will be considerably less Cheney and more Randy.

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President Obama’s Naive Foreign Policy Unravels As A “Tiny Country” Threatens Us With Nukes

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Photo Credit: IrishCentral

Four years ago a newly minted President Obama assured us we had very little to fear in his new world of foreign policy. There was no longer a Soviet Union that could threaten our very existence and besides, as a Nobel Peace Prize winner he had the moral authority to reset our foreign policy….to make America loved, rather than feared. Unlike it had been during the Bush administration.

He proclaimed that Iran, Cuba and North Korea were tiny countries and wouldn’t be able to resist his charm offensive coupled with a beer summit.

In order to show the utmost self confidence in his ability to change the world, President Obama acquiesced to the Russians and didn’t install planned anti missile defenses in Eastern Europe aimed at incoming missiles from Iran. He also cancelled/delayed planned deployment of anti missile shields on our own soil leaving us wide open and unprotected

But after over 4 years of the Obama foreign policy/charm offensive, the administration is feverishly trying to deploy the very missile shields it cancelled 4 years ago. These shields were designed to thwart incoming nuke missiles from the tiny country of North Korea. 14 anti missile batteries are being rushed into place in Alaska, along with other measures previously rejected by Obama in other parts of the world.

Four years of dithering and charm offensive have let Iran and North Korea go forward virtually unchecked in their nuclear ambitions. Now those chickens are starting to come home to roost.

Last week North Korea cancelled the armistice it had with South Korea and declared their right to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the US in retaliation for new sanctions imposed on them.

North Korea has already thumbed its nose at Obama by conducting underground nuclear explosions and successfully launched a missile capable of striking the US….All of this in the face of “stern” threats from the paper tiger Obama administration.

Ominously, in the other tiny country of Iran, the acquisition of much faster centrifuges will speed up the time it takes to get them enough enriched uranium for nuclear weapons…again all of this in the face of “stern” threats and trade sanctions from the Obama administration.

Buried in the press a few months back was the report that Iran had suffered an accident at one of their nuclear sites. The accident killed several of their scientists, but reportedly killed a few North Korean scientists as well.

President Obama: Today even tiny nuclear armed countries can have the ability to ruin our day, not by just lobbing nuclear missiles at us, but by spreading those weapons to terrorists and other rogue, tiny countries around the world. It’s time you take the rose colored glasses off. In this world it is far better and safer to be feared and respected, rather than trying to be liked.

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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.

All of a Sudden, the President Says We Don’t Have a Debt Crisis

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Photo Credit: Llima

Presto, change-o! At the beginning of the year, we were sternly lectured that huge tax increases were absolutely necessary to confront our looming debt crisis. America was driven to the edge of the “fiscal cliff,” ostensibly producing business panic that explained a fair measure of Barack Obama’s permanent economic malaise, by the President’s refusal to budge an inch from his demands for those deficit-fighting tax increases.

During the previous years, the President insisted that this “payroll tax cut,” funded by a raid on Social Security, was the vital ingredient to American economic survival. He asked citizens to send him their horror stories about how losing $60 in higher taxes from each paycheck would ruin their lives. But at the end of 2012, Obama let this supposedly crucial tax cut die without saying one single word in its defense. I mean that literally – he made absolutely no effort to protect it during “fiscal cliff” negotiations. The urgency of deficit reduction through tax increases was simply too great!

Throughout the 2012 campaign, every proposal for growth-inspiring tax cuts, and every serious effort at reforming America’s embarrassing tax system – from Mitt Romney’s relatively modest proposals, through the flat tax ideas advanced by Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, to Herman Cain’s “999 Plan” – was savagely denounced by the President and his team because they would supposedly risk increasing the deficit. A fraudulent study supposedly “proving” that Romney’s plan didn’t “add up” was endlessly cited by the Obama campaign, even after its authors admitted it was bunkum. The same argument is invariably advanced by liberals whenever ideas like the Flat Tax, Fair Tax, or even small tax rate reductions are suggested. The possibility (indeed, to any serious student of economics, absolute certainty) of increased government revenue from the combination of lower rates and higher economic output – a smaller slice of a larger pie – is dismissed out of hand. We simply cannot risk adding a single dollar to the deficit by reducing the tax burden on American consumers and businesses!

But all of a sudden, Barack Obama sat for an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and breezily asserted that “we don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt.”

Well– I understand. Which is why, at some point, I think I take myself out of this. Right now, what I’m trying to do is create an atmosphere where Democrats and Republicans can go ahead, get together, and try to get something done. And, y– you know– I think what’s important to recognize is that– we’ve already cut– $2.5– $2.7 trillion out of the deficit. If the sequester stays in, you’ve got over $3.5 trillion of deficit reduction already.

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Your Doctor To Become 1-Person Death Panel?

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Photo Credit: WND

A government-funded “mortality index” study – which helps doctors determine whether a patient has a “good chance” of dying within the next 10 years – raises renewed concerns about health-care rationing under Obamacare.

Federal grants from the National Institute on Aging and the American Federation for Aging Research helped pay for researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, to create a “mortality index” designed to aid doctors in decision-making about “preventive intervention” for older patients.

The index provides doctors with 12 measures to assign points to an elderly patient. The lower the patient’s total points, the better his or her odds of survival. The highest score, 26 points, represents a 95-percent chance the patient will die within 10 years.

The index assigns all male subjects 2 points automatically because men on the average have a lower life expectancy than women, the study noted. Men and women aged between 60 and 64 get 1 point; ages 70 and 74 get 3 points, while 85 or over get 7 points.

Two points are further assigned in the following cases: Patients with a current or a previous cancer diagnosis, excluding minor skin cancers; lung disease impacting on physical activity or requiring oxygen; heart failure; smoking; difficulty bathing; difficulty managing money because of health or memory problems; difficulty walking several blocks. One point is assigned to those with diabetes or high blood sugar; difficulty pushing a large object; being thin or of abnormal weight.

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Background Checks Won’t Make US Safer

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Photo Credit: Ross Catrow

In April of 2007, a mentally disturbed student showed up at the campus of his school, Virginia Tech, brandishing two semi-automatic pistols, murdered 32 students, teachers and school employees and wounded 17 others. Then he took his own life.

It was the one of deadliest mass-shooting incidents in American history. The nation was in shock, as it is now following the December mass murder at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

The press and public outcry was the same then as now. How can we stop horrors like this from occurring? We’ve got to stop criminals and nut cases from getting their hands on guns. The tragedy spurred passage of the first major piece of federal gun-control legislation since the assault weapon ban was passed in 1994.

The new law, signed by President George W. Bush in January of 2008, appropriated $1.3 billion for states to get the names of those deemed mentally ill into the FBI national data base used for gun-purchase screening. This supposedly would solve the problem of lax state compliance and make the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) more effective.

If only this had been the law of the land a year earlier, commentators opined, the Virginia Tech tragedy might not have happened.

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The Obama Admin, NY Times, And The Islamist

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Not only is The New York Times editorial page known for often being thin on facts, it is known for its cheerleading of the Obama administration—especially the administration’s shortsightedness regarding the Middle East.

To prove that point, they recently published their March 4 editorial: Egypt Needs to Act. In the course of attempting to make their argument, the Times not only butchered the facts, they praised the terrible decision by the Obama administration to hand Egypt wads of US money. Go figure.

They hailed Obama’s decision to send $250 million of hard-earned, taxpayer money to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt as “a vote of confidence in a country that is critical to stability in the region . . .”

That quarter of billion dollars would have produced better results if it had been reduced to ashes in the treasury department’s incinerator. You may think that is an exaggeration, but think about it: The money will be handed out to the brotherhoods cronies and to enable them to continue buying tear gas to blind true freedom-loving young people who have been peacefully demonstrating against Egypt’s new dictatorship. The dictatorship is Islamist and not secular, which pleases President Obama, so the money gets forwarded without restraint.

The US government has given money to foreign countries in the past for various reasons. But when previous seasoned politicians and diplomats did that, it was usually tied to concrete demands that were consistent with American values and interests. In Egypt’s case, there are no demands, no required results.

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Mark Steyn: The Panopticon State

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Photo Credit: National Review I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the last couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E–L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.

I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th-century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration — no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news — the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaeda’s critique of its enemies: As they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness.

For a war without strategic purpose, a drone’ll do. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen born in New Mexico, was whacked by a Predator not on a battlefield but after an apparently convivial lunch at a favorite Yemeni restaurant. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki’s son Abdulrahman was dining on the terrace of another local eatery when the CIA served him the old Hellfire Special and he wound up splattered all over the patio. Abdulrahman was 16, and born in Denver. As I understand it, the Supreme Court has ruled that American minors, convicted of the most heinous crimes, cannot be executed. But you can gaily atomize them halfway round the planet. My brief experience of Yemeni restaurants was not a happy one but, granted that, I couldn’t honestly say they met any recognized definition of a “battlefield.”

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