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After ObamaCare, Barack Obama’s Encore Performance

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While all eyes are on the Obamacare roll-out debacle, the establishment in Washington has been quietly working behind the scenes to cut a deal on amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.
 
The Senate measure passed earlier this year with the full support of Senator Begich is almost certainly dead in the House, but many fear that a deal is in the works to push a House bill through that will be gutted in conference committee and turned into an amnesty bill.
 
The Democrat machine is working overtime to create public pressure, while big business puts the full-court press on House Republicans to acquiesce.

Once again, just as with Obamacare, Senator Begich has chosen the agenda of the President and his party bosses over the interests of ordinary Alaskans. It’s time to hold him accountable.
 
And I intend to do exactly that! 
 
If you stand with me, I pledge to oppose amnesty and put Alaskans first.
 
Amnesty would be devastating to the American worker. With high unemployment, stagnant wages, and low economic growth, Americans seeking work can ill afford to compete with foreign workers who will undercut their earning potential and continue a long-term trend of wage suppression.
 
Amnesty also threatens the American economy by racking up more debt, overwhelming our social safety nets, and creating new demands on our already beleaguered health care system.
 
A study by the Heritage Foundation released earlier this year found that the net cost to the American taxpayers of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants would be a staggering $6 trillion. This figure is a conservative estimate, subtracting projected tax revenues from granting citizenship from the costs of Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, welfare, and other government programs. 

But that’s not all. There is a growing body of evidence that the porous southern border is being used by Islamic radicals and Chinese nationals who are a grave threat to our national security. The virtual open border policy of the Obama administration has imperiled the nation, and it is unconscionable to allow these dangerous elements permanent legal status, and even citizenship.
 
We must stop amnesty dead in its tracks!
 
It’s bad for American workers. It’s bad for national security. And it’s bad for the future of the country.
 
If you agree with me, I need your help today.

Together, we can save the country we love for future generations.
 
Yours for the Future,

Joe

Obama Adds Climate Change Initiatives to List of Executive Branch Power Grabs

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Photo Credit: NOAAThrough the stroke of a pen, President Obama on Friday used his executive powers to elevate and take control of climate change policies in an attempt to streamline sustainability initiatives – and potentially skirt legislative oversight and push a federal agenda on states.

The executive order establishes a task force of state and local officials to advise the administration on how to respond to severe storms, wildfires, droughts and other potential impacts of climate change. The task force includes governors of seven states — all Democrats — and the Republican governor of Guam, a U.S. territory. Fourteen mayors and two other local leaders also will serve on the task force.

All but three of those appointed are Democrats. The task force will look at federal money spent on roads, bridges, flood control and other projects. It ultimately will recommend how structures can be made more resilient to the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels and warming temperatures.

“We’re going to need to get prepared. And that’s why this plan will also protect critical sectors of our economy and prepare the United States for the impacts of climate change that we cannot avoid,” Obama said last June, when he first launched a Climate Action Plan.

“States and cities across the country are already taking it upon themselves to get ready… And we’ll partner with communities seeking help to prepare for droughts and floods, reduce the risk of wildfires, protect the dunes and wetlands that pull double duty as green space and as natural storm barriers.”

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Goldberg: The Myth of Obama the Master Strategist

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Photo credit: National Review Often in error but never in doubt, Barack Obama could walk into the Rose Garden and step on a half-dozen rakes like Foghorn Leghorn in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, and the official line would be, “He meant to do that.”

And the amazing thing is that so many people believe it. “Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle,” proclaimed then–New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in 2009. It’s an image of the president that his biggest fans, in and out of the press, have been terribly reluctant to relinquish — because it confirms the faith they invested in him. Nobody ever likes to admit they were suckered.

But the fiction of Obama as a man three steps ahead has taken a terrible beating if you have eyes to see it. The budget cuts under the so-called sequester are the law of the land because Obama thought he was outthinking his opponents when he gave budget-cutters budget cuts. Now he’s stuck railing against his own idea. His allegedly revolutionary decision to turn his presidential campaign into a personal political organization independent from the Democratic party has turned out to be the most expensive way ever to generate smarmy and ineffectual e-mail spam. And, if you want to believe that Obama’s goal in Syria all along was to elevate Vladimir Putin and alienate all of our Middle East allies, including Saudi Arabia and Israel, and to make Bashar Assad our strategic partner while he finds more politically correct ways to slaughter his own people, well, that’s nice.

Or consider Obama’s only clear-cut political victory since his reelection. Republican demands were a bit of a moving target, but basically the GOP wanted either an all-out repeal of Obamacare or, as a fallback, a one-year delay of the individual mandate. By the end, they would have taken even less.

But Obama wouldn’t consider it. Instead, he played hardball with everything from national-park closures to, temporarily at least, denying death benefits to military families. As the debt ceiling loomed, the GOP relented. Conventional wisdom says Obama won, and I basically agree with the conventional wisdom.

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Limbaugh: Nixon Resigned Over a Lie that Was Much Less Damaging in Scope (+video)

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Photo Credit: WND On Friday’s program, radio host Rush Limbaugh put the Obamacare rollout fiasco into historical perspective, declaring that in many ways, the current scandal is worse than Watergate.

“Folks,” Limbaugh told his audience, “Richard Nixon resigned over a lie that was much less damaging in scope than this one.”

“The bottom line,” he said, “is that Obama, the regime, knew that 93 million Americans would be unable to keep their health care plans under Obamacare. … I mean, this is an abject, purposeful lie to the American people for the express purpose of passing legislation.”

The other aim of Obamacare, Limbaugh insisted, was to undermine the private insurance business itself.

He pointed to an “obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register,” in which White House officials matter-of-factly predicted that Obamacare would create “massive disruption of the private insurance market because that’s what was intended.”

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Clinton: Obama Luckier than a Dog With Two…

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Photo Credit: Reuters/APBill Clinton trotted out a crude anatomical joke about President Obama, saying “he’s luckier than a dog with two d—-” to describe his comeback in last year’s presidential election, according to a new book.

Clinton made the dirty canine quip “again and again” to friends, according to “Double Down,” the latest campaign book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.

The book, which like its predecessor “Game Change” about the 2008 election, appears to have heavy sourcing from within the Clinton camp, describes lingering tensions between Obama and Clinton.

After a 2011 golf game with Bill Clinton, according to the book, Obama told an aide: “I like him … in doses.”

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Dems Resume ‘Nuclear Option’ Threats to Bypass GOP, Confirm Obama Nominees

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Photo Credit: Susan Walsh/APSome Senate Democrats resumed calls for the so-called “nuclear option” Thursday after Senate Republicans blocked two presidential nominees.

Republicans have blocked the nomination of Democratic Rep. Mel Watt to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the nomination of Patricia Millett to the U.S. Appeals Court for the Washington, D.C. Circuit by voting against cloture, effectively filibustering the nominations.

If invoked, the nuclear option would allow Democrats to push through presidential nominations without any support from Senate Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell struck a deal in January to avert the nuclear option. In July, the two again negotiated on a “new normal,” in Reid’s words, to streamline the process for confirming presidential nominees. The deal, Reid said at the time, was that “Qualified executive nominees must not be blocked on a procedural supermajority vote.” An exception was made for “extraordinary circumstances.”

But after the Watt and Millett votes, the nuclear option is back on the table, some Democrats have declared.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rand Paul on NSA: “They Could Well Be Spying on the President, For All I Know”

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Photo Credit: National Review In light of a recent report, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) fears the National Security Agency may be spying on President Barack Obama. “They could well be spying on the president, for all I know,” Paul says, in an interview with National Review Online. “He has a cell phone, and, in fact, my guess is that they have collected data on the president’s phone.”

Paul also believes the federal government may be tracking Pope Francis. “The most important question we need to ask the NSA is, ‘Are you telling us you’re collecting no data on the pope?’ And, ‘Did you collect any information on him when he was the archbishop, while staying in a certain residence in Rome at the time of the election?’ I don’t think they’re telling the truth.”

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The Obama Facade Cracks at Last

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerOnly now — five years into his presidency — are we seeing some cracks in the protective shield surrounding President Obama, and then only after the abuse of reporters’ privacy has been threatened. Mainstream journalists have not scrutinized his controversial policies, nor have they held him accountable for questionable actions that have caused outrage among fair-minded critics and produced irreparable harm to the nation.

Some facts are irrefutable, but the president has, by and large, deflected all blame and few in the media have dared question his policies and actions. Investor’s Business Daily reports that we are becoming a welfare state. The Census Department reported this week that almost half (49 percent) of Americans (151 million) are on federal aid. The U.S. has spent nearly $4 trillion ($3.7) on welfare over the past five years — that is five times greater than the money spent on transportation, education, and NASA, combined. Further, more than 70 percent of all federal spending goes to assistance programs, and the Congressional Budget Office projects that welfare spending will rise 80 percent over the next decade. Even with all that spending, though, 46.5 million Americans live in poverty and nearly half of all Americans pay absolutely no federal income tax. It doesn’t take an economics genius to realize that with the nation’s debt at $17 trillion and with more than $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities, we are in deep economic trouble. In short, the buck stops with President Obama when it comes to assessing blame for “the weakest recovery from a recession in modern American history.”

In the face of such dire statistics, it is instructive to review the president’s economic performance to date. President Obama has been late in turning in a budget to Congress in four of the past five years. Current “solutions” to the fiscal crisis are to print more money, raise taxes, and, in the process, weakened the American dollar, threatening its status as the sole world reserve currency.

The president’s signature legislation — his legacy, if you will — is ObamaCare. This massive health insurance legislation, taking over one-sixth of the American economy, was forced on the nation through a straight party-line vote. While the president constantly chided the Congress for not “negotiating” or being unwilling to be “bipartisan,” President Obama himself was unwilling to talk with Republicans and repeatedly stated that “He Won” the election and “shouldn’t have to offer anything.”

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G.O.P. Filibuster of 2 Obama Picks Sets Up Fight

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Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/APSenate Republicans on Thursday thwarted the confirmation of two of President Obama’s nominees, one to a powerful appeals court and another to a home-lending oversight post, setting up a confrontation with Democrats that could escalate into a larger fight over limiting the filibuster and restrict how far the minority party can go to block a president’s agenda.

In a series of swift back-to-back votes, Republicans first blocked the nomination of Representative Melvin Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, to become the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a rare affront to a sitting member of Congress who has an extensive record of public service.

Next Republicans, who have accused the president of trying to tip the court’s ideological balance in Democrats’ favor, quickly dispensed with the nomination of Patricia Ann Millett to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A former government lawyer whose husband serves in the military, she has worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations. The White House chose her as a test of how far Republicans would go to derail a qualified nominee.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a longtime member of the Senate and a fierce protector of its arcane institutions, said he believed the rejection of the two nominees was grounds to re-examine the filibuster rules, which some senior Senate Democrats have advocated.

“I think it’s time for some common sense on confirmations,” said Mr. Biden, who was in the Capitol to swear in Cory Booker, a Democrat, as New Jersey’s newest senator. He called the loss a “gigantic disappointment.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s Military Coup Purges 197 Officers In Five Years

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Photo Credit: APDefense: What the president calls “my military” is being cleansed of any officer suspected of disloyalty to or disagreement with the administration on matters of policy or force structure, leaving the compliant and fearful.

We recognize President Obama is the commander-in-chief and that throughout history presidents from Lincoln to Truman have seen fit to remove military commanders they view as inadequate or insubordinate. Turnover in the military ranks is normal, and in these times of sequestration and budget cuts the numbers are expected to tick up as force levels shrink and missions change.

Yet what has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture. We have commented on some of the higher profile cases, such as Gen. Carter Ham. He was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi.

Rear Adm. Chuck Gaouette, commander of the John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group, was relieved in October 2012 for disobeying orders when he sent his group on Sept. 11 to “assist and provide intelligence for” military forces ordered into action by Gen. Ham.

Other removals include the sacking of two nuclear commanders in a single week — Maj. Gen. Michael Carey, head of the 20th Air Force, responsible for the three wings that maintain control of the 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and Vice Adm. Tim Giardina, the No. 2 officer at U.S. Strategic Command.

Read more from this story HERE.