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Obama State University

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Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Images

By Wall Street Journal

President Obama recently concluded a five-year campus speaking tour in which he explained to students how his financing programs were making college more affordable. Then on Thursday he kicked off a new campus speaking tour to tell students that college is unaffordable, and that the financing program he has championed faces increasing defaults.

“We’ve got a crisis in terms of college affordability and student debt,” said Mr. Obama, without a trace of irony at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The same man who three years ago forced through a plan to add $1 trillion in student loans to the federal balance sheet over a decade said on Thursday, “Our economy can’t afford the trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt, much of which may not get repaid because students don’t have the capacity to pay it.”

Naturally, the President blamed somebody else and demanded more authority over higher education.

Mr. Obama specifically blamed colleges and universities for charging too much. “Not enough colleges have been working to figure out how do we control costs, how do we cut back on costs,” he said. His solution is for the federal government to rate colleges on their effectiveness and efficiency, and then to allocate federal subsidies to the schools that Washington believes are providing the best education at the lowest cost.

Particularly jarring for Mr. Obama’s fans in the faculty lounge, he talked about them on Thursday in the same disrespectful manner that he normally reserves for entrepreneurs. “And I’ve got to tell you ahead of time, these reforms won’t be popular with everybody, especially those who are making out just fine under the current system. But my main concern is not with those institutions; my main concern is the students those institutions are there to serve,” said the President.

Read more from this story HERE.
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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Obama Plan Encourages College Admissions to Discriminate Against Families Earning $60,000+

By Terence P. Jeffrey

President Barack Obama’s college reform plan, released by the White House on Thursday, would encourage colleges to discriminate against applicants who come from families with total incomes of $60,000 or more by awarding colleges higher federal ratings and increased federal aid for admitting a higher “percentage” of students who receive federal Pell Grants, which the Department of Education says are for “low-income” students.

According to a study by the Congressional Research Service, in the 2007-2008 school year, only 2.3 percent of undergraduates who were still dependent on their parents, and whose total family income was $60,000 or more, received Federal Pell Grants.

According to the College Board, in the 2010-2011 school year, only 5 percent of all Pell Grants were distributed to dependent students whose total family income was $60,000 or more.

Colleges that admit and graduate a higher “percentage” of students on Pell Grants–as the Obama plan would encourage them to do–will necessarily admit and graduate a lower percentage of students who are not on Pell Grants.

A college that based its admissions policies solely on the merit of the individual applicant–and did not consider the applicant’s family income or eligibility for a Pell Grant in deciding whether to offer the applicant a place at the school–could be penalized under the Obama plan with less federal aid for itself and for its students if its merit-only admissions policy resulted in a student body with a lower percentage of Pell Grant recipients than other schools.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama on CNN: Congress Has Two Jobs, But Too ‘Worried About’ Rush Limbaugh to Do Them (+video)

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Photo Credit: mediaite

Photo Credit: mediaite

In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Friday, President Barack Obama said that the upcoming fight over the continuation of a resolution which will fund the government does not have to be a fight at all. He said that enough Republicans in Congress agree that seeking to defund the Affordable Care Act is a bad idea, but they are afraid of angering their base or of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

“Congress doesn’t have a whole lot of core responsibilities,” Obama said. “One core responsibility is passing a budget, which they have not done yet. The other core responsibility that they’ve got is to pay the bills that they’ve already accrued.”…

He said that the notion that Republicans would shut down the government over the ACA is not good for the nation. He said the GOP sees this as “their last gasp.”

“I’ve made this argument to my Republican friends privately, and, by the way, sometimes they say to me privately, ‘I agree with you, but I’m worried about a primary from, you know, somebody in the tea party back in my district’ or, ‘I’m worried about what Rush Limbaugh is going to say about me on radio.”

Watch the clip below via CNN:

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Obama: Feds Will Define What a Good College Is, Punish and Reward Accordingly (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Speaking at the University of Buffalo, President Barack Obama today unveiled an ambitious new plan for the federal government to create a national rating system that will define what a good college is and financially reward or punish colleges depending on how they rank in the government’s system.

He said he intends to have the rating system in placed by the fall of 2015 and intends to work with Congress to enact legislation linking federal aid to colleges to the rating system.

As outlined by Obama, this rating system would look at essentially materialistic and financial characteristics of a college as opposed to intellectual and moral ones.

For example, as the president described it, the rating system will not measure how many of a school’s graduates go on to become exemplary and virtuous in the conduct of their personal and public lives, but it will measure things such as “how many students graduate on time,” “how well do those graduates do in the work force,” whether the college is “helping students from all kinds of backgrounds succeed,” and “how successful colleges are at enrolling and graduating students who are on Pell Grants.”

Federal Pell Grants are gifts of cash–not loans–that the federal government gives to some students, but not others. They are not based on academic merit but on whether a student’s income and his or her parents’ income is low enough to qualify the family as what the Department of Education calls “low-income.”

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Obama’s Brother Linked to Muslim Brotherhood

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

President Obama’s half-brother in Kenya could cause the White House more headaches over new evidence linking him to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and establishing that controversial IRS supervisor Lois Lerner signed his tax-exempt approval letter.

Malik Obama’s oversight of the Muslim Brotherhood’s international investments is one reason for the Obama administration’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to an Egyptian report citing the vice president of the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Tehani al-Gebali.

In a news report on Egyptian television of a Gebali speech, translated by researcher Walid Shoebat, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization operative, Gebali said she would like “to inform the American people that their president’s brother Obama is one of the architects of the major investments of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“We will carry out the law, and the Americans will not stop us,” she said. “We need to open the files and begin court sessions.

“The Obama administration cannot stop us; they know that they supported terrorism,” she continued. “We will open the files so these nations are exposed, to show how they collaborated with [the terrorists]. It is for this reason that the American administration fights us.”

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Gallup: Unemployment Rate Jumps from 7.7% to 8.9% in 30 Days

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By John Nolte.

Outside of the federal government’s Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation’s unemployment rate. While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven’t been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today.

This is an 18-month high.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Number of Long-Term Unemployed ‘Unprecedented’ Under Obama

By Bill McMorris.

The economy has seen an “unprecedented” number of long-term unemployed under the Obama administration, according to a liberal think tank, and economists say plans pursued by Democrats in Washington are unlikely to curb the problem.

Nearly 5 million workers are classified as long-term unemployed, while 900,000 more have stopped looking for work altogether, according to a new series of reports issued by the Urban Institute.

Three percent of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months, an improvement of only one percentage point since unemployment spiked in October 2009, according to the study.

“That long-term unemployment would rise during a recession is not at all surprising, but the extent of the increase and its persistently high level since the start of the recovery are both troubling and unprecedented,” the report states. “The U.S. economy is now well into its fourth year of recovery, the unemployment rate is below 8 percent, yet the long-term share of unemployment is still near 40 percent.”

The center-left think tank said that those startling figures are unlikely to change unless the United States can achieve dramatic job growth, rather than the middling 2 percent overall economic growth figures the Obama administration has averaged.

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Bradley Manning to Request Pardon from Obama Over 35-Year Jail Sentence

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Bradley Manning will send a personal plea to Barack Obama next week for a presidential pardon after he was sentenced on Wednesday to 35 years in prison for passing hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks.

The sentence was more severe than many observers expected, and is much longer than any punishment given to previous US government officials who have leaked information to the media.

Manning showed no emotion, neither when the sentence was delivered, nor after being escorted into a side room, where his lawyers and members of his family were waiting, some of them in tears.

“Everyone in his defence team was emotional, including myself,” his lawyer, David Coombs, told the Guardian. “The only person that wasn’t emotional was Brad. He looked to us and said: ‘It’s OK. I’m going to move forward and I’m going to be all right’.”

Coombs told a press conference that next week he will formally submit the request for a pardon, “or at the very least commute his sentence to time served”. That request will contain a personal appeal from Manning to Obama, which his lawyer read out.

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Europe and America are Suffering from Green Energy Tyranny

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Photo Credit: Irish Central

Photo Credit: Irish Central

President Obama and the hard left ideologues, who guide his energy policies, don’t seem to be paying attention to European economies staggering under the weight of years of “green.”

In a new article called The Law of Unintended Consequences, Peter C. Glover details Europe’s difficulty in coming to grips with providing energy for a modern society:…. with the economic realities of actual paying for a green energy society:

“If there is a message to be gotten across to Joe Public it’s this: there’s no such thing as ‘free’ solar, wind or any other ‘clean energy’ source. Someone, somewhere always has to pay for them. And they will always cost far more than hydrocarbons – don’t believe the green hype believe the physics. The bulk of that subsidized social levy is set to continue to be sustained by Joe Public, especially those forced into fuel poverty by costly renewable levies in their domestic bills.”

Europe is buckling under the weight of subsidizing green and the United States wouldn’t be far behind, except for the fact we have astronomical amounts of fossil energy on private and state lands, where it can’t be sealed off, or regulated away by federal edicts….yet.

But the Obama administration policies are punishing, non green energy producers and the resultant consequences mean unnecessarily higher costs to American consumers.

I asked Richard Storm, an energy expert and power engineer affiliated with Citizens for Common Sense Energy & Environment, for a snap shot into where clean coal technology is today and his thoughts on America’s energy landscape: Coal power is the source of almost 40% of Americas electrical energy:

New coal plants are clean and efficient. In most cases, the new plants replace older plants with much more efficient and much cleaner generation

These new, clean coal plants are likely to continue to produce reliable electricity for decades to come at the most reasonable rates, using America’s Treasure of Coal Energy.

Natural gas prices are likely to increase in the future as more demand for clean natural gas materializes.

Let’s look at just one example: The Duke Energy Cliffside Unit #6, is one of the cleanest power generation plants in the world furnishing enough power for about 660,000 average sized homes

The new Clean Coal Plants are not only cleaner than any others in the world, but they are also more efficient and use about 10% less fuel per megawatt of electricity generated.

America’s oil and gas production has increased during the Obama Presidency because of American innovation, risk taking and hard work by the oil and gas industry. With no help or encouragement from the Obama Administration. In fact, the Keystone Pipeline is just one clear example of Obama’s administration fighting progress. He is against literally all forms of energy except “Green, renewables”

How about shale gas? Nope. Neither Obama or the allies in the Environmental extremists support shale gas either. After the Sierra Club received millions of dollars to fight coal plants from Chesapeake Energy, now they are against shale gas. So are the Dept. of Interior and the EPA. One of the planned new coal plants for Oklahoma was stopped by the Sierra Club and Cheapeake Energy. As in other states, natural gas fueled plants were built as a substitute. This may be economical for a couple more years, but then gas prices are expected to rise. So will power costs because fuel is about 80% of the production cost of electricity.

A reminder, America runs on energy. 90% of America’s Energy comes from the traditional fuels of Coal, Oil, Natural Gas and Nuclear. Yes, 90%. When organizations are against these, millions of jobs are at risk as well as America’s energy security. Not to mention the fact that America has a high standard of living which is enjoyed by all.

Who can be against America’s sustained strength? Here are a few answers. The Sierra Club, The Natural Resources Defense Council, PEW Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation,most of The Democrat Party and for certain, the Democrat leadership.

Come on America; let’s get back to making America strong again. I support the four E’s: Energy, Economic Prosperity, Education and Environmental protection. Yes, speaking for myself and every other power engineer in the business, I support clean air, clean water and a strong America. Who wouldn’t?

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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.

Members of ’72 Dolphins Refuse White House Invite, “Diametrically Opposed” to Obama

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Photo Credit: USATSI

Photo Credit: USATSI

Good news: On Tuesday, the White House will honor the 1972 Dolphins, the NFL’s last undefeated team, because, really, that group doesn’t get enough attention.

Bad news: At least three members of the ’72 squad won’t attend the ceremony in the nation’s capital because they oppose the views of President Barack Obama.

“We’ve got some real moral compass issues in Washington,” Hall of Fame center Jim Langer told the Sun-Sentinel’s David Hyde. “I don’t want to be in a room with those people and pretend I’m having a good time. I can’t do that. If that [angers] people, so be it.”

“I’ll just say my views are diametrically opposed to the President’s,” Manny Fernandez said. “Enough said. Let’s leave it at that. I hope everyone enjoys the trip who goes.”

Read more from this story HERE.

How Does ‘Hope and Change’ Look Five Years Later? Here’s Chris Matthew’s Surprising Answer (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was cornered into admitting that President Barack Obama does indeed have his shortcomings. The TV host, who has previously referred to the president as the “perfect” American, father and husband, was asked by a GOP strategist on Tuesday morning: How does “hope and change” look five years later?

“What people signed up for, what people voted for, was the hope and change,” former John McCain aide Nicolle Wallace said. “How’s it look on the table five years later?”

After being evasive at first and talking about past presidents, Matthews ultimately addressed Obama’s “shortcoming.” He also acknowledged that he had been duped by politicians and been let down in the past.

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Obama Skips the Kennedy Tax Cuts

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

After delivering a number of “economic growth” speeches this summer, President Obama has failed to inspire any confidence, falling all the way back to square one in a recent Gallup poll. Actually, make that less than square one. Gallup reported that Obama’s approval rating on the economy has sunk to 35 percent in August from 42 percent in early June.

Why should we be surprised?

The actual economy shows real GDP falling well below 2 percent. This so-called recovery remains the worst in modern history dating back to 1947.

And as far as solutions go, Obama keeps giving us the same old, same old: End the spending-cut sequester, lower tax deductions, and raise taxes on the rich, all to free up money for infrastructure, green energy, “manufacturing innovation initiatives,” and the teachers’ unions.

Of course, this would all come on top of Obamacare, which if it doesn’t fall of its own weight, will add so many new taxes and regulations that it will sink the economy even more.

Read more from this story HERE.