Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced an amendment on Wednesday that would cut off all funds for Obamacare, a step he said Republicans should support and, if it were to pass in the House as well, could be sent to President Barack Obama to see if he’s “willing to try to shut the government down” over funding of the Affordable Care Act.
“I think it’s the right position for Republicans to be taking,” Cruz told CNSNews.com. “And I think it would be exactly the right decision to then send it back to Harry Reid and President Obama and ask if Harry Reid and President Obama are willing to try to shut the government down in order to insist that Obamacare be fully funded now, even though it could well push us into a recession.”
“I think that is an important stand for principle that makes a difference in the lives of those who are struggling the most,” said the senator.
On Wednesday, Cruz introduced his de-fund Obamacare amendment to the continuing resolution (CR), which is a massive “must-pass” bill to keep the government funded for the rest of this fiscal year, from late March through the end of September.
Last week, the Republican-controlled House passed a $982-billion CR, but the GOP leadership set the rule and did not allow the must-pass CR to include language prohibiting funding for Obamacare or for de-funding the controversial Obamacare mandate that requires nearly all health plans to offer contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs without co-payments.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-14 01:02:212013-03-14 01:02:21Cruz: Let’s See if Obama’s Willing to Shutdown Gov’t to Fund Obamacare
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.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-09 03:06:442016-04-11 11:23:06Mark Steyn: The Panopticon State
Photo Credit: Andrew BirajTake President Obama and his Cabinet of Liars, please. We all know what dirty tricks they played to try and stop the sequester’s automatic budget cuts from happening.
They spent weeks trying to frighten the America people into believing the country would collapse into chaos and suffering if the federal government’s sequester-forced spending cuts went into effect. The campaigner in chief and his chorus of toadies did everything they could to make sure the puny spending cuts — which would have merely taken the federal budget back to its 2012 level — would cause the most pain to the most people.
Supposedly the cuts were going to decimate the ranks of our local police forces and firefighters, throw hundreds of teachers into the streets, create long lines at airports and maybe even leave the United States vulnerable to a military invasion by Greece.
Of course, most of Big Media played right along with Obama’s dirty political game. Like the dupes they are, they publicized every sequester scare-story like it was going to mean the end of America as we know it.
(Too bad the MSN don’t devote the same level of hysteria to covering some of our real problems, like Obama’s runaway federal spending and our unpayable future debt load.)
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-07 02:11:402016-04-11 11:23:14Getting Wise To Government Lies
Photo Credit: APFederal agencies are forfeiting billions of dollars by failing to implement the recommendations of their inspectors general, according to a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report.
The report, released Tuesday, estimates that executive agencies could have saved more than $67 billion in 2012 by implementing thousands of recommendations from their inspectors general.
The report notes that the number of unimplemented recommendations rose by about 50 percent over the past four years, while the potential savings lost more than doubled. Almost 11,000 recommendations, at a potential savings of almost $30 billion, were left on the table in 2009; in 2012, close to 17,000 recommendations were neglected at a potential loss of more than $67 billion.
The report comes as mandatory, across-the-board budget cuts totaling $85 billion for the fiscal year are beginning to take effect. The Oversight Committee keyed the release of the report to a Tuesday morning hearing on the implementation of recommendations by the Transportation and Education Departments’ inspectors general.
“With my partners on both sides of the dais, today we’re starting a much greater dialogue with our IGs, a much greater dialogue with the changes that need to be made if in fact government, outside of this body in the executive branch, can do better, do quicker, to save the taxpayers money,” Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said in his opening statement.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-07 01:08:442016-04-11 11:23:16Money On The Table: Government Wastes Billions By Not Listening To IGs, Report Says
Photo Credit: APRepresentative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) – the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee – said that America does not need the “dirty oil” that would be imported through the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, which received long-awaited favorable environmental review from the U.S. government.
“We don’t need this dirty oil. To stop climate change and the destructive storms, droughts, floods, and wildfires that we are already experiencing, we should be investing in clean energy, not building a pipeline that will speed the exploitation of Canada’s highly polluting tar sands,” Waxman said in a statement on Friday responding to the government’s analysis.
In its draft environmental review released Friday, the State Department said the construction of the pipeline through much of the Midwest would not have a meaningful impact on climate change.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-05 01:50:592016-04-11 11:23:23Waxman On Keystone: ‘We Don’t Need This Dirty Oil’
Photo Credit: Getty Images In a column posted Friday at Salon.com, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich accused the Tea Party of engaging in a plot to “undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public’s business, and to sow distrust among the population,” Breitbart.com reported Saturday.
According to Reich, sequestration is “only the start.”
“What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government — ‘drown it in the bathtub,’ in the words of their guru Grover Norquist – slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we’ve had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future,” he added.
Joel B. Pollack reminded readers that sequestration was Obama’s idea — something he said Reich downplayed. Pollack then asked if, in Reich’s view, Obama is “some kind of Manchurian Tea Party candidate designed to demonstrate the failure of liberalism?”
Pollack also observed that it was Obama who tried to stir up fear and anger among the American people with dire predictions of gloom and doom. “And,” Pollack added, “perhaps Reich should be reminded that it was Democrats who consciously chose a strategy of fear in selling Obamacare to the public.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-03-04 02:59:022016-04-11 11:23:26Robert Reich Accuses Tea Party Of ‘Plot To Undermine’ U.S. Government
photo credit: silas216Club for Growth President Chris Chocola says Republican strategist Karl Rove is more concerned about the packaging of GOP candidates than their political philosophy, a position he believes dismisses how voters feel about a candidate’s “core beliefs.”
“What Karl Rove and some of the establishment groups care about is only the brand,” Chocola told CBS’ “Face to Face” Thursday. “They only care if someone’s a Republican or not. They don’t really care what their core beliefs are.”
Chocola, whose own limited government group just targeted nine GOP congressmen for defeat because their voting records aren’t conservative enough, was referring to Rove’s Conservative Victory Project, which plans to target conservative Republican candidates whose views may be too extreme to get them elected.
Chocola says there’s a difference between how Club for Growth measures candidates and how Rove does it.
Photo Credit: APAmerican government agencies – state, local, and federal — made a record 13,753 requests to read emails or gather other information sent through Google’s Gmail and other services in 2012, more than half without warrants, according to statistics released by Google.
The total number of users about whom government agencies wanted information also set a record at 31,072, up from 23,300 in 2011, the first year Google began reporting the data. The discrepancy comes because government agencies request information on multiple users or accounts at the same time.
Most of these 13,753 requests, 6,542 of 8,438 in the latter half of 2012 alone, were done without a search warrant, Google data show. Google did not make available any detailed data prior to June 2012, nor did it make available which requests came from the federal government and which came from state or local law enforcement agencies, when asked by CNSNews.com.
Google spokesman Chris Gaither said the company only started tracking which type of legal authority – subpoena, court order, or search warrant – was used in the latter half of 2012. Google issues biannual reports on the requests for user data it receives from government agencies from around the world, including ones in the U.S.
Google announced in June 2012 that it had 425 million active Gmail subscribers, making it the largest e-mail provider in the world. It also provides users the ability to store documents via its Google Drive service, phone service via Google Voice, YouTube, personal blogs via Blogger, as well as email hosting services for corporate clients through Gmail.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-02-23 02:31:212016-04-11 11:24:0313,753 Gov’t Requests for Google E-Mail Data in 2012, Most Without a Warrant
Photo Credit: Rush Limbaugh RUSH: Folks, I’m sorry here. I can’t help but think that we are all being played for a bunch of fools, a bunch of suckers on this sequester business. I don’t know. Are you like me? Do you really think 800,000 people are gonna lose their jobs in the Pentagon because we cut $22 billion? Do you really think air traffic control’s gonna shut down? Do you really think there aren’t gonna be any meat inspectors? Do you really think that all of these horror stories are going to happen? I don’t.
I feel like I’ve been here. This is deja vu all over again. I remember the 1995 budget battle. That involved a legitimate government shut down. That wasn’t just $22 billion we were not gonna spend. We’re still gonna spend $3.5 trillion. We’re just not gonna spend $22 billion, if it happens.
Now, the government shutdown in 1995, yeah, we were gonna starve kids. That was the plan then. I’m just kidding. Snerdley I’m sorry, it’s all ridiculous to me. Every bit of this. I’ve been doing this — you get new perspective. I’m into my 25th year, and I think I mentioned to you last week and maybe the week before, I’ve been doing this long enough now to start seeing the repeat cycles on everything. I don’t care whether it’s the debt limit or the fiscal cliff or continuing resolution or the budget crisis of 2008 or TARP or the auto bailouts, and now the sequester, it’s the same playbook.
It is the same threats. It’s the same danger. It’s the same crisis. It’s identical. There’s nothing about it that changes, over and over. And everybody gets sucked into it. I try to escape, I try to get out of it, I try to leave it aside, I try to move on, but it just sucks me back in, too, until I realize that I have been sucked back in. And then there’s a part of me that says, “Well, wait a minute now.” You got not just Panetta, but now a uniformed military general, General Odierno, saying that he could lose 600,000 uniformed people, and the common sense of this doesn’t add up. Now we’ve got a guy comparing this to the Oklahoma City bombing.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Everything gets repeated. The cycle, the claims, the threats, the crisis, Armageddon, it’s the same. And we’re talking $22 billion. It’s not as though we’re not gonna spend anything. If the sequester happens, the first year is $44 billion. Half of that’s defense. We’re still going to spend $3.5 trillion or $3.3 trillion, even if we don’t spend the $22 billion. Then there’s this guy who draws an analogy to the Oklahoma City bombing.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-02-22 03:12:102016-04-11 11:24:05Limbaugh: ‘For the First Time in My Life, I Am Ashamed of My Country’ (+video)
Photo Credit: AFP/GettyA prominent Muslim cleric in the United Kingdom reportedly urged a group of fellow Muslims to collect government benefits as a “jihad seeker’s allowance,” saying non-Muslims who work 9-5 jobs will end up “committing suicide” at the end of their lives when they realize it wasn’t worth anything.
Sun News secretly filmed the man’s remarks at three different meetings where he said, among other things, that it is natural for Muslims to take money from the kuffar (derogatory term for non-believer), that Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama are the devil, and that Islam is taking over Europe.
He explained the benefits of not working: “You find people are busy working the whole of their life. They wake up at 7 o’clock. They go to work at 9 o’clock. They work for eight, nine hours a day. They come home at 7 o’clock, watch EastEnders, sleep, and they do that for 40 years of their life. That is called slavery.
“And at the end of their life they realize their pension isn’t going to pay out anything, the mortgage isn’t going to pay out anything. Basically they are going to lose everything, commit suicide. What kind of a life is that, honestly? That is the life of kuffar (non-believer)…
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-02-19 03:08:132016-04-11 11:24:19Prominent Muslim Cleric: Collect Gov’t Welfare As A ‘Jihad Seeker’s Allowance’
