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Obama on Stupid: “More Government Workers Mean More Tax Revenue”

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Photo Credit: APPresident Barack Obama – citing the job losses since he took office — said “the economy would be much better off,” unemployment would be 6.5 percent and the national deficit would be in decline if there were more federal, state and local government workers.

“If those layoffs had not happened, if public sector employees grew like they did in the past two recessions, the unemployment rate would be 6.5 instead of 7.5,” Obama said. “Our economy would be much better off, and the deficit would still be going down because we would be getting more tax revenue.”

Obama spoke Tuesday at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he promoted plans he said would help the middle class such as corporate tax reform, increased federal spending on infrastructure, more education spending, public-private partnerships and rolling back the sequester.

“Instead of using a scalpel to get rid of programs we don’t need and keep vital investments that we do, the same group has kept in place this meat cleaver called the sequester that is just slashing all kinds of investments in education and research and our military,” Obama said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Party House Members Take on Establishment Senators in Fight to Defund Obamacare

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Photo Credit: majunznkBy Elise Viebeck. The Tea Party is ready to take a stand on defunding the divisive healthcare law and willing to risk a government shutdown in the process.

Establishment Republicans worry the strategy will repeat the Clinton-era government shutdown showdown, which hurt Republicans in the 1996 elections.

Tensions will reach a boiling point after the August recess, when lawmakers start negotiations over how to keep the government open.

In the meantime, old-guard Republicans are sending a clear message to conservatives: The shutdown isn’t worth the risk.

On Friday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said that a plan to shut down the government to block funds for ObamaCare would cost the GOP control of the House and could destroy the party. Read more from this story HERE.

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Sen. Cruz: Defund Obamacare before Americans become ‘addicted’ to subsidies

By Valerie Richardson. Sen. Ted Cruz urged conservatives Saturday to join a petition drive to defund Obamacare, calling it their last chance to stop the national health-care plan before its implementation in January.

“On Jan. 1, the exchanges kick in and the subsidies kick in,” said the Texas Republican in a speech Saturday at the Western Conservative Summit. “Once those kick in, it’s going to prove almost impossible to undo Obamacare. The administration’s plan is very simple: Get everyone addicted to the sugar so that Obamacare remains a permanent feature of our society.”

He asked foes of the Affordable Care Act to sign a national petition launched Saturday that calls for Congress to approve the Sept. 30 continuing budget resolution only if it eliminates funding for Obamacare.

The online petition, called Don’t Fund It, is located at www.dontfundobamacare.com

Opposing Mr. Cruz’s defunding plan was Republican strategist Dick Morris, who urged Republicans to “let the consequences of Obama’s policies happen.” Read more from this story HERE.

British Government Embraces ‘Self-Deportation’ With ‘Go Home Or Face Arrest’ Billboards

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The British government has brought in two vans to circle around London, displaying billboards that warn undocumented immigrants to “Go Home Or Face Arrest.”

The effort, which is being piloted by the U.K’s Home Office — similar to our Department of Homeland Security — is meant to encourage people to leave the country before they are deported. As part of the effort, the vans not only display a number that undocumented people can text for help, but also show the tally of people who have been arrested in the area where the vans are circling:

Photo Credit: Gov.uk

The vans are driving through six London boroughs — Hounslow, Barking & Dagenham, Ealing, Barnet, Brent and Redbridge. Those neighborhoods have particularly high immigrant populations.

Read more from this story HERE.

Root Cause of America’s Economic Decline: The Loss of the Protestant Work Ethic

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The causes of America’s current economic malaise are many, and some are harder to address than others. The misguided fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies of our profligate and dysfunctional government head the list. Those can be turned around.

But a problem much more difficult to turn back is the rotting of our moral fabric—the decay of the Protestant work ethic—engendered by decades of New Deals, Great Societies and one attempt after another to Spread the Wealth Around. In its stead, we now have a culture of entitlement and dependency that threatens to accelerate our slide into permanent decline.

The alarming statistics can be seen in the accompanying graph. The first is the breadwinner index—the percent of the U.S. male population that is gainfully employed. Only a few points of this decline can be ascribed to the aging of the population. The graph for males 18 to 52 has much the same slope.

The second shows the number of out-of-wedlock births, the rate of which surpassed 40 percent of all births as of 2008. Add to this the new-normal 50 percent divorce rate and we have a country in which the majority of our children are being raised outside of the economic unit once known as the nuclear family.

The third shows per capita inflation-adjusted total government spending, including federal, state, and municipal government expenditures as best as they can be estimated. The extent to which the huge spike in government spending per person over the past 60 years is the cause or the effect of the first two trends is open to debate. But the relationship is clear. When traditional family breadwinners stop carrying their load, the burden falls upon the remaining workers, an increasing number of whom are single mothers struggling to make ends meet.

Read more from this story HERE.

Computer Security Vanishing: Hackers Exploit Vulnerabilities for NSA, Governments

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Photo Credit: Gianni CiprianoOn the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, two Italian hackers have been searching for bugs — not the island’s many beetle varieties, but secret flaws in computer code that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit.

The hackers, Luigi Auriemma, 32, and Donato Ferrante, 28, sell technical details of such vulnerabilities to countries that want to break into the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The two will not reveal the clients of their company, ReVuln, but big buyers of services like theirs include the National Security Agency — which seeks the flaws for America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons — and American adversaries like the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.

All over the world, from South Africa to South Korea, business is booming in what hackers call “zero days,” the coding flaws in software like Microsoft Windows that can give a buyer unfettered access to a computer and any business, agency or individual dependent on one.

Just a few years ago, hackers like Mr. Auriemma and Mr. Ferrante would have sold the knowledge of coding flaws to companies like Microsoft and Apple, which would fix them. Last month, Microsoft sharply increased the amount it was willing to pay for such flaws, raising its top offer to $150,000.

But increasingly the businesses are being outbid by countries with the goal of exploiting the flaws in pursuit of the kind of success, albeit temporary, that the United States and Israel achieved three summers ago when they attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment program with a computer worm that became known as “Stuxnet.”

Read more from this story HERE.

July 3: The Day Big Government Finally Imploded

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Photo Credit: Douglas JonesMark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded.

July 3 was the quiet afternoon that a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy announced in a blog post that the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate would be delayed one year. Something about the “complexity of the requirements.” The Fourth’s fireworks couldn’t hold a candle to the sound of the U.S. government finally hitting the wall.

Since at least 1789, America’s conservatives and liberals have argued about the proper role of government. Home library shelves across the land splinter and creak beneath the weight of books arguing the case for individual liberty or for government-led social justice. World Wrestling smackdowns are nothing compared with Hayek vs. Rawls.

Maybe we have been listening to the wrong experts. Philosophers and pundits aren’t going to tell us anything new about government. The one-year rollover of ObamaCare because of its “complexity” suggests it’s time to call in the physicists, the people who study black holes and death stars. That’s what the federal government looks like after expanding ever outward for the past 224 years.

Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law’s theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Mike Lee: Defund Obamacare or Shut Down the Government

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Photo Credit: APSen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, thinks President Obama’s delay of key provisions of Obamacare could force Senate Democrats to defend the unpopular law during the upcoming congressional debate on a new continuing resolution to fund the government through the 2014 election.

“If congressional Democrats want to oppose appropriations bills without additional Obamacare funding, shut down the government, and side with the president and Big Business against the American people, then it’s their choice,” Lee said.

“But three years in, even the president himself has now admitted that Obamacare won’t work. The only responsible choice now is to protect the country from Obamacare’s looming disaster, start over and finally begin work on real health care reform.”

Lee is responding to the Treasury Department’s July 5th announcement that it will delay implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate on businesses to provide health insurance to workers.

The new CR would be the fourth such stop-gap funding measure since Congress failed to adopt an annual budget in 2010. The government is currently operating on a CR that expires Sept. 30.

Read more from this story HERE.

Snowden Loves America, Not Its Government; Says He’s Unwilling to Live Under Constant Surveillance

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Photo Credit: The Guardian The Guardian released the second part of Snowden’s interview with Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong. In it Snowden, made it clear that he loved America but hated what its government has become. He also predicted that the feds would ultimately accuse him of espionage. Here are excerpts of that interview:

“I think they are going to say I have committed grave crimes, I have violated the Espionage Act. They are going to say I have aided our enemies in making them aware of these systems. But this argument can be made against anyone who reveals information that points out mass surveillance systems,” he said.

Asked whether he had sought a career in the intelligence community specifically to become a mole and reveal secrets, Snowden, 30, said he had joined government service very young, first enlisting in the US army immediately after the invasion of Iraq out of a belief in “the goodness of what we were doing. I believed in the nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas.”

But his views shifted over the length of his career as he watched the news, which he saw as propaganda, not truth. “We were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all the publics, not just the American public, in order to create certain mindset in the global consciousness and I was actually a victim of that.”

He had not fallen out of love with America, only its government. “America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”

In the new excerpts, he explained his motivation for revealing the information. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded,” he said. “And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”

CBO: 20+ Week Fetuses Aborted at Rate of 30 Per Day; Saves Money for Government-Run Health Care

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Photo Credit: APUnborn babies who have reached at least 20 weeks of age in utero are aborted at a rate of about 30 per day in the United States, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The CBO has also concluded that aborting babies at 20 weeks or later in pregnancy saves money for the government-run federal-state Medicaid system.

The CBO made these determinations when doing its official “Cost Estimate” of a federal bill that would prohibit abortions at 20 weeks or later into pregnancy (except in cases of reported rape, incest against a minor or to save the life of the mother).

“Based on data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), CBO estimates that, each year, about 11,000 abortions take place 20 weeks or more after fertilization,” said the CBO’s analysis of H.R. 1797, the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

In a 365-day year, 11,000 late-term abortions works out to a little more than 30 per day—counting weekends and holidays.

Read more from this story HERE.

Nation’s First Monument to Atheism on Government Property Erected: “It’s Only the Beginning” (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

A monument to atheism now sits near a granite slab that lists the Ten Commandments outside a courthouse in a conservative north Florida town.

The New Jersey-based group American Atheists unveiled the 1,500-bound granite bench Saturday as a counter to the religious monument in what’s called a free speech zone.

Read more from this story HERE.