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Gallup: Virtually no support for third party candidacy in 2012

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U.S. registered voters show limited support for third-party candidates this year, with the vast majority preferring Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. A June 7-10 Gallup poll asked a special presidential preference question, listing three third-party candidates in addition to Obama and Romney. Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson is the choice of 3% of registered voters and Green Party candidate Jill Stein the choice of 1%. Another 2% volunteer Ron Paul’s name and 1% mention someone other than the listed candidates.

Gallup periodically asks a vote preference question during presidential election years, in which interviewers read the names of all candidates who will appear on the ballot in a large number of states, as one way of measuring third-party support. These findings reflect Gallup’s first such measurement in 2012. The resulting data suggest 5% of U.S. voters could vote for a third-party candidate this year, which could rise if Paul changes course and runs as an independent.

The standard presidential preference question included in Gallup Daily tracking mentions only Obama and Romney by name and finds a consistent 1% volunteering the name of some other candidate as their choice for president. The 1% is in line with the vote for third-party candidates in recent presidential elections when no high-profile third-party candidate (like Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, and Ralph Nader in 2000) ran.

Prominent third-party candidates have tended to receive significantly higher support in polls taken earlier in election years than they wind up getting on Election Day. This is based on a comparison of registered voter preferences in June with the final election vote share in years when higher-profile third-party candidates were included in Gallup’s presidential preference questions. In general, the candidates wound up getting a fraction of their June estimated support — in most cases, less than half.

The drop in support during the campaign is likely due to two factors. First, historically, third-party candidates’ support typically drops as the campaign approaches Election Day, perhaps because voters realize the candidates have little chance to win. Second, generally speaking, support for third-party candidates tends to be higher in the broader pool of registered voters than in the smaller group of actual voters.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Maine’s Governor calls the IRS the “new Gestapo”

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Gov. Paul LePage used his weekly radio address to blast President Obama’s health care law and described the Internal Revenue Service as the “new Gestapo.”

The IRS description was a reference to a provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires Americans not insured by their employers or Medicaid to buy health insurance or pay an annual penalty when filing their tax returns. The provision, known more broadly as the individual mandate, was the subject of a multi-state lawsuit, but was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

LePage said the court decision has “made America less free.”

“We the people have been told there is no choice,” he said. “You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo — the IRS.”

Maine Democratic Party Chairman Ben Grant, responding to LePage’s remarks, said, “We’ve come to expect a bunch of nonsense from Gov. LePage, but this is a step too far. There appears now to be no limit to the extreme language he will use to misinform, degrade and insult people. Somebody needs to explain to him that he’s the governor of a state, and not a talk radio host. I demand a full apology on behalf of all those who suffered at the hands of the real Gestapo.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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83% of doctors have considered quitting over Obamacare

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Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.

The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide. The survey found that the majority have thought about bailing out of their careers over the legislation, which was upheld last month by the Supreme Court.

Even if doctors do not quit their jobs over the ruling, America will face a shortage of at least 90,000 doctors by 2020. The new health care law increases demand for physicians by expanding insurance coverage. This change will exacerbate the current shortage as more Americans live past 65.

By 2025 the shortage will balloon to over 130,000, Len Marquez, the director of government relations at the American Association of Medical Colleges, told The Daily Caller.

“One of our primary concerns is that you’ve got an aging physician workforce and you have these new beneficiaries — these newly insured people — coming through the system,” he said. “There will be strains and there will be physician shortages.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama knows no shame: The Pathetic Attempt to Blame Fast and Furious on Bush

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Obama administration officials must remind each other daily that they will never have to accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong on their watch as long as they can find some way to blame their troubles on George W. Bush.

So it should surprise no one that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and the administration’s surrogates are vociferously claiming that Operation Fast and Furious, the gun-walking scandal run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is all Mr. Bush’s fault. Fast and Furious was a program that resulted in Congress holding Mr. Holder in contempt for lying, put a couple thousand guns into the hands of Mexican drug gangs and led to the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and as many as 200 Mexicans.

Obama spokesmen claim it all began under Mr. Bush and a little-known operation also run out of Phoenix, dubbed Operation Wide Receiver. The Bush-era program involved a few hundred guns and was designed and run by U.S. and Mexican agents who planted electronic tracking devices in the guns so the agents could follow the guns on both sides of the border. The idea was to compile evidence that could be used to prosecute gang kingpins.

A few of the guns vanished, however, as some of the batteries powering the implanted tracking devices failed, and in a few cases, gang members discovered and destroyed the devices. As soon as this was reported to Washington, the whole operation was canceled to prevent more guns from falling into the wrong hands. A vast majority of the guns involved were traced and retrieved; no one was killed; and the project was shelved as a bad idea.

Two years later, many of the same ATF and Justice Department officials in Phoenix came up with and launched a very different program they called Fast and Furious. Straw purchasers were allowed to buy more than 2,000 guns from dealers along our southern border who were pressured by government officials to look the other way. There was no attempt to trace or follow the guns; the Mexican government was not informed of the operation; and even ATF’s own agents in Mexico were kept in the dark.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Five men indicted for shooting death of US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry

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Five men were named Monday in a federal grand jury indictment unsealed in Tucson, Ariz., in the December 2010 shooting death of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry, with the FBI announcing a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of four of the men designated as fugitives.

The Terry death has been the catalyst for a heated debate between the Justice Department and Congress over Fast and Furious – a botched gun-running investigation in which two weapons purchased by “straw buyers” during the probe were found at the scene of the Terry shooting, just north of the Arizona-Mexico border.

The Justice Department’s refusal to turn over hundreds of pages of Fast and Furious documents led to a contempt citation by the House against Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

According to the indictment, Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, Jesus Rosario Favela-Astorga, Ivan Soto-Barraza, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes and Lionel Portillo-Meza are charged with first- and second-degree murder, conspiracy, robbery, use and carrying of a firearm during a crime of violence, assault on a federal officer and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. A sixth man, Rito Osorio-Arellanes, is charged with conspiracy.

The indictment, handed up by a federal grand jury on Nov. 7, 2011, alleges that on Dec. 14, 2010, Manuel Osorio-Arellanes, Favela-Astorga, Soto-Barraza, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes and Portillo-Meza engaged in a firefight with four Border Patrol agents and during that exchange, Terry was fatally shot.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama is “fundamentally transforming” the US military

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In “Lone Survivor,” a chilling firsthand account of the loss of 11 members of the Navy’s elite Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) Team and eight Army aviators, Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell describes the fateful decision that led to disaster for him and death for his comrades. It came down to a judgment call about whether to risk prosecution and jail time for doing whatever it took to complete their mission, or to allow three Afghan goatherds to rat out his unit to the Taliban.

Petty Officer Luttrell cast the deciding vote to turn loose the farmers who had stumbled upon him and three other SEALs shortly after they had been dropped behind enemy lines to take down a particularly dangerous Taliban leader. He describes the thought process:

“If we kill these guys, we have to be straight about it. Report what we did. We can’t sneak around this. … Their bodies will be found, the Taliban will use it to the max. They’ll get it in the papers, and the U.S. liberal media will attack us without mercy. We’ll almost certainly be charged with murder.”

Such concerns prompted Petty Officer Luttrell to make the call to release the goatherds, setting in motion calamity for his buddies and 16 others dispatched to rescue them from the massive Taliban assault that ensued. It turns out those concerns were well-founded, as was demonstrated most recently in a case before the U.S. Military Court of Appeals. By a 3-2 vote, the judges outrageously determined that an Army Ranger, 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, had no right to self-defense when he killed an Iraqi prisoner he was interrogating after the man threw a concrete block at him and tried to seize his firearm. Unless he is pardoned, Lt. Behenna will remain incarcerated for the next 12 years.

Unfortunately, under President Obama, service members’ rising fears of being prosecuted for acting to protect themselves and their missions are among many ways in which the military is being “fundamentally transformed,” to use Mr. Obama’s now-infamous turn of phrase.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama’s Transportation Secretary says we should be like Communist China

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China’s attempt at a high-speed rail network is fraught with corrupt officials, impossible costs, and deadly safety failures. But U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wishes America would follow it as a model.

LaHood told The Cable last week:  “The Chinese are more successful [in building infrastructure] because in their country, only three people make the decision. In our country, 3,000 people do, 3 million. In a country where only three people make the decision, they can decide where to put their rail line, get the money, and do it. We don’t do it that way in America.”

His comments are stunning. Yes, that’s how Communists do it: A few people make decisions for the country and control the money, land, resources, and workers. And how has that worked out?

“Rather than demonstrating the advantages of centrally planned long-term investment, as its foreign admirers sometimes suggested, China’s bullet-train experience shows what can go wrong when an unelected elite, influenced by corrupt opportunists, gives orders that all must follow — without the robust public discussion we would have in the states.” That sounds like a direct rebuttal to LaHood, but Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane wrote that back in April 2011.

The Telegraph (U.K.) reported in February that 70 percent of China’s railway projects had been suspended, as its railways ministry attempted to continue deficit financing while facing slow ticket sales. Last year, a deadly train crash brought safety concerns and corruption at the highest levels of the railway to light.

The bottom line is that high-speed rail is like pouring money down a hole. China’s official institutions aren’t known for transparency, but according to the Voice of America, “Even the [Chinese] national research institution, the Academy of Science, reported last year that at current investment and estimated passenger numbers, the trains will never collect enough in fares to repay construction loans.”

Read more from this story HERE.

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Conservative-led states creating far more jobs than those supporting Obama

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In each of the States that elected Republican governors during the Tea Party dominated 2010 midterm elections, unemployment rates have gone down. According to an Examiner.com analysis, since Tea Party Republicans took over in January 2011, the average reduction in unemployment for those 17 States has been 1.35%. When compared nationally, job creation in those States has been 50% better than the rest of the country.

The unemployment rate in States that elected “progressive” Democrats in 2010 saw a drop in rates that did no better than the .9% national rate of decline.  In at least one of these “progressive”-run states, the unemployment rate actually went up, not down. New York’s jobless rate increased from 8.2% to 8.6%, an increase of 0.4%.

Compare that lackluster performance to a solid decrease in unemployment in each of the 17 States that elected fiscally Conservative governors back in 2010:  Michigan -2.4%, Florida -2.3%, Nevada -2.2%, Alabama -1.9%, Ohio -1.7%, Tennessee -1.6%, South Carolina -1.5%, Georgia -1.2%, Wyoming -1.1%, Iowa -1.0%, New Mexico -1.0%, Wisconsin -0.9%, Kansas -0.8%, South Dakota -0.7%, Maine -0.6%, Pennsylvania -0.6%.

This is another substantiated example of how, when compared to fiscally Conservative Tea Party solutions, “progressive” economic policies fall short. It also blows a gigantic hole in the “we’re-making-progress-but-can’t-go-back-to-policies-that-caused-our-economic-problems” talking points lie that “progressives” insist on repeating ad nauseam.

This also indicates that the real problem in America is “progressive” ideas, which have been being imported into the United States from Europe since the early 20th century. Since then, these “progressive” ideas – hostile to the Republic envisioned by our Founders – have managed to infiltrate and infest both of America’s major political Parties.

The Republican vs. Democrat political paradigm is obsolete. This is especially true where economic policies and government power are concerned. To more accurately describe the philosophical divide in today’s political landscape, think Patriots vs. “progressives.”

It should be noted, “progressives” easily occupy a space within the “globalist” category. Globalism is a clear and present danger to the very concept of national sovereignty . . . any nation’s national sovereignty. Be assured, United States sovereignty is being targeted; “progressives” are eagerly playing a large part in this.

Patriots want the United States to follow the Constitution, which limits the size, scope, reach and power of the central government to that prescribed by the Constitution. “Progressives” wish to “evolve” beyond America’s foundation document, favoring a central government that usurps the maximum amount of power possible from the States and from the people.

Although many Americans supported the invasion of Iraq and George W. Bush’s strong backing of the U.S. military, a careful examination of his Presidency shows that Bush increased the size and cost of the federal government. He created the DHS, a large, expensive and essentially unnecessary Cabinet level bureaucracy. If the underlying cause of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was the FBI and the CIA not sharing information, that could have been rectified with the proper use of an Executive Order directing the two intelligence agencies to share pertinent data. Bush also greatly expanded the size, cost and presence of the TSA. Remember that the next time your 87 year old grandmother or four year old niece is being openly groped by an overly-controlling faux uniformed union member who can probably never be fired.

Bush also worked with a Republican majority Legislature to enact Medicare part D, which imposed that financial burden onto the States. Near the end of his Presidency he and his Goldman Sachs Treasurer promoted TARP, which put taxpayers on the hook to the tune of $700 billion. The Feds then used some of that money to bail out GM and Chrysler.  And, of course, we also have Bush’s role in adding $5 trillion to the national debt, War Powers Act issues, and nominating the current Supreme Court Chief Justice, who recently sided with “progressives” in preserving the biggest, farthest reaching government power grab in U.S. history.

Like it or not, the results of George W. Bush’s presidency indicate that in many instances he acted as a “progressive” Republican.

The chief discernible distinction between “progressive” Democrats and “progressive” Republicans is the rate at which government grows and individual Liberty is lost.

The government of the United States needs to shrink, not grow. Europe has been growing their governments decade after decade after decade. That is one of the major reasons why their economies are failing. “Progressives” are trying to make America more and more like Europe. Increasing government spending while expanding the size and scope of government bureaucracies and increasing the people’s dependency on government is not the way to fix a problem caused by big government spending, bloated bureaucracies and government dependency.

The last time America had an anyone like a patriot in the Oval Office was Ronald Reagan. Under the influence of the anti-American “progressive” economic policies of Obama, America’s GDP growth is currently 1.9%. At this point in his first term, under the influence of Reagan’s pro-American economic policies, America’s GDP growth was 7.2%.

For the America envisioned by its Founders to survive, “progressives” must be stopped. Forget the (R) and the (D). These political Party designations are growing increasingly meaningless. Voters need to realign their thinking and begin voting for Patriots and against “progressives”, regardless of Party affiliation.

If “progressives” currently living in America want to live in a European country doomed to economic failure, they can move to Europe. They would be doing America a favor. An even bigger favor would be if they sent disenfranchised Europeans who want to live the American way to the United States. America would definitely benefit from that exchange.

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Michael Fell is a former MCA recording artist from the seminal punk rock era who toured America from coast to coast. Today, he’s a leading voice in the L.A. Tea Party movement, active since the February 2009 inception. Mr. Fell currently chairs the Westwood Tea Party, is a founding member of the L.A. Metro Tea Party Coalition, serves as the Vice Chairman of the Westside Republicans Club in L.A. CA, and is an elected Republican delegate to the L.A. 47th AD Central Committee. He’s been Campaign Manager for a primary winning Congressional candidate, as well as Santa Monica and L.A. City Council candidates.  Mr. Fell is a contributing writer for https://conservativedailynews.com/, https://rightwingnews.com/, https://www.hollywoodrepublican.net/, https://beforeitsnews.com, https://www.redcounty.com/, https://www.uspatriotpac.com and, https://westsiderepublicans.com/.  His opinions on today’s news events and political climate can be found on his blog: https://mjfellright.wordpress.com/

 

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Obama circumvents Congress again, giving $1.5 billion to Muslim Brotherhood

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While President Barack Obama continually criticizes Congress publicly for not working with him, he rarely speaks of the times he just skips over their needed approvals to take actions in the international world.

Even though the United States Congress stopped any foreign aid via military aid to Egypt because the U.S. Congress has believed Egypt is not making progress on freedoms and human rights, Obama has allegedly granted $1.5 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood in that nation.

In spite of the fact that powerful persons in Egypt have spoken in very anti-American ways in the past, the president of the United States feels it necessary for the U.S. to assist them financially at a time when our country can obviously not afford to do so.

Since this story started making its way through the media months ago, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood has handily won the presidency in Egypt recently. The Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi is Egypt’s new president.

Though Obama did not publicly support a candidate in that election, his loyalties were clear. Washington insiders have suggested that Obama and his relation to the political powers in Egypt be scrutinized and monitored closely. Additionally, it has been repeatedly suggested – even by Obama’s own party members – that Obama’s free hand in giving handouts in the billions of dollars to foreign countries be monitored much more closely.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Boehner: GOP will be voting against Obama rather than for Romney

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When House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, endorsed Mitt Romney for president in April, he pledged to do “everything I can to help him win.”

In his words, however, the one thing he can’t do is make voters “fall in love” with the candidate.

Speaking last week at a fundraiser in Wheeling, W.Va., Boehner was surprisingly candid in his characterization of Romney’s candidacy when asked, in a question-and-answer session: “Can you make me love Mitt Romney?”

“No,” he answered, as first reported by Roll Call. “Listen, we’re just politicians. I wasn’t elected to play God. The American people probably aren’t going to fall in love with Mitt Romney.”

He added that the presumptive Republican nominee had “some friends, relatives, and fellow Mormons… some people that are going to vote for him,” but suggested that at the end of the day, Republicans would be voting against President Obama rather than for Romney.

Read more from this story HERE.

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