Posts

House Republicans Launch ‘2nd Amendment Initiative’ v. Obama Gun Agenda

Photo Credit: Rep. Stutzman’s officeThe House Republican Study Committee (RSC) has launched a Second Amendment Initiative for the 113th Congress under the leadership of Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Third District) to counter what they believe is President Barack Obama’s “out-of-touch agenda” on gun control.

In a press release, RSC Chairman Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Indiana) asserted that the president’s “radical anti-gun agenda is a threat to our constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

“Efforts to take away the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans will not reduce crime or prevent criminals from breaking the law,” Scalise said. “We will not allow President Obama and liberals in Congress to take away our right to bear arms.”

The president, according to Politico, has reined in major gun prohibition groups to concentrate on pushing new measures, including so-called “universal background checks” and a ban on so-called “assault weapons” and their original capacity magazines. Politico, quoting unnamed sources, noted that none of the participants will openly discuss what goes on in meetings at the White House with Bruce Reed, chief of staff for Vice President Joe Biden.

In exchange for what amounts to obedience to the Obama agenda, these groups, Politico reported, have “a voice in the discussions, a role in whatever final agreement is made and weekly meetings at the White House…”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Woodward Says Obama’s Decision Not To Deploy Carrier ‘A Kind Of Madness,’ White House Threatens

Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him in an email that he would “regret doing this,” the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester.

CNN host Wolf Blitzer said that the network invited a White House official to debate Woodward on-air, but the White House declined.

“It makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, ‘You’re going to regret doing something that you believe in,'” Woodward said.

“I think they’re confused,” Woodward said of the White House’s pushback on his reporting.

Earlier today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Woodward ripped into Obama in what has become an ongoing feud between the veteran Washington Post journalist and the White House. Woodward said Obama was showing a “kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time” for a decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf because of budget concerns.

See video on White House threat:

Read more from this story HERE.

The Unaffordable Care Act

Photo Credit: APThe Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report Tuesday showing that if cost-control measures are not maintained the Affordable Care Act could increase the deficit by $6.2 trillion, or .7 percent of GDP, over the next 75 years.

The report shows President Barack Obama’s comments that Obamacare would “not add a dime to the long term debt [are] false,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) said at a Budget Committee hearing.

“The result of this brand new report confirmed everything that Republicans were saying about the bill,” Sessions said. The report is the first to look at the long-term effects of the Affordable Care Act beyond a ten-year period.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) previously had projected the cost of Obamacare over a ten-year period and found it would save more than $100 billion if certain policies remained the same—policies that CBO director Doug Elmendorf said would be hard to maintain.

“CBO’s cost estimate noted that the legislation maintains and puts into effect a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time,” Elmendorf said at the time. The new GAO study ran two projections: one in which those cost reduction policies were maintained and another projection in which Congress phased out the reduction policies put into Obamacare.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Obama Selling Access to OFA Donors

Photo Credit: 401(K) 2013MSNBC’s Chuck Todd criticized Monday the new fundraising efforts of President Obama’s dark money group, Organizing for Action, calling a scheme for high donors to meet regularly with Obama “the definition of selling access.”

Todd was describing the quarterly meetings that will be enjoyed by OFA’s $500,000 donors, the New York Times reported over the weekend:

But those contributions will also translate into access, according to donors courted by the president’s aides. Next month, Organizing for Action will hold a “founders summit” at a hotel near the White House, where donors paying $50,000 each will mingle with Mr. Obama’s former campaign manager, Jim Messina, and Mr. Carson, who previously led the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama’s group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House. Moreover, the new cash demands on Mr. Obama’s top donors and bundlers come as many of them are angling for appointments to administration jobs or ambassadorships.

See video:

Read more from this story HERE.

The Great Sequester Panic

Photo Credit: Reuters Prepare for the end of food safety as we have known it. For a breakdown in public order. For little children languishing in ignorance. If only Edward Gibbon were here to chronicle the devastation. On March 1, the fabric of our civilization begins to unwind.

That’s when the economy begins to stall and we turn our back on our values, all because the federal government will have to begin to cut a few tens of billions of dollars from the largest budget the world has ever known.

This is the lurid fairy tale spun by President Barack Obama. In the fight over the sequester, he is resorting to the tried-and-true (and tiresome) strategy of every official confronted with budget cuts he doesn’t want to implement, from the commander in chief to a lowly bureaucrat toiling at some school district: maximize the scare-mongering and pain.

In Hans Christian Andersen terms, Obama is the princess and the sequester is the pea. Over the next 10 years, the sequester amounts to a $1.16 trillion cut, or roughly 3 cents on every federal dollar. If we can’t squeeze a couple of pennies out of every dollar, we might as well begin our great national bankruptcy proceedings right now.

This year we are supposed to cut $85 billion from a $3.5 trillion budget. And it won’t even be that much. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government won’t be able to cut the full $85 billion. It will manage to cut only about half that in 2013.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hagel Has Enough Support For Defense Secretary

Photo Credit: Susan Walsh/APBarring any new, damaging information, Chuck Hagel has secured the necessary votes for the Senate to confirm him to be the nation’s next defense secretary. A vote ending the bitter fight over President Barack Obama’s choice for his revamped second-term, national security team is expected next week.

Hagel cleared the threshold when five-term Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama said he would vote for the former GOP senator from Nebraska after joining other Republicans last week in an unprecedented filibuster of the Pentagon nominee.

“He’s probably as good as we’re going to get,” Shelby told the Decatur (Ala.) Daily.

Although a Republican, Hagel has faced strong GOP opposition, with many of his former colleagues voting last week to stall the nomination. Republicans have questioned Hagel’s support for Israel, tolerance of Iran and willingness to cut the nuclear arsenal. His opposition to the Iraq war after his initial vote for the conflict angered his onetime friend, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

GOP lawmakers demanded more time to review the nomination that a divided Armed Services Committee had approved on a party-line vote.

Read more from this story HERE.

Documents: Hagel Staffers Met With ‘Front Group’ For Iranian Regime

Photo Credit: APDocuments obtained by The Daily Caller show that staffers for then-Sen. Chuck Hagel met repeatedly with a controversial pro-Iran lobby group, and some met with the organization’s president.

Hagel is President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next secretary of defense. Arizona Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have conceded that a vote — and likely confirmation — will take place during the week of Feb. 25.

Iranian state-run media have referred to the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) since at least 2006 as “Iran’s lobby” in the U.S.

It portrays itself in the media as an independent group of Iranian expatriates. But Sam Nunberg, director of the Legal Project at the Middle East Forum project, describes the NIAC as an Iranian “front group.”

And documents released during the discovery phase of a defamation lawsuit NIAC filed against Seid Hassan Daioleslam, editor of the Iranian American Forum and one of the regime’s most public critics, include correspondence with Mohammed Javad Zaif, then Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations.

Read more from this story HERE.

Woman Killed In Chicago Hours After Her Sister Sat Behind Obama On Stage

Photo Credit: Getty ImagesAn 18-year-old Chicago woman was shot and killed Friday night, just hours after her younger sister sat onstage behind President Barack Obama as he spoke about gun violence.

Janay Mcfarlane was visiting friends and family when she was shot once in the head around 11:30 p.m. Friday in North Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. The bullet had been meant for a friend, said her mother, Angela Blakely. Mcfarlane had a 3-month-old son.

“I really feel like somebody cut a part of my heart out,” Blakely said. Hours before the slaying, Mcfarlane’s 14-year-old sister Destini was part of a group of teens who sat onstage behind the president when he delivered remarks at Hyde Park Career Academy.

“Barack Obama said teenagers are killing each other,” Destini Mcfarlane told the Sun-Times Saturday. “He was saying we need to cut down on street violence.”

Mcfarlane’s murder was apparently separate from the four shootings that took place in Chicago within a 90-minute period after Obama left. Those shootings occurred between about 5:55 p.m. and 7:20 p.m.; Mcfarlane was killed several hours later.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pentagon Conducting Urgent Assessment Of North Korean Mobile ICBM Threat

Photo Credit: APThe Pentagon’s Joint Staff is conducting an urgent threat assessment of North Korea’s new road-mobile missile and the danger it poses to the United States.

The classified assessment is being done for Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on an expedited basis, said defense officials familiar with the effort.

“This is an expedited examination of the North Korean ICBM threat specifically for the chairman,” one official said. A Joint Staff spokesman declined to comment on the North Korean ICBM assessment.

Disclosure of the urgent threat assessment from nuclear-armed North Korea comes as President Barack Obama is expected to announce Tuesday night that he plans to cut an additional one-third of the warheads from the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The Pentagon plans to cut its nuclear warheads to 1,550 warheads under the 2010 New START arms treaty with Russia. An additional cut of a third of those warheads would bring the U.S. warhead arsenal to around 1,000.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Obama Campaign Caught Lying Again

A recent campaign ad supposedly featuring “Republican women for Obama” has been proven false. At least two of the women are Democrats who previously voted for Obama. Moreover, one of the main messages of the video, that Obama stands for “small government,” is a complete fabrication. Watch it if you can stand it here: