Distraction 101

What a tangled web the White House weaves.  Benghazi is a word that the media and President wish you would forget.  Keep this all in your brain for future use.  Rice has pulled her name from contention for Secretary of State.  Hilary has fallen and can't get back up.  Her concussion will keep her from testifying.  Not only that she is slated to be replaced by John "why the long face" Kerry.  He will be the one who has to tackle this tough issue.  Being the new SoS he will not have any answers.  As it was best said by the Madagascar Penguins "smile and wave boys, smile and wave".

Sad X 2

I would never ever want to minimize the tragedy that took place in CT.  What those families are dealing with is unimaginable.  My heart truly goes out to them.
However I do feel compelled to say something about the larger issue.  The President and his media minions cannot let this opportunity pass.  He and they alike have taken full advantage of the tragedy to once again talk about gun control in the United States.  Why would any of us expect anything different.  The left has proven time and time again that the constitution has no value.  This would be just another example of how they spit on it.
Taking guns out of the hands of good guys, only empowers bad guys.  We all know that law following citizens would be those who would suffer the most from any type of gun control.
Lets look at all of the high profile examples that innocent people were killed by nut jobs.  Virginia Tech ( a gun free zone ) no honest person was on that college campus with a fire arm.  Naturally, the loser who did the killing did not stop when he read the sign "no guns allowed".  He was a law breaker, they ignore the rules.  He walked in and shot.  Not one person there was able to return fire.
Denver movie theater, again a "no gun" business.  If just one of those people had a gun, maybe one less person would have lost their life.
Let's arm the principals.  Train them to use a gun.  Create a deterrent.  We the people have the right to bear arms.  Let us use that right to defend ourselves from enemies foreign and domestic.

The End is Nigh

One week from today is our next MNCC meeting.  Questions?  Post to the blog and I will get back to you.

I just needed a change.

Congressman's view: President blames Republicans but is the one holding the economy hostage

Republicans have put revenue on the table to a level the President once sought. Now he says double it. We have shown a willingness to negotiate. It is the president who has announced positions that are non-negotiable. It is the president who continues to divide the country. He is showing a willingness to tank our fragile economy and send it back into recession. It is he who is holding the economy hostage.
By: U.S. Rep. Chip Cravaack, special to the News Tribune

 

U.S. Rep. Chip Cravaack

“Fiscal cliff” is a term repeated so often many Americans cringe when they hear it. Although hearing about it is grating, it is critical everyone comprehend what is at stake, how we got here, and what is preventing us from confronting this perfect fiscal storm.
Some brief history may provide insight. The “cliff” did not suddenly appear. It has been years in the making. Getting the most attention is the expiration of tax cuts passed a decade ago during President George W. Bush’s first term. Those tax rate cuts, referred to as the “Bush Tax Cuts,” helped everyone.
Two years ago, almost to the day, President Obama agreed to extend the existing tax rates for two more years. The president, while signing the extension, called maintaining the existing tax rates “a substantial victory for middle-class families across the country.” He said the tax cuts “will grow our economy and will create jobs for the American people.” He said it was not the time to be raising people’s taxes.
Apparently he doesn’t believe that anymore.
Also two years ago, the president formed a debt commission to at least begin addressing what is obvious to everyone: our country’s deteriorating financial condition. The Bowles-Simpson Commission worked diligently and compiled a detailed bipartisan report that contained more than $4 trillion in proposed spending cuts and tax increases to attack our mounting debt, a balanced approach if you will. What did the president and the Congress do with the commission’s report? Nothing. It was completely ignored, and the debt has continued to grow. Our national debt now exceeds $16 trillion, and we are on the fast track to $20 trillion and beyond.
Last year brought another significant aspect of the pending “cliff.” It was the Budget Control Act of 2011. The act amounted, again, to inaction. During the contentious debt-ceiling debate in late July 2011, an agreement was reached whereby a select committee was formed to work out a compromise between the two bodies of Congress. In order to compel an agreement, Congress decided to include provisions in the act that were thought to be so onerous both sides would fear the fallout if an agreement was not reached. Failure would result in automatic cuts amounting to more than $1 trillion with half coming from Defense budgets and the other half coming from social programs over the next 10 years. What happened? The committee failed and here we are with no plan to bring the debt under control.
So what stands in the way of compromise? Strip away the finger-pointing for a moment and some things have become apparent. The president refuses to lead in any serious way. He seems comfortable with his “lead from behind” style. Proposals he has made do not address our massive fiscal problems. On the contrary; what he has proposed would, if adopted, make matters much worse.
One of the president’s proposals is for the federal government to not have a debt ceiling. He sent Tim Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, to Capitol Hill last week to advocate that there should be no limit to what the federal government can spend; it should be infinite, endless.
Really? Infinite debt? Is there any thinking person who doesn’t see the fiscal irresponsibility in that? Yet this is what the administration offers as an idea to address our debt crisis. Common sense has gone out the window.
Some numbers the president has chosen to ignore include 99-0 and 414-0. Those were the results of votes taken in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House earlier this year when Congress decisively rejected the president’s “blueprint” for the Fiscal Year 2013 budget. Notice the zeroes. No one bought it. It was a total, complete, bipartisan rejection of what the president proposed to do.
One has to marvel at the president’s relentless attempt to twist the argument in such a way that portrays Republicans as standing in the way of extending tax cuts for the middle class when it is the Republican position to extend existing tax rates for everyone. Republicans want to make the current tax rates permanent for all taxpayers. That would include the middle class.
Republicans have put revenue on the table to a level the President once sought. Now he says double it. We have shown a willingness to negotiate. It is the president who has announced positions that are non-negotiable. It is the president who continues to divide the country. He is showing a willingness to tank our fragile economy and send it back into recession. It is he who is holding the economy hostage.
Why is he willing to do this? He is convinced the American public will again buy his rhetoric that Republicans are to blame. He sees the numbers that re-elected him to a second term last month and believes he can continue to get away with his divisive class-warfare rhetoric. Hopefully, he is wrong.
My message all along, and those of my Republican colleagues, has been clear. We have to stop spending money we don’t have. We have stated repeatedly that we have to stop kicking the proverbial can down the road. Our pleas for fiscal sanity seem to fall on deaf ears or they just evaporate into the ether. Half the country sees what’s happening and dreads about the financial calamity that is inevitable if we stay on our current course. Yet the other half of the country seems either oblivious to it, sees it but doesn’t fully comprehend it and therefore chooses to ignore it, or sees it and understands it but doesn’t care.
I care.
I care very deeply about the country we are leaving our children, a sentiment I believe is shared by all. I don’t want to see us or them buried under a growing mountain of debt. The serious debate and the decisions the president and the Congress have been putting off are needed more today than ever, and it is a mistake if we continue to resort to the practice of ignoring the problem.
I urge the president to join us, work with us and not bring the country to financial ruin, something which at the moment he seems intent on doing.
U.S. Rep. Chip Cravaack represents Minnesota’s 8th Congressional District, including Duluth and Northeastern Minnesota, in the U.S. House.

Interesting.

Nullification The Rightful Remedy: What do we do when the federal government steps outside of it’s Constitutional boundaries? Do we ‘vote the bums out’ and hope that the new bums limit their own power? Do we ask federal judges in black robes to limit the federal government’s power? Thomas Jefferson and James Madison didn’t think so, and neither do we. The rightful remedy to federal tyranny rests in the hands of the people and the States that created the federal government in the first place. It’s called Nullification, and it’s an idea whose time has come. This documentary explores the history of state nullification, and how it is being used today to push back against the encroachment of federal power.

Thanks Scarecrow for the link.  http://www.brotherjohnf.com/archives/91573

Tea Party vs. Progressive Republicans — Battle for the Soul of the GOP

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Since Nov. 6, there has been no shortage of opinions as to why challenger Mitt Romney and the Republican Party failed to ouster President Barack Obama.  Pre-election divisions in the Republican Party between moderates and conservatives have only widened since Romney’s defeat and the party’s strategy for the future remains unclear, a source of contention and heated internal & external debate.Specifically, many now wonder what the sobering 2012 election results means for the right-leaning Tea Party, the champions of personal freedom and smaller government who exploded on the political scene in the 2010 midterm elections.  The re-election of a progressive like Barack Obama would seem to signal the end of the conservative Tea Party, but the movement’s conservative leaders insist that last month’s election results only vindicate the group’s message.

“The Tea Party is not a political party; it’s an informal community of Americans who support a set of fiscally conservative issues,” says FreedomWorks’ Matt Kibbe.  “And when you take a look at the roster of new fiscal conservatives being sent to Congress next year, it’s clear our issues are winning.”
Indeed, although the Tea Party may be focusing the vast majority of its ongoing efforts on local issues, the conservative movement has left an undeniable mark on the national GOP establishment.  The group’s mantra of uncompromising fiscal conservatism and limited government has remained a driving force in shaping Republican platform.
For proof of this, one need look no further than Rep. Paul Ryan’s ascendancy to the No. 2 spot on the GOP ticket.  Once considered a fringe of the congressional conservative coalition, Tea Party-backed fiscal hawks like Ryan are now considered key players at the core of today’s Republican Party.
Critics, of course, will argue that Romney’s defeat in November signals a rebuff of these ideals.  “The 2012 elections have been the undoing of the 2010 Tea Party tsunami that crashed upon Washington,” the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) proclaimed in November.  “The Tea Party is over.”
But the actual election results suggests this declaration is a bit exaggerated and vastly underestimates the conservative Tea Party’s influence in the GOP.
Despite defeats in states like Indiana and Missouri, the Republican Senate caucus gained three new Tea Party-backed members with the addition of Ted Cruz of Texas, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Deb Fischer of Nebraska.  In the House, the Congressional Tea Party Caucus had 60 members before election day.  Of those 60, six did not seek re-election, seven lost their races and 47 were re-elected.  In addition, candidates endorsed by former GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum’s conservative PAC — Missouri’s Ann Wagner and Montana’s Steve Daines — also secured victories for the right.
“The Election Day losers were not the so-called ‘tea partiers,’” Kibbe points out, “they were the candidates embraced by (and some hand-picked by) the Republican establishment who failed to run on the winning message of economic freedom.”  When you boil it down, Kibbe argues, the lack of serious conservative candidates in 2012 meant many principled Republican voters chose to just stay home on Election Day.
This much is true — GOP turnout in 2012 was lower than both the 2008 and 2004 elections.  Turnout this year dropped by 7.9 million voters, falling to 123.6 million from 131.5 million in 2008. This year’s underwhelmed electorate marked the first decline in a presidential election in 16 years. Additionally, only 51.3% of the voting-age population went to the polls.  When you couple low turnout with a few obnoxious and offensive comments on rape from gaffe-prone politicians, it’s hard to say whether the GOP ran with bad policies or just bad candidates.
History also seems to be on the Tea Party’s side. Election results aside, Bloomberg News‘ Albert Hunt predicted the end the GOP establishment and continued rise of the conservative movement after Romney clinched the party’s nomination:

From Washington to the state capitals to the local level, the movement conservatives are in the ascendancy. For years, the Republican base was divided; it’s now dominated by the movement types.
A comparison of Reagan’s last year in office to today illustrates the dramatic change. Then, more than one-third of Senate Republicans were either genuine liberals such as Mark Hatfield, Lowell Weicker and Arlen Specter or moderates such as Bill Cohen, Bob Packwood and Nancy Kassebaum. With the retirement of Olympia Snowe of Maine there’ll be no more than two or three moderate Republicans in the Senate next year.
A quarter-century ago there were dozens of moderate Republicans in the House, members like Chris Shays of Connecticut, Amo Houghton of New York, Bill Gradison of Ohio, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Bill Frenzel of Minnesota. Today there are very few House Republicans who break with conservative orthodoxy.
The changes are equally dramatic at the state and local level. Moderate Republican governors are relics. In Kansas this month, the right wing, led by the state’s conservative governor, drummed a number of the Bob Dole-type centrist Republicans out of the party.

Columbia University political science Professor Brigitte Naco has studied the rise and influence of the Tea Party movement. “Some Democrats say the Tea Party is dead. That’s all baloney,” Naco says. “The fact of the matter is when you look at the basic agenda of the Republican ticket, it’s pretty much what the Tea Party likes.”
But does the GOP’s Old Guard establishment acknowledge or understand this fact?
In recent weeks, House Speaker John Boehner has appeared wobbly on his commitment to the New Guard’s steadfast fiscal conservatism.  Before the election, Boehner downplayed any likelihood of a Republican compromise on the so-called fiscal cliff — the $1.2 trillion in mandatory spending cuts coming at the end of this year.  But after Romney’s defeat, Boehner seemed to pivot, then characterizing Republicans’ re-elected House majority as a mandate to find “common ground” with House Democrats who demand increased spending and higher taxes.
“There will be some kind of war” between the GOP establishment and the Tea Party over the future direction of the party, longtime Republican Party consultant Mike Murphy told the New York Times.  On one side of the divide there are “mathematicians” like Murphy who argue that the GOP must shift its political strategy and policy focus to attract the votes of Hispanics, blacks, younger voters and women; on the other, there are those who believe that basic conservative principles — when articulated appropriately — will ultimately restore unity within the party and attract a wider base of national voters in the future.
Whatever course the party chooses to pursue, it will need to decide quickly as the countdowns to the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential election have already begun.  “We are in a situation where the Democrats are getting a massive amount of votes for free,” Murphy warns.
“Republicans need not jettison their principles. But they must avoid appearing judgmental and callous on social issues,” esteemed GOP strategist Karl Rove argued in the days following the election.
Tea Party favorite and Florida Senator Marco Rubio agrees: “The party has to continually ask ourselves, What do we represent?  But we have to remain the movement on behalf of upward mobility, the party people identify with their hopes and dreams. People want to have a chance.”
FreedomWorks’ Kibbe predicts the party’s pivotal shift that began in 2010 has put the GOP’s Old Guard on a collision course with a new generation of Republican leaders, including Rubio, Ryan, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose steadfast support of small government and limited spending launched him to national fame in a (successful) battle against some of the country’s most ruthless labor unions.
“You are going to see a continuation of the fight between the Old Guard and all of the new blood that has come in since 2010, but I don’t know how dramatic it is going to be,” Kibbe says. “It is getting to point where you can’t reach back and pull another establishment Republican from the queue like we have done with Romney.”
With Republicans holding onto their strong majority in the House of Representatives, we may see a more conservative voting bloc emerge in the 113th Congress than the 112th, and the ongoing debate over the nation’s fiscal crisis may be a good indicator of the divided Republican Party’s trajectory for the next four years.
Will the party establishment steer the party to be more conciliatory when pressured by the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill, or will the GOP dig in against political concessions that threaten their undermining ideological principles?
“Republicans lost this year because they failed to recognize that economic freedom is trending in America.  The shareholders in America have spoken, and they want senior management to stay out of their homes and to stop spending money we don’t have,” Kibbe wrote days after Obama’s re-election.  “The party that can communicate that message is the party that will win over the American electorate come 2014.”

• Posted on December 3, 2012 at 9:22am by Meredith Jessup

Detroit Councilwoman’s Actual Rant: We Voted for You, Obama, Now Give Us Some of That Gov’t ‘Bacon’

Speaking before the Detroit City Council on Tuesday, Councilwoman JoAnn Watson said President Barack Obama owes the ailing city a government bailout because its residents supported him in the 2012 presidential election.
“Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president and there ought to be a quid pro quo and you ought to exercise leadership on that,” said Watson, according to FOX 2 Detroit. “Of course, not just that, but why not?”
“After the election of Jimmy Carter, the honorable Coleman Alexander Young [Detroit’s former mayor of 20 years and former vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee], he went to Washington, D.C. and came home with some bacon,” she added. “That’s what you do.”
As of this writing, the White House has announced no plans to bailout the crumbling Motor City.
But, you know, this video got us thinking: Following the 2012 presidential election, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh were savaged by top GOP leaders for saying President Barack Obama won because he promised to give people “free” stuff.
Romney accused the president of promising “gifts” to minorities, young voters, and women, while Limbaugh dubbed the president “Baracka Claus” (a play on “Santa Claus”).
“In a nation of children,” said Limbaugh, “Santa Claus wins.”
“It’s a proven political strategy, which is give a bunch of money to a group and, guess what, they’ll vote for you,” said Romney.
Romney continued:

What the president did is he gave them two things. One, he gave them a big gift on immigration with the DREAM Act amnesty program, which was obviously very, very popular with Hispanic voters, and then number two was Obamacare … For a home earning — let’s say $30,000 a year — free health care, which is worth about $10,000 a year, I mean it’s massive, it’s huge. So this — he did two very popular things for the Hispanic community.

Exit Question: Given the “tit-for-tat” sentiments expressed by the Detroit Councilwoman, how far off do you think Limbaugh and Gov. Romney are? That is, is it really so outrageous to say that some people voted for President Obama because they were hoping he’d give them “free” stuff?
Follow Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) on Twitter

• Posted on December 5, 2012 at 9:30am by Becket Adams 

 http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/video?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=8033524

Debt Cliff talks.

How do you feel about the GOP offering up tax deductions, such as charitable contributions?  Wouldn't it make more sense to just pass the Bush tax cuts permanently and force the Senate and Obama to react?

Great

A must watch. And a lesson for the right.

http://blip.tv/davidhorowitztv/bill-whittle-6444929

A case of another fool.

Bob Costas is a damn idiot.  If you did not know that already, now you do.  Costas decided to preach to us yet again from his pulpit.  Suggesting that guns have a personality and brain to commit terrible acts.  When did our society and those who have positions to speak to the masses, give inanimate objects life.  Somehow we have to attach human action and emotion to things made of plastic and metal.  Rush put it best, "Are forks responsible for making people fat?"  Americans watch sports to be entertained, yet, television has decided to educate "we dolts" to understand the dangers in our lives.  Tell them to stick it up there...............you get the idea.  Weigh in!