Rush Limbaugh explains and delivers irrefutable evidence of how the elite media smears and brazenly lie about those who they oppose for partisan reasons. ’Elite media’ includes the networks and the newspapers. Watch carefully:
Yup another university sued for discriminating against and violating the civil rights of Christian students.
Calif. professor to student: “Ask God what your grade is”
L.A. Community College District after professor calls student ‘fascist bastard’ for sharing beliefs on faith and marriage.
It seems that every week or two another university is sued for this or a similar offense and all those cases have one thing in common; the university loses.
Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom filed a lawsuit against officials of the Los Angeles Community College District Wednesday. The lawsuit comes after a professor censored and threatened to expel a student following a speech about marriage and his Christian faith during an open-ended assignment in a public speaking class.
“Christian students shouldn’t be penalized or discriminated against for speaking about their beliefs,” said ADF Senior Counsel David French. “Public institutions of higher learning cannot selectively censor Christian speech. This student was speaking well within the confines of his professor’s assignment when he was censored and ultimately threatened with expulsion.”
On Nov. 24, 2008, Los Angeles City College speech professor John Matteson interrupted and ended Jonathan Lopez’s presentation mid-speech, calling him a “fascist bastard” in front of the class for speaking about his faith, which included reading the dictionary definition of marriage and reciting two Bible verses. Instead of allowing Lopez to finish, Matteson told the other students they could leave if they were offended. When no one left, Matteson dismissed the class. Refusing to grade the assigned speech, Matteson wrote on Lopez’s evaluation, “Ask God what your grade is.”
One week later, after seeing Lopez talking to the college’s dean of academic affairs, Matteson told Lopez that he would make sure he’d be expelled from school. Matteson’s treatment of Lopez during his speech follows an earlier incident in which Matteson told his entire class after the November election, “If you voted yes on Proposition 8, you are a fascist bastard.”
“Professor Matteson clearly violated Mr. Lopez’s free speech rights by engaging in viewpoint discrimination and retaliation because he disagreed with the student’s religious beliefs,” said French. “When students are given open-ended assignments in a public speaking class, the First Amendment protects their ability to express their views. Moreover, the district has a speech code that has created a culture of censorship on campus. America’s public universities and colleges are supposed to be a ‘marketplace of ideas,’ not a hotbed of intolerance.”
Now here is the rub, if this had to come to a lawsuit, this means that the administration is sitting on it’s hands. not going far enough to protect the students or backing the profesor. This is no surprise because as in the IUSB case, the IUPUI case, the SFSU cases, the TSU case, the Wayne State University case, and the Michigan case, it was the university administration that knowingly and willfully violated the student’s rights and the law.
The College Republicans at SFSU held an anti-hamas event on campus. They had a petition for students to sign in opposition to Hamas. Playing off the Bush shoe throwing incident, students who opposed hamas were encouraged to throw a shoe at the Hamas flag. Radical leftists and Hamas supporters rallied against the event and became violent. TWO students were taken into custody and charged for attacking the College Republicans.
Aftermath – Socialists and Islamists demand end to free speech at SFSU:
2/12/09
An anonymous source from inside the Palestinian Club and the Socialist club at SFSU has provided the College Republicans with the following information:
In response to the College Republican’s anti-Hamas event (video below) held on Wednesday the “offended parties” have banded together to push the school to punish the College Republicans for throwing shoes at the Hamas Flag. Over the next few days the coalition will release a statement making the following demands:
-Authorities must drop all charges pending against Muhammad Abdullah and Jeremy Stern, the two protestors that assaulted the College Republicans and stole their property.
-The school must sanction/punish the College Republicans for throwing shoes at the Hamas flag.
-The groups must organize a forum to “educate” students about what forms of speech are not acceptable according to the offended parties, specifically the always ambiguous “hate speech.”
So far we’ve confirmed that the General Union of Palestinian Students and Muslim Student Association are the main players in the push to ban/punish forms of speech that could potentially offend students.
Timeline of violence by leftist/Islamist students at SFSU:
Last week the College Republicans were attacked by a group of radical students on campus. Some protesters openly supported Hamas. One Hamas supporter leaned in to the table and said, “Of course I support Hamas, I voted for hamas! I fought for hamas! How dare you!” Some media outlets and bloggers think this is the opening salvo in a battle to suppress “offensive” speech at sfsu. But the frightening reality is that this kind of thing has been going on at SFSU for quite some time now. The following is a timeline of events that have taken place at SFSU that involve radicals trying to silence political opposition using violence or threats of violence. (Click the link for the timeline).
Bill O’reilly did a spot on one of the ‘incidents:
O’Reilly said that they look like Al-Qeada. They may be. According to Jihadwatch and some other watchdogs many Muslim Student Organizations are affiliated with or sympathetic to Al-Qeada.
SFSU GOP gets note from the violent student who was arrested and responds:
UPDATE: K Real responds. The arrested protester wrote to us with a dissertation that contained the following literary gems:
-”Standing on that flag could have caused many problems for the USA including a global boycott of US Goods which could have cost the USA billions during a recession. Food for thought homies.”
-”Petty Thefty all that was alleged! My case was thrown out already!!! So what theft? I took my flag back and it is were it belongs!!! “
-”Standing on that flag was like a KKK cross burning. “
-”yeah enjoy laughing at the fact that I have tens of thousands of people who adore me. Don’t be jealous!”
We’re flattered that k real thinks our club could start a global boycott of the United States. Anyone else think he’s giving us WAY too much credit? Whatever, we’ll take it! As far the case being dropped: Are we supposed to be surprised that the San Francisco DA wouldn’t press charges against a protester that attacked Republicans? We would have been shocked if punishment had been sought in the case. The KKK burned crosses to warn of impending violence and used it as a tool of their terror. It was YOU who committed acts of violence, not us. As for the “tens of thousands of people who adore you,” if thinking that helps you get to sleep at night, more power to you.
And of course the SFSU administration is covering for those who commit violence and had to be sued for violating the legal rights of College Republicans.
Today on Fox News Radio Senator Lindsay Graham said when we here at the IUSB Vision have been saying for weeks. The vast majority of thiese trillions are being spent for either corruption reasons or political reasons, not economic ones.
When the first bailout came the government promised to buy bad mortage assets to help people who were in trouble, renegotiate the mortages for those people which would also help out the banks. Instead Hank Paulsen handed out billion to banks he picked to be winners, and denied banks he chose to be losers so the banks who got billions of your money could buy up their competitors and get richer in the process.
The Federal Reserve, Treasury and now the Democrat Congress (democrats have been in control there for 3 years now) have/are spending trillions and so far not one bad mortgage asset has been bought. The stimulus bill spends almost a trillion dollars and even though small business creates 75% of the jobs in the United States, only 3.5% of the stimulus is there to help small business. Instead theya re gioving billions to political cronies and wall street and hoping it will trickle down to the rest of us….. or trickle back to the Democratic Party in kickbacks.
We hope to get a copy of the audio from Senator Graham to post here. In the mean time, we welcome Senator Graham (whose leadership is often inconsistant) to the club.
They call ity the “Fairmness Doctrine or “Localism” – but in practice it is plain old fashioned censorship in spite of the Orwellian relabel. Democrats are being stupid with this. If they try and do it it is likely that the Supreme Court won’t stand for it. If on the slim chance that they do Republicans would have two options when they take power again: eliminate it or enforce it on MSNBC, NBC, CBS, CNN and ABC just to see how the Democrats like it. Without these networks covering for the Democrats and spreading propaganda for them as they did in the last campaign, they would have a much smaller chance at holding power again.
Remember when the Left laughed at conservatives’ concerns over the Fairness Doctrine? Barack Obama already said he opposed the reimposition of the FCC rule, they said. After all, Obama’s campaign gave this definitive statement in June 2008:
“Senator Obama does not support re-imposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters,” said press secretary Michael Ortiz in an e-mail to B&C late Wednesday.
“He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible,” said Ortiz.
Today, Chris Wallace interviewed David Axelrod and asked him directly about the Fairness Doctrine — and suddenly the White House adviser got a lot less definitive:
WALLACE: Will you rule out reimposing the Fairness Doctrine?
AXELROD: I’m going to leave that issue to Julius Genachowski, our new head of the FCC, to, and the president, to discuss. So I don’t have an answer for you now.
Lester Kinsolving, the conservative radio host, has twice asked Robert Gibbs about it in the briefing room, and each time, the press secretary didn’t reveal the administration’s position.
Last week, I reached out to press office staffers in order to find out if the administration’s position is the same as in June, and have not yet received a response.
It’s an easy question. Does this administration believe in free speech or government censorship? Their sudden inability to provide a clear answer, when they had no problem giving such assurances eight months ago, does not bode well for the answer.
I’d like to say I told you so to all of those who accused us of paranoia, but the window on that ability to do so on the airwaves looks like it’s about to expire — like all of Obama’s campaign promises.
The American media should be ashamed of themselves on this issue. They pose as the defenders of the First Amendment and free speech. Why are Chris Wallace and Michael Calderone the only MSM people pursuing this?
Talk radio has a much larger audience than the TV networks. The “elites” at CBS and NBC can’t be happy about that. If talk radio is censored it will make talk radio’s ratings tank. No one will listen to it. The “MSM” thinks that their propaganda will become the default place for information after that.
Update: Now they are back to saying no censorship. Was a nice trial balloon hugh Axelrod?
Professor Brad Schiller from the University of Nevada blasts Obama for being dishonest about the economy. Forunately Schiller is in a business and economics department and not in a liberal arts department or social work department or writing this might harm his career.
President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.
AP
In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today’s economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.
This fearmongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics. It is bad history because our current economic woes don’t come close to those of the 1930s. At worst, a comparison to the 1981-82 recession might be appropriate. Consider the job losses that Mr. Obama always cites. In the last year, the U.S. economy shed 3.4 million jobs. That’s a grim statistic for sure, but represents just 2.2% of the labor force. From November 1981 to October 1982, 2.4 million jobs were lost — fewer in number than today, but the labor force was smaller. So 1981-82 job losses totaled 2.2% of the labor force, the same as now.
Job losses in the Great Depression were of an entirely different magnitude. In 1930, the economy shed 4.8% of the labor force. In 1931, 6.5%. And then in 1932, another 7.1%. Jobs were being lost at double or triple the rate of 2008-09 or 1981-82.
This was reflected in unemployment rates. The latest survey pegs U.S. unemployment at 7.6%. That’s more than three percentage points below the 1982 peak (10.8%) and not even a third of the peak in 1932 (25.2%). You simply can’t equate 7.6% unemployment with the Great Depression.
Other economic statistics also dispel any analogy between today’s economic woes and the Great Depression. Real gross domestic product (GDP) rose in 2008, despite a bad fourth quarter. The Congressional Budget Office projects a GDP decline of 2% in 2009. That’s comparable to 1982, when GDP contracted by 1.9%. It is nothing like 1930, when GDP fell by 9%, or 1931, when GDP contracted by another 8%, or 1932, when it fell yet another 13%.
Auto production last year declined by roughly 25%. That looks good compared to 1932, when production shriveled by 90%. The failure of a couple of dozen banks in 2008 just doesn’t compare to over 10,000 bank failures in 1933, or even the 3,000-plus bank (Savings & Loan) failures in 1987-88. Stockholders can take some solace from the fact that the recent stock market debacle doesn’t come close to the 90% devaluation of the early 1930s.
Mr. Obama’s analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they’re also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren’t likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence that is restraining a spending pickup. Beyond that, fearmongering can trigger a political stampede to embrace a “recovery” package that delivers a lot less than it promises. A more cool-headed assessment of the economy’s woes might produce better policies.
Mr. Schiller, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, is the author of “The Economy Today” (McGraw-Hill, 2007).
Michelle Malkin has this awesome post on her web site today:
1,500 bags of pork rinds for Schmucky
By Michelle Malkin • February 16, 2009 04:30 AM
Last week, I noted Kentucky radio talk show host Leland Conway’s campaign to send Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer bags of pork rinds in response to his arrogant claim that Americans don’t care about the pork in the trillion-dollar-porkulus.
Guess what? Conway’s call produced a mountain — an estimated 1,500 pork rind bags that will be packed up and delivered to the Schmuckster’s office. Yes, they care:
Guess he’ll just dismiss Central Kentucky taxpayers as more of the “chattering classes”…
E-Verify revisions specifically stripped from the Porkulus Bill so no check to see if a worker is legally eligible will be made in the few jobs that this bill will create.
How to get rich off loaning your campaign money and take political payoffs perfectly laundered to avoid the ethics laws. Ed Morrissey from Hotair.com explains:
Here’s how it’s done:
Withdraw money from a pension or tax-protected savings account to justify charging yourself an interest rate that would make most credit-card companies blush.
Pay only the interest as long as possible on the loan.
Hold fundraisers specifically to retire the debt you owe to yourself, and make sure donors understand exactly where that money goes.
Give yourself all the donations from those fundraisers.
Once you have that system established, it allows contributors to stuff money into your pockets as long as the loan remains outstanding. At 18% interest, that could go on for decades, and in Napolitano’s case, she already has one decade on the books. Napolitano has managed to keep more than half of the debt alive as principal while earning almost 150% just on interest payments — and at this rate, she could do this for another twenty years.
And she’s done it while giving contributors a direct line to her checking accounts — and it’s all legal.
Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) — During a decade in Congress, California Representative Grace Napolitano has pocketed more than $200,000 of political contributions by charging as much as 18 percent interest on money she loaned to her own campaign.
The suburban Los Angeles Democrat made the $150,000 loan in 1998, when she was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Through Dec. 31, her campaign committee has used donations to pay Napolitano $221,780 of interest while reducing the principal by just $64,727, a review of her Federal Election Commission filings shows.
As recently as June 2008, Napolitano held a fundraiser asking supporters and political action committees for money to pay down the 1998 debt. Napolitano, her spokesman and her campaign’s lawyers didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“I find this practice quite reprehensible,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a Washington advocacy group. Interest payments from Napolitano’s campaign treasury have “proven exorbitantly profitable,” he said. “Candidates are not supposed to personally benefit from these campaign funds.”
Check This out:
Former FEC Chairman Scott Thomas, a Democrat, said that while interest charges are legal he’s never seen another case “where someone has basically continued to generate interest income off a campaign loan this long.” Most candidates only seek repayment of the initial loan amount, Thomas said.
“This is unbelievable — it really is extraordinary,” said Michael Toner, a former Republican member of the FEC who was general counsel for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Toner said he “cannot recall a situation” where a candidate collected interest in sums that “actually exceeded the original loan balance.”
In the first five months of 2008, Napolitano’s campaign paid her almost $68,000 of interest, according to FEC records. An additional $15,227 of principal was paid last May.
It had to be done right now Obama said when he spoke in Elkhart. The rush was getting it through before enough of the American people found out what this pork lined corruption payoff bill this was.
PRESIDENT'S DAY: President Obama and Michelle Obama exit Table Fifty-Two in Chicago last night after enjoying a Valentine's Day dinner at the eatery.
After pushing Congress for weeks to hurry up and pass the massive $787 billion stimulus bill, President Obama promptly took off for a three-day holiday getaway.
Obama arrived at his home in Chicago on Friday, and treated wife Michelle to a Valentine’s Day dinner downtown last night. The couple was spotted leaving upscale Table Fifty-Two, which specializes in Southern cuisine, with the first lady toting what appeared to be a doggie bag.
The president plans to spend the Presidents’ Day weekend in the Windy City, and is not expected to sign the bill until Tuesday, when he travels to Denver to discuss his economic plan.
Both the House and Senate passed the bill Friday night.
The push to get the bill through before the holiday weekend was so frantic, members of Congress didn’t have a chance to read all 1,071 pages of the document before they could vote.
This is a lecture that every college student should see. If you take the campus Israeli/Palestinian conflict class you especially need to watch this lecture because this maybe the very best example of another perspective that you may ever see. Prager is well known for his charisma and logic. The lecture is entertaining and you will not regret watching.
Dennis Prageris one of the most sought after public speakers on the lecture circuit. His books include titles on happiness, philosophy, politics, and religion. Like Ayn Rand, Prager points out that universities are morally backwards and the “intellectuals” they produce are often half educated fools.
As they say on the TV show “24,” the following took place last week between 9 and 10 p.m. on a flight from Los Angeles to Denver.
I spoke for a few minutes to the 20-year-old woman seated across the aisle from me.
She: What brings you to Denver?”
Me: I am giving a speech.
She: What do you do?
Me: I’m a radio talk show host.
She: Who did you vote for?
Me: McCain
She: Why?
Me: Smaller government and the war on terror.
She: Terror is the new communism.
Me: Communism killed about a hundred million people. And who do you think attacked and killed 3,000 of us on Sept. 11?
She: The government.
For the record, as I believe this to be essential to understanding this young woman’s views, she is a student attending the University of California Santa Barbara.
Truth is she had to be a student at a major university. She would never have come up with “Terror is the new Communism” on her own. It is a moral obscenity that one has to learn.
Of course, there is an irony to this statement. Meant in the opposite way she meant it, I could largely assent to the proposition that terror is the new communism. Communism was an enslaving and murderous threat in its time and the Jihadism is such a threat in our lifetime.
But that is not how this young woman meant the statement. As she has learned history and the contemporary world, communism was a bogeyman in its time and terror is a bogeyman in our time.
When I told her that communism had killed 100 million people, I could not tell if she even processed the words. It was as if had I uttered a series of nonsense syllables. She either didn’t believe me or didn’t care.
On the assumption that I had met a person with a normal conscience, the only rational explanation for her non-reaction is that she didn’t believe me and regarded what I said as right-wing propaganda (just as the belief in that Islamist terror threatens us).
In her belief that neither communism nor terror were/are real threats, I suspect this young woman represents many college students. If one wants to understand what left-wing dominance in university social sciences departments produces, one merely had to meet this young woman.
At most universities, communism is a non-evil, indeed, largely a non-issue. The most enslaving and murderous movement in history is almost never taught as such. When communism is mentioned at all, it is usually solely in order to show how vile anti-communists were. Thus, as little as students may know about McCarthyism, most students far more readily identify it with evil than they do communism. Indeed, more could probably identify Joseph McCarthy than Joseph Stalin.
Nor is this a matter of students not being taught to label anything as evil. They have no problem labeling Nazism, Fascism, George W. Bush, slavery, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and tobacco companies as evil. It’s just that they won’t label communism as such.
Does one in 10.000 students know of the communist terror-famine that took about 6 million Ukarainian lives. How many know about the communist Pol Pot, who butchered nearly one-third of his fellow Cambodians? Or how many innocents were murdered in the Gulag Archipelago (or could even identify it)? Or that China’s communist tyrant Mao Zedong killed about 60 million of his fellow Chinese? Or that Communist North Korea is essentially a concentration camp in the guise of a country?
The answer to all these questions is very few.
And that, quite frankly, breaks my heart. I am currently reading “Mao: The Secret Life,” almost universally regarded, even in the mainstream media, as the most important book on Mao ever written. According to the authors, in 1930-31 alone, Mao and his gang developed 120 types of torture for use on innocent people he wanted to force into phony confessions so as to rule by terror. They included burning the vaginas of wives of opponents and pulling wires through men’s penises, which were then attached to their ears and plucked.
These poor souls have no memorial. Least of all at an American university.
Aasiya Z. and Muzzammil S. Hassan in happier times.
Today comes news from Orchard Park, near Buffalo, New York, of Hassan’s arrest on second-degree murder charges for having beheaded his wife, Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Aasiya (known professionally as Aasiya Zubair) had recently filed for divorce and won an order of protection forcing him out of their shared house; it appears that Hassan attempted to create a murder scene for police that would allay suspicion of himself, but failed in this.
Erie County District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III offered his view that “Obviously, this is the worst form of domestic violence possible.”
Comments: (1) No, this is not at all obviously about domestic violence. It is obviously about a totalitarian ideology in our midst that authorities like district attorneys refuse to open their eyes to. Phyllis Chesler establishes this point beyond a doubt in a forthcoming Middle East Quarterly article, “Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?” Spring 2009, pp. 61-69.
(2) According to news account from 2004, it was Aasiya’s concerns about raising Muslim children in the United States that inspired Muzzammil to develop Bridges TV.
(3) I predict that this atrocity brings Bridges TV’s short and ignominious career to an even faster and ignominious end.
When Muzzammil Hassan reached the Orchard Park Police headquarters at 6:20 p. m. on February 12, he announced that his wife was dead at the Bridges TV station, where officers proceeded to go and find her body. They then closed off Bridges TV’s offices as a crime scene.
The police have not yet located the murder weapon.
Corey Hogan, whose law firm had represented Aasiya Hassan in the couple’s divorce proceeding, noted that “There had been problems before — there had been prior incidents of physical abuse” and that discussions were underway about arrangements for the couple’s two children, ages 4 and 6, as well as for Muzzammil’s two older children from a previous marriage, ages 17 and 18.
If you think this doesn’t have real consequences, think again. Wasn’t it Ayn Rand who said that they would spend until they ran out of other people’s money? $65.5 Trillion.
The total U.S. obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits to be paid in the future, effectively have placed the U.S. government in bankruptcy, even before new continuing social welfare obligation embedded in the massive spending plan are taken into account.
We told you that China was balking. Can’t blame them. As the man says, people will only buy our debt if we can show them that we are running our financial house with some sanity. We aren’t. There will be serious economic consequences.
UPDATE: Hillary asks China to keep buying our debt.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Sunday urged China to keep buying US debt as she wrapped up her first overseas trip, during which she agreed to work closely with Beijing on the financial crisis. Clinton made the plea shortly before leaving China, the final stop on a four-nation Asian tour that also took her to Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, where she worked the crowds to try to restore America’s standing abroad.
In Beijing, she called on authorities in Beijing to continue buying US Treasuries, saying it would help jumpstart the flagging US economy and stimulate imports of Chinese goods.
“By continuing to support American Treasury instruments the Chinese are recognising our interconnection. We are truly going to rise or fall together,” Clinton said at the US embassy here.
Clinton had sought to focus on economic and environmental issues in Beijing, saying Washington’s concerns about the human rights situation in China should not be a distraction from those vital matters.
Beijing’s human rights record emerged nonetheless as an issue, as Chinese activists on Saturday reported being harassed or intimidated by Chinese authorities in a bid to stop them speaking out or meeting Clinton while she was here.
“Plainclothes police blocked me from leaving my home. They were afraid I would try to meet with Hillary Clinton or others in her delegation,” democracy campaigner Jiang Qisheng told AFP by phone on Sunday.
Clinton and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi largely agreed to disagree on human rights as they pledged future joint action on the economy and climate change.
And what comes out of their mouths is one of the GOP plans.
For what they are spending the government could suspend all taxes for a year.
Not only is she smart, but does anyone doubt that she is truly one of the world’s most lovely? She is Michelle Muccio of the Acton Institute. I wonder if she has a poster or a book or something.
The Democrats promised more ethical and transparent government. They promised to post all legislation on the internet for 48 hours before final passage to ensure that all members and the public could read the bills before theya re voted on. The porkulus package is HR1, thats right the first bill of the session and the Democrats have broken that promise already.
In a press conference Thursday, the House Republican leadership spoke candidly about being kept out of the House-Senate conference on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid so-called “economic stimulus” bill. They confirmed they had not yet seen the text of the bill as of 4 p.m.Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he was unsure how many Democrats would vote with Republicans again on this bill but that he thought Republicans “may get a few” Democrats to side with them. The fact that the Demos have now broken their promise to have the public able to see the bill for 48 hours may drive more Dems into the Republican camp.
“[I] don’t know, ‘cause they haven’t seen the bill either,” Boehner said.
“The American people have a right to know what’s in this bill,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind) told HUMAN EVENTS after the press conference. “Every member of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — voted to post this bill on the internet for 48 hours, 48 hours ago. We’ll see if the Democrats keep their word.”
Actually — as of 5:15 pm, the Democrats had broken their word. The stimulus bill — which we still haven’t seen — will be released late tonight and will be brought up on the House floor at 9 am tomorrow.
The following statement was released by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer at 4:57 p.m.:
“The House is scheduled to meet at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow and is expected to proceed directly to consideration of the American Recovery and Reinvestment conference report. The conference report text will be filed this evening, giving members enough time to review the conference report before voting on it tomorrow afternoon.”
“When John McCain warned of socialism in the campaign I thought he was fear mongering. John McCain was right and I was wrong.” – Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox News Radio this morning.
Thanks to a sleazy back-room deal between Barack Obama and Harry Reid, the city least in need of government bailouts will get a $8 billion pork project in the final version of Porkulus. Now Southern California residents can have another way to lose their money, and we can all pay for the ride:
In late-stage talks, Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pressed for $8 billion to construct high-speed rail lines, quadrupling the amount in the bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday.
Reid’s office issued a statement noting that a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas rail might get a big chunk of the money.
And what got cut to ensure Reid’s pork bonanza?
To tamp down costs, several tax provisions were dropped or sharply cut back. A provision popular with Republicans and the big business lobby that would have awarded about $54 billion to money-losing businesses over the next two years was instead limited to small businesses, greatly reducing its cost.
A $15,000 tax credit for anybody buying a home over the next year was dropped; instead, first-time homebuyers could claim an $8,000 credit for homes bought by the end of August. Car buyers could deduct the sales tax they paid on a new car but not the interest on their car loans.
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico is missing 67 computers, including 13 that were lost or stolen in the past year. Officials say no classified information has been lost.
The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight on Wednesday released a memo dated Feb. 3 from the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration outlining the loss of the computers.
Kevin Roark, a spokesman for Los Alamos, on Wednesday confirmed the computers were missing and said the lab was initiating a monthlong inventory to account for every computer. He said the computers were a cybersecurity issue because they may contain personal information like names and addresses, but they did not contain any classified information.
Thirteen of the missing computers were lost or stolen in the past 12 months, including three computers that were taken from a scientist’s home in Santa Fe, N.M., on Jan. 16, and a BlackBerry belonging to another employee was lost “in a sensitive foreign country,” according to the memo and an e-mail from a senior lab manager.
Sometimes the foreign press just nails it when they look at American domestic policy.
Literally trillions of dollars given to Wall Street, the expansion of government and special interest groups and how much do you think that you will see? Hey they are considering putting up a tiny 50 billion in comparison to help people with their mortgages. They could have paid off 90% of every mortgage in the United States with the money they have/are spending. We are not just talking about the trillion Congress has put up, but the trillions from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have put up as well.
Remember when they said that if we didn’t do that first trillion in bailouts that we would continue to fall. Well they got the trillion and did they help the mortgage crisis? Nope. They used the money to buy each other up and hand out billions to each other and the economy has continued to fall. So what is the answer, lets do it again….. (Quinn’s Law # 10: Leftists never think what they are doing is wrong, they only think they haven’t done enough of it yet or it is underfunded).
Barack Obama and Tim Geithner rob Main Street of $3 trillion
The sparkle has gone from his eyes already,” an American acquaintance said to me yesterday, referring to Barack Obama. “He doesn’t know what to do.” Obama’s performance at his press conference confirmed that impression, with the rhetoric of the campaign trail, fluent and banal as piped musak, replaced with long hesitations not just between sentences, but between clauses. This was an auto-cue junkie suffering cold turkey.
When a political lightweight is out of his depth, he seeks to compensate by counterfeiting the certainty he is far from feeling. Obama’s rantings in defence of his stimulus plan have assumed an apocalyptic intensity. Unless Congress agrees to flush almost $1 trillion of Joe Citizen’s hard-earned bucks down the sanitation, “Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”
So, America had better listen to the man who “screwed up” over Tom Daschle because he alone has the wisdom to extricate the US of A from financial disaster. The instrument of salvation is the biggest barrel of pork that the undeserving needy have ever seen in American history, from sea to shining sea. The financial crisis may seem complex, but the solution – the real solution – depends on one simple premise: tax cuts revive economies, handouts do not.
Trillion-dollar giveaways are like buses: there will be another one along in a moment. Driving the next vehicle is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who thinks it would be a nice gesture to hand another $2 trillion to Gordon Gekko and his pals on Wall Street. Apparently the last handout made no appreciable difference, so better throw some more moolah into the piranha pool – some of those poor SOBs are down to their last executive jet.
Where will the money come from? No problem – we just divert it from Main Street to Wall Street, an increasingly familiar route to those in the White House and on Capitol Hill who specialise in redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich. This seems to be in addition to Geithner’s $0.5 trillion scheme to stimulate spending in real estate, drawing cash largely from the US Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
So, overall, Barack and Tim are currently disposing of more than $3 trillion of taxpayers’ money. The only remotely comparable stimulus scheme proposed for America was a fictitious one: when the James Bond villain Auric Goldfinger planned to detonate a nuclear device in Fort Knox and irradiate the nation’s gold reserves. Incinerating $3 trillion in dollar bills could not be more wasteful than the Obama stimulus plan.
It is madness. These lunatics are mugging Main Street of $3 trillion and squandering it on a liberal fantasy. It could be a generation before America recovers – not simply from the loss of these funds, but from the economic mismanagement of which it is a symptom. The fall-out will be very serious for the rest of the world. Hope? Change we need? Vote in haste, repent at leisure.
I laughed out loud when they said that these Congressman are against this because they are for the failed policies of the last eight years. Most of the GOP members left in the House are those who stood up against the growth of government, the corruption and are those who pushed legislation to reform mortgage industry policing that Democrats opposed while they were taking incredible amounts of money from that industry, namely Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street interests. Many of the Republicans who went along with this kind of legislation were thrown out of office in the last two elections.
The AFSCME is a government employees union. This bill is largely a growth of government bill and AFSCME stands to make many millions off of this bill so they will have millions to kick back to Democrats.
This bill is what was wrong with government policy in the last eight years on steroids.
Update – Plum Online is reporting that AFSCME’s 527 group coordinated with the White House on this ad. That’s illegal. (Hat Tip Hotair.com)
Care to freeze your buns off in one of these things? How do you think it did in the insurance industry crash tests? What do you think one of the local potholes would do to one of these things? Congress is going to spend hundreds of millions buying these via the porkulus bill.
The $838 billion economic stimulus bill that passed the Senate yesterday contains $300 million for the government to purchase a fleet of “green” cars.
But the money won’t just go to buy fuel-efficient hybrids such as the Ford Escape or Chevy Volt.
The cash also can be used to purchase “neighborhood electric vehicles.”
The NEVs, which resemble streamlined golf carts, scoot at up to 25 mph, operate on battery power and can be plugged into 110-volt outlets for charging.
They are sometimes used at hospitals, college campuses and retirement communities, and can cost around $8,000 each. They don’t produce carbon emissions.
The House-passed version of the stimulus provides even more money for federal car purchases – $600 million. The pot of money also specifically includes the NEVs.
There’s also a tax subsidy in the bill to juice up vehicle sales – a potential a job-killer for golf caddies.
The provision gives a 10 percent tax credit off the price of specified “low-speed” vehicles costing up to $40,000..
UPDATE – Republicans shut out of bill negotiations make video outside the door –
Yes indeed – this is the most transparent, ethical and bipartisan government ever right? This is what they promised during the campaign. Now look at how brazen they break their promises.
It appears that Pelosi and Reid staff met all through the night in secret with Democratic conferees’ staff to cobble together the “stimulus” conference report. Republican conferees were frozen out.
The objective appears to be to produce a final conference report on the trillion-dollar spending bill by this afternoon so that floor action can take place in both chambers by Thursday.
They intend to ram this trillion-dollar spending bill through with as little debate and scrutiny as possible.
The House voted unanimously yesterday in support of a Republican measure stating that the American should have 48 hrs to review the bill prior to passage. Will Democrats follow through? Or will they do the opposite of what they voted to do yesterday?
RedState has more details from GOP Rep. Tom Price on the freeze-out.
These promises below are being abandoned already……
End the Practice of Writing Legislation Behind Closed Doors: As president, Barack Obama will restore the American people’s trust in their government by making government more open and transparent. Obama will work to reform congressional rules to require all legislative sessions, including committee mark-ups and conference committees, to be conducted in public. By making these practices public, the American people will be able to hold their leaders accountable for wasteful spending and lawmakers won’t be able to slip favors for lobbyists into bills at the last minute.
Create a Public “Contracts and Influence” Database: As president, Obama will create a “contracts and influence” database that will disclose how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and what contracts they are getting and how well they complete them.
Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.
Shine Light on Earmarks and Pork Barrel Spending: Obama’s Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act will shed light on all earmarks by disclosing the name of the legislator who asked for each earmark, along with a written justification, 72 hours before they can be approved by the full Senate.
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AP
by Gerald Warner 
Yup that’s Hillary.
