How To Avoid The Facts While Conducting An Investigation

Carol Platt Liebau posted an article at Townhall.com yesterday about the Inspector General‘s report on the Internal Revenue‘s dealing with people and groups associated with conservatism. Ms. Liebau has one of those analytical minds that can sort through the fluff and get to the heart of the issue. Her article is amazing in the way it asks the questions no one investigating seemed to be interested in asking.

The article reports:

There’s nothing in there about the targeting of individuals, as I noted last night.

There’s nothing in there about who leaked documents to the media (which I wrote about here).

There’s nothing in there about how an Obama relection campaign chairman came to possess confidential information he used to attack Mitt Romney.

What the report reveals — more than anything else — is that it’s a starting point for some sharp inquiry by Congress, raising more questions than it answers.

These are two of the questions Ms. Liebau wants answered:

2. On page 3, the report notes that “During the 2012 election cycle, some members of Congress raised concerns about selective enforcement.”  What were these members told? What investigation had been done internally — and by whom — before members like Orrin Hatch were assured that their concerns were baseless? This goes to whether members of Congress were deliberately lied to — and by whom — and whether their concerns were even taken seriously in the first place.

3. Also on page 3, the report states that some members of Congress asked the IRS to investigate whether existing 501(c)(4)’s were engaged in improper campaign activity. In other words, some members were urging greater scrutiny of 501(c)(4)’s.  What members were these? Whom did they contact at the IRS? What were they told, and by whom? It would be interesting to know whether any former staffers of these members participated in the wrongdoing.  What’s more, if top officials were responsive to these requests, it might suggest where direction for the targeting came from.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is amazing how much paper you can use to say nothing and how many questions you can ask that do not lead in the direction of finding out the truth.

I am reaching a point where I think 99% of the people now in power in Washington should be voted out of office.

 

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It’s An Old Story But We Are Just Now Hearing It

There is a lot of information coming out today about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeting conservatives for excessive scrutiny.  On Saturday, I posted an article which included some of the extra questions conservative groups were asked when they applied for their tax exemption status (rightwinggranny.com).  The use of the IRS and other groups to target political opponents is not new–the Clintons turned it into an art form. The Obamas have also learned to use it frequently.

In May of 2012, I posted an article about Intimidation of one Romney donor (rightwinggranny.com). Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of Melaleuca Inc.was subjected to the same kind of scrutiny that normally be reserved for a political candidate. Today’s Daily Caller details some of what Mr. Vandersloot was subjected to.

Fox News posted a story today showing how the initial interest of the IRS into the Tea Party Movement was expanded:

The article at Fox explains:

The internal IG timeline shows a unit in the agency was looking at Tea Party and “patriot” groups dating back to early 2010. But it shows that list of criteria drastically expanding by the time a June 2011 briefing was held. It then included groups focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to “make America a better place to live.” It even flagged groups whose file included criticism of “how the country is being run.” 

By early 2012, the criteria were updated to include organizations involved in “limiting/expanding government,” education on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and social economic reform. 

I remember that when Barack Obama was elected, many people were complaining that we were about to enter Jimmy Carter’s second term. I don’t think that is right. I think Barack Obama has morphed into the third term of Richard Nixon.

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Mark Sanford Has Won The South Carolina Special Election

Tonight the Washington Post is reporting that former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been elected to the House of Representatives.

The article reports:

Mitt Romney won this district by 18 points last fall, but Sanford’s personal history made the seat competitive. Democrats poured money into the race while national Republicans abandoned their candidate, giving Colbert Busch a 5-to-1 advantage in outside spending.

If the American people can forgive Bill Clinton for his indiscretions, I guess they can forgive Mark Sanford for his. There are two things in this election that bode well for the Republicans in 2014–the amount of money poured into the coffers of Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch did not make a difference, and a seriously flawed candidate whose positions on issues are in line with the voters can win an election despite his flaws.

As the House of Representatives considers the immigration bill that the Senate will hand them in the near future, they would do well to keep this election in mind–issues won–money did not.

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The President Who Cried ‘Wolf’

There really is a wolf, but it’s not in the sequester–it’s in the unsustainable spending which is creating an unmanageable deficit. But that ‘wolf’ is being ignored–to some extent by both sides of the aisle in Washington.

But back to the President crying ‘wolf.’ Marc Thiessen posted an article at the American Enterprise Institute on Monday entitled, “The president who cried ‘Sequester!’”

Mr. Thiessen points out that so far the biggest damage done by the sequester has been to President Obama’s credibility. The credibility problem began during the final debate with Mitt Romney when President Obama stated, “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” I believe the Washington Post gave the President four pinocchio’s for that statement. The problem with the internet and YouTube is that it is very easy to look up past statements of people in office. The President also stated that the sequester would never happen. Oh well.

The discourse got worse. The sequester would bring plagues and pestilence; the sequester would mean that everything about America we know and love would be gone. The sky would fall, the glaciers would melt, etc. Secretary of education, Arne Duncan, claimed that teachers would get pink slips. Homeland Security began letting criminals out of jail. Children would lose the Head Start Program (which has been proven ineffective anyway). The janitors at the Capitol would take a pay cut. When investigated, all of these claims proved to be false.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the answer given to Charles Brown of Raleigh, North Carolina, (see rightwinggranny.com) when he sent a memo to Washington asking how to implement the budget cuts in sequester. The bottom line of the answer he received was “make the cuts as painful to the public as possible.”

The posturing by the President and the Democrat Party on the sequester is not only bad politics, it is bad for the country. Can we please re-open the debate on term limits for Congress? That is probably not the total answer, but it would be a start.

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Class Warfare Backfired

One of the tenets of the Obama presidential campaign was the idea that we needed to tax millionaires and billionaires to fix our budget problems. A lot of voters who were not really paying attention decided that ‘the rich’ should be punished for their success and should contribute more. No one bothered to explain to them that even if you took all the money from the wealthy, it really wouldn’t help with the deficit because the problem is spending–not taxing.

The truth of who pays what is a little different. The Heritage Foundation reports:

The top 10 percent of income earners paid 71 percent of all federal income taxes in 2009 though they earned 43 percent of all income. The bottom 50 percent paid 2 percent of income taxes but earned 13 percent of total income. About half of tax filers paid no federal income tax at all.

Just for the record, in case anyone assumes I have a vested interest in this battle, I am not in danger of entering the top 10 percent of income earners. However, what I have learned over the years is that when the taxes go up on the rich, the rest of us suffer.

Meanwhile, Examiner.com reported today on some interesting tweets from Obama voters. These voters have received their first paycheck of the new year.

Some sample tweets posted in the article (please excuse the language, but some of these people are upset):

Twitter user Dave Cardenas15 tweeted, “Obama is the biggest f**king liar in the world why the f*ck did I vote for him.”

Another Twitter user said, “Idk why but I feel like I’ma regret voting for Obama.”

Some of the users wish they had voted for Mitt Romney as expressed by Warren G who tweeted, “I should have voted for Romney, I want a do over.”

Hilda Brown, a user on Warren G’s Twitter account replied back and said, “You’re entitled to your own opinion but do you really think Romney would have done a better job than Obama?”

Warren G responded, “My paycheck says yes.”

The Examiner article further reports:

Peterson (Hayley Peterson of the UK’s Mail Online news site) also said, “Earners in the latter group will pay an average 1.3 percent more – or an additional $2,711 – in taxes this year, while workers making between $30,000 and $200,000 will see their paychecks shrink by as much as 1.7 percent – or up to $1,784 – the D.C.-based think tank reported. Overall, nearly 80 percent of households will pay more money to the federal government as a result of the fiscal cliff deal.”

Part of the increase in middle class taxes is due to the fact that the Social Security tax is now back to what it had been previously, but other tax increases currently aimed at those making over $200,000 a year may filter down to the middle class fairly quickly as the cost of Obamacare rises.

Punishing the rich is not really a good economic policy. It winds up hurting everyone.Enhanced by Zemanta

JUST A NOTE: The Washington Times also posted a story about the reaction from Obama voters on their decreased paychecks. It is enjoyable reading.

One Of The Problems In Reforming The Tax Code

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal posted a story which might explain some of the difficulties Congress and the President are having in reaching a budget agreement before going over the fiscal cliff. The current American tax code is currently approximately 6,000 pages and 500 words. To say that it is difficult to navigate is a serious understatement.

One of Speaker of the House John Boehner‘s suggestions has been a limit on annual deductions. During the election campaign, Mitt Romney suggested a deduction cap somewhere between $17,000 and $50,000 a year.  Many liberal pundits supported the idea as representing equity. However, now that the election is over and the idea is examined more closely, there are serious consequences to this change–many of those consequences are political.

The article reports:

…For example, 44% of Connecticut filers itemize their deductions, but only some 21% of North and South Dakota residents do.

One tax writeoff in particular illustrates the point: the deduction for state and local income taxes. This allows a high-income tax filer who pays, say, $20,000 in state and local income taxes to deduct those payments from his federal taxable income.

Because the highest federal tax rate is 35%, the value of the state and local deduction is enormous for high-tax states. If President Obama succeeds in raising the federal tax rate to 39.6%, the value of those deductions rises to nearly 40 cents on the dollar. This deduction certainly eases the pain of New Jersey‘s 8.97% top tax rate, or Hawaii’s 11%.

The article explains that five states accounted for nearly half the tax revenue lost because of the state and local tax deduction–California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Massachusetts. California accounted for $51 billion of the writeoff due to state and local tax deductions. All of those five states can be found in the Democrat column during national elections.

The article explains:

To put it another way, when Californians voted to raise their top rate to 13.3% last month, they were voting to reduce revenue for the federal Treasury and thus increase the political pressure to raise tax rates on all Americans. The state and local tax loophole helps disperse and disguise the real cost of big government. As Mr. Obama likes to say, this is reverse Robin Hood.

The article concludes:

Mr. Obama wants to raise tax rates, rather than eliminate deductions, so his fellow Democrats can keep raising state and local taxes without bearing the full economic and political cost. Tax equity and economic growth are the big losers.

Because the current tax code is so politically loaded, I really don’t see Congress and the President agreeing to change it significantly. Unfortunately, it needs to be changed significantly.

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The Schizophrenic American Voter

Yesterday Mary Katharine Ham at Hot Air posted an article detailing some of the opinions of the American voters and contrasting those opinions with the way they voted.

The article reports:

A survey of 800 Obama voters, conducted last month by Benenson Strategy Group for the moderate Democratic think tank Third Way and shared first with POLITICO, finds that 96 percent believe the federal deficit is a problem and that 85 percent support increasing taxes on the wealthy.

Yet 41 percent who supported the Democratic incumbent want to get control of the deficit mostly by cutting spending, with only some tax increases, while another 41 percent want to solve it mostly with tax increases and only some spending cuts.

Just 5 percent of Obama supporters favor tax increases alone to solve the deficit, half the number who back an approach that relies entirely on spending cuts.

Their opinions put them much more in line with Mitt Romney than Barack Obama!

The article continues:

Meanwhile, according to polling by CNN, registered voters oppose Obamacare by a margin of 10 points — 52 to 42 percent. Independents like Obamacare even less, opposing it by a margin of 22 points — 57 to 35 percent. Clearly, voters didn’t think they were ratifying Obamacare when they pulled the lever for Obama.

…One thing that has not changed is that Americans still widely prefer a system based on private insurance to one run by the government. Currently, 57% prefer a private system and 36% a government-run system, essentially the same as in 2010 and 2011. Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the percentage of Americans in favor of a government-run system ranged from 32% to 41%.

Obviously, I have no explanation for this. Either voters were not paying attention or they voted for a candidate who opposed what they actually believed.

 

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The Kickoff Question For 2016

It is too early to be talking about the election of 2016, but evidently it is not too early for the press to begin demonizing the Republican contenders.

In January 2012, George Stephanopoulos asked Mitt Romney the following question at the Republican presidential primary debate (Newsbusters):

Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?”

The question really made no sense–it was not related to any current issue, and some pundits on the right wondered why Stephanopoulos asked it. It became obvious later on that part of the Democrat strategy in the 2012 election was to accuse the Republicans of waging a ‘war on women’ and saying that Republicans would take away a woman’s right to birth control. The question was a preemptive strike to begin debate on a subject that was not really important, but had possible political value when dealing with an uninformed electorate.

The preemptive strike has now been aimed at Florida Senator Marco Rubio. GQ asked the Senator, “How old do you think the earth is?” What in the world does that question have to do with anything?

Shawn Mitchell at Townhall.com points out:

First is the premeditated bad faith of an upscale publication. The random question is untethered  from public policy, from issues in the US Senate, or measures Rubio might pursue. It arose from a singular goal unrelated to reporting current events: GQ wanted to conjure a killer question, something that might damage a popular potential GOP presidential candidate.  It’s easy to imagine the query came from a group brainstorm over lunch: “Think, people…how can we trip him?!”

Second on the list is the poisonous effect of unresting, perpetual attack machinery.  Scarcely had the interview hit GQ’s website and newsstands when it ricocheted across the blogosphere and commentariat, with sneers from the left and defenses from the right. Barack Obama is two months shy of putting his hand on the Bible for a second term. Yet, already an anticipated candidate for 2016 is under manufactured attack for how he might read that book’s teachings.

This is disgusting, and until America’s electorate becomes informed enough to make attacks like this ineffective, these attacks will continue. The media will not police themselves, but when Americans begin to ignore stories like this and stop buying the newspapers and magazines that publish this trash, the trash will end. It is truly up to us.

 

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One Final Analysis Of The Election

One of the best analyses of this year’s Presidential election can be found on the Brody File at CBN.com. David Brody is the political correspondent for CBN and does a very concise job of breaking down the reasons for President Obama’s victory. The Brody File is a video about 30 minutes long and is well worth watching.

David Brody cites three main reasons for Mitt Romney‘s loss of the election:

1. Mitt Romney was the wrong candidate. He was the candidate put forward by the Republican establishment. As a candidate, Mitt Romney was not what the Republican base wanted–he was part of the GOP establishment–not the party base. Right now there are some serious gaps between the GOP establishment and the base of the party.

2. Mitt Romney was defined early by the Obama campaign–not by the Romney campaign. In April, May and June, the Obama campaign ran personal attack ads directed at Mitt Romney defining him as a rich businessman from Bain Capital who was going to ship everyone’s job overseas. He was accused of everything from causing a man’s wife to die of cancer to animal abuse. The Romney camp did not respond to the charges at the time, and that image of Mitt Romney was established.

3. The American electorate is changing. The GOP never reached out to the Hispanics, other minorities, or the youth vote. In 1996, 10 percent of American voters were non-whites. In 2012, 21 percent of American voters were non-whites. The Republican campaigns did not take into consideration the fact that the demographics of American voters have changed.

For me, the bottom line in this election is the split between the Republican establishment and the Tea Party. I voted for Mitt Romney. He is a good man who would have done a good job. However, I would have preferred a candidate who was more clearly a conservative. I believe a true conservative would have beaten Barack Obama.

I seriously doubt that the Republican establishment has learned from this experience. I suspect that when the new Congress convenes in January, it will have the same Republican leadership. Until we get the establishment out of Washington–both Republican and Democrat establishment–we will continue down the path we are currently on. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Right now that is a pretty good description of the American voter.

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President Obama Inherits The Mess Left By President Obama

John Hinderaker at Power Line posted his take on yesterday’s election. He makes some good points. Because President Obama was elected, he will now be forced to reveal his plans for his second term. How does he plan to deal with the $!6 trillion dollar debt (he created almost half of it)?

The article reminds us:

Ben Bernanke can’t keep interest rates at zero for another four years; at least, I don’t think he can. As soon as interest rates start to rise, the budget–no, wait, we don’t have a budget, but you know what I mean–is blown. It will be difficult for the press to conceal from the American people the fact that we are broke.

The article concludes:

This year’s presidential election represented the culmination of a trend that has been developing for several cycles, in which the campaign barely exists outside of a handful of swing states. This year, it got ridiculous. If you lived in 35 or 40 states, you barely knew that it was an election year, at the presidential level, anyway. The result was a foregone conclusion across a broad swath of America. Undoubtedly that depressed turnout in the non-swing states. It would be easy to test my hypothesis; did turnout remain high in the contested states, and drop off in the others? If so, I think that is the answer. Still, the fact that Obama’s turnout dropped so much more than his Republican opponent’s shows that at least a few million Americans have wised up since 2008.

Neither Governor Romney nor President Obama campaigned in Massachusetts. If you wanted a yard sign for the Romney/Ryan campaign in Massachusetts, you had to order it online. This actually makes sense–a candidate has a limited amount of money and a limited amount of appearances he can make while running for office. Obviously, he is going to spend his time and money where it is needed and will do the most good.

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America In Her Twilight Years

President Obama has been re-elected. What does that mean? It means that he has more flexibility, as he explained to Russian President Medvedev. What does that mean? There will be higher taxes for all Americans. There will be another round of quantitative easing, which will make American dollars worth less. America will unilaterally disarm. ObamaCare will not be repealed, and the elderly and those who value life in all seasons will soon find out what a serious mistake they have made.The new taxes from ObamaCare will begin to kick in during the coming year. Those taxes will impact the real estate market, the medical research industry, and many other areas of the economy. The number of people who take money from the government will increase; the number of people working and paying taxes will decrease. The economy will continue to limp along, possibly heading into a double dip recession.

What happened? There probably was some serious voter fraud along the way, but I don’t think that made the difference. The Evangelical vote never materialized. The average voter watched a media that left out the story of Benghazi and trashed Mitt Romney whenever possible. The mainstream media has exercised their power and elected a President. The majority of Americans are obviously ok with that.

Where do we go from here? We create a political party that actually represents people who are working, supporting their families, and not dependent on the government. That is going to be more difficult as jobs become more scarce.

The re-election of Barack Obama is a body blow to the principles America’s Founding Fathers expressed in The Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution. It is possible that America can return to her roots, but it will be a difficult path to travel from where we went last night.

 

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Here Come The Regulations

The National Journal posted an article on Thursday about increased regulations under the Obama Administration. The article noted that during the first two years of President Obama’s term there were more regulations than normal. In 2012, the number of regulations decreased as regulations became a campaign issue.

The article reports:

Federal agencies are sitting on a pile of major health, environmental, and financial regulations that lobbyists, congressional staffers, and former administration officials say are being held back to avoid providing ammunition to Mitt Romney and other Republican critics.

The article posted a chart to illustrate how Washington plays the regulations game: Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to post it here, so please follow the link to the article to view the chart. The bottom line is simple–the regulations game is played by both parties.

The article reports:

Among the most politically controversial rules is one that would slash toxic tailpipe pollution from gasoline, but that could also slightly increase costs at the pump. That rule, say industry lobbyists and environmentalists who work closely with EPA, has been sitting at the agency, ready to roll out, for nearly a year. But the White House was reluctant to regulate gasoline in an election year in which pain at the pump has ignited fierce firestorms.

“There are at least a half-dozen other examples like that throughout the agency,” said William Becker, executive director for the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. “And that’s why administrations will do everything they can to avoid putting these rules out during an election year. But all that ends after the election. Then it’s a mad rush to see who gets the rules out the door first.”

Before you vote, please consider this report, and please remember President Obama’s statement to Russian President Medvedev that he would be more flexible in dealing with the Russians in a second term. I sincerely believe that a second term of President Obama will destroy America as we have known it.

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The New York Daily News Endorses Mitt Romney For President

The New York Daily News is not known as a Republican leaning newspaper, but they have endorsed Mitt Romney.

Here are some excerpts from the endorsement:

Paychecks are shrunken after more than a decade in which the workplace has asked more of wage earners and rewarded them less. The decline has knocked someone at the midpoint of the salary scale back to where he or she would have been in 1996.

Then, the subway fare, still paid by token, was $1.50, gasoline was $1.23 a gallon and the median rent for a stabilized apartment was $600 a month. Today, the base MetroCard subway fare is $2.25, gasoline is in the $3.90 range and the median stabilized rent is $1,050, with all the increases outpacing wage growth.

…Four years ago, the Daily News endorsed Obama, seeing a historic figure whose intelligence, political skills and empathy with common folk positioned him to build on the small practical experience he would bring to the world’s toughest job. We valued Obama’s pledge to govern with bold pragmatism and bipartisanship.

The hopes of those days went unfulfilled.

…First came emergency economic stimulus. Because Obama gave free rein to House and Senate Democrats in deciding how to spend $800 billion, the legislation was heavily designed to satisfy the party’s constituencies and hunger for social programs, and inadequately weighted toward job-multiplier projects like building and repairing bridges and railroads — including subways.

After originally projecting that the program would produce 4 million more jobs than the country now has, along with a 5% jobless rate, Obama pleads that he saved Americans from more dire straits.

Next came Obamacare. While the country bled jobs, the President battled to establish universal health insurance — without first restraining soaring medical bills. Then he pushed one of the largest social programs in U.S. history through a Democratic-controlled Congress without a single Republican vote.

R.I.P. and never to be resurrected — Obama’s promised bipartisanship.

…Romney’s approach is the stronger.

Critically, he has tailored his policies to create jobs, jobs, jobs.

The centerpieces of Romney’s plan call for spending restraint and rewriting the Internal Revenue code to lower rates by 20%. He would make up much of the lost revenue by eliminating deductions and loopholes that have made the tax system a thicket of strangling complexities. On its own, paring the personal and corporate rules to the basics would catalyze business and consumer spending.

The endorsement concludes:

Offering a rosy vision of a country already on the rise, Obama argues that he would lead a resurgence by staying the course. He posits that spending in areas such as education and clean energy would be beneficial, and he sees raising taxes on high-income earners as key to “balanced” deficit reduction. Each on its own is attractive, but the whole comes up short.

The presidential imperative of the times is to energize the economy and get deficits under control to empower the working and middle classes to again enjoy the fruits of an ascendant America.

So The News is compelled to stand with Romney.

This is a newspaper that four years ago endorsed President Obama.

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The First Real October Surprise I Have Seen This Year

Yes, I know it’s November, but this is truly an October surprise. How do you recognize and October surprise? First of all, you look at the source. Second, you look to see if there is any way the issue can be clearly resolved before the actual election. Third, you look to see what impact the October surprise will have on the uninformed voter, because that is the target audience. To be an effective October surprise, there must be no traceable link to the candidate who will gain by the damaging (but not generally relevant) information contained in the surprise. Here we go.

Watchdog.net has posted the following information featuring the headline “BREAKING: Mitt Romney Charged With Violating Federal Ethics Law!”:

As of November 1, Mitt Romney is one of the first presidential candidates ever to be charged with violating federal ethics law.

United Automobile Workers (UAW) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) have just charged Romney with hiding between 15.3 to 11.5 million dollars from the auto industry bailout in his wife Anne’s “blind” trust to conceal the gain and reduce taxes on it.

“The American people have a right to know about Gov. Romney’s potential conflicts of interest, such as the profits his family made from the auto rescue,” the groups said in a statement. “It’s time for Gov. Romney to disclose or divest.”

It’s time to expose just how unscrupulous Romney is about making his fortune off the misfortunes of others. Please, support UAW and CREW by calling on Romney to reveal exactly how much he made and continues to make off the auto bailout!

PETITION TO MITT ROMNEY: It’s time to come clean. We demand to know how much money you hid in your wife’s supposed blind trust, and how much you continue to make thanks to the gutting of the auto industry.

There are a few problems with this. The UAW was one of the beneficiaries of the auto bailout and is a strong supporter of President Obama. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is working hard to undo the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) which Mitt Romney supports. Each group has a horse in this race. It makes sense that Mitt Romney would be invested in the auto industry–he is a ‘car guy’ from Michigan. This charge is bogus, and my hope is that it will go nowhere. I am posting this because I want people to be aware that there may be more attacks like this one in the remaining few days before the election. One of the goals here is to remind us that Mitt Romney is rich and that we should dislike him because he is rich. The other is simply to convince voters that there is something dishonest here. I rather doubt there is.

The thing to remember here is that watchdog.net is a site set up for people to start petitions and espouse causes. Any special interest group can go to watchdog.net and set up a petition. I have no idea how much traffic they get, so I don’t know how many people will be aware of this attack, but it is a true example of an October surprise.

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The Las Vegas Review-Journal Weighs In On The Presidential Election

The Las Vegas Review-Journal posted an editorial yesterday strongly criticizing President Obama for his handling of the Benghazi attack when it happened and his lying about it afterward.

In addition to criticism of President Obama’s foreign policy, the editorial reminds us:

This administration is an embarrassment on foreign policy and incompetent at best on the economy – though a more careful analysis shows what can only be a perverse and willful attempt to destroy our prosperity. Back in January 2008, Barack Obama told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle that under his cap-and-trade plan, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them.” He added, “Under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” It was also in 2008 that Mr. Obama’s future Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, famously said it would be necessary to “figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” – $9 a gallon.

The article concludes:

Candidate Obama said if he couldn’t fix the economy in four years, his would be a one-term presidency.

Mitt Romney is moral, capable and responsible man. Just this once, it’s time to hold Barack Obama to his word. Maybe we can all do something about that, come Tuesday.

I know Halloween is over, but I can’t think of a worse nightmare than four more years of President Obama.

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The Unmentioned Voter Bloc

Yesterday Dan Henninger at the Wall Street Journal posted an article about an often overlooked voting bloc–the evangelical vote.

The article reports:

When Mitt Romney‘s 2012 candidacy was gaining traction in the primaries, the conventional wisdom instantly conveyed that the evangelical vote, skeptical of Mormonism, would sink him.

What if in Ohio next week the opposite is true? There and in other swing states—Wisconsin, Iowa, North Carolina, Florida—the evangelical vote is flying beneath the media’s radar. It’s a lot of voters not to notice. In the 2008 presidential vote, they were 30% of the vote in Ohio, 31% in Iowa and 26% in Wisconsin.

Back in April, the policy director of the Southern Baptist Convention, Richard Land, predicted that evangelicals in time would coalesce behind Mitt Romney. Yesterday he endorsed Mr. Romney, the first time he has done so for any presidential candidate.

It is also interesting that the Reverend Billy Graham has endorsed Governor Romney and is actively supporting him.

As someone who shares the values of the evangelicals, I cannot understand how anyone who considers themselves an evangelical could vote for Barack Obama. President Obama has made his stand on life issues abundantly clear–he supports federally funded abortion, partial birth abortion, and forcing religious organizations to violate their consciences in order to fund his anti-life platform.

It will be interesting to see if the evangelical voters will bring their values into the voting booth.

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About Those Voting Machines

On October 24, I posted an article about voting machines in North Carolina that were malfunctioning (rightwinggranny.com). Well, it seems that North Carolina is not the only place where voting machines have a mind of their own.

The Marion Star is reporting today that a voting machine in Marion, Ohio, showed a vote for President Obama when the voter voted for Governor Romney.

The article reports:

Joan Stevens was one of several early voters at the polls on Monday. But when Stevens tried to cast her ballot for president, she noticed a problem.

Upon selecting “Mitt Romney” on the electronic touch screen, Barack Obama’s name lit up.

It took Stevens three tries before her selection was accurately recorded.

So if you are not paying attention, it would be very easy for your vote to be recorded incorrectly. Please vote carefully–regardless of how you vote.

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Why You Should Not Believe Anything You See On Television

We are in the last days of the silly season for this election. We will be seeing news stories and pictures designed to change your mind. Some of them will be real, and some of them will be totally false. To illustrate the fact that things are not always what they seem, I am posting a YouTube video below:

Keep this video in mind as you watch the political ads making the closing arguments.

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About That Apology Tour

When Mitt Romney mentioned the ‘Obama Apology Tour’ during Monday night’s Presidential debate, President Obama interrupted him saying, “This has been probably the biggest whopper that’s been told during the course of this campaign, and every fact-checker and every reporter who’s looked at it, governor, has said this is not true.”

Well, Investors Business Daily has a few comments on the tour: The article at Investors Business Daily takes a look at the advisers behind the tour and what they believe. A few examples:

Samantha Power. “U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought,” according to Obama’s national security adviser for multilateral affairs and human rights. “Instituting a doctrine of mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.”

Power has suggested the president literally bow to foreign leaders, as atonement for Americans’ “sins” — and that’s exactly what he’s done.

Anne-Marie Slaughter. The former State Department policy chief, who last year returned to Princeton University, also has advised the president to apologize for the war on terror.

“The president must ask Americans to acknowledge to ourselves and to the world that we have made serious, even tragic, mistakes in the aftermath of Sept. 11 — in invading Iraq, in condoning torture and flouting international law, and in denying the very existence of global warming,” Slaughter said.

Rashad Hussain. The White House adviser-turned Mideast envoy helped Obama kick off his apology tour in 2009 with a remorseful speech to Muslims in Cairo that he helped draft.

…Hussain also helped engineer the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt as Obama’s envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a powerful bloc of 57 Muslim governments that some say is a caliphate in the making.

Rose Gottemoeller. Echoing the president, the top State official thinks America is a global “bully” and that its nuclear superiority has created a global arms race.

She argues the U.S. must show humility by signing nuclear disarmament treaties and become strategically equal with Russia and China.

…”She (Gottemoeller) loves to shmooze the Russians,” said national security expert Bill Gertz — and the Chinese, who she’s invited back to the nuclear weapons labs. After Gottemoeller kicked open Los Alamos as head of the Clinton Energy Department’s national security office, Chinese espionage exploded.

Sounds like a great bunch.

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History Repeats Itself

In 2004, Barack Obama was campaigning to become a U. S. Senator from Illinois. After he opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race, Barack Obama easily won. What happened?

According to a Slate Magazine article from June 23, 2004:

Records from the 1999 divorce of Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan were unsealed Monday, and the revelations contained therein are spooking some of his supporters. The documents contain allegations from his ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan, that her then-husband had a predilection for taking her to raunchy sex clubs. Both Ryans opposed the unsealing of the divorce records. Why was the court permitted to overrule their wishes?

Because the First Amendment rights of media organizations generally supercede the privacy rights of litigants, since the American legal system favors transparency in all court proceedings. In the Ryan case, the Chicago Tribune and a Chicago TV station sued in Los Angeles (where the divorce proceedings took place) to unseal the records. In keeping with prior rulings nationwide, the court concluded that the public’s right of access outweighed whatever emotional distress the unsealing might cause.

The records were extremely embarrassing to Jack Ryan, and he dropped out of the race.

Fast forward to 2012. Yesterday Fox News reported:

DNC delegate and partisan Democrat lawyer Gloria Allred attended the “30 Days to Victory” Obama fundraiser at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles on October 7th.

…Now, two weeks later Allred is spearheading an “October surprise” targeting Mitt Romney just days before the election.

Allred is looking to unseal testimony that the GOP presidential candidate gave in the divorce case of Staples founder Tom Stemberg. Staples was founded with seed money from Romney’s firm, Bain Capital and Stemberg is a Romney surrogate. Allred appeared in court today with ex-wife Maureen Stemberg.  Many are wondering if there is any coordination between the Obama campaign and Gloria Allred, considering the relationship involved…

The testimony in question revolves around the fact that Ms. Stemberg was not told that Stapes planned to go public three years after the divorce  (Ms. Stemberg sold her Staples stock before that event–not realizing the increase that would come). The court document points out that the plan to go public was not a definite plan and that there was no way to know when and if it would happen.

The Weekly Standard posted the 1994 document that allowed the original divorce agreement to stand. It concludes that Ms. Stemberg did not prove “fraud, culpable nondisclosure, duress, coercion or undue influence.

Evidently President Obama’s approach to dealing with campaign opponents has not significantly changed over the years.

 

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“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Goodreads.com attributes the quote “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything” to Joseph Stalin. Why am I quoting Stalin? There seems to be a slight problem in one of the ‘swing states.’

An article posted yesterday by the Fox News outlet covering the Greensboro, High Point, Winston-Salem, North Carolina area reported:

On Monday, several voters complained that their electronic ballot machine cast the wrong vote.  All the complaints were made by people who voted at the Bur-Mil Park polling location.

One of the voters, Sher Coromalis, says she cast her ballot for Governor Mitt Romney, but every time she entered her vote the machine defaulted to President Obama.

“I was so upset that this could happen,” said Coromalis.

Guilford County Board of Elections Director George Gilbert says the problem arises every election. It can be resolved after the machine is re-calibrated by poll workers.

The election officials in charge are reporting that the machines have been fixed.

I hate to be suspicious, but the fact that this is happening in a swing state totally unnerves me.

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The Iranian Government Supports Obama

John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line today highlighting how the Iranian press is covering the American presidential election.

The article quotes an Israeli National News story posted today:

Iran’s government mouthpiece Press TV is panicking over the prospect of a defeat for President Barack Obama and warns that Mitt Romney will steal the election through “black-box” voting machines that “manufacture election outcomes.”

It also charged that the polls – virtually all of which now show Romney in the lead or at least in a dead heat – are fraudulent. Press TV has picked up on some American website tweets that predict black Americans will riot if Obama loses.

Obama is far from being a friend of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the prospect of a hawkish Republican candidate apparently is even less attractive for Tehran.

If Iran supports President Obama, then I support Governor Romney!

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About President Obama’s Energy Policy

This is a graph from Investors.com of energy of energy production on federal land since 2003:

The article reports:

When President Obama, in responding Tuesday to Mitt Romney‘s chiding about failing to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, claimed that his administration has added enough new oil and gas pipelines to “encircle the Earth and then some,” we felt a perfect response from Romney would have been, “You didn’t build that.”

The article further reports:

According to the Interior Department‘s Bureau of Land Management, in 2008 under President Bush a total of 55,085 oil and gas leases were in effect on federal land. In 2011 under Obama, there were just 49,174, a decrease of 11%.

Federal acreage under lease shrank from 47.2 million in 2008 to just 38.5 million, a drop of 19%. And 6,617 oil and gas permits were approved in 2008 vs. 4,244 permits in 2011, a decrease of 36%.

The Heritage Foundation‘s Nicolas Loras points out that a recent report from the EIA documents the fact that energy production fell 13% on federal lands in fiscal 2011 compared with fiscal 2010.

Although tapping domestic energy would not bring down gasoline prices tomorrow, it would impact those prices in the near future. It is time to elect a President who will allow us to become energy independent.

 

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