Why do you need assault rifles‘ or high-capacity‘magazines?

Why do you need "assault rifles" and "high-capacity" magazines? by Rob Olive

God bless,
JohnnyD

Why are Boy Scouts contemplating suicide?

David Kupelian on unreported but catastrophic consequences of changing ‘gay’ policy

 

From: World Net Daily

by - David Kupelian January 29, 2013

The Boy Scouts of America – one of the last truly great American institutions, which for 100 years has prepared tens of millions of boys for responsible manhood – is reportedly on the verge of changing its policy on homosexuals.

As NBC News first reported yesterday, BSA is talking about reversing, as early as next week, its decades-old policy of excluding homosexuals as adult leaders and scouts.

Considering that the United States Supreme Court has already sided with the Boy Scouts on this issue, and that a recent Gallup Poll shows most Americans side with the Scouts’ current policy, and that just six months ago BSA national spokesman Deron Smith affirmed the organization’s moral policy excluding homosexuals “is absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts,” this current development illustrates – if nothing else – the brutal effectiveness of the relentless intimidation and economic pressure brought to bear on the Boy Scouts by gay rights activists and cultural extremists.

Indeed, yesterday Smith did a complete 180 in disclosing in a press statement that BSA is now discussing ending the organization’s decades-long moral standard and, instead, deferring to the local chartering organizations to decide what their own membership standards will be – “consistent with each organization’s mission, principles, or religious beliefs.”

“The policy change under discussion,” Smith explained, “would allow the religious, civic, or educational organizations that oversee and deliver scouting to determine how to address this issue.” In other words, the BSA would abandon its prohibition on homosexuals and every local Boy Scout troop or Cub Scout pack could do whatever it wanted.

As one might expect, traditionally minded Americans are alarmed. They warn this change would spell the end of the Boy Scouts as they have always known it – a quintessentially American, moral and God-based private organization, as exemplified in the Scout Oath “to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins pinpointed the main reason for the BSA’s change of thinking – namely, the attacks on their funding sources by activist homosexuals. Said Perkins:

“The Boy Scouts of America board would be making a serious mistake to bow to the strong-arm tactics of LGBT activists and open the organization to homosexuality. What has changed in terms of the Boy Scouts’ concern for the well-being of the boys under their care? Or is this not about the well-being of the Scouts, but the funding for the organization?

“The Boy Scouts has for decades been a force for moral integrity and leadership in the United States. Sadly, their principled stances have marked them as a target for harassment by homosexual activists and corporations such as UPS which are working to pressure the Boy Scouts into abandoning their historic values.”

However, there is a second, largely unmentioned and potentially even more devastating reason that such a move on the part of the Boy Scouts’ national leadership would spell serious trouble for the organization, one that goes beyond the sad fact that many good people would walk away from the BSA for abandoning its principles.

Although under-reported in the press, the BSA, like the Catholic Church, has had a long struggle with predatory scout leaders embedding themselves in scout units and using the authority, familiarity and good will that goes with that position to sexually exploit boys and young men.

Two decades ago, journalist Patrick Boyle was the lead author of a comprehensive five-part Washington Times series on the large number of cases of predatory scout leaders. The series served as the basis for Boyle’s book, “Scout’s Honor: Sexual Abuse in America’s Most Trusted Institution.” Boyle wrote:On an average of more than once a week for the past two decades, a Cub Scout, Boy Scout or Explorer has reported being sexually abused by a Scout leader. An investigation by The Washington Times shows that at least 1,151 Scouts have reported being abused by their leaders over the past 19 years, making sex abuse more common in Scouting than accidental deaths and serious injuries combined.

In that time, at least 416 men have been arrested or banned from Scouting for molesting the boys in  their care – and experts say the real number of abusers and victims is probably several times higher.

Those are among the findings of an investigation that turned up abuse by Scout leaders in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

“I was naive to think the Boy Scouts was such a safe place,” said the mother of a Maryland boy abused by his Scoutmaster. “I thought the Boy Scouts was a sanctuary.”

In fact, the examination of sex abuse in Scouting reveals a long-standing paradox for the nation’s most revered youth group: For 80 years the Boy Scouts of America have given boys some of the best experiences of their lives, but for 80 years some men have used the Boy Scouts of America to have sexual relations with those boys.

“That’s been an issue since the Boy Scouts began,” said James Tarr, the nation’s chief Scout executive from 1979 through 1984.

In his reporting, Boyle does not implicate homosexuals as such, but refers to all of the predatory adult scouters as pedophiles or molesters.

Hold that thought while we fast-forward to today:

In 2010, the London Guardian newspaper reported that “America’s Scouting movement is fighting to keep secret thousands of ‘perversion files’ on suspected child molesters after it was ordered to pay record damages over the sexual abuse of a former Scout.” Describing a “growing scandal threatening to rival the crisis hitting the Roman Catholic church,” the UK paper reported that BSA “has been accused of covering up decades of child abuse” to protect the organization’s reputation.

It reported that an Oregon jury heard the case of former scout Kerry Lewis, “who was repeatedly assaulted by a former assistant scoutmaster, Timur Dykes, in the 1980s.” Dykes, the paper reported, “had admitted to a superior in the Scouts that he had abused boys, but was allowed to remain in the organization and is alleged to have sexually assaulted several other children who are also taking legal action.”

Get the picture? Just as in some Catholic dioceses, someone in authority with the Boy Scouts made the unwise and unprincipled decision to protect the organization rather than rat out the perpetrator and protect children.

There’s more:

The judge in the case overruled the Scouts’ attempts to keep the jury from seeing about 1,200 files kept by the organization on suspected pedophiles. Kelly Clark, Lewis’s lawyer, told the jury that while the files were often used to remove child abusers from the Scouting movement, many were allowed to remain in the organization. He said that the Scouts rarely alerted the police and when they did, the movement asked the authorities to avoid publicity. Clark told the jury that the Scouting leadership had been “reckless and outrageous” in failing to warn parents and boys about the problem.

The jury agreed and awarded Lewis $18.5 million, the largest-ever award to a single plaintiff in a U.S. child-abuse case, according to the Telegraph.

The files shown to the jury “were not made public and are just a small part of what is believed to be a cache of as many as 6,000 held at the Scouts’ headquarters in Texas, dating back to the 1920s,” the report added.

“We said they had 75 years of secret files about pedophiles, and that’s the way the evidence came in. I think that fact in itself was just staggering to the jury,” said Clark, Lewis’s lawyer. “They had a regular practice of placing guys on probation and then they would allow them to continue to be active in Scouting, not unlike some of what you saw in the Catholic church.”

Now the big question in all this, of course, is the following: With these sex-abuse cases within the Boy Scouting organization, just as those within the Catholic Church, are we dealing with actual “pedophiles” or with predatory homosexuals?

Virtually all defenders of the gay agenda will angrily denounce the mere suggestion that homosexuals could be victimizers here, or that the two groups could even overlap.

Yet while the London Telegraph and many others note the striking similarity between “pedophiles” in the Boy Scouts and “pedophile priests” in the Catholic Church, there is a disturbing if little-known reality to all this:

Contrary to the media myth that the Catholic Church’s problems are primarily with “pedophile priests” – terminology which safely absolves homosexuals from suspicion – the major portion of the church’s sexual-abuse problem has been the infiltration of its seminaries by homosexuals. In fact, widespread cases of predatory homosexual priests created a full-blown crisis for the church.

“The real problem the Catholic Church faces,” explains Father Donald B. Cozzens, author of “The Changing Face of the Priesthood,” is the “disproportionate number of gay men that populate our seminaries.”

Or as former California Congressman Bob Dornan put it, “the Catholic Church in this country has been penetrated by an aggressive homosexual network.”

And National Review senior writer Rod Dreher put it even more bluntly: “This is chiefly a scandal about unchaste or criminal homosexuals in the Catholic priesthood. … The overwhelming majority of priests who have molested minors are not pedophiles – that is … among the rare adults sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. They are, rather, “ephebophiles” – adults who are sexually attracted to post-pubescent youths, generally aged 12 to 17. And their victims have been almost exclusively boys.”

“Pedophilia” is, by definition, sexual contact with a pre-pubescent child. Most of the boys molested by “pedophile priests” have been pubescent teens. Likewise, in the scout world, although we can comfortably indulge the fantasy that there is a wide gulf between the land of homosexuals and the land of same-sex pedophiles, this does not comport with the known facts. (If you want, you can read Scientific American’s explanation here – but bottom line, many of these sex-abuse cases, whether in Scouts or in church, do not involve actual pedophiles.)

The Washington Times – which for its in-depth investigation reviewed “internal Scout records and tens of thousands of pages of court records from around the country, including confessions of molesters and testimony from children,” and also interviewed “molesters, families of victims, Scout leaders, sex abuse experts and lawyers” and analyzed the cases on a computer database – discovered the following:

Each year from 1971 through 1989, an average of at least 21 male Scout leaders and camp workers were banned from Scouting or arrested for sexual misconduct with Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Explorers. The acts ranged from proposing sex acts and fondling boys in their sleep to performing oral sex and intercourse with the children.

Pause-button, please. Cub Scouting is for boys 7 to 10, the Boy Scouts is open to boys 11 to 18, and Explorers (which was replaced in 1998 by Venturing) is for 14-to-20-year-olds. The average age of puberty for males in the U.S. is 13.

Although it’s politically incorrect in the extreme, it has to be said: In the homosexual subculture, sexual attraction toward young teen boys is far more prevalent and prized than gay activists would like you to know.

Moreover, predators are known to go where the children are. And that means the Boy Scouts are arguably at even higher risk of sexual-abuse on a broad scale than the Catholic Church was and is. That is why BSA has instituted one of the best Youth Protection Training programs in the world, as a direct response to predators in their midst.

How ironic and unfortunate, then, that the Boy Scouts are now being so pressured that they are contemplating opening themselves up to lawsuits, to disgrace, and to huge jury awards and out-of-court settlements. After all, by changing their policy on homosexual leaders, the BSA would be adopting a more overt and inviting stance toward homosexual leaders than the Catholic Church ever did – essentially advertising for homosexual adult “scouters.”

If you do not think lawsuits, test cases, de facto recruitment and de facto affirmative action will not follow adoption of this policy, then you do not understand the political and moral left. If you think the vast gay rights lobby will finally leave the Scouts alone, once the policy reversal occurs (if it does), you do not understand the left.

Just as bed-and-breakfasts, photographers and many other business are routinely sued today by homosexual activists as a tactical means of advancing their position, the scouting organization will likewise fall prey to this long-term legal strategy if it betrays its own commitment to being “morally straight.”

America is in a time of great crisis on many fronts, and much that is good we are in danger of permanently losing. The Boy Scouts of America is one of the most important and loved and truly valuable organizations in American history. It is literally a sacred trust between one generation and the next. The Supreme Court is on their side. Public opinion is on their side. God is on their side.

Why on earth would they trade all this away by giving in to pressure from people who detest them and everything they stand for?

A little bit of America will die if the Boy Scouts organization gives in to the pressure and makes this decision. You might want to let them know how you feel. You can reach the Boy Scouts of America at 972-580-2000. Tell them how much you appreciate them – and tell them to stand strong.

God bless,
JohnnyD

Feinstein's Gun Ban Exempts... Her

From: GOPUSA

By Bobby Eberle January 28, 2013

The Democrats are clamoring for a gun ban. It doesn't matter that the federal government has no business tracking us or telling us what firearm we can or can't own, but now liberals like Dianne Feinstein are throwing in a hefty dose of hypocrisy. It turns out that Feinstein's bill would exempt her from the restrictions placed on everyone else.

As reported in the Washington Times, "the measure is by far the most ambitious of the number of gun-control bills introduced in the wake of the school shootings in Newtown, Conn., last month."

Her bill seeks to reinstate and expand the ban on assault weapons that was first enacted in 1994, but which lapsed in 2004.
It would prohibit semiautomatic pistols that can accept a detachable magazine and have at least one military feature, such as a pistol grip or telescoping. Purchasing the AR-15 Bushmaster rifle, which was used by the shooter in Newtown, would be illegal under the ban.
Mrs. Feinstein's measure would exempt more than 2,200 types of hunting and sporting rifles; guns manually operated by bolt, pump, lever or slide action; and weapons used by government officials, law enforcement and retired law enforcement personnel.
It would also ban ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.

The Weekly Standard confirms other reports by stating, "if the proposed legislation becomes law, government officials and others will be exempt."

So what is going on here? People in houses... facing intruders... will be restricted on what they can use to defend themselves, but Feinstein and others won't?

This entire debate is just a ploy by the government to gain more control... and firearms are the vehicle. If Feinstein can defend herself with whatever means she deems appropriate, shouldn't you be able to do the same?


God bless,
JohnnyD

State's gun violence solution: Run away!

New Hampshire leading efforts to eliminate right of self-defense

From: World Net Daily

by Michael Carl - January 28, 2013

A lawmaker in the “Live Free or Die” state of New Hampshire is proposing a bill that would severely curb the right of self-defense once people leave their homes, critics charge.

House Bill 135, sponsored by state Rep. Stephen Shurtleff, makes New Hampshire one of seven states debating “Stand Your Ground” laws, which give citizens the right to use deadly force, without retreating first, if they reasonably believe they face an unlawful threat.

New Hampshire statute RSA 627:4 now reads: “A person is not justified in using deadly force on another to defend himself or herself or a third person from deadly force by the other if he or she knows that he or she and the third person can, with complete safety: Retreat from the encounter, except that he or she is not required to retreat if he or she is within his or her dwelling, its curtilage, or anywhere he or she has a right to be, and was not the initial aggressor.”

The bill proposed by Shurtleff would remove the phrase “or anywhere he or she has a right to be.” It also removes the provision that the “act of producing or displaying a weapon shall constitute non-deadly force.”

If the bill passes, simply producing a weapon will constitute deadly force.

Former New Hampshire state Sen. Jim Luther says if the bill passes, the consequence will be simple: People will have to run away.

“It will repeal the ability of an individual to defend [himself] from deadly force in a public setting where they have a right to be. Their only alternative is to run from the attacker,” Luther said.

He added bluntly, “The bill could pass.”

Luther explained that the New Hampshire House swung to the Democrats in the last election, and the Senate only has a one-seat Republican majority.

“The Dems are huge on gun control,” he said.

Second Amendment Sisters Legislative Affairs Director Jenn Coffey said Shurtleff’s political leanings are clear: “He supports gun control.”

Coffey and Luther said that if the bill passes, it’s unclear whether a potential intermediary could incur criminal penalties if he or she intervenes in a violent situation.

Second Amendment analyst and Examiner.com columnist David Codrea said criminal penalties are possible.

“I just don’t know. I imagine that anyone who intervenes in a public event could be setting themselves up for charges,” Codrea said. “The issue would have to be worked out in the courts.”

Coffey said the bill will change the dynamics in an emergency situation.

“I know the average response time for the police department is 10 minutes unless you live where I do and you may have to wait 30 to 45 minutes for the state police if the locals have the night off,” Coffey said.

Under those circumstances, she said, women will be hurt.

“I know that if a woman is faced with a criminal and tries to run, she may die,” Coffey said.

“Stand Your Ground” laws gained national attention last February 2012 as a result of the Sanford, Fla., case in which neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in what Zimmerman claimed was an act of self-defense.

Following the shooting, Florida Gov. Rick Scott appointed a task force to review the Florida law, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg went to Washington to lobby for changes in “Stand Your Ground” laws.

There are 19 states with “Stand Your Ground” laws and 24 states with “Castle Doctrine” laws, which allow residents to have the presumption of safety in their own homes.

The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that there are nine proposed laws dealing with deadly force or “Stand Your Ground” provisions pending in six other state legislatures.

A Michigan bill introduced in May would repeal a special provision allowing the use of deadly force in self-defense situations.

A bill in North Carolina will remove “Stand Your Ground” language from the state statutes, including acting in defense of another person.

The South Carolina legislature would change the state law and remove “Stand Your Ground” language if the person is in a public place.

Three states that could adopt or add “Stand Your Ground” laws are New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts.

The New Jersey Legislature has three bills pending which would allow the use of deadly force in a person’s home. The NCSL says the key provision in the bills is the right to assume safety.

“New Jersey bills articulate the presumption that one reasonably fears imminent peril by an intruder in justifying deadly force,” the NCSL site said.

A bill in the New York Legislature would allow the use of deadly force in defense of life if there is a “presumption of reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm.”

The Massachusetts Legislature has referred a bill to the joint committee on the judiciary that will allow residents to use deadly force and be free from immediate arrest if they apply deadly force in situations in which death is imminent.

God bless,

JohnnyD

High Crimes from the Obama Administration?

From: Clash Daily

by Rick David
Clash Daily Guest Contributor

It was reported in the Washington Times back in August of last year. That’s right, in 2012, before Obama was re-elected. The Obama administration was selling arms to al Qaeda in Libya. Of course, who could believe that? After all, it wasn’t reported on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC or in the newspaper of record. The New York Times finally released the story in December, after the election. What convenient timing was that?

In a more patriotic day, we used to call arming our enemies treason. A President can be impeached for “high crimes”. Treason would certainly fit the definition. But the amazing thing about the new “transformed” America is that nobody gives a damn. After all, “Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive.”

What is even more puzzling is that the point man in these arms deals was one Ambassador Chris Stevens, who is now dead because of a terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya that occurred last September 11, 2012. Doesn’t anybody think that something smells fishy here?

Certainly, security expert Frank Gaffney did. He was reported in the Washington

Times last October, before the election, “GAFFNEY: The real reason behind Benghazigate Was Obama gun-walking arms to jihadists?” The story reported:

It now appears that Stevens was there — on a particularly risky day, with no security to speak of and despite now copiously documented concerns about his own safety and that of his subordinates — for another priority mission: sending arms recovered from the former regime’s stocks to the “opposition” in Syria. As in Libya, the insurgents are known to include al Qaeda and other Shariah-supremacist groups … We know that Stevens‘ last official act was to hold such a meeting with an unidentified “Turkish diplomat.” Presumably, the conversation involved additional arms shipments to al Qaeda and its allies in Syria.

So, let’s get this straight. The Obama administration, through Ambassador Stevens, was illegally funneling arms to a declared enemy force. We now know that the administration was aware of security threats in Benghazi, but nevertheless put their Ambassador in harm’s way. When he was attacked, troops assigned to guard him were told to stand down and he ends up dead. Then, the administration tries to blame the attack on a phony riot, all the while knowing that it was a terrorist attack. Why the cover-up, if there was nothing to hide? But, as Hillary says, “What difference does it make?” Bin Laden is dead, right? And besides, Obama cares about the little guy, right?

It is a common practice for criminal enterprises to sacrifice foot soldiers who know too much. The whole thing sort of reminds me of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s death. During the Clinton administration, he supposedly died in a plane crash, but he had a 45 caliber bullet hole in his head. The fact that he had threatened to reveal that the administration was illegally selling trade missions had nothing to do with his death.

What is disturbing about all of this is that nobody seems all that interested in pursuing an investigation or doing anything about any illegal activity. Oh sure, they hold their hearings for the cameras, where Hillary can bark at all of them as the media cheers. But, no one really wants to do anything about it.

And believe me, they know. The New York Times knows. ABC, CBS and NBC know. Senators McCain and McConnell know. The Senate and House intelligence committees know. But, “What does it matter?” After all, Obama won. Where are the brave leaders to stand up to this criminal enterprise? Isn’t there just one Joe Wilson out there? Oh, that’s right; the GOP threw him under the bus. But Obamacare does cover illegals. Obama was lying.


God bless,

JohnnyD

Big Trouble for Little Labor

From: Americans for Limited Government

By - Rick Manning - January 28, 2013

Fewer and fewer Americans are represented by labor unions with only 6.6 percent of private sector workers belonging to organized labor in 2012 according to a survey released by the federal government last week.

The stunning drop in private sector labor union membership over the past ten years parallels organized labor’s decision to engage in massive political expenditures designed to elect supposed pro-labor candidates to office.

Since 2002, union membership dropped by more than 1.75 million with the losses almost exclusively occurring since 2008.  Ironically, these losses almost directly coincide with when the impacts from one of organized labor’s greatest political successes of the decade kicked in — the election of the Pelosi-Reid Congress.

The plummeting number of private sector union members, and there are now more public employees who are union members than private sector employees, means that the labor union leaders will be forced into the choice between supporting policies that increase their public sector base, which harm opportunities to create private sector jobs for their members.

The fact that Richard Trumka, the former head of the United Mine Workers union, who now heads the AFL-CIO, was an emphatic supporter of President Obama’s re-election while the mine workers (AFL-CIO affiliated) remained neutral in the race points out this internal tension.  Obama’s aggressive anti-mining stance through both the EPA and the Department of Interior has made the President a pariah in coal country.  Yet, when push came to shove, those who go into the mines were disregarded by their union brethren whose bigger fish to fry are solely related to expanding the size and scope of government.

While the decline of the private sector union employee has political implications, it also most importantly may force a change in the focus of those very labor leaders who purport to lead them.

The dirty little secret within the labor union world is that many of these very unions which are spending millions upon millions of dollars to elect candidates who are killing their members’ jobs have a different problem — dramatically underfunded pension systems.

In 2012, the Labor Department listed 212 private sector labor unions as being critically underfunded.  The notice specifically states the danger, “The Fund is in critical status (red zone) as of January 1, 2012… This means that contributions will not be enough to meet government standards for funding promised benefits plus those that participants are currently earning.”

Among the big name unions that have either national or local pensions clinging on the edge of not being able to meet their basic responsibilities to their own members are:  the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), and the United Food and Commercial Union.  Note that many of these unions are AFL-CIO affiliated.

Literally hundreds of thousands of workers’ pensions are being short changed by the labor unions themselves while those same unions spend millions on promoting the very political agenda that is killing their members’ jobs.

In 2010, desperate union officials like Jimmy Hoffa, Jr. pushed hard to get union pensions bailed out by putting the taxpayers on the hook for a portion of the benefit costs.  With the election of a Republican-led House of Representatives, that effort was sidelined and the issue of union pensions’ impending default on their members’ retirement payments was pushed aside.

Today, Congress and states should act on protecting these workers and pensioners by requiring that labor unions bring all of their local affiliates’ pensions systems up to 100 percent funding levels, before they can spend one dime on politics.

The more than 93 percent of non-union taxpayers should not, and cannot afford to, bail out the labor unions who have failed to meet their basic fiduciary responsibilities to their members.

To continue to allow these labor leaders to continue to spend money that rightfully should be paying for their members’ pensions on greasing political palms would be unconscionable.

When union retirees find themselves getting twenty cents on the dollar they were promised for retirement, they will only have their own labor leaders to blame.  A group that has chosen to pursue craven politics at the expense of their own members’ basic needs.

And perhaps that attitude by labor leaders explains more than anything else, the choice that workers are making all over America to reject union membership and the declining private sector union rolls that result.


God bless,

JohnnyD

Obama's Abuse of Power

An appeals court says his recess appointments are unconstitutional.

From: The Wall Street Journal

REVIEW & OUTLOOK - January 25, 2013

President Obama has shown increasing contempt for the constitutional limits on his power, and the courts are finally awakening to the news. A unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that the President's non-recess recess appointments are illegal and an abuse of executive power.

On January 4, 2012, Mr. Obama bypassed the Senate's advice and consent power by naming three new members of the National Labor Relations Board and appointing Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Other Presidents have made recess appointments and we've supported that executive authority.

But here's the Obama kicker: He consciously made those "recess" appointments when the Senate wasn't in recess but was conducting pro-forma sessions precisely so Mr. Obama couldn't make a recess appointment. No President to our knowledge had ever tried that one, no doubt because it means the executive can decide on his own when a co-equal branch of government is in session.

In Noel Canning v. NLRB, a Washington state Pepsi bottler challenged a board decision on grounds that the recess appointments were invalid and that the NLRB thus lacked the three-member quorum required to conduct business. The D.C. Circuit agreed, while whistling a 98 mile-per-hour, chin-high fastball past the White House about the separation of powers.

In the 46-page opinion, the three-judge panel said that "not only logic and language, but also constitutional history" reject the President's afflatus. The Federalist Papers refer to recess appointments expiring at the end of the following session of Congress, the court explained, so it stands to reason that recess appointments were intended to be made only when the Senate is in a recess between sessions, not any time the Senators step out of the Capitol.

"An interpretation of 'the Recess' that permits the President to decide when the Senate is in recess would demolish the checks and balances inherent in the advice-and-consent requirement," wrote Chief Judge David Sentelle for the court, "giving the President free rein to appoint his desired nominees at any time he pleases, whether that time be a weekend, lunch, or even when the Senate is in session and he is merely displeased with its inaction. This cannot be the law."

 

Judge Sentelle added, in a clear warning to the lawyers who let Mr. Obama walk out on this limb, that "Allowing the President to define the scope of his own appointments power would eviscerate the Constitution's separation of powers."

In a particular surprise, two of the three judges also ruled that recess appointments are only allowed to fill vacancies that arise during the time the Senate is in actual recess. This has not been the recent practice, and it means that Presidents could not wait, say, until a recess in December to appoint a controversial replacement for a Secretary of State who resigned in October.

The court nonetheless makes a plausible case based on the text of the Constitution, government practice in the decades after ratification and legal precedent. Mr. Obama's imperial overreach has invited the courts to re-examine the Constitution's Appointments Clause and tilt the balance of power back toward the Senate.

Meantime, the ruling potentially invalidates dozens of NLRB decisions since the illegal recess appointments were made. A similar mess occurred in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled in New Process Steel v. NLRB that some 600 decisions made by the NLRB without a three-member quorum were invalid.

The decision also means that Mr. Cordray has no authority to run the consumer financial bureau, which has been busy issuing thousands of pages of regulations since he was illegally imposed in the job. Mr. Obama renominated Mr. Cordray this week, which is an insult to the Senate and after this ruling to the Constitution too.

One question is whether Mr. Cordray can legally keep accepting his paycheck. Especially as a former Attorney General in Ohio, he ought to resign for having agreed to play along as a constitutional usurper.

White House spokesman Jay Carney criticized the unanimous decision Friday, which is consistent with the President's sense of constitutional entitlement. Mr. Obama decided last year he could selectively enforce the immigration laws, exempting certain young people even if Congress hadn't passed the Dream Act. We support the Dream Act but not his unilateral way of imposing it.

Mr. Obama has also signaled his intention to govern as much as possible by stretching the legal bounds of regulation and executive orders. The D.C. Circuit ruling is thus a particularly timely warning that while Mr. Obama was re-elected, has most of the press in his pocket and is popular with 52% of the public, he's subject to the rule of law like everybody else.


God bless,
JohnnyD

Is Obama Smarter Than A Communist?

From: Personal Liberty Digest

by - Wayne Allyn Root - January 24, 2013

Hello, I’m Wayne Allyn Root for Personal Liberty. You know that famous TV show “Are you Smarter Than a 5^th Grader?” Well that show has inspired me to ask: “Is Obama smarter than a communist?” Many socialist and communist leaders seem to have learned a lesson that Obama has not.

Remember when Obama said, “I just want to spread the wealth around”? If income redistribution works, if tax-and-spend is a model for America, why are Greece and Spain bankrupt basket cases threatening to bring down the entire European Union? Greece and Spain have both been led by Socialist Party politicians. They both have big taxes, big spending, big unions, big governments — just like Obama wants. Yet both Greece and Spain have unemployment rates above 26 percent and youth unemployment above 56 percent.

With that record of devastating failure, why did Obama just raise U.S. income tax rates to the levels of Greece and Spain? Greece’s income tax rate is 40 percent. Spain’s top rate ranges from 40 percent to 50 percent. In America we just raised the top rate to about 40 percent, plus add in Obamacare taxes, plus add in State and local taxes, and, of course, Obama took away deductions, too. Can you even imagine? We chose to emulate Greece and Spain right at the moment of disaster, at the moment of devastation, at the moment of 26 percent and 56 percent unemployment — right as they are headed into economic oblivion. With Obama’s re-election we chose Greece and Spain.

By the way, with high income taxes and value added taxes (a national sales tax), why are Greece and Spain both bankrupt and insolvent? Why would Obama want higher taxes for America, when Greece and Spain prove the model doesn’t work? Each country is going through a national nightmare. Thousands of trees are missing… because citizens can no longer afford to pay for electricity or fuel to heat their homes, so each night they go into parks and forests to cut down trees for firewood. Families are digging through dumpsters for food. Government employees go unpaid for months. This is what socialism and high taxes get you. And we chose Obama for another four years? Maybe we should check whether American voters are as smart as a 5^th grader.

All those Greek voters elected socialist politicians because they promised fat pensions, free healthcare and lavish early retirement. Does that sound familiar? Now, they face unimaginable poverty for years to come. This proves that when politicians promise chocolate cake with no calories, they should be put in prison for fraud.

Cuba has been a Marxist state since before I was born. Its leader, Raul Castro, is a proud communist. Yet Cuba recently passed the most sweeping reforms in its history. Castro is slashing more than 1 million government jobs, cutting entitlements, encouraging more private sector entrepreneurship, giving more power to private companies and reducing state spending.

One of the trademark features of Cuba’s socialist system — the universal monthly food ration — will be phased out. Castro said the ration given all Cubans since 1963 had become an “unsupportable burden” for Cuba’s bankrupt and crumbling government.

So get this: A Cuban communist leader is cutting 1 million government jobs and eliminating Cuba’s version of food stamps. Meanwhile, Obama keeps adding government jobs and food stamp use is setting all-time records in America; 47.7 million Americans are on food stamps. Tell me again: Who’s the communist and who’s the capitalist?

Even Russia’s Vladimir Putin (then serving as prime minister) seemed to have learned a common 5^th grade history lesson on socialism, when during a 2008 speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he stated: “In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state role absolute… In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly.”

Putin and Castro have learned their lessons from experience. But Obama? It sounds like he needs to attend re-education camp. Or at least do over the 5th grade.

Obama just raised our income tax rates to 40 percent and eliminated deductions; and, of course, he’s already passed a raft of new Obamacare taxes. He wants to take the cap off Social Security taxes and add a VAT tax (national sales tax). Add it up. Under Obama, Americans could soon have a tax rate above 70 percent. Not the super rich. These rates will apply to small business owners.

Now contrast those taxes with today’s tax rates in formerly Communist countries:

• Russia: 13 percent flat tax.
• Bulgaria: 10 percent flat tax.
• Georgia: 15 percent flat tax.
• Romania: 16 percent flat tax.
• Czech Republic: 15 percent flat tax.
• Albania: 10 percent flat tax.
• Kazakhstan: 10 percent flat tax.
• Lithuania: 15 percent flat tax.
• Slovakia: 19 percent flat tax.
• Bosnia: 10 percent flat tax.
• Serbia: 12 percent flat tax.
• Hungary: 16 percent flat tax.
• Estonia: 21 percent flat tax.

So ask yourself again, “Is Obama smarter than a communist?” Looking at those tax rates, it would be easy to mistake the United States under Obama for a socialist country.

While the big-tax, big-spend, big-government economies of Europe are floundering, examine how the low-tax model is performing around the world. Hong Kong, with its 15 percent flat tax and no capital gains tax, has 3.3 percent unemployment. That’s down in the 4^thquarter of last year from 3.4 percent in the quarter before that.

Singapore has a tax of 3 percent to 20 percent, with unemployment at a remarkable 1.9 percent.

Obviously, high taxes kill jobs. Case closed. Obama must have missed that 5th grade lesson.

So I’ll ask the question again: Is Obama smarter than a communist? Perhaps someone should sit Obama down with all these communist and ex-communist leaders and get him educated. Fast. Before the U.S. economic collapse is beyond repair. Before the America we know and love is gone forever.


God bless,
JohnnyD

Obama concedes: Obamacare didn’t do anything for rising health care costs

From: Hot Air

by - Mary Katharine Ham - January 22, 2013

It started out with such high hopes:

“I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.”

That was on the trail in 2008, an audacious promise Politifact ruled flatly “Broken.” Obama repeated the promises of lower premiums and bent cost curves as a central part of his pitch in passing the health care law. It is called “The Affordable Care Act.” But most supporters of Obamacare have stopped talking about cost savings and started focusing on increased benefits, acknowledging (sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly) that expanded coverage and more benefits will actually cost more money, not less, but that the trade-off is worth it.

President Obama joined that crowd in his second Inaugural address Monday. It came as Obama just barely grazed two issues rather important to the American people at the end of this paragraph:

"We understand that outworn programs are inadequate to the needs of our time. So we must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools, and empower our citizens with the skills they need to work hard or learn more, reach higher. But while the means will change, our purpose endures. A nation that rewards the effort and determination of every single American, that is what this moment requires. That is what will give real meaning to our creed. We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit."

And, now for the “but,” clause, which includes all the reasons he can’t actually ever make hard choices:

"But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future."

President Obama spent two years of his first term passing a giant health care bill that was supposed to address rising costs. This claim was front and center in his appeal to a joint session of Congress on the matter in 2009:

"Then there’s the problem of rising costs. We spend one-and-a-half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren’t any healthier for it. This is one of the reasons that insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages. It’s why so many employers – especially small businesses – are forcing their employees to pay more for insurance, or are dropping their coverage entirely. It’s why so many aspiring entrepreneurs cannot afford to open a business in the first place, and why American businesses that compete internationally – like our automakers – are at a huge disadvantage. And it’s why those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it – about $1000 per year that pays for somebody else’s emergency room and charitable care.

Finally, our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers. When health care costs grow at the rate they have, it puts greater pressure on programs like Medicare and Medicaid. If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs, we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close.

These are the facts. Nobody disputes them. We know we must reform this system."

And, so we did, allegedly with an eye toward “bending the cost curve down” and lowering premiums for families. It has been more than two years since the law passed. Critics of the law have been proven right again and again in their skepticism that it could do those things.

HHS, 2010:

President Obama’s health care overhaul law will increase the nation’s health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation.

A report by economic experts at the Health and Human Services Department said the health care remake will achieve Obama’s aim of expanding health insurance — adding 34 million Americans to the coverage rolls.

But the analysis also found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs. It also warned that Medicare cuts may be unrealistic and unsustainable, driving about 15% of hospitals into the red and “possibly jeopardizing access” to care for seniors.

The mixed verdict for Obama’s signature issue is the first comprehensive look by neutral experts.

Kaiser, 2011:

The Kaiser Family Foundation shows family premiums topped $15,000 a year for the first time in 2011, increasing a whopping 9% this year, three times more than the increase the year before. The study says that up to 2% of that increase is because of the health care law’s provisions, such as allowing families to add grown children up to 26 years old to their policies.

CLASS Act turns out to be fiction, not revenue, 2011:

How did a program so obviously unsustainable that the White House had no choice but to shut it down produce an $80 billion surplus for ObamaCare accounting purposes? Very simply, actually. The Democrats designed the first five years of CLASS to be a “vesting period” in which enrollees would pay into the program but receive no benefits yet. In other words, for the first five years, the program would have been pure profit for the government — and then, when benefits finally kicked in, the hemorrhaging would begin. The reason they did it that way is the same reason they delayed the start of ObamaCare until 2014: They knew that CBO “scores” new legislation based on its first 10 years of operation, so the more they could game the numbers during those first 10 years, the better the “score” for ObamaCare would look while Democrats were trying to sell it to the public. It was a massive accounting fraud designed to make health-care reform seem much less expensive than it really was. According to Klein, CLASS’s phony “savings” accounted for fully $70 billion of ObamaCare’s supposed $143 billion in deficit reduction.

The 1099 reporting rule turns out to be overburdensome regulation, not revenue, 2011:

The very first part of ObamaCare to get the knife was the 1099 reporting requirement. That extremist bit of legislation passed the Senate 87-12 and the House, 314-112, and landed on the President’s desk for signing on April 14. The 1099 reporting requirement was one of the funding fictions ObamaCare supporters used to make it look as if the President’s plan would fulfill his promise not to “add a dime to the deficit.” Post-passage it was almost universally recognized as unworkable. It would have required businesses to fill out an IRS form (1099) for every $600 of staples and printer paper they bought at Target within a calendar year. It closed a loophole, and that loophole was shopping.
When it was repealed, Obama called it “a big win for small business.”

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, 2012:

When President Obama began pushing national health care legislation in 2009, he argued that reform was needed to rein in the unsustainable growth in health care spending that was crippling the budgets of businesses, states and the federal government. But a new government actuarial study finds that as a result of the law, health care spending will be $478 billion higher over the next decade than it would have otherwise been had no law been passed.
Furthermore, as a result of the health care law, about 50 cents of every dollar of health care spending in the United States will be financed by government by 2021, according to the report from the actuary’s office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, unveiled today in the journal Health Affairs.

Then there’s the $63 Obamacare’s newly written regulations added to everyone’s premium in December, which even if it were the only increase for which Obamacare was responsible, would still put Obama $2,563 off his promise.

The charge, buried in a recent regulation, works out to tens of millions of dollars for the largest companies, employers say. Most of that is likely to be passed on to workers.

Oops, electronic records raise costs instead of lowering them, 2013:

The report predicted that widespread use of electronic records could save the United States health care system at least $81 billion a year, a figure RAND now says was overstated. The study was widely praised within the technology industry and helped persuade Congress and the Obama administration to authorize billions of dollars in federal stimulus money in 2009 to help hospitals and doctors pay for the installation of electronic records systems.

“RAND got a lot of attention and a lot of buzz with the original analysis,” said Dr. Kellermann, who was not involved in the 2005 study. “The industry quickly embraced it.”

But evidence of significant savings is scant, and there is increasing concern that electronic records have actually added to costs by making it easier to bill more for some services.

Politico discovers mandates of more benefits and more coverage paid for with more taxes might hike premium costs, 2013:

If you work for a small business, your next health insurance premium may give you sticker shock.

Many of the small-business and individual insurance policies are working the health reform law’s 2014 fees into their 2013 bills, contributing to double-digit premium increases for some people.
 

All those new consumer benefits packed into the health reform law — birth control without a co-pay, free preventive care and limits on when insurers can turn down a customer — had to be paid for somehow.

So the law’s drafters included a new tax on health insurers, starting at $8 billion in 2014 and increasing to $14 billion within four years, to help meet the new expenses. And insurers in 2014 will also have to pay a “reinsurance contribution” to cushion health plans that end up with a lot of sick customers under new rules requiring them to cover people with pre-existing conditions.

The Government Accountability Office, 2013:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO)’s annual audit of the government, released Thursday, raises serious concerns about the federal government’s long-term financial stability and the effectiveness of the Affordable Care Act’s cost-curbing measures.

The report found “that—absent policy changes—the federal government continues to face an unsustainable fiscal path.”

Obamacare has already failed in its promises. Our president spent two years, during the worst economic downturn since the Depression, passing a law more than 50 percent of the public still hates because 85 percent of them were satisfied with their current coverage, imperfect though it was. He turned the crayon box upside down to draw a picture no one wanted and we all must now pay more money to enjoy his vision. The only spending problem he’ll concede we have has been exacerbated by his own signature “achievement.”

These are the facts. Nobody disputes them. Not even Obama.


God bless,
JohnnyD