http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/a_nation_adrift_from_the_rule_of_...
Excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal by David Keel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, about how the idea of the rule of law has been gutted over the last few years
http://washingtonexaminer.com/gm-goes-from-bad-to-worse-despite-obama-bailout...
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that GM is bleeding money because of decisions made by a management eager to please its political masters — and by the terms of the bankruptcy arranged by Obama car czars Ron Bloom and Steven Rattner.
Rattner himself admitted late last year, in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, that “We should have asked the [United Auto Workers] to do a bit more. We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay.” Nonunion employees of GM spin-off Delphi lost their pensions. UAW members didn’t.
The UAW got its political payoff. And GM, according to Forbes writer Louis Woodhill, is headed to bankruptcy again.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/08/15/Erskine-Bowles-Barack-Obam...
Bowles goes on to say that Obama eventually had some kind words for the commission’s work, but the thrust of his comments is that President Obama didn’t get behind the proposal, despite it meeting and exceeding his own criteria for success.
In other words, according to the Democratic chairman of the bipartisan deficit commission, it wasn’t Paul Ryan that doomed the effort. It was Barack Obama.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/uniting_the_right_rwan8uk...
The secret of Paul Ryan is that he is a blend of the two; philosophically a small-government conservative, managerially a fiscal conservative.
He wants to reduce the size of government for the reasons the Tea Party elucidated — that Big Government saps individual initiative and is a betrayal of the rights enumerated in the Constitution. But he has also mastered the language and the approach of the fiscal conservatives, and has used them to get very specific about the threat posed to the American future by the coming tsunami in entitlement spending.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-romneys-presidential-pick/...
When Ryan said in Norfolk, “We won’t replace our Founding principles, we will reapply them,” he effectively challenged Obama to say what Obama believes, which is: Madison was an extremist in enunciating the principles of limited government — the enumeration and separation of powers. And Jefferson was an extremist in asserting that government exists not to grant rights but to “secure” natural rights that pre-exist government.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/08/has-the-obama-campaign-finally-...
The ad is outrageous on so many levels–the woman never worked for Bain Capital or any Bain-associated company; she died seven years after Romney left Bain, at a time when Bain was being run by a major Obama fundraiser; she had her own health insurance that had nothing to do with Bain, and her death had nothing to do with insurance anyway; she went to a hospital thinking she had pneumonia and turned out to be suffering from an incurable cancer–that it has horrified every halfway-objective observer.
More on the story:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/08/omg-joe-soptic-the-anti-romney-cancer...
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/331761.php
http://washingtonexaminer.com/sunday-reflection-repeal-the-hollywood-tax-cuts...
The movie excise tax was imposed in response to the high deficits after World War Two. Deficits are high again, and there’s already historical precedent. Of course, to keep up with technology, the tax should now apply to DVDs, downloadable movies, pay-per-view and the like.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-romneys-excellent-...
Look at how Romney was received. In Israel, its popular prime minister lavished on him a welcome so warm as to be a near-endorsement. In Poland, Romney received an actualendorsement from Lech Walesa, former dissident, former president, Cold War giant, Polish hero.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/07/30/federal-court-doj-official-may-have-lied...
But what is most disturbing about this court order is that it strongly suggests that Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez essentially lied in sworn testimony. At a hearing before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on May 14, 2010, Perez was asked by Commissioner Peter Kirsanow whether “any political leadership [was] involved in the decision not to pursue this particular case.” Perez’s answer, on page 79 of the transcript of that hearing, is an uncategorical “No.” When the statements of Perez are compared to the documents that Judicial Watch forced DOJ to release in the FOIA lawsuit, it is clear Judge Walton was polite when he said they are contradictory and “cast doubt on the accuracy” of Perez’s account.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/312666/dea-gone-wild-kevin-d-williamson
In short, the DEA here commandeered private property from a law-abiding businessman and ineptly deployed it in an operation that got a man killed and now endangers a family that had nothing to do with the case. There is a term for what the DEA did with that truck: grand theft auto.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/07/6-charts-that-show-the-welfare-state-run-amok/
These charts show an out-of-control welfare state that is about to get even bigger, increasing both budget costs and dependency.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/incinerating-america’s-west/?singlepage=true
The beetles have been spreading uncontrollably because continuously connected and extremely thick forests densely populated with mature trees provide the ideal environment for their proliferation. Logging to thin the forests of mature trees that afford the beetles their favorite homes would slow their growth considerably. Logging out tree-free gaps between sections of forests would impose quarantine limits on the epidemic. Logging out trees that have already been killed would remove fuel for the otherwise inevitable conflagration.
the same environmental groups that have halted western logging regard the idea of using DDT to stop the pine beetle with near hysteria. Rachel Carson’s 1962 tome Silent Spring (which falsely argued that the vital pesticide DDT should be banned because it was killing the birds, when actually it was protecting them — and us — from insect-borne diseases) is virtually sacred scripture to the greens, and the successful campaign to ban DDT that followed from its promotion serves as the core of their proudest creation myth. In enshrining this myth, the anti-technology cult has chosen to heartlessly turn its head away from the massive amount of human misery it has caused through its narcissistic sacrifice of millions of African children to malaria. It must perforce regard the very idea that its object of hatred might be used to save our forests and their wildlife from incineration as nothing short of outright heresy.
Good background information on what we currently know about the players in the Fast and Furious scandal:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-contributor-who-helped-enact-assault-we...
Dennis K. Burke, who as a lawyer for the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s was a key player behind the enactment of the 1994 assault-weapons ban, and who then went on to become Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano’s chief of staff, and a contributor to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential primary campaign, and then a member of Obama’s transition team focusing on border-enforcement issues, ended up in the Obama administration as the U.S. attorney in Arizona responsible for overseeing Operation Fast and Furious.
The following is taken from the dissent from the majority ruling in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act cases.
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/06/the-mandate-survived-will-the-market/
The penalty—now a tax—for failing to purchase insurance in 2014 is $95–for the entire year. That is far less than the monthly insurance premium even young healthy people would pay. It rises to $695 in 2016, or 2.5 percent of income, and increases with inflation thereafter. For a young person trying to afford rent and pay a student loan, the decision is clear. Delaying an insurance purchase is money in the bank, and the tax is too small to matter.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/303808/fast-and-furious-and-ocdetf-and...
Why is President Obama denying Congress and the public access to critical information about his administration’s part in a shockingly ill-conceived investigation that resulted in the murder of Brian Terry, a heroic federal Border Patrol agent and veteran U.S. Marine. And when I say “his administration’s part,” that, too, is intentional.
When the president intervened with an eleventh-hour privilege assertion as the House committee verged on citing his obstructive attorney general for contempt, the Obamedia storyline, naturally, was that Obama was protecting Holder. But if we know anything after a half-decade of closely watching Barack Obama, it is this: The One is in it for The One. The president invoked executive privilege because he is protecting himself.
There is little doubt that the wiretap applications would show that senior DOJ officials were aware of the gunwalking tactic long before Agent Terry was gunned down on December 14, 2010. But that’s not the half of it. Bet your bottom dollar that gunwalking was discussed in the consideration of whether to make Fast and Furious an OCDETF case in the first place. OCDETF investigations, moreover, are carefully monitored by the Justice Department throughout, to ensure that the extraordinary flow of funding continues to be worthwhile. I’m wagering that senior DOJ officials — which is to say, Obama-administration political appointees — knew about the gunwalking for close to a year before Agent Terry’s death.
Read the whole thing.
Power Line:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/06/obamas-claim-of-executive-privi...
Today Deputy Attorney General James Cole advised Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, that the Department of Justice will not respond to the committee’s subpoena of certain documents relating to the Fast and Furious scandal. Instead, the Obama administration is asserting a claim of executive privilege for the reasons laid out in Eric Holder’s letter to President Obama dated June 19.
Holder’s letter is a remarkable document. Viewed from a strictly technical standpoint, it is a terrible piece of legal work.
