Exactly two years ago this week, the Obama administration announced it had issued more than 100 waivers en masse to a select group of companies, unions and other health insurance providers seeking relief from the onerous federal health care law. The Obamacare waiver winner’s club now totals 2,000. Where are they now?
Among the first and most prominent recipients of the Obamacare waivers for favors were large restaurant chains that provide low-wage, seasonal and part-time workers with low-cost health insurance plans called “mini-med” plans. An estimated 1.7 million workers benefit from such plans. Obamacare forced companies carrying such coverage to raise their minimum limits on coverage to no less than $750,000 annually. Another Obamacare provision forces all employers to spend at least 80 percent to 85 percent of their premium revenue on medical care.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
(CNSNews.com) – Although the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal government will spend $3.563 trillion in fiscal year 2012 and the White House Office of Management estimates it will be $3.795 trillion, actual withdrawals from the U.S. Treasury have already exceeded $10 trillion.
In fact, as of the close of business Wednesday, withdrawals from the Treasury equaled $10,201,615,000,000 for fiscal 2012, which began on Oct. 1, 2011 and will end on Sept. 30.
According to the Daily Treasury Statement–the official daily accounting sheet for the federal government—withdrawals from the Treasury exceeded $10 trillion this year on Aug. 30, when they rose from $9.903 trillion to $10.035 trillion.
Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks to the crowd at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Florida, on August 29, 2012 during the Republican National Convention (RNC). (ROBYN BECK/AFP/GettyImages)
TAMPA, Fla. — Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rallied the GOP faithful at the Republican National Convention with a barn-burner speech Wednesday night.
The only speaker of the convention thus far to take the podium without the assistance of a teleprompter, Rice spoke of the challenges facing the country, both foreign and domestic, and the need for a leader.
Commencing with an anecdote about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Rice transitioned to the economic crisis and turmoil abroad. She pointed out that around the world people ask “Where does America stand?” only to find that the answer is ambiguous. To Rice, the country is in need of leadership.
“I know too that there is a weariness I know there is a sense that we have carried these burdens long enough,” she said, noting that the country has no other choice by to be a leader, because “either nobody will lead and there will be chaos or someone else will who does not share our values. We do not have a choice. We cannot be reluctant to lead — and you cannot lead from behind.” Rice asserted that Romney and Ryan are the ones who can lead.
Earlier today, the liberal website Gawker did a document dump including 950 pages worth of confidential documents affiliated with Bain Capital.
The idea was to expose Mitt Romney’s alleged tax-dodging schemes with offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. Problem being, the parent corporation known as the Gawker Media Group has a little secret of their own.
Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask).
Barack Hussein Obama has decided that in order to punish Arizona for having dared enforce American immigration laws, he has ordered his federal agencies to basically stop working with Arizona’s law enforcement agencies concerning illegal immigrants. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr has also made it known as the nations chief law enforcement officer that he too is only going to selectively enforce immigration laws that he personally likes. More to the point, Holder will only enforce what is beneficial to his boss’s re-election campaign. If I’m not mistaken, this attitude by both men is blatantly UNCONSTITUTIONAL and falls under the heading of “high crimes and misdemeanors’, an IMPEACHABLE offense!
Mr. Obama, how in the world can you look at the people of Arizona and tell them that YOU are not willing to give them EQUAL PROTECTION under the laws of the United States? Brian Terry, an American Border Patrol Agent, was shot in the back 18 miles INSIDE the border of the United States! Jaime Zapata, an ICE agent, was also killed because of an illegally run and botched program known as Fast & Furious. Being an accomplice to murder, Mr. Obama, is a crime punishable by prison time. Maybe you and Mr Holder could share a cell? Anyway, I digress…..again!
My feelings are, Mr. Obama, that you should be impeached before any more American and Mexican bodies pile up because of your insanity. Mr. Holder should be found guilty of contempt of Congress and charged with negligent homicide in the cases of the two dead federal agents. You and Holder should also have to face justice in the death of the Arizona rancher and others who were killed by your illegal compadres coming across our borders and onto American’s rightfully-owned land. I have an idea for a reverse gun walking program that I would like to run called “Slow & Deliberate”! It’s a program whereby I legally get to use federal funds to LEGALLY buy guns from LEGAL gun shop owners and arm American citizens to help guard the American border from the intrusion of illegals from everywhere. No problems, no paperwork, no questions! All neat, tidy, and LEGAL!
Well there was barely a peep from the MSM last week as some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world gathered together just outside of Washington, D.C. in Chantilly, VA for their annual meeting. Though their list is usually kept secret, they have released a list of people who were invited, though quite often people attend who are not on the list.
This year, being an election year, should be most interesting to Americans. In fact, it has been claimed that Mitt Romney was present for this year’s meeting.
Charlie Skelton, writing for the UK’s Guardian reports,
Four eyewitnesses on the hotel staff told me Willard Mitt Romney was here at Bilderberg 2012. My four eyewitnesses place him inside. That’s one more than Woodward and Bernstein used. Romney’s office initially refused to confirm or deny his attendance as Bilderberg is “not public”. They later said it was not him. (more…)
Some astoundingly grim news on the “economic recovery” front: half of American households are receiving government funds to support themselves. No matter which way you slice it, this number isn’t good news for the Obama administration — they can spin the jobs numbers by ignoring the number of people who dropped out of the workforce, but this statistic is pretty straightforward.
The 49.1% of the population in a household that gets benefits is up from 30% in the early 1980s and 44.4% as recently as the third quarter of 2008.
The increase in recent years is likely due in large part to the lingering effects of the recession. As of early 2011, 15% of people lived in a household that received food stamps, 26% had someone enrolled in Medicaid and 2% had a member receiving unemployment benefits. Families doubling up to save money or pool expenses also is likely leading to more multigenerational households. But even without the effects of the recession, there would be a larger reliance on government.
In the run-up to this weekend’s G-8 summit at Camp David, journalists have unfavorably compared European “austerity” with Barack Obama’s economic policies.
European spending cuts, the argument goes, have hurt people and are arousing political opposition, while Obama’s proposals to keep federal spending at 24 percent of gross domestic product indefinitely are likely to succeed.
Evil Republican spending cuts, in contrast, would deny the economy needed stimulus and wreak havoc on ordinary people. But the facts undermine the storyline. Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University took a look at what “austerity” in Europe actually means.
(AP) Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks in Hillsborough,…
HILLSBOROUGH, N.H. (AP) – Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney on Friday criticized a restored 19th century bridge as another “Bridge to Nowhere” and a fresh symbol of the waste he says is rampant in President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan.
From the parking lot of a Ford dealership, Romney pointed to the nearby stone bridge that straddles the Contoocook River and called it a boondoggle. The town of Hillsborough received $150,000 in federal stimulus money to repair the Sawyer Bridge as part of a new park project designed to put people to work installing new benches, lights and visitor parking.
In a long election season, it’s never wise to get too high or too low over any one poll. Presidential elections are won at the state level, but statewide polling is fairly sporadic at this stage of the race, so we’re stuck reading national polls a lot. But the latest poll is bad news for President Obama.
We all know the major issues by now to look for with individual polls: some polls are adults, and are totally useless, because only registered voters can vote. Polls of likely voters, in turn, are vastly more accurate and less Democratic-biased than polls of registered voters, many of whom also don’t show up to vote. Most polls are also reported after weighting to achieve some guesstimate of the partisan breakdown of the general electorate among Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Even polls that don’t feature egregious hackery are an inexact science, because they rest on the pollster’s current assumptions about the D/R/I split and the ‘screen’ they use to decide who is a likely voter. If the shape of the electorate is not as projected, the poll will be wrong.
I have written on the unconstitutionality of the Federal Reserve System before and how that fiat money is not to be printed by the federal government in any form. The Constitution is clear that only gold and silver coin is to be coined by the government. Those metals are the only metals they have authority to coin. Yet the propaganda machine of the Federal Reserve is now putting out it’s own educational propaganda material in order to teach 8-12 graders otherwise.
The lesson description begins,
The Constitution of the United States outlines the basic principles of the U.S. government. This lesson focuses on the express and implied powers of Congress and the power of the Supreme Court to decide whether a law is unconstitutional.
Type the word “Santorum” in Google and you won’t find his campaign website or other positive, useful information about him in the first, second or even third entries.In fact, almost every entry on the all-important first page of “Santorum” results — the one most users see — is laden with nasty, sometimes vulgar attacks.The very first entry for his name offers a “definition” that reads “Santorum [1.] The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. [ 2.]Senator Rick Santorum.”The definition is repeated in another entry in the popular website Urban Dictionary, which is a compendium of street and often-vulger slang terms.Other first page Google entries include those with headings such as “Santorum Exposed,” “Despicable: Rick Santorum’s Wife Uses Her Sick Child To Lie About …,” and “Rick Santorum’s Anal Sex Problem.”Buried amid the smut is entry number 7, which offers a link to Santorum’s official campaign website.Is Google at war with Rick Santorum?
Sarah Palin has criticized the ‘lame-stream media’ for making too much of Rick Santorum’s 2008 statement that Satan is attacking America. But the media aren’t the only ones concerned.
Sarah Palin says the lame-stream media are getting all “wee-weed up” about Rick Santorum’s Satan speech. By that, we believe she means the mainstream press is making too much of it. Is she right?
Well, we’ll note here that the media gets wee-weed up about many subjects, because if they don’t, it can be very hard to stay awake during a slow news day. Mr. Santorum’s remarks were made four years ago, in a different context than a presidential race, and are easy to misinterpret if you have a dissimilar religious background.
Once Barack Obama said that babies were a punishment:
“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” he said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.
But now we learn that in Obamacare, pregnancy is not simply a punishment, it is a disease.
“Covering contraception is cost neutral since it saves money by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services,”
Preventing this “disease” is supposed to save big money.
Democratic chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz: “[Contraception costs] about $700 a year. That’s real money.”
Typical of democrats, something is provided for “free” at someone else’s cost.
Privately, however, insurers say there’s nothing “free” about preventing unwarranted pregnancies. They say the mandate also covers costly surgical sterilization procedures, and that in any case even the pill has up-front costs.
“Saying it’s revenue-neutral doesn’t mean it’s free and that you’re not paying for it,” an industry source told The Hill.
Doctors still have to be paid to prescribe the pill, drugmakers and pharmacists have to be paid to provide it – and all that money has to come from insurance premiums, not future hypothetical savings, the source said.
Many of us are off of work today, but are unaware of the true origin of this holiday. Indeed, today is not Presidents’ Day; it is the legal holiday to celebrate George Washington’s birthday (his actual birthday is Wednesday). Washington’s Birthday has been usurped by liberals (and marketers), as it has been morphed into a generic celebration of all American presidents.
In 1885, President Chester Arthur signed the original bill to make Washington’s birthday – February 22 – a federal holiday. For the first 83 years, the holiday was celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday. It wasn’t until 1968, when Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holidays Act, that the holiday was moved to the third Monday in February. Now, the holiday can only fall out between Lincoln’s (Feb. 12) and Washington’s birthdays, but never on February 22, the original date of the holiday. There was no official act of Congress that changed the name of the holiday (although an earlier draft the 1968 law did), but the random date opened the door for those with influence over the culture to corrupt the name. Many states, including my home state, officially call it Presidents’ Day.
The head of Media Matters for America — now out coordinating a new super PAC to help President Obama get reelected — is operating his nonprofit organizationin close coordination with the Obama White House, a new investigative report out Monday says.
David Brock, according to the Daily Caller, has collected a $250,000 annual salary for his work at MMFA, which includes daily screeds against Fox News Channel and other media outlets that allow conservative perspectives in their reporting.
AP – Feb. 2, 2012: Attorney General Eric Holder testifies on Capitol Hill.
WASHINGTON – Federal officials announced Thursday that 49 states have accepted a $25 billion foreclosure-abuse settlement with the five largest mortgage lenders — a deal that primarily helps underwater homeowners but pays just $2,000 to those already wrongly foreclosed upon.
The bulk of the deal requires the banks to reduce some loans and refinance mortgages for underwater borrowers. Oklahoma was the lone holdout to the agreement.
President Obama described the deal as a “landmark settlement” that would “begin to turn the page on an era of recklessness” while speeding relief to hard-hit homeowners.
It is the biggest settlement involving a single industry since a 1998 multistate tobacco deal. Under the agreement, five major banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial — will reduce loans for nearly 1 million households.
(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said Tuesday that the Democratic Party would “effectively” be “put out of business,” if Congress were to pass a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“They can’t work with us on balancing the budget,” DeMint said. “Their whole platform is based on more promises from government and more government spending.
“A balanced budget Amendment to the Constitution would effectively put the Democratic Party out of business, because campaigns could no longer be based on all the promises of what else that government is going to do. Whether it’s partnering with businesses or redistributing wealth, it doesn’t work in a scenario where we have to stop spending.”
Aaron Klein – WorldNetDaily – Posted January 26, 2012
Billionaire George Soros is predicting protests by Occupy Wall Street will turn violent, while warning the U.S. financial system may collapse.
In an interview with Newsweek writer John Arlidge, Soros reportedly said riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable.
“‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he says, almost gleefully,” when asked about the prospect of Occupy turning violent, writes Arlidge.
Soros claimed the riots will “be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”
“At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” Soros continued.
“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros said. [Remember, Soros thinks he's god!]
The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it was likely to raise interest rates at the end of 2014, but not until then, adding another 18 months to the expected duration of its most basic and longest-running response to the financial crisis.
The announcement means that the Fed does not expect the economy to complete its recovery from the 2008 crisis over the next three years. By holding short-term rates near zero beyond mid-2013, its previous estimate, the Fed hopes to hasten that process somewhat by reducing the cost of borrowing.
The Fed said in a statement that the economy had expanded “moderately” in recent weeks, but that unemployment remained at a high level, the housing sector remained in a deep depression, and the possibility of a new financial crisis in Europe continued to threaten the domestic economy.
Mitt Romney, fighting for his political life in Florida after his stunning defeat in the South Carolina primary, launched a sustained and ferocious broadside against his rival Newt Gingrich in the most bitter yet of 18 Republican presidential debates.
The former Massachusetts governor, struggling to cling onto his status as Republican frontrunner, branded Mr Gingrich an ‘influence peddler’ in Washington who ‘had to resign in disgrace’ as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Mr Gingrich, unable to lay off a raucous crowd as he had in two South Carolina debates, was subdued, saying: ‘Well, look, I’m not going to spend the evening trying to chase Governor Romney’s misinformation.’
But he charged Mr Romney with ‘walking around the state saying things that are untrue’ and rejected the accusation he had been a lobbyist – revealing that he had employed an ‘expert on lobbying’ to ensure he did not cross the line from being a consultant.
The Republican frontrunners clashed repeatedly in heated, personal terms tonight in a crackling campaign debate in Tampa, Florida.
Americans aren’t the only ones shocked by U.S. Congressman Ron Paul’s assertion that international sanctions against Iran qualify as an “act of war.”
The Texas Congressman has made the assertion several times during the past few years, and reiterated it last night during the Republican debates in Florida when he argued that the U.S. had committed an act of war by “blockading” Iran (which the U.S. is not doing).
“We’re blockading them,” Paul said to a Tampa audience. “Can you imagine what we would do if someone blockaded the Gulf of Mexico? That would be an act of war–so the act of war has already been committed and this is retaliation.”
(Excerpted from Chapter 19: The Eight Families: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf… Part one of a five-part series)
The Four Horsemen of Banking (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) own the Four Horsemen of Oil (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP Amoco and Chevron Texaco); in tandem with Deutsche Bank, BNP, Barclays and other European old money behemoths. But their monopoly over the global economy does not end at the edge of the oil patch.
According to company 10K filings to the SEC, the Four Horsemen of Banking are among the top ten stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation. [1]
House Speaker John Boehner meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Jan. 23, 2011. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
(CNSNews.com) – Federal spending bills approved by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives have increased the national debt by more than $1 trillion dollars in just 10 months.
Republicans won a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2010 elections and took control of the House on Jan. 5, 2011, when the chamber convened and elected Rep. John Boehner (R.-Ohio) as speaker.
WARNING: Freedom of SPEECH and of the PRESS is still the LAW.
THIS WEBSITE IS SERVING THE PUBLIC INTEREST. TAMPERING WITH THIS WEBSITE IS PUNISHABLE BY LAW AS A VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.
The Scripture Call for God’s People:
II Chronicles 7:14 If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
LIKE us on FACEBOOK
FoxNews “The Speaker’s Lobby”
We the People...
Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Follow Caroline May
Get Caroline May Feed
Earlier today, the liberal website Gawker did a document dump including 950 pages worth of confidential documents affiliated with Bain Capital.
In the run-up to this weekend’s G-8 summit at Camp David, journalists have unfavorably compared European “austerity” with Barack Obama’s economic policies.
In a long election season, it’s never wise to get too high or too low over any one poll. Presidential elections are won at the state level, but statewide polling is fairly sporadic at this stage of the race, so we’re stuck reading national polls a lot. But the latest poll is bad news for President Obama.
Type the word “Santorum” in Google and you won’t find his campaign website or other positive, useful information about him in the first, second or even third entries.In fact, almost every entry on the all-important first page of “Santorum” results — the one most users see — is laden with nasty, sometimes vulgar attacks.The very first entry for his name offers a “definition” that reads “Santorum [1.] The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. [ 2.]Senator Rick Santorum.”The definition is repeated in another entry in the popular website Urban Dictionary, which is a compendium of street and often-vulger slang terms.Other first page Google entries include those with headings such as “Santorum Exposed,” “Despicable: Rick Santorum’s Wife Uses Her Sick Child To Lie About …,” and “Rick Santorum’s Anal Sex Problem.”Buried amid the smut is entry number 7, which offers a link to Santorum’s official campaign website.Is Google at war with Rick Santorum?
Once Barack Obama said that babies were a punishment:
Many of us are off of work today, but are unaware of the true origin of this holiday. Indeed, today is not Presidents’ Day; it is the legal holiday to celebrate George Washington’s birthday (his actual birthday is Wednesday). Washington’s Birthday has been usurped by liberals (and marketers), as it has been morphed into a generic celebration of all American presidents.
The head of Media Matters for America — now out coordinating a new super PAC to help President Obama get reelected — is operating his nonprofit organization in close coordination with the Obama White House, a new investigative report out Monday says.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) (AP Photo)
Billionaire George Soros is predicting protests by Occupy Wall Street will turn violent, while warning the U.S. financial system may collapse.
Mitt Romney, fighting for his political life in Florida after his stunning defeat in the South Carolina primary, launched a sustained and ferocious broadside against his rival Newt Gingrich in the most bitter yet of 18 Republican presidential debates.
(Excerpted from Chapter 19: The Eight Families: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf… Part one of a five-part series)
House Speaker John Boehner meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Jan. 23, 2011. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
CWNews Posted Comments