As the country is still standing following the financial crisis, Barack Obama has nominated a key figure in the disaster apparently so she can finish off the country for good.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama tapped Mike Froman and Penny Pritzker for the last two vacant Cabinet slots on his economic team on Thursday, turning to a law school classmate who is already one of his chief advisors and a billionaire businesswoman who helped put him in the White House.
As key members of his team, the two will work to boost demand for U.S. goods and workers, Obama said as he announced the nominations at the White House shortly before leaving on a trip to Mexico, a key U.S. trading partner.
Kevin Glass
Managing Editor, Townhall.com
April 05, 2013
President Obama’s budget proposal is due out next week. We’ve already got a relatively good idea of what he’s going to propose – more spending, more taxes, maybe some hints of deficit reduction. It also looks like President Obama will propose a statistical adjustment to Social Security’s adjustment formula – moving to the chained consumer price index (C-CPI) – that the Obama Administration has long portrayed as an important entitlement reform.
What is a C-CPI reform, exactly? It would peg Social Security cost-of-living adjustments to a different – and, economists say, more accurate – form of inflation. The practical effects of this are that there would be modest benefit cuts and modest tax increases over what’s currently projected for Social Security. Over a ten-year period, the CBO projects, there would be a $127 billion spending cut to Social Security and a $123 billion dollar tax hike. Liberals dislike the C-CPI reform due to the spending cuts and conservatives dislike it because of the tax hikes.
A “senior administration official” told the Huffington Post that President Obama’s plan is “not the President’s ideal deficit-reduction plan” and characterizes the C-CPI proposal as a “key Republican request… not the President’s preferred approach.”
This is a dishonest framing at best. As the Washington Post reports, it has consistently been the Obama Administration pushing for a C-CPI reform to Social Security. This is from a WaPo report on December’s fiscal cliff negotiations [emphasis mine]:
Liberal Democrats, too, were on edge about Obama’s offer on the inflation measure, known as the chained consumer price index, or chained CPI. Obama tentatively embraced the change in budget negotiations with Boehner in the summer of 2011.
Stocks closed out the first quarter on a high note with the S&P 500 piercing through levels last seen in 2007 to end at a record high near 1,570 and the Dow logging its strongest quarter in 15 years.
The S&P finally surpassed its closing high level of 1,565.15 shortly after the market open after flirting with the milestone for weeks, recovering all its losses from the financial crisis. The next milestone for the index is its all-time intraday high of 1,576.09, set on October 11, 2007.
Republicans are reportedly ready to vote to hike the debt ceiling without any of the major deficit-related concessions they’ve been pushing for from Democrats, and budget-watchers will soon turn their attention to the looming sequestration spending cuts (from the Budget Control Act, or BCA) scheculed to take place on March 1 and the expiration of the continuing resolution budget that the federal government has been operating on, scheduled to take place March 28.Progressives, however, have been declaring the deficit problem “mostly solved.” A report from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that, including all BCA cuts and the additional tax revenues from the January 1 fiscal cliff legislation, the U.S. is close to being on a stable ten-year budget path.
House Budget Committee chair Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has rejected President Barack Obama’s demand to raise taxes as part of Obama’s proposal to achieve $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenues to avoid the “fiscal cliff.”
Instead, Ryan backed Speaker John Boehner’s position, which is that any new tax revenues must be achieved without passing higher tax rates.
In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Ryan specified that new revenues should come through economic growth and tax reform, not tax hikes:
Speaker Boehner has outlined a bipartisan way forward to avoid the “fiscal cliff” and get our economy growing: common-sense entitlement reform coupled with pro-growth tax reform. We can find common ground on responsible spending restraint and greater revenue through economic growth, but we have yet to see either a serious plan or leadership from President Obama. Speaker Boehner and House Republicans have delivered both.
Earlier today, President Obama signaled an openness to tax reform, but said that “closing loopholes in deductions” would not cover the cost of extending the current tax rates for the top two percent of earners.
Obama reiterated that he interpreted last week’s election results as a mandate to raise taxes as a means to balance the federal budget. Ryan told ABC News yesterday that the electorate had not voted for higher taxes, since Republicans had retained control of the House of Representatives after opposing tax hikes.
Ryan’s support for Boehner signals growing unity among House Republicans behind the Speaker’s refusal to consider new taxes. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also made a firm commitment to prevent tax hikes in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News last week. Bipartisan talks on the “fiscal cliff’ begin Friday.
Nearly a dozen top United States companies plan to start laying off hundreds of employees with the implementation of Obamacare, according to the non-profit political action group FreedomWorks.
FreedomWorks compiled the list, reported in Friday’s Washington Times, from statements made by the firms since President Barack Obama’s healthcare mandate was passed.
The firms include:
Welch Allyn — a manufacturer of medical diagnostic equipment in central New York — which says it will cut 275 employees, about 10 percent of its workforce, over the next three years.
Dana Holding Corp. — a global auto parts manufacturing company — which warned of layoffs due “$24 million over the next six years in additional U.S. healthcare expenses.’’
Stryker — a medical device manufacturer — which plans to close its facility in Orchard Park, N.Y., eliminating 96 jobs in December. They also say they’ll slash 5 percent of their global workforce, about 1,170 positions.
Boston Scientific — a medical device manufacturer — said it plans to cut between 1,200 and 1,400 jobs, while shifting investments and workers overseas to China.
Medtronic — a medical device maker — which cut 500 positions over the summer, with 500 more set to be eliminated by the end of 2013.
U.S. employers stepped up hiring in October and the jobless rate ticked higher as more workers restarted job hunts, a hopeful sign for a lackluster economy that has dragged on President Barack Obama’s reelection chances.
Employers added 171,000 people to their payrolls last month, the Labor Department said on Friday. The government also said 84,000 more jobs were created in August and September than initially estimated.
The jobless rate edged a tenth of a point higher to 7.9 percent, but that was due to a surge of workers back into the workforce. Only people who have recently looked for a job can count as unemployed.
The employment data was the last major report card on the economy before Tuesday’s presidential election, which pits Obama against Republican Mitt Romney.
While the rise in the jobless rate was expected, the increase in payrolls beat even the most optimistic forecast in a Reuters poll.
As Einstein said, doing things the same way and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.
~ Bill Johnson, CEO Heinz Foods, on re-electing President Obama.
By Gary P Jackson
Tuesday afternoon on, Your World with Neil Cavuto, Neil talked with Heinz CEO Bill Johnson about the effects of Hurricane Sandy. During the interview Neil asks Johnson about President Obama’s performance during this crisis.
Johnson is diplomatic, saying most presidents rise to the occasion, and Obama is no different, but then goes on to say the President’s actions now have little do do with his poor performance during the last four years. Johnson goes on to quote Einstein’s definition of insanity regarding the notion of Obama’s re-election.
President Barack Obama could lose his home state of Illinois in November, a new poll shows.
A poll conducted by Illinois-based pollster and political strategist Michael McKeon found Obama leading Republican Mitt Romney by 49 percent to 37 percent in Cook County, the home of Chicago. That puts him ahead by a far thinner margin than expected in a county he should be winning handsomely.
Cook is the most Democratic leaning county in the state. It is also the most populous.
Those numbers do not bode well for the president.
“He has to come out of Cook County with a big lead or he’s gonna have problems downstate,” explained McKeon, who said that based on the numbers he had seen, Obama polled only in the forties in downstate Illinois.
Obama talks big [boca/mouth] in the final debate in Florida.
Barack Obama came to the last presidential debate ready for a fight. But he didn’t get one. Romney seemed more interested in talking to moderator Bob Schieffer than engaging Obama in a scuffle.
That relaxed strategy didn’t hurt Romney very much. At worst, the debate was a draw, which will only serve to seal the tightness of the race.
Though Romney kept stepping back from his punches, Obama didn’t tire of throwing them. Apparently Romney not only kills his sacked employees’ wives he also takes glee in outsourcing jobs to China and (in a new line of attack from Obama) invests in an Iranian company. Obama was unloading all the opposition research that he couldn’t cram into the previous debates.
HEMPSTEAD, NY – OCTOBER 16: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (L) listens as U.S. President Barack Obama answers a question during a town hall style debate at Hofstra University October 16, 2012 in Hempstead, New York. During the second of three presidential debates, the candidates fielded questions from audience members on a wide variety of issues. (Credit: Getty Images)
While many scored Tuesday night’s contentious presidential debate as a draw, or as a narrow victory for one of the candidates, Washington post columnist Charles Krauthammer thinks President Barack Obama made a gaffe — and a big one. One that will cost him dearly in the final debate on Monday.
“And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive.”
Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign fundraising event in Sarasota, Fla., Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Democrats complained Friday that Gov. Mitt Romney boosted his federal income bill to fend off criticisms about the low tax-rate owed on income earned from investments.
“Romney manipulated one of the only two years of tax returns he’s seen fit to show the American people — and then only to ‘conform’ with his public statements,” said a statement from Sen Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate.
“Had he not limited his [charitable] deductions … what would Gov. Romney’s effective tax rate have been?” asked an afternoon email from Obama’s campaign staff.
In 2011, Romney choose to deduct from his taxable income only $2.2 million of the $4 million he donated to charity. By limiting that deduction, he increased his own federal tax rate to 14.1 percent, and deflated Democratic allegations that he paid little or no taxes in some years.
I don’t normally read “true crime” books, and I’ve certainly never written a review of one, but Errol Morris’ new book, “A Wilderness of Error,” isn’t typical of the genre. It’s much more interesting and I think important. It’s a book about the failings of a legal system administered by very fallible human beings, and it’s a book about how we buy into false media narratives that tidy up uncomfortably complex stories and give us permission to call off any further search for truth – and, yes, Morris argues with refreshing clarity that objective truth is real and worthy of being sought after despite the pretentious nonsense preached in faculty lounges about all truth being relative. In fact, he argues passionately that the search for truth is what journalism and justice is all about.
Morris describes how false narratives can become a sort of prison. He opens by reminding us of the story of “The Count of Monte Cristo” – the novel about an innocent man who escapes from the seemingly inescapable island prison he was sent to. Morris writes that today we have an even worse prison than that fictional one – only ours is “built out of newsprint and media. A prison of beliefs. You can escape from prison, but how do you escape from a convincing story? After enough repetitions, the facts come to serve the story and not the other way around. Like kudzu, suddenly the story is everywhere and impenetrable.”
By: Ben Howe (Diary) | September 13th, 2012 at 06:00 PM
One of the talking points that Obama’s reelection campaign has been pushing is that “Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive!” It’s fair to say that the success of GM is a pretty important linchpin to his reelection case.
Something that Obama has not been running on is his failed attempts to force his green dreams on an unwilling public. You won’t see him selling bumper stickers about Solyndra or Fisker.
For Obama, his supposed successes and his actual failures merge into one story. Such is the case with the Chevy Volt, Obama’s green initiative and GM’s “moonshot.”
But these days even the Obama-friendly press is having trouble keeping up the act after the Volt halted production following their dismal sales of 21,000 vehicles since manufacturing first began. Honing in on the outlandish claims the administration & GM had made in the beginning that in hindsight are clearly unrealistic, the Washington Post Editorial Board ripped apart the administration on their failure to make their investment in the Volt worth the taxpayer’s while.
Lawmakers are investigating the Obama administration’s controversial decision to purchase over 100 advertisements touting so-called “green jobs” on the far-left MSNBC cable television outlet using “stimulus” funds, raising serious questions among analysts about misappropriation of taxpayer money to reward allies of the president who parrot White House talking points. No other TV media channels received similar contracts and no jobs were “created.”
The dubious Obama-friendly commercials touting “green” stimulus schemes ran over 100 times on MSNBC, costing taxpayers about half of a million dollars. But after the administration’s decision became a public scandal in the wake of watchdogs and media reports exposing it, criticism of the plot is growing. And now, members of Congress want answers.
President Barack Obama announced Friday that he’s heading to Louisiana, but he’ll arrive after Mitt Romney has toured the storm-damage state in company with the state’s popular Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal.
The president’s Sept. 3 visit was announced via a 11:54 a.m. tweet from White House communications director Daniel Pfeiffer. “President Obama will head to Louisiana on Monday to visit damage from Hurricane Isaac,” he tweeted.
Romney’s visit to the storm-damaged state the day after his successful convention speech highlights his aggressive campaign strategy, which seeks to preempts Democratic p.r. offensives. For example, Romney and his vice presidential pick, Rep. Paul Ryan, have aggressively criticized Obama for damaging Medicare in advance of Democratic efforts to “Mediscare” retirees into voting for Obama.
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.
(CNSNews.com) – A survey of 3,130 American adults conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation between July 25 and August 5 discovered that large majorities of Americans favor a smaller federal government and believe the government controls too much of our daily lives.
The survey discovered these results even though only 25 percent of the people it polled were Republicans, while another 34 percent were Democrats and another 34 percent were Independents.
‘Millennials have concluded government intervention is the problem, not the solution’
August 17, 2012
by Drew Zahn
Young voters – the ones who so notably turned out for Barack Obama in 2008 – are fed up with being unemployed, and many are beginning to turn against the president’s big-government solutions to America’s economic woes.
One group tracking this turnaround is Generation Opportunity, or GO, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that seeks to mobilize Americans aged 18-29 toward “real solutions” to joblessness and the flailing economy.
GO boasted this past week that its family of Facebook pages – with names like “We Like Small Government” and “Gas Prices Are too D— High” – have topped over 4 million “likes” and growing, fueled by a young demographic that polls show is increasingly disillusioned with Obama’s economic policies.
On Monday, the International Monetary Fund cut its forecast for global growth. This could particularly hurt exports and manufacturing in the United States.
All this is happening while the American president declares his contempt for private business, attacks success and renews his call for punitive tax increases, and his Democratic allies in Congress celebrate the idea of pushing America off the “fiscal cliff” — not in pursuit of economic recovery, but to satisfy their death wish for the most productive Americans. Let’s face it, Obama and the Democrats resent private accomplishment and want independent Americans to be cut down to size while the government is made a little bigger.
For too many years the left has used the charge of racism to put opponents on the defensive and deflect from serious debate on the issues. This practice also gets used across the spectrum of demagoguery. Are you against laws that lead to grammar school children being taught about gay marriage or religious adoption agencies being forced to close because they won’t place children with gay couples? You’re homophobic. Are you against laws that support federally funded abortions for 13 year old girls without parental notification? Sexist. Suggest that a presidential candidate who happens to be black with no meaningful life experience or any demonstration of leadership ability might be right for the job because he’s inexperienced and unqualified? Racist. You get the idea.
Americans for Tax Reform head Grover Norquist fired back against criticism that his anti-tax pledge is getting in the way of a tax compromise by Congress, arguing in an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV that his pledge makes possible real tax reform and that contained in any compromise is a hidden tax increase.
Norquist’s group organizes the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which asks all candidates for federal and state office to commit themselves in writing to oppose all tax increases. The pledge, which Norquist says he dreamed up when he was 12 years old, was endorsed by Ronald Reagan upon its inception in 1986, and has been signed by more than 1,100 state office holders as well as 238 current House members and 41 current Senators.
Norquist has come under fire from the first President George Bush and others about the rigidity of the pledge and Senate Democrats believe they have come up with a plan to get around the anti-tax pledge by letting all tax cuts lapse Jan. 1 and then reinstating most of them days later, an idea which Norquist has said “doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
The plan shows efforts by lawmakers to include new federal revenues in an attempt to avoid the “fiscal cliff” in January. All Bush-era tax cuts expire at that time and automatic spending cuts to the military kick in.
Norquist told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview that the pledge “stops a tax increase, so if somebody tells you the pledge is getting in the way of getting something done what they mean is it’s getting in the way of a tax increase.”
Glenn Beck hosted an unusual show on Tuesday night, devoting large segments of the program not to personal sermonizing, but instead to hearing from two different experts with very different takes on the economy. Those two experts were economists Art Laffer and Richard Duncan, who managed to both take a very pessimistic view of where the economy currently is, while also offering diametrically opposed suggestions for how to improve it.
Broadly speaking, Duncan approached the issue from the Left, while Laffer approached it from the Right. However, those two descriptions don’t actually do the full clash of ideologies justice. Duncan argued that the choice of options for the United States government was threefold, and that policymakers could either 1) Revert to a balanced budget, which would contract the economy all the way into a depression, 2) Keep spending at the current rates and go bankrupt and hit a recession in 5-10 years, or 3) Keep spending at current rates, but use the money to invest in up-and-coming technology, rather than to pay off cronies or create shovel-ready jobs. Duncan favored the third approach, as you’ll see in the following video:
While Obama is prosecuting a flaccid war overseas and apologizing for our troops when they defend against Taliban attacks, he is fighting a no-holds-barred class war at home. Once again, Obama has announced that he will orchestrate the largest tax hike in American history on those earning more than $200,000. After all, taxing the rich is a great way to raise revenue; it worked so well in Maryland. Oh, wait.
But fear not, he will renew the Bush tax cuts on those earning under $200,000, while repackaging them as his own tax cuts.
There’s one problem with Obama’s assertion that he hasn’t raised taxes on the middle class. YOU LIE! Government regulations and interventions that Obama supports will raise the cost of living on the middle class for the most vital goods and services. Those higher costs will trump any savings they actualize as a result of the tax cut extension. Oh, and there’s one other problem. He’s forgetting about the massive tax increase on all those who don’t purchase government-approved health insurance.
In that vein, let’s review some of the hidden [or not so hidden] tax increases on the “middle class” that Obama has orchestrated:
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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.
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Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed
As the country is still standing following the financial crisis, Barack Obama has nominated a key figure in the disaster apparently so she can finish off the country for good. 
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