Via Fox Nation

The left will use any excuse to limit our Second Amendment rights.

(The Hill) — Lax U.S. gun laws helped a Norwegian man pull off the deadliest attack in that country since World War II, a House Democrat charged Thursday.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) said Anders Behring Breivik — the suspect in last week’s shooting rampage outside Oslo that left 68 dead — exploited weak American weapons laws to arm himself for the attack.

“The easy availability of high-capacity ammo magazines in the U.S. has once again helped enable a large-scale massacre,” McCarthy said in a statement.

Less than a year ago he was held up as a “peacemaker” by the left, now he’s admitted to the Army that he planned to carry out a second Fort Hood jihad attack. That’s some serious assploding irony.

(Commentary) — The 21-year-old soldier arrested today for allegedly plotting to attack Fort Hood appears to be the same “conscientious objector” who was viewed as a peacemaker by anti-war activists last year, after he refused to serve in Afghanistan or Iraq because he claimed it violated his Muslim faith.

When Pfc. Naser Abdo applied for CO status last year, the utterly discredited Iraq Veterans Against the War organization posted a message in support of him on its website, and asked readers to donate to his legal defense fund. And Kimber Heinz, a writer for the far-left website Truthout, unluckily chose to profile Abdo in a 2010 article entitled, “One Year After Fort Hood: The Missing Story of Muslim Peacemaking.”

“We must lift up the stories and ongoing work of Muslim peacemakers like Naser Abdo,” Heinz wrote.

CNN and Al Jazeera also both featured glowing segments on Abdo’s quest to obtain CO status.

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As far as I can tell, he’s not joking.

The Centrist Cop-Out — Paul Krugman, NY Times

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

Keep reading…

The soap opera continues.

HT: Drudge

What parallel universe do these people live in?

(Briefing Room) — More than half of Americans think the press has been either too easy or else fair in its coverage of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), a new poll said Thursday.

A combined 54 percent of U.S. adults said the press had been too easy or had been fair toward Palin, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. Thirty-two percent said the press has been fair, and 22 percent say the press has been too easy on Palin, the potential GOP presidential candidate.

Palin’s known for her animosity toward the press corps; she calls it the “lamestream media,” and has taken to her website or Facebook page to dismiss occasionally negative or inaccurate press coverage of her activities.

Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans are more likely to perceive the coverage of Palin as too tough. Fifty-two percent of Republicans said the media are too tough, and 29 percent said the press is fair toward Palin.

Doomsday has been put on hold.

Via Zero Hedge:

By now some readers may have read ludicrous stories about the Fed coining multi-trillion precious metal coins in a way to loophole the debt ceiling situation. Granted, this plan is so far beyond ridiculous that we have not wasted the time to comment on it. That, however, does not mean that the Fed is powerless to assist the Treasury in a modestly long-term term fix of the debt ceiling fiasco. In fact, as Stone McCarthy’s Raymond Stone observes: “The Fed does not want to be a player in this debt ceiling/potential default debate. It didn’t want to be a player in the Bear Stearns debacle, or the Lehman situation. But when push comes to shove the Fed will do what it can to avoid a default.” In summary there are three avenues that the Fed can pursue in order to help Tim Geithner prolong the cash illusion modestly longer.

The three options for Bernanke are to i) book profits; ii) prepay expenses and, yes, iii) sell gold. Combined, these three approaches could squeeze out well over half a trillion dollars, giving the Treasury breathing room not only past August 2, but potentially into 2012! That said, “The Fed would not want to advertise to Congress the possibility of delaying default. It does not want to take Congress off the hook on increasing the debt ceiling.” But it will, if it has to, and the end result will be a delay potentially of up to a month. And if it means selling off the Fed’s gold, so be it.

Keep reading…

HT: Jim

Like when Obama and every other Dem senator voted against raising the debt ceiling in 2006 when Bush was president?

(The Hill) — Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) on Thursday evening said President Obama is being treated “differently” over the debt-ceiling vote than past presidents, and said it is unfair of House Republicans to make it more difficult to raise the ceiling under Obama.

“This president is begin treated differently than other presidents,” Jackson said on the House floor. “No other president has been stook up, shook down, or held hostage as president of the United States over this debt vote. This is fundamentally unfair, Mr. Speaker, to change the rules in the middle of the game.”

Jackson’s comments seemed to echo those of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), who strongly implied earlier this month that Republicans are making the vote more difficult because Obama is black.

If a Republican was president the left would be pissing and moaning about his or her “racist” economic policies.

(Fox News) — The unemployment situation across America is bad, no doubt. But for African-Americans in some cities, this is not the great recession. It’s the Great Depression.

Take Charlotte, N.C., for example. It is a jewel of the “new South.” The largest financial center outside of New York City, it’s the showcase for next year’s Democratic National Convention. It was a land of hope and opportunity for many blacks with a four-year college degree or higher.

According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, in Charlotte, N.C., the unemployment rate for African-Americans is 19.2 percent. If you add in people who have given up looking for jobs, that number exceeds 20 percent, which, according to economists Algernon Austin and William Darity, has effectively mired blacks in a depression.

“You’re looking at a community that is economically depressed in my opinion,” Austin said. “And we need action that will address that scale of joblessness.”

Vanessa Parker worked hard to get ahead. She was an administrative assistant at IBM in Charlotte. She went to night school to better herself, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in finance. Parker and her husband saved up enough money to move from a bad neighborhood to a quiet, middle-class street. But instead of moving up in the company, IBM moved out. Now she works at a big-box store for minimum wage.

Keep reading…

Time to scare the crap out of grandma.

(ABC News) — If there is no clear path out of this morass by tomorrow, sources say that administration officials will likely brief the public on how the Treasury Department will try to handle the bills Congress mandates that the government pay given a situation where Congress has not given them a way to do so.

Look for that briefing to come no earlier than Friday after the markets close at 4 p.m. ET, sources say.

Officials are most concerned about paying the interest on the existing debt, since failure to do so would result in default and almost certain immediate market panic, as well as questions about how Treasury would be able to roll over a pre-existing $87 billion in debt that comes due next week.

After that — a list of priorities, not all of which that can be met. Social Security checks? Medicare? Government workers? Pentagon contractors? Troops’ salaries? The FBI?

Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have been talking privately about a possible way forward should Boehner’s bill fail in the Senate, which seems likely, according to sources familiar with the talks.

HT: Fox Nation

The 17% consisting of unionists, moonbats and crackheads.

(Rasmussen) — Just 17% of Likely U.S. Voters now say the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey taken the week ending Sunday, July 24. That finding is the lowest measured since January 11, 2009.

From August 2007 to early January 2009, confidence in the nation’s current course ranged from a low of 10% to a high of 24%. When President Obama assumed office, optimism rose to 27% and climbed to the low to mid 30s until May 2009. That figure has steadily declined since.

Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters say the country is heading down the wrong track, the highest finding since early January 2009. Since that time, voter pessimism had ranged from 57% to 72%.

And this is the pork-man-thing for whom Tea Party conservatives plan to cave.

You know who hardest hit.

(Forbes) — NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

(Politico) — House Republican leaders have delayed a vote on Speaker John Boehner’s package to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, at the tail end of a long day of vote counting.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) office says the vote will still be held Thursday evening, but the delay may be an indication the votes aren’t totally locked down for passage.

For hours, Boehner has been engaged in intense one-on-one meetings with Republicans in an effort to win today’s fight.

Rep. Louie Gohmert, a conservative Texas Republican, emerged from Boehner’s suite of offices — which include Cantor’s space — and said he is a “bloody, beaten-down no.”

Several sources say the South Carolina delegation — which includes five Republicans — could be key in getting the vote across the finish line. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) visited the leadership office suite in the Capitol Thursday evening.

In the closing hours before a critical debt-limit vote, the speaker was pulling Republicans off the floor and meeting with them in his ceremonial office on the second floor of the Capitol as he tries to make sure he has at least 217 votes to pass his deficit package.

Keep reading…

Ouch.

A new poll shows President Barack Obama’s disapproval rate among political independents has broken above 50 percent, even while he is using the debt ceiling debate to seek approval from those critical swing voters.

Support for Obama among independents has fallen from 42 percent in May to 31 percent, and disapproval has risen to 54 percent, according to a late July poll of 1,500 registered voters by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

The drop in support among independents is critical because both parties have a roughly similar number of die-hard supporters. The 2012 election prize will go to the candidate who draws more independent voters, and Obama’s decline in that crucial demographic has dragged his ratings down among registered voters, according to the Pew poll.

Keep reading…

Nothing worse than a leftist accusing someone else of being “un-American.”

(MRC) — On July 28, 2011, former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones attended the Rebuild the Dream rally held outside the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. and said Americans don’t bow down to “hostage taking tactics” and the GOP is putting “a gun to the head of 310 million people”, in regards to the current debate on the debt limit.

Jones told MRCTV:

“Any faction in America that would put a gun to the head of 310 million people and say ‘If you don’t do it our way, we will blow your dreams away, we will blow a hole in the American economy’, that is un-American. That is not how we do business, and we refuse to bow down to those tactics.”

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Unfortunately, if they won’t listen to the American people, then you can be drop-dead sure they will not hear Mordecai nor Esther nor Sarah Palin.

Congressional Freshmen — For Such A Time As This

Out here in proverbial politico flyover country, we little folk are watching the debt ceiling debate with great interest and concern. Today I re-read the open letter I wrote to Republican Freshman Members of Congress in November 2010, just days after they were ushered into office in an historic landslide victory due in large part to the activism of commonsense patriots who are considered part of the Tea Party movement. I respectfully ask these GOP Freshman to re-read this letter and remember us “little people” who believed in them, donated to their campaigns, spent hours tirelessly volunteering for them, and trusted them with our votes. This new wave of public servants may recall that they were sent to D.C. for such a time as this.

The original letter is pasted below, with added emphasis to certain passages that I feel are especially relevant to the current discussion.

All my best to you, GOP Freshmen, from up here in the Last Frontier.

Sincerely,

Sarah Palin

P.S. Everyone I talk to still believes in contested primaries.

(more…)

(Weekly Standard) — Fox News drops this big revelation following the arrest of Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo, a Muslim soldier at Ft. Hood in Kileen, Texas this morning:

Sources said Abdo had enough materials to make two bombs, including 18 pounds of sugar and six pounds of smokeless gunpowder — a possible trigger for an explosive. A pressure cooker was also found.

“He was all ready to go,” one law enforcement source said.

Another counterterrorism source said the bomb making materials and methodology came “straight out of Inspire magazine and an Al Qaeda explosives course manual.”

Law enforcement officials suspect Abdo was planning an attack in or around Fort Hood, though they say the exact target is not clear.

Keep reading…

A much needed palate cleanser after a week of political theatrics.

God bless our brave and loyal fighting men and women. They far outshine the clowns in Washington D.C.