It’s time to wake up America, and smell the coffee before we become toast! The question, “Is it morning for America, or has our day in the sun passed?” has often been asked.
Well, there is no doubt that dark days have descended on this republic. When President Barrack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano demean, defame and ridicule the duly elected legislature, the governor, and the people of Arizona for protecting their property, we are indeed in trouble.
All admit they have not read the law. Well, why not apply the government program adopted to encourage children to read, to the executive branch?
Read more.You might think that Europe’s economic turmoil would inject a note of urgency into America’s budget debate. After all, high government deficits and debt are the roots of Europe’s problems, and these same problems afflict the United States. But no. Most Americans, starting with the nation’s political leaders, dismiss what’s happening in Europe as a continental drama with little relevance to them.
What Americans resolutely avoid is a realistic debate about the desirable role of government. How big should it be? Should it favor the old or the young? Will social spending crowd out defense spending? Will larger government dampen economic growth through higher deficits or taxes? No one engages this debate, because if rigorously conducted, it would disappoint both liberals and conservatives.
Confronted with huge spending increases — reflecting an aging population and soaring health costs — liberals would have to concede that benefits and spending ought to be reduced. Seeing that total government spending would rise even after these cuts (more people would receive benefits, even if benefit levels fell), conservatives would have to concede the need for higher taxes. On both left and right, true believers would howl.
Read more.Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said Sunday that President Barack Obama has so far lacked the “political will” and “political courage” to resolve the contentious issue of illegal immigration.
The liberal Chicago congressman and conservative former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, running for the Republican Senate nomination in Arizona, seemed to agree on one thing, though for very different reasons, in a joint interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press:” The president’s plan to send as many as 1,200 National Guard troops to the Arizona border is more political than practical.
For Hayworth, the troop level is too low to keep illegal immigrants out of the country. For Gutierrez, sending troops to the border is an easy political act that ignores significant questions of what to do with immigrants currently in the country illegally.
Read more.A California congressman who called it an “impeachable” offense for the administration to offer Rep. Joe Sestak a job in exchange for his quitting a Senate bid said Sunday the cover-up, as usual, appears worse than the crime.
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa said the explanation for the Sestak affair — that former President Bill Clinton offered the Democratic congressman an unpaid position on an advisory board if he would drop his challenge against party-switching Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter — is not plausible because as a sitting congressman Sestak couldn’t have served on a presidential commission.
“It’s a crime because they’ve admitted that they offered this position … So that begs the real question. Do we believe this is a further cover-up because he’s — they’re now talking about a job that President Clinton himself should have known Sestak couldn’t take? ” he said.
Read more.CHICAGO — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cancelled a scheduled meeting with President Barack Obama Tuesday in the wake of Israeli military action to block a flotilla bringing aid to the Gaza Strip. At least 10 people were killed in the attack.
The incident underscores how tenuous and difficult Middle East peace negotiations have been for Obama. It follows a long stretch of mounting tensions between the United States and Israel that had just begun to deescalate as the White House, under fire for taking a hard line with the Israelis, had moved to mend relations.
Obama spoke to Netanyahu by phone between 11 a.m. and 11:15 a.m. Eastern on Monday. Obama “said he understood the Prime Minister’s decision to return immediately to Israel to deal with today’s events. They agreed to reschedule their meeting at the first opportunity,” the White House said in a statement.
Read more.President Barack Obama spent the last year insisting he doesn’t want to turn the American health care system into a carbon copy of the government-run British system.
But Obama’s pick to run Medicaid and Medicare — Donald Berwick — is a pediatrician and Harvard University professor with a self-professed “love” of the British system.
Berwick has called Britain’s National Health Service “one of the greatest health care institutions in human history” and “a global treasure.” He once said it sets an “example” for the United States to follow. And his decadelong efforts to improve the NHS were so well-regarded that Queen Elizabeth granted him an honorary knighthood in 2005.
Now Senate Republicans are vowing to press their case against Obama’s sweeping new health care law by challenging Berwick’s nomination — just in time to resurrect the brutal yearlong health reform battle ahead of the midterm elections.
Read more.Bring it on.
That’s the attitude Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is taking toward the possibility that the Obama administration could file a legal challenge to her state’s immigration law.
“We’ll meet you in court,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “I have a pretty good record of winning in court.”
Attorney General Eric Holder has said the Department of Justice may challenge the law, which President Obama has called “misguided.” Brewer has staunchly defended the policy — which makes illegal immigration a state crime — and is expected to meet with the president Thursday, a White House official told FoxNews.com.
Read more.MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) – The political shooting-star otherwise known as anti-incumbency fell on Alabama, taking down a first-term congressman who switched from Democrat to Republican just last December.
The hotly-contested health care overhaul was among the issues working against Rep. Parker Griffith, voted out by Republicans Tuesday in the 5th Congressional District in favor of Madison County Commissioner Mo Brooks. With tea party support and the backing of local GOP leaders still bitter about losing to Griffith in 2008, Brooks won Tuesday’s primary with slightly more than 50 percent of the vote in a three-candidate field.
Griffith’s ouster came on a day in which Rep. Artur Davis lost his bid to become Alabama’s first black governor in the state’s Democratic primary and New Mexico’s gubernatorial primary set up a general election to decide who becomes the state’s first female governor. Read more.
Singapore (AP) — U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says China’s military isn’t as interested in developing a better relationship with the United States as its political leaders are.
Gates says he is disappointed that China disinvited him for a proposed visit that he had hoped would signal stronger ties between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.
Gates is in Singapore for three days of security talks with Asian powers. He had hoped to visit China afterward.
Gates says establishing better ties between the militaries could provide clarity and confidence for both sides. He says the U.S.-Chinese military relationship lags behind the political and economic ones.
In a speech this weekend, Gates will tell other Asian powers that the U.S. and China cannot afford to be in the dark about one another’s intentions.
James Carville walked into one of his favorite New Orleans eateries, Eleven 79, Tuesday night — and was stunned to find BP CEO Tony Hayward and Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the two men tasked with stopping the Gulf spill, eating dinner together.
Hayward, looking up from his Gulf shrimp and pasta, wasted no time defending his embattled and vilified company — to the rail-thin Democratic operative who has come to embody the growing popular disgust at BP and the federal government.
“You’ve said some harsh things,” Hayward said, according to Carville, who sat with the pair for about 30 minutes — the time it took the Louisiana-born Democratic consultant to polish off a Maker’s Mark.
Read more.Each day oil continues to spew into the Gulf of Mexico, investors are shaving billions of dollars off of BP’s value and raising the uncomfortable prospect of the British oil giant collapsing into the arms of the U.S. government as Wall Street and the auto industry did.
A grassroots campaign called Seize BP is protesting in more than 50 cities from Thursday through Saturday. And a former labor secretary has urged President Obama to take over BP, at least temporarily, until the oil spill is stopped.
Analysts said it appeared unlikely that the U.S. could or, if even possible, would take over BP in the event of its demise but didn’t rule out the possibility.
James Gattuso, a senior research fellow in regulatory policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told FoxNews.com that it is more likely that a British bankruptcy court would put BP into receivership and continue the cleanup efforts.
Read more.So just how big is the U.S. national debt in 2010? Well, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, on June 1st, the U.S. National Debt was $13,050,826,460,886.97. For those not used to seeing such big numbers, that is over 13 trillion dollars. To give you an idea of just how much a trillion dollars is, if you had started spending one million dollars every single day when Christ was born, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now. And yet somehow the U.S. government has accumulated a debt of over 13 trillion dollars. This is a debt that we have callously placed on the backs of future generations of Americans. Somehow we have the gall to expect our progeny to pay off the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world. What we have done to future generations is beyond sickening.
But hey, if you are feeling especially generous today, the federal government is actually taking online donations that will go towards paying off the national debt.
Read more.