This is your Senate Majority leader telling you what he thinks of us!
There is no doubt in my mind that Harry Reid’s recent unsubstantiated statement regarding Mitt Romney’s taxes is the work of David Axelrod and the Chicago Obama machine. I believe Reid is the puppet and Axelrod is the ventriloquist.
Just the fact that Dirty Harry made the allegation that ‘Mitt Romney paid no taxes in ten years’ on the Senate floor proves to me that it is false. Otherwise Reid would have made his unfounded statement in a more public forum and not hide behind the protection of voicing whatever you want without consequences from the Senate floor. If similar possible libelous allegations had been made against Obama using the Senate floor for cover the press would have been screaming abuse of power. Reid is protected from a libel suit by using his position as Senate Majority leader and using the Senate floor as his pulpit.
Again, I believe if the allegations were true, Prince Harry would have made them publicly instead of the cowardly way he did it. The man is a vile, incompetent, narcissistic leader whose abuse of power almost equals that of President Obama. Even liberal Comedy Central host, John Stewart, was repulsed by Dirty Harry’s underhanded tactics.
Alert! We must act. Obama is trying to shred the Constitution again!
We all know an Obama presidency is hazardous to freedom and liberty. He is now trying to bypass the Senate and impose a treaty on America that could shred the First Amendment.
This is very urgent and we must take action to stop it.
ACTA is an agreement that was signed on October 1, 2011. ACTA is in fact a treaty but Barack Obama wants this agreement accepted as a “Sole Executive Agreement.” Basically this means the constitutional provision that the Senate ratify treaties is thrown out and Barack Obama acts like a dictator.
ACTA is even worse than SOPA or PIPA. ACTA creates a new international governing body which controls counterfeit goods, generic medicines and pirated copyright protected works.
ACTA gives Copyright holders the power to demand Internet Service Providers (ISPs) remove allegedly copyrighted material from a website without a court hearing. It permits foreign governments to exercise control of ISPs in America. Those who are supporting ACTA also want an Internet death penalty that would cut off Internet access for those who “offend.” The only way to enforce such a mechanism would be to create an Internet ID that you must have to access the Internet.
Any claim of copyright infringement will require the ISP to remove the content from the website, without your constitutional right to your day in court. Tyrants all over the world want to crush a free press and free speech. Why would anyone think Barack Obama is any different?
Perhaps the most alarming part of this ACTA agreement is that it would create an international body that would supersede Congress’ authority. Can you imagine having your rights for freedom of speech to be adjudicated by Iran and China as opposed to American courts?
Does anyone see the problems with this?
This is a Treaty not a “sole executive agreement,” so it must go to the Senate for ratification. Even then, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives the authority for laws regarding intellection property specifically to Congress and not to the President.
As we stopped the attacks on the Constitution by SOPA and PIPA, we must now see ACTA killed.
Call your Congressman and Senators about this today. Your Senators need to demand the ACTA agreement be put to the Senate as a treaty so it can be voted down.
We also need our Senators and Congressmen to work to defund ACTA. Congress must strip all funding for anything related to ACTA from negotiation to enforcement of it until we can get the Senate to officially reject this treaty.
Barack Obama does not like our Republic. He would much rather be a dictator so he could simply do what he wants without bothering to ask we the people or getting the consent of our representatives.
Fortunately we still live in a Republic and America is still a free nation.
Of course President Obama is not concentrating on campaigning, White House press spokesmen assured us — as the president headed off to Chicago for three fundraisers and a drop-in at his campaign headquarters, two days after a high-roller fundraising choked off traffic five blocks from the White House, with the assistance of a score of D.C. police cars.
No one, or at least no one who is paying attention, is fooled. It’s standard presidential procedure to say you’re not absorbed in campaigning even as you go out to raise money every other day. Bill Clinton, in my view, spent an undue amount of time fundraising, George W. Bush spent more, and Barack Obama makes them both look like pikers.
So Obama’s scorn for the truth in this regard is only a minor matter. His scorn for the Constitution is something else.
That scorn has been expressed most recently in his “recess” appointments of members of the National Labor Relations Board and the chairmanship of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The quotation marks are appropriate because when he made the appointments the Senate was not in recess as the Constitution requires.
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution says that presidential appointments must be confirmed by the Senate unless Congress provides otherwise. But anticipating that the government may need officials when the Senate is unavailable, the section further provides that “the President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of the next session.”
What constitutes a recess? Article I, Section 5 reads, “Neither house, during the session of Congress, shall, without the consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days.”
The House did not consent to the adjournment of the Senate this year, so there is no recess, and hence no constitutional authority to make recess appointments.
The White House has belatedly trotted out an opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (headed by a political appointee) saying that the president was justified in considering the Senate in recess, because the sessions it was holding every three days were just pro forma or, in the words of Obama defenders, “gimmicks.”
Factually this is flat wrong. At one of those sessions the Senate passed the payroll tax cut extension, an important piece of legislation.
More important, what gives the head of the executive branch the authority to decide whether one house of the legislative branch is conducting serious business? Can the president decide that the quality of Senate debate is so poor on any particular day that he may deem it to be in recess?
The recess appointments Obama made are to important offices. The National Labor Relations Board last year issued a complaint against Boeing for building a $1 billion aircraft plant in South Carolina. The complaint was withdrawn only after the union representing Boeing’s Washington state workers bludgeoned the company into promising more jobs there.
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, established by the Dodd-Frank Act, has unusual powers, with a guaranteed revenue stream rather than reliance on congressional appropriations and a director with a fixed term (but can it extend beyond the end of the next session of Congress?) and independence from other regulatory authorities.
On this, Obama defied not only the Constitution, but Dodd-Frank, which explicitly states that the CFPB head can only take legal action after he is confirmed by the Senate. Presumably anyone aggrieved by one of his orders will sue and probably prevail.
So the appointment may turn out to be a futile act. But, hey, it’s good fodder for campaign ads.
That’s substantiated by the explanation for the appointment you can find of my.barackobama.com: “When Congress refuses to act, he will.”
This looks uncomfortably close to the view taken by King Louis XIV. “L’etat, c’est moi,” he is supposed to have said, and you don’t need John Kerry’s or Mitt Romney’s command of French to know that that means one man rule.
The Framers of the Constitution saw it a different way. When the Senate refuses to confirm a presidential appointee, that person does not take office. When the Senate is not in recess, the president cannot make a recess appointment.
The Framers thought it more important to limit power than for government to act quickly. Barack Obama disagrees.
Republican presidential candidates have been praising the Founding Fathers. Obama has been defying them. Interesting contrast.
Michael Barone
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at http://www.creators.com.
I have done extensive research on the subject because at one point, I was a Democrat. A few years ago, I was confronted with a fact that I knew to be false but after an investigation into the point, it turned out to be true. It was that Martin Luther King was a Republican.
This of course forced me to extend my research into other areas. What else could this Political Science Major be unaware of? The Truth became stranger than fiction. The list is quite long so here we go.
President Kennedy had little intention of enacting a Comprehensive Civil Rights Law during his 2 years in office. Tensions in society were running so high due to the riots and such that by the 1963 State of the Union address he had no other choice but to enact some kind of Law. Mind you, for the previous 100 years, it had only been the Republican Party who had supported any Civil Rights Legislations (I was not aware of these facts until I was 35 years old);
13th Amendment: Abolished Slavery
100% Republican Support 23% Democratic Support
14th Amendment: Slaves Allowed to be Citizens
94% Republican Support 0% Democratic Support
15th Amendment: Right to Vote for All
100% Republican Support 0% Democratic Support
CRA 1866 Enacted by the Republican Party Equal Rights
CRA 1871 Enacted by the Republican Party Anti-KKK
CRA 1875 99% Republican Support Anti-Discrimination
0% Democratic Support
———–It took another 82 years until the next Civil Rights Act———
———–The Democratic Party blocked every attempt to equalize citizens of color—–
CRA 1957 Enacted by the Eisenhower (R) Administration
Then Senator Kennedy Voted against this Bill
Filibustered by Democrats
CRA 1960 Enacted by the Eisenhower (R) Administration
The final version was watered down by then Senator LBJ
I do not want the “government” to treat me any differently than any other citizen. Therefore, I consider equality of opportunity and equal voting rights to be the summation of Civil Rights in America. If anything extra is afforded me or anyone else merely due to the color of their skin, I consider that to be an entitlement and patronizing.
Given my above statement, the Democratic Party, even if you sectionalize them by North and South, has never outvoted the Republican Party in any Civil Rights Law…Ever. The actual numbers play out like this;
Lifetime Republican Party support for Equal Rights for all Citizens: 94%
Lifetime Democratic Party Support for Equal rights for all Citizens: 35%
Now to the point of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was a proposal that the Republican Party, during the Eisenhower Administration attempted to put forth but alas, their efforts resulted in the first Civil Rights Law in the previous 82 years…The Civil Rights Act of 1957 formed a Commission on Civil Rights. The Plan of the Commission was to eventually enact the very Comprehensive Law of 1964. Remember, this was the Bill that Senator JFK voted against, for political aspirations I’m sure.
JFK had his Justice department write the original Bill in early 1963. The first version passed the House but stalled in the Senate. Everett McKinley Dirksen (R), the minority leader in the Senate took it upon himself to REWRITE the entire Bill. It took him 1 weekend and he had 2 helpers, 1 Democrat and another Republican.
The final version of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was written by a Republican which means that since the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, every Civil Rights Law was written by a Republican with more Republican support than Democratic Party Support.
Due to Dirksen’s tenacity, a cloture vote was successful and the Senate passed the Bill. It then passed the Houses and became Law.
Some notes about its passage;
Robert Byrd (D) filibustered the Bill…the longest filibuster in American History
William Fulbright (D) voted against the Bill. He was Bill Clinton’s mentor.
Al Gore Sr. (D) voted against the Bill
Speaking to two Governors on Air Force One, then President LB Johnson was quoted saying, “”I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” according Ronald Kessler’s Book in relation to the Law.
The big question is, did the South really turn “Red” after the CRA of 1964? Well, I researched that also and found the following conclusions.
Presidential Elections (covering “The Solid South”)
The 11 Former Confederate States
Year Blue States Red States
1964 6 5
1968 6 (Segregationist Wallace took 5) 5
1972 Landslide
1976 Landslide
1980 Landslide
1984 Landslide
1988 Landslide
1992 4 7
1996 4 7
2000 0 11
2004 0 11
2008 3 8
At least in Presidential elections, the Solid South wasn’t so “solid” until at least the year 2000 or 36 years after the CRA of 1964.
Now let’s take a look at the Governorships.
Governorships since 1964
(The 11 former “Confederate States”)
State Blue Red Years until a “Red” Gov. was elected
Georgia 7 2 39 years
Mississippi 8 2 28 years
Alabama 9 3 23 years
Louisiana 6 4 16 years
Texas 5 4 15 years
South Carolina 5 5 11 years
Arkansas 9 3 9 years
North Carolina 7 2 9 years
Tennessee 5 4 7 years
Virginia 7 5 6 years
Florida 7 5 3 years
Total 75 39
That’s almost 2 to 1 Blue over Red. I looked at the facts and not the rhetoric. The facts point to a different conclusion all together. The South did not become “Solid Red” after the CRA of 1964.
After finding out that both Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. were Republicans, I tend to deal only in facts and not with what I’ve been told.
Last Points
My former party, The Democratic Party says that they are for the “minority”. In this case, I’ll just say “blacks”. I believe in neither black nor minority but I defer to their thinking for this discussion. If that’s the case, then how could the following piece of history have been erased?
Ninety-nine percent of the country does not know the name Hiram Rhodes Revels. Here is his story and why the Democrats are not for “black” people.
At the end of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was captured and subsequently imprisoned for 2 years. Prior to this time period, Mr. Davis was a Senator from the State of Mississippi. In 1870, the State of Mississippi filled the vacant post of Mr. Davis with one Hiram Rhodes Revels. The curious fact behind this exchange is that now Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels did not only replace the President of the Confederacy, but he was also the First Black Senator in U.S. History…and virtually nobody knows his name.
One last point to explain this lack of universal knowledge…Jefferson Davis, The President of the Confederacy was a Democrat and his replacement, Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, was a Republican. Democratic leadership today will never share that history with their constituents of which I once was. That led me to believe that the Democratic Party is more interested in my vote than the Truth.
It gets bit deeper. 13 former slaves became members of Congress between 1870 and 1901. We as a nation killed our own citizens in a Civil War to FREE 4 Million slaves. 13 of those freed slaves became members of the U.S. Congress and the history books are silent to this fact. 640,000 Americans died in that war and the result was transformational yet, this groundbreaking and profound history is never taught in “left” leaning schools because it does not serve their agenda. All 13 of the former slaves were Republicans. I had to sift through the Library of Congress to reveal the following information…here it is for you in a video;
My belief is that the Party’s did not change. The tactics changed. They went from Pro-Slavery to Pro-Segregation to Pro-Entitlement, all of which results in nothing beneficial for the prosperity of an individual and is considered by many of my ilk, “Plantation Politics”.
All I want is the Truth and to be treated as an equal, no more and no less; as an equal. I do not need the Democratic Party telling me that I’m “black” or that I’m a minority who needs their assistance. I am not a color. I am Frantz Kebreau, an American Citizen.
For the Democratic Party, it has always been about “Control” over Freedom. Keeping the Truth from it’s constituents in order to maintain control over them is not what I want from my “Party”.
Revealing the Truth About the Democratic Party…On Video
On Wednesday, many websites were blacked up to show a unified opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the parallel bill in the Senate PROTECT-IP (PIPA).
Yesterday, something happened that shows just how much we do not need SOPA & PIPA.
What happened?
Yesterday, the Department of Justice shut down the Mega upload website and indicted a number of the owners and employees of the site. The site as the name suggested, hosted millions of dollars in pirated media.
Amazingly enough, despite what the proponents of SOPA and PIPA claim, the federal government was able to go out and shut down a site that allegedly violated copyright law, without SOPA or PIPA being the law of the land.
If the Department of Justice can do this without SOPA, why do we need SOPA?
The answer is, we do not need SOPA. We have the tools in the law now to do protect intellectual property. The only question is why aren’t they being used?
Copyright infringement is not only a civil law violation, it is often a criminal violation. If you doubt that, ask Kim Dotcom, the founder and CEO of Mega upload.
One of the claims of those who support SOPA and PIPA is that DOJ cannot reach out and touch sites in foreign countries. Kim Dotcom is in jail in New Zealand, awaiting extradition to America. As are other members of the Mega upload conspiracy.
In short everything the proponents of SOPA and PIPA say is needed has been handled without SOPA and PIPA.
What those who support SOPA and PIPA really want to do is make it easier for large corporations to intimidate small businesses and companies. It makes it very easy for large corporations to drive small businesses and potential competitors out of business.
Fortunately, Senators and Congressmen are starting to understand how toxic this is bill is. Marco Rubio has gone from being a co-sponsor to being opposed to this bill.
Mitch McConnell has called for Harry Reid to pull PIPA from Senate consideration. McConnell probably would not be doing this unless he has 41 votes to prevent cloture. Late last night, Congressman Marsha Blackburn, one of the earliest supporters of SOPA pulled her support of the bill, urging that the bill be scrapped and Congress start over from scratch.
We have to keep up the pressure on Congress to make sure neither SOPA nor PIPA ever become law. Contact your Senators and Congressman and make sure they understand how opposed you are to SOPA and PIPA.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, there used to be a dude who wasn’t Obama in the White House. His name was George W. Bush. The Left hated him. In fact, “hated” is an understatement. They loathed him so much that it caused a transformation which was otherworldly.
The hate was so strong that Democrats and liberals everywhere suddenly cared about deficits and budgets and the Constitution. Many of you might be too young to remember this brief transfiguration, but it was amazing to witness. They actually complained about too much spending… can you imagine? You would have hardly recognized them.
During this time they also did a pretty good job of acting like they cared about the Constitution and stuff. If you took their word for it, you would swear that Bush had essentially created a dictatorship in the US. How? The main beef they had was that he wouldn’t allow advisors to testify under oath in front of Congress. You see, Karl Rove was an advisor and they hated him more than Bush. So they wanted to bring him in front of Congress to see if they could somehow get him to say something that could land him in jail or something. Cut them some slack, they were desperate. But out of this fight over Executive privilege – which has long standing precedent – came other fights about Executive power.
A biggie was this idea of Presidential signing statements. Oh, man… they really got pissed off over those things. Despite the fact that they’d been used since the early 1800′s, the Left suddenly became totally anti-signing statement. When Obama was running for President, they brought it up and he promised – on tape – that he wouldn’t used them. He even gave some reasons on why the practice was unconstitutional. Watch:
Guess who has been using signing statements since taking office? According to the Leftists who hated Bush and thought he was a dictator, the answer is Obama, the Dictator. I have yet to see any criticism of Obama breaking this promise coming from the Left. I’m sure it will happen any day now.
Recently, Obama has taken to enacting “change” via the regulatory agencies instead of going through Congress because “We Can’t Wait,” which was initially a slogan for his “jobs bill” which Harry Reid killed, has now become a tool for Obama to rally his base. No jobs have been created by these measures, in case you were wondering.
Now Obama is bucking long-standing precedent and has “recess appointed” someone when the Senate isn’t technically in recess. It’s a convoluted issue but I’ll try to explain quickly. You’ll remember from Civics 101 that the Senate has to approve certain Presidential appointments. Cabinet, agency heads, judges/justices, etc. The Senate also has the authority to block these appointments. One way to get around these roadblocks was for the President to wait until the Senate was in recess to do it. When the Senate really wants to block an appointment, they will avoid going on recess. It’s tough to do – Senators really like their vacations… and fundraising – so they came up with a thing called a pro-forma session where they conduct business every few days in order to remain “in session.” The length of the recess, according to the Clinton era Justice Department, has to be longer than three days or the Senate is technically in session.
Obama the Dictator has had enough. Despite the fact that his own deputy solicitor general argued last year in front of the Supreme Court that a recess is only a recess when it is longer than three days, Obama is appointing Richard Cordray to head the new “consumer protection” agency the Dodd-Frank law created in 2010.
President Obama is under strong pressure from liberals to use his recess-appointment power during the congressional break, but doing so would break 20 years of precedent, putting him in a tough position.
That’s right. The very liberals who called Bush a dictator are pushing Obama to circumvent precedent… and Congress.
A Congressional Research Service report released this month found the shortest recess in the last 20 years during which the president made a recess appointment was 10 days.
Precedent, schmecedent. Democrats don’t care about precedents. Unless it is Roe v Wade. Or the filibuster when they’re in the minority, etc. etc.
But fear not! As soon as a Republican is back in the White House, this will change. They’ll be back to caring about deficits. They’ll be back to whining about unchecked Executive power. And you can bet cold hard cash that any Republican who tries to do a recess appointment during a pro-forma session will be called an evil dictator.
It is said that nothing is guaranteed in life but death and taxes. I’d argue that liberal hypocrisy is the third thing.
