Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney during the previous day's press gaggle cited a bogus MarketWatch report hysterically claiming "Obama Spending Binge Never Happened."

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler looked at Carney's comments as well as Rex Nutting's article Friday and gave their assertions three Pinocchios:

First of all, there are a few methodological problems with Nutting’s analysis — especially the beginning and the end point.

Nutting basically takes much of 2009 out of Obama’s column, saying it was the “the last [year] of George W. Bush’s presidency.” Of course, with the recession crashing down, that’s when federal spending ramped up. [...]

On the other end of his calculations, Nutting says that Obama plans to spend $3.58 trillion in 2013, citing the Congressional Budget Office budget outlook. But this figure is CBO’s baseline budget, which assumes no laws are changed, so this figure gives Obama credit for automatic spending cuts that he wants to halt.

The correct figure to use is the CBO’s analysis of the president’s 2013 budget, which clocks in at $3.72 trillion. [...]

Under these figures, and using this calculator, with 2008 as the base year and ending with 2012, the compound annual growth rate for Obama’s spending starting in 2009 is 5.2 percent.

Nutting using his liberal calculus actually came up with 1.4 percent.

On the other hand, I still prefer using numbers from the Office of Management and Budget because they reflect what the White House WANTED to spend before Congress got involved.

Kessler somewhat addressed this:

So in every case, the president wanted to spend more money than he ended up getting. Nutting suggests that federal spending flattened under Obama, but another way to look at it is that it flattened at a much higher, post-emergency level — thanks in part to the efforts of lawmakers, not Obama.

Indeed.

Kessler then made a fabulous point no one else has about this issue:

Even 5.5 percent growth would put Obama between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in terms of spending growth, but that does not take into account either inflation or the relative size of the U.S. economy. At 5.2 percent growth, Obama’s increase in spending would be nearly three times the rate of inflation. Meanwhile, Nutting pegs Ronald Reagan with 8.7 percent growth in his first term — we get 12.5 percent CAGR — but inflation then was running at 6.5 percent. [...]

In the post-war era, federal spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy has hovered around 20 percent, give or take a couple of percentage points. Under Obama, it has hit highs not seen since the end of World War II — completely the opposite of the point asserted by Carney.

Kessler concluded:

Carney suggested the media were guilty of “sloth and laziness,” but he might do better next time than cite an article he plucked off the Web, no matter how much it might advance his political interests. The data in the article are flawed, and the analysis lacks context — context that could easily could be found in the budget documents released by the White House.

The White House might have a case that some of the rhetoric concerning Obama’s spending patterns has been overblown, but the spokesman should do a better job of checking his facts before accusing reporters of failing to do so. The picture is not as rosy as he portrayed it when accurate numbers, taken in context, are used.

Indeed.

Sadly, Kessler didn't address all the MSNBC shills jumping on this bogus report, nor did he mention Politifact finding it "Mostly True."

But unlike other media outlets falling for Nutting's nonsense hook, line and sinker, it is tremendously encouraging to see the Post not only not amongst them, but also willing to call out the White House for citing something so clearly deficient.

Read more....

MEDIA SILENT

NBC, ABC and CBS have all ignored a new book by former Newsweek foreign editor Ed Klein that contains a shocking allegation from Klein's interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright in which the former Obama pastor claimed that an Obama supporter offered him $150,000 if he would refrain from preaching until after the 2008 election.

From "now until election day," the liberal media will be seeking to herald only news that "advances Obama" while spiking news that "hurts him in any way," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Hannity substitute host Tucker Carlson on the May 24 program's "Media Mash." [To watch the full segment, click on the play button in the video embedded below the page break

By contrast, "when [George W.] Bush ran for reelection, there were a slew of books that came out against him" and their authors were "all over" the broadcast network news programs promoting their claims. What's more, "Even when Bob Woodward wrote a book that was generally [favorable] to Bush," the fake National Guard memo-peddling anchor "brought him on to attack Bush."

"The duplicity is extraordinary," the Media Research Center (MRC) founder concluded.

Also discussed on last night's "Media Mash" was MSNBC host Chris Matthews going into full foaming-at-the-mouth mode to attack an Obama-supporting Democrat for daring to go off-script.

"Isn't liberal tolerance fun?" Bozell quipped  after watching a clip of MSNBC's Chris Matthews denounce Obama-supporting Democratic Mayor Cory Booker (Newark, N.J.) as a 'saboteur' for criticizing the Obama campaign's harsh attacks on private equity firms.

Booker is "on Obama's side" but he dares to utter a defense of the free enterprise system and that is intolerable to Obama acolytes in the media like Matthews.

"Karl Rove is giggling right now, and he's praying, he's hoping against hope that the Obama administration listens to Chris Matthews, because it will cost him the election," the MRC president argued.

Read more...........

As we at Breitbart News have noted before, the main function of the left-leaning mainstream media is to tell its audience what attitude to adopt towards the news, rather than the news itself. The case of the "born in Kenya" booklet produced by President Barack Obama's then-literary agency is a prime example. 

Whether on HBO or at the Washington Post  or at the New York Times (below), the media tells its consumers that Breitbart News encouraged the "Birther" movement--without telling them what we actually reported.

As NewsBusters reported, the Times' Michael Shear used the booklet issue to launch accusations of racism against conservatives, while obscuring what we had actually written about it:

Nevertheless, Shear advanced a racial argument against the GOP, while leaving out details of another scoop, from Joel Pollak of Breitbart, who dug up a 1991 booklet from a literary agent claiming that Obama was "Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii." He also likened the Drudge Report and Breitbart.com to "some extreme quarters of the American electorate" for the crime of reporting news the liberal media overlooked.

But the issues of race and religion never go completely away, at least in some extreme quarters of the American electorate.

On Thursday, the Drudge Report posted a link on its Web site to a report that sought to revive the long-discredited assertion that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. And as election season heats up, so does publication of books promoting various conspiracies and theories, including a new one seeking to focus new attention on Mr. Obama’s dealings with Mr. Wright.

Shear didn't bother to give details about the Drudge link, which presumably was this Breitbart scoop from last week, about a 1991 booklet from a literary agency listing Obama's birthplace as Kenya.

Shear ignored conservatives who aren't in fact questioning Obama's birthplace, but instead are asking why such details like the booklet were overlooked by the media during the race of 2008. They are also questioning whether Obama submitted his own biography, as was customary at that agency, or if not, why he failed to correct the erroneous bio (which remained uncorrected until 2007).

I have learned that Florida election officials are set to announce that the secretary of state has discovered and purged up to 53,000 dead voters from the voter rolls in Florida.

How could 53,000 dead voters have sat on the polls for so long?  Simple. Because Florida hadn’t been using the best available data revealing which voters have died.  Florida is now using the nationwide Social Security Death Index for determining which voters should be purged because they have died.

Here is the bad news.  Most states aren’t using the same database that Florida is.  In fact, I have heard reports that some election officials won’t even remove voters even when they are presented with a death certificate.  That means that voter rolls across the nation still are filled with dead voters, even if Florida is leading the way in detecting and removing them.

But surely people aren’t voting in the names of dead voters, the voter fraud deniers argue.  Wrong.

Consider the case of Lafayette Keaton.  Keaton not only voted for a dead person in Oregon, he voted for his dead son.  Making Keaton’s fraud easier was Oregon’s vote by mail scheme, which has opened up gaping holes in the integrity of elections.  The incident in Oregon just scratches the surface of the problem.  Massachusetts and Mississippi are but two other examples of the dead rising on election day.

Florida should be applauded for taking the problem seriously, even if Eric Holder’s Justice Department and many state election officials don’t.

Read More......

It cost taxpayers nearly a half-million dollars for first lady Michelle Obama to travel to Spain in 2010, according to an analysis by Judicial Watch.

The right-leaning watchdog group estimated that the trip cost $467,585. It based its analysis on documents obtained from the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Air Force.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said it took his group “two years and a lawsuit to get these documents out of the Obama administration.”

“It is hypocritical for President Obama to fire GSA officials for wasteful conference spending, while his family went on a luxury vacation in the Costa del Sol Spain that cost taxpayers nearly half a million dollars,” Fitton said.

Among the various travel costs, the group estimated — using the Defense Department’s 2010 published hourly rates — that it cost the government $199,323 to fly to Spain and back to the United States.

The New York Times reported that those on the trip included the first lady, one of her daughters and “two friends and four of their daughters, as well as a couple of aides and a couple of advance staff members.”

Fitton’s group has previously disclosed the cost of sending the first family on overseas trips. Its analysis indicated that it cost $424,142 to fly the first family to South Africa and Botswana in 2011.

White House press secretary Jay Carney declined to comment on the report during a press briefing Thursday.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/26/group-michelle-obamas-spain-trip-cost-taxpayers-467k/#ixzz1tAregDxD

A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

Rossie Blinson, a 21-year-old college student from Buis Creek, N.C., told The Daily Caller that the federal government’s plan will do far more harm than good.

“The main concern I have is that it would prevent kids from doing 4-H and FFA projects if they’re not at their parents’ house,” said Blinson.

“I started showing sheep when I was four years old. I started with cattle around 8. It’s been very important. I learned a lot of responsibility being a farm kid.”

In Kansas, Cherokee County Farm Bureau president Jeff Clark was out in the field — literally on a tractor — when TheDC reached him. He said if Solis’s regulations are implemented, farming families’ labor losses from their children will only be part of the problem.

“What would be more of a blow,” he said, “is not teaching our kids the values of working on a farm.”

The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average age of the American farmer is now over 50.

“Losing that work-ethic — it’s so hard to pick this up later in life,” Clark said. “There’s other ways to learn how to farm, but it’s so hard. You can learn so much more working on the farm when you’re 12, 13, 14 years old.”

John Weber, 19, understands this. The Minneapolis native grew up in suburbia and learned the livestock business working summers on his relatives’ farm.

He’s now a college Agriculture major.

“I started working on my grandparent’s and uncle’s farms for a couple of weeks in the summer when I was 12,” Weber told TheDC. “I started spending full summers there when I was 13.”

“The work ethic is a huge part of it. It gave me a lot of direction and opportunity in my life. If they do this it will prevent a lot of interest in agriculture. It’s harder to get a 16 year-old interested in farming than a 12 year old.”

Weber is also a small businessman. In high school, he said, he took out a loan and bought a few steers to raise for income. “Under these regulations,” he explained, “I wouldn’t be allowed to do that.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/25/rural-kids-parents-angry-about-labor-dept-rule-banning-farm-chores/#ixzz1t4IJrxqq

It's been several weeks since NBC disgraced itself by repeatedly airing doctored audio of George Zimmerman talking to a 9-1-1 dispatcher but the network has yet to apologize on the air, hoping instead that its paltry efforts of firing a lone producer and conducting an investigation into the matter but not releasing a report to the public would be sufficient.

Incredibly, it was a New York Times columnist, David Carr, who decided to confront the network on how that just isn't enough. NBC News president Steve Capus admitted his efforts have been insufficient but tried to spin away why his network hasn't bothered to tell viewers about its propagation of fraudulent journalism.

Carr hit the nail on the head about how television news, in this case, NBC almost never corrects previous on-air mistakes during air time:

What is it with television news and corrections? When the rest of the journalism world gets something wrong, they generally correct themselves. But network news acts as if an on-air admission of error might cause a meteor to land on the noggin of one of its precious talking heads. NBC used all of the powers at its disposal to amend the mistake, except the high-visibility airtime where the bad clip ran in the first place. [...]

Clearly, broadcast news time is precious and it would be impractical to correct every small error. But this was no misdemeanor. This was a deeply misleading compression in editing about an event that has taken on national significance.

Somewhere in the four expansive hours of “Today” — perhaps between the segment about a loud peacock that was bothering neighbors and the preview of Eva Longoria’s show about “hunky bachelors” — somebody could have looked into the camera and set the story straight.

With that correct attitude in mind, Carr approached Capus to ask why nothing had been done on the air. Capus acknowledged that he was "probably right" but didn't seem too enthused about sparing a few seconds to help correct the record, especially for those viewers who aren't following the media industry or political blogs, i.e. the vast majority of "Today" watchers.

“The reality is that we didn’t try to hide from it,” the oleagenous NBC president is quoted as saying. “We did an awful lot of work after it happened. We did an exhaustive investigation, I did interviews with a lot of publications to get the message out, but we probably should have done it on our own air.”

Supposedly, according to Capus, the peacock network was so busy trying to get to the bottom of things it never bothered to tell viewers. In all likelihood, that process was too "self-reflective," Capus told Carr.

If Capus really believes that, why not take the time tomorrow to get "Today" and "NBC Nightly News" to apologize to its viewers to tell the truth about the disgraceful edit? How about releasing that report about how a fraudulently edited audio segment got aired repeatedly on television?

Yes, that's right. NBC didn't air fake audio of George Zimmerman just once on the air. It did so on five separate occasions.

While most of the attention has been given to the "Today" show airing the spliced clip on March 20th, that wasn't the only day that NBC aired misleading audio of Zimmerman's conversation. There were five separate instances—-two using the formulation "this guy looks like he's up to no good. [...] he looks black” and three juxtaposing "up to no good" with Zimmerman's "he's a black male" comment from later in the conversation. The instances are below (thanks to NB's Rich Noyes for tabulating them):

NBC Nightly News, 3/19 (Pete Williams reporting):

Clip of GEORGE ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male.

NBC Today, 3/20; 7am and again at 9am
Both reported by Lilia Luciano

Clip of GEORGE ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male.

(The full transcript shows several exchanges between “...on drugs or something” and “He’s got his hand... This comes at a point in the conversation after the “He looks black” statement that was made in response to the 9-1-1 dispatcher. On screen, these were shown as two separate text boxes, but no indication that there was material cut out.)
 
NBC Today, 3/22 (Lilia Luciano reporting):

ZIMMERMAN: “This guy looks like he's up to no good... He looks black.”

NBC Today, 3/27 (Ron Allen reporting):

ZIMMERMAN: “This guy looks like he's up to no good... He looks black.”

(The on-screen graphic in both instances shows ellipses after “no good,” but the audio runs continuously and omits the fact that Zimmerman was asked to describe the person he was following.)

Given that there are two separate clips of Zimmerman's voice that were created and run on two separate shows, how can we be assured that NBC has taken sufficient steps to punish anyone involved in perpetuating the false racist narrative? Because there hasn't been much of a focus on the "NBC Nightly News," how do we know that it wasn't an additional producer who made the phoney edit on that show?

Unfortunately there is no way of knowing and since George Zimmerman is still trying to fend off prosecutors, he's not likely to be able to launch a lawsuit against NBC for sliming him as a racist. Capus needs to do the right thing and come fully clean on what happened. As the boss, he can make things right. But will he choose to without governmental pressure? It will come, why wait until then?

A former Palestinian intelligence officer has reportedly been sentenced to death after it was revealed he had sold his home to Jews.

Muhammad Abu Shahala, who worked for the Palestinian Authority reportedly confessed under torture to selling his home in Hebron on the West Bank to a Jewish man.

Jewish officials are now calling for the international community to get involved to save Mr Abu Shahala's life.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134245/Former-Palestinian-intelligence-officer-sentenced-death-selling-home-Jews.html#ixzz1syY8kWMj

Since the election of a Republican Congress in 2010, Congressional earmarks have been all but dead. Yet, somehow, Democratic members of Congress are securing funding for special projects anyway. How? With a little help from President Obama.

As Roll Call reports today, Hawaii Senators Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka (both Democrats) issued a press release touting a $250 million giveaway for a rail project in their state; Patty Murray (D-WA) also touted a $65 million grant for her state. Where did the money come from? It was pre-earmarked in the Obama budget. “Clearly lawmakers are taking credit for projects that were already slated to receive funding but did it in a very earmark-ish manner,” explained Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Inouye’s spokesman predictably denied that this was earmarking. “The fiscal year 2013 appropriations bills will contain no earmarks, but they will certainly contain funding for dozens of projects that are important to individual Members and to their constituents,” he said.

How convenient. President Obama, who was against earmarks before he was apparently for them, is the driving force here. Earmarks are the glue that holds together the Democratic coalition – it’s all back-scratching and pork-barrel spending. Were earmarks really to die, Democrats would have no way to get their friends on board with their big-spending projects. So President Obama is lending a hand.

This weekend, a video produced by Free Market America went live on YouTube — and it is racking up nationwide hits. Deservedly so. The Earth Day-timed message is compelling and extremely relevant this campaign season.

As the group writes: “The environmental agenda has been infected by extremism — it’s become an economic suicide pact. And we’re here to challenge it.” Watch:

     

According to the Department of Labor, although claims for unemployment decreased in the week ending April 14, the 4-week moving average was 374,750, up 5,500 from the previous week's revised average of 369,250.

This means that the economy is not improving, despite administration claims that it is. In Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, the number of firms that provided earnings guidance to investors in March was 27, which was the lowest ever for the month of March and the second-lowest of any month since 2000. This means that companies are nervous about their future earnings.

But the media continues to trumpet their calls of triumph for the Obama economy, despite the loosened money policy that creates an artificially inflated market. CBS, one of the arms of the vast left-wing conspiracy, hilariously titled a piece on the economy, “Economic outlook dim, but improving.” NBC, not to be outdone, had Matt Lauer say to Sarah Palin,  "Some people would say if things seem to get better, or be getting better, why would I take that chance and change the person in the White House?” And ABC? How’s this? George Stephanopolous, in March, “The economy has added more jobs than expected in each of the past three months…”  And just whose expectations was he referring to?

Meanwhile, the battle between Mitt Romney and Obama is heating up over the issue. Romney said on Wednesday, “Obama is over his head and swimming in the wrong direction … even if you like Barack Obama, we can’t afford Barack Obama … You’re not going to see President Obama standing alongside Greek columns. He’s not going to want to remind anyone of Greece, because he’s put us on a road to become more like Greece.”

Obama, running away from his record and still blaming former President Bush even after being in office for three and a half years, whined that during Bush’s administration, there was “the slowest job growth in half a century ... and we’ve spent the last three and a half years cleaning up after that mess.”

Obama still won’t grow up, and neither will the MSM that protects him.

By Damian Paletta

The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007. It  said the number of people receiving the benefits, commonly known as food stamps, would continue growing until 2014.

Click for larger CBO infographic.

Spending for the program, not including administrative costs, rose to $72 billion in 2011, up from $30 billion four years earlier. The CBO projected that one in seven U.S. residents received food stamps last year.

In a report, the CBO said roughly two-thirds of jump in spending was tied to an increase in the number of people participating in the program, which provides access to food for the poor, elderly, and disabled. It said another 20% “of the growth in spending can be attributed to temporarily higher benefit amounts enacted in the” 2009 stimulus law.

CBO said the number of people receiving benefits is expected to fall after 2014 because the economy will be improving.

“Nevertheless, the number of people receiving SNAP benefits will remain high by historical standards,” the agency said.

It estimated that 34 million people, or 1 in 10 U.S. residents, would receive SNAP benefits in 2022 “and SNAP expenditures, at about $73 billion, will be among the highest of all non-health-related federal support programs for low-income households.”

(Reuters) - Instead of curbing government spending, President Barack Obama's healthcare law could add up to $530 billion to the federal debt over ten years, a Republican expert on U.S. government benefit programs said on Tuesday.

A study by Charles Blahous, a George Mason University research fellow and the Republican trustee for the Medicare and Social Security entitlement programs for the elderly, challenged the administration's contention that the 2010 law would reduce healthcare costs.

But the Obama administration defended the law as a cost-saver and sharply criticized the report by Blahous, an economic policy adviser under former President George W. Bush.

Known as the "Affordable Care Act," or by conservatives as "Obamacare," the measure to expand health insurance for millions of Americans is considered Obama's signature domestic policy achievement.

The Supreme Court is weighing whether Congress overstepped its authority to regulate commerce in approving the law. The justices heard arguments in the high-stakes case two weeks ago.

Republican presidential candidates have promised to repeal the law if one of them wins the White House in the November election. Conservatives denounce the sweeping overhaul as an unwarranted government intrusion.

Obama and the Democrats believe the law will control skyrocketing costs and curtail government "red ink."

White House health adviser Jeanne Lambrew said Blahous' analysis wrongly charges that some savings are "double counted." She said government estimates from the Office of Management and Budget and from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office show the 2010 law would lower federal deficits over a 10 year period.

"This new math fits the old pattern of mischaracterizations about the Affordable Care Act when official estimates show the health care law reduces the deficit," Lambrew, deputy assistant to the president for health policy, wrote in a blog post on the White House website.

But Blahous, who also served as the deputy director of the National Economic Council under Bush, said in his research that the law is expected to boost net federal spending by more than $1.15 trillion and add between $340 billion and $530 billion to deficits between 2012-21.

"Relative to previous law, the (healthcare law) both exacerbates projected federal deficits and increases an already unsustainable federal commitment to health care spending," he concluded.

The analysis, first reported by the Washington Post late on Monday, also comes a month after the Congressional Budget Office cut the estimated net cost of the healthcare law by $48 billion to $1.08 trillion through 2021.

The shape of President Obama’s re-election strategy is coming clear. The key elements:

1) Don’t run on your record; run as if there were no incumbent

2) Stress class warfare; exploit fear of Republican spending cuts. Harp on the negatives.

3) Hide the negatives about your record in a miasma of general pessimism. (Medicare was broken before we got here; headwinds slowed the economy.)

It’s hard to see how this works. Economic populism has never been able to reach more than about 40 percent of the American electorate. And the only modern incumbent to run away from his record and win was Harry Truman in the aftermath of World War II and the Roosevelt era.

So what are the people around Obama thinking?

They seem to be betting that a decided shift in our political culture in the past decade has transformed class envy and save-government-spending demagoguery into a way to win a majority.

The Democratic Party’s left has long believed in this strategy. In the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign, moderates squared off against economic populists and won the day. The likes of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pushed populist remedies, but the polling never showed that this rhetoric would suffice to win a majority. (Yes, Clinton used some of their arguments to get elected in 1992 — but he only had to win 43 percent of the vote to prevail, because Ross Perot made it a three-way race.)

Has our culture changed that much since? Are the partisan divisions so entrenched and hatred of the other side so pronounced that a divisive campaign, a la Richard Nixon in 1968, can win? We don’t know yet.

Perhaps Obama’s people have polling that suggests things are different now — that the country is so embittered and divided that sunny optimism and appeals to national unity strike a false note with voters.

Alternately, it may all just be an attempt to revive the 2008 Obama coalition by igniting divisive passions to amplify turnout among his old base.

Note that Obama regularly draws 49 percent to 52 percent of registered voters in national polls against Romney — but does far worse when the poll is limited to the smaller pool of likely voters, trailing Romney 47 percent to 45 percent (Rasmussen) or tied at 47 (Bloomberg).

That gap illustrates Obama’s central problem: turnout.

He won in 2008 because blacks rose from 11 percent of the vote to 14 percent, Latino participation rose from 7 percent to 8.5 percent, and the under-30 voters dramatically increased their turnout as well.

His ratings among African-Americans remain high, but the prospects for a heavy turnout are diminished. And (according to Rasmussen) his approval among Latinos is down to 41 percent and among under-30 voters to 54 percent.

Obama’s appeals to fear, envy and class antagonisms haven’t been working lately. But even if they start to, he’s sacrificing the themes of optimism and hope.

A dour, bitter Obama, lashing out at the rich and peddling fear of the Republicans, can’t compete with a sunny, smiling Mitt Romney. He’s largely stuck talking about who Romney is — an unbecoming attack line that doesn’t inspire faith in a national leader.

Were we France or Italy, perhaps this rhetoric would fall on receptive ears conditioned by years of discord. Here in America? Not yet.

With two presidential signatures- one on New Year’s Day and the other issued last week – President Barack Obama has assumed the right to assert dictatorial powers over almost all aspects of the U.S. economy and to hold American citizens indefinitely without trial!

(This is not some “Space Aliens Invade” story. It is really happening).

On New Year’s Day, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to fund the Pentagon. But smuggled into its language is an explicit authority “allowing him to indefinitely detain [US] citizens” according to Jonathan Turley writing in the U.K. Guardian newspaper.

While the story was buried in the American media, Turley notes that it is “one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties” in American history.

At first, Obama “insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops.” But, Turley reports, “that spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) disclosed that it was the White House that insisted that there be no exception for [US] citizens in the indefinite detention provision.”

Turley is critical of “reporters [who] continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true.

The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review.”

Read the full text of Turley’s article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-assault-american-liberty

Perhaps even more terrifying is the executive order President Obama signed on Friday, March 16 giving him vast powers to control every aspect of the U.S. economy in the event of war or even during a peacetime “emergency.” Edwin Black, writing for the liberal-oriented Huffington Post, says that the order “may have quietly placed the United States on a war preparedness footing” possibly in anticipation of “an outbreak of war between Israel, the West, and Iran.”

Read the full text of Black’s article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/edwin-black/obama-national-defense-resources-preparedness_b_1359715.html

The Order entitled “National Defense Resources Preparedness” gives the president the power “to take control of all civil energy supplies, including oil and natural gas, control and restrict all civil transportation,” according to Black. It also even allows a draft “in order to achieve both the military and non-military demands of the country.”

Obama’s order would be effective both during times of war and times of other emergencies. It says the purpose of the order is to assure that “the United States [has] an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency.” (Emphasis added)

The far reaching order authorizes the president “in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements.”

Likely the president already has most of the enumerated powers as part of his role as commander in chief. So, why the order right now?

Black speculates that it is related to the tensions over Iran’s nuclear program. Is the president reminding big oil that he would take over their industry in the event of war? Or is Obama equipping himself with vast powers to be used even in peacetime as a result of whatever he decides is a “national emergency.” Could the rise in gas prices constitute such an “emergency?” Is the issuance of this order right now a shot across the bow of oil companies to get them to go easy on oil prices? Where are we? Stalinist Russia?

In any case, these two presidential signatures – one on a law and the other on an order – together constitute a massive power grab totally unsuited to a democracy. The idea that he would be preparing to assume dictatorial powers seems so remote that the mainstream media has not even reported on these initiatives. But they should give all of us pause.

Heritage Foundation Mike Gonzalez  Tuesday, March 27, 2012

It is hard to overstate the dangerous implications of what happened this week when President Obama was caught by an open mic sending a message to Russia’s dictator-in-waiting to wait quietly till after the November elections, after which Mr. Obama could make concessions on America’s national defense. The White House is trying to explain this incident away as par for the course in an electoral year. It is not.

Here, in essence, is what it appears to be: this was our commander in chief in league with an anti-American autocrat to dupe the American public until after it’s too late. What makes it even worse is that the issue at hand–missile defense–has to do with protecting the American people against the likes of Russia.

We don’t need to exaggerate what happened. All we need is to review what Obama, our President, was caught telling Russia’s current president, Dmitri Medvedev, while the two met at the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea. Neither man knew the microphones were live and picked up their exchange. Here it is:

More…

CHICAGO – Did the parents of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers help finance Barack Obama’s Harvard education?

Did Ayers’ mother believe Obama was a foreign student?

And was the young Obama convinced at the time – long before he even entered politics – that he was going to become president of the United States?

A retired U.S. Postal Service carrier who delivered mail to Tom and Mary Ayers in a Chicago suburb in the late 1980s and early 1990s and claims to have met Obama in front of the Ayers home emphatically says yes to all three questions.

Allen Hulton, who was commended for 39 years of honorable service with the USPS, has given a sworn affidavit to investigators commissioned by Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio to determine whether Obama is eligible for Arizona’s 2012 election ballot. Hulton has recorded about three hours of video interviews with WND.

Hulton says that in conversations with Mary Ayers while on his route he learned of the couple’s enthusiasm and support for a black foreign student. One bright, warm Chicagoland day, he recounts, he met the student who fit Mary Ayers’ description in front of the Ayers home in Glen Ellyn, Ill. That young man, Hulton is convinced, was Barack Obama.

Follow all the future developments in this story – sign up for WND’s email news alerts right now!

Hulton delivered mail to the Ayers, who are both deceased, when he was stationed at the post office in Glen Ellyn, an upper-middle class suburb 25 miles west of downtown Chicago, from late 1986 to 1997. He was a USPS employee from March 28, 1962, through March 30, 2001. (Editor’s note: Although the Ayers family no longer lives there, WND is withholding the Glen Ellyn street address for the sake of the current residents’ privacy.)

“It was a beautiful neighborhood – one of the nicer routes any of the letter carriers would have liked to have had,” Hulton recalls. “It had some large and very beautiful homes.”

As WND reported yesterday, Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers – whom he dismissed in a 2008 debate as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood” – plagued him in the 2008 presidential campaign and could resurface in this year’s election, as many questions remain.

Young Obama

Over a period of years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hulton estimates he spoke with Mary Ayers about 18 to 20 times and once to Tom Ayers, who died in 2007. Mary Ayers died in 2000.

“Sometimes Mary would be out when I delivered the mail, and we would exchange a few words on occasion,” he says, recalling that she liked to talk about her family.

“One day, Mary came to the door when I came up to the house with the mail,” he remembers. “After a greeting, she started enthusiastically talking to me about this young black student they were helping out, and she referred to him as a foreign student.”

Hulton assumed that by “helping” the student, Mary Ayers meant she and her husband were financially supporting the black foreign-exchange student with his education.

He says that Mary Ayers told him the student’s name, but that it was a “strange name” that he could not remember, even though at the time it sounded African to him.

“I was taken aback by how enthusiastic she was about him,” Hulton says. “And I believe she said he was from either Kenya or Indonesia, and I favor Indonesia in my recollection.”

WND has reported that when Obama was in Indonesia with his Indonesian stepfather and his mother from ages 6 to10, he was registered in school as an Indonesian citizen and a Muslim. He went by the name Barry Soetoro, adopting the surname of his Indonesian stepfather. His mother’s passport listed him with the surname Soebarkah.

Obama refuses to waive privacy rights that would allow the Hawaii Department of Health to release any adoption records that may exist for him.

NOTE: In case you missed the news conference of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse,” you can view it here.

Even should Obama waive privacy rights, the Hawaii Department of Health might not feel compelled to release any adoption records that may exist. Tight restrictions to vital records have been enacted by the Hawaii State Legislature to seal any public documents pertaining to Obama’s birth records and his adoption status.

If Obama were adopted by his Indonesian stepfather, he may have compromised his eligibility to be president, according to Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution, which requires that a president be a “natural-born citizen,” which experts say means having both parents be U.S. citizens.

‘I’m going to be president of the United States’

About a year after discussing with Mary Ayers the foreign student she and her husband were supporting, Hulton recalls meeting a young black male on the sidewalk in front of the Ayers home.

Hulton describes the man as being in his early 20s, noting that he was tall, thin, had a light complexion and that his ears stuck out.

“He greeted me,” Hulton says. “He was very polite, dressed nicely, but informally – slacks and a dress shirt – and he spoke with no accent. Immediately this young black man entered into conversation with me. He told me he had taken the train out from Chicago and had come to thank the Ayers family personally for having helped him with his education.”

Hulton remembers asking the young man what his plans were for the future.

“He looked right at me and told me he was going to be president of the United States,” Hulton says.

“There was a little bit of a grin on his face when he said it – he sounded sure of himself, but not arrogant. I know how people will say things because they have an ambition, but it did not come across that way,” Hulton says. “It came across as if this young black male was telling me he was going to be president, almost as if it were the statement of a scientific fact that had already been determined, as if his being president had been already pre-arranged.”

Hulton says the claim made him speechless.

“I kind of stuttered a response and said that nowadays anything is possible. I wished him good luck with his ambition,” he says.

Immediately, Hulton associated the young black man with the foreign student Mary Ayers had mentioned to him so enthusiastically about a year earlier.

“I remembered the conversation I had with Mary, and I associated this young man with the foreign student she had discussed with me, because Mary said they were supporting this foreign student, and the young black man I met outside the Ayers’ home said he had come to Glen Ellyn to thank the Ayers in person for helping him with his education.”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Hulton observed several news reports detailing the relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, and he recalled the encounter with the young man in front of Tom and Mary Ayers’ home.

“The facial and physical characteristics, as well as candidate Obama’s voice, matched that of the young black male I met in front of the Ayers’ home,” Hulton says in the affidavit he signed Nov. 12, 2011, for Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse investigation.

“I am positive that the black male I spoke with in front of the Ayers’ house that day was indeed a young Barack Obama.”

Hulton distinctly recalls that the day he met Obama in front of the Ayers’ residence was a warm, sunny day and that Obama wasn’t wearing a jacket.

Marxist

Hulton recalls that he had one conversation with Tom Ayers, who was retired as CEO and chairman of Commonwealth Edison, shortly after the Ayers family moved into their home in Glen Ellyn.

“He asked me how I liked my job, and he started into what seemed to me a Marxist viewpoint on what it is like for the working man, trying to convince me that working people like me were exploited by their employers,” Hulton remembers of the conversation.

“As an American citizen, I appreciated everything I had, and I was not at war with people who had more than I had,” he says. “It surprised me to hear somebody who had been president of Consolidated Edison talking in these terms.”

Hulton says he got the feeling that Tom Ayers thought he knew more about the plight of the workingman than he did.

Summer 1989

A likely timeframe for Hulton’s alleged encounter with Obama is the summer of 1989, when Obama was an intern at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin, after his first year at Harvard Law School.

Hulton says Obama mentioned to him taking the train. The Metra, a commuter from downtown Chicago, stops at a Glen Ellyn station a little more than a mile from the Ayers’ residence.

Michelle Robinson, Obama’s wife-to-be, was the attorney at the firm assigned to mentor Obama in the summer of 1989.

Bernardine Dohrn also had worked as a paralegal at Sidley Austin, from 1984 through 1988. Dohrn’s 1960s radical activities as a self-described “revolutionary communist” landed her on the FBI’s list of 10 most wanted fugitives, and because of her felony conviction, she was not allowed to take the Illinois bar exam.

Widely speculated in Chicago is that Dohrn got the job at Sidley Austin through the influence of her father-in-law, Thomas Ayers, who was one of the law firm’s biggest clients.

Michelle Obama started at the firm in the summer of 1988 and remained there until 1991.

Hulton recalls meeting Dohrn at the home of her in-laws, although his encounters with her were limited to having Dohrn sign for mail addressed to her.

First reported in 2009

Hulton’s account of meeting Obama in suburban Chicago was first reported by California lawyer and political scientist Stephen Diamond in September 2009.

Writing on his blog, Diamond reported that he had interviewed Hulton at length and considered his account credible.

“The statement by Hulton is the first eyewitness account of a possible relationship between Obama and Tom Ayers and the first that dates his relationship with the Ayers family to the mid-1980s,” Diamond wrote.

As early as Oct. 13, 2008, prior to the November 2008 presidential election, Diamond had reported that Obama’s relationship with the Ayers family dated back to 1988. At that time, Obama, as head of the Developing Communities Project, joined the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, the ABCs Coalition. The lobbying alliance aimed to push through Chicago public schools the creation of “Local School Councils,” or LSCs, to oversee teachers and administrators.

“The proposal was very controversial, and groups like Operation PUSH headed by Jesse Jackson did not support it, because many teachers were black – it was one of the first stable middle class careers a black person, and black women in particular, could aspire to in Chicago,” Diamond wrote.

Tom Ayers and Bill Ayers were strong supporters of the LSCs, however, according to Diamond, and Chicago United, a group founded by Tom Ayers, joined ABCs too. Bill Ayers became chairman of ABCs.

Knew Ayers’ brother

Hulton was in the same class as Tim Ayers, Bill Ayers’ brother, at Glenbard High School in Glen Ellyn. Although he did not know Bill Ayers, Hulton thought he might have met him at the parents’ home once or twice, but he could not say for certain.

Hulton attended Glenbard, now known as Glenbard West, for four years, but did not have enough credits to graduate. He later earned a GED while in military service. Taking leave from the USPS when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965, Hulton returned to work as a mailman following his honorable discharge in 1967.

While in the Army, he was assigned to a Pershing Ballistics Missile unit in Germany. Although the Vietnam War was being fought at the time, he was never assigned to Vietnam.

It's not unusual for President Obama to criticize his Republican predecessors from time to time, but this morning, he targeted his scorn not at George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, but ... Rutherford B. Hayes. As Politico reported:

Speaking about the need to develop new sources of American energy in Largo, Md., Obama used our 19th president as a failure of forward-thinking leadership.

"One of my predecessors, President Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone: 'It’s a great invention but who would ever want to use one?'" Obama said. "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore."

"He's looking backwards, he's not looking forward. He's explaining why we can't do something instead of why we can do something," Obama said. 

Burn. 

We thought it was a bit unsporting of Obama to attack President Hayes, who is quite unable to respond. So we called up the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, where Nan Card, the curator of manuscripts, was plenty willing to correct Obama's ignorance of White House history. Just as soon as she finished chuckling. 

"I've heard that before, and no one ever knows where it came from," Card said of Hayes's alleged phone remark, "but people just keep repeating it and repeating it, so it's out there." 

Wait, so Hayes didn't even say the quote that Obama is mocking him for? "No, no," Card confirmed.

She then read aloud a newspaper article from June 29, 1877, which describes Hayes's delight upon first experiencing the magic of the telephone. The Providence Journal story reported that as Hayes listened on the phone, "a gradually increasing smile wreathe[d] his lips and wonder shone in his eyes more and more.” Hayes took the phone from his ear, "looked at it a moment in surprise and remarked, 'That is wonderful.'"

In fact, Card noted, Hayes was not only the first president to have a telephone in the White House, but he was also the first to use the typewriter, and he had Thomas Edison come to the White House to demonstrate the phonograph. "So I think he was pretty much cutting edge," Card insisted, "maybe just the opposite of what President Obama had to say there."

by Wynton Hall

The New York Times bestselling author of the explosive new book, Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s Biggest Backers, Jason Mattera, had his crew’s camera snatched and hurled by comedian Chris Rock when he asked the star why he has called the Tea Party racist (video below).

“I was stunned,” said Mr. Mattera in an exclusive interview with Big Hollywood. “Tea Party members get called the worst things imaginable and still remain peaceful. But ask a big Hollywood celebrity to explain himself and the guy goes ballistic, wrestles the camera away from my camerawoman, chucks it 50 feet, and then challenges me to a fight. It’s unreal. And it perfectly illustrates why I decided to investigate and writeHollywood Hypocrites.” 

The confrontation, which took place around 2:00 a.m. on January 23, 2012, at Spike Lee’s Sundance Film Festival after party at Tao night club, ended with Chris Rock challenging the conservative author to a fight, says Mr. Mattera:

“Chris Rock shouted, ‘You want to throw down?  Let’s throw down right now!’ Of course, he was standing safely behind two bodyguards when he said it.”

The clash was ignited when Jason Mattera inquired about disparaging comments Chris Rock made about the Tea Party in an Esquire article in 2011:

When I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism's almost over. Because this is the last — this is the act up before the sleep. They're going crazy. They're insane. You want to get rid of them — and the next thing you know, they're fucking knocked out. And that's what's going on in the country right now.  

Jason Mattera says his confrontation with Chris Rock is just the opening salvo in a series of forthcoming ambush celebrity interviews with some of the big name stars he chronicles in Hollywood Hypocrites.

“Hollywood celebrities preach to us to vote for Barack Obama and his leftist policies, yet not even they live by the values Obama and the progressive left stand for,” said Mattera. “If conservatives and Republicans are going to win in 2012, we must muzzle Obama’s backers. And that starts with a full-scale investigation of the positions they take and the lives they actually lead.”

Among the celebrity targets Jason Mattera’s investigates in his new book are:

• Alec Baldwin
• Matt Damon
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Madonna
• Bruce Springsteen
• Whoopi Goldberg
• Bono
• Arianna Huffington
• Jon Bon Jovi
• Spike Lee

Andrew Breitbart endorsed Jason Mattera’s book, saying that it “unleashes a barrage of body blows to Hollywood’s holier-than-thou limousine liberals that may make them think twice next time they open their pretty mouths.”

As for when he plans to release his next celebrity interview for Hollywood Hypocrites, Mr. Mattera says: “As President Ronald Reagan used to say, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’  The next video is likely to drop sometime next week.”