The Constitutional crisis in America’s near future

Posted By J. D. Longstreet On April 30, 2010 (6:38 am) In Top Page News

I really hate to direct your attention to yet another crisis in America, but we have one headed our way. Yes, it is down the road aways – but it is a monster and will very likely set the USA down amidst the biggest constitutional crisis this nation has ever seen. It has the potential of becoming our undoing as a nation. And it is out there — just staring us in the face.

I know you have heard it all before, but sooner or later we, as a nation, are going to have to deal with it. Yes, I am writing about the lingering question of whether or not the man formerly known as Barry Soetoro, now known as Barack Obama, is legally qualified to hold the office of President of the United States. And who the hell is he, anyway? WHERE did he come from? WHAT has he done to America?

“He has, inside of a year, destroyed our alliances, abandoned our allies, nationalized banks, insurance companies, and the automotive business, and rammed communist healthcare down our collective throats. He has bankrupted this country and stolen the wealth of our nation and our children. He has embraced Islamic anti-Semitism, sanctioned the Islamic bomb of the Iranian mullahcracy, handed Russia Eastern Europe on a plate, thrown away our nuclear advantage, and despised us for our superiority. And then contemptuously told us to thank him and kiss his Marxist ass. “ — Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs (SOURCE).

But WHO IS HE? Barry Soetoro? Did the President legally change his name from Soetoro to Obama? Well, we know that when Barack/Barry and his mother lived in Indonesia, with Oil executive father, Lolo, he went by the name Barry Soetoro.

So, where was Soetoro actually born? According to an article at “ Indonesia Matters” “Barrak Hussein Obama II was born to a white American Ann Dunham and Kenyan Barrak Hussein Obama Senior, in Nyang’oma Kogelo now in Kenya.” You’ll find the entire article HERE.

From the same article there is this: “In his tellingly-titled Memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his Indonesian interlude as “one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy’s life”. But he also recalls being troubled by the poverty around him: “the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came,” and the desperation of the disabled beggars who came to the family’s door.

“The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel,” he writes. Obama and his mother thus we were very well acquainted with the harsh realities of indigenous Indonesians.
Fermina Katarina Sinaga, recalled yojhng Obama in her class: in the common task of class to write an essay titled “My dream: What I want to be in the future.” Obama “wrote ‘I want to be a president,’ ” she said. During a later writing assignment on family, he wrote, “My father is my idol.” You will find the entire article HERE.

Above, I referred to a constitutional crisis in America’s future. Here’s what I mean: Just suppose the courts rule that Obama/Soetoro is NOT legally qualified to be President of the United States? What is to be done about all the bills he has signed into law? What is to be done about all the Executive Orders he has issued over his signature? What about all the military commands, appointments, promotions, etc, he has made? What about all the negotiations associated with treaties, international agreements, etc, Obama/Soetoro has been involved in as the US President? Are they not, at the least, null and void, and, at the worst – illegal?

Do you begin to sense the monumental “MESS” the country will find itself?

And what about the Vice-Presidency? How would a court finding that Obama/Soetoro was not legally qualified to be President affect the Vice-Presidency? Should Obama/Soetoro be forced to step down, would the court order Vice-President Biden to step down as well? If so, will Nancy Pelosi move into the Oval Office as President of the US? Talk about a nightmare!

There are some who believe that officials within the current government already KNOW Obama/Soetoro is NOT the legal President of the US and yet they are keeping quiet and not coming forward with the evidence.

J. B. Williams has written an article that will shake you to your core. In the article he states his opinion that THAT is exactly what is happening in our national government. This is a “Must Read” article. The title of the article is: “DC Knows that Obama is Ineligible for Office.” You will find Mr. Williams’ article HERE. We urge you to read it.

The next question is: who, if anyone, will go to jail? Even more importantly – what do we do to ensure a candidate for President of the United States is properly “vetted” and his natural born citizenship confirmed well before he stands for election?

It may require an amendment to the US Constitution to guarantee this never comes up again. Then so be it! Let’s get her done!

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Article taken from SmallGovTimes.com – http://www.smallgovtimes.com
URL to article: http://www.smallgovtimes.com/2010/04/the-constitutional-crisis-in-america%e2%80%99s-near-future/

 

The truth about health insurance profits

Posted By Will Bridges On March 18, 2010 (4:49 pm) In Voices and Choices

Throughout the course of his pitch for Universal Healthcare, President Obama has repeatedly impugned the character of the health insurance industry. The President’s onlookers have been regaled with tales of health insurance providers nefariously stripping their customers of coverage in pursuit of their allegedly massive profit margins.

Reality, as is often the case, has something different to say than the President.

Current market data, as of today, shows the healthcare insurance industry coming in at 88th place among industries for profit margins, at 4.4%.

Last week, the industry ranked 86th.

If the Health Plan providers are as sinister as the President claims, then what industries are apparently even worse?

Air Services, Railroads, Biotechnology, Auto Parts Stores, Toys and Games, Cleaning Products, Restaurants, and many more ALL routinely boast significantly higher profit margins on average than the likes of Aetna, AMERIGROUP, Humana, and United Healthgroup.

Yet, while crusading against private industry and lamenting the denial of claims, the President fails to mention one of the worst offenders of all. Namely, because this offender happens to be the one he supports – government. The American Medical Association’s 2008 National Health Insurer Report Card showed that Medicare topped all the major private providers in percentage of claims denied for the year.

Of course, in fairness to the president, things aren’t going so well for Medicare. Far from enjoying 4.4% profit margins like its private counterparts, Medicare is itself bankrupt, and simultaneously helping to bankrupt America. The President’s 2011 budget shows over $1.4 Trillion in expected expenditures for both Medicare and Medicaid.

Interestingly, there is one related industry that ranks very highly. Major drug manufacturers, coming in at 3rd place with 22.2% profit margins. Last week the industry ranked 6th, with 21.6% profit margins. While much of those impressive margins can be attributed to those firms’ intellectual property rights and ability that dominate the markets for the new drugs they create (those margins, in turn, allowing for reinvestment into research that will develop the new drugs of tomorrow), some can also be attributed to the lack of free trade in America when it comes to prescription drugs.

Limited government advocates have long called for free trade, specifically with Canada, for prescription drugs. Competition leads to lower drug prices for consumers; and the lower the cost for consumers – both individuals and the insurance providers who cover them – the lower the costs of Healthcare. The same effect could be felt in Healthcare plans themselves through instituting free trade within our own borders and allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines.

Lowering costs – isn’t that what the President claims this is all about?

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Article taken from SmallGovTimes.com – http://www.smallgovtimes.com
URL to article: http://www.smallgovtimes.com/2010/03/the-truth-about-health-insurance-profits/

 

Obama, Congress wink at massive surveillance abuses

Posted By Julian Sanchez On March 9, 2010 (7:20 pm) In Voices and Choices

Here’s how it was supposed to be. Under his administration, candidate Barack Obama explained in 2007, America would abandon the “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” There would be “no more National Security Letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime” because “that is not who we are, and it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.”

Even after his disappointing vote for the execrable FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which expanded government surveillance power while retroactively immunizing telecoms for their role in George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping, civil libertarians held out hope that the erstwhile professor of constitutional law would begin to restore some of the checks on government surveillance power that had been demolished in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

The serial betrayal of that hope reached its culmination last week, when a Democratic-controlled Congress quietly voted to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act without implementing a single one of the additional safeguards that had been under consideration — among them, more stringent limits on the national security letters (NSLs) Obama had once decried. Worse yet, the vote came on the heels of the revelation, in a blistering inspector general’s report, that Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) had issued a secret opinion, once again granting retroactive immunity for systematic lawbreaking — and opening the door for the FBI to ignore even the current feeble limits on its power to vacuum up sensitive telecommunications records.

NSLs have been around for decades, but their scope was radically expanded by the Patriot Act and subsequent intelligence bills. They allow investigators to obtain a wide array of financial records and telecommunications transaction data without a court order — revealing the phone numbers, e-mail accounts, and Web addresses with which their targets have been in contact.

But as a detailed report released last month by the office of the inspector general (OIG) revealed, between 2003 and 2006, the FBI sought to stretch its NSL powers beyond even these ample boundaries. Investigators obtained thousands of records from telecommunications providers using a made-up process called an “exigent letter” — which essentially promised that a proper NSL would be along shortly. Among those whose records were obtained in this way were reporters for The Washington Post and The New York Times — in violation of both the law and internal regulations requiring that the attorney general approve such requests.

Still more incredibly, investigators sought records pertaining to more than 3,500 telephone numbers without any process at all, simply requesting records verbally or via scrawled Post-It notes. Many of those data requests were either unrelated to any authorized investigation or had to do with domestic criminal investigations — meaning they could not legally have been made via NSLs. Despite this, the letters would routinely, and falsely, claim that an NSL or subpoena was already being sought.

When the OIG interviewed the agents responsible, it found that “no one could satisfactorily explain their actions,” instead offering only “unpersuasive excuses.” When supervisors attempted to implement a database to track these requests, agents revolted, refusing to use the new system “because they did not want the responsibility for inputting the data,” which suggests either an extreme aversion to clerical work or an awareness that something not quite Hoyle was afoot. When information obtained by these extralegal means was later cited in warrant applications to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the applicants falsely claimed that legitimate NSLs or subpoenas had been used.

All of this, the OIG report noted, constituted a gross violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which clearly stipulates that subscriber records may only be turned over to the government pursuant to legal process. There’s an exception for genuine emergencies, as when an attack is believed to be imminent, but that exception was not invoked and would not have applied to only a tiny fraction of the putatively “exigent” cases.

Following standard practice, the OIG sent a draft copy of its report to the FBI for comment before publication. Understandably distressed by the watchdog’s finding that analysts had broken the law repeatedly and systematically over a period of years, FBI attorneys scrambled for retroactive cover. As a heavily redacted section of the report explains, they hatched a novel theory, according to which some broad class of records was actually exempt from the requirements of the ECPA, and therefore eligible to be handed over “voluntarily” by the telecoms. Even in the freewheeling days of the Bush administration, apparently, nobody had come up with this particular rationalization for evading federal privacy statutes — but it would still serve as a retroactive excuse if Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel could be persuaded to bless the new reasoning.

Shamefully, the OLC appears to have done just that in a secret opinion issued in January, just weeks before the publication of the OIG report. While it’s impossible to know the precise scope of this novel legal loophole — sufficiently clever parsing of the statutory definition of “subscriber” or “record” might generate a good deal of wiggle room — the OIG stressed that this freshly discovered power “has significant policy implications that need to be considered by the FBI, the Department, and the Congress.” It was a page straight from the John Yoo playbook: When intelligence agencies are discovered to have broken the law, simply reinterpret the law!

Though the NSL provisions were not among those slated to expire, previous OIG reports documenting widespread abuse of NSL authority had placed them at the center of the reauthorization debate, even before this latest bombshell. The Justice Department, meanwhile, had declared its openness to “modifications” of the Patriot Act to better protect civil liberties but took no overt position on the competing proposals.

Indeed, by the time the House Judiciary Committee took up the question of reauthorization in early November, legislators of both parties were venting their frustration about the scant guidance they’d gotten from the administration.

Behind closed doors, however, the administration was anything but silent. Instead of openly opposing civil-liberties reforms that had been under consideration in the Senate, The New York Times reported in October, the Obama administration opted for a kind of political ventriloquist’s routine. The Justice Department wrote a series of amendments diluting or stripping away the new protections, then laundered them through Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, who offered them up verbatim.

It’s worth taking a closer look at one such reform proposal — again, predating the latest and most damning OIG report — to get a sense of the disconnect between the administration’s public and private stances. Some legislators had wanted to require the FBI to develop “minimization procedures” for NSLs, as they do when full-blown wiretaps are employed, to ensure that information about innocents is not circulated indiscriminately and that irrelevant records are ultimately discarded. This would only bring NSLs in line with other Patriot provisions compelling production of business records, where minimization is already required, and in principle, the Justice Department is already on board with this plan: As Inspector General Glenn Fine noted in his testimony before the Senate in September, the department’s NSL working group was already laboring to develop such procedures in response to the abuses documented in previous OIG reports — but the working group had been dragging their heels for more than two years.

The task of blocking any legal requirement that the Justice Department pick up the pace fell to Rep. Dan Lungren, a Republican from California. At a House markup session in November, Lungren offered up an amendment that would strip away the minimization mandate and even argued, bizarrely, that the very concept of “minimization” was inapplicable in the NSL context. He was visibly confused when Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, after making a point of praising Lungren’s “scrupulous study” of the issue, pointed out that the Justice Department itself had publicly accepted the need for such procedures.

“This is the first I had heard that the Justice Department was either considering it or had not raised any objections to this,” a visibly perplexed Lungren stammered, “because it was my understanding they felt this was an inappropriate transfer of a process that is used in the electronic surveillance arena.” The talking points with which Lundgren had been supplied, it seems, had not been checked against the official assurances the department had been providing.

It seems the administration need not have troubled itself with torpedoing civil-liberties reforms one at a time. Despite the publication of the OIG’s blistering January report — which warned that the OLC’s new secret opinion “creates a significant gap in FBI accountability and oversight,” making it “critical for the Department and Congress to consider appropriate controls” — even the flaccid reforms approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee appear to have fallen by the wayside for the time being. The only silver lining for civil libertarians is that the expiring Patriot provisions have only been reauthorized for one year, meaning Congress will have to take up these issues again relatively soon.

The question, given the muted public reaction to the abuses that have already been disclosed, is why we should hope legislators will be any more willing to expend political capital resisting the intelligence community’s demands a year from now. The “choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide” may be a false one, but in the current political climate, it appears to be an easy one as well.

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Article taken from SmallGovTimes.com – http://www.smallgovtimes.com
URL to article: http://www.smallgovtimes.com/2010/03/obama-congress-wink-at-massive-surveillance-abuses/

 

Using “reconciliation” to smash through unpopular legislation

Posted By Neal Boortz On March 4, 2010 (6:28 am) In Voices and Choices

While Barack Obama didn’t explicitly say it, he opened the door for Democrats to use reconciliation to pass healthcare reform. And that is exactly what they intend to do. Obama says:

“[N]o matter which approach you favor, I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for a year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts — all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority … I have therefore asked leaders in both of Houses of Congress to finish their work and schedule a vote in the next few weeks.”

Never mind the .. dare I say it .. hypocrisy surrounding this approach. Here is not one but four different examples of Obama demagoguing the use of reconciliation.

CBS Interview 11/2/04
My understanding of the Senate is that you need 60 votes to get something significant to happen, which means that Democrats and Republicans have to ask the question, do we have the will to move an American agenda forward, not a Democratic or Republican agenda forward?

Change to Win Convention 9/25/07
The bottom line is that our healthcare plans are similar, the question once again is, who can get it done? Who can build a movement for change? This is an area where we’re going to have to have a 60% majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We’re going to have to have a majority to get a bill to my desk. That is not just a fifty plus one majority.

Obama Interview with the Concord Monitor 10/9/07
You’ve got to break out of what I call the sort of fifty plus one pattern of presidential politics. Maybe you eke out a victory of fifty plus one. Then you can’t govern. You know, you get Air Force One, there are a lot of nice perks, but you can’t deliver on healthcare. We are not going to pass universal health care with a fifty plus one strategy.

Center for American Progress Conference 7/12/06
Those big-ticket items: fixing our health care system. You know, one of the arguments that sometimes I get with my fellow progressives, and some of these have flashed up in the blog communities on occasion, is this notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove where we identify our core base, we throw ‘em red meat, we get a fifty plus one victory. See, Karl Rove doesn’t need a broad consensus because he doesn’t believe in government. If we want to transform the country, though, that requires a sizeable majority.

And then lest we forget this from Robert Byrd in 2005. When Republicans wanted to use reconciliation to stop the Democrat filibuster of Bush judicial nominees, Robert Byrd compared the strategy to Nazi tactics. Seriously!Here’s what he had to say back then:

Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.

Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

Please, folks; if you won’t fight for your liberty, how about fighting for the future of your children and grandchildren.

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Article taken from SmallGovTimes.com – http://www.smallgovtimes.com
URL to article: http://www.smallgovtimes.com/2010/03/using-reconciliation-to-smash-through-unpopular-legislation/

 

Crime Inc.

Read the Glenn Beck article provided by Fox News here.

 

The land of diminishing returns

Posted By Steve Adcock On April 5, 2010 (11:45 am) In Top Page News

Michael Barone wrote an excellent piece in the Washington Examiner yesterday that indicates young people, who had previously thrown their support behind Barack Obama in fairly large numbers, may be realizing the magnitude of their mistake.

When people actually begin to pay attention, you know it is bad.

“The Pew Research Center’s poll of the millennial generation, which voted 66 to 32 percent for Obama in 2008, found that they identify with Democrats over Republicans by only a 54 to 40 percent margin this year,” he wrote.

“Perhaps they are coming to realize that the burdens the Obama policies are placing on the private sector economy are reducing their choices for the future.”

As Obama and Congress continue to pound home the idea that success in this country is something to be punished, so goes the desire to strive for bigger and better things among our younger population – heck, among our entire population.

There is a quite significant reason why unemployment continues to flirt with double digits.  The policies from Washington that punish success and reward underachievement are archaic job killers.  They fundamentally destroy the natural desire to work hard and succeed.  They remove the very motivation that most people need to make their societies and communities a great place to live – for better or worse.

I reported recently that the public sector is alive and well, while the private sector continues to struggle.  The government is systematically developing an environment where government is the entity that provides for the livelihood of Americans.  This includes the recent passage of nationalized health care, and certainly includes the collective implementation of an environment that strangles private sector investment and enhances areas for government bureaucracy.  This is accomplished through excessive taxation, scores of rules and mountains of bureaucracy that do nothing but cost businesses money – costs that those businesses ultimately pass on to the consumer.

CNN reported recently that even many Democrats, disgruntled with the heavy hand of our government, are beginning to join the much-maligned tea party movement.  When you see people from both ends of the political spectrum banding together to fight back against obscene government encroachments into the lives of the American people, then you know firsthand how serious the situation is.  When people actually begin to pay attention, you know it is bad.

As popular radio talk show host Neal Boortz likes to write, how’s that hopey changey thing working out for you?

 

White House pushing amnesty and national ID cards

Posted By Jim Kouri On March 19, 2010 (8:10 am) In Voices and Choices

President Barack Obama is already planning his next sweeping change for American society after he gets his Obamacare passed in both houses of Congress: fulfillment of his campaign promise to revamp U.S. immigration policy as part of his fundamental transformation of the United States.

On Thursday, Obama mentioned a proposal by Democrat Senator Charles Schumer and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, that features a first-ever national identification card for U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who want a job.
In a blog posted online by The Washington Post, Senators Schumer and Graham stated “our immigration system is badly broken.” Graham, who has angered conservatives time and time again, and Schumer outlined plan revamp U.S. immigration policy.

While the proposal for state-of-the-art identification cards are a new development in the Senate, other parts of the Schumer-Graham plan are old hat including a promise to upgrade border security, creating a new process for admitting temporary workers, and implementing a “tough but fair path to legalization for those already here,” a euphemism for illegal alien amnesty.

Obama met last week with Schumer and Graham, and the White House said a sweeping agreement dealing with as many as 12 million illegal immigrants was unlikely to get through Congress without support from both parties. Such a measure would have difficulty advancing before November’s congressional election especially with the epidemic of violence occurring at the U.S.-Mexico border and reports that Islamic terrorist groups are recruiting and training would-be terrorists in Central and South American countries.

It’s been widely reported that illegal aliens comprise upwards of 27 percent of the US prison and jail population. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — two agencies within the Department of Homeland Security — claim in several reports that they’ve apprehended over 100,000 criminal aliens whose offenses go far beyond violation of immigration laws and regulations.

Sadly, only about 25 percent of expenses for imprisoning criminal aliens is reimbursed by the federal government to state and local governments. This creates a hardship for taxpayers in states with high incarceration rates for criminal aliens. The proponents of open borders or lax immigration enforcement always point to the benefits derived from illegal immigration such as the amount of taxes they pay into the government system. Evidence, however, exists that refutes those claims. For instance, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence that suggests a large number of illegal aliens are paid “off-the-books” therefore those wages are not taxed.

The National Research Council has estimated that the net fiscal cost of immigration ranges from $11 billion to $22 billion per year, with most government expenditures on immigrants coming from state and local coffers, while most taxes paid by immigrants who actually do pay taxes go to the federal treasury.

The net deficit is caused by a low level of tax payments by immigrants, because they are disproportionately low-skilled and thus earn low wages, and a higher rate of consumption of government services, both because of their relative poverty and their higher fertility.

This is especially true of illegal immigration. Even though illegal aliens make little use of welfare, from which they are generally barred, the costs of illegal immigration in terms of government expenditures for education, criminal justice, and emergency medical care are significant.

Californian officials have estimated that the net cost to taxpayers in order to provide government services to illegal immigrants approached $3 billion during a single fiscal year. The fact that states must bear the cost of federal failure turns illegal immigration, in effect, into one of the largest unfunded federal mandates existing today.

In addition, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, even with free trade, the United States continues to enjoy a higher real wage than other nations, due to the superiority of US technology. If taken to an extreme and the US removed all barriers to migration, most foreign workers would move to the United States, lured by the higher wages available here; Foreign labor would essentially cease to exist.

However, with all labor now in the United States, the prices of goods would return to their level of self-sufficiency, prior to the opening of trade. That is, perfectly free migration entirely eliminates the gains from trade that US natives had enjoyed. World income rose with the migration, but the natives of foreign countries in this case received more than all of this rise, since the income of US natives declined. With the world’s majority of low-wage workers in the US, there would be tremendous damage to free trade and its benefits, with US middle and upper-middle class workers suffering the brunt of declining wages.

The urge for a utopian state of existence and a desire to make all things equal by the American Left has given way to a desire simply to make all things equal sans utopia. In their passion for a neo-Marxist level for the masses, they’ve decided consciously or subconsciously that if they could not bring the World’s population up to the American level of prosperity and wealth, then they will bring US citizens down to the World’s level of poverty and misery. For this is a result of seeing free trade as a zero-sum entity, and self-alienation of the American Left from their own country, the USA.

The problem isn’t about the need for new laws; the problem is about the lack of enforcement of existing laws. The US Constitution provides the executive branch with a number of inherent powers such as the enforcement of immigration laws.

The Constitution also mandates that the President protect American sovereignty and the American people. That is the number one priority for our government — of it should be. And congress is mandated to provide domestic tranquility for Americans. Criminal alien gangbangers do not add to our domestic tranquility.

Why is it suddenly necessary for congress to pass laws on illegal immigration when we haven’t been enforcing the laws that already exist. The executive branch has the power to add border agents, equipment and other resources. The President has the power to use the military if necessary to enhance border protection. Passing laws is an easy, painless process. The trick is to enforce those laws.

And why isn’t the US government arresting illegal aliens while they are protesting in our city’s streets all across the country? The protest organizers, are said to be sponsored by left-wing groups including Open Borders and MEChA, are protesting the border security bill that passed the US House of Representatives in December and is still awaiting passage by the US Senate.

The University of Texas at El Paso recently conducted a study that found the following: Treating illegal immigrants in hospitals accounts for nearly one quarter of the uncompensated costs at border county hospitals in Cochise County. That county in Arizona spends tens of thousands of dollars just picking up trash left at campsites by these illegals. Prosecuting and jailing illegals costs this county an additional $5 million a year. And 25 percent of Cochise County’s budget is paid for health care for the uninsured, the majority of whom are illegally in the country.

In another study of a sample group of 55,000 criminal aliens, it was discovered they accounted for over 400,000 arrests and more than 700,000 criminal acts including felonies. In Los Angeles, the city that’s hosting the protest — which was whole-heartedly endorsed by its mayor — 95% of the outstanding arrest warrants for homicides are for illegal aliens and 65% of all felony warrants are for so-called undocumented immigrants. Are they committing the crimes Americans won’t commit?

Sources: National Criminal Justice Research Service, Department of Justice, The Center for Immigration Studies, National Institute of Justice.

 

Obama’s Approval Rating Lowest Yet, Congress’ Declines

March 18, 2010

Slightly more disapprove than approve of Obama

by Jeffrey M. Jones

PRINCETON, NJ — President Barack Obama’s job approval is the worst of his presidency to date, with 46% of Americans approving and 48% disapproving of the job he is doing as president in the latest Gallup Daily three-day average.

“Americans hold Congress in far less esteem than they do the president — 16% approve and 80% disapprove of the job Congress is doing.”

Obama’s approval rating has hovered around 50% since November, but in the last two days has declined to the point that slightly more Americans now disapprove than approve of his performance in office.

The new low ratings come during a week in which the White House and Democratic congressional leaders are working to convince wavering House Democrats to support healthcare reform, which they hope to pass using a series of parliamentary maneuvers in the House of Representatives and Senate.

Americans hold Congress in far less esteem than they do the president — 16% approve and 80% disapprove of the job Congress is doing, according to the latest update from a March 4-7 Gallup poll. That is just two points off the record-low 14% Gallup measured in July 2008. Gallup has been measuring congressional approval since 1974.

Congress’ image improved during the early part of the Obama administration, peaking at 39% in March 2009. But by last month its ratings were back to where they were before Obama took office, mainly due to a loss in support from Democratic identifiers.

Bottom Line

Public support for President Obama and Congress — both of which were running near their low points prior to the beginning of this month — continues to slip. That is an ominous sign heading into this year’s midterm elections. As of now, Gallup’s tracking of congressional election preferences suggests a close House race, and a much worse performance for Democrats than in the 2006 election that restored the party to majority status in Congress.

Survey Methods

Results for Obama job approval are based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,478 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted March 15-17, 2010, as part of Gallup Daily tracking. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.

Results for congressional job approval are based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,014 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted March 4-7, 2010. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones and cellular phones.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

 

The cost of President Barack Obama

Posted By Neal Boortz On March 9, 2010 (6:25 am) In Voices and Choices

There is one thing that Democrats, Republicans and Independents can all agree on – the debt we owe is our greatest long-term threat to national security. By a two-to-one margin, Americans of all demographics and political parties believe that the amount of money we owe to China is now a greater long-term threat than radical Islam. They’re right, but it’s must worse than that. The level of debt facing this country will destroy the dreams of our children and grandchildren. It is hard to imagine that future generations will have the opportunity to pursue anything close to the lifestyle we enjoy as they are faced with this crushing debt to retire.

Just how bad is this problem? Read on …..

Last Friday, the Congressional Budget office released a report stating that our projected debt is actually going to be much higher than the White House predicted. Wow! Now who didn’t see THAT coming? The CBO says that Obama’s budget is going to lead to annual deficits averaging $1 trillion for the next decade. The White House’s prediction was an annual budget shortfall of $853 billion for the next decade. Why the discrepancy? Obama expects to bring in more tax revenue. The CBO, on the other hand, does not believe the Obama economy will be able to generate the tax revenue because it expects less economic growth. In fact, the CBO predicts that the deficit will never fall below 4% of the GDP under Obama’s policies and “would begin to grow rapidly after 2015.”

(By the way, as of right now our predicted annual deficit for this year is $1.5 trillion – a post WWII record at 10.3% of our economy.)

But back to this report … the CBO says that deficits of that magnitude would force the Treasury to continue borrowing at prodigious rates, sending the national debt soaring to 90% of the economy by 2020, while interest payments on the debt would also skyrocket by $800 billion over the same period.

Speaking of interest rates, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell puts our interest rates into perspective. He says, ” … in just four years the administration predicts the government will have to spend more just to pay interest on the federal debt than it spends on the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, HUD (Housing and Urban Development), Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Treasury, and the Corps of Engineers, Environment Protection Agency, GSA (General Services Administration), NASA, National Science Foundation, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration — combined.”

 

The new Barack Obama poverty scam

Posted By Neal Boortz On March 9, 2010 (8:25 am) In Voices and Choices

The Obama administration has decided that it wants to create a new way to measure poverty. The new Obama system would essentially be the same in that a family would be considered “poor” if its income drops below a certain threshold. But the difference in Obama’s new system would be the addition of a “built-in escalator clause.” This is described as measuring poverty income threshold in direct proportion to any rise in living standards for average Americans.

As Robert Rector points out, this means that under Obama’s new measurement … “poverty can be reduced only if the incomes of the ‘poor’ are rising faster than the incomes of everyone else.” Here’s another interesting result of Obama’s new poverty measurement. Countries like Bangladesh and Albania will actually have lower poverty rates than the United States. Haiti will probably have the lowest poverty rate!

Here’s something I’ve been saying for decades on the air … something nobody has ever been able to refute, though many have tried. Listen up:

You could have:

1. $15,000,000 in a checking account
2. A paid-for $5,000,000 home
3. Eight exotic automobiles valued at $250,000 each
4. A 32-oz Aquafina bottle full to the top of diamonds
5. A different $500,000 watch for every day of the year
6. $16,000,000 in cash stashed in a colostomy bag hanging on your belt
7. A Gulfstream G-650 fueled and ready at KATL to take you anywhere in the world you might want to go to get away from Barack Obama
8. A bag of chips

You could have all that … and the Imperial Federal Government could KNOW that you have all that … and you could STILL be classified by the Feds as “living in poverty.”