I love this depiction of our Capitol - the disfunctional place that it is, taken by my disfunctioning camera!
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The liberal Politico writes: Dems' 'Mediscare' A Dubious Winner
Now, PolitiFact has chosen the Democrats' claim as the 2011 Lie of the Year. The Democratic attack about "ending Medicare" was a pervasive line in 2011 that preyed on seniors' worries about whether they could afford health care (Drobnic Holan and Adair, 12/20).
• Just four days after the party-line vote, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a Web ad, saying seniors will have to pay $12,500 more for health care “because Republicans voted to end Medicare.”
• Rep. Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the DCCC, appeared on cable news shows and declared that Republicans voted to “terminate Medicare.”
• A Web video from the Agenda Project, a liberal group, said the Ryan plan would leave the country “without Medicare” and showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff.
• And just last month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a fundraising appeal that read, “House Republicans’ vote to end Medicare is a shameful act of betrayal.”
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70705.html#ixzz1hlQgQgA0-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AP reports: Already they [Occupy] have interrupted Michele Bachmann and drawn a withering putdown from Newt Gingrich as "all noise, no thought."
Now, to the dismay of Iowa Republicans, Occupy activists in Des Moines are vowing to expand their protests as GOP presidential hopefuls converge on the state that speaks first in the race for the party's presidential nomination.
Gingrich dismissed them as the "one-tenth of one percent" and noted he'd been similarly heckled during an earlier stop in Iowa City. "All noise, no thought, tried to drown out conversation," he said.
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Election Law Center writes: The Wall Street Journal had the must-read article on DOJ's refusal to permit South Carolina to implement a photo ID law. Below is an excerpt from Assistant Attorney General Perez's letter to South Carolina objecting on behalf of Attorney General Holder.
"Although the state has a legitimate interest in preventing voter fraud and safeguarding voter confidence," it didn't provide "any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud that is not already addressed by the state's existing voter identification requirement," said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney for civil rights, in a letter to state officials.
In its letter, DOJ rejected South Carolina's voter ID law, in large part because the state failed to provide "any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud..." Requiring a state to provide evidence of extensive fraud sets an elevated standard specifically rejected by the Supreme Court and in direct contradiction to the Court's opinion endorsing photo identification and previous precedent.
Also in its letter to South Carolina, DOJ asserted that requiring a voter to obtain a photo ID might burden voters to obtain the necessary documentation and prevent them from voting. The Supreme Court had previously disposed of that argument by essentially stating that the burden to travel to an elections office with proof of identity or to a drivers license agency to obtain the appropriate identification is no more a burden that traveling to a polling place to cast a ballot. The Supreme Court found the law was not discriminatory. DOJ failed to take into account that voter turnout had increased in voter ID states thus speculating that voter ID would decrease turnout had no evidentiary basis and counter to existing statistics since implementation of the law. http://electionlawcenter.com/2011/12/24/contradicting-supreme-court-doj-rejected-sc-photo-id-law-due-to-lack-to-voter-impersonation-fraud.aspx
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USA Today writes: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has helped legislators in several states craft laws aimed at illegal immigrants, said legislators will continue expanding programs such as E-Verify, which businesses can use to check the immigration status of job applicants.
Yet it's a new provision in Alabama's law that has become popular. Kobach, a Republican, said Alabama was the first state to invalidate all contracts entered into with illegal immigrants. A strict reading of the law could mean any contract, including apartment leases and basic work agreements, can be ruled null and void.
Another aspect of Alabama's law forbids illegal immigrants from conducting any "business transaction" with a government agency. An Alabama federal judge ruled that the state must stop using that provision to prohibit illegal immigrants from renewing permits for their mobile homes, but it's being applied elsewhere.
The combination of those provisions "has led to nothing short of chaos in the state," said Karen Tumlin, managing attorney for the National Immigration Law Center, which was part of a lawsuit against Alabama's law. "They've been applied to a striking range of activities, from getting tags on your cars to getting public utilities to changing title on your cars."
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Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., will announce later on Tuesday that he will retire after two terms in office, according to a senior Democratic operative familiar with his plans. Nelson's decision is a serious blow to Democrats' hopes of maintaining its slim Senate majority, turning what would have been a competitive red-state Senate race into a very likely GOP pickup next year.
News of Nelson's retirement is especially tough for Democrats, given that outside groups poured over $1 million in ads on his behalf to shore up his standing in the state. The ads were also aired in hopes of convincing Nelson to run for a third term.
Republicans have aggressively targeted Nelson this year, and outside GOP groups had already begun pouring money into the state, hitting him over his vote for President Obama's health care law.
Follow this story on nationaljournal.com as it develops »
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Reuters writes: The White House plans to ask Congress by the end of the week for an increase in the government's debt ceiling to allow the United States to pay its bills on time, according to a senior Treasury Department official on Tuesday.
The approval is expected to go through without a challenge, given that Congress is in recess until later in January and the request is in line with an agreement to keep the U.S. government funded into 2013. Under the agreement struck in August during the showdown over the government's debt limit, the cap is automatically raised unless Congress votes to block the debt-ceiling extension.
The deal called for raising the debt ceiling by $2.1 trillion to serve the nation's borrowing needs into 2013 and also included mandatory cuts to the federal budget deficit. Since then, the extension has been increased twice by a total of $900 billion.
The debt limit currently stands at $15.194 trillion and would increase to $16.394 trillion with the reques
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/27/us-usa-treasury-debt-idUSTRE7BQ0KU20111227 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
American Thinker writes about crony capitalism: John Kerry specializes in using advance information on upcoming bills to make investments, which Schweizer correctly characterizes as a form of insider trading. During the ObamaCare debate of 2009 Kerry invested $200,000 in the healthcare company ResMed, the value of which shot up over 70%, a tidy little windfall even to a man married into one of the richest families in the United States. At the same time, ObamaCare cut Medicare reimbursements, so Kerry dumped all his shares in United Health, a medical insurance company deeply dependent on Medicare. Kerry, it seems, didn't have to pass the bill to know what was in it.
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American Thinkers opines: This century will be an American century, much like the last one. Despite what President Obama believes, we are not one nation among many, we are the United States of America, the greatest nation on earth, and the last best hope for humanity.
The only thing standing between the United States and continued exceptionalism is the dreary delirium of Barack Obama, whose dismal socialist policies have been a spectacular disaster for the nation.
Now they say, the Chinese that will bury us. Falling behind China is a recurring theme in many of Barack Obama's speeches. We have to do as they do, or we risk losing out. State directed capitalism is the wave of the future, resistance is futile. Americans must pay more taxes, and give the President more control...of well...everything.
America, because of immigration and a birthrate near replacement level, will not be aging the way Russia, Japan, Europe and China are. Despite Barack Obama's best effort, we have comparatively little racial, religious and economic strife, a moderately free press, and the most economic freedom and mobility the world has ever known.
We have a dynamic economy and are still the world's largest manufacturer. America is blessed with an abundance of natural resources. Due to improvements in technology, we now have potential fossil fuel resources to last us 200 years or more. Since much of it is on federal lands, some have said the royalties to the Treasury have the potential to pay off the national debt. To paraphrase Joe Biden, it is a big fracking deal.
Even if Mr. Obama wins reelection, he can only delay the coming energy independence of America, he cannot prevent it. Citizens, not thrilled with him now, will be irate when their electric bills triple and gasoline is $10 a gallon. All that oil, coal and natural gas will come out of the ground. Obama, as a modern day King Canute trying to command the tide, will be powerless to stop it.
Four more years of this President will leave the nation miserable and divided, with high unemployment, a moribund economy and a bloated bureaucracy. With another term, Barack Obama will continue his transformation of America into a land of perpetual trillion dollar deficits and a national debt measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. We will be weak militarily, morally and economically. Lesser nations, like those discussed here, would not survive 8 years of hope and change, but we will not be defeated.
The only thing standing between America and continued preeminence is Barack Obama. The sooner we realize that, and rid the nation of the abomination of his presidency, the better. http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/m-americas_greatness_will_defeat_obama.html
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Great stuff to know about. Thanks for all the research and verification you do for us. Nice photographs, too !
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