March 22, 2013

NEWSMAX
Marine Kills Two at Quantico, Takes Own Life
by Thomson/Reuters
March 22, 2013

A U.S. Marine shot dead two fellow service members at a base at Quantico, Virginia, then barricaded himself in a building and apparently killed himself, prompting a brief lockdown of the base, the Marines said on Friday.
The shootings took place late on Thursday in the vicinity of the Marine Corps Base at Quantico's Officer Candidate School, and all three people who died were identified as Marines, Marines spokesman Sergeant Christopher Zahn said.

"An isolated shooting incident has occurred at Officer Candidate School, Quantico," the base said on its Facebook page. "The suspect has been barricaded by law enforcement personnel."

The Facebook message told base residents to remain in their homes with their doors locked, until the lockdown was lifted before dawn on Friday. No other injuries were reported, and Zahn could give no details as to a motive for the shootings.

"The investigation is in the very early stages," he said.

The shootings came days after seven U.S. Marines were killed in a mortar explosion at an Army munitions depot in Nevada during a live-fire training exercise.

In that incident on Monday, a lightweight mortar exploded prematurely in its firing tube, killing the Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, who had been undergoing mountain warfare training, and wounding eight other service members.

It prompted the Marines to order a blanket suspension of the use of 60mm mortars pending a review.

Read more: http://goo.gl/fIEPR

HUMAN EVENTS
Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?
by James Antle
March 21, 2013

You wouldn’t know it by listening to the political debate in Washington, but the United States government is essentially broke.

The $16 trillion national debt is just the beginning of the problem. The major entitlement programs have unfunded liabilities bigger than the national economy. Social Security is currently promising $8.6 trillion more in benefits than it has revenues to pay for. Extend that time horizon even further into the future and that number eclipses $20 trillion.

Medicare isn’t in much better shape. Last year’s Trustees’ report estimated the net unfunded liability for the program that pays for our seniors’ health care at $42.8 trillion. The trust funds are stuffed with IOUs.

We’ve already seen this happen at the state level, where government workers’ pension benefits are crowding out other budget priorities. Medicaid is also bankrupting states. An aging population plus rising health care costs is causing government to grow on auto pilot.

People’s eyes tend to glaze over looking at such big numbers. It has also been difficult to get the voters’ attention because the dates when Social Security and Medicare were projected to be in trouble were so far into the future.

But now the future is almost here. Within a decade, interest payments on the national debt may exceed the entire military budget. Think about that: money we should be spending protecting the country from future Osama bin Ladens will instead be paid to our creditors.

Medicare is already paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes. Social Security ran a deficit in fiscal 2012.

And that’s assuming interest rates don’t return to where they were before the 2007 financial crisis or spike even higher. Higher interest rates would make it even more expensive to service the debt.

Unless there are structural reforms, it is likely that the quality of these programs will worsen at the same time taxpayers are expected to contribute more to pay for them.

The Senate Democrats took four years to produce a budget and it achieves deficit reduction mostly through nearly $1 trillion in tax increases.

Sounds like a great bargain, right?

The problem is much bigger than money. Our current fiscal path limits our political options. We can’t have the kind of government programs we want, whether it is investing infrastructure, enhancing homeland security, or funding the cure for cancer, because the dollars are already spoken for.

Every dollar of federal spending is sucked out of the private economy, a net drain on the American people’s resources. That limits your freedom, as do the myriad regulations big government imposes.

Obamacare comes not only with new federal subsidies and mandates, but also a clearer government role in your personal lifestyle choices. The government wants to be able to tell you what health insurance you have to buy, how much water your toilet will hold, what light bulbs you can use, and what size soda you can drink.

No wonder they don’t want to answer questions about whether they can launch domestic drone strikes! No limit on federal power, even one extremely unlikely to ever be exercised, can be contemplated in public.

The people who say the present course is sustainable rely on two arguments: Trust us, we’re the experts. And there’s a sucker born every minute.

Think about the contradictions there.

The suckers’ argument is, “Hey, people are buying our bonds now, so they always will.” Uncle Sam can borrow money indefinitely, the liberal’s American exceptionalism.

The experts’ argument assumes technocrats can avert a fiscal crisis with the right policy adjustments at the last minute. The government can bid down health care spending and spend us into lower deficits with fiscal stimulus.

The economist and Paul Krugman gave us a preview of that would look like recently: “death panels” and “sales taxes.”

But the situation is not hopeless. The truth is, from Reagan to Gingrich to even the end of World War II, we have cut government spending before. We can learn from their mistakes. We can also build on their successes.

More often than not, the problem isn’t that big government can’t be curtailed. It’s that politicians seldom have the will to try.

Despite the results of last November, a growing number of voters doubt the experts. They don’t believe a sucker is born every minute. And they want their politicians to protect their pocketbooks—and their freedom.

Read more: http://goo.gl/ymHCT

TOWNHALL
Democrat Controlled Senate Votes to Repeal ObamaCare Medical Device Tax
by Katie Pavlich 
March 22, 2013

Apparently, the Senate thinks the medical device tax in ObamaCare is a pretty bad idea and voted to repeal it last night.

The Senate overwhelmingly passed a largely symbolic resolution calling for repeal of a 2.3 percent tax on medical device companies on Thursday, as more than 30 Democrats joined Republicans in approving it. 

The tax helps to fund President Barack Obama's 2010 healthcare law. It applies to a range of medical products - from bedpans to expensive heart devices - many manufactured in the home states of the senators backing the repeal. 

The Senate voted 79-20 to call for repeal of the tax, but the resolution is non-binding and will not change the levy. The symbolic measure will be attached to a non-binding budget measure drafted by Senate Democrats that is expected to pass on Friday. 

Full repeal of the tax may be difficult to achieve, given its $30 billion price tag and the opposition of key Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid.

As a reminder of just how bad the medical device tax is, it's pretty much a tax within a tax that will not only kill jobs in the medical device industry, but will kill medical device innovation as well.

Not only does this tax increase costs on companies, it also increases costs on hospitals, doctors and people in need of medical treatment that requires medical devices to be used. As a consequence of this, biomedical or medical device engineering firms are already laying off workers who develop crucial medical products due to the "unforeseen" costs, or in other words, the costs of ObamaCare. Not to mention, the more money these companies pay to the government, the less money they have to invest in research and development. 

With this new medical device tax, students who pay large sums of money to get degrees in the field of biomedical engineering, just like doctors, will no longer see the benefits of going into the field and therefore, we will have a shortage of engineers developing new medical device technology. The medical device tax is a death sentence for American medical innovation.

And where exactly does this tax hurt the most? When it comes to research and development of new products.

Medical-device manufacturers contend, however, that the potential problems go much further. While the tax may seem relatively small -- it would amount to $230 on the sale of a $10,000 medical device -- opponents note that it hits sales, not just profits, which increases its impact. Indeed, several medical companies say that the surcharge would eat into their profitability, at the expense of their research and development budgets. Large orthopedic device maker Stryker says that in anticipation of the tax, it plans to cut more than $100 million from its annual pretax operating costs next year. Smaller device maker Zoll Medical says the new surcharge will raise its overall rate above 50 percent and use up its entire R&D budget.

Read more: http://goo.gl/RzfrC

January 31, 2013

NEWSMAX
Obamacare Glitch: Some Families to be Priced out of Health Coverage
by Associated Press
January 30, 2013

Some families could get priced out of health insurance due to what's being called a glitch in President Barack Obama's overhaul law. IRS regulations issued Wednesday failed to fix the problem as liberal backers of the president's plan had hoped.

As a result, some families that can't afford the employer coverage that they are offered on the job will not be able to get financial assistance from the government to buy private health insurance on their own. How many people will be affected is unclear.

The Obama administration says its hands were tied by the way Congress wrote the law. Officials said the administration tried to mitigate the impact. Families that can't get coverage because of the glitch will not face a tax penalty for remaining uninsured, the IRS rules said.

"This is a very significant problem, and we have urged that it be fixed," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, an advocacy group that supported the overhaul from its early days. "It is clear that the only way this can be fixed is through legislation and not the regulatory process."

But there's not much hope for an immediate fix from Congress, since the House is controlled by Republicans who would still like to see the whole law repealed.

The affordability glitch is one of a series of problems coming into sharper focus as the law moves to full implementation.

Starting Oct. 1, many middle-class uninsured will be able to sign up for government-subsidized private coverage through new healthcare marketplaces known as exchanges. Coverage will be effective Jan. 1.

Low-income people will be steered to expanded safety-net programs. At the same time, virtually all Americans will be required to carry health insurance, either through an employer, a government program, or by buying their own plan.

Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus, an advocacy group for children, cited estimates that close to 500,000 children could remain uninsured because of the glitch. "The children's community is disappointed by the administration's decision to deny access to coverage for children based on a bogus definition of affordability," Lesley said in a statement.

The problem seems to be the way the law defined affordable.

Congress said affordable coverage can't cost more than 9.5 percent of family income. People with coverage the law considers affordable cannot get subsidies to go into the new insurance markets. The purpose of that restriction was to prevent a stampede away from employer coverage.

Congress went on to say that what counts as affordable is keyed to the cost of self-only coverage offered to an individual worker, not his or her family. A typical workplace plan costs about $5,600 for an individual worker. But the cost of family coverage is nearly three times higher, about $15,700, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

So if the employer isn't willing to chip in for family premiums — as most big companies already do — some families will be out of luck. They may not be able to afford the full premium on their own, and they'd be locked out of the subsidies in the healthcare overhaul law.

Employers are relieved that the Obama administration didn't try to put the cost of providing family coverage on them.

"They are bound by the law and cannot extend further than what the law provides," said Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation.

Read more: http://goo.gl/5RTYl

TOWNHALL
Gun Control Takes Center Stage
by Bob Barr
January 30, 2013

The race to further the gun-control agenda in the wake of last month’s tragic shooting by a crazed gunman in Newtown, Connecticut is moving into high gear. The Grand Old Lady of Gun Control, California Senator Diane Feinstein, last week introduced a bill that not only seeks to reinstate the 1994 “Federal Assault Weapons Ban” (AWB), but goes far beyond the scope of the earlier law (which expired a decade later) in undermining Second Amendment protections for law abiding Americans.

Feinstein’s proposal specifically targets 157 modern sporting rifles -- or, as she almost gleefully refers to them, “assault weapons.” In addition to these firearms, the California liberal’s bill prohibits the sale, transfer, manufacture and importing of semi-automatic rifles and pistols able to accept detachable magazines, and which have at least one cosmetic “military” characteristic (the “Clinton Gun Ban” only banned those types of rifles with at least two such characteristics). The bill goes on to outlaw magazines with capacities greater than 10-rounds, and bans the sale or transfer of larger, grandfathered magazines.

Don’t even think about trying to get a semi-automatic shotgun with a rocket launcher attached; Feinstein specifically listed those as well.

By now, Americans should realize that gun bans such as Feinstein’s have little to do with stopping crime or solving the plague of gun violence. As Feinstein herself said, the goal is eventually to “dry up the supply of these weapons over time,” and completely remove them from our society. In other words: take them out of the hands of the millions of law-abiding citizens who use them without incident every year; and leave the military and law enforcement -- and criminals -- with a monopoly as such firearms and ammunition clips.

Following the Clinton Gun Ban’s expiration in 2004, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) studied the results. Unsurprisingly, they found “insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes.” Additionally, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service reported “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

Gun control advocates, of course, remain undeterred. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “they may trip over the truth, but get right back up, simply dust themselves off, and keep right on going.”

Read more: http://goo.gl/8YKoY

THE WEEKLY STANDARD

Government Report: Women in Combat to Cost Money

by Jeryl Bier

January 31, 2013

Ever since outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced a week ago that the U.S. military would lift its ban on women in combat roles, the debate, which has been simmering for decades, boiled up again. Much of the argument has centered on cultural, social, and morale-related effects that such a change would bring about, though other practical issues have been raised as well. However, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released just this week may bring some other considerations to the fore, among them, the financial impact.

According to the introduction to the GAO report, the National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2012 charged the GAO with conducting “a review of the female-specific health care services provided by DOD to female servicemembers...”  Though not directly addressed by the GAO, the report raises a perhaps unanticipated consequence of lifting the ban on women in combat. With an increasing number of women in combat units, as well as presumably an overall increase in women enlisting in the service now that more positions will be open to them, there may be a corresponding increase in health-related costs. For example, the report says:

DOD has put in place policies and guidance that include female-specific aspects to help address the health care needs of servicewomen during deployment. Also, as part of pre-deployment preparations, servicewomen are screened for potentially deployment-limiting conditions, such as pregnancy, and DOD officials and health care providers with whom GAO met noted that such screening helps ensure that many female-specific health care needs are addressed prior to deployment.

Read more: http://goo.gl/lCsJy

January 29, 2013

REDSTATE
Senator Ron Johnson the Winner of the Week in Washington
by briansikma
January 28, 2013

Sometimes a citizen lawmaker dares to exercise such candor that the inside-the-Beltway crowd recoils in horror at the blatant honesty. Such was the case with Wisconsin’s own Senator Ron Johnson (R) this past week. Johnson captured attention with his tough questioning of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to finally answer questions about the Benghazi disaster of last September.

Clinton, demonstrating the cunning political acumen that propelled her and her husband so far on the national political stage, weaved a range of emotions into her carefully prepared opening statement. With her final months as Secretary of State clouded by the death of an American ambassador and a subsequent lack of honesty in dealing with the situation during a political campaign, Clinton had to present a strong showing to maintain future political opportunities.

Then Ron Johnson happened.

Refusing to accept Clinton’s scripted answers, Johnson pressed the Secretary for specific details of her involvement in the disaster and her Department’s failure to protect one of its own. The exchange was contentious and tumultuous.

After the hearing, Johnson suggested to a reporter that Clinton was less than genuine in her appearance before the committee. What he suggested wasn’t flattering, but it was true. As any candid political observer knows, the Clintons are masterful politicians who are able to fabricate and project an image that may not be genuine but is quite convincing.

For daring to question Hillary Clinton’s motives, Senator Johnson was named the person who had the “Worst Week in Washington” by the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza. Cillizza is a smart reporter, even if infected by the more liberal-leaning Potomac fever that taints a number in the nation’s political press corps elite, and his observations are often useful and insightful. But he’s dead wrong on this one.

Ron Johnson may have felt the pressure to back off his statement and the Washington intelligentsia may have found his honesty woefully out of line. But what he said didn’t only need to be said, it was true.

For far too long an incestuous atmosphere has pervaded the nation’s capitol. Establishment political figures in both parties have been given a pass by those who are supposed to be the watchdogs of the process. Instead of receiving the skepticism and vetting bestowed on others, these individuals – and the Clintons are among them – have been able to act with impunity expecting to never be held accountable.

Senator Johnson’s questions at the hearing, and subsequent candor about the attitude of Secretary Clinton, are a refreshing breath of fresh air.

Washington’s self-confidence does not comport well with a nation that sees looming fiscal and economic challenges growing closer by the day. To fix the problems we face it is going to take more honest leadership than Washington is used to being comfortable with. Senator Ron Johnson is one of those leaders who is willing to ignore the status quo that got us to where we are, and provide the honesty we need.

Read more: http://goo.gl/h7zcj

PJ MEDIA
California at Twilight
by Victor Davis Hanson
January 29, 2013

We keep trying to understand the enigma of California, mostly why it still breathes for a while longer, given the efforts to destroy the sources of its success. Let’s try to navigate through its sociology and politics to grasp why something that should not survive is surviving quite well — at least in some places.

Conservati delendi sunt

The old blue/red war for California is over. Conservatives lost. Liberals won — by a combination of flooding the state with government-supplied stuff, and welcoming millions in while showing the exit to others. The only mystery is how Carthaginian will be the victor’s peace, e.g., how high will taxes go, how many will leave, how happy will the majority be at their departure?

The state of Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson, and George Deukmejian is long dead due to the most radical demographic shifts of any one state in recent American history — as far away as Cicero was to Nero. One minor, but telling example: Salinas, in Monterey County where the murder rate is the highest in the state, just — at least I think the news story is not a prank — named its new middle school after Tiburcio Vasquez.

A convicted murderer.

He was the legendary 19th-century robber and murderer who was hanged for his crimes. But who is to say that Vasquez is a killer, and Henry Huntington a visionary?

The New Demography

California has changed not due to race but due to culture, most prominently because the recent generation of immigrants from Latin America did not — as in the past, for the most part — come legally in manageable numbers and integrate under the host’s assimilationist paradigm. Instead, in the last three decades huge arrivals of illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America saw Democrats as the party of multiculturalism, separatism, entitlements, open borders, non-enforcement of immigration laws, and eventually plentiful state employment.

Given the numbers, the multicultural paradigm of the salad bowl that focused on “diversity” rather than unity, and the massive new government assistance, how could the old American tonic of assimilation, intermarriage, and integration keep up with the new influxes? It could not.

Finally, we live in an era of untruth and Orwellian censorship. It is absolutely taboo to write about the above, or to talk about the ever more weird artifacts of illegal immigration — the war now on black families in demographically changing areas of Los Angeles, the statistics behind DUI arrests, or the burgeoning profile of Medi-Cal recipients. I recall of the serial dissimulation in California my high school memorization of Sir Walter Raleigh:

Tell potentates, they live/Acting by others’ action/Not loved unless they give; Not strong but by affection; If potentates reply/Give potentates the lie.

There were, of course, other parallel demographic developments. Hundreds of thousands of the working and upper-middle class, mostly from the interior of the state, have fled — maybe four million in all over the last thirty years, taking with them $1 trillion in capital and income-producing education and expertise. Apparently, they tired of high taxes, poor schools, crime, and the culture of serial blame-gaming and victimhood. In this reverse Dust Bowl migration, a barren no-tax Nevada or humid Texas was a bargain.

Their California is long gone (“Lo, all our pomp and of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre”), and a Stockton, Fresno, or Visalia misses their presence, because they had skills, education, and were net pluses to the California economy.

Add in a hip, youth, and gay influx to the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and coastal Los Angeles that saw California as a sort of upscale, metrosexual lifestyle (rule of thumb: conservatives always find better restaurants in liberal locales), and California now has an enormous number of single-person households, childless couples, and one-child families. Without the lifetime obligation to raise $1 million in capital to pay for bringing up and educating two kids from birth to 21 (if you’re lucky), the non-traditional classes have plenty of disposable income for entertainment, housing, and high taxes. For examples, read Petronius, especially the visit to Croton.

Finally, there is our huge affluent public work force. It is the new aristocracy; landing a job with the state is like hitting the lottery. Californians have discovered that, in today’s low/non-interest economy, a $70,000 salary with defined benefit public pension for life is far better than having the income from a lifetime savings of $3 million.

Or, look at it another way: with passbooks paying 0.5-1%, the successful private accountant or lawyer could put away $10,000 a month for thirty years of his productive career and still not match the monthly retirement income of the Caltrans worker who quit at 60 with modest contributions to PERS.

And with money came political clout. To freeze the pension contribution of a highway patrolman is a mortal sin; but no one worries much about the private security’s guard minimum wage and zero retirement, whose nightly duties are often just as dangerous. The former is sacrosanct; the latter a mere loser.

The result of 30 years of illegal immigration, the reigning culture of the coastal childless households, the exodus of the overtaxed, and the rule of public employees is not just Democratic, but hyper-liberal supermajorities in the legislature. In the most naturally wealthy state in the union with a rich endowment from prior generations, California is serially broke — the master now of its own fate. It has the highest menu of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, and about the worst infrastructure, business climate, and public education. Is the latter fact despite or because of the former?

Read more: http://goo.gl/0dMAS

January 28, 2013

NEWSMAX
DeMint: Obama Pouring Debt on ‘Our Children’
by Amy Woods
January 27, 2013 

Former Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina on Sunday said it’s clear that President Obama “plans to keep spending and borrowing and putting more debt on our children.”

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” DeMint also praised former GOP vice presidential nominee and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan for his comments on the same program regarding the president’s apparent failure to recognize that the U.S. has a fiscal crisis.

DeMint said. “We can show where President Obama’s ideas go. The tax-and-spend and big-government approach has always failed us. Our job as conservatives is to make sure Americans know that, and we need to show it with real people and real faces.”

He called Ryan’s ideas a “complete contrast” to Obama’s.

With respect to foreign policy, the incoming president of the Heritage Foundation said that the United States needs to better understand the root causes of its failures as well as its successes in order to develop coherency and avoid the perception of weakness.

“We don’t understand what North Korea really is doing right now,” DeMint said, referring to nuclear weapons. “It’s not just to provoke us, but it’s a product demonstration for Iran and other countries that want to see if these things work because we know North Korea wants to sell them. Our problem here is a failure to really understand what is motivating these countries.”

Read more: http://goo.gl/sNHo0

TOWNHALL
America Needs a New Birth of Freedom
by Star Parker
January 28, 2013

Journalist Bill Moyers, who worked as an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, shared memories in a column last year about how his old boss thought about our entitlement programs.

It was under Johnson, who championed the "Great Society" in the 1960s, that a good portion of the runaway government spending we are trying to get under control today originated.

Johnson signed into law Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty programs, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Moyers recounted that for Johnson, Social Security and Medicare "were about a lot more than economics."

He recalls a time when the Johnson administration was supporting retroactive increases in Social Security payments. Moyers said he argued for the increases as economic stimulus. But Johnson called him and said:

"My inclination would be ... that it ought be retroactive as far back as you can get it ... because none of them ever get enough. That they are entitled to it. That's an obligation of ours. It's just like your mother writing you and saying she wants $20, and I always sent mine $100 when she did. I always did it because I thought she was entitled to it. ... We do know that it affects the economy. But that's not the basis to go to the Hill, or the justification. We've got to say that by God you can't treat grandma this way. She's entitled to it and we promised it to her."

I don't think we could have a clearer picture of Johnson's muddled thinking about his job and the role of government, which contributed so much to the problems we have today.

Johnson's words sound so wonderfully compassionate. But let's get things in perspective.

He saw no difference in his relationship and responsibilities toward his own mother, and sending her his own money, and his responsibilities as president of the United States and the relationship of government to citizens.

There is a world of difference between the appropriate responsibility of parents toward their children and children toward their parents, and politicians deciding on how to spend someone else's money for someone else's children, parents or grandparents.

Johnson didn't seem to grasp, or care, about the fact that family and government are two entirely different social institutions that serve very different purposes.

So the Johnson administration years marked not just the beginning of many huge government programs that we can't pay for today, but they also marked a major cultural change where government began displacing family and personal responsibility.

It is no accident that as the American welfare state grew, the American family collapsed.


Read more: http://goo.gl/Dgmfa

BREITBART
Palin: 'We Haven't Yet Begun to Fight!'—Exclusive Interview with Breitbart News
by Stephen K. Bannon
January 26, 2103

In my research for the film I made on Governor Palin, The Undefeated, I was constantly amazed at the anti-establishment stands she took at every step in her rise to power. Moves that a conventional politician would run from, she embraced: in Wasilla, in Juneau, and in the rise of the Tea Party. Her ability to see “over the hill” to what is really important, what really matters, is what sets her apart.

Andrew Breitbart embraced the Governor as a fellow warrior in the long struggle against a detached and venal political/media complex. He lives on in spirit and through the work of those he inspired—including, but not limited to, those who report and contribute at his site.

The Governor has been at the forefront of the fight against the Permanent Political Class and, as such, inspired Peter Schweizer and myself in our work last night on Fox News with Sean Hannity’s special “Boomtown.” We consider ourselves honored at Breitbart News to have her share with us her thoughts on the road ahead in this exclusive Q & A.

1. What's next for you?

Short term: I encourage others to step out in faith, jump out of the comfort zone, and broaden our reach as believers in American exceptionalism. That means broadening our audience. I’m taking my own advice here as I free up opportunities to share more broadly the message of the beauty of freedom and the imperative of defending our republic and restoring this most exceptional nation. We can't just preach to the choir; the message of liberty and true hope must be understood by a larger audience.

Focus on the 2014 election is also imperative. It’s going to be like 2010, but this time around we need to shake up the GOP machine that tries to orchestrate away too much of the will of constitutional conservatives who don’t give a hoot how they do it in DC. DC is out of touch, obviously. Voices on the right like Mark Levin, Rush, and the writers here at Breitbart have come out strongly against the “go along to get along” politicians who wave the white flag before the battle even begins. We’re not going to be able to advance the cause of limited constitutional government unless we deal with these big government enablers on our side. And this all ties into the problem of crony capitalism and the permanent political class in the Beltway. We need to consistently take them on election after election – ever vigilant.

As far as long-term plans, the door is wide open. I know the country needs more truth-telling in the media, and I’m willing to do that. So, we shall see. And always in the center of it all I have an awesome, full, exciting, and large family living in a very unique part of America that keeps me hopping! I love it!

2. Where do you think the country stands at the beginning of the President's 2nd term?

Before the November election I wrote that we all know what Obama’s second term will look like because we’ve seen his first. I said: “We know what we will get from a second Obama term. We will get the same failed policies. We will get Obamacare locked into law. We will get a debt crisis. We will get more inflation and higher gas prices. We will get tax increases. We will get fewer jobs. We will get more small businesses collapsing under the weight of higher taxes and unfair regulation. We will get more corruption and crony capitalism favoring the Obama administration’s friends. We will get less domestic energy development and increased dependence on terrorist sponsoring foreign regimes for our energy needs. We will get a 'blame America first' foreign policy that bows to our enemies and snubs our friends like Israel and leaves America and the world less safe. We will get less opportunity and security for ourselves and for our children.”

Predicting the future has never been easier because here we are! Already we see higher taxes, a stagnant economy, the same inflationary monetary policies, Obamacare looming like a dark cloud over small businesses, yet another demand for “debt ceiling” increases, continued stonewalling about the tragic Benghazi attacks, a Secretary of Defense nominee who has a history of being antagonistic to our ally Israel, and the attack on our Second Amendment rights by an administration that has no respect for the Constitution or the separation of powers.

The problem is that some on the Right are now skittish because of the lost 2012 election. They shouldn’t be. Conservatism didn’t lose. A moderate Republican candidate lost after he was perceived to alienate working class Reagan Democrat and Independent voters who didn’t turn out for him as much as they did for the McCain/Palin ticket in 2008. Granted, those same voters also didn’t turn out for Obama as strongly either. We had an election defined by a biased media plus millions of voters who sat it out in disgust. As long as we allow the media and GOP establishment to tell us who our nominees must be, we can expect to lose. I’m not interested in losing. America’s next generation can’t afford another loss.

3. The MSM have declared both you and the Tea Party dead and buried. Reaction?

I was raised to never retreat and to pick battles wisely, and all in due season. When it comes to defending our republic, we haven’t begun to fight! But we delight in those who underestimate us.

Read more: http://goo.gl/juMNk

January 25, 2013

NATIONAL REVIEW
Obama: Reagan of the Left 
The president sees himself as the unabashed apostle of the ever-expanding state.
by Charles Krauthammer
January 24, 2013

The media herd is stunned to discover that Barack Obama is a man of the Left. After 699 teleprompted presidential speeches, the commentariat was apparently still oblivious. Until Monday’s inaugural address, that is.

Where has everyone been these four years? The only surprise is that Obama chose his second inaugural, generally an occasion for ““malice toward none”“ ecumenism, to unveil so uncompromising a left-liberal manifesto.

But the substance was no surprise. After all, Obama had unveiled his transformational agenda in his very first address to Congress four years ago (February 24, 2009). It was, I wrote at the time, “the boldest social-democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.”

Nor was it mere talk. Obama went on to essentially nationalize health care, which is 18 percent of the U.S. economy — after passing an $833 billion stimulus that precipitated an unprecedented expansion of government spending. Washington now spends 24 percent of GDP, fully one-fifth higher than the postwar norm of 20 percent.

Obama’s ambitions were derailed by the 2010 midterm shellacking that cost him the House. But now that he’s won again, the revolution is back, as announced in Monday’s inaugural address.

It was a paean to big government. At its heart was Obama’s pledge to (1) defend unyieldingly the 20th-century welfare state and (2) expand it unrelentingly for the 21st.

The first part of that agenda — clinging zealously to the increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — is the very definition of reactionary liberalism. Social Security was created when life expectancy was 62. Medicare was created when modern medical technology was in its infancy. Today’s radically different demographics and technology have rendered these programs, as structured, unsustainable. Everyone knows that, unless reformed, they will swallow up the rest of the budget.
As for the second part — enlargement — Obama had already begun that in his first term with Obamacare. Monday’s inaugural address reinstated yet another grand Obama project — healing the planet. It promised a state-created green-energy sector, massively subsidized (even as the state’s regulatory apparatus systematically squeezes fossil fuels, killing coal today, shale gas tomorrow).

The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and economist) Václav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now, it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.

Monday’s address also served to disabuse the fantasists of any Obama interest in fiscal reform or debt reduction. This speech was spectacularly devoid of any acknowledgment of the central threat to the post-industrial democracies (as already seen in Europe) — the crisis of an increasingly insolvent entitlement state.

On the contrary. Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state. His speech was an ode to the collectivity. But by that he means only government, not the myriad of voluntary associations — religious, cultural, charitable, artistic, advocacy, ad infinitum — that are the glory of the American system.

For Obama, nothing lies between citizen and state. It is a desert, within which the isolated citizen finds protection only in the shadow of Leviathan. Put another way, this speech is the perfect homily for the marriage of Julia — the Obama campaign’s atomized citizen, coddled from cradle to grave — and the state.

In the eye of history, Obama’s second inaugural is a direct response to Ronald Reagan’s first. On January 20, 1981, Reagan had proclaimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” And then succeeded in bending the national consensus to his ideology — as confirmed 15 years later when the next Democratic president declared “the era of big government is over.” So said Bill Clinton, who then proceeded to abolish welfare.

Obama is no Clinton. He doesn’t abolish entitlements; he preserves the old ones and creates new ones in pursuit of a vision of a more just social order where fighting inequality and leveling social differences are the great task of government.

Obama said in 2008 that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that Clinton did not. He meant that Reagan had transformed the political zeitgeist, while Clinton accepted and thus validated the new Reaganite norm.

Not Obama. His mission is to redeem and resurrect the 50-year pre-Reagan liberal ascendancy. Accordingly, his second inaugural address, ideologically unapologetic and aggressive, is his historical marker, his self-proclamation as the Reagan of the Left. If he succeeds in these next four years, he will have earned the title.

Read more: http://goo.gl/Bcwf1

BREITBART

Rand on 'President Paul': "I like the Ring of That"

by Breitbart News

January 24, 2013

Senator Rand Paul told Breitbart News's Ben Shapiro that he felt foreign aid to other countries should be reassessed considering America's own financial situation. Shapiro began a hypothetical question insinuating it would be "President Paul" in the future. Rand interrupted and said, "I like the ring of that," with a smile.

Read more: http://goo.gl/mTgmz

HOTAIR
Jindal: The GOP “might need to change just about everything”
by Erika Johnsen
January 24, 2013

Since the failed presidential election, the GOP has been grappling with identifying exactly what it is the party needs to work on most — diversity, social issues, and Latino outreach, or election mechanics and a flawed Romney candidacy/campaign? — or some combination thereof, and all of the issues are on the table for discussion at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in North Carolina. Keynote speaker and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, however, is going for a more overarching message in his address tonight: It’s time to “recalibrate the compass of conservatism,” stop focusing so much on Washington-centric politics, and start going for a message of inclusion and economic growth:

“We do not need to change what we believe as conservatives – our principles are timeless,” Jindal says. “But we do need to re-orient our focus to the place where conservatism thrives: in the real world beyond the Washington Beltway.” … 

“Today’s conservatism is completely wrapped up in solving the hideous mess that is the federal budget, the burgeoning deficits, the mammoth federal debt, the shortfall in our entitlement programs,” he says. “We seem to have an obsession with government bookkeeping. This is a rigged game, and it is the wrong game for us to play.” … 

“The Republican Party must become the party of growth, the party of a prosperous future that is based in our economic growth and opportunity that is based in every community in this great country and that is not based in Washington, D.C.,” Jindal says.

Of course, the 2016 brand-building has already begun in earnest, and with the GOP bench looking pretty solid, the competition for free-market, economy-growing, conservative credentials will be fierce — and I am one hundred percent okay with that. Jindal is already looking to institute some aggressive pro-growth changes to Louisiana’s tax code, and the message of goal-oriented optimism is one the Republicans could definitely use right about now.

The Democrats have somehow managed to become the party that can provide more for people through the auspices of big government; as Jindal plans to say, they “promise to be the party of ‘more from government,’ but they are actually the party of less.  They are the party of economic contraction, austerity and less from the economy.  The Republican Party is the party of ‘more,’ the party that creates more from the economy.’” The GOP needs to keep hammering home that they aren’t against a social safety net — rather, they’re actively for an economy in which opportunities are so readily available and attractive that people don’t want to be on welfare — and its the type of economy that cannot be achieved through federal orchestration.

Read more: http://goo.gl/CvUqx

December 29, 2012

NEWSMAX
McConnell and Reid Called in to Come up With Fiscal Cliff Deal
by Thomson/Reuters
December 28, 2012

Senate leaders are working to craft legislation by Sunday that averts the year-end "fiscal cliff" of tax hikes and spending cuts, but many details needed to be worked out after a crucial meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and his Republican counterpart Mitch McConnell, termed the meeting "constructive" and "positive" and said they would keep working on trying to find a solution over the weekend.

However shortly afterwards Reid said he would be sending a bill to the Senate calling for an end to the Bush-era tax cuts for households earning more than $250,000, a figure that Republicans have repeatedly said they will not accept.

"At President Obama's request, I am readying a bill for a vote by Monday that will prevent a tax hike on middle-class families making up to $250,000, and that will include the additional, critical provisions outlined by President Obama," Reid said in a statement.

"In the next 24 hours, I look forward to hearing any good-faith proposals Senator McConnell has for altering this bill."

After adjourning on Friday, Reid he would probably not call the Senate back into session until about 1 p.m. on Sunday to give leaders time to hash out a deal.

On the Senate floor, McConnell said, "We are engaged in discussions, the majority leader and myself and the White House, in the hopes that we can come forward as early as Sunday and have a recommendation that I can make to my conference and the majority leader can make to his conference."

"So we'll be working hard to try to see if we can get there in the next 24 hours. So I'm hopeful and optimistic," he added.

An aide to House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said it was agreed at the White House meeting that the Senate should act first.

"The speaker told the president that if the Senate amends the House-passed legislation and sends back a plan, the House will consider it — either by accepting or amending," the aide said.

However, Reid said it would be difficult to craft a solution that can win passage in both the House and Senate, adding that it involves "big numbers."

"Whatever we come up with is going to be imperfect," Reid said. "Some people aren't going to like it. Some people will like it less. But that's where we are and I feel confident that we have an obligation to do the best we can."

Read more: http://goo.gl/lKKlm

TOWNHALL
Senate Approves $60.4 Billion Sandy Aid Bill
by AP News
December 29, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate on Friday approved a $60.4 billion emergency spending aid package for victims of Hurricane Sandy that had been backed by Senate Democrats.

Democrats had to turn back Republican efforts to cut programs such as $150 million in fisheries aid that Republican lawmakers said was unrelated to the storm that hammered the East Coast late in October. The measure cleared the Senate on a 62-32 vote, with 12 Republicans supporting the bill. Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., was the only Democrat to vote against the bill, but he later switched his vote to support the measure.

The bill faces uncertain prospects in the House, where GOP leaders appear reluctant to move quickly on a big spending bill in the final days of a lame duck session. Congress' attention is focused on talks over the so-called fiscal cliff of tax hikes and automatic spending cuts.

Sandy was blamed for at least 120 deaths and battered coastline areas from North Carolina to Maine. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were the hardest hit states and suffered high winds, flooding and storm surges. Sandy damaged or destroyed more than 72,000 homes and businesses in New Jersey. In New York, 305,000 housing units were damaged or destroyed and more than 265,000 businesses were affected.

Senate Republicans failed on an amendment for a smaller package of about $24 billion in aid for Sandy, which was the most costly natural disaster since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and one of the worst storms ever in the Northeast.

House GOP leaders have not said how they plan to proceed. But House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers of Kentucky has said Congress should probably begin with a smaller aid package for immediate recovery needs and wait until more data can be collected about storm damage before approving additional money next year.

Rep. Paul Ryan, the 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee and a leading House fiscal conservative, has criticized the Democratic bill as "packed with funding for unrelated items, such as commercial fisheries in American Samoa and roof repair of museums in Washington, D.C."

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., urged House leaders to "put this bill on the floor quickly and allow a vote." If the House balks, Schumer said, the Senate bill provides "very good groundwork" for seeking Sandy aid next year.

The measure includes $11.5 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's chief disaster relief fund and $17 billion for community development block grants, much of which would help homeowners repair or replace their homes. Another $11.7 billion would help repair New York City's subways and other mass transit damage and protect them from future storms. Some $9.7 billion would go toward the government's flood insurance program. The Army Corps of Engineers would receive $5.3 billion to mitigate flood future risks and rebuild damaged projects.

Senate Republicans said much of the spending in the Democratic bill was for projects unrelated to Sandy, such as $150 million for fisheries disasters that could go to Alaska as well as Gulf Coast and New England states. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., sought to strip the fisheries funding, but his amendment failed.

To court votes, Democrats last week broadened some of their bill's provisions to cover damage from Hurricane Isaac, which struck the Gulf Coast earlier this year. A provision was added to the $2.9 billion allotted to Army Corps of Engineers projects to reduce future flooding risks; the coverage area for that program will now include areas hit by Isaac in addition to Sandy. Democrats also shifted $400 million into a community development program for regions suffering disasters, beyond areas struck by Sandy.

A Coburn amendment to reduce the federal share of costs for the Army Corps of Engineer projects to reduce future flooding risks also failed.

Read more: http://goo.gl/dQevo

WASHINGTON TIMES
Washington spenders flunk basic math - Raising taxes won’t avoid ‘fiscal cliff’
by Rep. Darrell E. Issa
December 28, 2012

Politicians in Washington have spent the better part of the past two months advancing a myth that is undermining one of the most important public policy debates in recent memory. It’s a myth that is coming at the expense of solutions based on common sense that could return us to balance and fiscal stability.

Twenty-six years ago, President Reagan implemented significant tax reforms that lowered the individual income tax rate, limited deductions and brought equality to tax rates across all levels. Before that reform, there had been 15 different marginal tax rates reaching levels as high as 50 percent for top brackets. By the time Reagan left office, the number of brackets had been reduced to two: 15 percent and 28 percent.

In 1993, President Clinton raised the top two income rates to 36 percent and 39.6 percent while also raising the corporate tax rate, increasing the taxable portion of Social Security benefits and increasing income taxable for Medicare. This is what has become known as the “Clinton tax rates.”

In 2001, President George W. Bush changed the rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent, lowered the capital gains and dividend income rates, and expanded credits and deductions such as the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

So much time and energy is being spent advancing the myth that raising taxes is the best way to avoid falling off the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

If you raised taxes on the top income bracket, you would generate around $1 trillion over 10 years. The past four years under President Obama have resulted in trillion-dollar deficits each year. At this rate, in 10 years we’re looking at $10 trillion in new debt. At best, the “tax-the-rich” proposal is just a 10 percent solution.

Let’s take this tax-more, spend-more approach to the extreme. If you return everyone to the Clinton-era tax rates, you’re still left with a 10-year, $2.3 trillion deficit, and that’s assuming everything stays as it is right now, and Washington breaks its trend of spending more every year. (Even if we go over the fiscal cliff and return to Clinton-era tax rates, we’re still left with at least a $2.3 trillion deficit over the next 10 years.) The bottom line is this: Under no proposed scenario does raising taxes eliminate the deficit and return us to a balanced budget. The problem is government spending.

This fixation with tax increases is doing a huge disservice to the American people because it ignores the real crisis: government spending. By now, you know all too well that government spends more than it takes in. The federal government is spending more per household than ever before. Since 1965, spending per household has grown by 152 percent.

Conveniently omitted from the current fiscal-cliff discussions is the reality that for individuals earning more than $200,000 a year, their taxes already are going up in 2013, courtesy of Obamacare, which includes a new 1 percent tax on persons making more than $200,000 a year as well as an additional 3.8 percent tax on capital gains, investment income and certain home sales. These two new taxes will generate $317.7 billion over a 10-year period, or $31 billion a year — covering just a fraction of the current $1.1 trillion deficit for fiscal 2012 alone.

Do you know what some in Washington will say 10 years from now, when the problem hasn’t gone away? They’ll say, “We need to tax more.” Why isn’t the solution ever about spending less?

Some in Washington aren’t interested in the truth. They aren’t interested in facts. They aren’t interested in solving the problem. For them, that’s bad for business. It’s much easier for them to keep kicking the can down the road and using our fiscal decline to essentially “cry wolf” and raise your taxes. When will it ever stop?

I can guarantee you this: It won’t stop here, it won’t stop with just the “1 percent” or the “2 percent.” There will never be enough to satisfy this insatiable appetite to spend more.

That’s what’s really at stake right now.

The other side tries to boil this down into a seven-second sound bite about taxing the rich and people paying their fair share. In 2009, the top 10 percent of earners in the United States already paid more than 70 percent of federal income taxes.

This isn’t about fairness and unfairness. It’s about taxing and spending, and the federal government has spent enough.

Read more: http://goo.gl/Zi0b6

December 13, 2012

PJ MEDIA
Washington's Grand Illusion: The Fiscal Cliff
by Damon Geller
December 13, 2012

By now, we've all been scared to death with talk of the country going over the "fiscal cliff" without some kind of budget deal being struck by year's end.  While this kind of talk is great at driving up media ratings and getting politicians airtime, the simple fact is "the fiscal cliff" being discussed is nothing more than Washington's Grand Illusion.  Why?  Because the factors that drive our fiscal policy will not change regardless of whether a budget deal is struck by year's end.  As a result, we are already riding an unstoppable train toward $28 trillion in debt – an unsustainable burden that will cripple our economy, destroy our currency, and slash our paper investments.  And no last-minute budget compromise is going to stop that.  The bottom line?  There is only one thing saving you and your money from launching over the fiscal cliff.

The Clock Is Ticking

At midnight on December 31, 2012 the terms of the “Budget Control Act of 2011” will go into effect.  This means simply that more taxes go into effect as well as spending cuts that were agreed upon as part of the debt ceiling debacle of 2011.  In other words, these measures are necessary just to keep us on track to (only) add $1.5 trillion per year for the next 6 years to our already massive and unsustainable U.S. debt.  Rather than follow this path, the politicians and the media will now pitch the American people that this is a horrible idea because it will “slow growth and GDP” and that any slowdown is bad.   They will tell you that if things slow down, we won't be able to fix unemployment, real estate prices will fall, the stock market will tank, people will be depressed and won’t spend money, and we’ll go “back into recession” (as if we ever recovered).   They are right about the outcome – whether that’s bad is up for debate and obviously depends where your wealth lives.

So, what will happen to your wealth with or without a compromise?  That’s the million dollar question.  Either way, I'll put this in common sense terms, because we’re not here to speculate – we’re here to help offer some helpful suggestions how to protect your wealth in the event of either scenario.


Scenario #1:  No Compromise

The Terms of the 2011 Budget Control Act take effect and growth slows even more.  This causes the devaluation of stocks, real estate and oil  and a “flight to safety” as investors go “risk-off.”   One might assume the dollar may rise, but there’s a major hole in that theory.  When politicians fail, confidence in this country and its leadership drops.  When confidence drops, credit agencies drop our credit rating.  It’s a 2008-type scenario with the difference being the Fed is printing dollars as fast as possible to stave off deflation in favor of inflation.  That will cause the dollar and paper-based investments to plummet.  How much?  In 2008, everything besides dollars and gold dropped 25-35%.  Used car, stock portfolio, your home…  30% drop in 2008.  Remember the debt-ceiling debacle in 2011?  The U.S. lost its AAA rating for the first time and gold went from $1500-$1925 in 10 weeks while other assets fell.  One thing is for certain, even if the politicians fail to reach an agreement, this upward trajectory of debt, gold and gas will not change.  If this happens, like in 2008, gold preserves wealth very well while other “asset classes” drop.

Scenario #2:  Compromise Reached

Some budget cuts and some tax breaks are agree upon, yet the Fed continues to print money at a breakneck pace for all of the same reasons mentioned above.  That doesn't change even if we avoid a budget impasse. To ponder the outcome in this scenario, just think back to 2009-2010 when the Fed initiated QE1 and QE2.  The result was a tremendous devaluation of the U.S. dollar and a precipitous rise in hard assets like gold.  But today, even with a compromise, we're facing worse inflation because we’ll have QE3 happening alongside less budget restraints (more spending) and less taxes (less revenue), so fiscal  deficits will grow even faster than before!

Damned If We Do or Don't

So as you can plainly see, not much changes for your investments or your investment strategy regardless of either scenario.  That's why all this talk about a fiscal cliff is nothing but a distraction from the real issue:  the Fed’s balance sheet and U.S. debt are what determine our path, not the state of the real economy. So whether or not politicians agree to be fiscally irresponsible and strike a deal to spend more with less revenue, or they do not come to an agreement and we follow the same trajectory we’ve been on, here’s what we're looking at:

All debt-data is January 1st and gold-price data is based on the monthly average for the month of January:

• 2008 US Debt = 10.7T, Gold = $875/oz.
• 2009 US Debt = 10.6T, Gold = $855/oz.
• 2010 US Debt = 12.3T, Gold = $1,100/oz.
• 2011 US Debt = 14T, Gold = $1,360/oz.
• June 2011 US Debt = 14.3T, Gold = $1500/oz.
• May 2012 US Debt = 15.6T, Gold = $1650/oz.
• Oct 2012 US Debt = 16.2T, Gold = $1750/oz

And here’s where we’re going:

• 2013 US Debt = 17T, Gold = $1,875/oz.
• 2014 US Debt = 18.5T, Gold = $2,200/oz.
• 2015 US Debt = 20T, Gold = $2,600/oz.
• 2016 US Debt = 21.5T, Gold = $3,100/oz.
• 2017 US Debt = 23T, Gold = $3,575/oz.
• 2018 US Debt = 24.5T, Gold = $3,800/oz.

And so on, with many outside shots of inflation breaking out, banking systems imploding, currencies failing, or any host of black-swan events that could speed this trajectory.

The Cost of Fighting

Although I suspect the politicians will come to some sort of agreement, I can only hope it doesn’t come at the last possible minute after much bickering.  This is dangerous because of the corrosion of confidence issue (like 2011), another possible credit-rating loss, and massively volatile markets as the drama unfolds.  I see politicians finally making an agreement to allow some tax breaks and some spending.  But which party “wins” is completely irrelevant to your money.  Seriously, your wealth doesn’t care whether the Right cuts more spending or the Left cuts more tax breaks.  Your wealth cares that, with an agreement in place, inflation will accelerate even faster with less to inhibit it; and as a result, the deficit will grow.

As a result, money printing will accelerate at a much faster pace in order to service that debt and keep interest rates low, which will further drive up the debt.  Under this scenario, you can take the numbers above and move them forward faster in time because the budget projections will now go out the window.  One can assume this is better for stocks, better for real estate, far better for gold (which is really the only win-win in both situations) and may keep the banking system from some very rough times.

Save Yourself from the Real Fiscal Cliff

The Bottom line is that because gold doesn’t care about inflation or deflation – it attaches itself to other variables.  It becomes the best protector against the current fiscal cliff situation in either outcome.  It also offers possible huge upside as it’s priced far below its 2011 high of $1925, despite the fact that we’ve added over $900 billion in debt since last September and the Fed has started yet another round of easing and money printing.   If you want a real no-brainer preservation asset moving into another round of very uncertain times, gold is bar-none the safest bet with the greatest upside potential.  The math is all there.  You can look at the Fed policy math, the debt-based math or the historical perspective on these types of fiscally-driven debates, and you can see clear-as-day that it has become increasingly important to have exposure to hard tangible assets that live outside the banking system and stock market, and that right now offer the lowest risk profile with great upside.

Read more: http://goo.gl/ChBfL

REDSTATE
The Republicans Have Failed the Nation
by Erick Erickson
December 13, 2012

Over the next couple of years, Barack Obama wants to raise the national debt to $18.9 trillion or so.

John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and the congressional Republicans want to raise the national debt to $18.4 trillion or so.

The present leadership of the Republican Party has gone from making the case that government is the problem and the American people are the solution to making the case that Democratic controlled government is the problem and Republican controlled government is the solution.

By giving up on making the case that government is the problem and pivoting to “Democrats are the problem,” the Republican Party has failed the American people. Historically, when parties lost, their leadership went and hid for an appropriate amount of time under a rock after an acceptance of blame and a resignation.

The present Republican leaders in Washington, instead of hiding under a rock, have taken to standing on the rock and demanding conservatives self flagellate. Neither John Boehner nor Mitch McConnell are visionaries. They are survivors. They survive by recognizing the biggest threat to them and trying to befriend it or neutralize it.

Right now, both see conservatives as their biggest threat, not Barack Obama. Why? Because while Barack Obama maintains the White House, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell maintain their positions of power. They exist for power, not for vision. The visions they articulate are routinely backpedaled. Remember the pledge to nowhere the House Republicans concocted in 2010 as a second coming of the Contract With America? Within two months of returning to the majority they’d already ditched their pledge faster than a frat boy fleeing a one night stand. Only conservatives wish to hold them accountable for their breach of trust, thus conservatives are the threat.

The very same Republican leadership who paved the way for the rise of the Democrats in 2006 through moral opaqueness on the role of government in the lives of Americans now seek to shut up and shut out the conservatives who continue to loudly point out that the size and scope of the federal leviathan has grown too unwieldy. More troubling, with the removal of the several of the critics within the party from key committees and a clear message that loud voices of conservatism will not get plumb committee assignments, the incoming freshman class and even the current conservative leaders in the House of Representatives have rolled over.

Let us not kid ourselves. The Republicans intend to strike a last minute deal to cave. They will. They are going blind in the bathroom over the idea of bifurcating tax cuts so Barack Obama can veto the tax cut for high income earners and let the rest slide through. It is, as usual, a too clever by half compromise from the GOP, which has spent more time out negotiating itself to the left than negotiating with the Democrats.

The compromise is no longer the issue. It will happen.

The issue is that the Republican leaders who will be in charge in January are the Republican leaders who were directly complicit in the construction of the fiscal cliff and were directly complicit in getting us already to $16 trillion in national debt. Democrats are not to blame; both parties in Washington are.

Obsequious praise for small government does the Republicans no good when they too are in favor of big government in their actions. And having two leaders as the face of the party who have both been in Washington since 1986 does no good restoring credibility when these multi-decade residents of the swamp wink and smile that they really do think Washington is the problem.

Is it any wonder the American people have come to the conclusion that government isn’t so bad when the party of small government keeps expanding it too? The leaders of the party are the message, not the words. And the message does not resonate because they do not practice what they preach.

Until the Republicans change their message, they will keep losing. Changing the message means changing the men. Will 16 Republicans in the House be brave enough to stand up and say the party needs a new Speaker of the House?

This is not about the compromise. This is not about the fiscal cliff. This is not even about removing Amash, Huelskamp, Schweikert, and Jones. This is about beginning again anew — a process that cannot happen when the faces of the Republican leadership have been in Washington since 1986 expanding government while preaching the need for limiting it.

Read more: http://goo.gl/RJkBN

December 11, 2012

NEWSMAX 
Fiscal Cliff Deadline May Come Sooner Than Expected
by Stephen Feller 
December 10, 2012 

While the tax increases and spending cuts of the fiscal cliff don’t kick in until Jan. 1, if Congress wants to do something to stop the country from going over the cliff they’ll need to make a deal and get it passed much sooner than that.

Congress will recess for the holidays on Dec. 21, so President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner have until Dec. 15 to reach a deal, so that legislation can be written and printed with enough time for it to be read and voted on before the break, reported NBC News.

On Jan. 1, the Bush-era tax cuts are set to automatically expire for all income levels and about $110 billion in cuts to the Pentagon budget will begin to be phased in unless Congress passes legislation to override them.

Congress has made a habit during the last few years of waiting until the last possible second to make deals when faced with the threat of extreme calamity. Debates and resulting legislation on tax cut extensions, the debt ceiling debate, and the payroll tax holiday are clear examples of this since 2010.

"The Congress doesn't work on the clock; it works on the calendar," Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri told Reuters. "There is just that required moment when something has to happen because you've run out of time. [In the meantime] there is a desire to maximize your negotiating position until you realize you don't have any room any more to negotiate. It almost invariably works that way."

Obama and Boehner met Sunday at the White House in a private meeting that both agreed not to discuss. The meeting comes days after reports that the two leaders had failed to discuss the cliff last week or speak at all to one another at the White House Christmas party they both attended on Oct. 5.

The money-saving and revenue-generating provisions were put in place by Congress with approval of the Budget Control Act of 2011. The act provided for a super-committee to find areas of the budget that could be slashed with Congressional approval or risk having the automatic cuts kick in. 

After much discussion of the fiscal cliff in the presidential and congressional races, Congress did not start working on a solution until Obama was re-elected.

Negotiations have stalled on Democratic demands that taxes be increased back to Clinton-era levels for the top 2 percent of earners, while Republicans would prefer to reduce spending and keep tax rates unchanged.

In the last week or two, however, some Republicans have walked back their position that nobody’s taxes should go up. 

"There is a growing group of folks looking at this and realizing that we don't have a lot of cards as it relates to the tax issue before year end," Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said on "Fox News Sunday."

If Republicans decide to go with Democratic efforts to raise taxes, Corker added, "the focus then shifts to entitlements and maybe it puts us in a place where we actually can do something that really saves the nation."

Read more: http://goo.gl/Hv7n9

REAL CLEAR POLITICS

Taxing the Poor

by Thomas Sowell

December 11, 2012

With all the talk about taxing the rich, we hear very little talk about taxing the poor. Yet the marginal tax rate on someone living in poverty can sometimes be higher than the marginal tax rate on millionaires.

While it is true that nearly half the households in the country pay no income tax at all, the apparently simple word "tax" has many complications that can be a challenge for even professional economists to untangle.

If you define a tax as only those things that the government chooses to call a tax, you get a radically different picture from what you get when you say, "If it looks like a tax, acts like a tax and takes away your resources like a tax, then it's a tax."

One of the biggest, and one of the oldest, taxes in this latter sense is inflation. Governments have stolen their people's resources this way, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years.

Hyperinflation can take virtually your entire life's savings, without the government having to bother raising the official tax rate at all. The Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1920s had thousands of printing presses turning out vast amounts of money, which the government could then spend to pay for whatever it wanted to pay for.

Of course, prices skyrocketed with vastly more money in circulation. Many people's life savings would not buy a loaf of bread. For all practical purposes, they had been robbed, big time.

A rising demagogue coined the phrase "starving billionaires," because even a billion Deutschmarks was not enough to feed your family. That demagogue was Adolf Hitler, and the public's loss of faith in their irresponsible government may well have contributed toward his Nazi movement's growth.

Most inflation does not reach that level, but the government can quietly steal a lot of your wealth with much lower rates of inflation. For example a $100 bill at the end of the 20th century would buy less than a $20 bill would buy in 1960.

If you put $1,000 in your piggy bank in 1960 and took it out to spend in 2000, you would discover that your money had, over time, lost 80 percent of its value.

Despite all the political rhetoric today about how nobody's taxes will be raised, except for "the rich," inflation transfers a percentage of everybody's wealth to a government that expands the money supply. Moreover, inflation takes the same percentage from the poorest person in the country as it does from the richest.

That's not all. Income taxes only transfer money from your current income to the government, but it does not touch whatever money you may have saved over the years. With inflation, the government takes the same cut out of both.

It is bad enough when the poorest have to turn over the same share of their assets to the government as the richest do, but it is grotesque when the government puts a bigger bite on the poorest. This can happen because the rich can more easily convert their assets from money into things like real estate, gold or other assets whose value rises with inflation. But a welfare mother is unlikely to be able to buy real estate or gold. She can put a few dollars aside in a jar somewhere. But wherever she may hide it, inflation can steal value from it without having to lay a hand on it.

No wonder the Federal Reserve uses fancy words like "quantitative easing," instead of saying in plain English that they are essentially just printing more money.

The biggest and most deadly "tax" rate on the poor comes from a loss of various welfare state benefits-- food stamps, housing subsidies and the like-- if their income goes up.

Someone who is trying to climb out of poverty by working their way up can easily reach a point where a $10,000 increase in pay can cost them $15,000 in lost benefits that they no longer qualify for. That amounts to a marginal tax rate of 150 percent-- far more than millionaires pay. Some government policies help some people at the expense of other people. But some policies can hurt welfare recipients, the taxpayers and others, all at the same time, even though in different ways.

Why? Because we are too easily impressed by lofty political rhetoric and too little interested in the reality behind the words. 

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