by Jack
Just a couple of questions for our very intelligent and well informed readers:  First, do you think Michelle Obama is going to make a run for president in 2016 with Hillary Clinton?  I’m hearing that lately.  Quite a few people seem to think this is now a possibility and it could explain her recent flurry of public appearances.   If she is thinking about a career in politics she may want to consider being a community organizer first,  although I’m sure her supporters would argue that being first lady makes her automatically qualified.   God help us if she runs and SHE could be either Hillary or Michelle.

Next, do you think the Pres went too far scaring the American public with dire predictions if sequestration was implemented?   If you listen to his rhetoric it’s definitely been toned down in the last few days.  I remember his now heavily criticized speech where he said that the FBI and air traffic controllers will be furloughed, that seniors won’t get their meds and all sorts of horrible things, now it’s (and I am paraphrasing)… you may not notice the cuts in the first few weeks or months, but the cuts will have a negative impact on the economy.   Wow Barry that’s almost a 180!  I submit the American economy is only struggling because of Obama’s policies (Obama-care) and all the wasteful, misdirected, do nothing spending, not to mention his lousy leadership.

Can’t wait for the big day tomorrow…that’s when those cuts are scheduled to begin.   I just wish those so-called cuts (that aren’t cuts, but lower raises) were designed NOT TO GROW the freaking national debt by another 2 trillion!

Posted by Tina

First Lady Michelle Obama is traveling the country and making media appearances to celebrate the third anniversary of her “Lets Move” program and praise it’s success. The goal of “Let’s Move” is to reduce childhood obesity by stressing food choices, nutrition education, and exercise. In media appearances she cited a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report and stressed gains made in Mississippi, a state with very high obesity rates in children. Childhood obesity In Mississippi has declined by 13.3%, according to the foundation report which is very good news for the children of Mississippi! But the First Lady should not be so quick to take credit for this improvement without acknowledging that most of it occurred prior to the start of her efforts with “Let’s Move”.

The Weekly Standard has the story and quotes the First Lady from her appearance on “Good Morning America”:

“We’ve really changed the conversation in this country. When we started, there were a lot of people in this country who would have never thought that childhood obesity was a health crisis. But now we’re starting to see some movement on this issue,” the first lady told Roberts. “Our kids are eating better at school. They’re moving more. And we’re starting…to see a change in the trends. We’re starting to see rates of obesity coming down like never before.” …(continues) …”But the good news in Mississippi is that they’ve seen a decline in childhood obesity of 13 percent, so we’re gonna go celebrate and highlight what has been going on there. There’s still work to do,” the first lady said.

The White House also issued this press release:

Mrs. Obama and Rachael Ray chose to highlight school lunches in Mississippi, which was rated the most obese state in the nation for several years, because the state’s childhood obesity rates have declined by 13% among elementary school students in recent years. According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Mississippi is one of several states and cities to show decreases in childhood obesity, including Philadelphia, New York City and California. Mrs. Obama praised Mississippi’s efforts and called on other states and cities to follow suit.

A chart from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (see the Weekly Standard page or follow a link there to the full report) clearly shows that the 13.3% improvement happened between 2005 and 2011. Mississippi’s accomplishment in lowering childhood obesity began five years prior to the start of Let’s Move”.

Clearly kids all over the country are being encouraged to eat better and exercise more through Michelle Obama’s efforts and that is a good thing but I think the First Lady could have been a bit more truthful when speaking before the American public…it wouldn’t hurt to give Mississippi parents and teachers more credit for the accomplishment since they are more responsible for the success.

It pains me to say so, because I love this country, but it seems with this administration, including First Lady Michelle Obama, the important thing is their personal image and political power.

Posted by Tina

The environmentalists have gotten away with touting their clean energy solutions for decades without actually having to prove the workability of the products they endorse…at least until now. President Obama and Governor Brown have both pushed for alternative energy solutions to problems in the environment that have been grossly overstated. Now that they are up and running, or not as the case may be, we can finally begin to evaluate their effectiveness in the real world. Some reports indicate the people have made a disastrous bargain in bending to the will of wacky extremist voices on the left. Poor management and unwise investment of taxpayer dollars by Democrats in power not only adds to pollution of the environment but spells a failure of leadership investment of precious taxpayer dollars.

This morning in The Denver Post:

Colorado health and environment officials have ordered Loveland-based Abound Solar, the bankrupt solar-panel maker, to clean up hazardous waste at four Front Range locations.
The Abound facilities are storing thousands of “unsellable” solar panels and thousands of gallons of toxic liquids, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reports.

Cadmium, a known carcinogen, is the polluting element burning this failing company. The cost of cleaning up is estimated at $2.2 million. Since this company only exists because it was given a sizable government loan guarantee, of which it spent $70 million, it is pretty sad that when the bankruptcy dust settles taxpayer will still be on the hook for between $40 and $60 million.

Paul Taylor examines the findings in a report by the Pacific Research Institute:

According to PRI:

• The renewable mandate represents a new 27% tax on power generation in the state due to the forced substitution of expensive renewables power in place of cheaper electricity, particularly in terms of transmission, backup, and generation costs;

• The embedded tax to be imposed upon the California economy will grow each year as the size of the electricity market expands and the RPS requirement forces ever-greater amounts of high-cost power onto the market;

• The costs to California electric power consumers by 2020 will rise by more than 13% as a result of the renewables mandate;

• The aggregate effect of these regulations will cause power rates and costs to rise nearly 33 percent between now and 2020, according to the PRI report;

• PRI notes that even without the RPS, state power rates would rise by nearly 20% due to various capital investments driven by both economic and regulatory factors, including those due to the state’s go-it-alone carbon cap-and-trade program.

Green madness mandates known as the “Renewable Power Standard” will cost Californians an additional $5 billion by 2020. If that news isn’t shocking enough during this stinkin’ economy consider a reported in the Los Angeles Times in December 2012:

The Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco, was roaring at nearly full bore one day last month, its four gas and steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to the California grid.

On the horizon, across an industrial shipping channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, scores of wind turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades — or many others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide in the midafternoon, less than 1% of the potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.

As is true on many days in California when multibillion-dollar investments in wind and solar energy plants are thwarted by the weather, the void was filled by gas-fired plants like the Delta Energy Center.

One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power — and a problem the state is not yet prepared to meet — is that wind and solar energy must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired generators. As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a legal mandate to produce one-third of California’s electricity by 2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from fossil fuel plants.

Energy experts suggest this extreme approach to energy will cost Californians in the billions of dollars in years to come while creating a greater demand from the very cheap clean energy sources they are claiming to eliminate. The people will pay for the debacle that the greens have foisted with lies and exaggerations of untested ideas.

Wind energy and solar energy are noisy, polluting, wasteful, unreliable, and serve mainly as a political tool rather than as a real benefit to the people or the earth. Gee, maybe that’s why we rejected these alternative sources of energy way back in the day when sanity and smarts still had some influence in decision making.

Visit this informative site for links to many articles on the utter failure of green energy to deliver as promised.

by Jack Lee

Sequestration – do you know what it is or do you even care?  You should, because the President is lying about it and you need to know; especially if you voted for him!

A:  Sequestration is a group of automatic spending cuts totaling $1.2 trillion scheduled to being March 1 and ending in 2021. The cuts are evenly split between defense spending and discretionary domestic spending.   In most cases they are not cuts at all, but scheduled increases that will not be increased as much as previously budgeted.

War spending and most spending on entitlements such as Social Security and Medicaid are exempt.   The White House says cuts in 2013 will total as little as a puny $109 billion…big whoop.

Legislators on both sides don’t like the sequester because the across-the-board cuts take them out of the fiscal equation. Because the cuts hit all programs equally, everyone’s ox, theoretically, gets gored.

The important part to focus on here is this,  even after the tepid so-called “cuts” we have done next to nothing about the horrendous debt our government has created to give the illusion of prosperity.   In actually fact with are going to reduce spending by 1/2 of 1 percent and this means the bloated, wasteful, pork filled budget will actually grow larger, despite the cuts.

It’s interesting that Bob Woodward of the Washington Post is saying that President Obama is lying about the dire effects of the reductions.    I kinda thought he was too, because he was saying how FBI agents wouldn’t be able to investigate all the cases, air traffic controllers would be reduced and this will cause serious delays.  He warns us, oldsters will suffer!  There will be fewer teachers, police officers and firemen and the USA will be in grave danger thanks to Republicans forcing us to make those cuts, and it’s all BS.

I’m 100% for sequestration, bring it on baby!  Hack, cut, chop away…cut that 1/2 of 1% of increased spending, we can take it!

PS  Did Obama’s nose grow when he said 40% of guns are sold without a background check?

Posted by Tina

The sequester, an $85 billion dollar dip in increased spending, will happen on Friday unless the House, Senate, and President can come to agreement on an alternative plan. I don’t mean to smirk but even if they managed to come together and agree to paste some crazy alternate plan together at the last second nothing of significance is going to happen. Again, I don’t mean to smirk but the President, who first conceived of this plan that everyone agreed to, is blasting the airwaves with the usual sky is falling scare tactics…cuts in education, cuts in defense, cuts in air traffic control, meat inspections…cuts, cuts, cuts!

The House has passed an alternative bill that allows department heads to decide how reduced spending increases will be spent. The President doesn’t want to give them this power. Democrats in the Senate have managed to pass a bill in committee…stay tuned.

The President has been all over TV claiming the Republicans conceived of this plan. It was actually budget director, Jack Lew, who came up with the politically charged scheme.

Jay Nordlinger at <a href=”http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/341407/crazy-vehicle-c-jay-nordlinger”>National Review</a> quotes Defense Secretary Leon Panetta who in May of 2012 said that sequestration was a “crazy vehicle” that was supposed to force the Congress to act.

Sequestration does not result in real cuts to departmental budgets! Sequestration is a political penny on the dollar scheme that <em>decreases</em> the amount the government will <em>increase spending<em> going forward. That’s right, this is worth repeating: <strong>spending will increase under sequestration but the amount of increase will be cut by $85 billion</strong>. Unfortunately the military will take the biggest hit, $43 billion, unless sequestration is replaced with an alternate plan.

Most Americans won’t even notice if the sequestration takes place. Life will go on as usual. As for me, Friday can’t come soon enough so we can move on to the next “crisis” brought to us by the dysfunctional federal government under the failing leadership of the crisis centered Barack H. Obama.

Thanks go to RHT for this find….

Would you sign this petition?

Who among us does not feel like America is in it’s last days and under siege from within?  I sure do and I’ve about had enough…check this out:

According to the DOJ there are currently 1.4 million gang members in the US.   Every year we’re spending roughly $2 billion to house then deport 400,000 illegals and it’s assumed a far larger number enter and escape detection.   2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2010 and twice that many are on parole and probation.  Ten years ago the number jailed to be deported was about 3,300, but in the last 15 years we’ve seen a 40% increase in the prison population and about 27% of that number are illegal aliens who have committed serious felonies.   We spend $37 billion a year on prisons and that breaks down to about $28,284 per prisoner.  You could send a kid to a good college for that kind of money!

Our inner-cities are like the canaries in the coal mine.

If you just look at the government stats you get a pretty strong sense that we’re failing and our cities are becoming too dangerous.   City-wide crime and victimization has never been more rampant.   The UNODC says the US homicide rate is 4.6 per 100k population, but right next door Canada has a homicide rate of 1.6.   Europe is 3.5 and this includes some pretty seedy countries.   Something in America is going seriously wrong and it’s costing us more than we can afford!

As our resources dwindle supporting a million and half long term prisoners and keeping up a costly justice system, our crime riddled neighborhoods are only getting worse and this taxes the system more each passing year.   Despite their failures our leaders still keep doing the same old things to fix the problem and worse, they force us to pour billions into their monuments of stupidity and waste (aka dysfunctional government programs).   This needs to stop now and we need to think more creatively.

Which brings up my first thought, what makes criminals so special that we should allow them to stay here… on our dime?  Answer..they are not special and we don’t have to put up with their drag on society – not anymore.

Solution:  Deportation!

Why not?   It’s legal…we need to consider this a viable alternative to housing criminals.   Deportation will send a message that if you engage in activities that make you an intolerable  [burden] on society we will send you away and you can’t come back.   Once deported and over there (wherever it is) whatever happens to you is not our problem, it’s all on you!  You can sink or swim, we don’t care, but just remember one thing…you did it to yourself.  And when you are working your butt off to survive you will have plenty of time to think of what you left behind.  We can only hope your experience will serve as a warning to others, but if not, we’ve got plenty of one way tickets!

In practical terms it would be no great feat to arrange deportation with any number of poor nations far from our shores.  They need our money and they could use the labor.

Imagine, how much better off this country would be without a million hardcore predators committing millions of violent crimes each year here while potentially breeding more to grow up just like ol Dad.

Imagine, if we had started doing this a 150 years ago!  Think how much better off we would be today and how empty our prisons would be and how many of us would have been spared from being victims and great our schools would be.

This is perhaps the most economical way to deal with the incorrigibles that are destroying our country and draining our wealth.    What do you think?

Day of Resistance – Gun owners are staging a protest rally at the Capitol tomorrow

Location  – State Capital Bldg. 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Sacramento, CA Day of Resistance Rally – protest is nation-wide.

 (Click on pic to see full size)  It’s not very reassuring that our officers will be using these types of targets to get  conditioned to shooting non-traditional threats.  Do we really need this?  A police officer of any sort (any agency) relies on judgement, not knee jerk reactions and to do otherwise is a public threat.   So, if the point of these targets is to cause officers to shoot without hesitation at any perceived threat (and this is stated in the ads) then we’re headed down a very dangerous path.

We have targets clearly depicting everyday [white] Americans.  This not only looks suspicious on a number of levels, but it has racist overtones.   Don’t get me wrong, these targets are offensive no matter what color person might be in them.  That’s absolutely my first concern, these targets are offensive and the agenda is suspicious, but just imagine for a moment if everyone of these targets was a black person!  Holy cow, the NAACP would be all over this.  And likely there would be community-wide protests from coast to coast by black and whites alike and they would be right to protest…heck, I would join them!  I hope you understand that I’m just trying to point out a double standard from by the far left.   No Americans ought to be made into targets and that’s the bottom line!

This government contractor thinks it’s safe to use white Americans as targets because it will be more politically correct than using minorities.  And what’s up with using kids and women?  Are pregnant women and teenage girls with a child some kind of new and growing threat to national security?   Do our security people really need to practice shooting them?

Something wrong is happening in this country and we need to question it.   I think it began when government used 9-11 to grow fear and use ways to encroach on our Constitution.   It became much worse when Obama took over,  in particular,  using presidential orders almost every week to by-pass the safeguards in Congress.   George Bush is not off the hook either, after all he created the DHS that is now buying these American targets.

The news stories say this contractor received several million dollars from DHS to procure the lifelike targets.   DHS has spent billions of our tax dollars under the pretext of making us more secure.  Do these targets make you feel secure?  I think the DHS has done much more to make Americans feel less secure… and how could it be otherwise, we seem to be transitioning to a police state.

On a related story:  We’ve known for quite some time that large purchases of ammunition by DHS has created shortages of sporting ammo and a backlog for civilian-orders that must wait to be filled.   Certain kinds of ammo (.223 and .40 cal) is for the first time in short supply.   And now we have these new targets (see above pictures), oh great….