Tuesday, August 20, 2013

15 Pictures of Ridiculous Government Spending Guaranteed to Make You Mad


08/20/2013

In 2013, federal spending approached $3.5 trillion. Now that’s hard to wrap your brain around. It’s about $27,700 for every American household.

All across America, families balance their budgets, rein in spending, and pay down their debts. If Americans can do it, why can’t the federal government?

Instead, they’re wasting your taxpayer dollars on programs like the ones below. We’ve compiled just 15 examples of the ridiculous spending that is driving America toward a $17 trillion national debt.

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1. GATHERING DUST: The Transportation Security Administration let 5,700 pieces of unused security equipment worth $184 million sit in storage in a Dallas, Texas, warehouse, which costs $3.5 million annually to lease and manage. Taxpayers lost another $23 million in depreciation costs, because most of the 472 carry-on baggage screening machines had been housed there for nine months or more. That’s a lot of money!



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2. DANCE THE NIGHT AWAY: The National Science Foundation used part of a half-million dollar grant to develop a video game that simulates a high school prom.



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3. BIRD IS THE WORD: The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research spent $300,000 on a study that concluded the first bird on Earth probably had black feathers.



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4. CAFÉ CAR: Taxpayer-funded Amtrak recovered only 44 cents of every dollar of its food and beverage costs on long-distance routes, which already annually lose money.


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5. SO MUCH FOR ROBOT NANNIES: The Office of Naval Research spent $450,000 on a study that determined unintelligent robots do not have the ability to maintain a baby’s attention.



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6. RENOVATIONS ON A PRESIDENTIAL SCALE: The Oval Office is getting a facelift. While it’s out of commission, the President will need a pseudo-Oval Office, right? $376 million will go to an Oval Office renovation and plans to construct a second office for the President to use during the renovation.



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7. FELLAS, GET YOUR GUNS: Do you think this guy appears taller, stronger, and manlier? The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research spent $681,387 on a study to confirm that he does—when he’s carrying a firearm.



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8. THAT’S ILLOGICAL, CAPTAIN: The Internal Revenue Service spent$4.1 million on a lavish conference in 2010 for 2,609 of its employees in Anaheim, California. Expenses included $50,000 for line-dancing and “Star Trek” parody videos, $135,350 for outside speakers, $64,000 in conference “swag” for the employees, plus free meals, cocktails, and hotel suite upgrades.





9. DOUBLE DIPPERS: In 2010, 117,000 people who double-dipped into Social Security’s disability insurance program and the federal unemployment insurance program received $850 million in cash benefits.



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10. GET IN THE HOLE! Did you know that golfers who imagine that the hole is bigger boost their confidence and accuracy? Thanks to the National Science Foundation, Purdue University, and $350,000 in taxpayer money, now you do.



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11. MORE THAN POTATOES: In 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent $300,000 on activities promoting caviar produced in Idaho.



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12. IT’S THE UNLIMITED ICE CREAM: The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded a $149,992 grant to researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey who are trying to eliminate the infamous “freshman 15” by studying college students’ on-campus dining selections.



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13. GIRL POWER? A $100,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts funded a video game that depicts a female superhero sent to save planet Earth from climate changes allegedly caused by social issues that affect women.



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14. SO THAT’S WHAT “TRANSPARENCY” MEANS: Have you ever visited USASpending.gov? It’s a website dedicated to unveiling government spending. The Department of Health and Human Services failed to report $800 billion in spending on time. So much for “government transparency.”



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15. WELL, THEY CAN’T WORK…: 1,000 prisoners like these in Pennsylvania collected weekly unemployment benefits over a four-month period, costing taxpayers $7 million. Thank you, poor oversight!

If you're as mad as we were after reading this list, forward along to your friendsMake sure they know where their tax dollars are really going.

>>>Read about more ridiculous spending here.

Read the Morning Bell and more en español every day at Heritage Libertad.

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European Jihadists: The Continuation of a Historical Trend

European Jihadists: The Continuation of a Historical Trend

Guns Save Lives


Link to Guns Save Lives

NYC Authorities Confiscate 250+ Guns in Operation

Posted: 19 Aug 2013 02:40 PM PDT

stock According to ABC, authorities in New York have reportedly confiscated of 250 illegal (under NY law) firearms as part of a gun smuggling bust. The gun investigation started as a result of a drug investigation which led to information about a gun operation. The guns, all completely legal in the Carolinas (where they are […]

[Video] Trace Adkins to Piers Morgan – “I Wouldv’e Slapped the Sh** Out of You”

Posted: 19 Aug 2013 10:48 AM PDT

Mondays are never fun, so to make today better here is a video of country music star Trace Adkins humiliating CNN talk show host Piers Morgan on the Celebrity Apprentice, aired earlier this year. Adkins, an adamant Second Amendment supporter as well as a lifetime NRA member, may have been aware of Morgan’s anti-gun stances […]

[Video] Texas Homeowner Shoots and Kills Axe Wielding Intruder

Posted: 19 Aug 2013 09:02 AM PDT

A homeowner in Montgomery County, TX was forced to defend himself and his family last Friday night. Following some sort of disturbance, the suspect drove his truck into the yard of the homeowner. The suspect exited the vehicle carrying an axe and went to confront the homeowner. The homeowner, fearing for his own safety as […]

BREAKING: Illinois Governor Signs Strict Gun Control Bill Into Law Effective Immediately

Posted: 18 Aug 2013 10:18 PM PDT

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn has signed into law a bill that will place new restrictions onto law abiding gun owners in the state. The measure will both require background checks on privately sold firearms (aka “universal background checks”) and require that any lost or stolen gun be reported to law enforcement within 72 hours. The […]

Monday, August 19, 2013

McCarthy: Obama Has Backed Islamic Radicals in Egypt

Tags: Egypt Unrest | obama | islamic | radicals | egypt | mccarthy


Thursday, 15 Aug 2013 06:10 PM

By Bill Hoffmann

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President Barack Obama has backed Islamic radicals in Egypt from the get-go — the end result being the U.S. has little influence left in the war-torn nation, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy says.

“He’s been trying to empower Islamic supremacists since the first hours of his administration,” McCarthy told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

“When [Mohammed] Morsi won the election … Obama decisively sided with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Story continues below video.


 

But now that the Muslim Brotherhood and President Mohammed Morsi have been ousted from power — resulting in hundreds of deaths this week as the Egyptian military battles pro-Morsi protesters — the U.S. can do almost nothing about it, according to McCarthy.

“The Obama administration has left us in a position where we have very little influence on the outcome here. We've somehow managed to irritate and turn hostile virtually every faction of that society against us,” he said.

“The military has, for a long time, been very unhappy with the way that's been pressured by the United States. The Muslim Brotherhood feels like Obama is semi-abandoning them in their hour of need because he's not doing more to stop the military.

“There's virtually no one that we have any influence with in Egypt.”

McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and author of “Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy,” the best outcome the U.S. can ask for is the military driving the Muslim Brotherhood underground.

“Letting [the Muslim Brotherhood] come back into the process — which they are committed to undermining because they're totally committed to a Sharia society — would be ridiculous,” McCarthy said.

“So the best we can hope for is a very long process of a technocratic Egyptian government operating under the light supervision of the military … [It would be] a long process where they try to write an inclusive constitution that respects the rights of women and minority rights.”

McCarthy, who prosecuted the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, said Obama attempted to be neutral in his remarks about Egypt on Thursday, but “to pretend now that we’ve been objective all along is not anything that has credibility ...

“There seems to be very little acknowledgement that the violence here is two-sided and that in fact you have the legitimate military authorities of Egypt against these Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim supremacists who are hardly just peaceful protesters, despite the way they’ve been portrayed.”

See the Steve Malzberg Show on Newsmax TV each weekday live by Clicking Here Now

You can listen to the Steve Malzberg Show each weekday live from 3-6 PM ET on SiriusXM 244.

 

© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.



Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

COMMUNISTS IN CONGRESS? JUST COUNT 'EM



NEW YORK – New Zealander Trevor Loudon has just published an encyclopedic new 689-page volume, “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress,” to accompany his 668-page 2011 book, “Barack Obama and the Enemies Within.”

In both volumes, Loudon has proved himself to be among the foremost experts in the world investigating and reporting the penetration of communists, socialists and the current group of “progressives” affiliated with Democratic Party politics who portray themselves as liberals.

In his 2011 book, Loudon presented documented evidence that Barack Obama’s rise in politics was not an accident, but a conscious, decade-long effort by the radical left to promote a candidate with African roots. Obama, he said, was packaged as an engaging and seemingly harmless Trojan Horse radical, sent to Chicago to refine his skills running for office as a Democratic Party politician.

It is impossible to read “Barack Obama and the Enemies Within” without being convinced that Obama’s education in communist ideology stretches from the extracurricular education he received from Communist Party mentor Frank Marshall Davis in Honolulu to his recruitment as a New Party candidate in Chicago, with strong ties to the Democratic Socialists of America.

Loudon continues naming names in his current volume, “The Enemies Within,” which documents how extensively communists, socialists and progressives have penetrated the U.S. Congress, running on the Democratic Party ticket.

The goal of these radicals in Congress, Loudon demonstrates, is the same goal Obama announced when running for president in 2008, to transform the United States from the constitutional republic established by its Founding Fathers into a radical socialist state. The aim is to be achieved through passing extensive social welfare legislation designed to bankrupt a government adhering to concepts of private property and private enterprise.

In an insightful essay on the Democratic Socialists of America, Loudon emphasizes the impact on U.S. radicals of the late Italian Communist Party theoretician Antonio Gramsci, whose writings from prison declared that the “working class revolution” is a dead end, arguing instead that communism can best be achieved “by infiltrating civil society – political parties, churches, labor unions, universities, the media, community groups, etc., to turn them into revolutionary vehicles.”

Similarly, Loudon documents how the Communist Party of the USA itself has adopted a stealth plan to achieve revolutionary goals by decisions made in the 1970s to infiltrate and manipulate the Democratic Party. The plan is to form alliances with the radical elements in organized labor in conjunction with radicals in the African-American community and the feminist movement to establish a progressive coalition on the left that could dominate the national political agenda for decades to come.

His essay on the Institute for Policy Studies provides extensive evidence that the IPS, operating today with the distinction of being oldest – founded in 1963 – and most influential of the far left “think tanks” in Washington, D.C., “works closely with several U.S. Marxist groups, but is particularly close to the Democratic Socialists of America.”

The congressional profiles of current members of Congress provides extensive evidence of radical leftist ties in the backgrounds of top Democratic Party legislators, including Democratic Party Sens. Barbara Boxer, Dick Durbin, Tom Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Debbie Stabenow, Al Franken, Sherrod Brown, Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Patty Murray and Tammy Baldwin.

In the House of Representatives, Loudon profiles the radical left background of Democratic Party Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Louis Gutierrez, John Conyers, Charles Rangel, Marcy Kaptur, Peter DeFazio, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jim McDermott and dozens more.

Loudon’s profiles of the radical lawmakers is extensively footnoted, complete with photos, news clips, website screen captures and quotations from published sources that leave no doubt as to the authenticity and accuracy of his allegations.

In documenting the success with which the radical left has captured the politically correct core of Democratic Party politics since the 1970s and the end of the Vietnam War, Loudon joins bestselling author Paul Kengor, who published in 2010 “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Conservatives for a Century,” followed in 2012 by “The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.”

What authors Loudon and Kengor show is that communism in America did not die with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is alive and well, with ties that run deep today with Barack Obama in the White House and the radical leftist Democrats serving in the halls of Congress.

Loudon will be in Washington, D.C., at the National Press Club Aug. 20 to participate in the all day conference “The Crisis in American Journalism and the Conservative Response,” hosted by the public policy group America’s Survival Inc.

Joining Loudon, who is listed on the program to speak about his book “The Enemies Within,



Obama sees the Constitution’s separation of powers as a quaint anachronism.

Barack the Lawgiver 


Text   
Charles Krauthammer 

As a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s, many federal drug laws carry strict mandatory sentences. This has stirred unease in Congress and sparked a bipartisan effort to revise and relax some of the more draconian laws.

Traditionally — meaning before Barack Obama — that’s how laws were changed: We have a problem, we hold hearings, we find some new arrangement, which is ratified by Congress and signed by the president.

That was then. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder, a liberal in a hurry, ordered all U.S. attorneys to simply stop charging nonviolent, non-gang-related drug defendants with crimes that, while fitting the offense, carry mandatory sentences. Find some lesser, non-triggering charge. How might you do that? Withhold evidence — e.g., about the amount of dope involved.

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In other words, evade the law, by deceiving the court if necessary. “If the companies that I represent in federal criminal cases” did that, said former deputy attorney general George Terwilliger, “they could be charged with a felony.”

But such niceties must not stand in the way of an administration’s agenda. Indeed, the very next day, it was revealed that the administration had unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation.

Which followed a presidentially directed 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congressmen and their personal staffs — under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well-off.

Which came just a month after the administration’s equally lawless suspension of one of the cornerstones of Obamacare: the employer mandate.

Which followed hundreds of Obamacare waivers granted by Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius to selected businesses, unions, and other well-lobbied, very special interests.

Nor is this kind of rule-by-decree restricted to health care. In 2012, the immigration service was ordered to cease proceedings against young illegal immigrants brought here as children. Congress had refused to pass such a law (the DREAM Act) just 18 months earlier. Obama himself had repeatedly said that the Constitution forbade him from enacting it without Congress. But with the fast approach of an election that could hinge on the Hispanic vote, Obama did exactly that. Unilaterally.

The point is not what you think about the merits of the DREAM Act. Or of mandatory drug sentences. Or of subsidizing health-care premiums for $175,000-a-year members of Congress. Or even whether you think governors should be allowed to weaken the work requirements for welfare recipients — an authority the administration granted last year in clear violation of section 407 of the landmark Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform of 1996.

The point is whether a president, charged with faithfully executing the laws that Congress enacts, may create, ignore, suspend, and/or amend the law at will. Presidents are arguably permitted to refuse to enforce laws they consider unconstitutional (the basis for so many of George W. Bush’s so-called signing statements). But presidents are forbidden from doing so for reason of mere policy — the reason for every Obama violation listed above.

Such gross executive usurpation disdains the Constitution. It mocks the separation of powers. And, most consequentially, it introduces a fatal instability into law itself. If the law is not what is plainly written, but is whatever the president and his agents decide, what’s left of the law?

What’s the point of the whole legislative process — of crafting various provisions through give-and-take negotiation — if you cannot rely on the fixity of the final product, on the assurance that the provisions bargained for by both sides will be carried out?

Consider immigration reform. The essence of any deal would be legalization in return for strict border enforcement. If some such legislative compromise is struck, what confidence can anyone have in it — if the president can unilaterally alter what he signs?

Yet this president is not only untroubled by what he’s doing, but open and rather proud. As he tells cheering crowds on his never-ending campaign-style tours: I am going to do X — and I’m not going to wait for Congress.

That’s caudillo talk. That’s banana-republic stuff. In this country, the president is required to win the consent of Congress first.

At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law. And whether presidents get to write their own.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. His email address isletters@charleskrauthammer.com. © 2013 The Washington Post Writers Group.

Incompetent Implementation Of ObamaCare Underway - GrassFire.com – Report Truth. Take Action.

Incompetent Implementation Of ObamaCare Underway - GrassFire.com – Report Truth. Take Action.

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