The Right Lane update 2.18.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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How Can the Leader of the Free World Lie With Such Impunity? UK Telegraph

Earlier this week in his State of the Union address President Obama made some observations on climate change so brimming with falsehoods I’m surprised his nose didn’t fall off. It really doesn’t matter where he himself was deliberately lying or whether he was merely lending the gravitas of his office to the deliberate lies of others. The point is that the President of the USA has access to any number of fact checkers and advisers and if he stands up and addresses the nation with a farrago of complete untruths then the buck stops with him. This dissembling and mendacity becomes all the more culpable when it forms the basis of major public policy decisions which will have a serious impact on people’s lives in the US and beyond. So why this snake-oil salesman being allowed to get away with it?

Here’s the offending part of Obama’s speech.

"Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late."

And here’s Marc Morano’s unanswerable point by point rebuttal. Obama’s war on climate change is a war against a chimera. He is enlarging the state, holding back the economic recovery, restricting freedoms, driving up the price of energy and killing jobs in order to deal with a problem which only exists in the discredited computer projections of a shameless cabal of grant-troughing activist scientists increasingly out of touch with real world data.  So why, outside the internet, has no one called him on it?

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Why is it that none of the disturbed and evil men, who steal guns, then go and kill movie-goers and children in school, has ever been identified as a conservative NRA member?

Ft Hood - Registered Democrat ~ Muslim

Columbine -  Too young to vote; both families were registered Democrats and progressive liberals

Virginia Tech -  Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff ~ Registered Democrat

Colorado Theater -  Registered Democrat; staff worker on the Obama campaign; Occupy Wall Street participant; progressive liberal

Connecticut School Shooter - Registered Democrat; hated Christians

Common thread is that all of these shooters is there was not one NRA member or a sane law abiding citizen!

INTERESTING, isn't it?

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Jim Rogers to Moneynews: ‘We Should Be Terrified’ Because Fed Tactics 'Going to End Badly'By Dan Weil and Kathleen Walter

The Federal Reserve’s massive easing campaign will produce a crisis for the economy, says famed investor Jim Rogers. “The central bank has been printing staggering amounts of money, and the government has been spending a lot of money because they wanted Mr. Obama to get re-elected, That's still spilling over into the economy.” Central banks across the world are matching each other virtually ease for ease, notes Rogers. “We should all be terrified of what has happened, because governments around the world are printing huge amounts of money and spending huge amounts of money,” he says. “The debts are going up like a rocket. This is going to end very badly,” notes Rogers, author of the new book “Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has said he's going to keep doing this until 2014 or 2015. The man doesn't know anything about economics. He doesn't understand finance or currencies. All he understands is printing money.” Rogers doesn’t buy President Barack Obama’s claim that the economy has improved over the last three years. “Do you believe the government?” Rogers asks rhetorically. “If you are going to believe the government you are going to go bankrupt.” All governments lie — Democrat and Republican, domestic and foreign, he notes. “We're in worse shape than we were before Obama,” Rogers adds.

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House overrides Obama, votes to freeze federal pay

The House voted Friday to freeze the pay of federal workers for the third year in a row over the objections of congressional Democrats and the Obama administration. Members voted 261-154 in favor of the bill, which would also lock in a pay freeze for members of Congress. It exempts people serving in the military. The bill won significant support from Democrats — 43 voted for it — while 10 Republicans voted against it. The legislation is an attempt to override President Obama’s executive order in December that seeks to give federal workers a 0.5 percent pay hike in late March. That order incensed congressional Republicans, who criticized it as an attempt to seize control of an issue that has traditionally been under Congress’s purview

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In defense of Obama’s drone war Charles Krauthammer

The nation’s vexation over the morality and legality of President Barack Obama’s drone war has produced a salutary but hopelessly confused debate. Three categories of questions are being asked. They must be separated to be clearly understood. 
1. By what right does the president order the killing by drone of enemies abroad? What criteria justify assassination?
Answer: (a) imminent threat, under the doctrine of self-defense, and (b) affiliation with al-Qaida, under the laws of war. Imminent threat is obvious. If we know a freelance jihadist cell in Yemen is actively plotting an attack, we don’t have to wait until after the fact. Elementary self-defense justifies attacking first. Al-Qaida is a different matter. We are in a mutual state of war. Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa declaring war on the United States in 1996; we reciprocated three days after 9/11 with Congress’ Authorization for Use of Military Force – against al-Qaida and those who harbor and abet it. Regarding al-Qaida, therefore, imminence is not required. Its members are legitimate targets, day or night, awake or asleep. Nothing new here. In World War II, we bombed German and Japanese barracks without hesitation. Unfortunately, Obama’s Justice Department memos justifying the drone attacks are hopelessly muddled. They imply that the sole justification for drone attack is imminent threat – and whereas al-Qaida is plotting all the time, an al-Qaida honcho sleeping in his bed is therefore a legitimate target. Nonsense. Slippery nonsense. It gives the impression of an administration making up criteria to fit the president’s kill list. No need to confuse categories. A sleeping Anwar al-Awlaki could lawfully be snuffed not because of imminence but because he was self-declared al-Qaida and thus an enemy combatant as defined by congressional resolution and the laws of war.

2. But Awlaki was no ordinary enemy. He was a U.S. citizen. By what right does the president order the killing by drone of an American? Where’s the due process?
Answer: Once you take up arms against the United States, you become an enemy combatant, thereby forfeiting the privileges of citizenship and the protections of the Constitution, including due process. You retain only the protection of the laws of war – no more and no less than those of your foreign comrades-in-arms. Lincoln steadfastly refused to recognize the Confederacy as a separate nation. The soldiers that his Union Army confronted at Antietam were American citizens (in rebellion) – killed without due process. Nor did the Americans storming German bunkers at Normandy inquire before firing if there were any German- Americans among them – to be excused for gentler treatment while the other Germans were mowed down.

3. Who has the authority to decide life and death targeting?
In war, the ultimate authority is always the commander in chief and those in the lawful chain of command to whom he has delegated such authority.  This looks troubling. Obama sitting alone in the Oval Office deciding what individuals to kill. But how is that different from Lyndon Johnson sitting in his office choosing bombing targets in North Vietnam? Moreover, we firebombed entire cities in World War II. Who chose? Commanders under the ultimate authority of the president. No judicial review, no outside legislative committee, no secret court, no authority above the president.  OK, you say. But today’s war is entirely different: no front line, no end in sight.  So what? It’s the jihadists who decided to make the world a battlefield and to wage war in perpetuity. Until they abandon the field, what choice do we have but to carry the fight to them?  We have our principles and precedents for lawful war making, and a growing body of case law for the more vexing complexities of the present war – for example, the treatment of suspected terrorists apprehended on U.S. soil. The courts having granted them varying degrees of habeas corpus protection, it is obvious that termination by drone is forbidden – unless Congress and the courts decide otherwise, which, short of a Taliban invasion from New Brunswick, is inconceivable.

Now, for those who believe that the war on terror is not war but law enforcement, (a) I concede that they will find the foregoing analysis to be useless, and (b) I assert that they are living on a different and distant planet.  For us earthlings, the case for Obama’s drone war is clear. Pity that his Justice Department couldn’t make it.

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Get ‘Em Young: Obama’s Plan for Universal Preschool  by Tad Cronn

Since the recent State of the Union address, President Obama has been touting his proposal to offer free preschool to everybody. The White House cites studies that claim all manner of benefits to sticking young children into the zoo early on, including later “success.” And Obama claims one of his main motivations is to close the test score “achievement gap” between poor and rich kids. It’s evidently never too early to begin class warfare, which leads us into some other issues about this whole notion of preschool. Preschool is billed as preparation for kindergarten and sold to parents as an opportunity for essential socialization of children. Experience suggests reality is other than what the public is being sold. Preparation for kindergarten? Like without intensive studying, children might not be able to grasp the difficult concepts of counting or macaroni art?  Socialization, too, is one of those buzz words used to sucker parents into doing what some bureaucrat insists is best for the children. Many a young parent has been conned with images of war-painted kids running amok if they don’t put them into the government-sanctioned hands of strangers for five hours a day, whether Mommy needs to go to work or not. I’m sorry, but I’ve seen preschools. You’d be better serving your child by leaving him tied to a stake in the backyard with a bowl of water and some kibble than by letting him near some of the hell-spawn that are enrolled in preschool. As for those supposed educational successes, many of them are sitting in the nation’s prisons because they never learned not to steal or sell drugs, but they can finger paint up a storm. If you truly want to give your child an educational head start, turn off the TV and make him crack a couple of books every week. The real reason for promoting universal preschool should be obvious. Besides serving as yet another excuse to raise taxes, preschool is the first real opportunity government has to indoctrinate young children by exposing them to ideas like Timmy having two daddies, the Pilgrims being illegal aliens, the Founding Fathers being terrorists and free condoms. The world would be a better place if the kids could just stay home with their parents.

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Democrat Calls for Draft for Women

When outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta signed an order allowing women in the military to join frontline combat units, the first question many conservatives asked was when would the draft be reinstated and used to “equalize” the gender breakdown of the military? Currently, women make up less than one-fifth of our military forces. By liberal thinking, that’s “unfair.” Clearly, there must be discrimination at work. Almost on cue, Rep. Charles Rangel, the House’s resident draft enthusiast, said Friday that he will once again introduce legislation to reinstate the draft, this time with the added requirement that women register for Selective Service, as men must do on their 18th birthdays. In a statement, Rangel said, “Now that women can serve in combat they should register for the Selective Service alongside their male counterparts. Reinstating the draft and requiring women to register for the Selective Service would compel the American public to have a stake in the wars we fight as a nation. We must question why and how we go to war, and who decides to send our men and women into harm’s way.”

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NBC Sports Writer Smears Baptist Church with Tebow Ties By Todd Starnes

The pastor of one of the nation’s most prominent Southern Baptist churches is calling on NBC to retract a column that labeled the congregation as being “virulently anti-gay and anti-Semitic.” Rick Chandler, an NBC Sports “Off the Bench” writer, smeared the historic First Baptist Church of Dallas and urged Tim Tebow to cancel an upcoming appearance at the church. “Tim Tebow to speak at virulently anti-gay, anti-Semitic Dallas megachurch,” read the headline on Chandler’s column. “That’s the church led by pastor Robert Jeffress, a virulently anti-gay and anti-Semitic evangelical Christian,” he wrote. “It seems that lately Tim Tebow has been making more speaking appearances in church than he has quarterback appearances in NFL games.” Jeffress said the accusations levied by Chandler were based on second and third-hand stories that were filled with inaccuracies. “I would like NBC Sports to acknowledge that they made an error in their reporting and relied on secondary sources instead of doing their own reporting and fact-finding like any credible news organization ought to,” said Jeffress. “ Jeffress denied that his 11,000-member church is anti-gay or anti-Semitic. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he told Fox News. “We are a very pro-Israel church. To say that Jesus Christ is the only way for a person to be saved is not anti-Semitic.” The New York Daily News also picked up on Tebow’s upcoming appearance at the church and also slammed the church. “Tebow’s Hate Date: Tim to Talk at Gay Bash, Anti-Jew pastor’s church,” the headline screamed. Jeffress said that kind of reporting is why Americans don’t trust journalists.  “This is another example of gross inaccuracies supported by the liberal press with no resemblance to truth whatsoever,” Jeffress said. “This is a part of not just a liberal agenda – but sloppy journalism.”

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Obama Wants to Unilaterally Cut Nuclear Arsenal by One-Third By: Lisa Barron

The White House is set to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal by one-third, signing off on a new internal review of the country’s nuclear weapons strategy, reports The Hill newspaper. It says that according to a report by the Center for Public Integrity issued Friday, the recommended reductions were part of a draft version of a classified directive compiled by top defense and national security officials.  Sources told CPI that Obama, while he has not officially approved the directive, has not expressed any opposition to the findings, said the paper. It also reports that administration officials had pushed to get the new directive finalized late last year but the White House at that point objected to the plan; Obama’s advisers did not want the directive released publicly before the November election. According to the internal U.S. review, however, using a smaller arsenal to target a limited number of threats, including North Korea and Iran, rather than keeping a large ballistic arsenal, would still allow the country to maintain a viable nuclear deterrence strategy.  It’s not clear how many nuclear weapons a one-third cut would come to, said The Hill, because the total amount of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal is classified. The move is bound to draw criticism from Republicans, who have denounced Obama’s stance on missile defense.

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Sen. Rubio: President Obama's Immigration Bill Is 'Dead on Arrival' By: Paul Scicchitano

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called details of President Obama's leaked immigration proposal "half-baked" on Saturday and predicted that the measure would be "dead on arrival in Congress."  Rubio, who is spending this week in the Middle East, was responding to a story published online Saturday by USA Today which revealed that the draft bill would allow illegal immigrants in the U.S. to apply for newly created "Lawful Prospective Immigrant" visas. The bill would also provide more security funding and require that businesses verify the immigration status of new hires within four years, according to the report.

“It’s a mistake for the White House to draft immigration legislation without seeking input from Republican members of Congress," Rubio said in a statement. "President Obama’s leaked immigration proposal is disappointing to those of us working on a serious solution. The president’s bill repeats the failures of past legislation.  "It fails to follow through on previously broken promises to secure our borders, creates a special pathway that puts those who broke our immigration laws at an advantage over those who chose to do things the right way and come here legally, and does nothing to address guest workers or future flow, which serious immigration experts agree is critical to preventing future influxes of illegal immigrants," Rubio explained.  “If actually proposed, the President’s bill would be dead on arrival in Congress, leaving us with unsecured borders and a broken legal immigration system for years to come,” Rubio added.

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Gun Manufacturers Refuse To Sell To Government Agencies by Philip Hodges

For months, we’ve been showing the hypocrisy of the left when it comes to guns. They don’t want guns for citizens to protect themselves, but they want guns for police, government officials and bodyguards. And no one can justify having an AR-15. Even though it is only a semi-automatic weapon like most handguns, they look scary, and therefore should not be accessible to citizens. Police and military, sure, but not ordinary people.  Well, it looks like those restrictions are backfiring. Six firearms manufacturers are fed up with these gun control laws around the country, and they’ve made announcements stating that they will no longer be selling their products to any government agency within a jurisdiction that restricts firearms from citizens.

Olympic Arms had this to say:

 “Due the passing of this legislation, Olympic Arms would like to announce that the State of New York, any Law Enforcement Departments, Law Enforcement Officers, First Responders within the State of New York, or any New York State government entity or employee of such an entity – will no longer be served as customers. In short, Olympic Arms will no longer be doing business with the State of New York or any governmental entity or employee of such governmental entity within the State of New York – henceforth and until such legislation is repealed, and an apology made to the good people of the State of New York and the American people.”

Here’s another statement from York Arms:

“Based on the recent legislation in New York, we are prohibited from selling rifles and receivers to residents of New York. We have chosen to extend that prohibition to all governmental agencies associated with or located within New York. As a result we have halted sales of rifles, short-barreled rifles, short barreled shotguns, machine guns, and silencers to New York governmental agencies.”

Other manufacturers include LaRue Tactical, Extreme Firepower, Templar Custom and Cheaper than Dirt. They’re only being consistent and fair. And liberals are all about making sure we all have “equal rights.” So, if these manufacturers are not allowed to sell a particular gun or clip to a regular, law-abiding citizen, then forget it, they’re not going to sell it to a police officer or the mayor’s security detail either. Now, if we could just get Glock, Sig Sauer and Smith and Wesson on board, then that could do some real damage. If they do join the boycott, watch for the government mandate requiring that they continue manufacturing for the government.

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"Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world. Justly understood it is sacred next to those which we appropriate in divine adoration; but in the mouths of some it means anything, which enervate a necessary government; excite a jealousy of the rulers who are our own choice, and keep society in confusion for want of a power sufficiently concentered to promote good." --Oliver Ellsworth, A Landholder, No. III, 1787

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