The Right Lane update 7.29.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom 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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Former Ambassador: Benghazi “Stand Down” Order Came from Obama

Ann Wagner, a former US ambassador and current congresswoman from Missouri, was interviewed about what the protocol would be for a “stand down” order in the event of a consulate being under attack, and she answered what many have suspected already: that’s an order that would come from Obama himself. This is one of the reasons that the Obama administration has essentially refused to provide details about where Obama was at or what he was doing during the attack. This is because we know exactly what he was doing — ignoring the cries for help for political reasons. Being wrong about policy is one thing. But ignoring the screams of those who work for you because you’d rather them die than accept that your foreign policy is creating more terrorists is a level of treason rare, even for the most despotic tyrants.

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CBO: Public Debt Will Hit 73 Percent of GDP

Many Democrats pointed to the Congressional Budget Office's revised deficit figures as proof that the national debt is not as large of a threat as previously feared. But a closer look at America's debt reveals a much different — and alarming — reality. In mid-May, the CBO said the federal deficit in fiscal 2013, which ends in September, will be $642 billion, down from the $1 trillion-plus of the previous four years.

"We don't have an immediate crisis in terms of debt," President Obama said in an interview with ABC News. "In fact for the next 10 years it's going to be in a sustainable place."  But "after years of bipartisan overspending, public debt today — that's the money that the federal government owes to domestic and foreign investors — is almost 90 percent higher than at the onset of the financial crisis in 2008," according to Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. "It climbed by $1 trillion between December 2011 and December 2012 alone to its current level of $12.03 trillion."

Public debt is now 75 percent of GDP, the highest level since 1950 — and that doesn't include debt the government owes to Social Security and other accounts. But the worst is yet to come. The CBO projects that the public debt is scheduled to grow to $19 trillion by 2023, or 73.6 percent of projected GDP — up from 36 percent as recently as the end of 2007. But if Congress reverses the spending cuts forced through sequestration, the public debt will rise to 83 percent of GDP, the CBO projects. By 2023, the federal government is expected to spend $823 billion a year on interest payments, up from $223 billion today. Interest payments plus entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will account for 75 percent of the federal budget, and other programs will "gradually be squeezed out," de Rugy writes for Reason magazine. She concludes: "Congress should circumvent these scenarios by acting now to cut spending and reduce future entitlement obligations. No level of taxes can address the phenomenal fiscal imbalance that our country is facing now and into the future. "History will not judge the debt-denialists kindly."

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DOJ Finally Goes Insane: Uses Federal Power To Force School To Allow Girl To Use Boys’ Restroom by Mark Horne

The DOJ has forced a school district to allow a girl to use the boys restroom because the girl calls herself a boy. “The student was born a girl but “has identified as a boy from a young age,” according to the Department of Justice, which reached a settlement with the public school district in Arcadia, an affluent LA suburb. Under the deal, the district must not only change the student’s restroom privileges and make similar accommodations on overnight trips.  It also must institute a host of measures to ensure transgender students are treated as whatever gender they consider themselves to be.”

This is the “T” in the “GLBT” we hear about. The girl is allegedly “transgender.”

So what if a girl identifies herself as a boy? I’m pasty white. So are my children. If one of them “identifies as an African American from a young age” does that mean he is “transracial” and can sue any college that doesn’t give him minority preferences? Are all colleges required to affirm his “transracial identity” and treat him as an African American? How is transgender any different? It isn’t! Every single Liberal adult reading these words knows that he or she is lying, transparently and stupidly lying, to go along with this pretense. A girl is a girl is a girl. She should use a girl’s restroom. That’s just biology. That’s just humanity.  You don’t get to choose what you are. You don’t get to bully other people to conform to your fantasy reality (and any parents who encourage their child to expect this, hate their child).

Also, being bullied because you are perceived as different in some way is no excuse at all for inventing "transgender" rules. Nothing justifies this obvious piece of fiction and fantasy being enforced by the courts. No science. No civil rights law. Nothing.  It is just stupidity at the point of a gun. The DoJ had zero authority for this tyrannical and perverse move in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They just did it anyway. If any African American wants to see the Civil Rights Act preserved he should be outraged by this appeal to it to justify fantasy coercion. It makes it into a joke. It makes Martin Luther King into a dirty joke. It makes a mockery of human life.

Again, there are girls and there are boys, there are women and there are men. And, in this case, yes, they are just born that way. A boy or girl can no more “identify” as the opposite sex than he or she can identify as a bird or a planet.

I should be horrified by how evil all this is, but I can’t get past the stupidity part. Is some Liberal going to write in the comments (as usually happens when I address homosexual issues) that my ranting just shows how irrational belief in God is? Right. Because if I were an atheist it would suddenly make complete sense to say that girls can be boys by saying so and vice versa. Just get rid of the superstitions of the past and suddenly we will all see that a boy is really a girl “inside” and needs to use the girl’s restroom. God is a delusion and that girl is really a boy.

Give me a break.

Christians watch the Department of Justice and, if we ever had any doubts that modern liberal unbelievers are just stupid people trying desperately to make themselves more stupid, those doubts all scatter in the face of this monstrosity. And you expect us to accept your expertise on the definition of marriage? Maybe after your hallucinations go away. Why would anyone think that the leaders of this kind of society have any brains when they do and say such stupid things? The Western World is run by idiots. Raving, stupid, morons.

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NBC Is Developing a Hillary Clinton Miniseries By Josef Adalian

NBC is giving Hillary Clinton the miniseries treatment, tapping Diane Lane (Man of Steel) to play the former senator and first lady in a four-hour project in development at the network. Peacock chief Bob Greenblatt announced the project Saturday morning at the network's portion of the TV Critics Association press tour as part of an ambitious miniseries slate the network hopes will give it a much-needed ratings boost. Oscar-nominated writer Courtney Hunt (Frozen River) is writing the project, which NBC said will examine "Clinton’s life as a wife, mother, politician and cabinet member from 1998 to the present. The script will begin with Clinton living in the White House as her husband is serving the second of his two terms as president." There's no word yet on when the project will air, though Greenblatt indicated it run before a possible Clinton announcement about running for president. Given TV's relatively speedy turnaround time with projects, it's also possible the network is looking to get out in front of director James Ponsoldt's Rodham, a feature biopic of Clinton which has yet to cast its lead.  

Wow! Wouldn't any Presidential hopeful give anything to have this free Promo for their presidential run!

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MUSLIMS SECOND LARGEST GROUP OF ILLEGAL ALIENS IN NYC

The US is home to more than 11 million undocumented workers, and there are an estimated 2 million migrants working in New York. They are taxi drivers, domestic workers, restaurant, retail and construction staff. They are paid far less than the city’s minimum wage of $7.25 an hour and they are often mistreated by their employers.  Their lives may undergo major changes if the US House of Representatives approves an immigration bill, passed by the Senate last month, which offers a 13-year path to citizenship for undocumented migrants, but also reinforces border security and enables businesses to check workers’ social security numbers, under the E-verify program.

The program would make “every single undocumented person one click away from being notified or deported”, according to Monami Maulik, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum), an organization of low-wage south Asian immigrants in Jackson Heights, Queens, which has 2,000 members. “Our members … and many others in immigrant communities are really disappointed with this legislation. It’s turning out to be more and more repressive, harsher measures,” she said. “So we are following it very closely.”  After Latinos, she added, south Asians are among the second-largest undocumented population in New York.

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Planned Parenthood and Others Could Have Access to Citizens' Information Through Obamacare's Federal Data Hub

As the Obama administration frantically tries to enlist the help of organizations to promote the Affordable Care Act, Planned Parenthood could be one of several groups with access to citizens’ sensitive information in the Federal Data Hub. According to The Illinois Typepad Review, if the organization is granted funding through the Department of Health and Human Services’ $54 million in navigator grants, the nonprofit will have access to Obamacare’s Federal Data Hub. The database contains citizens’ information collected from the Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, and includes Social Security numbers. Though these navigators have yet to be named, Planned Parenthood is likely to be one. Navigators would assist Americans with enrollment in Obamacare’s exchanges and inform them about the subsidized insurance, according to HHS. Officials from organizations receiving navigator grants are required to take an online course about how the law works. Planned Parenthood has already signed on to promote the healthcare law and some affiliates will apply for HHS’ navigator grants, the news outlet stated last month. The deadline to apply for the funding was June 7, but the agency has yet to announce all the organizations receiving the awards.

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Four in Five Americans Face Near-poverty, No Work Under Obama -  While race is becoming less of an issue

Economic Recovery?  Gaining on Employment Numbers?  Lifting the poor out of poverty?  Phony scandals according to Obama.  Four out of five U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.  Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press point to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend. The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality. Like more speaches will help?  How about action and leadership?

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race. Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor." "I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit-and-vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks. "If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press. The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones. "It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not. "There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.

Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white. More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains. Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor. More than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks. Salyers' daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5. Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need." "It's pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."

Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60. By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty. By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.  "Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need." The numbers come from Rank's analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.

Among the findings:

—For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.

—Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.

—The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining. The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.

—Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a non-majority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.

Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America. The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse. Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites — defined as those lacking a college degree — remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those non-college whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale. Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas. "They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.

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Caught! Immigration bill shackles border agents Bars them from considering race or ethnicity 'to any degree' by Aaron Klein

A truckload of young Hispanic men is spotted by a U.S. Border Patrol agent rumbling down a dusty road a mile north of the Mexican border toward El Paso, Texas.  How should the agent respond?

Under the immigration-reform bill currently under consideration by Congress, Border Patrol agents or any other law-enforcement officer who stops such a vehicle to demand identification might be found in violation of the law. The legislation bars all federal law-enforcement officers, including border agents, from using race or ethnicity “to any degree” while making routine or spontaneous law-enforcement decisions, a review of the legislation has found.  The bill further calls for the Homeland Security Department to collect data on immigration enforcement activities to determine the existence of racial profiling.  The data would be utilized to issue future guidelines to officers regarding the use of race or ethnicity during routine enforcement. The bill states that “in making routine or spontaneous law enforcement decisions, such as ordinary traffic stops, Federal law enforcement officers may not use race or ethnicity to any degree, except that officers may rely on race and ethnicity if a specific suspect description exists.” The bill defines federal law-enforcement officers as any “officer, agent, or employee of the United States authorized by law or by a Government agency to engage in or supervise the prevention, detection, investigation, or prosecution of any violation of Federal law.” The definition includes U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. It is clear that immigration enforcement officials are singled out by the new directives.  The legislation refers specifically to border-security agents with another clause that states “in enforcing laws protecting the integrity of the Nation’s borders, Federal law enforcement officers may not consider race or ethnicity except to the extent permitted by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

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