STIMULUS WATCH: Salary raise counted as saved job

By Brett J. Blackledge and Matt Apuzzo Associated Press

The government’s latest count of stimulus jobs significantly overstates the effects of the $787 billion program under a popular federal preschool program, raising fresh questions about the process the Obama administration is using to tout the success of its economic recovery plan.

An Associated Press review of the latest stimulus reports — which the White House promised would undergo extensive reviews to ensure accuracy — found that more than two-thirds of 14,506 jobs credited to the recovery act under spending by just one federal office were overstated because they counted pay increases for existing workers as jobs saved.

The inflated job count is at least partly the product of the administration instructing local community agencies that received money to count the raises as jobs saved.

“That’s more than ridiculous,” said Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner.

Most of the inflated figures were like those cited in the 935 saved jobs reported by the Southwest Georgia Community Action in Moultrie, Ga. The agency, like hundreds of others collecting Head Start money, claimed all its existing employees’ jobs were saved because they received a pay raise with the stimulus cash.

CONTINUED…...boston.com

Palin: Dems will apply abortion mind-set to elderly

 Palin rallies thousands of abortion opponents

By JONATHAN MARTIN,POLITICO

Sarah Palin rallied thousands of abortion opponents Friday night with a a stark warning that the same philosophy that allows abortion rights could soon be invoked to allow the government to cut off health care for the elderly or children with special needs. 

 Speaking to a fund-raising banquet of Wisconsin Right to Life, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee asserted that if policy-makers don’t believe a child in the womb is valuable, then “perhaps the same mind-set applies to other persons.” 

“What may they feel about an elderly person who doesn’t have a whole lot of productive years left,” Palin asked an audience of about 5,000 who paid $30 each to hear her speak in an airplane hangar-like exhibition hall at the Wisconsin state fairgrounds just outside of Milwaukee. “In order to save government money, government health care has to be rationed… [so] than this elderly person that perhaps could be seen as costing taxpayers to pay for a non-productive life? Do you think our elderly will be first in line for limited health care?

MORE…...politico.com

Obama on Ft. Hood — Not Even ‘Shocked’

By Dan Gainor,FOXNEWS

How a president responds to a crisis defines him. President Obama has shown how upset he was after the murder of abortion Dr. George Tiller and after the attack on the Holocaust Museum. But when it came to the Ft. Hood shootings, the president twice gave the incident a limited response …devoting little more than 4 minutes over two separate appearances to the 13 dead and 30 wounded.

In the Tiller case, the president was “shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning.” In the case of the museum attack, Obama was “shocked and saddened by today’s shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.”

But when it came to the horrendous Ft. Hood shootings, the term “shocked” was nowhere to be found. Instead, the initial response was shoehorned into comments he made opening the White House Tribal Nations Conference. First there were a couple applause lines to Native Americans and Obama’s “shout out to that Congressional Medal of Honor winner,” who appears not to have won the medal. (Joe Medicine Crow won the Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor.)

Then the president addressed the shooting. While he called the incident “horrible” and a “tragedy” and urged “prayers,” the response seemed understated compared to the other incidents. Then, in true Obama fashion, he did manage to make the shootings at least in part about him. “I want all of you to know that as commander in chief, that there’s no greater honor but also no greater responsibility for me than to make sure that the extraordinary men and women in uniform are properly cared for and that their safety and security when they are at home is provided for us.”

Two minutes and 39 seconds later he was done and without even taking a breath back to talking about the Native American event. Nowhere in his speech or his remarks the next day did he even acknowledge that the attacker was a Muslim. In his statement after the museum attack, he correctly criticized “anti-Semitism and prejudice” but made no mention of religion in the latest incident.

The Nov. 6 appearance took up just 1 minute 30 seconds and this time it was paired with his remarks on the bad unemployment numbers. In all, he spent 4 minutes 9 seconds to address the attack on 43 Americans …less than 6 seconds per person.

.foxnews.com/

ACORN’s Big Spender

by Matthew Vadum  AMERICAN SPECTATOR

It’s becoming more and more difficult for the Obama White House to deny that White House political director Patrick Gaspard has strong, longstanding ties to the corrupt activist group ACORN.

Gaspard is a longtime operative for ACORN and one of its political parties, New York’s Working Families Party.

Internal ACORN documents show Gaspard gave ACORN $40,000 over the past two years while he worked as an executive vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 in New York he gave ACORN $15,000 in 2007 and $25,000 in 2008.

CONTINUED…..spectator.org/

OBama’s shock Troops: SEIU and Political Intimidation in St. Louis

by Mike Flynn BIG GOVERNMENT

Yesterday, Pastor Himes provided powerful, and courageous, witness to the union violence he and his wife saw in St. Louis on August 6th.  They provided strong testament to the union attack on Kenneth Gladney. But, his comments only dealt with the events of that day. Evidence is emerging that the events of that day went far beyond St. Louis and may have been part of a nationally orchestrated campaign to intimidate and silence dissent.

When Congress went into its summer recess at the end of July, an organic movement erupted to protest Congressional proposals to inject government deeper into our health care system. The ferocity of citizen’s reactions caught most congressmen off-guard. The citizen’s spontaneous protests against Congress dominated the news coverage. It was only a matter of time until the left struck back,.

On the morning of August 6th, Sam Stein reported at the Huffington Post that labor unions had released a comprehensive memo, detailing tactics to counter what were called “town hall protestors”. That same day, a White House official said to reporters, “If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard.”

Those both happened the morning of the assault on Kenneth Gladney. Is it any surprise that on the specific day that Big Labor and the White House signaled a commitment to ‘punch back’ at the town hall protests, an innocent bystander, Kenneth Gladney, was brutally beaten?

READ MORE…..biggovernment.com/

The Myth of ‘08, Demolished

By Charles Krauthammer

REALCLEARPOLITICS

WASHINGTON — Sure, Election Day 2009 will scare moderate Democrats and make passage of Obamacare more difficult. Sure, it makes it easier for resurgent Republicans to raise money and recruit candidates for 2010. But the most important effect of Tuesday’s elections is historical. It demolishes the great realignment myth of 2008.

In the aftermath of last year’s Obama sweep, we heard endlessly about its fundamental, revolutionary, transformational nature. How it was ushering in an FDR-like realignment for the 21st century in which new demographics — most prominently, rising minorities and the young — would bury the GOP far into the future. One book proclaimed “The Death of Conservatism,” while the more modest merely predicted the terminal decline of the Republican Party into a regional party of the Deep South or a rump party of marginalized angry white men.

This was all ridiculous from the beginning. 2008 was a historical anomaly. A uniquely charismatic candidate was running at a time of deep war weariness, with an intensely unpopular Republican president, against a politically incompetent opponent, amid the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. And still he won by only seven points.

.realclearpolitics.com

AARP’s tacit endorsement of Medicare cuts lines its pockets, but shortchanges seniors

MCT News Service

November 5, 2009

Why else would the nation’s largest lobbying organization, sworn to protect the interests of senior citizens, watch silently as Congress plans to cut Medicare spending by $400 billion to pay for its health reform legislation? Could it be that the interests of seniors and AARP are not exactly aligned?

Let’s follow the money. AARP takes in more than half of its $1.1 billion budget in royalty fees from health insurers and other vendors that market services with the organization’s name. Medicare supplementary policies, called “Medigap” plans, make up the biggest share of this royalty revenue.

AARP has an interest in selling more, not fewer, Medigap plans, of course. But there is a competitor on the block.

A growing number of seniors are enrolling in a new form of Medicare coverage Medicare Advantage where they don’t need Medigap.

Medicare Advantage was created in 2003 to give seniors the option of joining private plans that are paid up to 12 percent more to provide better health benefits than traditional Medicare.

These private plans compete with each other by offering seniors such services as lower premiums, better drug coverage, dental care and eyeglasses, and more comprehensive coverage for major medical expenses. Nearly 11 million of Medicare’s 45-million beneficiaries are in the program.

CONTINUED…….chicagotribune.com

The Soros Plan to Kill Capitalism

by Matthew Vadum

Having purchased, rented, or placed a down payment on all the political influence up for sale in America, leftist troublemaker George Soros now plans to ramp up his war on markets worldwide by creating an “Institute for New Economic Thinking” (INET).

“The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” Soros told the Financial Times last month.

Soros said he wants Communist China to run this new financial system. “You really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, a financial world order,” Soros said.

If that doesn’t send a chill down the spines of freedom lovers in America and elsewhere, nothing will.

In an interview with Der Spiegel last year Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society.”

READ MORE…..biggovernment.com

Finally, an Authentic G.O.P.

By ALEX CASTELLANOS,NYTIMES

DID Republicans win so many of the elections on Tuesday because of their conservative base or because they went beyond it? The answer to both questions is yes.

In some places in 2009 it was enough to not be a Democrat, just as it was sufficient for Barack Obama to be an alternative to President George W. Bush in 2008. In Greensboro, N.C., an unknown 70-year-old conservative who has never held elective office beat the incumbent mayor, the first such defeat there since 1973. Message to Republicans: When only 20 percent of Americans self-identify as Republicans, it is not our brand voters are buying. It’s the other guy’s brand they are rejecting.

READ MORE…...nytimes.com

My Experience at a Tea Party Last Night

Last night my wife and I attended our first political event. We went to The Tea Party Express in Oklahoma City.  We were in town visiting our son. The national Tea Party group was in town on their tour. No matter what party your belong to this  group applies to you. The Tea Party group is against government bailouts, government taking over health care,the global warming bill. The tea party is for small government, frugal government spending, less taxes and a strong national defense. I also believe in these things.

 

There were maybe a dozen speakers. All were ordinary citizens. All expressed their views on many issues. This was an issues Tea Party. I heard the name Obama  six times and a few Pelosi’s but this was about issues that we face in our daily lives that government is interfering with.The crowd was orderly. They crowd looked like everyday people, neighbors, coworkers. The ages of the crowd seemed to be in their mid-thiries to seniors. Most of the people had American flags and or homemade signs. I bought a very lagred “Dont tread on me” sign. We recited the Pledge of Allegance and sang the national anthyem. A one minute prayers was said. Gosh, I hope that didn’t offend anyone.

This event was held on the steps of the capital building and north plaza of the capital complex. Attendance was estimated at 3000 people. This was one of the best experiences I have had in my 63 years. Our pictures aren’t ready but will be today.Photos are from the same event in Denver. It looks identical to what I saw last night in Oklahoma City. SHAW