Saturday was much less structured than the tightly scheduled day before. We were allowed to sleep in after the whirlwind of activity on Friday.
A few of us women were invited to a screening of the new Citizens Unitedfilm, Fire In The Heartland, a film about the women behind the tea party movement, which I’ll be writing more about, later.
Citizen’s United filmmaker,Steve Bannon introducing the film.
The Citizens United offices are located in a beautiful DC row house. Alexa Shruggedgave us a grand tour:
After the screening, a we went to the Freedomworks building to work on signs, and meet Dick Army, who was signing his new book, (co-written by Matt Kibbe) Give Us Liberty.
ND, Dick Armey
Cheryl Prater,Steve Green (VodkaPundit), and I decided to go out for some drinks and a bite to eat. I’d like to take the opportunity now, to say that VodkaPundit is aptly named. The man drank prodigious amounts of vodka, both at the restaurant, and later on at the hotel lounge, which is where everyone ended up, Saturday night:
I apologize for the quality of these pictures – they were taken with my cell phone.
Friday was the main conference day, so it was packed from 8:30 to 4:00 with speeches and panels with helpful information for bloggers. I was unable to get decent pictures because I was seated at a table towards the back of the room.
The Humor in Blogging panel:
(Iowahawk was squeamish about having his picture published, so I photoshopped a clever disguise for him).
After the conference we took the subway to DC for a debate between Erick Erickson of RedState, & Jim Geraghty on the right, and Alan Rosenblatt & Adam Green on the left. Don’t feel bad if you missed it. It was a snoozer.
Then, we headed for the Freedomworks office for some chow…
Nine years ago today, Americans were forced into the conversion of an act of travel into acts of mass murder, by followers of a religion that claims to be peaceful, yet collects a trail of the bodies of those killed in its name wherever these followers happen to go. And on that day, the rest of us were assaulted with visions of incomprehensible evil on our television screens, the sounds of terror and chaos on the radio, and tales of desperation, fear, and ultimately death, in our print media. On that day, everything stopped. And everything changed.
Televisions flickered in household after household, the images replaying the horror over and over, while the various network talking heads continued to ramble as if they tried hard enough, they might find the right words. The right words to make themselves understand what they had witnessed. The right words to guide a stunned and shaken nation to a harbor of emotional stability and clarity. Each of us personally struggled with sorrow, with anger, with disbelief. The unusually silent skies, cruised only by military fighters on patrol, did not offer any relief for these emotions. And seeing images like these on our televisions as the day progressed offered a glimpse of the belief that refuses to be ignored, and is unrepentant about its actions:
I could have done without the peace of Islam that day, as could millions of others.
But then, as the evening approached, President Bush came to the microphone, as we expect our leaders to do at such moments, and he brought words that delivered, in part, what the pundits and anchors could not. I have excerpted parts below.
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
The victims were in airplanes or in their offices — secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers. Moms and dads. Friends and neighbors.
Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.
The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger.
These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.
Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.
America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.
None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.
BlogCon, aFreedomworks-sponsored conference for conservative bloggers, is being held in Washington, DC, this weekend. It was scheduled to coincide with the 9/12 March on Sunday, which we’ll all be covering live. I was honored to be one of the bloggers invited to attend, so here I am.
The conference started bright and early this morning at 8:30, with speakers like Dr. Melissa Clouthier (Melissa Tweets), Steve Kruiser, Jim Hoft, Mary Katherine Ham, and John Hawkins.
Mary Katherine Ham at BlogCon
We were privileged to watch the first ever LIVE Trifecta show with Bill Whittle, Steve Green, and Scott Ott.
This afternoon,we’ll be treated to panel featuring Ace of Spades, Caleb Howe, Lori Ziganto, and IowaHawk who’ll be discussing humor in blogging.
The best way to follow the conference, if you’re interested, is by using the #blogcon hashtag on Twitter, which is currently the #1 trending twitter in Washington DC.
Ten Buck Fridays is proud to announce that Stephen Broden is the winner of this week’s TBF poll. Broden demonstrates a profound understanding of the compelling issues that are at stake in the upcoming election. If you watch a bit of this video, I think you’ll be greatly impressed. Listen to the clear, bold message:
We’d be very fortunate to have Stephen Broden eloquently defending our cherished conservative principles in the halls of Congress.
In contrast, listen to a few words from the Congresswoman Broden hopes to replace:
Please help Stephen Broden by sending him a generous donation today:
The TBF poll in a nutshell: This is a poll designed to promote rising conservative stars. At the end of the week, the winner will be promoted by a network of over 80 conservative blogs and will receive a flurry of contributions from patriots across the country. More information here.
Boohooohooo, what happened to all the drones, Time magazineasks:
What happened to Barack Obama’s once vaunted political machine? The outfit that put upwards of 8 million volunteers on the street in 2008 — known as Organizing for America — is a ghost of its former self. Its staff has shrunk from 6,000 to 300, and its donors are depressed: receipts are a fraction of what they were in 2008. Virtually no one in politics believes it will turn many contests this fall. “There’s no chance that OFA is going to have the slightest impact on the midterms,” says Charlie Cook, who tracks congressional races.
Neglect is to blame. After Obama was elected, his political aides ignored the army he had created until it eventually disappeared. No one was in charge; decisions were often deferred but rarely made. By the time they realized they needed more troops, says longtime consultant Joe Trippi, “their supporters had taken a vacation from politics.”
Since when is the White House supposed to be directing a Chicago-style political machine, anyway?
So earlier this year, when the White House gave OFA a whopping $30 million — more than half of the party’s entire budget for 2010 — senior Democrats suspected a hidden agenda. Several tell Time that OFA boss David Plouffe, who ran Obama’s 2008 campaign, is using the cash to rebuild an army for 2012 under the cover of boosting turnout in 2010. OFA is putting staff into such states as Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona, which have few close statewide races this fall but which are all prime targets in an Obama re-election campaign. “This is totally about 2012,” Cook says.
Dems in Congress are such suckers. They’ve staked their political careers on Obama’s radical agenda, and he thanks them by hoarding most of their money for himself? Too funny!
I think Republicans in Congress are as sick of Obama’s whoppers as we are, probably more so, since they’re so often the target of his barbs. Today, during his speech on the economy in Cleveland, Obama once again accused the Republicans of having no ideas – “And when you ask them what programs they’d actually cut, they usually don’t have an answer.”
“President Obama must have misspoken today, because I have personally sat across the table from him and suggested specific ways to cut spending. Furthermore, House Republican Leader John Boehner and I urged President Obama to work with Republicans to cut spending by using his authority to send Congress a “rescissions” package. In fact, we sent President Obama a letter twice pledging to work together with him on that effort. We still have not heard back – seven months later. It doesn’t end there, through the YouCut program House Republicans have offered over $120 billion in spending cuts, only to be voted down by Democrats in the House. Finally, House Republicans Jeb Hensarling and Paul Ryan have introduced a “Cut Spending Now” package of specific cuts that would save taxpayers $1.3 trillion.
“President Obama is entitled to his opinion, but he’s not entitled to his own facts, and with that in mind I am asking him to either clarify or withdraw the accusation that he made earlier today.”
Gee, since Obama didn’t see fit to respond to any of the previous communications from House Republicans, I rather doubt he’ll hearken to this. Nice try, anyway.
You know why I love this video? Because when the Dems first came up with the supposedly devastating “Party of No” label for Republicans early in 2009, I said, “Embrace it Republicans!” Save us from these ruinous policies!
So, the President is in Cleveland Ohio, today, to give (yet another) speech on the economy, and he plans to target House GOP Leader John Boehner as the “foil Democrats want to run against in an uphill election year.”
In blogs and speeches, Obama and administration aides have repeatedly targeted the longtime Ohio lawmaker possibly poised to become Speaker, but Wednesday’s address by the president will be the most direct assault yet.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that Obama specifically chose Cleveland as the site to lay out his new economic proposals because of Boehner’s address on the economy two weeks ago there.
He said Obama “will spend a decent amount of time” contrasting his economic views with Boehner’s, which the White House argues would return the country to failed policies that led to a financial crisis and recession.
Yes, please do contrast the economic views. Say one more time, “the same policies that drove us into the ditch….” because the American people are not tired of hearing that yet. Keep pretending ruinous Democrat policies had nothing to do with the financial meltdown.
Obama plans to defend his plans to let tax cuts on the “wealthiest taxpayers” expire. This is a key tenet of his Marxist redistributive ideology.
Obama is expected to include a forceful defense of his plans to let tax cuts on the wealthiest taxpayers expire at the end of the year while extending tax cuts on the middle class.
Boehner and Republicans have hammered the president on this point, arguing that all of the tax cuts should be extended. The GOP received an unlikely boost Tuesday from Obama’s former budget director Peter Orszag, who argued the tax cuts on the wealthy should be extended for two years, and that all of the tax cuts should be allowed to expire at that point.
The “wealthiest Americans” who will see their taxes rise are individuals who make over $200,000 and families with incomes below $250,000. Who are these people? Predominantly small business owners. The same people Obama purports to be helping with his new job stimulus.
Part of the stimulus is a program of targeted tax cuts for small business.
The plan, floated as a trial balloon at the New York Times, is this. The administration proposes to take the $35 billion extra revenue from the rich by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on taxpayers earning more than $250,000 a year. Then they will give the $35 billion to small businesses through targeted tax breaks.
Does your head hurt, yet?
So Barack’s cunning plan to jump-start the economy is to steal money out of the back pockets of the nation’s most successful small business owners and then give it right back to them — minus the usual cut to the redistributionist bureaucrats, and plus the administrative burden placed on those busy business owners.
Just brilliant.
According to The Hill:
Boehner’s office seems delighted with the White House strategy, which it framed Tuesday as a desperate and “unprecedented” move by an administration worried it is on the verge of seeing both chambers of Congress go GOP.
“You can sense the panic setting in,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel wrote in an e-mail.
“When was the last time a sitting president of the United States chose to follow the minority leader of the House of Representatives to a city and respond to his or her speech?” Steel asked.
It does smack of desperation. And it won’t work. Obama suffers from overexposure as it is, and his credibility has collapsed. People don’t believe him or trust him, anymore, and all the speeches in the world are not going to change that.
Sixty-eight percent (68%) of U.S. voters prefer a smaller government with fewer services and lower taxes to a more active one that offers more services and higher taxes.
Obama on Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): “Now, it would be one thing if he had admitted his party’s mistakes during the eight years that they were in power.”
Conservative hero Alan Keyes is asking whether there is a pattern of submission surrounding the nation’s 9/11 sites. Apparently he has seen our video expose of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the crescent memorial to Flight 93 (now called a broken circle). Like any straight-thinker, he doesn’t like what he sees. The Flight 93 crash site is no place for a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, no matter what it is called.
On this point, Keyes cites Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo’s 2005 objection to the newly unveiled Crescent of Embrace design:
Back in 2005, then-Rep. Tom Tancredo was reported to have sent a letter to the National Park Service “asking the Interior Department to reconsider the crescent-shaped design of the memorial to those aboard a plane hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, because some may think it honors the terrorists.” Tancredo quite sensibly argues that “regardless of whether ‘the invocation of a Muslim Symbol’ was intentional, ‘it seems that such a symbol is unsuitable for paying appropriate tribute to the heroes of Flight 93 or the ensuing American struggle against radical Islam.’”
Keyes notes our claim that the design is still replete with terrorist memorializing features and he seems to find it credible. Why shouldn’t he? The damning features are all right there in architect Paul Murdoch’s design drawings. Thank you Doctor Keyes!
“It’s not just embarrassing. It is a dangerous willful blindness, spurning the woken vigilance of Flight 93.”
That’s the last line of the full-page advertisement that Tom Burnett Senior and Alec Rawls will be running in the Somerset Daily American this Friday and Saturday (when the two first ladies will be in town for the 9/11 anniversary):
Click for legible image. Full ad-copy PDF here (large file warning).
We are hoping that visitors will hold onto our ad, maybe even tape it to their car windows, and most especially, show it to any press people they come across. Hey, if the Park Service can use 9/11 to plant the world’s largest mosque on the Flight 93 crash site, we can use 9/11 to object.
To join our blogburst against the crescent mosque, just send your blog’s url.
A truly moderate Muslim, former Imam, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, discussed the GZ mosque with Hannity, tonight. Muhammad, in answering Hannity’s query about Rauf, offered his remarkable opinion- that Feisal Abdul Rauf is “making a play to be the most powerful Imam in the Muslim world…if he gets the mosque built, the Muslim world will see it as a heavenly validation of the attacks of 9/11″:
We are proceeding with the community center, Cordoba House. More important, we are doing so with the support of the downtown community, government at all levels and leaders from across the religious spectrum, who will be our partners. I am convinced that it is the right thing to do for many reasons.
What in the world is CNN thinking? – “Hey, let’s get two of the most unpopular personalities on the political scene, and team them up for a new talk show!”
Who’s their target audience? Kathleen Parker is annoyingto most, if not all righties; Eliot Spitzeris embarrassing to most, if not all lefties… The mushy middle is not going to know who the hell either of them are.
Independents’ disapproval of the president has reached an all-time high, with 57 percent giving him negative marks. About 61 percent of independents say Obama has not brought change to Washington. Nearly half now consider him “too liberal” ideologically.
Overall, by a 13-point margin, independent voters say they would support Republican over Democratic candidates in their House districts. A majority of independents – 59 percent – say they would prefer to have Republicans in charge of Congress to serve as a check on the president’s agenda.
It’s easy to figure out why. They believed Obama when he promised them a new, post partisan, post racial, centrist direction. After watching him operate for a year and a half, they know they’ve been had.
Here’s another excellent ad from theNRSC which hits the Dems hard on their failure to revive the economy:
But Democrats will not give up all their power without a fight, and we all know how Dem Socialists fight. That’s why Republicans need to remain vigilant, not only on election day, but right now.
America’s voter rolls are a mess. But you can’t count on the Department of Social Justice and corruptocrat Attorney General Eric Holder to clean them up. It’s another job the feds won’t do. Time for ordinary citizens to step up to the plate. Thanks to a provision in federal law, you can pick up the slack.
Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, has an interesting expose in the Washington Examiner revealing how the U.S. government has decided to allow an obviously illegal fund-raising scheme that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) invented to fuel its spending on political causes and campaigns.
The SEIU has decided to fine any of its locals that does not meet a $25,000 Political Action Committee (PAC) contribution limit. The fine imposed is $37,500. This means that union headquarters is telling the locals that they MUST donate a “voluntary” $27,000 or face this exorbitant fine.
Mix puts it like this:
Imagine the outcry if McDonalds executives demanded that franchise owners collect “voluntary” contributions totaling $25,000 for the company’s PAC from employees at every restaurant.
The outcry would be loud, for sure. But this is exactly what the SEIU is doing to its members.
The FEC expressly forbids organizations from fining members for not contributing to political action committees (PACs), but after receiving complaints, Obama’s FEC has opted to violated its own rules and is allow the SEIU to violate the law. This is the kind of corruption we’re up against.
Some include the words, “Barack Obama, President.” Most say “Putting America to Work.” All say “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.” Regardless, if you see another gaudy sign promoting the $862 billion stimulus package, Rep. Darrell Issa wants to know about it.
Issa, the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has set up an e-mail address, stimulussigns@gmail.com, asking folks to send pictures of the signs with information. The California Republican also asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to explore whether the signs promoting the recovery act, and other actions he considers propaganda, are legal.
On Iraq, the president said, “Our combat mission is ending, but our commitment to Iraq’s future is not.” But what our enemies heard was that in Iraq “we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page,” and his unequivocal pledge that “all U.S. troops will leave by the end of next year.” This was music to the ears of Islamic extremists from the caves of Waziristan to the palaces of Tehran.
On Afghanistan, while the president said he was committed to “preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a base for terrorists,” what our enemies heard was that while the “pace of our troop reductions will be determined by conditions on the ground” those reductions will go forward — regardless of conditions on the ground. “But make no mistake: This transition will begin — because open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.” For the enemy, there is no mistaking the meaning of the president’s words. Recently Marine Corps Commandant James Conway said the Afghanistan deadline is “probably giving our enemy sustenance. In fact we’ve intercepted communications that say, ‘Hey, you know, we only need to hold out for so long.’ ” By reinforcing this perception, Obama’s Oval Office address gave our enemies sustenance as well.
It was painful to watch President Obama give his speech on the end of the combat mission in Iraq. It was a war he had opposed, refused to fund, and said the surge would not work. All this war stuff seemed boring to him. Obama came across as cold and aloof. He said some of the right things but you had this gnawing feeling that he didn’t really mean them.
When he announced that “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was over, he made it sound like he had fulfilled a campaign promise to bring the troops home. In reality the agreement was signed under President Bush. Since Obama had never discussed Iraq as President, it was even off-putting to hear him name it. It reminded me of the time I spent volunteering for the Family Readiness Group of an Army unit near my home. I was at a table filling out forms for the soldier and his or her family. It informed them of the services available to their loved ones. I was instructed to fill the form out with the code OIF–Operation Iraqi Freedom. It really hit me as I talked to these soldiers that they were volunteers and proud to go even with the disruption in their lives. I was in awe of them.
President Bush was accused of not being eloquent but you could never accuse him of not being sincere with the troops. His voice broke many times and his face got red as he tried to hold back tears. Many thought that was corny. But it was real. He was real. Yes, we miss him now. In Ohio a poll shows that if the Presidential election were held today Bush would beat Obama 50-42!
Check back, I’ll add more links as the day wears on.
Barack Obama is an internationalist, and this has more ominous implications for American sovereignty. As soon as he became president, he took decisive steps to submit American sovereignty to the will of international bodies.
Legal expert M. Edward Whelan III has spelled out the implications of this. He explains that transnationalists, among whom Obama and many of his appointees must clearly be numbered, “aim in particular to use American courts to import international law to override the policies adopted through the processes of representative government.”
Whelan is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. “What transnationalism, at bottom, is all about,” he explains, “is depriving American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites.”
Whelan wrote this before Obama reported Arizona to the U.N., and the Arizona case bears him out fully. Obama’s latest attack on America may shock Americans, but readers of my book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America nod their heads in recognition. It’s all in the book: the relinquishing of American sovereignty and Obama’s internationalism. Americans can’t say they weren’t warned. They should have noticed that the charismatic young Democratic presidential candidate had numerous socialist associations, going back to a childhood spent among internationalists. And even as recently as nine months before he was elected president, he sponsored a bill in the Senate that would compromise American sovereignty: the Global Poverty Act.
Nazi collaborator, and sociopath, George Soros is up to no good in The Great White North: Moral hollowness at work:
This mini bio by Ezra Levant highlights the moral hollowness that has defined George Soros’ life, starting with his Nazi collaboration as a teenagerto his 3.3 billion profit off of the financial collapse, last year.
Now Soros has turned his attention to Canada.
One of his front groups, called Avaaz, is lobbying to stop Sun Media’s license for a TV news channel. Soros doesn’t know anything about Canada — Avaaz called the Sun newspapers the “Suncor newspapers” — but we’re his latest toy.
Avaaz is sending a petition to Canada’s TV regulator, the CRTC, claiming that thousands of Canadians want to censor the Sun and keep it off the air.
The petition is a fraud — it’s an Internet petition, and anyone can sign anyone else up without their permission. Fake names are permitted, and so are foreign citizens. And the whole campaign is run out of New York.
Do you think Soros should determine what you can watch on TV? Do you think that decision should be made in New York? Is our freedom of speech just another trinket for him to buy and sell?
ND, Dick Armey
ExUrban Jon with my The Other McCain coffee mug, which I lost, and McCain ungraciously refused to replace.
Breeanne, Alexa, Cheryl
