Mr. and Mrs. Bergdahl held another press conference, Sunday, to send a messages to their son.
Mrs. Bergdahl sounded like you would expect any mother to sound like after enduring such a long ordeal – tearfully happy and thankful that her son is coming home.
Mr. B. was an entirely different matter, though – raising more questions than he answered.
“I hope your English is coming back and know that I love you, so proud of your character,” he said of the son who was not well regarded by his former comrades at all. After deserting his post, no less than six soldiers from his unit were killed trying to find him.
Seeming to confirm that Bowe indeed went AWOL, he said, “I’m proud of how much you wanted to help the Afghan people and what you were willing to do to go to that length…”
At the State of the Union, last night one of House Minority Leader Eric Cantor’s staffers was evicted from the Capitol because he didn’t have his ID on him. Doug Heye, Cantor’s deputy chief of staff for communications was in Statuary Hall chatting with some reporters, when a Capitol Police officer came by to check for credentials.
Heye, right, forgot his ID. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
He searched every pocket and didn’t have it. A fellow staffer, Cantor Communications Director Rory Cooper, vouched for Heye, but to no avail.
Heye had momentarily dressed down in the hours leading up to SOTU — “Left my ID in my topcoat!” he told HOH — but rocketed back to the office to retrieve his congressional credentials.
ID’s were apparently not an issue for the 5 illegal immigrants who were official guests of various Democrats (including the Obamas) at the SOTU, last night.
Rep. Joe Garcia (D-Fla.) proudly announced that his guest to the State of the Union was Mayra Rubio Limon, a “Dreamer” who was arrested last November at the Capitol Hill at (ironically enough) Eric Cantor’s office.
Rep. Garcia is not the only one who has invited illegal aliens. Sitting with Michelle Obama is illegal alien Cristian Avila. Illinois delegation members Reps. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) and Bill Foster (D- Ill.), invited Estefania Garcia and Maria Torres, while Lucas Codognolla is the guest of Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.). All five have been granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows certain illegal aliens to stay and work in the United States for two years, with eligibility for extension.
The head of the union representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and staff issued a harsh rebuke to President Obama for having illegal immigrants in the chamber during his State of the Union address.
“According to news accounts, the President has once again invited illegal immigrants to the State of the Union — and yet the President still refuses to meet with ICE officers,” National ICE Council head and ICE officer Chris Crane in a statement. “We have a President who will provide those illegally in the US with the seat of honor at one of the most important events of the year, but ICE officers who serve under him are unwelcome in the White House.”
“The country’s biggest challenge, domestically speaking, no doubt about it, is a debt crisis. … It looks like the debt is going to continue rising under this budget,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Presidents are elected to lead, not to punt. And this president has been punting.”
Some who worked on Obama’s fiscal panel were also disappointed by his decision not to endorse any of the major elements of their deficit-reduction plan, which calls for raising the Social Security retirement age, charging wealthy seniors more for Medicare and limiting popular tax breaks such as the mortgage interest deduction.
“I would have preferred to see the administration get out front on addressing the entitlements and the tax reform that we need to reduce long-run deficits,” said Alice Rivlin, a commission member who served as budget director in the Clinton White House. “But they clearly made a tactical decision that this is not the best way to get to a positive result.”
Erskine Bowles, the Democratic chairman of the fiscal commission, said the White House budget request goes “nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare.”
Hot Air has video of Ryan slamming Obama for “punting” on the budget crisis.
His plan appears to be nothing more than a continuation of the insanely irresponsible tax and spend fiscal policies that are leading the nation to ruin.
Raising the top marginal income tax rate (at which a majority of small business profits face taxation) from 35% to 39.6%. This is a $709 billion/10 year tax hike
Raising the capital gains and dividends rate from 15% to 20%
Raising the death tax rate from 35% to 45% and lowering the death tax exemption amount from $5 million ($10 million for couples) to $3.5 million. This is a $98 billion/ten year tax hike
Capping the value of itemized deductions at the 28% bracket rate. This will effectively cut tax deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, property taxes, state and local income or sales taxes, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and unreimbursed employee business expenses. A new means-tested phaseout of itemized deductions limits them even more. This is a $321 billion/ten year tax hike
New bank taxes totaling $33 billion over ten years
New international corporate tax hikes totaling $129 billion over ten years
New life insurance company taxes totaling $14 billion over ten years
Massive new taxes on energy, including LIFO repeal, Superfund, domestic energy manufacturing, and many others totaling $120 billion over ten years
Increasing unemployment payroll taxes by $15 billion over ten years
Taxing management capital gains in an investment partnership (“carried interest”) as ordinary income. This is a tax hike of $15 billion over ten years
A giveaway to the trial lawyers—not letting companies deduct the cost of punitive damages from a lawsuit settlement. This is a tax hike of $300 million over ten years
Increasing tax penalties, information reporting, and IRS information sharing. This is a ten-year tax hike of $20 billion.
Republican Budget Committee ranking member, Jeff Sessions, called the President’s plan, “a blueprint for losing the future”:
Park 51is purportedly the Twitter account for the Cordoba Initiative (ground zero mosque), which aims to promote “understanding and interfaith dialog”.
Sources in New York said on Monday that Muslim religious and business leaders will announce plans to abandon the project in the next few days.
New York Governor David Patterson said last weekend that Muslim leaders had rejected outright his proposal tto swap the site in for another in Manhattan.
But several people familiar with the debate among New York’s Islamic activists now claim that the leaders are convinced abandoning the site is preferable to unleashing a wave of bitterness towards Muslims.
They also hope the move will be seen as a show of sensitivity to families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and to the American public generally.
It didn’t take long for GZ mosque organizers, (Park51), to push back against those claims on twitter:
True, it seems from my own perusal of Park51’s tweets, he does not answer questions related to Islamic extremism, including the question, “Does Israel have a right to exist?”
I don’t know the owners of the building that will be Park51, but if their spokesman on twitter is any indication of who they are, then I am even more uncomfortable with the Mosque being built there.
Just a thought:
It looks to me like the man behind the tweets of Park51 is employing a combination oftaqiyya,and Alinsky’s rule #5.
I wonder if Breitbart knew what a can of worms he was opening when he posted that edited Shirley Sherrod video? Because the more we look at her and her husband, that 13 million settlement she got just prior to being hired by the USDA, and the multi-billion Pigford vs Glickman class action settlement, the more disgusted and suspicious we get. The settlement is starting to look more like a boondoggle, or worse yet, reparations.
Zombie, did a little snooping and found more questions than answers:
In the 1999 case Pigford v. Glickman, the USDA agreed to pay 16,000 black farmers $1 billion after a judge held the federal government responsible for the decline in black farmers. Critics argued that more than 70,000 farmers were shut out of the lawsuit. In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley got a law passed to reopen the case, and the settlement talks moved forward.
The $1.25 billion settlement, announced Thursday, comes on top of the money paid out a decade ago. The new agreement would provide cash payments and debt relief to farmers who applied too late to participate in the earlier settlement, The Washington Post reported. Authorities say they are not certain how many farmers might apply this time, but analysts say the number could be higher than 70,000.
Seventy-thousand+ applicants in addition to the 16,000 already compensated now means that over 86,000 people are slated to be paid.
What I want to know is: How can there be 86,000 legitimate
claimants?
The Census pinpoints the precise number of African-American
farmers
In the pdf version of the government’s official 2007 Agricultural
Census, Table 53 on page 646 shows that there are exactly 39,697
African-American farmers grand total in the entire nation.
Moreover, another Dept. of Agriculture census report gives the total number of black farmers in 1992, the time of the Pigford vs Glickman lawsuit:
It makes no sense. The woman has no judicial experience, she’s clearly a radical with a judicial philosophy hostile to the Constitution, she’s manipulated science to further her extreme position on abortion, and worst of all she’s young and healthy, which means we’ll be dealing with her destructive views for the next 30 years….
And what are our Republican Senators doing? Rolling over and playing dead.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, one of the few GOP senators who can normally be counted on to stand up for conservatism, has all but agreed to buy Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan a celebratory lunch once she’s confirmed.
Kagan is a documented enemy of the individual right to keep and bear arms, a self-described practitioner of judicial activism (she believes the Constitution has to evolve with the times), an attorney who views “equality” as paramount (particularly when that equality encompasses gay relationships like marriage), and a woman who refuses to admit whether she believes the government has the right to ban books based on their political content.
Yet Cornyn, on day three of Kagan’s confirmation hearings, said he was trying to ascertain what kind of justice she “will be” (such defeatist language almost always portends that it’s a foregone conclusion that the nominee “will be” confirmed).
And he even added: “My gut tells me that she will probably be a predictable member of the minority block” and also said, “I assume she will be confirmed.”
Why assume something will happen when you have the power to stop it?
The rules of “cloture” and “nuclear option” aside and assuming all 100 members are present, it would take 41 senators to filibuster a vote to confirm Elena Kagan as the 112th Justice of the Supreme Court. It seems rather odd that 41 senators could impede the will of 59 colleagues, especially because it takes only a simple majority to complete President Obama’s plan to ensure that the makeup of the court loses no ground in the relentless pursuit of unlimited (and unconstitutional) power. Guess how many senators are Republicans?
In general, I prefer majority rule in a legislative body. But, because confirmation of the wrong nominee to the Court is of such singular importance to our nation, my advice to the 41 is to filibuster.
***
The only evidence worth considering are the facts revealed by an independent investigation into the nominee’s past. And, the only question worth investigating is whether that past is predictive of a willingness to abide by an oath to support the Constitution (otherwise known as the “rule of law”) or whether it is predictive of a plan “to mold and steer the law in order to promote ethical values and achieve certain social ends” (otherwise known as the “rule of whatever floats your boat”). Ms. Kagan approves of the latter. I do not. Nominees who believe in the activist approach to judging missed their calling, for Congress is where the job of “molding the law to achieve social ends” properly resides.
I’ve already linked to this AUL video, along with the transcript of Dr. Yoest’s powerful July 1 testimony. In case you missed it, the video is worth watching. Dr. Yoest is a powerful spokesman for the pro life cause, and is calling for an investigation into Kagan’s Clinton era hijinks :
Under the circumstances, why is it considered “dirty” to filibuster this nominee? Just because she’s been affable at her hearings, and is a Twilight fan? I don’t get it.
Senators to Contact, via Atlas Shrugs,(watch her video at the link, as well):
Nice Deb 