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I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 5 or 6 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

The White House threatened to veto House legislation to extend transportation programs because it contains GOP language that mandates approval of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.

Defying a White House veto threat, the House on Wednesday passed legislation that extends transportation program funding through September and mandates construction of thea controversial keystone oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast. 69 Democrats voted for this bill and 14 Republicans voted against it.

Police reveal that George Zimmerman, who has been charged with second-degree murder in the racially charged case, was bleeding from the nose and the back of his head and was treated by medics before being taken to Sanford police station after the February 26 shooting. There are pictures to confirm this. Zimmerman was offered semi-reasonable bail. One of the key pieces of evidence is also that, the shooting took place at close range, which would support Zimmerman’s claim that they had been struggling (however, there has been almost no reporting on the alleged powder burns on Martin’s clothing).

Alton L. Hayes III, a west suburban man charged with a hate crime, told police he was so upset about the Trayvon Martin case in Florida that he beat up a white man early Tuesday.

The Los Angeles County coroner's office has ruled that conservative blogger and commentator Andrew Breitbart died of heart failure stemming from coronary disease.

The Obama administration is looking for states that will experiment with unemployment insurance programs by letting people “test” a job while still receiving benefits. Yes, you get to work and collect unemployment benefits. Only the government could come up with something like this.

An appeals court upheld a requirement in a 2004 Arizona law that voters show identification before they can cast ballots, saying that there wasn't evidence that the mandate disproportionately affected Latinos as the challengers had alleged.

President Obama's big initiative for the day is yet another pledge to crack down on nefarious energy traders who are driving up prices of oil and gasoline. This is the fourth year of making this same pledge.

A new controversial measure could potentially impact every American who owns a car. Beginning in 2015, all cars will be required to be fitted with a black box data recorder, known officially as "event data recorders" or EDRs. These black box recorders work much like the ones on airplanes, capturing data related to a crash. In some cases, authorities can tap into a car's EDR to check vehicle speed, airbag deployments, and pedal application a few seconds before and after impact.

We just found out that President Barack Obama's economic stimulus act allocated $10 million to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for “Project Gunrunner,” a program that traced guns sold to straw purchasers, an operation that was designed to prevent Mexican criminal organizations from obtaining U.S. guns. However, it is not clear if “Operation Fast & Furious” (where guns were sold to straw purchases but never followed up on) was a completely new programs or what “Project Gunrunner” morphed into. Many people believe that “Operation Fast & Furious” was designed to put guns out on the street into the hands of dangerous people, so that gun legislation could be passed because of the ugly results. Recall that, there are emails indicating that some in the ATF were worried that Gabby Giffords had been shot with a F&F gun.

Tait Sye, Planned Parenthood's former media director, has joined Obama’s HHS as deputy assistant secretary for public affairs.

The White House announced Friday that the president will speak at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Iowa, to call on Congress to pass legislation designed to keep student loan rates down. The White House has denied that political concerns were behind President Obama's decision to travel to Iowa, North Carolina and Colorado—3 key battleground states—next week.

Senate Republicans turned to Miguel Estrada, a man whom Democrats denied a presidential appointment in 2003, to be their lawyer as they fight to overturn some of President Obama's own appointments. The move escalates the simmering constitutional battle between the Congress and the White House over several appointments Mr. Obama made in January, when the Senate was still meeting every few days and considered itself in session.

There is nothing more mobile than rich people with money. Last year, almost 1,800 people renounced their U.S. citizenship or handed in their Green Cards. That's a record number since the Internal Revenue Service began publishing a list of those who renounced in 1998. It's also almost eight times more than the number of citizens who renounced in 2008, and more than the total for 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined. Democrats, who want to tax the rich do not realize that we live in a dynamic society; and once you pile on taxes high enough, rich people will simply move somewhere else. Money can buy whatever sort of lifestyle money can afford in nearly any country.

The Senate rejected the so-called Buffett Rule on Monday evening. 51 senators voted in favor the tax increase on high-income owners, officially called the Paying A Fair Share Act, while 45 voted against it. But the Buffett Rule failed to get the necessary 60 votes to invoke cloture and end debate on the bill, effectively killing the rule's chances of passing the Senate. One Democrat voted against it and one Republican voted for it.

Fareed Zakaria, a CNN pundit who has advocated nuclear containment of Iran and expressed antipathy towards American democracy, is said to be on the short list for a top diplomatic post in a second Obama administration-perhaps even secretary of State.

It’s come out that the Obama Administration gave Hilary Rosen back-door lobbying privileges with high-level access to top White House Officials.

Disgraced ex-MF Global CEO Jon Corzine is still bundling for Obama, and has raised more than $500K. You will recall that MF Global, which Corzine ran, had $1.2 billion of client money go missing from its coffers and Corzine had no idea where it was and is presently being sued for some of these missing funds (I’ve seen different figures; $1.2 billion seems to be the latest one).

Small Illinois town Comptroller, Rita Crundwell, steals $30 Million from the small town of Dixon since 2006; and is yet another example of government fraud, waste and abuse.

Apparently, what set of the Secret Service scandal was a Colombian prostitute who got angry with two agents who refused to pay her full price for servicing the two of them, leading to a financial dispute over between $40 and $60. Other sources say that the disagreement was over a lot more money. The girl’s “name” was Dania, by the way. It will cost us about $1.5 million to investigate “Hookergate.”

A recent study, funded by taxpayers, tried to determine if rats on coke liked Miles Davis records.

Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to "insource" jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields - including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses. The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It's available to college students in the Philippines.

First Solar, a solar energy company that received a $1.46 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, announced that it will layoff 2,000 workers in the United States and world-wide.

A bankruptcy court ordered $368,500 in bonuses for 20 top managers and employees of Solyndra, the solar panel firm that received $535 million from taxpayers two years before filing for bankruptcy and laying off 11,000 employees.

More layoffs at Obama-funded electric carmaker Fisker Automotive, Delaware plant Is "absolutely empty" $529 million flushed down the toilet.

A Boston feminist group, the SPARK Movement, has formally objected to Lego’s "LadyFigs," which are the female version of the little figures who man the spaceships, trucks and forts children create. "Ladyfigs" are somewhat anatomically correct, which hypersexualizes girls, according to the group. "They have little breasts and they have fancy hair," the organization's executive director, Dana Edell, told FoxNews.com. "And it just disturbs us that this is the image that they want girls to see." They’re not insane.

This coming Tuesday, radicals of all stripes will descend upon the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington D.C. to rally in support of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, whom they would like to see released from prison. Interestingly enough, as Weasel Zippers points out, these same groups would support Zimmerman being thrown into jail forever.

Since it is Spring and the weather is nicer, the Occupy movement is back. In NYC, Occupy protesters smash Starbucks, shouting "All pigs must die." They have vowed to shut down tunnels and bridges in San Francisco and New York City; and to invade shareholders’ meetings.

A banned militant organization in Pakistan torched a house to punish its residents for playing music and beating drums during a wedding ceremony.

Mohammad Ashan, a mid-level Taliban commander in Paktika province, strolled toward a police checkpoint in the district of Sar Howza with a wanted poster bearing his own face. He demanded the finder's fee referenced on the poster: $100.

A Muslim mob has burned down a Catholic church frequented by Southern Sudanese in the capital Khartoum.

About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned after drinking contaminated water at a high school in the country's north, officials said, blaming it on conservative radicals opposed to female education.

President Obama: “We need to be supporting scientists and researches who are trying to make the next breakthrough in clean energy or biotech. I want clean energy to happen here in the United States. I want advanced batteries made here in the United States. I want electric cars made here in the United States. I want solar and wind power made here in the United States. We've been subsidizing oil companies with taxpayer giveadays for about a hundred years now. It's time to double down on clean energy that has never been more promising!"

President Barack Obama: "Republicans in Congress have voted against new ways to make college more affordable . . . and voted for huge new tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires"

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: "The fact is this president has been so respectful of the Republicans in Congress. He has given them every opportunity for the executive and the legislative branch to work together, to have a solution that has bi-partisan support. He's been criticized by some for taking the time that it takes to find out that they're never going to give him a break, which is a compromise."

President Obama on the Trayvon Martin shooting: "Well, I think we all understand that issues of race are deeply embedded in the history of this country. Sometimes that history has been tragic, slavery, Jim Crow, but also more recent examples of anti-immigrant sentiment, and you know, I think what I always tell people is that . . . my election alone is not going to completely transform attitudes because this has to do with hearts and not just minds. It has to do with attitudes, not just laws." George Zimmerman is Hispanic, for goodness sake!

First lady Michelle Obama, when talking about the Trayvon Martin shooting: “...there isn't, you know, a one-shot solution to this.”

President Barack Obama: "I believe in investing in basic research and science because I understand that all these extraordinary companies that are these enormous wealth-generators - many of them would have never been there; Google, Facebook would not exist, had it not been for investments that we made as a country in basic science and research."

President Obama on opposite day: “I've never believed that government can or should try to solve every problem we've got. I believe that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. I agree that everybody has personal responsibility for their own lives. Everybody has got to work hard. Nothing is ever handed to us.”

Michelle Obama: "This President has brought us out of the dark and into the light."

Former Obama administration adviser Van Jones: "We have to win politically in November to stop the tea party. We don't want a tea party presidency, and I don't care what you think about Mitt Romney. If we wins, he'll win because the tea party got excited enough - that base got excited enough - he will have to govern as a tea party president so we don't want a tea party president."

Vice President Joe Biden: "As the guys on the other side [Republicans] have shown and promised, they're going to spend several hundred million dollars carpet bombing the President with negative ads.”

Michelle Obama: “My father, he had MS, was a blue-collar city worker all his life”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.): "...when talking about seniors, seniors love getting junk mail. It's sometimes their only way of communicating or feeling like they're part of the real world."

Harry Reid on John Mica, who has been conducting House questioning of the GSA spending scandal: "First of all, Mica, who is doing this, should get a life and do what he's supposed to do."

Joseph Kennedy III, who will be running for Barney Frank’s [House] seat: "Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama - they've all talked about the same thing: the need to wean ourselves off our debilitating dependence on foreign oil. The cycle that allows cheap oil to trump tough choices has to stop. Forty years is enough." $5/gallon isn’t enough.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner: “...the president's policies were remarkably effective. if you look at this recovery and this -- the effectiveness, in recent memory, dramatically effective, at a much lower cost than people expected...this president's policies were extremely successful. if you look at the record of what we did and what other countries did, history will judge what he did as remarkably effective crisis management at a deeply dark time for the world economy .”

Jesse Jackson Jr.: “And, for the middle class, the Ryan, Romney budget for the rich is not the path to prosperity; for the 99%, the Ryan budget is really the road to hell.” The Ryan budget cuts about $19 billion from a $3.8 trillion dollar budget.

North Carolina Democrat Governor Beverly Purdue to a reporter on Democratic sexual harassment scandal: “Get over it. None of us, none of us ever condone or put up with or tolerate sexual harassment. It's unacceptable, it's illegal and intolerable. What we have here, and what has been going on is an internal personnel matter being dealt with by this party and that's all there is.” Whatever happened, there appears to have been a settlement agreed to quite quickly.

Joe Biden: “What do you think will happen to your grandparents' Medicare and Medicaid [if Romney is elected]?”

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.): "I think there's something to be said about people who park their money off-shore and we don't know exactly what is in those accounts. You know, you look at despots from foreign countries putting their money in Swiss bank accounts, we have always frowned upon that, and I don't see us saying people of wealth, especially people wanting to be president of the United States."

Joe Klein on Barack Obama in Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people: “A year ago, Barack Obama's presidency seemed to be in deep trouble. His party had been thrashed in the 2010 congressional elections. The economy was languishing. His poll ratings were dismal. A year later, though, he stands as the favorite to win the presidential election of 2012.... most of all, in the roil of a difficult time, he seemed smart and steady, trustworthy. Monuments are not often built to politicians who are merely trustworthy, but they do tend to win re-election.”

Vice President Joe Biden about President Obama: "I'm telling you folks, not only do I know this guy, we've become close. He means it. It's not just campaign. This guy means it, he feels it, he tastes it. It's the reason why he's engaged."

President Obama about Warren Buffet in Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people: "Today Warren is not just one of the world's richest men but also one of the most admired and respected. He has devoted the vast majority of his wealth to those around the world who are suffering, or sick, or in need of help. And he uses his stature as a leader to press others of great means to do the same."

Senator Barbara Boxer: "I got to say to the women out there, whether you're a Republican, a Democrat or Independent, if you're a self-respecting human being, please vote for President Obama. And for the men who care about women, do the same thing."

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi statement: "For more than four decades, Earth Day has brought Americans together to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the environment we all share. This day is an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to the cause of a cleaner planet, to the promise of a clean energy economy, to the potential of new technologies, and to the movement to confront the challenge of climate change.”

Government funded report by the University of Arizona researchers, who collaborated with Mexican researchers at El Colegio de Sonora: "Rapid growth in these areas [like Arizona] has increased the vulnerability of urban water users to climatic changes. Researchers found increased vulnerability of urban water users to climatic changes because of factors such as aging or inadequate water-delivery infrastructure, over-allocation of water resources within the region and the location of poor neighborhoods in flood-prone areas or other areas at risk." Like those factors would not impact the water supply by themselves, apart from climate change?

Van Jones: "You always have some Americans that, they don't want to go forward. `We like slavery,' or `we like segregation,' or `we like women not voting,' or `we like the environment being destroyed, we like workers having no rights, we like children in factories. . .' And they want to conserve, ahem, conserve, ahem, conserve the old ways."

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan: “[Obama knows what] it's like to take a subway or a bus just to find a fresh piece of fruit in a grocery store."

Vice President Joe Biden, either making a joke or off his meds: "Obama knew that some actions were going to be unpopular, such as the financial sector bailout. `That would be like legalizing rattlesnakes in the lobbies of hotels in Arizona' “

A prayer guide found at PlannedParenthood.org, 40 Days of Prayer Supporting Women Everywhere, suggests these prayers: "We give thanks for the doctors who provide quality abortion care." and “We pray for a cloud of gentleness to surround every abortion facility." and “We pray for all the staff at abortion clinics around the nation. May they be daily confirmed in the sacred care that they offer women."

Liberal talkler, Ed Schultz: “Am I missing something? Should I be talking about or covering this hooker scandal down in Colombia that the Secret Service is involved in? I've heard they do that stuff all the time. I'm not trying to denigrate the service or anything, but it's amazing how they got caught.”

Behind Mitt Romney is the banner, “Obama isn’t working.” So, Tommy Christopher of Mediate, explains how this is racist: “The slogan is a multiple entendre, but one of those entendres, intentionally or not, is evocative of a nasty racial stereotype about black men...That's not a nice thing to say about any president, but like it or not, it becomes a more loaded accusation when leveled at our first black president.”

Jesse Jackson: “Healthcare—we don’t live as long. High infant mortality rate, short life expectency, that’s profiling; school suspensions, and that’s profiling...you look at the Trayvon Martin case, it starts with a suspension, an unnecessary suspension—he’s been thrown away by the thousands of days out of school, and you get 10 days behind in physics, or math, and you can’t catch up. You go there from suspension, to expulsion, to truancy, the streets, the gangs, the drugs, and [inaudible] death.”

Van Jones: “The right wing and the law enforcement establishment brought the wrath of God down on the White House, I was there, and suddenly he's forced to do a beer summit to sit eye to eye with a racist police officer . . . as a black man, even the most powerful man in the world, can not speak about race and if he does he's then forced to sit humbly across the table from a racist police officer.”

MSNBC’s Michael Eric Dyson, explaining how many whites view Obama: “...the stereotypes that prevail, right, I'm afraid of him, he's a - he's a moron, he's an orangutan, he's an animal. Look at all of that.

Farrakhan: "It ain't about hating you [whities]. We ain't got no time for that. But we know who we're dealing with. We know what we're dealing with. We know your origin in the world and we know how long you were set to live and unless you change, your end has come."

House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.): "Reagan, of course, is somewhat out of style except theoretically nowadays. Reagan would not have felt comfortable in my opinion in the Republican conference [because] he was prepared to sit down and work together." Interestingly enough, a much younger Rep. Steny Hoyer voted in favor of Reagan’s now-famous 1981 tax cuts.

NBC anchor Anchor Brian Williams introduced Andrea Mitchell's report: “Federal investigators are trying to figure out whether Ted Nugent is just a loud mouth or a dangerous loud mouth. It's what the former rock musician said in support of Mitt Romney that got him an appointment to talk to the feds right at this time when Romney is trying to win over conservative Republicans.”

A clip of "gun-loving rocker" Ted Nugent making a reference to the movie Braveheart and calling on audience members to "chop their heads off in November."

Andrea Mitchell then linked Nugent to the Romney campaign. Mitchell: “Nugent endorsed Romney in March, tweeting, ‘After a long heart and soul conversation with Mitt Romney today, I concluded this good man will properly represent 'we the people,' and I endorsed him.’ "

Mitchell: “Asked about Nugent's latest comments, the Romney campaign said divisive language is offensive without mentioning Nugent. But Nugent has been trash talking Barack Obama since 2007....For now, the Romney campaign seems to think Nugent's support is more important than the criticism he brings.”

Of course, nothing was ever said about similar language from President Obama. What Obama said and what Ted Nugent said were perhaps a little strong, but one gets reported in a segment which condemnation is at least implied; and the other is not covered at all in the same way.

The AP (and this is a little complex): “The job market is improving in Michigan and Ohio. In Michigan, unemployment fell to 8.5 percent in March from 10.5 percent in March 2011. And in Ohio, it dropped to 7.5 percent from 8.8 percent over the same period, putting it well below the national average of 8.2 percent. A Fox News poll released Friday showed Obama leading Romney 45 percent to 39 percent among registered voters in Ohio... Many blue-collar workers in Ohio and Michigan credit the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler for saving tens of thousands of auto industry jobs, says Paul Allen Beck, a political science professor at Ohio State University. The bailout began under President George W. Bush, but Obama expanded it. "There's a feeling the administration went out of its way to protect jobs that are very important," Beck said.” No mention and not credit is given to the Republican governors of those states. Furthermore, very pertinent facts, such as, the unemployment rates at the beginning of the Obama regime and well as right before the 2010 election, would have been important stats to include in this story. But they weren’t. Newsbusters does a more extensive analysis.

NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski: “These controversial photos taken by American soldiers were actually taken two years ago, but it makes them no less embarrassing today. The uncropped photos are too graphic and disturbing to show on television. In this shot, Afghan soldiers are holding up the severed legs of a dead Taliban suicide bomber while American soldiers in the background mug for the camera. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta Secretary Leon Panetta today strongly condemned the soldiers' conduct.” And this is fine; and I have no problem with his report. CBS gave a similar report. However, 4 or more years ago, whenever there was an embarrassing incident in Iraq or Afghanistan, this would constantly be trotted out by the media to show just another place where President Bush had failed.

MSNBC host Alex Wagner: “[Catholics] are not a monolithic voting bloc...There are a lot of Catholics in the country, and I could name a few, who think that the Church, you know, has been far too vocal on issues that don't matter and not nearly vocal enough on those that do." Apparently to Wagner, the USCCB's pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, and anti-ObamaCare contraception mandate are those pesky, inconsequential policy matters that the bishops waste their time on. From Newsbusters.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “...this time will it be the messiah again or a mechanic - in other words, Romney?”

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir: “You have to hand it to Mitt and Ann Romney. Even their righteous indignation is as fake and as two-faced as everything else that marks their presidential campaign.”

MSNBC host Martin Ashir: "Sarah Palin barked up with a comment in regard to the Secret Service issue, where she also bragged about being `checked out.' ”

Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown: “During Hitler's Germany, there were 50 foreign correspondents in Berlin, which is an incredible index of the golden era of journalism. What we have, of course, in the era of today with Andrew Breitbart - the blogger, the right-wing radical blogger who just recently dropped dead in the early 40s - was, of course, the absolute opposite. It's really the degradation, in a sense, of the journalistic ideals of a William Shirer. It was the absolute opposite. Breitbart didn't report anything. What really what Breitbart did was he was a provocateur. He was a death by 1,000 tweets. He, you know, was quite happy to take the flying sound bite - any sound bite - and misapply it in its context and create an absolute mayhem for the person concerned like he did for poor Shirley Sherrod who was the obscure official in the Agriculture Department. He gave the impression by the cutting of her words in a tape that he released that she was giving racially motivated financing decisions when actually she was doing the very opposite. So this was really

using a kind of bastardization of journalism through the format of Web and tweeting and, you know, just simply using the Internet as a tool for activism.”

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir: "It doesn't matter how many times he hears the truth, Mitt Romney prefers to tell lies...from the Book of Mormon to Nephi, Chapter 2, Verse 34 we find this: `Wo unto the liar, for he shall be thrust down to hell.'”

Film star Matt Damon: "I would kiss George W. Bush on the mouth for what he did on PEPFAR [AIDS work in Africa]. Three seconds. No tongue."

Roseanna Barr: “[M]rs. Mitt Romney and one of her adult sons took to the airwaves in defense of countless stay-at-home mothers whose husbands are billionaire insurance-company hucksters and corporate raiders, and both represented a decadent and crumbling empire well. Mrs. Mitt Romney claims to have worked her toned ass off, raising five Romney males all on her own, as privileged wives often do - but, no, Ann, I call b__t on your Big Mama story, girlfriend. Your son may flash that "I adore my mother" grin on cable TV all day as he backs up your claims that you did it all on your own with no help - except from a "lady" who comes in one or two hours a week to help with housework. Of course neither Mrs. Mitt Romney nor her son knew the name of the "cleaning lady," either, because like 99 percent of rich people, they are oblivious to those women who do work outside the home, even when they work inside the home of the Romney family.”

President Obama, 2008: "If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things."

Citizen Obama from Dreams from my Father: "With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).”

Media Matters submission to the IRS for tax exempt status: "Media Matters for America (MMA) believes that news reporting and analysis by the American media, with its eye on profit margin and preservation of the status quo, has become biased. It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to overly promote corporate interests, the rights of the wealthy, and a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology."

Sec. Steven Chu, in 2011: “Together we can help meet President Obama's bold but achievable vehicle goals. We can become the first country to put one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.” The plan here was to have the government buy these cars for various governmental agencies, like the GSA.

Liberal birthday wishes to Ann Romney: “Happy birthday, bitch; hope you die.” Actually, none of them were quite that nice. In case you want to read how loving liberals can be.

David Axelrod, top campaign adviser to President Obama, on comprehensive immigration reform: "A lot of Republicans in Congress want to cooperate, they know better, but they are in the thralls of this reign of terror from the far right that has dragged this party to the right."

Current TV host Cenk Uygur: "All right, before I go to my panel, let me just level Bill O'Reilly. First of all, it's you right-wingers who try to hurt people and their families, by killing them, by bombing abortion clinics, et cetera. You're the one with the right-wing extremist terrorists on your side...[Bill], You are a g___n Nazi. That's what you are, OK? You're going to call us fascists all day long, and we're not going to respond? Well, those days are over, Nazi."

Pastor T. Ray McJunkins of the Union Baptist Church, of taking out Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker: “We are the Davids. . . and you may be a big giant, a big goliath, but David had 5 smooth stones that brought Goliath down. . . all he had was stones and a sling shot, and I just wonder out there among us, how many of you came with your sling today?. . . Load your slings up today when we leave here, putting a smooth stone of equal rights at the collective bargaining table and throw it at Goliath. . . And Goliath will come down, Scott Walker we send you back to Wisconsin as David did Goliath, we cut your head off and go back into town, singing a new song!”

Bill Maher explaining what Hilary Rosen meant to say: "But what she meant to say, I think, was that Ann Romney has never gotten her ass out of the house to work. No one is denying that being a mother is a tough job, I remember that I was a handful. Okay, but there is a big difference in being a mother, and that tough job, and getting your ass out of the door at 7 am when it's cold, having to deal with the boss, being in a workplace, where even if you're unhappy you can't show it for 8 hours."

Climate change alarmist Steve Wick, writing for Forbes Magazine: "We know who the active denialists are - not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let's start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let's make them pay. Let's let their houses burn. Let's swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let's force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?"

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin: “In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly.” The entire speech is on the WSJ.

Sen. James Webb (D-Va.). Webb “[ObamaCare] cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader."

David Axelrod: `The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead, and their kids a chance to get ahead, and an economy that continues down the road we're on.' OOPS

First lady Michelle Obama : "You're here because you know that next November we're going to make a choice that will impact our lives for decades to come."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the lead sponsor of the Buffett Tax bill, says, "The Senate Republican Leader has described the bill as yet another proposal from the White House that won't create a single job or lower the price at the pump by a penny. Well, the Minority Leader is absolutely right that the aim of this bill is not to lower the unemployment rate or the price of gasoline."

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.): "I think we paid a terrible price for healthcare. I would not have pushed it as hard. As a matter of fact, after [Sen.] Scott Brown [R-Mass.] won [in January 2010], I suggested going back. I would have started with financial reform, but certainly not healthcare."

Secret Service David Randall Chaney, on Facebook, of his time spent guarding Sarah Palin: "I was really checking her out, if you know what i mean?"

Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois: "Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care."

Bishop Jenky: "For 2,000 years the enemies of Christ have certainly tried their best. But think about it. The Church survived and even flourished during centuries of terrible persecution, during the days of the Roman Empire. The Church survived barbarian invasions. The Church survived wave after wave of Jihads. The Church survived the age of revolution. The Church survived Nazism and Communism." I think I have found a church for the President to attend.

Volker Kauder, head of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc in parliament: "Islam is not part of our tradition and identity in Germany and so does not belong to Germany." Probably a conservative.

Guitarist Ted Nugent: "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year. We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November. Our president, attorney general, our vice president, Hillary Clinton - they're criminals, they're criminals."

Don Imus: “And someone like Ted Nugent should be put in jail forever—repugnant, repulsive.”

Ted Nugent, when agreeing to meet with Secret Service Personnel: "Every reference I made, whether it's a shot across the bow or targeting the enemy, it always ended the sentence with `in November at the voter booth,'" he said on the show. "I'm not trying to diminish the seriousness of this, because if the Secret Service are doing it they are serious. They are dedicated and I will be as polite and supportive as I possibly can be, which will be thoroughly."

Weasel Zipper editor: “Let me get this straight, libs claimed Obama isn't responsible for Hilary Rosen, who visited the White House 35 times with high-level access to top Obama officials, was a paid DNC consultant and a former campaign worker but Romney is responsible for Ted Nugent?”

Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary: “Oh, absolute - the president inherited, again, as you know, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis caused by a shock larger than what caused the Great Depression. And he did the necessarily, deeply damaging - deeply politically hard things to get growth started again. And he's done everything he could to convince a reluctant opposition to join him in doing things to make the economy stronger. And we're going to keep doing that even if they're against it, even if they don't like it.”

Geithner: “Absolutely. This president's policies were extremely successful.”

Barack Obama, 2008: “I know there are those who dismiss such [Democrat platform] beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer, and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. ”

Obama, 2012: “[The Ryan budget is] a Trojan horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plan, it's really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”

Van Jones: “It means I love Americans-the people who actually live here, who look all kind of different ways, who pray all kind of different ways, who love all kinds of people. And I challenge the people who are the opponents of my values to explain how they get to be patriots. As I say in the book, they seem to distrust the American government. They seem to dislike most of the American people. They seem to resent most of America's achievements over the last century, including unions and public education and environmental protection and so many of the things that made the American century the American century. So I don't get why we don't just tell them to sit down and shut up. They can complain if they like, but we have another century to win. We have another century to win!”

WSJ’s James Freeman: “[Obama is] not responsible for any of these individual’s actions [like those from the GSA] but he’s the one making the case every day that government works and we need more of it; that is needs to be bigger...[but there are] repeated examples of how it doesn’t work, it’s too big, and it spends too much.”

Dick Morris: “A president of the United States is not going to be elected on excuses.” [quoted from memory]

Jeff Sessions, of Washington D.C.: “I don’t think the American people ought to send another dime to this place.” To be fair, he is facing a more conservative opponent in his primary.

Paul Ryan to Greta Van Susteren about the looming debt crisis: “We know its coming, why it’s happening, and we don’t do anything.”

FoxNews Commentator Charles Krauthammer: "[Obama’s push for the ‘Buffet rule’ is] almost an embarrassment, it's so shameless. If you were to collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years - that's longer than the life of this republic - you will not have covered the deficit, Obama's deficit for 2011. You collect it for another 250 years, so we're now in the year 2612, and you've covered 2011 and 2012 and you need to cover only 498 other years of deficits."

Charles Krauthammer: "[Obama] doesn`t want to talk about what he's done. He's had the longest over 8 percent unemployment since the Great Depression, he has had the slowest and most anemic recovery of any recession since the second World War. And he's accumulated in one term the greatest amount of debt, $5 trillion in galactic history. He can`t run on that so instead he's going to hold the ball over there, a shiny ball and say `look over here' so he doesn't have to speak about a record which has been an economic disaster."

Herman Cain, about voter ID laws taking us back to Jim Crow: "That's a big fat lie. They are not taking us back to Jim Crow. The only reason that the Liberals don't want photo ID in order for people to vote, is because it makes it easier for them to cheat at the polls. I grew up in the South and during the Civil Rights Movement. We have to have a photo ID for everything we do, but yet they want to frame it as taking us back to Jim Crow. That's just a distraction and a lie as to why Conservatives want photo Voter ID Laws passed."

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.): "I would like to congratulate President Obama on securing the endorsement of the radical environmental left, a prize that is well deserved and hard won," Senator Inhofe said. "Looking back on his record, President Obama has many major accomplishments to tout. By imposing backdoor global warming cap-and-trade regulations through the EPA, he is fulfilling his campaign promise that energy prices would `necessarily skyrocket'; by vetoing the Keystone pipeline, he gave the far left what one of his supporters called the biggest global warming victory in years; by finalizing the most expensive EPA rule in history, he is making good on his campaign promise that if anybody wants to build a coal fired power plant they can - `it's just that it will bankrupt them'; and he succeeded in throwing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars out the window on companies like Solyndra, which he said would lead us to a `brighter and more prosperous future.'”

Paula Priesse: “Once again DC shysters prove their love of symbolism over substance. The Senate pushed through a vote on the "Buffett Rule" but has not produced a budget in nearly 3 years! Obama: "It will help close our deficit." To be fair (popular word) the "Rule" would have paid off the 2011 federal deficit. Not the debt, just the 2011 deficit. Best estimate - IN THE YEAR 2526. Figures never presented at an O campaign rally: In 2007 (most recent found), the "evil" top 1% accounted for only 22.8% of wages, but paid 40.6% of federal income taxes. The bottom 50% paid 2.9%. One last thing. In 1913, the U.S. tax code was 400 pages. In 2010 it had grown to 71,684. (below) Happy Tax Day! P”

Congressman Allen West of Obama: “An abject failure in everything that he has done.”

U.S. Congressman Allen West: "There is a very thin line between communism, progressivism, Marxism, Socialism . it's about nationalizing production, it's about creating and expanding the welfare state. It's about this idea of social and economic justice."

Dennis Miller on hiring a prostitute in Cartagena: “Listen,...when they go down with different presidents, the rules change. If you did this under Clinton, you were in line for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

The Five’s Andrea Tantaros on Obama’s attacks on the oil speculators: “It’s just another villain for him.”

Greg Gutfeld: “They should come up with a $500 million dollar currency and call it the Chu.”

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney: "I would love the Supreme Court to say, `Let's send this back to the states.' Rather than having a federal mandate through Roe v. Wade, let the states again consider this issue state by state."

Greg Gutfeld, on Obama eating a dog: “I called Hilary Rosen about this whole dog thing and asked if this was a big deal, and she said, ‘no’ and that ‘it was probably a stay-at-home dog.’” [quoted from memory].

Dapandico (a reader of Weasel Zippers): “In a week, the media can find the hooker in Colombia but can't find [Obama’s] college records from Columbia.”

Rush Limbaugh: "The last I looked, Barack Obama had not spent a day in the oil industry. I don't know why we should have to listen to anything he says about it. He doesn't know anything about it. Obama's never been in the oil business. All he's ever had is contempt for it."

Rush Limbaugh: "This whole idea of replacing oil is akin to taking away our power, folks, as a nation and as individuals. Furthermore, it is intellectually bankrupt."

Rush Limbaugh: "There's not a battery that would get that 747 and that shuttle even to the runway on a full charge, much less at speed to take off and go anywhere!"

Rush Limbaugh: "The American left, Barack Obama, American liberalism is nothing but ideology. It is nothing but politics. Their issues are not rooted in science. The electric car is not about saving the planet. The electric car is not about cleaner energy. The electric car is not about cleaner air. The electric car is about taking away choices from the American people about what they want to drive."

Rush Limbaugh: "You go anywhere, any state, any city that has been run unchecked for years by liberals and you're going to find destitution. You're going to find destruction. You're gonna find bulldozed houses. You're gonna find elevated levels of poverty, hopelessness, all of this stuff."

Rush Limbaugh: "We're up against, for all intents and purposes, an admitted socialist. He denies it, but there's no doubt in anybody's mind."

Rush Limbaugh: "I have become one of those people that's now very much concerned about the national debt cause it's never, ever been anywhere near as large as it is expressed any way you want, as a percentage, total dollars, or what have you. We are nearing collapse. The old adage was the national debt never really mattered because we owed it to ourselves, therefore we never really had to pay it back. But we don't owe it just to ourselves now. We owe it to the ChiComs. We owe it to the Japanese. We owe it to a lot of people who expect to be paid back, who expect their interest payments to be made."

Rush Limbaugh: "One of Axelrod's signature identities has been to find or create a likable candidate out of somebody who is essentially an empty suit, somebody that nobody knows anything about, which is the key. When nobody knows anything about 'em, you can make them what you want people to think they are."

Rush Limbaugh: "How does a guy with no experience at anything pass himself off as an expert in health care and have people believe it? Well, that's Axelrod's modus operandi. You create the empty suit, or you find one, and then you make him likable."

Rush Limbaugh: "The frustration is that Republican nominee should be walking away with this. There is no way an incumbent president with this record should have a chance. There is no way an incumbent president with this record should even be running for reelection. Most of them would quit in shame like LBJ did."

Brent Bozell: "In the primaries in 2008, we counted 29 different times when the networks either called him [Obama] a rising star, an emerging star, a rock star, or a superstar. Twenty-nine different times...This is embarrassing, this is journalism today."

NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham on Your World with Neil Cavuto: "As much as they say they hate being stenographers to power, this really is what we're seeing in this reelection year, and that is, oh, well, Obama said this today and Obama's going to do this today, and they don't seem to come up with any troublesome facts or counter-arguments."

Greta Van Susteren on Barbara Boxer saying that GSA corruption goes back decades: “I'll tell what disturbed me...[is] Senator Boxer said that the GSA has a history of misconduct dating back decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations. When I heard her say that, I said, If there's a, quote, "history," if it goes back decades, what in the world were you all thinking as this was going on? History and decades? I mean, all these senators have been up there a long time...[and] they've known about this, apparently.”

Rocker Ted Nugent, after his public remarks were condemned by Debbie Wasserman Schultz: "Wasserman Schultz is such a brain-dead, soulless idiot."

Congressman Allen West talking. Is there a teleprompter anywhere? Note cards? Anything? He is just talking?

The real story behind the `Jefferson Bible'? David Barton shared it with Glen Beck on GBTV. David Barton is one of the great founding father historians.

One of the scenes from “I Want Your Money.” It was not all like this. There are real people in this movie.

Voting officials offer ballots to project veritas in the names of Ben Jealous, Bill Maher, and David Brock.

A bit of a debate on Obama’s accomplishes. Michelle Malkin uses the great designation, “The drool-bucket media.”

This made me smile (it’s from 2011), Stephen Chu and GSA Martha Johnson would help fulfill Obama’s goal of putting 1 million electrical vehicles on the road by having the government buy them.

Jodi Miller: “Democratic advisor Hilary Rosen is under fire for saying, quote, ‘Ann Romney never worked a day in her life.’ Hey, if she really never worked a day in her life, Ann Romney would be endorsing Obama.”

Jodi Miller: “North Korea’s rocket launch failed when it broke up and crashed into the ocean; but, there is good news for North Korea. The Obama administration just ordered thousands of these rockets and just have GM sell them as the new Chevy Volt.”

1) I just received a phone call from a 23 year old gal who is on housing and wants to look at one of my rentals. She has one child and one on the way. She wants to move to be closer to the father. She isn't quite ready for marriage (actually, I think she spoke of living together and not marriage), she tells me, because she is very young, but it would be nice to live closer to the father of the child who is coming. Isn't that nice that she does not have to be responsible; she does not have to make any tough choices, and our tax dollars make it all possible.

2) A call for equality of outcomes is what you get when the schools teach kids self-esteem above all else.

3) I just heard Sean Hannity and Dick Morris spend about 10 minutes talking about Obama-Romney polls; please tell me they can find something else to talk about.

4) Do you want to increase the cost of something, and make it more bureaucratic and inefficient, which will probably require several bailouts in the future? Then let the government take over.

5) Paying payroll taxes is not the same as paying federal taxes. Payroll taxes go to pay for social security and medicare, ideally programs that we will all directly benefit from in the future. It is like a contributing to a very poorly run 401K plan; just because you put some money away for retirement, that is not the same thing as paying taxes.

6) Our greatest problem is our “shadow government.” I don’t mean that some secret group of men in a dark room run the country; I am referring to the hundreds of out-in-the-open government agencies, most of which we know: the EPA, the GSA, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the IRS, and the quasi-governmental agencies like FNMA and FHLMC. This is where there is so much unelected power. These people have the power to take our money and, for all intents and purposes, burn it to keep their hands warm. They do not require Congress to even pass a budget to enumerate where all of the tax money is going to; our government somehow spends $3.5 trillion each year, over a trillion of which is borrowed (and most of that “from ourselves”); and all of this is done without even a budget (no proper budget has been passed by the Senate for 3 years now). The Department of Energy has doled out billions of dollars to various green companies who just happen to be run by Obama supporters and bundlers, many of whom, get a huge check from the government, and then shut their company down. FNMA and FHLMC essentially brought our economy down—with help and guidance from Congress. And, as I have heard over and over again on the news, many of these people, like the heads of GSA, cannot even be easily fired. Getting rid of the people who have thrown gobs of taxpayer money down the toilet cannot even be removed from their job. This is not solely a Democratic problem, although I put most of the blame upon them; the House could have refused to raise the debt ceiling, but they caved. Anytime there is a concentration of power and money, there is always corruption.

7) Okay, here’s a Romney ad: devote about 10 seconds to the GSA scandal, 10 seconds on the Solandra scandal, and 10 seconds on the secret service scandal; and then Romney’s line, “I like to fire people.”

8) Here is another, similar to one the RNC has already put out. President Obama is giving excuses for all that has gone wrong (which he does constantly). Tag line: “President Excuse; do you want to elect a man who does nothing but give excuses or do you want to elect a man to fix the problems of America?”

9) Elsewhere in this issue, I have pointed out that government wastes at least $400 billion each year in duplicative and wasteful programs; and that Senators like Barbara Boxer have known out the GSA’s excesses for decades. If government is unable to manage the bureaucracy it has created, whether democrats or republicans, why in the world should anyone pay additional tax dollars to them?

10) Are you curious as to whether someone has a reasonably opened mind? Ask their opinion of the Clinton balanced budgets. If they launch into a tirade about how the Democrats balanced the budget and how Bush messed it all up with 2 unpaid for wars, then this is a person you cannot reason with. If this person cannot give Clinton any credit at all, this person cannot be reasoned with. Whether you like or hate Bill Clinton, Dick Morris (his long-time advisor) and/or Newt Gingrich; you cannot appreciate having a balanced budget for 4 years in a row unless you give all 3 of these men credit. A balanced budget did not happen in a vacuum, nor was it the result of political enemies joining hands and singing Kumbayah together. This was the result of tough negotiations of 3 men who often savaged one another outside of this process, but were able to still work toward a common goal. Clinton did not promise to balance the budget; and yet, he worked with Gingrich to do so, at the advice of Dick Morris. Gingrich campaigned to balance the budget, but would have gone nowhere without Morris guiding Clinton. If you cannot give all 3 men some credit, you are unable to be objective when it comes to politics.

11) Someone made the comment that American Bandstand’s Dick Clark probably had as much to do about thawing out tense race relations on his show, where Black artists and white artists simply appeared as entertainers and musicians. I don’t believe that Clark at any time made any sort of issue out of race (although, certainly, behind the scenes, I bet there was a lot that went on).

Total Debt Obama Has Added To Deficit Stands At $5,027,761,476,484.56. That is over $16,000 per person for every man, woman and child in the United States.

The GAO finds that more than $400 billion is spent each year on 1,500 duplicative, fragmented, and inefficient programs. If Barbara Boxer and others have known about GSA abuses for decades, why haven’t they done anything about them?

The Congressional Budget Office said that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007.

Moments after Barack Obama vowed to go after oil speculators, oil prices spiked at $105.07.

The widow's mite: Obama gave the church less than ½ percent of $18 million income over 12 years.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants "at least $2 billion" a year from the United States after it withdraws its troops in 2014.

Hamas' missile and rocket war on southern Israel is 11 years old today (Tuesday), 12,500 rockets total, which is 1100 missiles/year. More than 40 people have been killed, thousands have been wounded and property damage and economic losses has been immeasurable.

Riffing on what Glen Beck said this week, if this were a Republican administration, there would have been a Hooker-gate, a Solyndra-gate, an MF Global-gate, and a Fast & Furious scandal. However, most news organizations are looking to mention these stories quickly and then move on and leave enough space to run another photo of Romney's dog on top of his vehicle.

Romney drove with his dog on the roof of his car and President Obama has admitted to eating dog meat in Indonesia. Which do you think will get the more media play? Which of things did you know about and the other is a surprise?

Barack Obama makes Falklands gaffe by calling Malvinas the Maldives. Had a conservative made this mistake, they would be hounded and ridiculed. Remember when Michele Bachmann did not get the birthplace of Elvis Presley (I think that was who is was) or made some mistake about an revolutionary event in another town? This was reported for several days after she made this minor errors. Obama’s error here? You probably did not even know that it happened.

ABC, NBC and CBS have, thus far, shown little interest in investigating the nearly one million dollars in commuting costs spent by Barack Obama's Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, as has been reported in the Washington Times. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was actually asked on it, but it has not made the network new yet (they do not like to report on stories that make their guy look bad; they will, if it would cost them viewers).

The Washington Post promoted Barack Obama's slam at Romney yesterday: "I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth.” Down past paragraph 20, we find out that Mitt Romney spent most of his youth as being typical middle class. And further, what was ignored was, Obama’s upbringing was not that bad. I don’t believe that he ever went to a public school and that he also went to Columbia and Harvard—something which is not true of Romney or of the other 99% of us (to coin a phrase). More details and links at Newsbusters.

PBS anchor Gwen Ifill will emcee LGBT fundraiser hailing HHS secretary's work on ObamaCare. Do you suppose we will see any stories on this? Will Ifill’s objectivity be called into question even once by any network other than FoxNews?

The season is about up. I do not recall seeing a single sketch on Obama, Geithner, or Holder that could have been seen at all negatively (were any sketches on them done at all?). Lots of scandals throughout this past year, but were any spoken of by a snarky Seth Myers? Not that I recall. After all, it is an election year. And yet, nearly every single cold open was all about Mitt Romney and the other Republican candidates. Of course, they should have been lampooned—I have no problem with that—but is Seth unable to come up with any jokes about Obama? Or about today’s economy?

Several Democrats spoke out against Obamacare; too bad they did not have this reaction when Obamacare was being “debated.”

The Obama campaign has been touting a Reagan video clip about some rich people using all of these tax loopholes to get a lower tax rate than those who make less money. Obama is using this tax clip to argue for higher taxes on the rich; Reagan’s point was to reduce EVERYONE’s tax rate, including the tax rates on the rich, and to eliminate many of the deductions. Reagan was also arguing to cut the capital gains tax rate.

The President continues to push his tax increases for the wealthy, with the suggestion that this money could be used to support whatever it is his audience believes should be supported (e.g., more funds for education). At this point in time, what the President has proposed, a doubling of the capital gains tax and an increase of taxes on the rich would, in a static environment, do very little; and in a dynamic economy, the end result could be less revenue for the state. However, what he is selling is, concentrate on the rich, how they have much more than you do, how many of them are of questionable moral character because they have that money, and that the government should even things out. However, Obama has to talk about anything other than the current state of the economy.

Obviously, the White House wants to talk about anything but today’s economy, gas prices, the debt and the deficit, so the most recent tit for tat was Romney drove around with a dog on top of his car (20–30 years ago) and Obama ate dog meat (revealed in one of his books). When offered the chance to discuss this on Hannity’s show, Romney wisely declined.

According to most of what I have read, there is a good chance that George Zimmerman will not be convicted and, if that occurs, a very good chance that a half dozen or more people are killed in racial riots.

Dick Morris sees this upcoming election as building up to be a landslide. This is his reasoning: most of the polls have Romney and Obama in a dead heat, around 45 to 45. Usually, the undecided’s (most of them) break for the challenger because they already know who the incumbent is. Quite obviously, anything could occur between now and November. This is only based upon today’s numbers.

This sort of falls into this category. A great strategy for Mitt Romney is, he is a turn around CEO, who takes on big companies, and gets rid of the waste and useless portions, and makes that company profitable again. I said that this is Mitt’s best approach, and for him to emphasize this as his background, and apply it to the government. This past week, Michele Bachmann, on one of the shows touted Romney as a “turn-around agent” as a person who took on dying companies and turned them around and/or parted them out.

Weasel Zipper subhead on Obama giving ½% of his $18 million income to the church over 12 years:

You come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighborhood and your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings.

According to the as of today, the United States debt stands at: $15,667,152,416,040.25

Last Friday, former energy trader and now Fox News host Eric Bolling and I hosted a Fox special called "Paying at the Pump," which offered President Obama solutions to reduce prices at the pump and get our country on the path to real energy security.

A genuine "all of the above" approach to energy independence is, of course, a multifaceted plan. It includes conservation and sensible private sector investment in sound alternative energy, and it absolutely must involve unleashing our domestic energy production. We cannot ignore the need to drill, baby, drill; frack, baby, frack; and mine, baby, mine. Those who are concerned about the environment and our dangerous dependence on foreign oil should encourage the development of natural gas as a clean and plentiful bridge-fuel to a more renewable future. We have enough clean, green natural gas in America to be energy independent for many decades-whether we use it for natural gas cars or natural gas power plants. We also need to look at our oil refining capacity and our regulations there. We must cut the job-killing, anti-domestic energy regulations of Obama's EPA and IRS which create such burdens and uncertainty. Finally, Eric pointed out that we must do something about the Wall Street speculators. I know this is a touchy issue, but Eric's points are valid. Obama's Federal Trade Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission appear to have no teeth in dealing with this because they haven't cracked down on the president's friends on Wall Street who are creating unnecessary oil market volatility. Eric suggested that we could reduce the problem of speculation by raising energy margin requirements. In his press conference today, President Obama seems to have latched on to Eric's idea of dealing with speculators. But the president proposed an outrageously expensive "fix," claiming that he needs a boatload of tax dollars and bureaucrats to merely apply common sense to regulating oil trades and enforcing the authority the CFTC was already granted by the Dodd-Frank bill. This is ridiculous, and it's not enough. Keep in mind that cracking down on speculation is only a small part of the solution. The key remedy is still drilling.

Basically, President Obama's idea of an "all of the above" approach to energy is really "none-of-the-above" to the resources we use right now to power our economy. Take for instance the Obama EPA's war against coal production (which he promised when he was a candidate), which will ultimately leave us with higher electric bills and less electricity. Because his cap and trade legislation got sidelined, Obama is now using his EPA to accomplish the same destructive goals by imposing draconian regulations aimed at crippling the coal industry. According to the Associated Press, Obama's EPA will soon "force 32 mostly coal-fired power plants to shut down and threatens to close 36 others" and will eventually remove from our power grid enough electricity to power 11 million households. Just ask Californians how much fun "rolling blackouts" are. I suppose we can look forward to more romantic candle-lit evenings ahead as America moves backward with less energy, which must be more of Obama's "leading from behind" strategy. I hope the folks up North have a hearty wood supply for their fireplace warmth, and that those in the Southwest don't mind sweltering in the summer heat. Air conditioning takes up an awful lot of electricity; and in Obama's America, energy will be scarce. As Mark Levin has pointed out numerous times, Obama's policies will ultimately de-industrialize America.

But we don't have to look to the future to feel the pain of Obama's energy policies. Look at our current gas prices. The Obama administration is locking up federal lands to drilling. The EIA reports that production and sale of fossil fuels on federal lands dropped by 6% last year under Obama. Other studies show a 12% decline. When you hear the president boast of all the "new" drilling going on, he's talking about production on private and state land that was in the works long ago and is not under his control. He doesn't tell you how his administration has done everything in its power to strangle resource development with regulatory red tape and foot dragging on the permitting and leasing process. We hear his endless claims that we only have "2% of the world's oil"-sometimes he adds "reserves" to that-but know that the White House is playing games with semantics. The Obama administration is using a subset of "proved oil reserves" to make it sound like America is energy poor! They're deliberately distorting the true picture of our massive recoverable oil resources-most of which is on federal land that the government has locked up to responsible development. In short, the president is deceiving the public. As I've said before, the energy production "facts" and numbers President Obama repeats are skewed, deceptive and downright Orwellian. Ironically, President Obama likes to remind us that global factors outside of our control affect the price of oil, but he never seems to make the connection that this is precisely why we should increase our domestic supply of oil by drilling here where environmental and worker safety standards are stricter than any foreign country from which we purchase oil, and that our increased domestic supply would put downward pressure on the price of oil. If Obama doesn't think increasing the supply on the market affects the price at the pump, then why did he ask the Saudis to increase their production? And Brazil? Why did he open our Strategic Reserves last year to lower prices at the pump? Common sense tells you that, of course, increasing the supply of something has an affect on the price.

President Obama refuses to acknowledge this obvious truth because he doesn't want to do what needs to be done. He isn't interested in drilling, fracking or mining for the resources we actually use to power our economy. His idea of an energy plan amounts to dumping more of our tax dollars into the bankrupt green energy companies that his campaign donors invested in. It's crony capitalism on steroids. He's also in favor of "investing" your tax dollars into algae because he believes pond scum is the wave of the future. He also tells you to deal with gas prices by merely inflating your tires; getting a tune up; and, despite your work needs or the size of your family, ditch your larger vehicle for one he deems acceptably small. But what about the $4 per gallon gas prices that are devastating the budgets of American families, crippling our small businesses, and increasing the transportation costs of all goods shipped in America and thereby increasing the prices of everything we buy? Barack Obama's answer to your pain is basically, "give me some flexibility here." because "change isn't easy." Well, actually it is. It starts with getting rid of this energy illiterate administration.

Today, on Tax Day, our big, wasteful, and largely useless centralized government is taking hard-earned money from 85 million Americans.

The Republican Study Committee reports: "According to the non-partisan Tax Foundation, the country will work 107 days this year just to pay for federal, state, and local taxes. By their calculations, a larger share of Americans' income will go to taxes than food, clothing & housing combined!"

And what do we get in return on our investment in big government? More marching orders from the faceless bureaucrats in D.C. More crony capitalism for the administration's favored friends. More expensive conventions, vacations, parties (and Colombian hookers?) for the profligate Obama administration. Less energy security. Less allowance for resource development. More EPA regulations to de-industrialize our country and kill jobs. More opportunities shipped overseas as we allow others to produce for us that which our government refuses to allow us to produce for ourselves!

Aren't we tired of this by now? Candidate Obama promised us a sensible energy plan to get us to energy independence. President Obama has failed to deliver it.

He fails to understand the fundamental truth that there is an inherent link between energy and prosperity, and energy and security. Oil prices affect everything in our lives, including where we send our sons and daughters in war. Developing resources here grows our economy, decreases our trade imbalance, creates hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, and secures our union by eliminating our dependence on dangerous foreign regimes who use our energy insecurity as a weapon against us. Access to secure domestic energy will make us a more peaceful and prosperous nation.

Obama doesn't understand this-just as he doesn't understand the dangers of his wasteful spending. Our energy policy is also linked with our fiscal and monetary policies. In light of America's unsustainable $16 trillion debt, there's more talk about dumping the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency, which is the currency used to buy and sell oil. If that happens, we'll feel the pain of inflation everywhere-especially at the pump. That, in turn, will trickle down to everything in our economy. Those living on fixed incomes and retirement pensions and annuities will feel the pain especially hard. So, this is one more reason to get government debt under control with sound monetary policy that doesn't try to "inflate away" our debt with currency manipulation and gimmicks like quantitative easing.

Obama fails to understand this. He's failed us as the nation's stakeholders, and that's why we must replace our CEO at November's ballot box. As one audience member in our Fox special said, "I can't fill my gas tank with hope and change."

Wake up, America. November is around the corner. Change is easier than you've been led to believe.

Have you recovered from your Tax Day hangover yet? It usually takes a few days before the headache of complying with 161 pages of IRS instructions goes away. Not to make it worse, but that's triple the number of pages in 1985 and four times more than in 1975. That made it worse, didn't it?

Despite all your hard work filing - Americans spend about 7.3 billion hours per year complying with all the IRS requirements - the United States still faces a budget deficit that is $1.3 trillion. President Obama and Democrats argue the answer to this is to raise taxes on the rich. Republicans disagree, but only about the raising the rate part.

That is what passes for a tax debate in Washington these days. Neither side wants to confront the reality that the only way to return a sense of sanity to the tax code is by scrapping the thing altogether. In it's place? A tax code that is simple, low, fair, and honest. In other words, we need a flat tax that greatly eases the burden of compliance and stimulates the economy.

Step 1: Scrap the code. Entirely. It's not as impossible as it might sound. Even Obama's own Bipartisan Deficit Commission, the so-called Simpson-Bowles Commission, called for tax reform that would lower rates and do away with many of the deductions and loopholes currently infecting the code. Not surprisingly, Obama ignored it.

Step 2: Establish a single, flat rate on personal and business income. Again, this isn't as fantastic as it might sound. The key is in the process. You've probably heard that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Let's just assume this is true. Billionaires like Buffett, and even millionaires like Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney, can afford an army of tax lawyers to comb every word in the 3.6-million-word tax code looking for their deductions and loopholes. Can you afford such an army?

By eliminating every single deduction, credit, penalty, and loophole, we can erase the tax code's inherent unfairness, which only benefits the Buffetts, Pelosis, and Romneys. Not only will this raise revenues, it will ensnare the tax cheats, expanding the nation's taxable base. Next, you lower the rates considerably, doing away with brackets, until we have a single flat tax rate. In one popular flat tax proposal, a family of four would have the first $33,800 of its income tax free; any amount above this would be taxed at 17 percent - for everyone. No deductions, no loopholes.

Step 3: Do the same thing with corporate taxes. Right now, the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. Even Obama has suggested it needs to go down. Like the individual flat tax, with the business flat tax income would be taxed once and only once. Businesses would calculate total revenue, subtract total expenses, and pay a flat tax on that amount.

Step 5: Use all the time and money you've saved in the full pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

That's what a simple, low, fair, and honest tax code would look like. Many accuse the Tea Party of simply wanting lower taxes. We do, but lower rates are just part of fundamental tax reform. Many accuse the Tea Party of favoring the wealthy. These people have obviously never been to a Tea Party rally before. In fact, what the Tea Party wants is fairness - and not the faux class warfare "fairness" espoused by the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Although the economic benefits of tax reform are important, the passion of grassroots activists is driven primarily by a set of simple values: Treat everyone the same as everyone else; don't punish success; and simplicity equals transparency. Americans should know that there isn't a better deal to be had if you can afford a lobbyist or a lawyer.

The reason Congress made 4,400 legislative changes to the tax code between 2000 and 2010 wasn't to ensure that the U.S. Treasury was fat and full. It was because the tax code has become the plaything of Washington politicians, to be stuffed with as many little favors for select interests as possible.

It's reforming that central unfairness that lies at the heart of the Tea Party Tax Code: Simple, low, fair, honest, and, most of all, flat.

For the past several years, it's not been an uncommon sight in Anytown, USA, to drive down the street and see home after home for sale after going through foreclosure. They are the still-lingering hangover from the housing crash that began in 2007. Though the true cause of what burst America's housing bubble is still debated, two of the culprits - housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - are still going strong even though both essentially failed in 2008 and are under government control. Economists and politicians alike are now pondering whether we need Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at all and what would happen if they were eliminated altogether.

For several years prior to 2007, home prices went through the roof, but then they crashed through the basement. Since then, more than 2.3 million homeowners have faced foreclosure - an 81 percent increase over 2007. This all, of course, contributed to the Great Recession we're still rebuilding from today. "Easy credit" is pointed to as the corrosive acid that ate away at the housing market's foundation, and federal government-sponsored mortgage finance giants - the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) - were there to supply it and help other lenders to do so.

Consistent with policies dating back to the Carter and Clinton Administrations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made it easier for low and moderate income Americans to obtain mortgages and purchase homes. In a new paper from The Heritage Foundation, A Housing Market Without Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Effect on Home Prices, Nahid Anaraki reports that this "fueled an excessive expansion of credit in the housing sector, shifted the demand for real estate to the right, and caused home prices to overshoot their underlying market equilibriums." In other words, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's intervention in the housing market helped to fuel the boom-to-bust housing bubble by subsidizing interest rates and enabling reduced down payment requirements on single-family homes, thus unnaturally boosting demand and causing prices to go up.

The trouble with all this, Heritage reports, is that though Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have made it easier for a family to buy a home, in the long run their actions have a detrimental effect on the economy, as America has witnessed.

So what would happen if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were phased out? Would the absence of their ability to offer lower interest loans and smaller down payments impact the cost of homes in America? Anaraki's analysis shows that it would not. In fact, interest rates and changes in down payment requirements have little influence on housing prices. Instead, fundamentals-such as household assets, personal income, the S&P Index, and the effective tax rate-play substantial roles in shaping home prices. As such, she advises, it's time for Washington to get out of the business altogether:

Eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in fact, will help more Americans afford homeownership. Since these institutions increase demand - thereby increasing home prices - it becomes increasingly difficult for lower-income Americans to afford to purchase homes without subsidized interest rates. If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are eliminated, interest rates may slightly go up initially, but Anaraki finds that "higher interest rates will lead to lower median home prices, which in turn will increase the ability of low-income groups to purchase a house." What's more, competition among housing lenders would increase, leading to lower interest rates in the medium to long term.

Owning your own home is the American Dream, but suffering a foreclosure and winding up on the streets is the American Nightmare. In pursuit of encouraging the former, the federal government helped produce the latter. Government intervention by way of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have given more Americans the keys to their own homes, but they bought homes they could not afford and in a marketplace that could not be sustained. As Heritage showed in an earlier paper, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can be phased out without disrupting the housing recovery. A better way forward is to phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and let the home market find a healthy and sustainable equilibrium.

The recovery has not yielded job vacancies, but here are five ways to cure our labor woes

America has long been a country where almost everyone, including the poor and unskilled, could get a job. Given the will to do a reasonable day's work, a job was a passport to economic and social well-being; it was the fount of self-esteem and the foundation of family life. Indeed, work was Life.

More than 15 million Americans no longer have that passport to Life. Think of it as roughly the entire population of the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma, all standing idle-every man, woman, and child. The traditional breadwinners, namely men between the ages of 25 and 54, are among those hardest hit. According to an Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll, some 25 percent of households include someone who is unemployed and looking for work. As well as laying waste to work, to the equivalent of losing every job created in the last decade, the Great Recession has visited us with reduced incomes, declining home equity, and a growing contraction in credit.

For the 80 percent of Americans born after World War II, this is their Depression. They have 5.5 million fewer jobs than at the recession's start in 2008, despite the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in our history. Employment has been below the pre-recession peak for over 50 months. It's the longest time since the Great Depression that payrolls have not made a new high. The 120,000 new jobs for March make no dent (and adjusted for the peculiarity of warm weather, the number of real net jobs created was 76,000); we need at least 125,000 jobs each month just to provide for new entrants in a rising population.

Discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force make the unemployment rate look fractionally better, but the 8.2 percent headline masks the misery. It is a reflection of the U-3 statistic, which counts only people who have applied for a job in the last four weeks. Among the jobless army, a staggering 42 percent of them are long-term unemployed, without jobs for six months or longer. Look instead at the more relevant U-6 statistic, which counts the number of people who have applied over the last six months. U-6 also includes those who are involuntarily working on a part-time basis. That U-6 unemployment is now in the range of 15 percent. Since 2008, some 3 million people have dropped out of the job market. If they hadn't, the unemployment rate would be about 10.8 percent. In March, the unemployment rate seemed to fall a tenth of 1 percent, yet the number of people who are actually employed dropped by 31,000. Why? Because the number of people who looked for a job dropped by 164,000 and they are not considered unemployed. Not to mention that half the new jobs are in temporary help agencies.

America's great job creation machine is sputtering badly. It is now estimated that structural unemployment has risen from 5 percent before the crisis to close to 7 percent today. This means that one third of the rise in American joblessness may be impervious to the business cycle; it represents lost jobs that cannot be restored by boosting demand.

The problem now is not that people are being laid off by the millions. When an economy has reached bottom, as it did, it has already shed much of its labor, and layoffs slow. But the anemic recovery has not yielded job vacancies. Hiring today is at about 70 percent of the 2006 level. Given the increase in unemployed totals, job seekers are only about one third as likely to find work as in 2006.

Compare that to the fabled Great Depression of the 1930s. In the three years after 1933, the economy rebounded with growth rates of 11 percent, 9 percent, and 13 percent. But in 2010, months into our recovery, growth was about 3 percent, followed by 1.7 percent growth in 2011. The rate for 2012 could be about 2 percent-below the 3.4 percent throughout the postwar period.

What has happened? The process of making stuff fosters innovation, leading to new products. When companies go from prototype to mass production, they scale up, figure out where they can build factories affordably, and hire people by the thousands. But many enterprises in America have discovered they cannot compete in engineering or manufacturing with their Chinese or Indian counterparts, which are equally, if not more, productive with workers willing to accept significantly lower wages. In turn, they gain the skills, knowledge, and experience to innovate. Hence our loss of 6 million blue-collar manufacturing jobs.

The paradox is that the low labor costs which attract work abroad are now being visited on the American worker. In the past six months, according to a Bloomberg study, 70 percent of job openings have been in mostly low-wage sectors, including healthcare, leisure, hospitality, and retail. And some 7.7 million workers are stuck in part-time jobs, their pay inadequate for entry into the middle class. Why so much temporary employment? Because companies do not wish to pay for healthcare and retirement in a very uncertain economy, so they hedge their bets with short-term help.

Remarkably, as David Rosenberg, chief economist of Gluskin Sheff, has reported, two thirds of the employment growth rate has been in the 55 and older age cohort. Since the recession began in December 2007, employment in this age group is up 4 million, even as total employment for everyone else is down. What's going on here? The boomer population, Rosenberg notes, has seen its wealth destroyed by the bear market in equities and housing, and these people are now recalculating the date when they can retire with some sense of financial confidence and dignity. They know that if they quit without another job they face the real prospect of never working again, certainly not at their former pay levels, and that being without work means that they will receive lower retirement benefits from Social Security. So much for job mobility in America.

This creates a bottleneck for younger workers, especially young minorities. The jobless rate for workers ages 20 to 24 is over 13 percent; teenagers, 25 percent; Hispanic teenagers, 30.5 percent; and black teenagers, 37.9 percent.

Even people with a college education face unemployment rates of about 4.2 percent, which is about double the norm for this group. Those with a certificate from a community college or at least some college coursework have a jobless rate of 7.5 percent, again about double the norm; and people who did not finish high school have it worst at almost 13 percent.

Each month more Americans lose hope, permanently alienated from the workplace, their savings exhausted. The gradual expansion of the economy is too little to hope the cavalry is riding to the rescue. Real, authentic job creation will not come from Washington. It has to come out of the energy and spirits of the private sector. Two thirds of our employment is concentrated in 6 million small and medium-size businesses. We are not going to create jobs until they are in a state of mind to do so. They are not yet, and in part that's because of policy uncertainty that has depressed or confused them.

According to the Heritage Foundation, private sector hiring through June 2011 was 10 times slower following the passage of President Obama's healthcare bill compared to the prior 16 months. Economists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago estimated in the fall of 2011 that policy uncertainty has cost more than 2 million jobs since early 2010. These estimates reflect the small business community's reluctance to make new hires until employers know exactly what the law means in practice. The high level of temporary employment is a reflection of the same uncertainty. Businesses hedge their bets with short-term help.

We need 1 million new businesses every year to keep us on the right track. Instead we have only about 400,000 firms starting up. We need a labor market that creates over 400,000 jobs a month. We haven't seen anything like that. In fact, through the first few months of 2012, layoff announcements have risen 18 percent from a year ago, and hiring plans have dropped 82 percent.

Millions of people who had good private sector jobs now have to depend on the government for life support.

No wonder America's inflation-adjusted, after-tax income, which is the fuel for the consumer spending that drives the economy, has barely risen in the past six months. No wonder about half of Americans believe that their real income will contract in the coming months, while only about one fifth expect it to increase.

David Rosenberg also reports that nominal per capita disposable income-$37,606-is actually lower today than it was in May 2008 when the recession was in its infancy ($37,752). When you look at the data in real terms, adjusted for inflation, the comparison is even more startling: $32,600 now versus $34,641 back then. In fact, real personal disposable income per capita is lower now than it was in November 2006! And if you strip out government subsidies and assistance, real personal income is down even more from four years ago. This appears to be the first time since the 1930s that inflation-adjusted incomes of Americans have declined.

Don't talk "recovery" to these people, especially if you pause at a gas pump. The consumer remains constrained as well by the ratio of total household debt to after-tax earnings. It was down to 117 percent last year from a peak of 131 percent, but is still above the pre-bubble rate of 70 percent. We are still in an era of deleveraging, rising savings rates, home price deflation, and squeezed real income, all of which will continue to affect consumer spending.

The private sector workweek has stagnated at about 34.5 hours, and wage growth has been tepid at best with average hourly earnings eking out a 0.1 percent monthly increase for the last five months. Over the last nine months, overall consumer spending was up just 0.6 percent, adjusted for inflation.

There is no doubt that the next presidential term will start with a rate of unemployment that is far higher than what President Obama inherited when he took office. The programs that he has put in place have failed. The U.S. economic recovery is like a person who promises much and doesn't deliver. There are not many months left for Obama to persuade the nation to measure his performance by a different mark.

What can we do to get out of this? How can we regenerate the high-paying jobs in service industries with sophisticated intellectual content such as entertainment, digital media, education, and financial services?

1. Push students to a higher level of education, if necessary by mandating at least a year of higher education or vocational training at the public's expense.

2. Increase the number of H-1B visas for foreign graduate students in the hard sciences. Crazily, we reduced them from 195,000 in 2003 to 65,000 today. This intellectual firepower is critical to growing industries that focus on the world of high tech.

4. Create financial incentives for businesses to invest in America, rather than provoking American companies to reap greater rewards by laying off U.S. workers and outsourcing production to foreign countries that have lower environmental standards.

America has a history of comebacks, of pulling itself out of a hole, and it happens when we're led with energy and conviction. When we feel we are, we will build a new version of the promised land: millions restored to Life.

Are We Headed Toward the Constitution or the Communist Manifesto? This Breakdown Tells You

During his Thursday morning radio broadcast, Glenn Beck asked if America, on its current trajectory, is headed toward the values and principles of the Constitution, or rather, those of the Communist Manifesto.

To glean greater insight, The Blaze expanded on each of the Manifesto's 10 planks and juxtaposed them with modern day American society. The picture revealed, while perhaps not shocking, is unsettling to say the least.

10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American LifeConsidered the playbook, the framework, the founding document of Communism, it is argued that no other political volume has altered the course of history more than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's tiny yet effective blueprint for the proletariat.

Commissioned by the Communist League, Marx and Engels laid out their analysis of capitalism and class struggle while supposedly offering economic and socio-political "solutions" rooted in what they called science. While every instance of Communism attempted around the globe has since failed abysmally and without exception, proponents still cry that Marx's inviolable political and economic theories were simply "improperly executed" and thus, if true to the Manifesto, Marxism is, in itself, "perfect." A little known fact, however, is that these champions' premise is based on a flawed narrative, as Karl Marx in fact falsified much of the data he used to support his untenable political and economic system. Of Marx's flagrant disregard for the facts, British philosopher Anthony Flew wrote:

Flew continued that Marx's response was "merely to suppress the falsifying data." This was manifested in the first edition of Das Kapital where "various available British statistics-about the reliability of which there was no question-were given up to 1865 or 1866, whereas those for the movement of wages stop at 1850." In Kapital's second edition, however, according to Flew, all subsequent runs were "brought up to date, while that of wage movements still stops at 1850."

While clearly not a "man of science," nor one who held facts in high regard, generations of leftists take the words of Karl Marx as absolute truth, and indeed, the gospel. Below are the tenets they seek to live by, as mapped out in his "magnum opus."

The first plank of Communism is the abolishment of private property. America is certainly here in terms of eminent domain, where the state has the ability to expropriate private property "for the public good." Per the Fifth Amendment, the government must fairly compensate a citizen in return, but lines tend to blur when the government is given the authority to assess what is "fair and just" in the first place. Regardless of whether the final sum is one agreeable to the private citizen, the property will still be confiscated with or without the owner's consent.

Typically, land or property acquired through eminent domain is used to house public works that are10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American Life intended to benefit the community such as public utilities, freeways, libraries and schools. It is a slippery slope, however. After the Supreme Court's ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, the scope of eminent domain was expanded outside its traditional boundaries to include revitalizing "depressed areas." In other words, in the spirit of gentrification or regeneration, a citizen's private property can be seized by the government to build a sports complex, or even a shopping mall if the state deems it a public good.

Another example of government encroachment on citizens' private property is evident in the far-reach of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) that buy mortgages on the secondary market. If a citizen's mortgage is held by one of these government-backed giants, Uncle Sam is entirely "too close to home."

Interconnected is property tax. Simply, if one is subject to property tax, then the land or property being taxed doesn't actually belong to the "owner." Fall behind on these payments and the government will seize a citizen's home, business or land, regardless of whether his or her mortgage is paid in full.

10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American LifeHomes are not the only area subject to government encroachment, however. In fact, Uncle Sam owns roughly 650 million acres of land across the 50 states - with its highest ownership stake (85%) in Nevada. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) also has the authority to seize private property during "emergency" situations.

This particular tenet needs no introduction, nor example. America now holds the world record for highest corporate tax rate, surpassing even Japan. This is a crucial plank of the Manifesto, as it ensures that nary a high income earner will remain standing and everyone may subsist in equal mediocrity or (worse).

Ironically, Communists bang on incessantly about "equality" when in fact a flat-tax is arguably the fairest system of all and one that would, by design, ensure "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." If a 10% flat tax were implemented, then 10% of a $5,000 income would amount to far less than 10% of a $500,000 income. Thus, those who make more money, still pay more. Alas, that is certainly not the way Marx would have portrayed it. Nor is it the way the current administration seems to see it given the president's renewed push to instate "The Buffett Rule," which seeks to raise the income tax rate on high income earners - including small business owners - even higher than it is now.

Regardless, whether one is subject to a flat or a progressive tax system, a foreboding and omnipotent force looms dangerously over the American ether: The IRS. Fail to pay your "fair share," and you will soon learn of the government's ultimate power - to freeze your bank accounts, seize your property, penalize and, in some instances even imprison you. There is perhaps no greater example of a Marxist economic policy in action than this.

One of the many stark contradictions found in the Manifesto is outlined in this particular pillar. What was most ironic about Marx's desire to abolish inheritance was that, if he had his way, citizens would not own anything of value to bequeath upon death in the first place. Nonetheless, his odd and arguably redundant tenet has worked its way into the American landscape via the estate tax - and its very alias, the "death tax." This alone should raise eyebrows, if not outright suspicion of government's dubious motives.

First, many argue the estate tax is unconstitutional because it creates a direct tax that is not disbursed to the states for collection. But the more obvious discrepancy is that it allows the government to tax individuals twice, as the items that find their way into one's estate - be they a car, house, land, jewelry or other valuable possessions - have already been subject to either sales or property tax once before. The Federal government's carte blanche to double-dip is spurred further by Democrats' renewed push to resurrect and expand what the Wall Street Journal dubs President Obama's "night of living death tax."

With the staggering rate applied to estates worth over $5 million, citizens may soon wonder why it is worth the bother to spend a lifetime building a personal or business empire to pass down to their children and grandchildren at all. By the second generation, there would be nothing left.

This Manifesto pillar is perhaps best laid out in the recent string of government crackdowns on "homegrown militias." Those who have paid careful attention to Janet Napolitano know that one of Homeland Security's preoccupations of late has been the "rise" of "homegrown militias." With this in mind, the department is likely honing in on anyone considered an "opposition group," be they merely survivalists or those with a more militant bent.

Some may recall the Michigan militia, or "Hutaree," as they are known - a group of anti-government "rebels" who were allegedly engaged in preparations for a potential future clash with federal agencies. The defendants were accused of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government, a planned assassination of a police officer, and an ambush of that officer's funeral with explosives in order to incite an uprising against the Federal government. While the anticipated attack never actually occurred, this did not stop the Feds, under the blessing of Attorney General Eric Holder, from raiding the Hutaree's various outposts, confiscating its members' arms and waging an all-out legal battle against the group.

At the end of March, 2012, presiding U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts dismissed the most serious of the charges against the Hutaree, leveling a staggering blow to the Fed. She said the members' hatred of government did not amount to a conspiracy to overthrow it.

It remains unclear whether the Hutaree were indeed poised to be the aggressors of a violent assault or if they were simply anti-big-government, "good ol' boy" survivalists preparing to "defend themselves" against a perceived government threat. But the Federal agencies' indictment of the group perhaps reveals how government will deal with homegrown "threats" - be they real or perceived - moving forward.

Another key element, and one that warrants mention due to its relevance in modern day America, is10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American Life the confiscation of citizens' weapons. Those who have felt their Second Amendment rights slowly whittle away understand that disarming the public is a crucial step vital to ensuring the state's grip over its citizenry. In fact, one of the first tasks performed by the then-fledgling Soviet state was the confiscation of citizens' private arms - even hunting rifles. By stripping people of the ability to defend themselves, the authoritarian state could reign over the vulnerable Russian populace. Many Americans consider this a highly plausible reality given increasingly stringent gun laws and regulations spread across all 50-states.

It should also be noted that IRS liens, levies and seizures are all means by which the Federal government can confiscate a "rebel" entity's assets - one instance being the recent IRS "shakedown" of Tea Party members. And, in terms of "emigrants," taxing the off-shore income and assets of American citizens, or causing Americans to give up their U.S. citizenship and flee to foreign lands to avoid abusive U.S. taxes, is yet another means by which the Fed's confiscatory, overreaching tentacles are changing the American landscape. Statistics point out a rising trend.

10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American LifeCreated by Congress in 1913, the Federal Reserve is, for all intents and purposes, America`s national bank charged with setting the monetary policy that controls the nation's economic stability. The Federal Reserve holds the power to guide interest rates, thus controlling inflation. The effects of this agency's actions are felt in measurable ways by everyday Americans, every day. From the interest rate accrued to mortgages and other lines of credit to determining the value of one's home, it is both the seen and unforeseen reach of this institution that sets the tone for Americans' financial security.

On the grander scale, the Federal Reserve has the more sinister power of devaluing U.S. currency, and thus the value of goods, services and property, via "quantitative easing," or, as it is affectionately dubbed, printing money.

"One of the fundamental problems with the U.S. economy right now is the Federal Reserve thinks the answer to all our economic problems is printing money," said the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore. "We haven't created new jobs from all of this printing of money, but what we have produced is inflation in prices."

The ways in which the Federal government controls America's communication and transportation systems are almost too vast to count, but a few shining examples stand out. In terms of transportation, the Interstate Highway System, the Federal Aviation Authority and the Department of Transportation are of course the most obvious government bureaucracies controlling the country's means of transport. Less-obvious, perhaps, is Amtrak, a government owned corporation and essentially the only passenger rail carrier in the country. Indeed the railroad industry's metamorphosis from a private enterprise to a nationalized entity perhaps tells the greatest tale of the insidious ways in which the Federal government appropriates what it wants, when it wants.

The once flourishing U.S. rail industry's day in the sun was eclipsed when the Fed introduced a "rate-10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American Lifesetting" scheme by which rail carriers were forced to adopt. The result was a decrease in profits, decrease in rail system growth, decrease in investments and an increase in labor costs. Not surprisingly, this had the reverse effect than that intended by the Fed when it first set rail carrier rates.. Inevitably, a battered Amtrak gave way to government take-over. The obvious lesson here is that if it can happen to Amtrak there is no reason to think it couldn't just as easily happen to a commercial air carrier, for example, or any other privately held mode of transportation.

As mentioned above, air traffic, ground traffic and maritime traffic via the nation's port authorities are all overseen and subject to take-over by the government should FEMA deem a state of emergency.

Presently, when it comes to communication, conservatives argue that nothing screams of Marxism louder than the Federal Communications Commission and Obama's appointment of its "Chief Diversity Officer," Frank Lloyd.

10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American LifeOne of the administration's many "czars," Lloyd was a senior fellow at the progressive think tank, Center for American Progress, where he authored a June 2007 report titled, "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio." The content may point to Lloyd's intentions when it comes to silencing voices of opposition, and many conservatives believe that Obama's "Diversity Czar" intends to revive the Fairness Doctrine.

For those unfamiliar, the Fairness Doctrine, adopted in 1949, obligated broadcasters to provide opposing points of view on issues of national importance regardless of actual market demand for the content. Media Research Center's Setton Motley said, if reinstated, caps would be placed on local and national ownership of commercial radio stations; local accountability over licensing would be ensured; and those not in compliance would be subject to paying a fee to support public broadcasting. As it stands, the FCC already levies heavy regulations on broadcasters and monitors all communication aired across radio and television waves.

Looking forward, another impending threat can be found in the current struggle for control over the Internet. Currently, the World Wide Web is controlled by the U.S. government via the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and its subsidiary, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Both are under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

There has been a growing push, however, for America to relinquish its control in the name of a world "without borders," or "one world government." Countries like China and Russia, in particular, have vied for control, doggedly pursuing the United Nations for assistance in breaking the U.S. stronghold.

If the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union (ITU), along with its nearly 200 member state allies were to take control of the levers, cyber security and data privacy would be subject to international control.

While even in the land of the free no information received or transmitted over the Internet escapes the prying eyes of Big Brother, it goes without saying America's First Amendment rights still ensure a far more liberated information superhighway than the one that would exist under the reins of a dubious global body formed by the U.N. and led by China and Russia. Meanwhile, the entire global economy hangs in the balance.

In terms of government owned factories, few could ever forget "Government Motors." After nearly $53 billion in bailout funds over the course of two administrations, the U.S. government now owns a controlling stake in GM, raising the obvious question of how government can fairly regulate its own business. While GM asked the government to intervene, and while Amtrak was instead a victim of a federally-engineered scheme, both are examples of how government assumes control of private enterprise. Typically, it is the American taxpayer who fails to reap the dividends and becomes the victim of these machinations.

The first thought which springs to mind when reading the Manifesto's tenet on equal labor is the overriding presence of labor unions within the U.S. workforce. While labor unions in and of themselves are not nationalized organizing bodies, they have enjoyed a long and harmonious relationship with government, particularly through the progressive policies and lawmakers that prop up their various agendas. In fact, there may be no brighter an illustration of socialism manifested than the collective organizing body of America's labor unions. Although subject to regulation and oversight by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), unions still overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates, thus a cycle of quid pro quo is perpetuated.

Another example of government control in the workplace emerges via the Labor Department's Affirmative Action policies. By mandating that employers meet a staff-quota comprised of women, minorities and people with disabilities, private business is being forced to relinquish its ability to hire on the basis of merit, thus failing to deliver excellence and best practices. While many women, minorities and those with disabilities do indeed possess the skill sets needed to succeed in a specific job, it should, critics argue, be left to private enterprise to determine which candidate is best suited for the task at hand.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a government owned corporation, has been hailed a prime10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American Life example of true socialism in America. It is the country's largest public power company, with a generating capacity of 31,658 megawatts. Its 17,000 miles of transmission lines deliver power through 158 locally owned distributors to 8.5 million residents of the Tennessee Valley. While even Republicans, for the most part, consider TVA to be a success, its case is considered unique in that the government model has never been able to be successfully duplicated along any other State waterway.

Agricultural subsidies are another prime example of this Manifesto plank in motion. An extensive analysis conducted by the CATO Institute determined that, when it comes to corporate welfare no one has reaped a greater windfall, or hurt taxpayers more than the "supermarket to the world," Archer Daniels. An excerpt from the report reads:

ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM's annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM's corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30

Aside from being incongruent with the free market, the nation's agricultural subsidies cost tax payers tens of billions of dollars each year and typically only benefit larger farming outfits.

On the flip side, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is placing greater and greater restrictions on business in the form of cap and trade and in mandating the purchase of carbon credits.

What can be said of America's beleaguered public education system could fill volumes, yet one needn't look far to pluck one or two prime examples as proof that there are indeed no "free lunches."

The Blaze recently uncovered a series of reports revealing what happens when a bureaucrat decides that the school district, along with its unionized faculty members, know better about a child's needs than his or her parents do. Whether the control comes via mandating a child's school lunch box contents, or altering the Pledge of Allegiance to omit the phrase "one nation under God," or subjecting students to inadequate instruction from a teacher solely on the basis of that teacher's tenure - a teacher who cannot be fired or replaced - the public school system is, arguably, setting up generations for failure.

10 Tenets of The Communist Manifesto Manifested in American LifeWhile not addressed specifically in the 10 tenets of the Communist Manifesto, national health care is perhaps - at least in modern day America - "the key to the empire." It is why the fate of Obamacare is of utmost importance to the left. If passed, it sets precedent by establishing the "new normal" in government authority over private citizens. Legal experts and pundits alike have consistently argued the unconstitutionality of the health care bill, underscoring its significance as a "gateway" to other forms of government intrusion.

The bill's unconstitutionality is irrelevant to those who, while claiming to champion the founding document, appear to be working to dismantle it.

Some balk at the use of the word "Communism," dismissing its invocation as hyperbole. Yet when dissecting actual policies, laws, regulations and bureaucratic government approaches which Americans are increasingly subjected to, and weighing them against the 10 progressive "rules to live by," the facts scream loudly and clearly in the face of those who deny the ever-creeping onset of Socialism. Marx's Communist "utopia" is only one evolutionary stage away from reality.

Is it suddenly disreputable to advocate free-market policies? That's the question raised by a remarkable political assault on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which promotes reform in the 50 states. Led by former White House aide Van Jones, various left-wing activists and media are bullying big business to cut off ALEC's funding. So much for free and open debate.

Founded in 1973, ALEC is a group of state lawmakers who meet to share and spread conservative policy ideas. ALEC's main focus is fiscal and economic policy, notably at the moment pension and lawsuit reform, tax and spending limitation, and school choice. For years it labored in obscurity, its influence rising or falling with the public mood. But after conservatives made record gains in state legislatures in 2010, the left began to target ALEC for destruction.

Enter Mr. Jones and his Color of Change movement, which has ginned up a campaign to portray ALEC as racist and unworthy of business support. The evidence? Well, it seems that ALEC has supported-brace yourself-voter ID laws. It has also endorsed so-called "stand your ground" laws that have become controversial in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida.

Roughly half the states have passed some form of voter ID law, polls show the public overwhelmingly supports them, there's no evidence they suppress minority turnout, and the Supreme Court has declared a model Indiana ID law to be constitutional.

But on its website, Color of Change nonetheless accuses ALEC of "trying to stop Black people, other people of color, young people, and the elderly from voting-and now some of America's biggest companies are helping them do it."

In a letter typical of its anti-ALEC campaign, Color of Change urged its 85,000 members to write Coca-Cola and demand that the company stop donating to ALEC. "We contacted Coca-Cola to make sure they understand that through their membership in ALEC, they are supporting racially-discriminatory voter ID laws that have the potential to disenfranchise over 5 million people in the upcoming elections," Color of Change wrote.

The letter also denounced ALEC for supporting Florida's "'Shoot First' law," though similar stand-your-ground laws have passed in some 26 states and have been signed by such former Democratic Governors as Janet Napolitano in Arizona (now U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security) and Jennifer Granholm of Michigan. Are they racist too?

After it is done playing the race card, the Color of Change letter finally gets to its real political agenda by citing ALEC's support for legislation "to privatize education, and to break unions."

Color of Change and outfits like the Center for Media and Democracy are playing up the race angle because they know it has the most potential to spook big businesses. If they merely fought against tax cuts or school choice, the companies would ignore them. But if you shout "racism" in a crowded marketplace, most CEOs duck and cover.

And sure enough, Coca-Cola quickly announced it would stop its $25,000 donation to ALEC, saying in a statement that "Our involvement with ALEC was focused on efforts to oppose discriminatory food and beverage taxes, not on issues that have no direct bearing on our business." So Coke executives are happy to get ALEC's help in their self-interest but head for the tall grass when ALEC needs a friend.

Editorial board member Steve Moore on how left-wing activists have cowed Coca-Cola and other businesses into dropping out of ALEC. Photo: Getty Images

Several other companies have also announced they won't donate to ALEC in the future, including Mars, Wendy's and Kraft. The Gates Foundation donated to ALEC to promote school reform, but in the wake of the left-wing attacks it has also announced it won't again. The likes of AT&T, Wal-Mart, Johnson & Johnson and State Farm have so far withstood the attacks, to their credit.

If they do cut off ALEC, these companies will be abandoning one of the few voices in state capitals that supports free-market policies. (Disclosure: One of our editorial board members, Stephen Moore, is the co-author of a study distributed by ALEC comparing the economic performance of various states. He was not compensated for the work.)

ALEC's 2,000 legislator members chip in $50 a year, but donations make up the rest of its meager $7 million annual budget. Contrast that to the tens of millions that teachers unions are investing in Wisconsin to recall Governor Scott Walker. Or all the corporate cash that flows to Planned Parenthood, the NAACP, green groups and other liberal lobbies for higher taxes and more regulation.

ALEC is feeling enough pressure that late Tuesday it announced it is disbanding its Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues. This may be prudent politically to prevent a further decline in its business funding, but it's a shame to see the group bend to such pressure.

The ugly, race-baiting anti-ALEC campaign is typical of today's liberal activism. It's akin to the campaigns to smear libertarian donors Charles and David Koch and to exploit shareholder proxies to stop companies from giving to political campaigns or even the Chamber of Commerce.

The left these days isn't content merely to fight on the merits in legislatures or during elections. If they lose, they resort to demonizing opponents and trying to shut them down. The business community had better understand that ALEC won't be the last target.

All the polls say the same thing. Americans who don't have a lot of money, overwhelmingly support the President. That's because since Mr. Obama has been in office, welfare spending has increased 41 percent.

Right now about $1 trillion every year is spent on entitlements. Medicaid, the biggest situation but there are 126 anti-poverty programs on the books. Back in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty. At that time the poverty rate was about 19 percent.

Since then, America has spent roughly $15 trillion fighting poverty. Yet, right now the poverty rate is above 15 percent. So you can see all the money has not done much to combat the problem.

The reason is that poor education and poor parenting are driving destitution. High school dropouts are almost four times more likely to end up in poverty than those who graduate. And children growing up in single parent families are four times more likely to be poor than those living with both parents.

As long as Americans refuse to educate themselves and family units remain chaotic, you will have a 15 percent poverty rate no matter how much money you throw at it. The statistics I have cited come from a new study by the Cato Institute but as you may know "Talking Points" has been telling you this for years.

In a free society, people have a right to be a moron and no government can stop irresponsible parenting. So, what is the solution?

President Obama believes that the federal government should give money to the poor. Hand it right to them in a variety of ways. The problem with that is that many of the poor will use the money irresponsibly. The high rate of alcohol and drug addiction and other social problems assure a massive amount of waste in the entitlement arena.

Americans are the most generous people on earth. But the truth is that income redistribution doesn't work. For what the feds spend now on entitlements, every single poor person in America could be handed almost $21,000 a year.

Now, Mitt Romney would be wise to lay out his own anti-poverty program that would be heavy on personal responsibility that if you're getting entitlements, you have to show where the money goes. It can't go to buy drugs and alcohol or to be used in a casino.

The bible says the poor will always be with us and that's absolutely true. There are always going to be human beings who cannot and will not support themselves. Society must be compassionate but must be responsible in trying to help these people especially the kids.

But right now there is no discipline at all in the entitlement culture. And President Obama simply wants to throw more money at the problem.

President Obama continues to urge higher taxes on the affluent but he also continues to expand the federal government in record-breaking ways. Since the President has been in office about 147,000 government employees have been added to the payroll despite the $16 trillion federal debt. And as we've been reporting, government waste has reached epidemic proportions.

This man 57-year-old Jeffrey Neely, the acting commissioner of the General Services Administration's Pacific Rim region may have taken 131 trips worth more than $100,000 on the taxpayer dime. Neely was also behind the outrageous $823,000 Las Vegas junket.

NEELY: Mr. Chairman, on the advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my Fifth Amendment constitutional privilege.

O'REILLY: What a weasel. And here he is, Mr. Weasel, in a Vegas hotel room using a hot tub with a champagne chaser or two. And we pay for this. Ah. I would be smiling, too huh, Jeff? Neely also took trips to Hawaii and South Pacific. We hope they had hot tubs in both those places and he brought his wife.

So Mr. President, you are telling me I should pay more taxes so Jeffrey can run around the world jumping at the hot tubs. Is that what you're telling me?

Federal government needs to be down sized and reorganized. It's one thing after the other. If it isn't Secret Service chasing hookers, it's bankrupt solar energy companies or research studies that put shrimp on a treadmill. Remember that?

And that reminds me, Neely was the guy who OK'd the $4 shrimp appetizer in Vegas that so upset Jon Stewart. It is beyond galling to hear the Democratic Party continuing to pound the table for more tax dollars in light of what's happening.

Education? They want more money. Well, the USA spends more than any other country on earth except Switzerland to educate our students. Jobs creation, more money, green energy, more money. it never ends.

You know what I think, I think God sent us Jeffrey Neely. I think the deity allowed government investigators to uncover what that guy was doing. If American voters still don't understand the giant con that is going on at the federal level, then we deserve to be like Greece.

Once again "Talking Points" believes the government should respect taxpayer dollars, should down size, should transfer some power to the states. let them screw it up. Jeffrey Neely gamed the system and we all pay for it. Put him on trial.

As author of the book "Killing Lincoln," I know a little bit about the nation's first Republican president and the current President Barack Obama knows something about Mr. Lincoln as well.

In fact, he often cites old Abe in his speeches. Here is an example yesterday in Ohio.

OBAMA: I believe that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. I agree that everybody has personal responsibility for their own lives. Everybody has got to work hard. Nothing is ever handed to us.

But I also agree with our first Republican president, a guy named Abraham Lincoln, who said that "through government, we should be able to do together what we can't do as well on our own."

O'REILLY: Interesting sound bite. Number one, Mr. Obama is responding to criticism from this program and other places that he is a social justice guy who wants government to somewhat control individual outcomes. The President denies that but there is no question that his administration has embraced the entitlement culture spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on it.

Now, what Mr. Obama said about Abraham Lincoln is also very interesting. We should do together what we cannot do as well on our own. Ok. What did Mr. Lincoln actually mean by that? Let's take slavery, for example. No American could defeat that on his or her own. We had to fight a war for emancipation. Americans in the north had to band together to defeat pro-slavery forces. That's a legitimate function of the federal government. Is it not? Of course it is.

Now, I believe President Obama would say that a just society is what Abraham Lincoln stood for. And that's true. But collective justice is far different than individual justice. All of us get hosed in life. Nobody escapes unharmed. The federal government can't alter that reality. We will pay for our mistakes and for the bad things people do to us.

What President Obama does not seem to understand but Abraham Lincoln did is the limitations of the bureaucracy. If the President continues spending the way he has in the past, he'll bankrupt the country. Is that justice for all? Economic chaos is not far away. And that is what this year's presidential election will be about.

Unlike some of you, I believe Mr. Obama is a sincere man. But I do not believe he understands economics. And I don't think he lives in the real world. But he should. He should.

For years Barack Obama worked on the south side of Chicago. He saw millions of dollars poured into that neighborhood. And he saw the money did very little to improve the lives of the people there.

In fact, the south side of Chicago is worse now than it's ever been. But President Obama has his story and he is sticking to it. But Abraham Lincoln's story, that's another matter.

"And yet, Congresswoman Schneider, in 1989, fiscal 1989 as we say in America, the Environmental Protection Agency got $5.1 billion dollars and the Defense Department got $290 billion dollars. What's that tell us about our priorities?"

- ABC anchor Peter Jennings on the September 12, 1989 Capital to Capital special "The Environment: Crisis In the Global Village."

Tom Brokaw: "About 10 percent of the Earth's surface is covered by ice, most of that in the polar regions. But if enough of that ice melts, the seas will rise dramatically and the results will be calamitous....If this worst-case scenario should occur, in the coming centuries New York could be abandoned, its famous landmarks lost to the sea."

Dr. James Hansen, Goddard Institute for Space Studies: "Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami -- they would all be under water."

- From Brokaw's two-hour Discovery Channel special, Global Warming: What You Need to Know, excerpt shown on the July 15, 2006 NBC Nightly News.

"No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth....Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us....Something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming....It's undeniable that the White House's environmental record - from the abandonment of Kyoto to the President's [George W. Bush] broken campaign pledge to control carbon output to the relaxation of emission standards - has been dismal."

- Time's Jeffrey Kluger in the magazine's April 3, 2006 global warming cover story: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."

"The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming....Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue....As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change."

- Former Washington Post and Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan in an August 30, 2005 Boston Globe op-ed.

"ExxonMobil - I think this is a real group of bad guys, considering that they have funded all the anti-global-warming propaganda out there in the world. And Bush is just not going to go against guys like that. They are bad, bad guys, because of what they are doing in fighting the science of global warming."

- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in an interview published in Rolling Stone, October 17, 2002.

"If nothing is done to reverse ozone damage, scientists predict hundreds of millions of skin cancer cases in the U.S. alone, not to mention increased global warming that would turn much of the planet into a desert."

"The noises coming from [Rep. Sonny] Bono and many of his fellow Republican signers of House Speaker Newt Gingrich's `Contract with America' signal a radical shift in Congress's attitude toward environmental issues -- a shift that may bode ill for the health of snail darters, spotted owls, and even the human species."

- Time reporter Dick Thompson in a February 27, 1995 story headlined "Congressional Chain-Saw Massacre: If Speaker Newt Gingrich gets his way, the laws protecting air, water and wildlife may be endangered."

"Next week on ABC's World News Tonight, a series of reports about our environment which will tell you precisely what the new [Republican] Congress has in mind: the most frontal assault on the environment in 25 years. Is this what the country wants?"

- Peter Jennings in an ABC promo during the July 9, 1995 This Week with David Brinkley.

"Ultimately, no problem may be more threatening to the Earth's environment than the proliferation of the human species."

- Anastasia Toufexis, "Overpopulation: Too Many Mouths," article in Time's special "Planet of the Year" edition, January 2, 1989.

"The missteps, poor efforts and setbacks brought on by the Reagan years have made this a more sober Earth Day. The task seems larger now."

"You know, Bob, you'd still be holding your breath and kicking your feet if what had happened to Al Gore in Florida had happened to you. He rose above a great injustice....He became a prophet on an issue that is crucially important to the world."

- Ex-Time reporter Margaret Carlson to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bob Novak on Bloomberg TV's Political Capital, October 13, 2007.

"Despite the danger that climate change poses, the resources currently devoted to studying this problem -- and combating it -- are inconsequential compared with the trillions spent during the Cold War. Twenty years from now, we may wonder how we could have miscalculated which threat represented the greater peril."

Karen Kerrigan, Small Business Survival Committee: "To say that the science is conclusive...is actually bunk."

Host Ted Koppel: "I was just going to make the observation that there are still some people who believe in the Flat Earth Society, too, but that doesn't mean they're right."

"Put an international tax on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases....Find a way to put the brakes on the world's spiraling population, which will otherwise double by the year 2050....Give the United Nations broad powers to create an environmental police force for the planet."

- Time list of "What They Should Do But Won't" at the United Nations "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro, June 1, 1992.

"Today, life on Earth is disappearing faster than the days when dinosaurs breathed their last, but for a very different reason....Us homo sapiens are turning out to be as destructive a force as any asteroid. Earth's intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives....The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home....It will take a massive global effort to make things right, but the solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption, develop green technologies."

- NBC's Matt Lauer hosting Countdown to Doomsday, a two-hour June 14, 2006 Sci-Fi Channel special.

Bryant Gumbel: "At the risk of starting an argument, are you a believer in global warming?"

Gumbel: "So am I....And you wonder what it's gonna take. I mean, is it gonna take some kind of a real catastrophe? I mean, does an iceberg have to come floating down the Hudson before somebody stands up and goes, `Oh, yeah'?"

"So I'm running in the park on Saturday, in shorts, thinking this [warm weather] is great, but are we all gonna die? You know? I can't, I can't figure this out."

- Co-host Meredith Vieira talking about global warming on NBC's Today, January 8, 2007.

"There is an even greater threat that scientists can only speculate about. As global temperatures rise, they may cause the massive West Antarctic ice sheet to slip more rapidly. Then we'll be facing a sea-level rise not of one to three feet in a century, but of 10 or 20 feet in a much shorter time. The Supreme Court would be flooded. You could tie your boat to the Washington Monument. Storm surges would make the Capitol unusable. For Today, Paul Ehrlich in Washington, DC, on the future shoreline of Chesapeake Bay."

Children singing: "Oil drops are falling on their heads/And that surely means that soon they will all be dead."...

Scheider: "The environmental revolution has made us understand where we humans are taking the Earth. Towards a world poisoned by pollution. Towards an atmosphere disrupted by greenhouse warming and losing its protective layer of ozone. Towards rivers, oceans and beaches made unusable by sewage and toxic waste. Towards unmanageable piles of garbage filled with the squandered resources of the planet. Towards a population of 10 billion in 60 years, twice as many as today. With the prospect of feeding those billions from farmland eroded toward the breaking point. It will be a world in which wild things have no room to live. A world in which forests have disappeared. Only the environmental revolution can save the planet from this fate."

- Actor Roy Scheider narrating ten-part PBS series Race to Save the Planet aired from October 7 to 11, 1990.

- ABC's Sam Champion teasing an upcoming segment on Good Morning America, February 8, 2008.

"Not doing it [fighting global warming] will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years, and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down."

"It's a morbid observation, but if everyone on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a problem."

This candidate will have to be pushed a lot harder to make him a good president.

Watching Rick Perry in the Republican debate at Dartmouth say that the answer to every aspect of economic revival is to "get our energy industry back to work," and watching Herman Cain say that the answer to virtually anything is "my 9-9-9 plan," one's thoughts of course turned to John Belushi's immortal Greek diner owner, Pete Dionasopolis, who defined his world in three words: "Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger!"

Perhaps destiny brought these GOP candidates to Dartmouth. After the debate, Gov. Perry attended a Dartmouth frat party. A Dartmouth fraternity was of course the inspiration for "Animal House," an apt metaphor for the GOP nomination process.

Newt Gingrich's variation on cheeseburger is to repeatedly attack Ben Bernanke. This is slightly weird, but the former House Speaker apparently has decided that if he talks too much about Washington, he'll be fingered as one of them. So his strategy is attacking the Fed.

Incredible to behold, the Federal Reserve offered the evening's one, genuine comic highlight. After Julianna Goldman elicited from Herman Cain his view that the best Fed chairman in the past 40 years was Alan Greenspan, all the synapses in Ron Paul's brain fired in a straight line to assert: "Alan Greenspan was a disaster! Everybody in Washington-liberals and conservatives-said he kept interest rates too low, too long . . . and ushered in the biggest [housing] bubble."

We all know the meaning of the saying, It isn't over until the fat lady sings. A few hours before the Dartmouth debate, Chris Christie endorsed Mitt Romney. Gov. Christie's sudden and awkwardly timed endorsement may only reflect his belief that the process is over, we have a candidate and it's time to get on with the campaign to defeat Barack Obama.

We see his point, but what's the rush? The election is 13 months away. No voters in any primary have had a chance to provide a verdict on the candidates more real than these hapless debates or another opinion poll.

By this early, imperfect measure, Mitt Romney's status is weak. Despite running against this field, he never rises above 25% in GOP preferences. At best, Mr. Romney is running as the party's Unsinkable Molly Brown.

A week ago, Mr. Christie seemed to understand that the reason so many wanted him to run wasn't merely dissatisfaction with Mr. Romney. It had to do as well with the clear sense that the 2012 election is historic, a moment for the American people to choose decisively between Barack Obama's Americanized version of a flatlined European social democracy or the steady upward path of the nation's past two centuries.

The enthusiasm flowing to Mr. Christie came from the same people who had hoped to see Congressman Paul Ryan in the race, or Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush. All of them made clear they understood we had arrived at a big moment for the nation. Mr. Romney, by contrast, leaves the impression that the country has arrived at his big moment.

Before any primary vote, Mr. Christie and others are falling in behind a former Massachusetts governor whose message is both very good and very bad. It would help the Romney candidacy a lot-or a Romney presidency-if he were under more pressure now from his peers in the party.

Mr. Romney was at his best in the debate when pressed to bow to the conventional Beltway wisdom that any deficit compromise demands tax increases. He ran his questioner through total government spending's rising share of the economy, heading toward 40%, and said merely matching revenue to that share would mean "we cease at some point to be a free economy."

That's true and well said. But Mr. Romney also said: "You have to stand by your principles." Doubts about that statement are the main reason Mr. Romney, in the current RealClearPolitics average, is polling at 21.7%, a level that gives new meaning to front-runner.

The health-care problem has been widely discussed. There are two other troubling policy areas, both on display in the debate: taxes and China.

Newt Gingrich rightly asked Mr. Romney why his capital gains cut stops at incomes above $200,000-a total economic absurdity, especially for anyone who purports to know "how the economy works."

Mr. Romney's standard reply is that the "rich can take care of themselves" and he's all about "the middle class." But that's Barack Obama's divisive view. And despite two bipartisan commissions explicitly calling for lower individual rates, Mr. Romney's tax reforms are "in the future." So he sits below 22% support.

China is hacking into the Pentagon's computers, grabbing the South China Sea, offering little help on nuclear proliferation, and Mr. Romney's big proposal is "on day one" to file a complaint against China with the World Trade Organization for currency manipulation. But that's proto-Democrat Chuck Schumer's issue. If one can glean a commonality in the Schumer-Romney complaint, it would be campaign contributions.

Mitt Romney has undoubted gifts. He could be president. But in the current Obama morass, so could 100 other people. What voters, including Republican voters, want for the United States now is the best president possible. Mr. Romney isn't there yet. Only more competition or criticism will get him there.

This is a diary, in which, I will explain how I see a fetus as a parasite. I'm also bored and felt like typing :)

Anyways, back to the whole fetus= parasite thing. That is how I see them. I don't see them as cute and cuddly. I see them as terrifying and scary. I see pregnancy the same way.

Some people would argue that this is a form of Mutualism, which is a relationship where both the host and the parasite benefit, but how does this benefit the mother? Where is that "benefit"?

2Timothy 3:1–4 But know this, that in the last days grievous times will be upon us. For men will be lovers of themselves, money-lovers, braggarts, arrogant, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural feeling, unyielding, slanderers, without self-control, savage, haters of good, betrayers, reckless, arrogant, and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

There are all of those Obama halo pictures out there; but there are also the Obama-staring-pensively-out-of-the-window photos as well. The New York Magazine. Weasel Zippers.

Nancy Pelosi argues that President Obama has not been in campaign mode. Also, on this page, is a clever sort of ad that does something I’ve never seen before (but it did not do it the second time I opened that page).

Peggy Noonan Schools Olbermann: 'A Lot of People Think Businessmen Create Businesses Which Create Jobs'

Dad who shot daughter's laptop faces massive public blowback. That is too bad; I saw the original video and I thought it was reasonably funny.

RUSH: Did you see this? According to an analysis by the Tax Foundation, only 84 million Americans paid any federal income tax at all in 2010? We have a country, this is everybody, over 310 million people. I don't know how many of those are crumb crunchers versus how many are adults, but I can guarantee you that there are more than 84 million adults. Eighty-four million Americans paid any federal income tax at all in 2010. There are over 313 million Americans. That doesn't count the illegal aliens -- uh, uh, uh -- sorry, undocumented Democrat voters. The Tax Foundation, nonpartisan bunch, also found that people making over $50,000 a year paid 93.3% of all the income tax collected in 2010. That is, I guess, what Obama means by fairness. It's what he calls social justice.

People who make less than $50,000 a year pay 6% of the total tax burden. And even this statistic, people making over $50,000 paid 93.3% is a little bit misleading because when you get to the top 1%, the top five and top ten, you'd be stunned. I never can remember off the top of my head, the top 1% pay something like 20% or 25. The top 10% are paying close to 50%. But it's also true that if you make over $60,000 a year in this country, you're in the top 10% of wage earners. And that's why, if you start taxing the rich you're not gonna raise enough money to significantly reduce the deficit, as evidenced by the Buffett Rule. A minimum 30% tax on all millionaires would raise $5 billion. A rounding error in Obama's budget.

RUSH: It's official. Obama's deficit spending for his first term, $5 trillion. This is why there's a Tea Party. This is why the 2010 midterms happened. Five trillion in deficit spending added to the national debt. Now, I remember when I was 15, 20 years old, I remember the adults that I knew and hung around, my parents' friends, were always worried about the national debt. This is in the 1960s, the early seventies. I constantly remember hearing them worried about the national debt. Of course I wasn't. I wasn't old enough to even really understand what it was, but as I got older and I kept hearing people talk about it, I said, "For my whole life I've been hearing about the national debt and how it's gonna crush the country. It hasn't happened so it must not be that big a deal."

Well, guess what I've become? I have become one of those people that's now very much concerned about the national debt cause it's never, ever been anywhere near as large as it is expressed any way you want, as a percentage, total dollars, or what have you. We are nearing collapse. The old adage was the national debt never really mattered because we owed it to ourselves, therefore we never really had to pay it back. But we don't owe it just to ourselves now. We owe it to the ChiComs. We owe it to the Japanese. We owe it to a lot of people who expect to be paid back, who expect their interest payments to be made. So it's not just something that we owe ourselves and can forget about or forgive or what have you. It's a far greater problem because the tax rates required to make a dent in this, coupled with the spending cuts that nobody so far has had the guts to propose or implement, are unthinkable to a lot of people.

That's why the total income tax, here's a stat I heard the other day, for those of you who have grandkids, their total life tax payments have already been spent, at current income tax rates. If they went out and got jobs out of college, worked until they're 65, somebody ran the numbers, and your grandkids, two generations from now, their lifetime taxes have already been spent. Now, what are their tax rates gonna be if something isn't done about this? This is why there is a Tea Party. This president has rung up more debt than all previous presidents combined. And the horizon we can now see, it's Greece, it's Spain, it is Europe.

RUSH: I'm thinking about this $5 trillion that Obama has rung up here. That will be the total indebtedness, the total of deficits for Obama's first term. And I gotta tell you: As dumb as they are about economics, I would bet your average stay-at-home mom wouldn't even be dumb enough to run up that much debt in three-and-a-half years. Hilary Rosen says they don't know what they're talking about; stay-at-home moms never worked a day in their life. It's $5 trillion! It's incomprehensible. A hundred billion is what is it, 10,000 million? I mean, it's incomprehensible. It's just as incomprehensible as the amount of power required to get a Boeing 747 off the ground and fly any distance.

Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.

Climate Change Dispatch; a sometimes humorous approach to the religion of Climate Change:

Conservative Review
Issue #224	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	April 22, 2012