Connecticut Residents’ Gun Rights Change Dramatically on April 1 — and It’s No April Fools

(TheBlaze/AP) – Connecticut State Police are reminding firearms owners that state regulations on long guns will change Tuesday.

Troopers say that beginning April 1, long guns cannot be sold or transferred without one of the following documents: a permit to carry pistols or revolvers, an eligibility certificate for pistols or revolvers or a long gun eligibility certificate.

State police say those documents also will allow people to buy ammunition. Anyone who wants to buy ammunition and not additional firearms will only be required to obtain an ammunition certificate.

Also beginning Tuesday, hunting licenses will no longer be accepted for the purchase of long guns.

All permits and certificates can be applied for at state police headquarters in Middletown.

As TheBlaze has reported extensively, Connecticut’s hastily-passed gun control law made tens of thousands of legal gun owners technically guilty of committing felonies overnight. The law requirers owners of semi-automatic rifles classified as so-called “assault weapons” to register their guns and high-capacity magazines.

That part of the law officially went into affect on the first day of 2014.

The state estimates there are still thousands of gun owners who haven’t done so. It’s unclear at this point what action police intend to take — if any — to enforce the law.

[H/T TheBlaze: Jason Howerton]

Air Force removes Bible from POW-MIA display

(Fox News) – On March 14 Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told members of the House Armed Services committee that there was no war on religious liberty.

“The single biggest frustration I’ve had in this job is the perception that somehow there is religious persecution inside the United States Air Force,” the general told lawmakers. “It is not true.”

Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) told me the Air Force seems to be the worst offender when it comes to attacks on religious liberty.

If that’s true, perhaps Gen. Welsh could explain why a Bible was removed from a POW/MIA Missing Man Table at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. The removal of the Good Book was first reported by the Gannett-owned newspaper Florida Today.

Base officials confirmed to Fox News Monday that the entire Missing Man Table display had been removed from a dining hall because of the Bible. A press statement said the inclusion of the Bible ignited “controversy and division.”

Missing Man Tables are a long honored military tradition. The tables serve as a reminder of the plight of brave Americans who are missing in action or who are being held prisoner of war. The display includes a white table cloth setting with an inverted glass, a plate with lemon and salt, a single rose, a candle and a Bible.

Each item is an integral part of the Missing Man Table & Honors Ceremony, according to the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia.

“The Bible represents the strength gained through faith in our country, founded as one nation under god, to sustain those lost from our midst,” the official ceremony document states.

However, someone at Patrick Air Force Base objected to the Bible’s placement on the table.

The following is the Air Force’s explanation of what happened:

“The 45th Space Wing deeply desires to honor America’s Prisoners and War (POW) and Missing in Action (MIA) personnel. Unfortunately, the Bible’s presence or absence on the table at the Riverside Dining Facility ignited controversy and division, distracting from the table’s primary purpose of honoring POWs/MIAs. Consequently, we temporarily replaced the table with the POW/MIA flag in an effort to show our continued support of these heroes while seeking an acceptable solution to the controversy. After consultation with several relevant organizations, we now intend to re-introduce the POW/MIA table in a manner inclusive of all POWs/MIAs as well as Americans everywhere.”

The Air Force did not say when the Missing Man Table would be returned. Nor did they say whether the Bible would be included in the display. They also declined to explain what they meant by the word “inclusive.”

Retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, now an executive vice president with the Family Research Council, denounced the Air Force Academy’s actions.

“I’m still looking for somebody in a leadership position in the Air Force with an ounce of courage,” he told me. “They buckle to an extreme minority group every time and constitutionally they are simply wrong.”

Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) told me the Air Force seems to be the worst offender when it comes to attacks on religious liberty.

“It’s very disconcerting that all it takes is for someone to be offended by that – and it comes down,” he said. “The First Amendment is very clear on this. Speech may offend some people – in this case maybe Christianity offends some people in the Air Force – but that doesn’t matter.  We’re stil allowed to speak about our closely held beliefs.”

Fleming accused the Air Force of ignoring the law.

“Since when does one unnamed, unknown individual have veto power over the First Amendment rights of all people in the military and in this case the Air Force?” he asked.

Ann Mills-Griffiths, is the chairman of the National League of POW/MIA Families. She told me she was glad the Air Force base is going to reinstall the Missing Man Table, but she wonders if the new display will include the Bible.

She said the Bible is “part of the Missing Man Honor Ceremony and we hope it will be restored to what it was.”

“Our country is one nation under God,” she said. “It doesn’t seem outrageous or unreasonable to have the Bible on the table.”

Ron Crews, the executive director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty, told me he hopes the Air Force will restore the Bible to its rightful place. He called it a symbol of hope and courage for military personnel and their families.

“It is sad when military traditions honoring our POWs and MIAs are trumped by pursuits to remove any vestige of the faith that has sustained our warriors since Valley Forge,” Crews told me.

Earlier this month, a cadet at the Air Force Academy removed an inspirational Bible verse from a white board hanging outside his dorm room. Air Force officials said the cadet “voluntarily” removed the verse after someone complained.

However, Liberty Institute attorney Michael Berry said he was told by officials at the Air Force Academy that had the cadet not voluntarily removed the verse, he would have been ordered to remove it.

Berry told OneNewsNow.com the incident was a clear denial of the cadet’s right of freedom of religious expression.

“He said, well, the Air Force’s official policy – and this is coming from the very top, from the Pentagon level – is that the term ‘free exercise of religion’ does not extend to speech of this kind,” Berry told the news organization. “Either verbal speech or writing a verse on a whiteboard, he said, would not fall under the protection of free exercise of religion as it is written in the First Amendment.”

I would certainly be remiss if I did not extend my thanks to the staff of Florida Today, for first reporting this latest incident of religious liberty under attack.

General Welsh’s remarks from March 14 bear repeating. He claimed there is no religious persecution happening in the Air Force. If that’s the case, sir, what have you done with the Bible?

[H/T FoxNews: Todd Starnes]

Transgender defense: Serial killer says former male self committed the murders

(Liberty Unyielding) – Some observers might say that Donna Perry has a lethal injection coming, but the serial killer of three Spokane women in 1990 would argue she has a thank you coming. Perry, who claims it was not her but her former male self, Douglas, who committed the murders, insists moreover that her elective sex reassignment surgery took a vicious killer off the streets. When someone goes from being male to female, she maintains, “there’s a great downturn in violence” and she had her sex change operation “as a permanent way to control” Douglas Perry’s violent urges.

According to Spokane ABC affiliate KXLY, Perry has been linked through DNA evidence to the murders of Yolanda Sapp, Kathleen Brisbois, and Nickie Lowe, all prostitutes. Perry — whose criminal history also includes charges of assault and illegal possession of firearms and explosives — was additionally charged with soliciting prostitutes in Spokane in 1989.

In 2012, Detectives Mark Burbridge and Jim Dresback interviewed Perry. Detective Burbridge told Perry that people who kill multiple victims usually don’t stop killing. He asked Perry why the killings stopped and she replied, “Douglas didn’t stop, Donna stopped it.” Perry told detectives that since the sex change, she is “paranoid and emotional but won’t hurt anybody.”

She went on to say, “I’m not going to admit I killed anybody, I didn’t. Donna has killed nobody.” Detective Burbridge replied, “Doug did.” And Perry said, “I don’t know if Doug did or not, it was 20 years ago and I have no idea whether he did or did not.”

Prior to being returned to Spokane, Perry served time in a Texas prison on federal weapons charges. Burbridge and Dresback spoke with a former cellmate of Perry, who says Perry told her she was a contract killer and that had killed nine prostitutes. That woman further submits that Perry told her she killed the hookers “because she couldn’t breed and the women had the ability to have children and they were wasting it being ‘pond scum.’” That former cellmate says Perry admitted the murders took place in Washington.

An article about the case at ABC News quotes Jack Halberstam, a transgender and professor of American and gender studies at University of Southern California, as saying that Perry’s publicized statements are “very sketchy and a desperate defense ploy.”

It harkens back to the discourse on multiple personalities a decade ago — that another personality has taken over my body space. It’s an idea that we are simply competing personalities or selves. If you talk about transgenderism or psychopathology, nobody really believes that stuff. That research is now pretty much flawed.

Perry, Halberstam concluded, has a “weak defense.”

Perry is in Spokane County Jail, being held on $1,000,000 bond.

[H/T LibertyUnyielding]

Thank God. Baseball is Back.

(The Daily Beast) – Put on a glove, watch a game, and the years fall away, time stands still, and the joy of baseball reminds you again of life’s eternal sweetness.

It could be in a bottom bureau drawer beneath some old tee shirts, sweat pants that no longer fit or laundered dress shirts purchased during the first Reagan administration and not worn since the second Clinton tenure. It might be on a closet shelf or perhaps in the attic, wrapped tightly in thick twine. Or maybe—if you’re an optimist, someone who never checks the date of birth on your driver’s license or are simply a bit delusional—it’s in the trunk of your car, ready to be used at the simplest provocation: a sunny day, a field, a driveway, a back-yard, really doesn’t matter.

It’s your glove, your baseball glove. It’s got a soul, a memory all its own, and a future that never fades because it has never let go of the grasp the past has on you and so many others.

It might be a hand-me-down relic, a Spalding fielder’s glove with the name “George Kell,” faded but still semi-recognizable, stitched on its pocket, the leather darkened by 60 years of use. Maybe it’s a catcher’s mitt from 1962, a MacGregor Yogi Berra or Del Crandall model. Or a Wilson outfielder’s glove from the ’70s just like the one worn by Fred Lynn or the great Clemente before he died. Might even be your latest purchase, a Rawlings RGG1200, nice, soft leather, nearly broken in, less than a year old, bought because you never know when someone might want to play catch.

The glove is like checking a calendar. It comes out of the drawer, the attic, the trunk of your car with the first tease of spring. Comes out and stays out with the arrival of baseball and Opening Day.

Go ahead. Put it on your hand. Wear it. Punch the pocket. Flip a ball in the air. Catch it. Shut your eyes and watch the years roll off like shingles from a roof battered by the winds of winter’s last assault. Wait a minute and the glove, your glove, will unwind the decades between a moment when your waist was smaller than your sleeve length and life’s small ambushes had not yet altered your game plan.

That’s one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you, still, to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hadn’t begun to batter optimism.

It is back for real this week, baseball. Returned to ball yards and constituencies as different as Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, as similar as Boston and St. Louis, as historic as Chicago and New York.

Baseball is a game that shouts “Slow Down” to America. Stop tweeting, texting, blogging, watching cable news, and obsessing about polls, lost planes, and focus group-driven politicians.

Baseball is a movable conversation across nine innings. It is eye contact with the person seated next to you in a park where the pitcher is separated from the batter by 60 feet, six inches or in a family room where a 60-inch TV screen hangs on the wall.

Almost everyone grows out of all the other games played earlier in life—basketball, football, hockey, soccer—the years and the calories taking their inevitable toll. So you sit and watch games involving athletes who are nearly seven-feet tall or who weigh 250-350 pounds and run “the 40” in fewer than five seconds.

But nobody really grows out of baseball. Go ahead. Do it. Put the glove on your hand. Flip the ball in the air and it’s 1958 and Teddy Ballgame is in the batter’s box, or it’s 1967 and ‘Yaz’ is dragging the Red Sox across September into the impossible dream of a world series. Catch it and you can still hit and still run and still stand in the infield or outfield, hands on your knees, waiting for the pitcher to throw a heater, a slider, a curve. A sandlot, a playground, a high school field … You own them all for that one moment.

And when you open your eyes, sitting there in Section 16 or your living room, the players look kind of like you, don’t they?

They’re not wearing pads or helmets. Sure they’re quick and obviously athletically gifted beyond description or even comprehension. But these guys, these ballplayers, they’re about your size, aren’t they? When you were younger? When you played? When you put your glove down on the kitchen counter a half hour ago in order to make a turkey sandwich for yourself? Yeah … they are you, kind of, sort of, once upon a time.

Baseball is the perfect antidote to one of the particular cultural poisons of the age: That we—nearly everyone—are so busy, so time crunched, so stressed, so worn out by the demands and disappointments of life, of the economy, of family issues that there is not a second to spare in the course of a day. We have cell phones, text messaging and email to minimize human contact, apps to deliver dinner, do a kid’s school assignments, grocery shop, get a movie, a song, a book, a car, anything at all. And we’re stressed? Please!

Listen to the voice of baseball. Listen to Vin Scully. Listen to the game itself. It is telling you to chill, relax, reorder your priorities, winter is behind us, put the heavy coat in the closet, go outdoors, wear short sleeves, enjoy the sunshine, enjoy life.

Pay attention to this, the greatest game of all. It is your life played across nine innings. It comes with hits, runs and errors. It is played by people who are rather isolated on the field—the pitcher, the shortstop, the center fielder—and when they make a mistake, an error, it’s there for all to see. But they do what you must do every day: Get back in the batter’s box and keep on swinging.

Get your glove. Baseball is back.

[H/T TheDailyBeast: Mike Barnicle]

Can Anyone Be This Incompetent?

(Rush Limbaugh) – BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I mentioned in the first hour of the program, ladies and gentlemen, that the back end of HealthCare.gov still doesn’t exist.  Here are the details.  This from Fox News: “Much emphasis has been placed on enrollment stats as [Obamacare]’s inaugural open enrollment period comes to an end. But there’s a key function on the federal exchange that remains inactive:

“The mechanism to reconcile payments between the government and insurance companies.  This ‘back-end mechanism’ has been missing for the entirety of open enrollment period, which launched Oct.1, meaning insurance companies have had to manually bill the government for subsidies and cost-sharing plans, a procedure that’s being dubbed an administrative nightmare.”

They don’t have the personnel for it.  It’s supposed to be automated.  This is part of any website that sells anything. The back end records the sale to the seller so the seller can begin the fulfillment process and the collection process, and that doesn’t exist.  It’s unbelievable.  It would be like if you went to Amazon to buy something, and you clicked “submit” when your order was done, and you thought it went.

But that’s where it stopped, because Amazon doesn’t go any further than you clicking “submit.” It doesn’t have a record of you clicking “submit,” and it doesn’t have any way of fulfilling your order and it doesn’t have any way of collecting your payment. So you sit there, and you wait for your delivery, and it doesn’t come.

But you think you’ve paid for it.  And after a couple of days go by when it hasn’t shown up, you call and you’re all out of whack because you’ve paid for it. They say, “We don’t have any record of your purchase.”  That’s where people are who have purchased health care via the federal exchange HealthCare.gov.

Now, the problem, aside from the obvious is this: Insurance companies are threatening to pull out of Obamacare if this back end isn’t fixed because they aren’t being paid.  The last line here, the last paragraph illustrates why the insurance companies might back out.  “Bob Laszewski, author of the Health Care Marketplace and Policy Blog, says the missing payment mechanism is contributing to the lack of clarity over enrollment numbers.”

They don’t know how many people have signed up, folks! They don’t know how many people have signed up and they don’t know how many have paid. They don’t have any record of that at all.  Here’s a companion story before I get to this paragraph.  This is from The Daily Caller: “Nearly 40% of Washington Obamacare Enrollees Haven’t Paid.”  This is a state exchange, not HealthCare.gov.

They can’t even blame the glitches on HealthCare.gov for their problem.  This is the Washington state exchange where they can’t even calculate that, and 40% have not paid.  So now we know why the federal exchange claims they can’t give out the numbers as to who has paid. It’s because they don’t want anybody to know just how bad things are.  That’s the real truth of this.

Sebelius said, “Well, yeah. We said seven million.” Well, how many have signed up? “Well, the number’s constantly in flux.  It’s a number that we can’t give. It’s not stagnant.  The number’s always moving.  The number’s always in flux.  It’s always changing. People are signing up new every second of the day.  It’s impossible give you a number.”

They can’t give us the number ’cause they don’t know.  “‘I think most carriers would pull out of the program,’ Laszewski says. ‘Everyone believes this will be up and running in a month or two. If not, we will have an administrative nightmare. If I were an executive in a program, I would pull out — you can’t run your business'” this way. Meaning: An insurance company.

“‘You don’t know what the premium is, who you are covering.'” I don’t know how to adequately describe for you what a disaster this is.  The frightening thing is that this is intentional.  The frightening thing… Nobody’s gonna believe this, not the low-information crowd.  The frightening thing is, this chaos — this mountain of problems for the insurance companies — is by design.

Because the ultimate aim of the Regime is to eliminate the insurance industry when it comes to insurance — just wipe ’em out — because they want single payer.  They want everybody getting so frustrated that, at some point, that they throw up their hands and just agree to “simplify” everything by putting everybody on Medicare, which has its own bureaucratic nightmare to deal with.

There is no panacea or utopia.

There’s no fix or solution.

Well, there is.  That’s not the right thing to say.

There is a fix, if you get the right tech people involved. If you get an honest system based on a specific set of goals, you could fix this fairly quickly.  But it’s because the Regime is just chock-full with people incompetent that don’t know even what the objective here is, other than long-term objective single payer, but all of this mess in the way of getting there, it’s an absolute disaster, and it just frosts me.  I don’t know what to do about this.  No matter how bad the government screws anything up, it seems like the people of this country are always willing to let the government fix it.

It seems like the people of this country have the idea or the impression that government’s better at running health care than doctors and hospitals and health professionals. That government’s better at running the energy systems and programs of this country than the actual energy producers.  I know part of the reason.  The Democrat Party has succeeded in convincing people that the private sector operators are a bunch of cheats and liars and fraudsters who are trying to kill their customers, and the government cares.  I understand that.

But at some point everybody who interacts with government in some way has got to realize it doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything better than what takes place in the private sector.  And yet, people continue to invest their hope and their confidence in the government to run things that, in this case, in the case of this administration, they don’t have one person that’s ever done anything successfully in the private sector.

So no back end on HealthCare.gov; no way of knowing who’s enrolled; no way of knowing how many have paid.  The insurance companies have no way of collecting.  And they had three years to do this.  That is what makes it tough for me to believe that this is simply and strictly incompetence.

END TRANSCRIPT

[H/T Rush Limbaugh]

Report: Obama Admin Released Tens of Thousands of Illegal Immigrant Criminals

(Breitbart) – President Obama’s Department of Homeland Security caught then released 68,000 aliens who had previously been convicted of a crime, a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies shows.

The report, provided to Breitbart News ahead of its late Sunday evening release, reviews internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) metrics to conclude that the Obama administration released 35 percent—or 68,000—convicted criminal aliens back into the U.S. general population when they could have been deported. “The criminal alien releases typically occur without formal notice to local law enforcement agencies and victims,” CIS’s Jessica Vaughan, the report’s author, added.

By “criminal,” ICE means people who have been convicted of a misdemeanor or felony that is not a traffic violation. For instance, traffic violations like Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol or even vehicular manslaughter do not count toward this description of “criminal alien.” As for the definition of “alien,” ICE mostly means illegal aliens, though some are legal aliens when they are considered deportable legal aliens—which is possible for legal immigrants who have committed a serious crime, like a felony.

The documents also show ICE only deported a small fraction of the aliens they encountered overall.

“In 2013, ICE targeted only 195,000, or 25 percent, out of 722,000 potentially deportable aliens they encountered,” CIS’s Vaughan wrote. “Most of these aliens came to ICE’s attention after incarceration for a local arrest.”

This report comes out on the heels of a report from the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) last week which found that only .08 percent of the aliens deported in 2013 were not serial immigration law violators or convicted of serious crimes.

In response to these findings from CIS that follow up on his office’s report last week, Sessions said immigration law in America has essentially ceased to exist.

“The preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that immigration enforcement in America has collapsed,” Sessions said. “Even those with criminal convictions are being released. DHS is a department in crisis. Secretary [Jeh] Johnson must reject the President’s demands to weaken enforcement further and tell him that his duty, and his officers’ duty, is to enforce the law – not break it. As Homeland Secretary, Mr. Johnson is tasked with ensuring the public safety and the rule of law. But Secretary Johnson is not meeting these duties.”

The CIS report also contains a breakdown per city of percentages of criminal aliens who were released back into the population. San Antonio’s 79 percent is the highest, where ICE encountered 36,228 criminal aliens and released 28,680 back into the general population in 2013. New York City’s 71 percent is next, where ICE agents encountered 7,571 criminal aliens and released 5,391 of them. Washington, D.C. follows that, with ICE agents encountering 8,688 criminal aliens and releasing 64 percent, or 5,558, of them into the public. Other cities with high percentages include Salt Lake City, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Newark, and Buffalo. Notably, many of these cities are not in border states, which means visa overstays and illegal aliens who crossed the border but migrated further inward are as much a problem as the actual U.S.-Mexico border in terms of stopping the flow and enforcing the law.

“These findings raise further alarm over the Obama administration’s pending review of deportation practices, which reportedly may further expand the administration’s abuse of ‘prosecutorial discretion,’” CIS’s Vaughan wrote. “Interior enforcement activity has already declined 40 percent since the imposition of “prosecutorial discretion” policies in 2011. Rather than accelerating this decline, there is an urgent need to review and reverse the public safety and fiscal harm cause by the president’s policies.”

Sessions echoed Vaughan’s concerns, saying the lack of enforcement for immigration laws further hurts the ability of American citizens to obtain employment.

“American citizens have a legal and moral right to the protections our immigration laws afford – at the border, the interior and the workplace,” Sessions said. “The administration has stripped these protections and adopted a government policy that encourages new arrivals to enter illegally or overstay visas by advertising immunity from future enforcement.  Comments from top Administration officials, such as Attorney General Holder’s claim that amnesty is a civil right, or Vice President Biden’s claim that those here illegally are all US citizens (apparently including someone whose visa expired yesterday), demonstrate the administration’s increasing belief in an open borders policy the American public has always rejected.”

[H/T Breitbart: Matthew Boyle]

Judge Jeanine to President Obama: ‘You Draw Lines, Putin Crosses Them’

(Fox News Insider) – The following is a transcript of Judge Jeanine Pirro’s opening statement from last night.

Watch the latest video at video.insider.foxnews.com
Watch the latest video at video.insider.foxnews.com

Sometimes the perception of power is more important than power itself.

As our president continues to fumble on the world stage, he single-handedly is bringing about the decline of the U.S. as a world power, something that impacts you in every way from your pocketbook to your safety.

This decline in power has been ongoing since Barack Obama took office.

Starting with the red lines…

The finger wagging…

Removing economic sanctions against Iran, allowing it to continue its nuclear buildup…

Relying on Russian President Putin to broker a deal for Syria’s removal of its chemical weapons just to save face after announcing plans to attack Syria…

Not even sending reinforcements to protect our men in Benghazi…

Unilaterally removing the missile defense system that protects eastern Europe from Russia…

All the while trumpeting the reduction of our military on the world stage with pride.

Not only are we now perceived as weak…

Our enemies emboldened…

Impacting your safety and mine.

With this loss of power – or the perception of that loss – goes manufacturing jobs, trade alliances, allies standing with us.

Weakness encourages aggression.

Putin’s perception of power is so strong that he took Crimea with virtually no one hurt or killed.

Our president threatens costs, claiming to speak for the international community. Except the international community wasn’t with the president.  The UN, NATO, the EU – no one with initials – nobody was with him.

Our president revokes a few Russian businessmen’s visas to Disney World and withdraws Putin’s invitation to tea with the G7 – formerly the G8 – Putin being the odd man out.

Mr. President, while you’re moving tea cups, Putin is moving soldiers and tanks. Today 80,000 Russian soldiers on the Ukraine border.

Now you come out and say there will be more costs should Putin take more than Crimea.

Since Putin already took Crimea, you really didn’t mean what you said, and didn’t say what you meant, so why should he listen?

While you’ve got a pen and phone running around wagging your finger, Putin is running around with tanks and soldiers.

You brag about reducing the U.S. Military. He increases Russia’s military by 79 percent.

Putin’s influence in Europe and the Middle East increases. Russia is on its way to becoming the dominant world power.  And you say this??

“Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors – not out of strength, but out of weakness.”

A regional power?  Weak?  Really?

You engaged him to broker a deal with Syria after you didn’t have the fortitude to follow through on your threat, relying on this KGB agent’s “truth telling” that Syria would eliminate its chemical weapons – all the while he’s selling weapons to Syria.

And don’t we rely on Russia to get us into space now that we’ve shut down our own program.

And take a listen to this…

“And I think the strong condemnation that its received from countries around the world indicates the degree to which Russia is on the wrong side of history on this.”

I’ll tell you who’s looking like they’re on the wrong side of history.

You are not listening to history.  And he who doesn’t learn from history is destined to repeat it.

Ronald Reagan was a strong president. He trusted, but he verified.  He ended the Cold War.

You come in taking down the missile defense system in eastern Europe with nothing in return. Why are you doing this? Do you even know who our enemies are?  Do you know that your obligation is to protect us and our economy?

And you say Russia is a regional power? With all due respect Mr. President, Putin is a pig, but he’s been bitch-slapping you since the Edward Snowden mess.

And speaking of perception, your Secret Service bozos, passing out drunk in hotel hallways traveling with you in Europe makes you look weak yet again. Do you think Putin’s KGB guys would dare do something like that?

I suspect they can handle their Stoli better.

You draw lines… Putin crosses them.

You play make believe war games… He sends the troops.

You sit around moving tea cups… He moves armored tanks.

And you want to poke this tiger in the eye?

The perception of power – as strong as power itself.

[H/T FoxNewsInsider: Justice With Judge Jeanine]

Chickens come home to roost for Obama…

(New York Post) – Today’s quiz: What do Vladimir Putin’s aggression and ObamaCare’s troubles have in common? OK, that was too easy.

It is impossible to dismiss as mere coincidence the Russian Bear’s invasion of Ukraine and the continuing mayhem of the Affordable Care Act. In their own ways, each reflects the full flowering of the policies of Barack Obama.

His chickens are coming home to roost, and what a mess they are making.

Obama’s sixth year in the White House is shaping up as his worst, and that’s saying something. He’s been in the Oval Office so long that it is obscene to blame his problems on George W. Bush, the weather or racism. Obama owns the world he made, or more accurately, the world he tried to remake.

Nothing important has worked as promised, and there is every reason to believe the worst is yet to come. The president’s casual remark the other day that he worries about “a nuclear weapon ­going off in Manhattan” inadvertently reflected the fear millions of Americans have about his leadership. Not necessarily about a bomb, but about where he is taking the country.

We are racing downhill and he is stepping on the gas. Will he stop before the nation crashes?

Ideologues love to dream, and some do it eloquently. Robert Kennedy famously said: “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

Mario Cuomo, no slouch at dreaming, nonetheless offered a caveat, saying, “You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose.”

Obama hasn’t figured out the difference. Even more alarming, he shows no signs of trying to learn. In the ways of the world, he remains a know-it-all rookie.

The view from his faculty lounge has no space for reality. Anything that doesn’t fit the grand plan is dismissed as illegitimate. So while global hot spots multiply and the world grows dangerously unstable, the president still plans to slash the military.

His trip abroad last week further secured his reputation for historic ineptitude. It wasn’t that the trip was a disaster — it never rose to that level. His presence and his promises simply made no difference.

He failed to move the European Union toward a firmer stance on Russia, created bizarre headlines by differing with the Vatican over what he and the pope discussed, and got not-so-veiled threats from the Saudis about Syria and Iran.

He could have stayed home and not done worse.

No president can win ’em all, but Obama’s foreign-policy record is unblemished by success. From east to west and north to south, America’s standing and influence have declined universally.

It is impossible for a US president to be irrelevant, but Obama is testing the proposition.

The frequent reports that Putin laughs when Obama warns of consequences can’t be far from the truth. Otherwise, Putin would be cautious instead of carving up neighbors and massing his military. It was also noteworthy that, after their Friday phone talk, ­Putin copied the Vatican and put out his own version of the discussion. Two can play the spin game, he seemed to be saying.

ObamaCare is the domestic expression of the president’s ineptitude. The law that was supposed to fix health care has become a problem for millions, and now enjoys mere 26 percent approval, a poll finds. It is proving so unworkable that the White House has given up defending it as written and instead simply changes key provisions when they prove impossible to implement or politically inconvenient.

Change No. 38 came when officials extended the March 31 deadline for signing up. Never mind that those same officials said recently there would be no extension, and that the law wouldn’t allow it.

Presto — the limits on his power are moot because the president says so. Meanwhile, aides claim they don’t know how many of the 6 million who enrolled actually paid for insurance.

A Caesar at home and a Chamberlain abroad, Obama manages to simultaneously provoke fury and ridicule. He bullies critics here while shrinking from adversaries there.

He divides the country and unites the world against us, ­diminishing the nation in both ways. His reign of error can’t end soon enough, nor can it end well.

Bronze meddle by gov’t tan foes

A chain of tanning salons has learned an important lesson: Only the government can legally lie.

Hollywood Tans, which has seven franchises in New York and scores around the nation, promises to stop promoting certain health benefits of tanning in a deal with New York’s attorney general.

I guess that means the company can’t claim that “if you like your tan, you can keep your tan.”

A backpedalin biz

Color me confused. The Wall Street Journal reports that business experts say the big problem with Citi Bike is that the system is “underpriced and underused.”

In theory, then, raising prices will yield more customers. Really — that’s how business works?

Water under Chris’ bridge

Outrage! Scandal! Waste! You have to marvel at the absolute certainty of those who are denouncing a report that found Gov. Chris Christie knew nothing about the Bridgegate lane closings.

It is true Christie’s office hired the lawyers who did the report, but does that make it less credible than the probes being conducted by Jersey Democrats who repeatedly accuse him of lying? And the report is no more biased than The New York Times’ breathless coverage, which is as naked as the ladies in Bada Bing!

The Gray Lady outdid itself in Saturday’s paper with a snarling package that included a front-page story, a full page inside the paper, an editorial and an op-ed column. The editors also chose a photo of Christie that made him look film-noir sinister.

Of special note was a convoluted article on a conversation that may or may not have happened and may or may not have included any relevant exchange between the governor and a former associate.

The headline on the piece was a master of innuendo without a smidgen of fact: “Potentially Explosive Detail in Bridge Scandal is Unlikely to Be Confirmed.” The paper should have included tin-foil hats so readers could decipher the coded message to partisans.

None of this is meant to suggest that Bridgegate isn’t newsworthy, or that Christie is blameless. Rather, the issue is one of proportion and fairness, not to mention at least a pretense of respect for evidence.

Compared to the unanswered questions about the deaths of four Americans at the hands of terrorists in Benghazi, Bridgegate is more chaff than wheat. Similarly, compelling evidence that the IRS denied conservative groups equal treatment is a far more important story about government abuse of power than a traffic jam.

But those stories reflect badly on a Democratic president, so the Times doesn’t have much interest in getting the truth, especially when there is a Republican they can turn into a piñata.

[H/T NewYorkPost: Michael Goodwin]

Get to know the Common Core marketing overlords

(Michelle Malkin) – They’re everywhere. Turn on Fox News, local news, Animal Planet, HGTV, The Family Channel or talk radio. Pro-Common Core commercials have been airing ad nauseam in a desperate attempt to persuade American families to support the beleaguered federal education standards/testing/technology racket. Who’s funding these public relations pushes? D.C. lobbyists, entrenched politicians and Big Business interests.

The foundational myth of Common Core is that it’s a “state-led” initiative with grassroots support that was crafted by local educators for the good of all of our children. But the cash and power behind the new ad campaign tell you all you need to know. For parents in the know, this will be a refresher course. But repeated lies must be countered with redoubled truths.

The Bipartisan Policy Center is one of the leading Common Core ad sponsors. It’s a self-described nonprofit “think tank” founded by a pantheon of Beltway barnacles: former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell.

“Lobbying tank” would be more accurate. The BPC’s “senior fellows” include K Street influence peddlers such as liberal Republican Robert Bennett, the big-spending Utah senator-turned-lobbyist booted from office by tea party conservatives; former Democratic Agriculture Secretary and House member-turned-lobbyist Dan Glickman; and liberal Democrat Byron Dorgan, the former North Dakota senator who crusaded as an anti-D.C. lobbying populist before retiring from office to work as, you guessed it, a D.C. lobbyist.

Jeb Bush’s “Foundation for Excellence in Education” is also saturating the airwaves with ads trying to salvage Common Core in the face of truly bipartisan, truly grassroots opposition in his own home state of Florida. As I’ve reported previously, the former GOP governor’s foundation is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which pulled in $186 million through the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program to develop Common Core tests.

One of the Bush foundation’s top corporate sponsors is Pearson, the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate. Pearson snagged $23 million in contracts to design the first wave of PARCC test items and $1 billion for overpriced, insecure Common Core iPads purchased by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and is leading the $13.4 billion edutech cash-in catalyzed by Common Core’s technology mandates.

In December, you should know, the state of New York determined that Pearson’s nonprofit foundation had abused the law by siphoning charitable assets to benefit its for-profit arm in order to curry favor with the Common Core-peddling Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Pearson paid a $7.7 million settlement after the attorney general concluded that the company’s charitable arm was marketing Common Core course material it believed could be sold by the for-profit side for “tens of millions of dollars.” After being smoked out, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to its corporate sibling for $15.1 million.

Then there’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has joined the Clintonite-stocked Center for American Progress to promote Common Core and has earmarked more than $52 million on D.C. lobbying efforts.

Two D.C. trade associations, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, continue to rubber-stamp Common Core propaganda. They are both recipients of tens of millions of dollars in Gates Foundation money. NGA employed Democratic education wonk Dane Linn to help shepherd through the standards; Linn now flacks for Common Core at the D.C.-based Business Roundtable lobbying shop, another leading sponsor of the ads now bombarding your TVs and radios.

Despite its misleading name, the NGA does not represent all of the nation’s governors, holds only nonbinding resolution votes, and serves primarily as an “unelected, unrepresentative networking forum,” as Heartland Institute scholar Joy Pullmann put it, with funding from both taxpayers and private corporations. NGA’s Common Core standards writing meetings were convened in secret and are protected by confidentiality agreements.

Direct public input was nil. Of the 25 people in the NGA and CCSSO’s two Common Core standards-writing “working groups,” EdWeek blogger Anthony Cody reported in 2009, six were associated with the test-makers from the College Board, five were with fellow test-publishers ACT, and four were with Achieve Inc. Several had zero experience in standards writing.

Achieve Inc., you may recall from my previous work, is a Washington, D.C., nonprofit stocked with education lobbyists who’ve been working on federal standards schemes since the Clinton years. In fact, Achieve’s president, Michael Cohen, is a veteran Clinton-era educrat who also used to direct education policy for the NGA. In addition to staffing the standards writing committee and acting as lead Common Core coordinating mouthpiece, Achieve Inc. is the “project management partner” of the Common Core-aligned, tax-subsidized PARCC testing conglomerate.

Who’s behind Achieve? Reminder: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has dumped $37 million into the group since 1999 to promote Common Core. According to a new analysis by former Georgia State University professor Jack Hassard, the Gates Foundation has now doled out an estimated total of $2.3 billion on Common Core-related grants to thousands of recipients in addition to NGA, CCSSO, the Foundation for Excellence in Education and Achieve.

As they prop up astroturfed front groups and agitprop, D.C.’s Common Core p.r. blitzers scoff at their critics as “black helicopter” theorists. Don’t read their lips. Just follow the money. This bipartisan power grab is Washington-led and Washington-fed. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s elementary: All Common Core roads lead to K Street.

[H/T MichelleMalkin]

Obama Must Show He’ll Use Military Means to Deter Russia in Ukraine

(The Daily Beast) – To deter Putin and other aggressors, diplomatic and economic slaps are not enough; the U.S. needs a military dimension.

Don’t pop the champagne corks just yet because Vladimir Putin phoned Barack Obama to pursue diplomacy on Ukraine and environs. It may be just a ploy, like Moscow’s proposal to denude Syria of chemical weapons to head off a potent U.S. air strike against President Assad’s forces. It may just be a gambit to tamp down the West’s drive toward greater sanctions against Russia. And all sinister explanations of the call gain weight by the fact that some 25,000 Russian troops still threaten Ukraine’s borders.

Even if Putin is serious about diplomacy for the moment, there is a deeper problem afoot for Obama. It is one that the White House rejects outright, but one that officials outside the White House and experts outside the administration are certainly fretting about. It is that Obama’s idea of combating aggression essentially by means of economic sanctions and “diplomacy” is not nearly enough, that the costs of aggression have to be raised, and that there has to be a stronger and more credible military dimension to U.S. national security policy. Whether the White House admits it or not, foes the world over seem to have concluded that Obama has taken the U.S. military force option off the table and made aggression easier.

In that vein, take a second look at what Obama said last Wednesday about a Russian attack on Ukraine: “Of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO, in part because of its close and complex history with Russia. Nor will Russia be dislodged from Crimea or deterred from further escalation by military force.” That sounds awfully close to telling Putin that if he wants to grab more of Ukraine or all of it he need not worry about a U.S. military response. In effect, the U.S. president is saying that the only cost to Russia for totally violating the basic rules of international behavior is the threat of tougher sanctions (and this only if the Europeans and others can get their act together). Why on earth would Obama give Putin this virtual free ride?

Did the White House fear that unless the Ukrainians felt totally abandoned they might be foolhardy enough to actually precipitate a war with Russia? If this was the White House’s worry, Obama could have warned Ukrainian leaders publicly and privately that their only chance of help from the West was to make it absolutely clear that Moscow was the guilty party.

When Obama said that the United States would do nothing militarily to protect Ukraine against an attack, he was in effect walking away from the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 signed by Ukraine, Russia, Britain and America. By this paper, Ukraine gave back its nuclear weapons to Russia on a pledge by all parties not to violate Ukraine’s security and sovereignty. To be sure, neither London nor Washington was legally obliged to defend Ukraine if attacked. But it is perfectly obvious that Kiev never would have given up its nukes unless it believed the U.S. would come to its defense in some meaningful fashion.

The Budapest document makes sense historically only as a quid pro quo agreement resting upon American credibility to act. The United States cannot simply walk away from the plain meaning of the Budapest Memorandum and leave Ukraine in the lurch. And how would this complete washing of U.S. hands affect U.S. efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, supposedly a top national priority? Why should any nation forego nukes or give them away like Ukraine, if other nations, and especially the U.S., feel zero responsibility for their defense? It’s not that Washington has to send ground troops or start using its nuclear weapons; it’s just that potential aggressors have to see some potential military cost.

It’s bad enough that Obama thinks of the U.S. response to Russia in Ukraine almost exclusively in terms of diplomatic isolation of the bad guy, plus economic sanctions such as they are or might be, and a touch of military aid. But the real worry is that this has become his pattern worldwide.

If potential aggressors come to think that their power grabs will be met solely by diplomatic harassment and some economic squeezing, they will be tempted increasingly to snatch whatever they want first and worry later. Greedy lawbreakers have been  emboldened by Obama’s unenforced “red lines” in Syria. Same goes for North Korean rockets landing on South Korean lands without serious penalty. And the same holds for China’s new pattern of muscle flexing to establish its interests in the East and South China Seas. Ukraine only reinforces the pattern.

Economic sanctions are a good tool, but not a substitute for a credible military option. Even potent economic sanctions over decades have not brought Cuba, Iran, and North Korea to their knees.  Russia will be even more difficult to break with economic sanctions because it is the eighth largest economy in the world.

How can the U.S. add muscle in the present Ukraine crisis?

The boldest and riskiest course would be to dispatch 50 or 60 of the incredibly potent F-22s to Poland plus Patriot batteries and appropriate ground support and protection. Russian generals and even Putin surely know that the F-22s could smash the far inferior Russian air force and then punish Russian armies invading eastern Ukraine or elsewhere in the region.

There’s no sense at all in making this move unless Obama unambiguously resolves to use the F-22s. The worst thing to do is bluff. Nor would the dangers end there even if Obama were not bluffing; Putin might think he was bluffing anyway and start a war.  With all these complications and risks, the Obama team still should give this option a serious look—and let Russia and our NATO partners know this tough course is under serious consideration. Obama has sent a few F-15’s and F-16’s to Eastern Europe, some military aid to Ukraine and other states. But everyone knows this is tokenism.

Another plausible and perhaps less risky measure: help prepare Ukrainians for guerrilla war against an invading Russian force. Pound for pound in conventional war, the Ukrainian forces are no match whatsoever for the Russians. But irregular Ukrainian troops armed with first-class rifles, mortars, and explosive devices would do Russian troops great damage. Russians know this. They have surely not forgotten the horrors fighting guerrillas in Afghanistan.

These steps would be plausible, purely defensive, and a deterrent for starters. They would demonstrate to Moscow that further aggression against Ukraine would result in much more than economic and diplomatic slaps.  Credible force has been the missing ingredient in U.S. policy. Support for what might be the Ukrainian Resistance, combined with an F-22 deployment to Poland “to protect U.S./NATO security interests in the region,” should give Putin pause. And this approach would make the dictators in Pyongyang, Damascus, and Beijing think twice now as well.

[H/T DailyBeast: Leslie H. Gelb]