Issues
The Tea Party is upset with at least four House members who rode to victory in November of 2008 on promises of cutting government spending and then changed sides and voted for the Boehner bill last Friday. The four “defectors,” according to Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Founding Fathers, and United West, are James Lankford (R-Okla.), Allen West (R-Fla. — pictured), Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), and Bill Flores (R-Texas).
The strongest criticisms were directed at Allen West, who ran on the promise of standing firm in his convictions and not compromising his principles. Tom Trento, director of the Tea Party Founding Fathers, called the four lawmakers “Stupak defectors”, comparing them to the former House member who at the last minute changed sides on ObamaCare and “betray[ed] conservatives.” The uproar then was so great that Stupak decided to end his career and step down. As Trento noted
Two weeks ago, concerned about news reports that President Obama would order the investigation of citizens buying two or more rifles at a time, a licensed Texas gun dealer contacted his local Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) official to find out if the reports were true, so he could be in compliance. The ATF official assured him that he was aware of such legislation having been considered, but added, “The law is not going to pass, and we can’t enforce something that isn’t law.” This week, however, gun dealers and pawnshop owners across the country received a certified letter from the ATF requiring just such compliance.
The letter received by the dealer (viewable at Infowars.com, and personally examined by this writer) requires gun dealers in the states bordering Mexico (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California) to report the sale or disposition of two or more semi-automatic rifles of certain types to the same person during a five-day period. Compliance with the new demand is to begin on August 14, 2011. The rifles in question are those capable of accepting a detachable magazine and with a caliber great than .22 (including .223/5.56 caliber).
Admitted Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik was making wild demands from jail, saying he would only reveal more information about the attack and other “cells” waiting to unleash more terror if and when the government and the monarchy resigned. The killer was also demanding that he be installed as head of the armed forces, according to officials cited in news reports.
During his second police interrogation on July 29, Breivik originally said he would not discuss anything until Norwegian King Harald V, the ruling Labor Party-led government, and the nation’s top military leaders all stepped down. Apparently he wanted to be in charge. But all of his demands were denied outright.
Drive your car through the small town of Royston, England, and your license plate will be photographed by a hidden camera and checked against a national police database, regardless of whether there is probable cause to suspect you have committed a crime. Simply passing through the city limits is apparently cause enough.
Royston, writes the Daily Mail, “has become the first [town] in Britain to have every car passing through it tracked by police cameras,” with “a set of police cameras installed on every road leading in and out of it, recording the number plate of every vehicle that passes them.”
The devices are known as Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras.
The Obama-Boehner debt limit increase bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a 269-161 vote August 1, solely as a result of Republican votes. But most of the GOP presidential candidates, perhaps smelling the will of the voters, voted against the so-called Budget Control Act of 2011, which would raise the debt limit as much as an additional $2.4 trillion. GOP congressmen overwhelmingly voted in favor of the bill with a 174-66 vote. Meanwhile, Democrats were evenly divided, 95-95, meaning that half the Democrats opposed their leadership while most Republicans supported their leadership.
The vote followed a week of tough talk and whip-cracking in the House Republican caucus. “Get your a** in line,” House Speaker John Boehner demanded at a private meeting of the entire House Republican conference July 27, according to multiple press accounts. “I can’t do this job unless you are behind me.”
As Democrat-turned-Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry continues to tease Americans with “will he or won’t he?” run for President, many Lone Star State voters are taking a closer look at his record — particularly on the issue of immigration.
Of the four border states (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California), Texas presides over more than half of the nation’s international border with Mexico: 1,254 miles of the Rio Grande River. Though the other three states have their fair share of serious immigration problems, Texas — by its sheer size — has the lion's share.
For the record, the Governor’s website gives his position on border security: “There can be no homeland security without border security, and there can be no higher priority than protecting our citizens.”
After attending the Bilderberg conference in Switzerland in June, Facebook’s marketing director, Randi Zuckerberg, announced that she had solved the cyberbullying issue: Prohibit anonymous Internet activity.
In addition to being the director of marketing for the social media icon, Zuckerberg is the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The siblings attended the Bilderberg conference where Mark Zuckerberg delivered a key address.
Many of the Internet’s elites were present for the annual secret confab held this year in St. Moritz, Switzerland. According to an exposé by The New American’s own Alex Newman, many such luminaries were on hand at the conference:
In 1958, Congress created NASA, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration. The rationale for America's first venture into outer space was national security: to insure that the country could defend itself against any threat from space. The Soviets appeared to have a head start through Sputnik and similar short space flights. The United States quickly realized the invaluable military benefits of satellites and developed "smart" weapons using geosynchronous communication systems to deliver ordnance precisely. Thus, all the first astronauts were military officers.
Since that time, the space endeavor has devolved into just another federal program. The United States faces no threat from any nation on Earth that can outflank it in space. Though NASA conducts certain research projects, there is little reason to believe that philanthropies and private corporations could not accomplish this research just as easily. In fact, one of the major breakthroughs in cosmology was accomplished at Bell Laboratories almost 50 years ago when scientists there discovered microwaves. Background radiation consistently showed that the basic temperature of outer space was four degrees Kelvin, or four degrees above absolute zero.
Many years ago, the Saturday Evening Post was one of the best-known magazines in America. But somehow I learned that the Saturday Evening Post was actually published on Wednesday morning. That was a little disconcerting at first. But it was one of the most valuable lessons, that words do not necessarily reflect reality.
Recent statistics on the average wealth or net worth of blacks are a painful reminder that rhetoric favoring blacks does not mean that politicians using such rhetoric are actually helping blacks. The media seized upon the statistics published by the Pew Research Center to show that whites averaged far more net worth than blacks, and that this disparity was now greater than it was in years past. But what is even more revealing is that the net worth of blacks in 2009 was less than half of what it was in 2005.
What happened to cause such a sharp loss in such a few years?
Americans have been paying closer attention to the United Nation’s Agenda 21, a plan for global management of people and resources, and rightfully so. The plan virtually micromanages every aspect of human life, violating several Constitutional rights in the process. A number of agencies in the United States have already signed on to efforts to enforce Agenda 21, including the Department of Transportation, which has recently proposed a rule change for farm equipment that exhibits greater government control.
Agenda 21 is defined by the United Nations as a “comprehensive plan for action to be taken globally, nationally, and locally by organizations of the United Nations system, governments and major groups in every area in which humans impact the environment.”
The New American’s William Jasper wrote of Agenda 21 in February, explaining that the plan is virtually all encompassing:
