YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK

[HisDaughter]

Ariz. Senate OKs Presidential Birth Certificate Bill
Thursday, 14 Apr 2011 11:59 AM

The  battle over presidential candidates' birth certificates took its first legislative turn when Arizona’s Senate approved a bill requiring all presidential candidates to provide documentation proving they were born in the United States before getting on the state ballot.

The bill, which passed 20 to 9 on a party-line vote Wednesday, still has to be approved by Arizona's House. A Democrat who voted against the measure claimed that if it becomes law, it is likely to be struck down by the courts, reports the Arizona Daily Star.

The original bill, which would have required presidential candidates to provide their long-form birth certificate, was amended to allow other documents such as baptism, circumcision or hospital birth records.

Article Two of the Constitution requires the president to be a “natural born citizen.” The Arizona bill did not specifically mention President Barack Obama, who has consistently refused to release his long-form certificate. Many Republicans, led by prospective presidential candidate Donald Trump, have cast doubt on Obama’s claim that he was born in Hawaii.

Phoenix Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema claimed the measure would not pass legal muster, but GOP Senate President Russell Pearce disagreed, saying: ‘This is an obligation the state has.”

© Newsmax. All rights reserved.

[HisDaughter]

GOP accuses Obama of pushing up gas prices
'We need to look at the actions of this administration'

Posted: April 19, 2011
8:11 pm Eastern
© 2011 WorldNetDaily

Republicans say the Obama administration's policies are contributing to skyrocketing gasoline prices – now at more than $4 per gallon throughout much of the country – and they have introduced legislation to reopen the nation's coasts to drilling.

This year will be the first year since 1958 that the federal government will not have sold a lease for offshore drilling, and Republicans say this is fueling skyrocketing prices at the pump.

Congress opened the nation's coasts to drilling when gas hit $4 per gallon in 2008, but the Obama administration effectively reinstated the ban last year by placing the Alaskan, Atlantic and Pacific coasts off-limits to drilling, as well as Florida's west coast.

"We need to look at the actions of this administration, which are leading to more of a domestic shortage of energy production in this country – whether you are looking at the outer continental shelf or whether you are looking at offshore lease sales," said House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash.

The chairman told WND that comments made by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar make it seem the administration has a political agenda behind its unwillingness to expand domestic oil drilling.

More than 12,000 jobs in the oil drilling sector have been lost as a direct result of the drilling moratorium the Obama administration imposed last May in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Despite the administration's announcement last October that it was lifting its drilling moratorium, little progress has been made in reopening the Gulf to drilling. Only 10 permits have been granted, while 40 projects remain stalled due to the administration's inaction. And since July 2010 only 49 shallow-water permits have been issued at an average of 4.9 permits per month, which lags far behind the historical average of 7.1 permits per month.

The administration needs to act in a timely manner to address the drilling permits that were in play when it imposed the moratorium to increase oil and gas supplies and reduce prices, Hastings said.

"We're going to try to change that through our committee and with Doc Hastings over at natural resources," House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton told WND. "We know it is a supply problem, and we cannot continue to say no to domestic production because only one thing happens – the prices are going to go up."

The oil industry today produces 100,000 barrels less per day than the Department of Energy predicted, and the department expects production in the Gulf of Mexico to drop by 240,000 barrels per day this year and by 200,000 per day in 2012.

"We've got to say stop it; stop these regulations and putting the U.S. off-limits," Upton said. "We're going to do our best to pursue legislation to change that. If you are going to impose restrictions on the domestic oil and gas industries, guess what, they're going to go ahead and drill someplace else."

That seems to have already started. So far, 12 oil rigs have departed the Gulf since the moratorium was imposed for destinations such as Nigeria, Egypt and Brazil, potentially costing thousands of jobs, according to the House Natural Resources Committee.

Upton's committee currently is considering legislation being proposed by Colorado Rep. Cory Gardner that would eliminate permitting delays that have been imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency on drilling projects off the Alaskan coast.

The House Natural Resources Committee passed three bills last week that would force the administration to reopen the nation's coasts to oil drilling. The first bill would require the Secretary of the Interior to conduct oil and natural gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Virginia coast for offshore parcels that have either been canceled or delayed by the administration.

The legislation would require lease sales to be held no later than June 1, 2012. Hastings' second bill would require that each five-year offshore leasing plan crafted by the Department of the Interior include lease sales in areas with the largest known oil and natural gas reserves.

A third bill would require the Secretary of the Interior to act on a permit within 30 days of receiving an application and prevent the Obama administration from imposing a drilling moratorium through inaction. It would also beef up oil rig safety standards to ensure an accident of the kind that happened last year is never repeated.

Hastings anticipates the full House will bring his legislation to the floor for a vote before Memorial Day, but its fate in the Senate is uncertain.

"People in the Senate and in the administration definitely are not going to be looking kindly on my legislation," Hastings said. "But with gas prices a little over $4 per gallon now in some parts of the country, with some saying it could go over $5 a gallon, then I think there is going to be political pressure put on the Senate to act on something."

The chairman said Senate Democrats should pass legislation of their own and work out a compromise proposal with him if they have a different view from his, so the nation can become less dependent on foreign sources and create jobs.

Salazar struck at Hastings' legislation last week by accusing the chairman of "amnesia" about the Deepwater Horizon accident and the subsequent oil spill.

"I don't have amnesia, and neither does the president," Politico reported Salazar as having said last week. "And much of the legislation that I have seen being bandied around, especially with the House Republicans, is almost as if the Deepwater Horizon Macondo well incident never happened."

Michael Conathan, director of ocean policy with the Center for American Progress, echoed Salazar's comments by calling the Republican approach "simplistic" because it allegedly ignores how globalization has impacted the oil market.

"We have 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, yet we use 25 percent of the world's oil reserves," Conathan said. "That's a huge gap that we're not going to make up even if we drilled every drop out of everywhere that we have access to.

"I think particularly today [near] the one-year anniversary of the BP oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in American history, this is definitely the wrong time to be reopening any area for oil exploration."

[HisDaughter]

Bush Attorney General Slams Obama Terror Policies
newsmax.com

The killing of Osama bin Laden was a great victory for the U.S. intelligence community, but it may well be the last one because of the Obama administration’s refusal to use tough tactics such as waterboarding on terror suspects, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey warns.

The information that led U.S. agents to bin Laden could not have been obtained without stringent interrogation methods, Mukasey writes in The Wall Street Journal.

“Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [KSM], who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden,” writes Mukasey, who was the nation’s top law enforcement officer under President George W. Bush from 2007 to 2009.

The Obama administration prevents intelligence officers from doing their work to the best of their ability, he said.

“Policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. The administration also hounds our intelligence gatherers in ways that can only demoralize them,” he said in the opinion piece published Friday.

Practices such as waterboarding, in which a suspect’s head is held underwater until he believes he is drowning, are used only in extreme cases in which agents know the prisoners have vital information, Mukasey said.

“The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques,” he said.

Mukasey quoted former CIA Director Michael Hayden as saying that, “as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of [al-Qaida] came from those interrogations.”

Far from resorting to illegal methods to obtain information, Muksaey said, the Bush administration “put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful.”

The Bush administration's decision to call these methods “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which he described as “absurdly antiseptic,” gave rise to unfounded suspicions that the phrase must be a euphemism for something truly beyond the pale.

The former attorney general said that, in April 2009, the Obama administration released previously classified Justice Department documents on the interrogation techniques — “thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used again.”

The current administration, in deciding to turn interrogation duties over to the FBI instead of the CIA, had not ensured that its new policies were properly in place, Mukasey said.

Thus, he said, when Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives hidden in his underwear, no one was quite sure how to handle him. The Nigerian national was read his Miranda rights, like an ordinary criminal suspect, but “no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.”

Although the administration had not yet determined how to handle terror suspects, it had found time to pursue investigations against CIA employees who already had been cleared of any wrongdoing, Mukasey said.

“Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorist,” Mukasey wrote in the WSJ.

Those investigations had been closed formally two years earlier, with no charges filed. Years later, he said, the investigations drag on with no charges in sight, with “prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.”

[HisDaughter]

GOP Warns Obama Not to Issue Executive Order for Government Contractors
foxnews.com

Republicans are warning President Obama not to issue an executive order that would require government contractors to disclose their political donations.

Obama drafted the proposal last month, which is reminiscent of a provision in a Democratic bill called the Disclose Act that died in the Congress last year.

That bill would have required corporations and unions to identify themselves in political ads they pay for – a response to a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the First Amendment rights of these groups to spend money on campaign ads.

The proposed order would require government contractors to disclose all donations to federal candidates, political parties, committees or interest groups spending money on campaigns once the total exceeds $5,000 in a given year.

The White House has said the proposed order would provide transparency to taxpayers about political spending by government contractors.

But in a letter to the president, California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the No. 3 Republican in the House, said Obama's proposed order "seems like a blatant attempt to intimidate, and potentially silence, certain speakers who are engaged in their constitutionally protected right to free speech."

Twenty other Republicans signed the letter, which expresses their concern that the effect of the proposed order would be "stifled political speech, as potential and current federal contractors decide to limit their political speech in order to protect their livelihoods.

"While we may often disagree on policy matters, we can surely agree that an open and free political process works best for all," the letter reads.

The Professional Services Council, a trade association that represents more than 330 companies that work with federal agencies, also opposes the order.

"This proposal should never see the light of day," PSC President and CEO Stan Soloway said in a statement. "It is based on dubious legality and a complete lack of awareness of the realities of the federal procurement process."

Soloway added, "This is an ill-conceived proposal that would place government contractors and their senior executives in a unique class. No other individuals or entities, including unions, federal grantees, federal employees, or other business entities, would be subject to such requirements, no matter how reliant they are on government policy or other decisions. It is counterintuitive and will likely be counterproductive."

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the proposed order "an outrageous and anti-Democratic abuse of executive branch authority."

"Let me be clear: No White House should be able to review your political party affiliation before deciding if you're worthy of a government contract," he said in a statement. "And no one should have to worry about whether their political support will determine their ability to get or keep a federal contract or keep their job."

[HisDaughter]

"The White House has said the proposed order would provide transparency to taxpayers about political spending by government contractors."

I read this yesterday and thought my head was going to blow up!  I am so tired of hearing the word "transparency" coming out of an administration that has no clue of what the concept is!  If they were to pass something like this, then our nation is offically a communist regime.  I am "flabbergasted" by the things that this White House pulls/ is trying to pull.  Do you all know what flabbergasted means.  It means "beyond belief".  Actually, I don't think there is a word yet to describe it in an all encompassing way!

Concerning "transparency", this tax payer can see right through them!

[nChrist]

"The White House has said the proposed order would provide transparency to taxpayers about political spending by government contractors."

I read this yesterday and thought my head was going to blow up!  I am so tired of hearing the word "transparency" coming out of an administration that has no clue of what the concept is!  If they were to pass something like this, then our nation is offically a communist regime.  I am "flabbergasted" by the things that this White House pulls/ is trying to pull.  Do you all know what flabbergasted means.  It means "beyond belief".  Actually, I don't think there is a word yet to describe it in an all encompassing way!

Concerning "transparency", this tax payer can see right through them!

We must be nice to the dictator comrade.   

[HisDaughter]

We must be nice to the dictator comrade.  

I'm so ready to join in a take-over coup!

[Soldier4Christ]

I'm so ready to join in a take-over coup!

 

[nChrist]

Charge!

[HisDaughter]

Charge!

[HisDaughter]

Federal Reserve bank flies the rainbow flag
WND 6/4/2011

A state delegate in Virginia has sent a letter to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, demanding that it remove a "rainbow" flag from the flagpole that also holds Old Glory.

"Dear President [Jeffrey M.] Lacker," wrote state Delegate Bob Marshall, "Flying the homosexual flag just under the American flag outside Richmond's Federal Reserve Bank building is a serious deficiency of judgment by your organization."

Marshall said the Federal Reserve policies are supposed to "contribute to the strength and vitality of the U.S. economy," but "a flagpole in front of a federal building is not a commercial or political message board."

"What does flying the homosexual flag, or any other similar display, have to do with your central banking mission under the Federal Reserve Act passed by Congress?"

"The Richmond Fed's endorsement of costly, anti-social, immoral behavior is rejected by 6,000 years of Western religious and moral teaching. You want the American people to trust your judgment in economic matters when your spokesperson celebrates an attack on public morals? Why?" Marshall continued.

Marshall told WND that his letter to the bank must have "set off a firecracker," because there had been hundreds of responses via email and the like already.

"This guy has no business taking an institution Congress created for financial dealings and turning it into a political billboard," he said.

Bank spokesman Jim Strader told WND that Marshall's letter had been delievered and "we are reviewing his letter and we will respond."

He refused to say what the response would be or when it would come.

But he said the "pride flag is flying at our bank as a symbol of our commitment to diversity and inclusion."

He said bank managers got a request from "an employee group" and the request to fly the flag was approved.

Strader said it coincides with Barack Obama's "proclamation" that June is the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month."

"This month … marks the 30th anniversary of the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which has had a profound impact on the LGBT community," Obama said. "Though we have made strides in combating this devastating disease, more work remains to be done, and I am committed to expanding access to HIV/AIDS prevention and care."

Strader refused to respond to questions about whether the statement of a social agenda was a precedent for the bank, or whether other employee or interest groups could take advantage of the forum and proclaim their campaigns, also.

"I can't comment on that," he said.

He said the bank, too, has gotten comments on the "pride flag" flying in front of the institution assigned to manage the nation's fiscal policy.

Officials with the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors refused to reply to WND requests for comment.

But Marshall said, "This is a celebration of a behavior that is still a class six felony in Virginia."

This dispute is not the only headache the Federal Reserve could be facing. WND recently reported on a series of grass-roots lawsuits that are being developed against the Fed.
 
And U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas long has advocated an audit of the intensely secret organization, as well as a shutdown of its operations.

The lawsuit plans come from the PatriotStorm organization at its SuetheFed.com website. The plan envisions teams of attorneys analyzing data, demanding information, verifying damages and arguing court cases.

"Our litigation plan will be loosely patterned after the tobacco litigation model executed during the 1980s and 1990s; only far more organized, coordinated and focused in order to provide shared access of all discovery materials and briefs developed to all of our network law firms and prosecutors nationwide," the website explains.

"The litigation activities will be divided among three broad areas: a) research; b) analysis and dissemination of discovery materials and briefs, and c) litigation coordination. The company will recruit several hundred to several thousand highly respected small to mid-sized litigating law firms to pursue the class action litigation for their representative plaintiffs (live persons, companies, municipalities, etc.) residing in their respective geographic areas."

Congressman Paul long has argued that the Federal Reserve simply is illegal. Some of his concerns have revolved around Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which assigns to Congress the right to coin money.

There is no mention in the Constitution of a central bank, and it wasn't until the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that the Fed was created.
 
Paul previously has said, "Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar. Since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95 percent of its purchasing power, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy."

And he's proposed repeatedly – and again in this Congress – the idea of auditing the Fed to determine exactly what it has been doing and then begin making corrections. With a book titled "End the Fed," he's made no secret of his ultimate goal.

That the Fed is at least partly to blame for the financial problems that have developed in the U.S. seems not to be in dispute.

It was longtime Federal Reserve chairman Ben. S. Bernanke who admitted as much.

Bernanke said it was the Fed that caused the Great Depression, the worldwide economic downturn that persisted from 1929 until about 1939. It was the longest and worst depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world. While originating in the U.S., it ended up causing drastic declines in output, severe unemployment and acute deflation in virtually every country on earth. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the Great Depression ranks second only to the Civil War as the gravest crisis in American history."

cont.....

[HisDaughter]

Federal Reserve bank flies the rainbow flag   cont....


At a Nov. 8, 2002, conference to honor economist Milton Friedman's 90th birthday, Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor, gave a speech at Friedman's old home base, the University of Chicago.

After citing how Friedman and a co-author documented the Fed's continual contraction of the money supply during the Depression and its aftermath – and the subsequent abandonment of the gold standard by many nations in order to stop the devastating monetary contraction – Bernanke added:

Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, Friedman and [Anna] Schwartz noted, bank panics were typically handled by banks themselves – for example, through urban consortiums of private banks called clearinghouses. If a run on one or more banks in a city began, the clearinghouse might declare a suspension of payments, meaning that, temporarily, deposits would not be convertible into cash. Larger, stronger banks would then take the lead, first, in determining that the banks under attack were in fact fundamentally solvent, and second, in lending cash to those banks that needed to meet withdrawals. Though not an entirely satisfactory solution – the suspension of payments for several weeks was a significant hardship for the public – the system of suspension of payments usually prevented local banking panics from spreading or persisting. Large, solvent banks had an incentive to participate in curing panics because they knew that an unchecked panic might ultimately threaten their own deposits.

It was in large part to improve the management of banking panics that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. However, as Friedman and Schwartz discuss in some detail, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve did not serve that function. The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's infamous "liquidationist" thesis, that weeding out "weak" banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System.

Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks – which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed – felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view.

In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. …

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.

G. Edward Griffin, in "The Creature from Jekyll Island," explains the cause of wars, boom-bust cycles, inflation, depression, prosperity and more – and calls the Fed the most blatant scam of all history.

History records that in 1913 President Woodrow Wilson approved the Federal Reserve Act but later reflected that his actions "unwittingly ruined my country."

Wilson said that since the U.S. system of credit is concentrated in the hands of a few, "we have become … one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world."

Paul recently announced, as chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology, a plan to audit the Fed.



In case you missed it...


Strader said it coincides with Barack Obama's "proclamation" that June is the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month."

That's not going to sit well with all his Muslim brothers and sisters!

[nChrist]

In case you missed it...


Strader said it coincides with Barack Obama's "proclamation" that June is the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month."

That's not going to sit well with all his Muslim brothers and sisters!

I didn't miss it, and it makes me sick to hear that a rainbow flag was flown on a Federal building - especially on the same pole as the U.S. Flag. Two words describe my feelings - EVIL CHAOS.

[HisDaughter]

Alabama Governor Weighs Approval of Arizona-Style Crackdown on Illegal Immigrants
foxnews.com

The governor of Alabama is taking the weekend to decide whether he will sign an Arizona-style bill into law to crack down on illegal immigrants.

If Gov. Robert Bentley gives his stamp of approval to the controversial legislation, the American Civil Liberties Union has vowed to challenge it in court.

"It's an outrageous throwback to the pre-civil rights era and we call on Governor Bentley to veto this deeply misguided bill," Cecillia Wang, director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, said Friday. "The Alabama Legislature has invited rank discrimination into people's everyday lives,"

The bill, passed by the Alabama Legislature on Thursday night, makes it a crime for a person to be in the state without a valid federal registration or other proof of legal presence.

Like the Arizona law, the bill allows police in a traffic stop to detain anyone without legal papers if the officers have "reasonable suspicion" that they may be present illegally and research by the officers can't turn up any records. "Reasonable suspicion" could include acting nervously or having a tag that doesn't match vehicle registration records, sponsors of the bill said.

It would also be a crime for an illegal immigrant to apply for work. The bill requires all Alabama businesses to use the federal E-Verify system to check the legal status of new employees, although businesses with 25 or fewer employees could get the state Department of Homeland Security to do it for them. A business caught twice for knowingly hiring an illegal immigrant would lose its business license.

The bill also makes it a crime to transport or harbor illegal immigrants and it prevents cities from passing laws to protect illegal immigrants in their cities.

The bill sailed through the Legislature on votes of 67-29 in the House and 25-7 in the Senate.

Support came from Republicans and some white Democrats, while black Democrats led the opposition.

"This is an Arizona bill with an Alabama twist," said the sponsor, House Republican leader Micky Hammon.

Republican Sen. Scott Beason, who helped write the legislation, said it's designed to take jobs away from illegal immigrants and give them to legal residents. "This is a jobs bill," he said.

Democratic Sen. Linda Coleman predicted it would lead to discrimination. But Beason said, "You can't just stop someone because of how they look."

Bentley's communications director, Rebekak Mason, said he will spend the weekend reviewing the long, complicated bill before deciding what action to take, but "having a strong illegal immigration bill has been a top priority for the governor."