Valerie Jarrett: Unemployment Stimulates the Economy (from Newsmax)

This is crazy!
White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett argued during a speaking engagement at North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina.

“Even though we had a terrible economic crisis three years ago, throughout our country many people were suffering before the last three years, particularly in the black community. And so we need to make sure that we continue to support that important safety net. It not only is good for the family, but it’s good for the economy. People who receive that unemployment check go out and spend it and help stimulate the economy, so that’s healthy as well,”

Read more on Newsmax.com: Valerie Jarrett: Unemployment Stimulates the Economy

Media Matters out to get conservatives

This article makes me made at all those left wing people who are so bent on destroying free speech. Fox News has been a voice that has been fair and balanced for me and has helped me see all sides of the issues. Media Matters wants to shut anything that does not agree with them and it looks like the Obama administration is in cahoots with them. That is scary when the White House has the power to shut out other voices that should also be heard in this free nation.

Liberal Media Matters Targeted Fox News, Newsmax
By Jim Meyers
Newsmax and the Fox News Channel are among the conservative media entities targeted by an “opposition research team” formed by the left-wing media watchdog group Media Matters for America.

That eye-opening disclosure came to light in an internal Media Matters memo obtained by The Daily Caller, which lists targets including conservative websites, conservative think tanks, media outlets, and politicians.

A Media Matters memo actually went so far as to call for the hiring of private investigators to look into the private lives of Fox News employees and to harass them at their homes.

Media Matters says it is "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” Its financial contributors include a who’s who of liberal foundations and philanthropists, including billionaire financier George Soros.

But the group has contemplated activities far more aggressive than simply monitoring, according to a September 2009 memo sent by a staffer to Media Matters founder David Brock and President Eric Burns.

“Simply put,” the staffer wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around anymore. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.

“We must take Fox News head-on in a well-funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”

The memo also states: “We should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff.”

The memo said Media Matters should look into hiring a law firm to pursue lawsuits against Fox, conduct demonstrations at News Corp. shareholder meetings, attack Fox News employees on Facebook and other social media, mail anti-Fox literature to their homes, and place “yard signs and outdoor advertising in their neighborhoods.”

Media Matters set up its “opposition research team” to target political entities and even individuals associated with them.

“We will conduct extensive public records searches and compile opposition books on individuals,” states the memo, according to The Daily Caller.

The research team “will focus on the backgrounds, connections, operations and political and financial activities of the individuals.”

In addition to the Fox News Channel and Newsmax, the target list includes The Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Fox News websites, Fox Business Network, and the American Enterprise Institute.

Also on the list are several News Corp. executives, including Rupert Murdoch; Fox News executives, including CEO Roger Ailes; Fox personalities Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity; conservative donors; and politicians, including John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Mitch McConnell.

The Daily Caller also discloses that Media Matters has been successful in dictating the content of liberal media, and even exerts influence on the Obama administration, thanks to “regular contact with political operatives” inside the Obama White House.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Liberal Media Matters Targeted Fox News, Newsmax

Government rules getting in the way of family

N.C. Food ‘Inspector’ Sends Girl's Lunch Home After Determining It’s Not Healthy Enough

(read full story at Carolina Journal)
A North Carolina mom is irate after her four-year-old daughter returned home late last month with an uneaten lunch the mother had packed for the girl earlier that day. But she wasn’t mad because the daughter decided to go on a hunger strike. Instead, the reason the daughter didn‘t eat her lunch is because someone at the school determined the lunch wasn’t healthy enough and sent it back home.

Yes, you read that right.

The incident happened in Raeford, N.C. at West Hoke Elementary School. What was wrong with the lunch? That’s still a head-scratcher because it didn’t contain anything egregious: a turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice. But for the inspector on hand that day, it didn’t meet the healthy requirements.

See, in North Carolina, all pre-Kindergarten programs are required to evaluate the lunches being provided and determine if they meet USDA nutrition guidelines. If not, they must provide an alternative.

But that’s not the worst of it. Instead of being given a salad or something really healthy, the girl was given chicken nuggets instead. On top of it, her mother was then sent a bill for the cafeteria food.

Sara Burrows from the Carolina Journal explains:

The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the agent who was inspecting all lunch boxes in her More at Four classroom that day.

The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.

When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.

The girl’s mother — who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation — said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a “healthy lunch” would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.

“I don’t feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home,” the mother wrote in a complaint to her state representative, Republican G.L. Pridgen of Robeson County, reports the Journal.

“What got me so mad is, number one, don’t tell my kid I’m not packing her lunch box properly,” the girl’s mother told the Journal. “I pack her lunchbox according to what she eats. It always consists of a fruit. It never consists of a vegetable. She eats vegetables at home because I have to watch her because she doesn’t really care for vegetables.”

The Journal provides a copy of the state regulation:

“Sites must provide breakfast and/or snacks and lunch meeting USDA requirements during the regular school day. The partial/full cost of meals may be charged when families do not qualify for free/reduced price meals.

“When children bring their own food for meals and snacks to the center, if the food does not meet the specified nutritional requirements, the center must provide additional food necessary to meet those requirements.”

But what was so wrong with the lunch the mother provided? Nothing apparently. A spokesowman for the Division of Child Development explained that the mother’s meal should have been okay.

“With a turkey sandwich, that covers your protein, your grain, and if it had cheese on it, that’s the dairy,” Jani Kozlowski, the fiscal and statutory policy manager for the division, told the Journal. “It sounds like the lunch itself would’ve met all of the standard.”

It‘s unclear from reports who determined the lunch wasn’t healthy enough. The Carolina Journal refers to the person as a “state agent,” while the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calls the person a “state inspector” who was checking lunches that day. In an email to The Blaze, Caroline Journal reporter said the inspector was “an employee of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Child Development and Early Education.”

The school denied knowledge of the incident and said it’s looking into it.

“While I share concerns about childhood obesity, I still remain uncertain of the right role for schools,” writes the Journal-Constitution’s Maureen Downey. “This story clearly exemplifies the wrong role.”

Family Budget vs Government Bugdet

Bringing the Budget Numbers Down to Size

By Carrie Lukas

Politicians generally know the importance of translating complicated policy into language that non-wonks can understand. When it comes to budget numbers, that can be challenging. Many Americans don’t know how many zeros are in a “trillion,” much less what a trillion deficit means in terms of the economy and its economic effects. In this poll question, for example, respondents were given five multiple-choice answers for the question “how many thousands are in a trillion” and just 21 percent answered correctly (barely more than you would expect if everyone guessed randomly).

The Gainesville Tea Party seems to have the right idea: They take some of our key economic numbers — how much money the U.S. government brings in, how much it spends, and how much brave politicians are “cutting” to bring those numbers into balance — and simply lop off eight zeros (i.e., divide by 100 million) to make those numbers something that American families can relate to:

Why S&P Downgraded the US:
U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent [April] budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:
Annual family income: $21,700
Money the family spent: $38,200
New debt on the credit card: $16,500
Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
Budget cuts: $385

Even as a self-described policy wonk, I found this eye-opening. It’s harder to pretend that Washington leadership is serious about restoring fiscal sanity when their budget cuts are seen in this context.

Constitution Trashed

Occupy Wallstreet

Written by Jack A. Furnari, Knoxville

"The current Occupy Wall Street movement is the best illustration to date of what President Barack Obama's America looks like. It is an America where the lawless, unaccomplished, ignorant and incompetent rule. It is anAmerica where those who have sacrificed nothing pillage and destroy the lives of those who have sacrificed greatly. It is an America where history is rewritten to honor dictators, murderers and thieves. It is an America where violence, racism, hatred, class warfare and murder are all promoted as acceptable means of overturning the American civil society.

It is an America where humans have been degraded to the level of animals: defecating in public, having sex in public, devoid of basic hygiene. It is an America where the basic tenets of a civil society, including faith, family, a free press and individual rights, have been rejected. It is an Americawhere our founding documents have been shredded and, with them, every person's guaranteed liberties.

It is an America where, ultimately, great suffering will come to the American people, but the rulers like Obama, Michelle Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, liberal college professors, union bosses and other loyal liberal/Communist Party members will live in opulent splendor.

It is the America that Obama and the Democratic Party have created with the willing assistance of the American media, Hollywood, unions, universities, the Communist Party of America, the Black Panthers and numerous anti-American foreign entities.

Obama has brought more destruction upon this country in four years than any other event in the history of our nation, but it is just the beginning of what he and his comrades are capable of. The Occupy Wall Street movement is just another step in their plan for the annihilation of America"

Minimum wage law

Written by Thomas Sowell, excellent reason why we need to get rid of the Minimum wage law:

"Governor Mitt Romney’s statement about not worrying about the poor has been treated as a gaffe in much of the media, and those in the Republican establishment who have been rushing toward endorsing his coronation as the GOP’s nominee for president — with 90 percent of the delegates still not yet chosen — have been trying to sweep his statement under the rug.

But Romney’s statement about not worrying about the poor — because they “have a very ample safety net” — was followed by a statement that was not just a slip of the tongue, and should be a defining moment in telling us about this man’s qualifications as a conservative and, what is more important, as a potential president of the United States.

Mitt Romney has come out in support of indexing the minimum-wage law, to have it rise automatically to keep pace with inflation. To many people, that would seem like a small thing that can be left for economists or statisticians to deal with.

But to people who call themselves conservatives, and aspire to public office, there is no excuse for not being aware of what a major social disaster the minimum-wage law has been for the young, the poor, and especially for young and poor blacks.

It is not written in the stars that young black males must have astronomical rates of unemployment. It is written implicitly in the minimum-wage laws.

We have gotten so used to seeing unemployment rates of 30 or 40 percent for black teenage males that it might come as a shock to many people to learn that the unemployment rate for 16- and-17-year-old black males was just under 10 percent back in 1948. Moreover, it was slightly lower than the unemployment rate for white males of the same age.

How could this be?

The economic reason is quite plain. The inflation of the 1940s had pushed money wages for even unskilled, entry-level labor above the level specified in the minimum-wage law passed ten years earlier. In other words, there was in practical effect no national minimum-wage law in the late 1940s.

My first full-time job, as a black high-school dropout in 1946, was as a lowly messenger delivering telegrams. But my starting pay was more than 50 percent above the level specified in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Liberals were of course appalled that the federal minimum-wage law had lagged so far behind inflation — and, in 1950, they began a series of escalations of the minimum-wage level over the years.

It was in the wake of these escalations that black teenage unemployment rose to levels that were three or four times the level in 1948. Even in the most prosperous years of later times, the unemployment rate for black teenage males was some multiple of what it was even in the recession year of 1949. And now it was often double the unemployment rate for white males of the same ages.

This was not the first or the last time that liberals did something that made them feel good about themselves while leaving havoc in their wake, especially among the poor whom they were supposedly helping."

Teacher teaching that Communism is better than Capitalism

The following article was written by Mike Opelka.

This curious flyer was handed out to students studying the history of the Cold War at Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa.

What do you think the lesson was supposed to be?

Let’s review.

The CAPITALISM side of the flyer shows workers in tattered clothing, chained to a machine that delivers all of the money produced to a cigar-smoking man who is also much better dressed.

Over on the COMMUNISM side, there is no boss and the smiling workers are better dressed, don’t have chains on their legs and the money goes back to them.

This gem was discovered by Simon Conway of Iowa’s Who Radio. A listener who is a parent of a student at the high school, sent the hand out to the radio host. Conway read the words of the flyer verbatim:

“Communism stands for equal sharing of the work according to the benefits and ability. But in Capitalism an individual is responsible for his works and if he wants to raise the ladder, he has to work hard.”

He continued to read and clarify further:

“While the profit of any enterprise is equally shared by all in Communism, the profit in the Capitalist structure belongs to the private owner only.”

Conway contacted Roosevelt High School for an explanation and was told that only person who could speak for the school on this topic is the principal. The Blaze has also reached out to Principal Kathie Danielson for comment. The principal has not responded.

Great quote of the day

Parody on an old saying
"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day… Give a man a welfare check, a forty ounce malt liquor, a crack pipe and some Air Jordens… and he votes Democrat for a lifetime…" by Detroit Paperboy

Obama has become an "Islamist Firster"

The following was written by Charles Hurt. (I say to his words - Ditto!)

"GOLAN HEIGHTS — Surveying the live minefields, cratered roads and mortar-pocked concrete buildings along the border here between Syria and Israel, it is hard not to be reminded of the historic and monumental disappointment President Obama has been.

When he was campaigning to become the most powerful man in the last standing superpower on Earth, he spoke passionately about changing the world, restoring America’s greatness and bringing more peace and fairness to everyone.

In both foreign and domestic matters, Mr. Obama had unique credibility to change things as few presidents ever had.

Despite his background as a liberal street organizer, he campaigned on tax cuts and personal responsibility and preached that the government simply cannot be the answer to every problem. Republicans would have no choice but to go along with an agenda to shrink the tax burden and get the federal government out of our everyday lives.

Instead, Mr. Obama has devoted his administration to raising taxes, adding to the byzantine structure of the federal government, and has created a whole new massive bureaucracy he claims really will cure our every little boo-boo.

As for the rest of the world, Mr. Obama promised to devote himself to healing the grave injustices and halting the atrocities that have afflicted the world since the rise of radical, violent jihadism. With his Muslim roots, Mr. Obama was positioned better than any leader on the global stage to speak with authority to radical Islamists and finally bring about permanent peace.

Instead, Mr. Obama chose to unilaterally alienate perhaps our most strategically important ally in the world and do all he can to cozy up to the very people who are dedicated to destroying not only Israel, but America as well.

Leading Democrats have been in the news lately sliming Americans who stick up for Israel as being “Israel Firsters.” Well, Mr. Obama has become an “Islamist Firster.”

Since becoming president, he has not once visited our greatest ally in the region. Rather, he has gone to places like Cairo to tell the Muslim world how much he likes it. He also stunningly trashed the oath of office he took by saying it is “part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

And, of course, he apologized for the “sexuality” and “mindless violence” from the West permeating the Internet. But Internet porn and creepy videos are little match for virginity tests, stoning women and beheading Jews — all for the fun of it.

When Mr. Obama finally addressed Israel, he shockingly said the tiny country should further retrench so its well-armed enemies can retake high ground from which to fire rockets at Israelis and move closer so they can hit major population centers such as Tel Aviv.

Such a twisted and half-baked view of justice is bad enough in a president. But things are about to get much more terrifying when Iran finally gets its hands on a nuclear warhead, which appears likely to happen in a matter of months.

It will be a very complicated situation because the most powerful man in the last remaining superpower on the planet is an Islamist Firster."

National day of Prayer by Pres Obama

I turned on the TV this morning for my usual exercise routine (I watch the news while exercising) and there was Obama talking at the National day of Prayer breakfast. I decided to listen. The more I listened the more I realized that he was using the Bible, specifically Jesus' sayings, to justify his political issues of raising taxes. I had just listened to Ronald Reagan talking about his faith in God several days earlier and I was moved that he believed that there was a God. Obama never once expressed his feelings about God and I was definately not moved. Obama wants us to have faith in ourselves and rely each other. The one scripture that came to my mind was "Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm," Are we not supposed to have faith in Jesus? Not once did he say to pray to God or rely on Jesus. Obama was using scriptures to make us feel guilty to pay taxes because "We are our brothers keeper and we need to rely on each other to help one another." It is interesting to also note that he lumped Islam and Jews along with all the Bible verses of Jesus. The thing is - Nether of them have those scriptures so why should they listen to what Jesus says. It sounds like he is only trying to make us Christains feel guiltly because he knows we love Jesus and would follow him. Jesus did say to beware of Wolves in Sheeps clothing.

As I was reading what others said here are some great writings other people said:

"Earth to Obama: Jesus came to change the hearts of individuals, NOT FORM A GOVERNMENT. Paying taxes IS NOT THE SAME as charity!" by Th3oph1lus

LibertyGoddess wrote:

"1. Jesus only asked for 10% in tithing to care for the poor. Obama, you are already taking around 30% and most of that is not going to the poor, but to those who are refusing to care for themselves.

2. Obama you are not asking for more money for the poor, you are asking for more money to waste on projects that are not constitutional and trying to transform this country...

3. Jesus did not put the government in charge of caring for the poor. You are not only doing it wrong, you are not effective. More money has been spent on welfare than ever in history, and we have more broken families, more immorality, more moochers, and more godless people than ever. Do not invoke the Lord’s name again in your speeches, it is sacrilegious."