This comment was in a response to a Wall Street Journal article about Obama Ad Campaign not working but I thought it sums up Obama and why he does not have the integrity to get another 4 years:

“Just another patch in the beautiful tapestry that is Obama’s political life.”

• Communist parents
• Communist mentors
• Radical socialist professors
• “Sealed” academic records
• Shady real estate deal with convicted felon, Rezko
• 20 year relationship with a racial black liberation pastor, self described as his mentor
• Close friendship with the Ayers family, including terrorists Bill and his lovely bomber wife, Bernadette
• Employed shady campaign tactics in ALL his races, using opponents “sealed” divorce records to slime
• Exploded dependency, debt, regulation and taxes implemented and proposed as the economy sinks
• Tried to use “Fast and Furious” to illegally plant evidence to attempt an attack on the 2nd amendment
• Purposely leaked sensitive intel risking national security and putting lives in danger just to benefit him
• Exploded debt over $5,000,000,000,000 and shows no concern whatsoever
• Stands by and almost happily watches our national security and defenses being taken down

A rich tapestry, indeed.

Below is the story of Angelo’s, a 73-year old Italian Restaurant in Washington, PA.  The video features an interview with the restaurant’s owner, Michael Passalacqua, who explains the effect that President Barack Obama’s tax hike would have on communities like Washington, PA and, in turn, restaurants like his.

Anthropocon recently posted an article on the re-drawn Congressional Districts in the State of Maryland and that there are some Democratic candidates that could be facing challenges in this year’s elections from upstart Republicans like Ken Timmerman.  You can read the entire article and view a few videos of Ken Timmerman below:

Another Key Democrat is Vulnerable in 2012

Thanks to a one party monopoly in Annapolis, Maryland now has some bizarrely drawn congressional districts. Governor Martin O’Malley’s attempt to redistrict Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett out of his seat, he may have put the neighboring district in play. Democrat Chris Van Hollen is the incumbent in MD-8, but the district that elected him bears little resemblance to the newly O’Malley-mandered district. Van Hollen is facing a challenge from the adroit Ken Timmerman, an investigative reporter and Middle East expert  who has a strategy to beat Van Hollen’s financial advantage.

In 2010 the district looked like this:

The old MD-8 was virtually all in Democrat leaning Montgomery County.

The 2012 version of MD-8 looks like this:

Note that in order to peel Republican votes away from Bartlett in neighboring District 6, much of northern (Republican leaning) Frederick County, and a chunk of rural Carroll County are now in District 8. A large portion of Montgomery County has been taken from District 8 and added to District 6.

Of course the Republican areas added to district 8 are more rural and more sparsely populated, so the party distribution remains about 50% Democrat and 50% Republican and Independent.

Here are some key facts to consider though:

1. Thousands of registered Democrats signed petitions against legislation legalizing same sex marriage and granting in state tuition to illegal aliens. Republican challenger Ken Timmerman is employing a strategy specifically targeting these registered Democrat “values” voters rather than expending resources on hardcore Democrat voters.
2. The new district lines also include some areas with sizable populations of Orthodox Jewish Marylanders. Van Hollen has a reputation for being very two-faced with regard to supporting Israel, while Timmerman has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East as an investigative reporter and activist. He knows the skeletons in Van Hollen’s closet and will exploit them to his advantage.
3. Republican turnout will be large because of anti-Obama sentiment and the presence of the exciting Republican Dan Bongino in the Maryland U.S. Senate race against lackluster incumbent Democrat, Ben Cardin.
4. Van Hollen was on the bogus “super committee” charged with identifying cuts in the federal budget and declared that any cuts outside the defense department would be “reckless.” There are registered Democrats in Maryland who do understand that Washington has a spending problem and may be swayed to the Republican in 2012.

As of yet, it does not seem that Van Hollen has mounted much of an effort to campaign in the new territory in his district. His campaign web site even has the district map of the old district 8 posted still. Van Hollen appears to be taking his seat for granted.

He obviously has an extreme money advantage over Timmerman but Timmerman has the benefits related to the petition drives and social issues. Timmerman is also a very engaging candidate with an interesting personal narrative. If Timmerman is able to bring in some more campaign cash he will give Van Hollen a tougher race than he has ever faced.

Find Ken Timmerman on Facebook and please donate to his campaign at www.TimmermanForCongress.com. If you live in the district, volunteer to help the campaign.

Ken Timmerman lays out some campaign strategy:

Ken Timmerman contrasts himself with Chris Van Hollen on Israel:

Yesterday, Representative Mike Kelly gave a speech on the house floor on regulatory red tape and Washington’s culture of control that was so powerful it received a standing ovation.  You can read the entire article regarding the speech from The Blaze and view the speech for yourself below:

‘USA, USA, USA!’: See the Speech That Got a Standing Ovation in Congress Today 

Representative Mike Kelly, speaking on the House floor today, managed something very rare in the history of the institution – he got a standing ovation. Applause is usually forbidden in the house, but Kelly‘s blistering attack on regulatory red tape and Washington’s culture of control was apparently so powerful that several of his fellow house members couldn’t resist showing their support, clapping, standing up and shouting “USA! USA! USA!”

Would you applaud this way? See Kelly’s speech below and decide for yourself:

Rush Limbaugh has created a song parody around Obama’s “you didn’t build that” statement from earlier this week.  You can read the article below, as well as listen to the song in the video clip.

‘Without Me…What Good Are You?’: Limbaugh Releases Parody of Obama’s ‘You Didn‘t Build That’ Remarks

Rush Limbaugh is well-known for his comedic takes on current events.  Partnering with Paul Shanklin, Limbaugh has popularized ballads like “Banking Queen” in honor Barney Frank, and “Jeremiah Was My Pastor,” in honor of Jeremiah Wright.

Now, a new ballad has been thrown into the mix: “You Didn’t Build That,” in honor of Barack Obama.

A mockery of the president’s recent comment that, if you have a business, “you didn’t build that“ and ”somebody else made that happen” because government was there providing necessary services along the way, Limbaugh said:

Go down to Mexico — go down to Texas or Arizona — and find some people crossing the border and ask, “Why are you coming here?”  I guarantee you not a one of them will say because of the roads and bridges, or the Internet.  They love to talk about the poem on the Statue of Liberty that Emma Lazarus wrote: “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to [walk across roads and bridges].”  Did it say that?  It did not say that. [Emphasis added]

Listen to the sarcastic ballad, based on a song by the Righteous Brothers, below:

Here are the lyrics:

Who’s the one who gave you success?

How can you talk that way?

Who’s the one who built your business?

It‘s not because you’re smart and work hard every day…

Baby, I‘m the soul of your heart’s inspiration…

I’m all you got, to get you by…

I‘m the soul of your heart’s inspiration

Without me– Barry– what good are you?

You wouldn’t have much going

Thank goodness you had me

Somebody else made that happen

You didn’t build it alone, nothing’s free!

Baby…I‘m the soul of your heart’s inspiration

[Chorus]

That business– you, you didn’t make it, without me

And I’m telling you, sonny, I‘m the reason you’re growing, and thriving, or shrinking, and dying

Business, you can’t ride it, without me…

Yes, I’m threatening your business!

If I go, all the bridges and roads will implode, yes I swear it!

[Chorus]

Limbaugh added that he believes there is a “groundswell of anti-Obamaism out there that is set to explode“ and ”shock and surprise” everybody in the media and on the left.

He explained: “You don’t attack the U.S. economy this way, you don’t damage it this way and have people sit by and say, ‘Oh, okay.’”

“We have not become a passive people.  We are not a passive country.”

Allen West says “This is Going to be a Dogfight for Your Country!”

 The video says it all, what an amazing man!

Yesterday, Fox News published a story about the house GOP questioning legal grounds for changes to welfare work requirements.  You can read the entire article below:

House GOP questions legal grounds for changes to welfare work requirements

June 20, 2012: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius speaks at Covenant Community Care, Inc. in Detroit. (AP)

Thomas Sowell has an article on today’s RomanticPoet blog that talks about Obama’s recent quote regarding entrepreneurs, where he said “if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.” The entire article can be viewed below:

Obama’s Rhetoric
By Thomas Sowell
July 19, 2012

Barack Obama’s great rhetorical gifts include the ability to make the absurd sound not only plausible, but inspiring and profound.

His latest verbal triumph was to say on July 13th, “if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.” As an example, “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Let’s stop and think, even though the whole purpose of much political rhetoric is to keep us from thinking, and stir our emotions instead.

Even if we were to assume, just for the sake of argument, that 90 percent of what a successful person has achieved was due to the government, what follows from that? That politicians will make better decisions than individual citizens, that politicians will spend the wealth of the country better than those who created it? That doesn’t follow logically — and certainly not empirically.

Does anyone doubt that most people owe a lot to the parents who raised them? But what follows from that? That they should never become adults who make their own decisions?

The whole point of the collectivist mindset is to concentrate power in the hands of the collectivists — which is to say, to take away our freedom. They do this in stages, starting with some group that others envy or resent — Jews in Nazi Germany, capitalists in the Soviet Union, foreign investors in Third World countries that confiscate their investments and call this theft “nationalization.”

Freedom is seldom destroyed all at once. More often it is eroded, bit by bit, until it is gone. This can happen so gradually that there is no sudden change that would alert people to the danger. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it can be too late, because their freedom is gone.

All the high-flown talk about how people who are successful in business should “give back” to the community that created the things that facilitated their success is, again, something that sounds plausible to people who do not stop and think through what is being said. After years of dumbed-down education, that apparently includes a lot of people.

Take Obama’s example of the business that benefits from being able to ship their products on roads that the government built. How does that create a need to “give back”?

Did the taxpayers, including business taxpayers, not pay for that road when it was built? Why should they have to pay for it twice?

What about the workers that businesses hire, whose education is usually created in government-financed schools? The government doesn’t have any wealth of its own, except what it takes from taxpayers, whether individuals or businesses. They have already paid for that education. It is not a gift that they have to “give back” by letting politicians take more of their money and freedom.

When businesses hire highly educated people, such as chemists or engineers, competition in the labor market forces them to pay higher salaries for people with longer years of valuable education. That education is not a government gift to the employers. It is paid for while it is being created in schools and universities, and it is paid for in higher salaries when highly educated people are hired.

One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience’s attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about “giving back” distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom.

Even the envy that politicians stir up against “the rich” is highly focussed on those particular high income-earners whose decisions the politicians want to take over. Others in sports or entertainment can make far more money than the highest paid corporate executive, but there is no way that politicians can take over the roles of Roger Federer or Oprah Winfrey, so highly paid sports stars or entertainers are never accused of “greed.”

If we are so easily distracted by self-serving political rhetoric, we are not only going to see our money, but our freedom, increasingly taken away from us by slick-talking politicians, including our current slick-talker-in-chief in the White House.

The July 13th issue of The Gazette features an interview that Robert Rand did with RMR & Associates CEO Robyn Sachs regarding the formation of Entrepreneurs for Free Enterprise.  You can read the interview below or on the Gazette website.

Dan Gross/The Gazette “They’re the only one telling the truth,” Robyn Sachs, CEO of Rockville marketing company RMR & Associates and co-founder of Entrepreneurs for Free Enterprise, says of Fox News.

Fox guarding henhouse

Six months ago, Robyn Sachs had an epiphany.

And on Tuesday, the self-described Democratic Jewish woman from Maryland — and CEO of Rockville marketing company RMR & Associates — launched an online effort sparked by that Road to Damascus experience. Her mission: to save the country by defeating President Obama in November.

Together with Northern Virginia entrepreneurs, Sachs has formed Entrepreneurs for Free Enterprise, which is dedicated to save “the free America we all know and love,” she said in an interview.

Calling Obama a socialist who is leading the U.S. down the path of Greece and Spain, Sachs said the president is attacking “job creators” through his health insurance law and his calls for letting the Bush-era income tax cuts expire for the richest earners at the end of the year.

“This administration has gone too far,” Sachs said. “I’ve never been a political person … now I’m seeing our country hijacked.”

Corporate America has plenty of cash to hire more people, she said. It’s the “uncertainty” engendered by the policies of “King Obama” that is restraining employers from adding to their payrolls.

Sachs’ conversion came when a group she belongs to, the Entrepreneurs Organization, asked her to write about how the 2012 presidential election would affect entrepreneurs. Some quick online research led to her newfound passion for politics. Her prior ignorance resulted from her reliance on the “mainstream media” for news, she said.

“If you want real news, you better watch Fox,” she said. “They’re the only one telling the truth.”

Rupert Murdoch would be pleased.

— Robert Rand

RomanticPoet’s blog today has a story about how Sen. Harry Reid won’t bring the house-passed jobs bills to the Senate floor.  You can read the entire article below:

America:  It is NOT the House of Representatives holding up jobs bills for vote/passage, it is Sen.Harry Reid in the Senate.  When questioned about the jobs bills, his response is they will be brought up after the NOVEMBER elections.  The Obstructionist in Congress is DEMOCRAT HARRY REID in the Senate.

Now, in the latest “under the table” maneuver, Harry Reid and Senate Democrats do this:

From The Free Beacon:

Not-So-Full Disclosure

To protect unions, Senate Democrats drop ad requirement from DISCLOSE Act

BY: CJ Ciaramella –

July 16, 2012

The Senate is scheduled to vote today on a new version of the DISCLOSE Act, a controversial bill requiring more disclosure of political activity.

Senate Democrats introduced a new version of the bill last Tuesday evening, but a provision requiring political ads to reveal their funders was pulled from the latest version at the behest of unions, senior GOP aides say.

The DISCLOSE Act of 2012, first introduced in March, had two major provisions: requiring politically active super PACs, unions, and corporations to disclose the identity of donors who contribute $10,000 or more; and requiring electioneering ads to disclose who is funding them.

But the latter so-called “stand by your ad” provision is absent from the version of the bill on which the Senate will vote. A spokesman for Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.), who introduced the bill, said the provision was nixed in response to GOP complaints.

“The ‘stand by your ad’ provision was dropped in response to objections we’ve heard from folks on the other side of the aisle,” the spokesman said. “It’s now targeted specifically at requiring disclosure.”

However, a senior Republican aide told the Free Beacon the provision was dropped due to union pressure.

The “stand by your ad” provision would have required the CEO or equivalent position of an organization buying electioneering ads—AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, for example—to endorse them, similar to the endorsements required at the end of ads purchased by political campaigns.

“The Trumkas of the world aren’t exactly the warm, fuzzy personalities you want appearing at the end of your ad,” the aide said.

Lisa Rosenberg, a government accountability consultant for the pro-transparency Sunlight Foundation, said the bill treated organizations equally, since member dues in groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association would also fall under the threshold.

The remaining provisions leave unions and other labor groups largely unaffected, because union member dues do not trigger the disclosure threshold. Additionally, local union chapters can funnel donations under $10,000 to their parent groups. That is another way to avoid disclosure.

When the DISCLOSE Act was first introduced in 2010, the reporting threshold was only $600, but it was raised to reduce the bureaucratic burden on organizations.

Democratic Senators introduced the new version of the bill on the same day the Wall Street Journal reported unions and labor groups spent $4.4 billion in political activity between 2005 and 2011.

The Republican aide said the heart of the Democrats’ decision was protecting unions from disclosure while forcing their political adversaries, such as the Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads, to reveal their donors.

Senior GOP aides also criticized Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) for invoking a rule to move the bill to the floor without taking it through a committee first, as is the usual process for a congressional bill.

The act was “written in secrecy, placed on calendar without a single hearing, and taken to the floor without a mark-up,” the aide said. “Not exactly usual process in the Senate.”

Democrats and campaign finance reform advocates say the DISCLOSE Act would bring much-needed transparency to the political spending allowed by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.

“The flood of secret money unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision threatens to drown out the voices of middle class families in our democracy,” Sen. Whitehouse said in a statement Thursday.

“The DISCLOSE Act will uphold every citizen’s right to know where this secret money is coming from and whom it is going to, and will help protect the interests of middle class families from the special interests who already have too much power.”

However, Republicans and free speech advocates say the legislation would be a tool for liberals to harass and intimidate political donors. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is an outspoken opponent of the bill.

“Billed as ‘reform,’ the measure is an attempt to identify and punish political enemies, or at the very least, intimidate others from participating in the process—an effort that’s already underway,” McConnell wrote in a recent USA Today op-ed. “The president has used selective disclosure not as a tool of good government, in other words, but as a political weapon.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said as much when promoting the bill at a 2010 press conference. “The deterrent effect should not be underestimated,” Schumer said.

David Keating, the president of the Center for Competitive Politics, said the act is “a fraud the way they’re selling it.”

“A lot of nonprofit orgs are going to have to make major choices on whether they want to run an ad and disclose their donors or sit out of the process,” he said. “This is a radical bill that’s being sold as a reasonable bill.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which also supported the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, opposes the DISCLOSE Act as well.

“The electoral system is strengthened by efforts to facilitate public participation, not by chilling free speech and invading the privacy of donors to controversial causes,” the ACLU writes in a letter.

“Indeed, our Constitution embraces public discussion of matters that are important to our nation’s future, and it respects the right of individuals to support those conversations without being exposed to unnecessary risk of harassment or embarrassment. Only reforms that promote speech will bring positive change to our elections, and overbroad disclosure requirements do the opposite.”

Sen. Reid’s office did not return requests for comment.

The AFL-CIO did not return requests for comment.