Rand Paul and the 2014 Revolution

Posted by Judson Phillips on March 8, 2013 at 8:57am in Tea Party Nation Forum

 

Rand Paul launched his filibuster Wednesday night.  He may have also fired the first shot in the second wave of the Tea Party movement.

The actions of Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and other conservatives in the Senate have galvanized the Tea Party movement in a way we have not seen in a long time.

What does that mean for 2014 or even 2013?

We have seen friends and enemies for 2013 and 2014.

Top on the enemy list is now Lindsay Graham.  I have been preaching caution as to which Republicans we primary so that we ensure that we take control of the Senate.  Graham is an exception to that.

South Carolina needs to pull out all of the stops to find a winning candidate who can beat Graham.

Republicans can and should learn from Rand Paul’s filibuster.  Stepping out and being courageous brings support.  Rand Paul and Ted Cruz singlehandedly brought a desperately needed jolt of enthusiasm to the movement.

In the space of 13 hours, Rand Paul transformed himself from the Junior Senator from Kentucky to one of the top leaders of the conservative movement.  Doing even less, Ted Cruz went from being a freshman Senator to another major leader in the conservative movement.

In Colorado, Republicans are planning a Rand Paul like filibuster to stop radical gun control.   While some of the radical bills will probably pass, the Republicans will energize their base by simply standing up and fighting.  Reports indicate some Democrats are wavering and may even break from the party.

Why is this happening?

It is happening because Republicans are showing courage.

This is a lesson that is totally lost on the House Republican leadership.

John Boehner, Eric Cantor and the entire House leadership are clueless.  You would think they would have learned by now in their dealings with Obama that they cannot simply deal with the Obama Regime.

What do the Republicans need to do?

First they need courage.  Rand Paul and Ted Cruz just showed them how to do it.  John McCain and Lindsay Graham, who were dining with Obama instead of standing for liberty, reacted like petulant, hormonal teenaged girls.  Graham said he had been opposed to CIA nominee John Brennen before Rand Paul’s filibuster.  Now because Rand Paul had taken the spotlight, he would now vote for Brennen.

Rand Paul’s filibuster reminds us that it was not the GOP message that was the problem in the 2008 and 2012 elections.  It was the candidate and the candidate’s message.

#standwithrand became the top twitter hashtag in the world while Rand was doing his filibuster.  There is a reason for that.  There is a reason why the RINOs like McCain, Graham, Boehner and Cantor have repeatedly failed.

It is time for the Tea Party to go hunting for 2014.

RINO are in season and there is no bag limit.

Rotten to the Core: The Feds' Invasive Student Tracking Database

Michelle Malkin

(This is the fourth installment of a continuing series on nationalized academic standards known as the "Common Core.")

While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.

Say goodbye to your children's privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It's yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of "Common Core."

As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core's technological project is "merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce." The 2009 porkulus package included a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" to bribe states into constructing "longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students."

These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data -- health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.

At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education technology gurus were salivating at the prospects of information plunder. "This is going to be a huge win for us," Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters. Cha-ching-ching-ching.

The company is already aggressively marketing curricular material "aligned" to fuzzy, dumbed-down Common Core math and reading guidelines (which more than a dozen states are now revolting against). Along with two dozen other tech firms, CompassLearning sees even greater financial opportunities to mine Common Core student tracking systems. The centralized database is a strange-bedfellows alliance between the liberal Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which largely underwrote and promoted the Common Core curricular scheme) and a division of conservative Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (which built the database infrastructure).

Another nonprofit startup, "inBloom, Inc.," has evolved out of that partnership to operate the database. The Gates Foundation and other partners provided $100 million in seed money. Reuters reports that inBloom, Inc. will "likely start to charge fees in 2015" to states and school districts participating in the system. "So far, seven states -- Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina and Massachusetts -- have committed to enter data from select school districts. Louisiana and New York will be entering nearly all student records statewide."

The National Education Data Model, available online at http://nces.sifinfo.org/datamodel/eiebrowser/techview.aspx?instance=studentElementarySecondary, lists hundreds of data points considered indispensable to the nationalized student tracking racket. These include:

--"Bus Stop Arrival Time" and "Bus Stop Description."

--"Dwelling arrangement."

--"Diseases, Illnesses and Other Health Conditions."

--"Religious Affiliation."

--"Telephone Number Type" and "Telephone Status."

Home-schoolers and religious families that reject traditional government education would be tracked. Original NEDM data points included hair color, eye color, weight, blood types and even dental status.

How exactly does amassing and selling such personal data improve educational outcomes? It doesn't. This, at its core, is the central fraud of Washington's top-down nationalized curricular scheme. The Bill Gates-endorsed Common Core "standards" are a phony pretext for big-government expansion. The dazzling allure of "21st-century technology" masks the privacy-undermining agenda of nosy bureaucratic drones allergic to transparency, accountability and parental autonomy. Individual student privacy is sacrificed at the collective "For the Children" altar.

Fed Ed is not about excellence or academic achievement. It's about control, control and more control.

Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.

ABC's Porn Pinup for Teenage Girls

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Sin Tax on Bikes

Now They've Done It: A Sin Tax on...Bikes

• 
• Lincoln Brown

Well, it took longer than I thought, but a government has finally out-greened itself. In the great state of Washington, the legislature wants to tax… wait for it …breathing.

“Holy exhalations!” you say, “Is it true?”

Yes old chum, I’m afraid it is. It would appear the folks on Washington’s equivalent of a capitol hill have come up with a transportation package that tabs out at 10 billion clams, which is a lot, even for a coastal state. Okay, that was a lousy play on words. MOVING ON THEN…

Actually $10 billion is a lot of money, even in a day and age in which the national debt probably increased by that much in the time it has taken me to put the period at the end of this sentence.

So from where will all these dollars flow? Well, from a gasoline tax naturally. Anymore you can’t have a left-wing state without a gasoline tax on all of those icky carbon spewing vehicles. C’mon, you should have been able to guess that one on your own!

But according to a handy flyer provided by the Seattle Times, a gas tax is only part of the plan. There is also an increase in the commercial gross weight fee, a Motor Vehicle Excise Tax, a Hazardous Substance Tax, two bonds (“Bond” is a nice word for “taxes”, by the way.) and… drumroll please…a $25 tax on bicycles that cost more than $500. The legislators in Washington figure that should garner about a million bucks for roads.

What?

Yup, Washington State wants to tax bikes. The legislature there want to tax gas saving, non-polluting bikes powered by the human machine that emits no disgusting substances to befoul the air. You might be tempted to say “Hey, bicyclists use the road, they ought to pick up at least some of the tab.” And you would be right. But according to one legislator, it is the amount of carbon exhaled by cyclists that merit them getting hit with this tax. And imagine my chagrin when I discovered it was a Republican spouting this bit of nonsense. In an article on The Examiner website by Mikael Thalen, GOP State Representative Ed Orcutt is quoted as saying: “A cyclists [sic] has an increased heart rate and respiration. That means that the act of riding a bike results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride."

Insert laugh track here.

So, a Washington Republican finally succeeded where Jacque Cousteau, Sir David Attenborough, England’s Prince Phillip, and Ted Turner could not- he has pinned climate change onHomo sapiens. And apparently also on his semi-high-end bike.

I know folks who eschew cars for bikes because of the cost and because they want to lessen their personal carbon footprint. That’s fine, do as thou wilt, oh pilgrim. They are put out by motorists who don’t give them the space they need, or call them “dirty hippies” as they drive by. Conversely, I know motorists who are annoyed by what they perceive to be an elitist attitude by cyclists, who seem intent on making themselves a nuisance on streets and roads. That’s a debate for another time. (Personally, I just wish they would not ride so close to the white line on the side of the road. I always think they are going to swing out into traffic.)

What is germane to this discussion is that bicycles have at best a barely discernible impact on roads. That, and in this case we are essentially talking about what amounts to BREATHING TAX. The problem with that is breathing is one of those things everyone does. Unless you are a fetus, a corpse or an astronaut, you are at this moment inhaling and exhaling; and apparently inflicting damage on the atmosphere.

A story goes that Mark Twain was once trapped by a bore who lectured him at length on the Great Hereafter. The man said to Twain: “Do you realize that every time I exhale some poor soul departs this world?” Twain is reported to have replied “Really? Have you tried chewing cloves?”

Apparently for the elected officials of the Evergreen State, chewing cloves will not suffice.

They feel it is time to tax people simply for existing.

The Historical Jesus

The Historical Jesus

• 
• Jerry Newcombe

Every once in a while, we hear a false charge. A charge that has significance during this Lenten season of 2013.

It’s an old lie that seems to keep resurfacing. The accusation is that supposedly there is no historical reliability to Jesus as a person.

In other words, we supposedly can’t know for sure that He even existed historically.

That is so false. For example, Will Durant, the great historian who wrote the series, "The Story of Civilization,"noted in the volume, "Caesar and Christ," that if the same criterion by which some philosophers claim Jesus didn’t really exist as an historical person, then by that same criterion we’d have to throw out all sorts of historical figures, such as Hammurabi or King David.

Will Durant was not a believer. But even he saw how false this notion was.

This lie that we don’t know if Jesus ever existed is even dallied with, and (thankfully) dismissed, by some of the modern bestselling books promoting atheism by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

I heard a caller on a talk show recently where he was challenging the host and co-host as to Jesus Christ. The caller made the astounding claim that Jesus is only written about in the New Testament, but there were no secular or non-Christian sources writing about Him during those early years.

Unfortunately, the hosts let this comment slide by with some sort of remark like, “You have to take it on faith.” But Christianity is well-rooted in history. Jesus is better attested than virtually any figure of antiquity.

Dr. Gary Habermas of Liberty University is the author of "The Historical Jesus." He tells us that there are multiple non-Christian sources from the first and second centuries that refer to Jesus Christ in one way or another.

These include: Josephus, Tacitus, Thallus, Phlegon, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, Emperor Trajan, Emperor Hadrian, the Talmud, Lucian, Mara Bar-Serapion, and so on.

In addition, there are multiple sources from Christian writers who are not in the New Testament. They would include Clement of Rome, Diognetus, Aristedes, Papias, Barnabas, Polycarp, Ignatius, Melito of Sardis, Quadratus, Justin Martyr, and so on.

Dr. Gary Habermas and Dr. Mike Licona, authors of "The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus," note that there is more documentation for Jesus Christ within 150 years of his life, even from secular sources, than there is for Caesar Tiberius.

That’s an astounding observation.

To create an analogy: Imagine if 2000 years from now, there was more documentation on the life of a traveling minister (whose ministry lasted three and a half years) than there was for the President of the United States, during whose term the preacher preached.

Furthermore, Dr. Habermas once told me, “Actually, the life of Jesus is recorded in whole or in part, different segments, in about 20 different non-Christian sources, archaeological or historical, outside the New Testament.”

He went on to say, “Now most of these are little snippets, a sentence here, a paragraph there, but you put them all together and there’s approximately 60 to 65 facts concerning the life, death, resurrection, teachings of Jesus in the earliest Church. You can get an outline of his life and never touch the New Testament.”

So the next time somebody tries to sell you on the idea that Jesus cannot be documented in history---even secular history, please lovingly but firmly stop them in their tracks…with the facts.

No reputable historian denies the historicity of Jesus.

5 Reasons Barack Obama is a Creep

John Hawkins
John Hawkins is a professional blogger who runs Right Wing News

Is Barack Obama the Vladimir Lenin of American Presidents? No, Lenin was competent in an evil sort of way. Obama is more like Leonid Brezhnev: an ultra left-wing, belligerent doofus who isn't laughed at by the general population primarily because the mainstream media liberals say nice things about him out of fear that they'll end up in a gulag if they're too harsh. Of course, we don't have gulags, but reporters who criticize Obama would be snubbed by their peers at cocktail parties in Manhattan and Old Town, which seems almost as bad to liberals. This is how a narcissist who scores at "Nixon after Watergate" on the presidential likability scale can be perceived by much of the public as a long suffering, bipartisan nice guy. The real picture is less Van Gogh and is more Andy Warhol, if Andy Warhol were a five year old coloring with cow dung crayons.

1) Obama NEVER stops campaigning: Barack Obama almost seems disinterested in actually governing the country. Apparently the only thing he does passably well is campaign; so he has just decided to do that. His agenda, from Obamacare, to free birth control, to amnesty for illegals has nothing to do with the country's immediate problems and everything to do with politics. This is a big part of the reason that Washington has become even more nonfunctional than usual under Obama -- because he ALWAYS acts as if there's an election next week and winning it by trying to make the GOP look bad is his first priority.

2) What he says is completely unrelated to what he does: Barack Obama is like an alcoholic who pledges to quit drinking and then gets hammered every night. Afterwards, his doting family full of enablers (played by the part of the mainstream media) pats him on the back and talks about what a great example he is for other people because he pledged to quit drinking. This is how Barack Obama can demand a sequester and then turn around and run against it or yammer on incessantly about transparency while he stonewalls on Fast and Furious. We're talking about a man who's worth nearly 10 million dollars, who has campaign events with celebrities and millionaires on a regular basis, and who just seems to squeeze in a little bit of work in between lavish vacations and golf outings with Tiger Woods; yet he spent most of last year campaigning against rich people. This is almost like listening to Bill Maher complain about loud mouth know-nothings who regularly say incredibly stupid things just for shock value.

3) He works overtime to pit Americans against each other: Barack Obama's entire campaign strategy -- and don't forget, he's always campaigning -- is based on convincing different groups of Americans to hate each other. He tries to convince black and Hispanic Americans that Republicans hate them for their skin color, gays that Republicans hate them for their sexuality, women that the GOP is pro-rape, poor people that the rich are taking all their money, people who've had children killed that gun owners are in favor of their children dying -- it just goes on and on. There have been campaigns of genocide across the world that have featured less vitriolic rhetoric against the people who were murdered than Barack Obama and Company have engaged in since he became President. Then they turn around and wonder why Republicans in Congress have trouble working with them. Go figure.

4) His hypocrisy on bipartisanship never ends: Politics is a brass-knuckled street fight in a phone booth and if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog or alternately, if you're Robert Menendez, you hire an underage Dominican prostitute. What's so frustrating about Barack Obama is that he's as much of a diehard partisan as Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews, but he never stops yapping about the importance of bipartisanship. This is a man who has done everything short of screaming, "Screw you, Republicans," over and over at the State of the Union and yet he keeps claiming other people put "party before country." It would be nice if he ever put his country before his party. Once. Ever. In his entire presidency. But, we're still waiting.

5) He's such a liar: Calling a politician a liar is a little bit like calling the Occupy Movement lazy and violent. It just sort of goes with the territory. But, even in a profession known for lying, Obama is the “lyingest” liar ever to spew lies out of his lie hole because he is allowed to get away with it. Obama's coverage by the press is like that movie, The Invention Of Lying, where the main character is the first person on the planet to ever figure out how to lie and everyone simply takes whatever he says at face value. In this case, the part of "everyone" is played by the mainstream media which starts with the uncritical assumption that Obama is always right, good, and truthful, while the people who disagree with him are mean, partisan liars. Obama could sacrifice a child to Satan at a press conference tomorrow, get ripped for it by Republicans, and the headlines would read, "Republicans Accuse The President Of Child Murder. Have They No Shame?" Afterwards, Obama would blame the child sacrifice on Bush and we’d have weeks of “Republicans and Satan team up to wage war on children” stories in the media.

Political Irony

Isn’t it ironic that the wife of the president who failed to rescue embassy personnel gave out an award for a movie about the successful rescue of embassy personnel?

Joe Biden: Gun Advice

If you prefer to be armed, Vice President Joe Biden really wants you to get a shotgun. During an online town hall event recently, Biden advised women to get a “double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun” and fire “two blasts” outside if they feel threatened by a home intruder.

Well, now the vice president has some more gun advice. During an interview with Field and Stream, Biden advised gun owners to “just fire the shotgun through the door.” He also doubled-down on his claim that most people can “handle a shotgun a hell of a lot better than they can a semi-automatic weapon.”

Here’s a partial transcript of the interview via Field and Stream:

F&S: What about the other uses, for self-defense and target practice?

BIDEN: Well, the way in which we measure it is—I think most scholars would say—is that as long as you have a weapon sufficient to be able to provide your self-defense. I did one of these town-hall meetings on the Internet and one guy said, “Well, what happens when the end days come? What happens when there’s the earthquake? I live in California, and I have to protect myself.”

I said, “Well, you know, my shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15, because you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.” Most people can handle a shotgun a hell of a lot better than they can a semi-automatic weapon in terms of both their aim and in terms of their ability to deter people coming. We can argue whether that’s true or not, but it is no argument that, for example, a shotgun could do the same job of protecting you. Now, granted, you can come back and say, “Well, a machine gun could do a better job of protecting me.” No one’s arguing we should make machine guns legal.

A Texas gun shop owner who spoke to TheBlaze refuted Biden’s claim that a 12-gauge shotgun is easier to handle and use than a semi-automatic rifle like the AR-15, which is known for its ease of use and accuracy.

He said a 12-gauge shotgun can be difficult to use for some people. Having taught many women how to shoot, the 21-year gun industry veteran, said the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle is “better suited for a lady.”

“It would be better for all-around home defense and it’s one of the most accurate guns out there,” he added.

In the same Field and Stream interview, Biden also said that anyone who needs a “clip” (actually a magazine) with 30 rounds in it is a “danger” to themselves.

“If you can’t get the bear or deer in four or five shots, you’ve got a problem,” he said.

What is Important to Obama

What is important to Obama?

• Posted by Judson Phillips on February 28, 2013 at 6:36pm in Tea Party Nation Forum

Psychologists will tell you that you can tell what is important to people by how the send their time and how they spend their money.

In the case of Barack Obama you can tell by how he spends his time and our money.

What is important to Barack Obama and why does he hate real Americans?

Barack Obama has been spending his time the last few days telling about the gloom and doom about to befall America.

Soldiers and sailors will be furloughed.  Air Traffic will no longer be safe.  Meat inspectors will not inspect meat.  Illegal aliens are being released because there is no space for them in detention facilities because of the budget cuts.  The aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman cannot sail and the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln cannot have its nuclear power plant refueled because of budget cuts.

What can Obama spend money on?

Secretary of State and famed defamer of Vietnam vets, John Kerry just promised the Syrian rebels $60 million.

Wait a minute?  Isn’t our nation broke?  Isn’t sequester going to be the end of the world as we know it?

Won’t sequester mean the government will quit functioning?

Obama’s hysterics aside, it is only a two percent cut in the budget.  Realistically it is cutting 2% out of a 4% raise.

But if our situation is so dire that shipyard workers who build ships for the Navy are going to be furloughed, why are we giving money to Syria?  If the situation is so grim that the Department of Homeland Security must release criminal illegal aliens, why are we giving money to these Islamic terrorists?

Perhaps the better question is why are we giving them money at all.  While we are told the world is ending, we are giving Egypt billions of dollars worth of fighter planes and tanks.  Why are we doing this?  We are giving them billions of dollars in foreign aid.

If Americans are going to lose their jobs because of this sequester, why are we sending this money overseas?

If we cannot defend our nation, why are we giving billions to other nations?

Either it is not nearly as bad as Obama says it is or Obama really hates America and wants to drive us under.

You decide.

Whitehouse Threats To Media

Former Clinton aide, columnist joins Woodward in claiming White House threat

Published February 28, 2013

Another member of the Washington political media stepped forward Thursday to claim he was threatened by the Obama White House, shortly after the White House denied reports that an adviser threatened famed Watergate journalist Bob Woodward.

The latest claim comes from Lanny Davis, who served as counsel to former President Bill Clinton and later went on to write a column for The Washington Times. In a radio interview on WMAL, Davis said that a "senior Obama White House official" once called his editor at the Times and said that if the paper continued to run his columns, "his reporters would lose their credentials." 

Davis said he "couldn't imagine why this call was made" since he's an Obama supporter.

But he called the alleged threat "unfortunate."

The account comes after Woodward claimed Wednesday night that a White House aide sent him an email saying he would "regret" his recent reporting on the sequester battle. The aide was not identified, but an official familiar with the exchange told Fox News it was National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling -- the tone of the email was rather mixed, as it also included an apology. That was after Woodward wrote a column this past weekend claiming Obama was trying to re-write history -- regarding not only whose idea the sequester was, but also how it would take effect.

Woodward wrote that based on his reporting earlier in the budget battle, the president was trying to move the goalposts by trying to replace the sequester with a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts -- instead of solely spending cuts.

After Politico reported late Wednesday that Woodward was coming forward to claim he was threatened, a White House aide denied the claim.

"Of course no threat was intended," wrote the White House aide. "As Mr. Woodward noted, the email from the aide was sent to apologize for voices being raised in their previous conversation. The note suggested that Mr. Woodward would regret the observation he made regarding the sequester because that observation was inaccurate, nothing more. And Mr. Woodward responded to this aide's email in a friendly manner."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that Woodward and Obama's advisers merely "had a factual disagreement that I think we stand by."

He stressed that it's clear nobody was threatening anybody, and that the tone was "respectful."

According to Politico, Woodward said he was "yelled at" by an Obama aide over his weekend column in the Post. Then, he said he received a page-long email from the aide -- apparently Sperling -- that said: "I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today. ... You're focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. ... I think you will regret staking out that claim."

Animosity between Woodward and the Obama team is rising, as the journalist has repeatedly needled the administration on its sequester talking points. His reporting bolstered claims that the sequester idea originated at the White House. And this week, he called the administration's handling of the cuts "madness."

Former Obama adviser David Plouffe tweeted Wednesday: "Watching Woodward last 2 days is like imagining my idol Mike Schmidt facing live pitching again. Perfection gained once is rarely repeated."