The liberal activist group Common Cause is rallying its supporters to protest David and Charles Koch’s convocation of conservative heavy hitters in California this weekend. The billionaire Koch brothers, whose family business is one of the largest private companies in the world, are longtime funders of many conservative causes, including Tea Party groups, and initiatives to defeat Obamacare and global warming legislation.
Common Cause and its allies see a more sinister agenda. They’ll be shouting outside — and in at least one case, from above. Greenpeace has chartered a blimp emblazoned with the words “dirty money” to fly over the conference.
Prior to the rally, the liberal group plans to host an opposition panel discussion called, “Uncloaking the Kochs: The Billionaires’ Caucus and its Threat to our Democracy.” The featured speakers include Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary and now chairman of Common Case’s National Governing Board; Van Jones, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress and former “Green Jobs Czar”; Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California-Irvine; Lee Fang, an journalist at the Center for American Progress; and DeAnn McEwen, co-President of the California Nurses Association.
Despite the hyperbole, the Koch conference doesn’t sound so different from many off-the-record political conferences, including those held by the professional left. Shortly after the 2010 elections, for example, liberal groups converged on Washington D.C.’s Oriental Mandarin hotel, The meeting, hosted by Democracy Alliance featured liberal leaders such as Van Jones, hedge fund manager Donald Sussman, and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. Michael Vachon, a George Soros representative, Peter Lewis, CEO of Progressive Insurance; and Fred Baron, the former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America also attended.
The editor of Stealth Stocks explains, "Siga is a bio-defense company. In 2004, the U.S. started an initiative called Project BioShield, which gave the government the right to purchase and stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox and other potential agents of bio-terror.
"SIGA is a leader in the development of pharmaceutical agents to fight potential bio-warfare pathogens and their ST-246 drug is considered to be the only known cure for smallpox, which the government is keenly interested in.
"Recently, BARDA has stated their intent to award SIGA a $500 million contract, with options that potentially could be as high as $2.8 billion in orders.
Half a billion? Options as high as $2.8 billion?
It looks like SIGA's investment in Stern may just be paying off.
The recent court decision striking down the linchpin provision of the health care bill is a reminder that what's at stake is larger than the future of Obamacare.
If this law passes constitutional muster, the question is whether the federal government can be constrained by any limits at all.
At issue is the personal mandate, the part of the law that says everyone must buy health insurance or pay a penalty.
The implications were aptly captured by U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson, ruling in Virginia vs. Sebelius -- one of several lawsuits challenging Obamacare.
If the government can dictate how you live your life, what is to stop them on dictating how you end it?
Conservative groups and lawmakers are firing back at the Southern Poverty Law Center for releasing a new report labeling some mainstream conservative organizations as "hate groups" for their opposition to gay marriage.
In its latest report, the center added 18 "anti-gay groups" to its list of active hate organizations, including Concerned Women for America, the Traditional Values Coalition, the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage.
They join the center's list of more than 900 hate groups, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, skinheads, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and black separatists like the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam.
"Even as some well-known anti-gay groups like Focus on the Family moderate their views, a hard core of smaller groups, most of them religiously motivated, have continued to pump out demonizing propaganda aimed at homosexuals and other sexual minorities," the report reads. "These groups' influence reaches far beyond what their size would suggest, because the 'facts' they disseminate about homosexuality are often amplified by certain politicians, other groups and even news organizations."
Outraged conservatives, led by the Family Research Council, have launched an online petition called "start debating, stop hating," which was published as a full page advertisement in the print editions of Politico and the Washington Examiner.
"Tell the radical Left it is time to stop spreading hateful rhetoric attacking individuals and organizations merely for expressing ideas with which they disagree," the petition reads. "Our debates can and must remain civil – but they must never be suppressed through personal assaults that aim only to malign an opponent's character."
There's only so much appeasement and bi-partisanship this country can take before it goes bankrupt. However, incoming GOP freshman say they're all about stopping Obama.
All the momentum President Barack Obama picked up at the tail end of the 111th Congress means he'll hit the partisan wall that much harder when the 112th Congress opens, according to liberal and conservative lawmakers who are girding for political warfare in January.
"Nov. 2 wasn't about working with the president," Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, new chairman of the influential and deeply conservative Republican Study Committee, told POLITICO Wednesday. "It's about stopping him."
It's the singular, not-on-my-watch determination of Jordan's wing of the GOP — bolstered by the coming influx of tea party Republicans in both chambers — that has many lawmakers convinced the deal-making lame-duck session will give way to a blood-feuding 112th Congress. Liberals are gearing up, too, ready to defend Obama when he takes up their causes and to treat him as a traitor when he embraces Republicans.
Philadelphia's pension fund is 45% funded—meaning its assets represent 45% of its long-term liabilities—and the city's payments are projected to increase to $600 million in 2015, up from $230 million in 2004. Actuaries recommend pension systems be 80% funded.
If you saw the movie 300, you essentially know the computer-generated and highly-stylized story of the Battle of Thermopylae. However, it is the real story of the Battle of Thermopylae that is far more inspiring.
It has been argued that, were it not for this battle and, ultimately, the defeat of the hordes of the Persian Empire at Salamis and, later, at Marathon, the nation-states of Greece would not have united as one nation. As a consequence, Western Civilization and all that Greece gave birth to (including the democratic principles of representative government, the western philosophy of Aristotle and others, as well as the United States itself) might never have occurred.
On November 2, 2010, America's Battle of Thermopylae will take place. This time, however, it is not the birth of Western Civilization that is at stake but, rather, whether we live as a free people, orsuccumb to the yoke of a government that does not care about the liberties that so many have fought and died for.
Over time, our nation's children and the simple-minded have been brainwashed into believing that enslaving freedom is "social justice," that the taking of liberty is "leveling the playing field," and that individual rights are inferior to the will of the masses.
While the last 18 months have been an awakening to many, our nation's fall has been long in the making.
Today, though, we see the evidence all around us that America may be at the end of her rope.
It is not one set of politicians or the other set of politicians. It is the addiction to power and control over a free people that has driven our nation to the brink of destruction. Whether by malice or asininity no longer matters.
Our nation will either live free, or it will perish. There, what so many have thought and many have uttered has now been stated...openly and publicly. 2010.This is our Thermopylae.
Our nation's treasury has been looted by those entrusted with it;
Our nation's debt is over $13 trillion and rising;
Our children's future has been reduced to become nothing more than servants to the State in order to pay our nation's debt;
We have been asked to bail out banks and auto companies;
Labor union bosses control two branches of our federal government and a multitude of the states and municipalities;
Union pensions are causing many states to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy, and we are being told we must loot our children's future even further by paying out another $165 billion to bail them out;
We have thugs storming private property while the police stand idly by;
Politicians refuse to secure our borders from terrorists or invaders from other nations
Democrats want to eviscerate the First and Second Amendments of our Constitution and have taken over the health of our bodies; and
Our nation's gulf shore lines are being ruined due to ineptness of our nation's leader.
America is near the end of its rope and we, as a people, will either use that rope to pull our nation up, or we will hang by the rope we give to our nation's rulers. It is an either-or alternative. There is no other alternative. And, it will be decided on November 2nd. America will either live to fight another day, or it is finished.
Like the allies at Thermopylae, the forces marshaled against the American citizenry are vast.
Raise Your Vote is part of a one-two punch on the part of Organizing for America and the Democratic National Committee. The first, of course, is using technology to get useful voters registered and to the polls. Other groups, notably Rock the Vote and the League of Women Voters, have done similar work in the past, though OFA has demonstrated a quiet competence in pulling together those efforts in this graceful a package.
[snip]
The second punch, though, is applying some of that Obama '08 organizing magic to the new and newish voters who flow through the site. "After we have that information," says Stewart when asked, "we're going to treat them like any first time voter." A 'chase program' includes following up with people who filled out a registration form on the site to make sure that they actually folded, stamped, and mailed their papers. (The Republican National Committee hasn't rolled out any comparable voter registration or information project.) And registering to vote includes the option of signing up to stay in contact with the DNC and OFA.
The Republican Party, by its abject failure to keep up with the machine that is the OFA, has been derelict in a core, fundamental principle in politics: GOTV.
This means, we, as Americans, we must do it ourselves if the nation is to survive to fight another day. This is our Thermopylae.
Forge alliances: Set aside petty differences and turf battles and vow to work together. Be you a Libertarian, Conservative, Independent or Moderate, save the bickering over individual policies or candidates until the nation is steady again. There is no difference between Libertarian, Conservative, Independent or Moderate if there is not a nation in which those debates cannot occur. Work together or perish.
Embark on outreach: Ask friends and family alike, do you like the way our nation is headed? If they answer in the negative, then have them commit to you they will vote and, just as importantly, will help Get Out The Vote (GOTV). Then, fan out from there. Do you belong to a bowling league, a rifle club, a church or a synagogue? Get to work and do it now. The Marxist hordes have already begun their march to finish this war.
Repeat numbers 1 and 2
Follow up and follow through, develop lists including telephone numbers and e-mails
Get Out the Vote on November 2nd.
America, this is it. While control of the federal apparatchik will not be wrested from the hands of the hordes, at least the destruction can be slowed. But only if you begin working now.
If we fail, America fails and a nation borne from the blood of patriots 234 years ago—who were inspired by warriors who died nearly 2500 years ago—will fall.
On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galliand his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.
Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal's office.
"They said we could wear it on any other day," Daniel Galli said, "but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it's supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it today."
The boys said the administrators called their T-shirts "incendiary" that would lead to fights on campus.
And, to add insult to injury, school officials wanted the boys to apologize for "offending" the Mexican-Americans.
But to many Mexican-American students at Live Oak, this was a big deal. They say they were offended by the five boys and others for wearing American colors on a Mexican holiday.
"I think they should apologize cause it is a Mexican Heritage Day," Annicia Nunez, a Live Oak High student, said. "We don't deserve to be get disrespected like that. We wouldn't do that on Fourth of July."
As for an apology, the boys and their families say, "fat chance."
"I'm not going to apologize. I did nothing wrong," Galli said. "I went along with my normal day. I might have worn an American flag, but I'm an American and I'm proud to be an American."
The five boys and their families met with a Morgan Hill Unified School District official Wednesday night. The district released a statement saying it does not agree with how Live Oak High School administrators handled this incident. [Emphasis added.]
Why isn't the ACLU suing on behalf of these children?
If Americans cannot display the American flag for fear of offending people who are from other countries (regardless whether they are here legally or not), there is something drastically wrong with this picture.
DIENEKES' FAVORITE QUOTES "In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." - Ayn Rand
Nearly 2500 years ago, a small army of warriors and their allies engaged in a battle against tyranny—freedom against slavery.
Without this battle, it has been said, Western Civilization and Democracy would never have been born.
Indeed, were it not for the Battle of Thermopylae in the year 480 B.C., America could never have existed.
And, here is the story of Dienekes:
Although extraordinary valor was displayed by the entire corps of Spartans and Thespians, yet bravest of all was declared the Spartan Dienekes.
It is said that on the eve of battle, he was told by a native of Trachis that the Persian archers were so numerous that their arrows would blot out the sun.
Dienekes, however, undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh:
