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POPSObama's 2010 budget includes 'poverty traps' "Bradley -- who before joining The Heritage Foundation was the associate director of the TANF Bureau at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- says unfortunately,all the other 69 programs for the poor "keep them poor" and "do nothing to help them become self-sufficient.""
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POPS Trial Lawyers Buy Democrats in Congress (98% of total "contributions"!)
Since Jan. 3, 2009, 581 contributions worth $1,261,023 have been made by donors identifying themselves as employees of the 15 firms (contributions by employees who did not identify their employer are not reflected in this data). Democratic candidates and committees received $1,241,978, or 98 percent of the total. The most generous of these lucrative sources of Democratic campaign cash was the Dallas-based Baron & Budd, best known for the late Fred Baron, who was finance chairman for former Sen. John Edwards' 2008 presidential run. Thus far in 2009, Baron & Budd employees have contributed $212,958 to 21 Democrats, and not a cent to Republicans. Second on the list is the New York-based Grant Eisenhofer firm, with employees contributing $184,078 to seven Democrats and no Republicans. Of the 138 total recipients from employees of all 15 of the firms, 122 were Democrats and just 16 were Republicans. The Democrats received contributions averaging more than $4,700,
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POPSThe New Yard Signs Are Here! The New Yard Signs Are Here! In this way, you can show your sincere appreciation for their act of voting us into a depression. For voting in favor of an economic catastrophe. After the election, I recall a bitter taste in my mouth. Scrutinizing my neighbors. Questioning them, mentally, as to their motives. More than a year later, the Obama bumper stickers and signs have all but disappeared. The economic disaster, endemic to any Socialist strategy -- and especially that of Alinsky's acolyte -- is apparent to all but the most obtuse observer. Doug Ross http://bit.ly/78k5Rq
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POPSPalin's New Book Doesn't Let A Pesky Little Things Like The Truth Get In The Way Not that we should be surprised, but this article from the AP is well worth reading. It contains many more statements by Palin in her new book, "Going Rogue," than I've clipped here, each one juxtaposed with facts. And, while it is true that Palin's statements have not become truer over time, it is a sad fact of American politics that, all too often, the more oft-repeated an untruth, the more likely voters are to believe it is true. As the late, great George Carlin once said (paraphrasing), "Honesty is the best policy, but dishonesty is the second-best policy."
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POPSExcuses Wearing Thin for Obama, Media Pals 
Yet just a few months ago, the Obama camp was singing a little different tune. It was under criticism for the $787 billion stimulus package it bulldozed through Congress on grounds that massive spending was needed to keep the unemployment rate from breaching 8 percent. When joblessness hit 9.5 percent in June, Vice President Joe Biden said, "We misread how bad the economy was." They inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, or the economy turned out to be worse than they thought. Which is it? It can't be both -- unless your brain is completely addled by the Obama charisma. That's the backdrop to the story of Rush Limbaugh getting booted from a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams. He was smeared on CNN and MSNBC with false accusations of making two racist comments. He is an abrasive critic of Obama, so he must be racist.. . Recently an MSNBC personality accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of lobbying for policies that amount to being "treasonous . . .
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POPS Waiting For Godot “The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.” Last week the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Thomas J. Tradewell Sr., gave voice to the concerns of those in the military when he issued a terse statement criticizing Mr. Obama’s review of Afghan war strategy. “The extremists are sensing weakness and indecision within the U.S. government, which plays into their hands,” said Mr. Tradewell’s statement on behalf of his group, which represents 1.5 million former soldiers. Last August, in a speech to the V.F.W., Mr. Obama defended . . .
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POPSSpin Doctors for Obamacare The White House event was organized in conjunction with DFA and Organizing for America, Obama’s campaign outfit. OFA and DFA are behind a massive new Obamacare ad campaign, letter-writing campaign, and doctor recruitment campaign. The supposedly “grass-roots,” non-profit DFA is a spin-off of Doctors for Obama, a 2008 campaign arm that aggressively pushed the Democrats’ government health care takeover. DFA claims to have thousands of members with a “variety of backgrounds.” But there’s little diversity in their views on socialized medicine (98 percent want a taxpayer-funded public insurance option) " or in their political contributions. DFA president and co-founder Dr. Vivek Murthy, an internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, served as a member of the Obama Health Policy Advisory Committee and the Obama New England Steering Committee during the 2008 presidential campaign.
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POPSUnpublished Palin memoir already No. 1 Much much scarier than Palin, is the demoralizing realization that there are so very many dimwits who are actually willing to pay money to read the words of this intellectual midget ... the patron saint of fools and charlatans
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POPSObama phenonemon I think the idea that someone like Obama can take on the whitehouse has opened up a lot of doors where previously were locked and impossible to open
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POPSTOO MANY SECRETS Obama first learned of the plant as president-elect, before his inauguration Jan. 20, the officials said. Eight months...........and silence. And what else are they NOT telling us about?
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POPSWhite America has never liked social insurance for people of color More: Meanwhile, there has been a massive expansion in government-sponsored welfare going disproportionately to the white and affluent. What the political scientist Christopher Howard calls the hidden welfare state includes the tax-favored employer-provided health insurance that most working-age Americans depend on, as well as the home mortgage interest deduction and the childcare and child tax credits. Affluent and educated workers are more likely to work for employers who provide private health benefits than are low-skilled workers and employees of small businesses. Personal tax benefits like the home mortgage interest deduction are available only to the top half of households who pay federal income taxes, and are unavailable to lower-income workers who pay payroll taxes but no income taxes. In many cases, the benefits of this tax-credit welfare state increase with income.
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POPSACORN: No Business Like Poverty Business
ACORN proves the axiom of the modern welfare state " that there's no business like the poverty business. Although ACORN runs a large conglomerate of social-activist anti-poverty front groups out of a New Orleans hub, it is registered as a nonprofit corporation in Arkansas, which does not require financial disclosure. This has allowed it keep its own finances shielded from public scrutiny, while demanding transparency from all others. The group's nonprofit status refers only to its corporate form. That is, ACORN must be organized for a public purpose and have no stockholders, unlike a regular corporation. However, it is not tax exempt under federal law, since it does advocacy and lobbying that would run afoul of IRS restrictions, such as endorsing political candidates. ACORN was started in 1970 by Stephen Wade Rathke, a former SDS radical and Boston-based community organizer. The group now consists of so many interlocking associations, corporations, and affiliates . . .
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POPSBirds of the Feather
ACORN executives have also changed their organization’s name, which was tarnished by investigations in at least 14 states of allegations of voter registration fraud during the 2008 presidential campaign... ACORN’s radical goals to transform the U.S. into a Marxist utopia have not changed in the four decades since Alinsky wrote: “The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive — but real — allies of the Haves. The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.” .... On cue enter ACORN and Barack Obama. After staged demonstrations across the county and several changes of tactics, SEIU hires ACORN as a “consultant” to protest the Carlyle Group. ACORN readily accepts the money, but has one problem — how to turn the people out, to make them care about the issue. Using the same tried and true manipulation tactics that S
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POPSWhite House Setting Stage to Rahm Through Obamacare That will set up a Democratic argument that Senate leaders have been forced to use a partisan budget tool known as reconciliation to pass a health bill through the Senate by a simple majority, instead of 60 votes. Under the budget plan they passed earlier this year, Democrats could invoke the reconciliation process on Oct. 15. Republicans contend that the use of reconciliation would be at odds with Obama’s call for bipartisanship during his 2008 presidential campaign. But Obama has countered that argument in recent days by forcefully resurrecting the anti-Washington rhetoric that got him elected. Posted by Gateway Pundit
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POPSUS is slipping toward Plutocracy: Money rules
Latest example is healthcare reform. In the second quarter of 2009, the health industry spent $133 million on lobbyists, reckons the Center for Responsive Politics. That doesn’t count lobbying by associations. The US Chamber of Commerce alone spent $26 million on lobbying in the first half of this year, “a good chunk” on the health issue, says Dave Levinthal, spokesman for the center. Polls show the public wants healthcare reform and a public-insurance option. So the health-insurance industry is pretending to be in favor of reform while trying to kill it through campaign contributions, ads, and lobbying, says Wendell Potter, who until recently led corporate communications at CIGNA, a major health-insurance company. Moreover trade unions provide some balance of power to the might of business and wealth. In Sweden, 85 percent of the labor force is organized; in other major nations 35-40 percent. Compare with 7.4 percent of workers in the private sector in the US.
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POPSACORN’s “Muscle for Money” does the bidding of SEIU 
Muscle for Money includes multiple techniques for creating highly aggressive, organized efforts both to pressure businesses and officials to support the activists’ agenda or to discredit and intimidate opponents of their agenda, according to present and former ACORN members. SEIU has funded Muscle for Money activities in the past and continues to finance corporate shakedown efforts across the country as part of this program. SEIU locals 100 and 880 have been identified as allied organizations on ACORN’s web site. That information has since been removed from the ACORN web site, but U.S. Department of Labor LM-2 financial disclosure forms show over $600,000 in transactions between these same locals and ACORN operations in recent years. Muscle for Money has generated significant opposition within ACORN. “I don’t mind being up on a soapbox to get someone’s attention but I would much rather talk and negotiate, said Karen Inman, a Minnesota resident and former ACORN nationa
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POPSSteve Schmidt Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s senior advisor, attended the University of Delaware.
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POPSCitizen Ignorance It is vitally important that the people who make the decisions in this country are put there by people who understand how the institutions in our country work. How do we ensure that? Should everyone be required to take a citizenship test before being allowed to register to vote?
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POPSGaining steam: Ron Paul’s HR 1207 Ron Paul, that gadfly presidential candidate from 2008, has been making headway in Congress with his new bill, HR 1207. The bill, entitled the Federal Reserve Transparancy Act, was crafted by Rep. Paul in order to allow the Government Accountability Office the ability to Audit the Federal Reserve.