Dear Dick and Lynn,
Since the first American battle deaths on the Green at Lexington in 1775 until present times, over 650,000 brave Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our freedom. As the greatest nation in the history of the world, the United States of America, blessed by God, is also the most free. And it has been the blood of so many men and women that has vouchsafed our cherished liberty. Today we honor the memory of these brave patriots. As a former Army Ranger and retired soldier, as a son AND father of veteran infantrymen and as the father of a West Point Cadet, Memorial Day has a special meaning to me and my family. You see, every man and woman who has taken the oath of service as an American warrior signed a blank check to the American people that was redeemable with the cost of his or her life, upon our requirement. So we also honor those who have offered their lives in the service of this great Nation. May we never forget that the greatness that is America is built on the sacrifices of the few who gave their lives.
And so today let us recommit ourselves to honoring the memory of our fallen heroes by more ably caring for their wounded and struggling comrades in our communities. We can start by electing more veterans to Congress and enlist their expertise to revamp and redirect the Department of Veterans' Affairs to become a more nimble and responsive agency. Surely the tears of our fallen comrades fall from Heaven on this now heartless bureaucracy and we should feel compelled to respond without reservation or hesitancy. It is the most sacred vow of every American fighting man and woman: we leave no comrade behind.
"All gave some,
Some gave all."
May God Bless our great Nation on this Memorial Day, 2014,
Dr Bob Johnson
Candidate for Congress
2a)
| A New Contract With America |
By Jack Kingston
Americans deserve a choice between the tired, failing policies we have lingered under for the last six years or a renewed dedication to success and prosperity across our great country.
My American Renewal Initiative, which I launched late last year, offers that choice. The 6-point plan emphasizes cutting spending and getting the government out of the way. If Americans are allowed to get back to work and are given the tools they need to succeed, this nation will continue to lead the world.
To lead in the world, we must have clear goals and a strong military able to secure the peace we desire. When the world is more peaceful, trading routes are open, and our resources are directed toward critical investments, we can achieve the kind of growth we have enjoyed in the past.
Please take a moment to watch my appearance on Fox News with Gretchen Carlson today and be sure to check out the details of my plan: http://kingston.house.gov/americanrenewal/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)- Random Thoughts
By Thomas Sowell
Random thoughts on the passing scene:
Will the Veterans Administration scandal wake up those people who have been blithely saying that what we need is a "single payer" system for medical care? Delays in getting to see a doctor have been a common denominator in government-run medical systems in England, Canada and Australia, among other places.
Class warfare rhetoric would have us resenting "the top ten percent" in income. But that would be a farce, because most of us would be resenting ourselves, since more than half of all Americans -- 54 percent -- are in the top ten percent at some stage of their lives.
Some people act as if the answer to every problem is to put more money and power in the hands of politicians.
Freedom means nothing if it does not mean the freedom to do what other people don't like. Everyone was free to be a Communist under the Stalin dictatorship, and everyone is free to be a Muslim in Saudi Arabia. Yet whole generations are coming out of our colleges where only those who are politically correct are free to speak their minds. What kind of America will they create?
In Thomas Piketty's highly-praised new book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" he asserts that the top tax rate under President Herbert Hoover was 25 percent. But Internal Revenue Service records show that it was 63 percent in 1932. If Piketty can't even get his facts straight, why should his grandiose plans for confiscatory global taxation be taken seriously?
Sometimes I think that this is an era when sanity has become controversial.
Republicans in Congress seem to be drawn toward the immigration issue like a moth toward a flame. How turning illegal immigrants into Democratic voters, while demoralizing the Republican base, will help either the country or the Republicans is a mystery. If ever there was a high-risk, low-yield investment, this is it.
President Theodore Roosevelt said that his foreign policy was to "speak softly and carry a big stick." President Barack Obama's foreign policy is to speak loudly and carry a little stick. They say talk is cheap, but loose talk by a President of the United States can be very expensive in both blood and treasure.
One of the scariest aspects of our times is how seldom either people or policies are judged by their track record.
Why in the world are the Baltic states in NATO? The Russian army could overrun them before NATO could get a meeting together to decide what to do.
If the Democrats retain control of the Senate after this year's election, Barack Obama can load the federal courts from top to bottom with judges who will ignore the Constitution, as he does, and promote his far-left political agenda instead, long after he is gone.
I get nervous every time I see Mitt Romney showing up in the media. He seems to be maintaining his visibility, in hopes of another run for the White House in 2016. He might well get a second chance to fail. Romney is the Republican establishment's idea of the perfect candidate for president -- no matter how many times such candidates lose, even under promising conditions.
Anti-Semitism may have the dubious distinction of being the oldest of the group hatreds. You might think that the world would have gotten over anti-Semitism by now, but Jews have been singled out for separate treatment by the Russian insurgents in Ukraine.
"We cannot insure to the vicious the fruits of a virtuous life; we would not invade the home of the provident in order to supply the wants of the spendthrift; we do not propose to transfer the rewards of industry to the lap of indolence." Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan said that in 1896. Today's Democrats do all those things that Bryan rejected.
Any fool can say the word "racism." In fact, quite a few fools do say it. But clever people can also say "racism," in order to get fools to vote their way.
Those people who want Hillary Clinton elected president, so that we could have our first woman president, seem to have learned absolutely nothing from the current disaster of choosing a president on the basis of demographics and symbolism.
The old saying that taxes are the price we pay for civilization has long since become obsolete. The amount that the government spends to defend us from foreign attack, or to maintain law and order at home, has been overtaken by the money it spends just to transfer some people's money to other people who are more likely to vote for the reelection of incumbents.
Government policies to "bring down the cost of medical care" almost never bring down those costs, and often increase the costs. These policies simply refuse to pay the full costs of medical care. Any one of us can do that, but we know there will be consequences. There will also be consequences when the government refuses to pay the costs, but these consequences will be concealed and/or denied.
The old saying that "politics is the art of the possible" is dead wrong. Politics is the art of making the impossible seem possible, and even plausible and desirable. That is how ObamaCare got passed.
To let the world's leading terrorism-exporting nation get nuclear weapons can prove to be the most irresponsible and catastrophic decision in the history of the human race. It was also an irresponsible and catastrophic decision of the American voters to elect as president someone who would let that happen, basing their votes on rhetoric and racial symbolism.
3a) VA scandal shows Obama is out of the loop — again
Former president George W. Bush once said, rather proudly, that he didn’t read newspapers.
President Obama, a confirmed newsie, has claimed to read the major papers, perhaps to learn what’s going on in his own administration.
Latest to the list of presidential discoveries, thanks to the dailies, is the horrific news that the Department of Veterans Affairs has kept secret lists of veterans waiting for treatment. Some have died during the wait.
In a world of faux outrage, finally we have something about which to be scandalized. It is hard to imagine leaving our veterans to wither and die after they’ve survived enemy fire and war. As we celebrate Memorial Day weekend, it must be particularly painful for the families of those who never reached the top of the list.
The deepest cut is knowing that the president, who as a candidate promised that veterans’ care would be among his highest priorities, hasn’t burdened himself with keeping this promise.
Instead, we learn that Obama knows more or less what every newspaper-reading American knows. Does he also do more or less what Americans do in response? Shake his head, cluck his tongue and then turn the page?
The president didn’t know, for instance, how badly things were going over at the Department of Health and Human Services preceding the dramatic non-rollout of the Affordable Care Act.
In other breaking news, Obama was surprised to learn that the Internal Revenue Service was paying special attention to conservative groups.
And, who, by the way, knew whatever was going on in Benghazi that horrific night? Not to pound the Republican drum, which too often sounds like a car alarm, but was the administration’s first impulse really to call YouTube?
So says Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He recently noted a State Department e-mail indicated that one of the White House’s first responses to the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, was to contact the video-sharing Web site to warn of the ramifications of posting the anti-Islam video initially blamed for the attack.
Issa has entered into the Congressional Record an excerpt from the e-mail , which was sent at 9:11 Eastern time that very night:
“White House is reaching out to U-Tube [sic] to advise ramifications of the posting of the Pastor Jon video,” the e-mail reads, according to Issa.
No word yet on whether the president knew about this at the time, but his history suggests that this, too, may have been news. His communications team has managed, meanwhile, to detect a sliver of silver in the cloud of doubt hovering over Benghazi.
The fact that the White House was contacting YouTube as Americans were being attacked merely confirms that the administration really believed that the attack erupted during a video-induced riot.
What difference does it make at this point, one might ask? Does it matter that the president gets his news from the media rather than from his staff and Cabinet? Does it matter that time after time — add the NSA spying on our allied leaders and the Justice Department tapping into reporters’ communications — the president doesn’t know what’s going on in agencies his Cabinet oversees?
Yes, it all really matters. It matters because denial of knowledge tastes like chicken and smells like cover-up. At best it sounds like incompetence. It matters because this White House has failed to perform in a manner that justifies the public’s faith and trust in its leadership.
Being president is surely the least enviable job imaginable, second only to being a woman in most other places. Staying abreast of so many complex issues — not to mention foreign affairs — must be overwhelming at times. And, to be fair, sometimes agency leaders don’t like to share bad news with their commander in chief.
Finally, the problem of admitted ignorance may be less a matter of negligence than a symptom of an even bigger problem — the programs themselves. To admit that our government bureaucracies and our hulking programs are too big to succeed, however, is to admit to a failure of ideology. The president likely knows this in his heart, which may be why he prefers being surprised by news than collapsing under the burden of being wrong.
By Victor Davis Hanson
If we were living in normal times, the following scandals and failures — without going into foreign policy — would have ruined a presidency to the point of reducing it to Nixon, Bush, or Truman poll ratings
Think of the following: the Fast and Furious scandal, the VA mess, the tapping of the communications of the Associated Press reporters, the NSA monitoring, Benghazi in all of its manifestations, the serial lies about Obamacare, the failed stimuli, the chronic zero interest/print money policies, the serial high unemployment, the borrowing of $7 trillion to no stimulatory effect, the spiraling national debt, the customary violations of the Hatch Act by Obama cabinet officials, the alter ego/fake identity of EPA head Lisa Jackson, the sudden departure of Hilda Solis after receiving union freebies, the mendacity of Kathleen Sebelius, the strange atmospherics surrounding the Petraeus resignation, the customary presidential neglect of enforcing the laws from immigration statutes to his own health care rules, the presidential divisiveness (“punish our enemies,” “you didn’t build that,” Trayvon as the son that Obama never had, etc.), and on and on.
So why is there not much public reaction or media investigatory outrage?
In one sense there is: an iconic, landmark president was ushered into office with a super majority in the Senate and a solidly Democratic House, at a time the public felt angry over the Iraq war and the 2008 financial meltdown. Six years later, Obama’s poll ratings bottomed out at about 43%. He lost the House in 2010, and he probably will see the Senate gone in 2014. But that said, amid such failure Obama will never descend to 30% approval ratings, and that again bring to mind the question: why?
Obvious answers:
1) His record support among minorities will not change since 70-90% of various hyphenated groups see the Obama tenure as long-overdue representation of their own interests — economic, ethnic, and symbolic. It does no good to cite rising unemployment rates among African-Americans or a deterioration in household income among Latinos. The point is that Obama feels their pain, even if his policies helped cause it. In this view, expecting blacks, to take one example, to defect from Obama would be as if right-wing rural Texans would have abandoned Bush in 2006, or the Malibu set would have given up on Clinton during Monicagate. In short — unlikely.
2) The media is not just overwhelmingly hard left, but hard left with a chip on its shoulder that its own views are neither accepted by the majority nor usually implemented by government.-
3c) With new troubles, questions mount about Obama's competence
Give Barack Obama credit. He never claimed he had the executive experience many Americans feel is essential for a president.
Go back to October 2006. There was much buzz that Sen. Obama, newly arrived in Washington, would run for the White House. "You've been a United States senator less than two years, you don't have any executive experience. Are you ready to be president?" the late Tim Russert asked Obama on NBC.
"Well, I'm not sure anybody is ready to be president before they're president," Obama responded. "You know, ultimately, I trust the judgment of the American people."
That didn't exactly answer the question. Obama's theory was that if he could survive the rigors of a campaign, and voters chose him to be president, then he was ready to be president. He didn't say anything about actually running the executive branch of the U.S. government.
A couple of months later, in December 2007, Obama again appeared on NBC and was again asked why Americans should vote for a candidate with no executive experience.
"People desperately want change," he answered, explaining that he could "bring people together to get things done" and "make sure that the voices of the American people aren't drowned out." Again, there was nothing about actually running the government.
When it came to the question of executive experience, Obama was lucky in the 2007-2008 Democratic primary season. Most of his rivals didn't have any such experience, either. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and others -- none had even a bit of executive experience, although some Clinton supporters tried to argue that her years as first lady should count.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson was the only real contender in the Democratic race who had actually run something. "I think prior executive experience is very important," Richardson said at a January 2008 debate in New Hampshire. "I'm the only governor here. I'm the only person here who has actually balanced budgets. ... You want somebody in this position that has had executive experience."
Voters didn't buy Richardson's argument. And Obama was lucky again in the general election, as far as executive experience was concerned, when Republicans chose a senator without any such background as their nominee. (Some John McCain supporters tried to argue that his time in the military counted as executive experience.) The '08 election was the first in nearly a half-century in which executive experience, usually in the person of a former governor or vice president, was not on the ballot.
In 2012, Mitt Romney, a one-term governor of Massachusetts, tried to make executive experience an issue. But of course by that time Obama had been president four years. The experience issue was a non-issue.
That's not true any more. Last fall's disastrous rollout of Obamacare did terrible damage to the public's trust in Obama's ability to run the government. A November 2013 CNN poll found that just 40 percent of those surveyed believe Obama "can manage the government effectively."
Fixing the Obamacare website -- sort of -- did little to improve Obama's reputation. In a Quinnipiac poll in January of this year, 53 percent said the administration is not "competent in running the government," while just 42 percent said it is competent.
Now comes the Veterans Affairs hospital scandal, and the president again appears in over his head. It seems inevitable that public opinion of Obama's competence will fall still more. The president and Democrats can blame Republicans -- has there ever been a moment when they didn't? -- but the fact is, voters have less and less faith in Obama's ability to run the government.
That loss of faith could shape his last two years in the White House. Obama has two great policy goals left -- to "fix" the nation's "broken" immigration system, and to enact draconian restrictions on carbon emissions.
At the moment, Congress won't do either one. There are lots of reasons Republicans oppose Obama's initiatives. But the issue of executive competence alone would be reason enough to oppose; why should GOP lawmakers entrust far-reaching new authority to a president who is struggling to run the executive branch as it is?
In a February 2008 candidate forum, Obama conceded that "most of my career has been in a legislative role." But he pointed to his campaign as evidence of his executive abilities, noting that it was "a $100 million-plus operation with hundreds of employees around the country."
One hundred million dollars! How about that! Of course, the federal government spends more than four times that much every hour, for a total approaching $4 trillion a year.
Running the federal bureaucracy is a considerably bigger job than running a campaign. Maybe next time, voters will take that into account.
3d) White House scrambles to contain damage after outing CIA chief in Afghanistan
The White House is scrambling to contain the damage from inadvertently outing the top CIA official in Afghanistan, a rare blunder that potentially puts that individual at risk.
The official's name, identified as "chief of station," was included in the White House press office's basic list of senior officials President Obama met with during his surprise visit to Afghanistan on Sunday. The list of 15 names apparently came first from the military, and was circulated by the White House press office.
The list then went to a much wider audience when it was included as part of what's known as a "pool report," which in this case was filed by The Washington Post's Scott Wilson.
It was only after Wilson raised the issue with the White House, according to the Post, that officials sought to circulate a new list without the officer's name. But by that point, the mistake already had been noted on Twitter.
"There's simply no excuse for it," John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told Fox News on Tuesday, saying the blunder left him "speechless."
"In a White House that is filled with press flacks ... was there no one who understood the significance of what they were doing?" he said. "Somebody's head should roll for this. ... This is utter incompetence."
FoxNews.com is not publishing the name of the chief of station.
The fact that it was circulated at all, though, raises security concerns -- and distracts from Obama's visit to Bagram air base meant to honor troops in advance of Memorial Day.
Several CIA station chiefs in Pakistan have been exposed during the course of the war in Afghanistan. One of them had to be removed from the country in 2010.
It's unclear whether the administration will be forced to take that step here. Bolton noted that the official's identity would have been known to some in the Afghan government anyway -- though the exposure could also damage intelligence operations.
The most recent high-profile incident of a U.S. official exposing a CIA agent was the outing of operative Valerie Plame's identity in 2003.
In this case, the original list circulated by the White House included several names of well-known public officials, including National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham, as well as that of the chief of station.
According to the Post, Wilson noticed the reference to the station chief after he had already sent out the pool report.
When he raised the issue, the press office did not raise any objection, according to the Post. But the office later reportedly scrambled to send around a new list, without the officer's name -- apparently realizing the error.
"Soon after, I think that they talked to their bosses, and realized that it was not OK," Wilson told The Guardian. "And they tried to figure out what to do about this, if there was a way to kind of un-ring the bell."
Wilson said it appeared "very junior people" were just trying to follow an order without realizing the "ramifications."
Wilson also said he wishes he had caught the mistake before sending out the list in the pool report.
"I wish I had, I regret it," he reportedly said.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 
.jpg)
.jpg)
