Read the rest here.

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWnB9FGmWE 450 300] [youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYIP8lGBtFQ 450 300]

“German Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing a growing number of critics in her own party to her debt- crisis policies, potentially hindering a European compromise on the firewall to limit contagion from Greece.

Three lawmakers in Merkel’s bloc defied party leaders to reject the Greek bailout on Feb. 27 after voting to strengthen the rescue fund in September. Merkel depended on the opposition to push through the 130 billion-euro ($172 billion) package due to defectors in her caucus, made up of the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union.

“My support is not without its limits,” Paul Lehrieder, a CSU lawmaker from the baroque Bavarian city of Wuerzburg who switched to oppose the Greek bailout, said in an interview. “I admire the strength with which the chancellor fights, but I just can’t support this program.”

European finance ministers meet March 30-31 to decide reinforcing the financial firewall against the crisis by allowing the temporary rescue fund to run together with the 500 billion-euro permanent European Stability Mechanism when it comes into force in July. German officials, including Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, have resisted international calls to expand the ESM to safeguard Spain and Italy.

All three flip-floppers in the CDU/CSU caucus cited doubts that the Greek government can carry out reforms demanded as a condition for the rescue. Two of the three distinguished between that ballot and their Sept. 29 “yes” votes, which expanded the scope of the temporary European Financial Stability Facility….”

Read more

Rick Santorum wants to put an end to the distribution of pornography in the United States.

“America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography,” Santorum’s official website reads. “Pornography is toxic to marriages and relationships. It contributes to misogyny and violence against women. It is a contributing factor to prostitution and sex trafficking.”

The former Pennsylvania senator states that, “as a parent, I am concerned about the widespread distribution of illegal obscene pornography and its profound effects on our culture.”

Santorum criticized the Obama administration for turning “a blind eye … to the scourge of pornography” and for refusing to enforce obscenity laws.

“If elected President, I will appoint an Attorney General who will do so,” Santorum writes. “While the Obama Department of Justice seems to favor pornographers over children and families, that will change under a Santorum Administration.”

Read the rest here.

Read here:

As the Obama administration tries to respond to rising gas prices by touting an all-of-the-above strategy for energy independence, its own alternative energy initiatives are getting slammed from both sides.

The administration for the past six months has been under fire for blowing through nearly $530 million on Solyndra, the solar panel firm that filed for bankruptcy last September. A new government report now finds the loan program that funded Solyndra continues to suffer from management problems.

The administration was also just hit with a lawsuit from the gas companies’ trade association over a biofuels mandate that dates back to the George W. Bush administration — one which the industry says is unworkable.

Meanwhile, companies that are trying to secure government funding for fuel-efficient vehicles in the wake of Solyndra say the fallout from that controversy has led to a bureaucratic freeze at the Department of Energy and prevented their firms from getting any money.

Several companies applying for loans for their vehicle projects have abandoned that process in recent weeks.

The frustration was encapsulated in a letter sent by Bright Automotive to the department in late February, just days before the firm withdrew its loan application and started to close down shop.

“Unfortunately, irrationality and petty politics have paralyzed your agency at a time America needs you most. One cannot score if one does not shoot,” the executives of the now-defunct company wrote to Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Mike Donoughe, chief operating officer with Bright, told FoxNews.com that Energy Department officials told them repeatedly they were under a directive to never put the department through another Solyndra.

“Those were their sort of marching orders,” Donoughe said of the department officials his firm dealt with. He said officials are so wound up they “do nothing. And they’re good at that.”

via wsj.com 

By KARL ROVE

Last July, President Obama’s campaign announced that it had raised an average of $29 million in each of the previous three months for itself and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I was only mildly impressed. After all, that was well below the $50 million a month needed to reach the campaign’s goal of a $1 billion war chest for the 2012 race.

Seven months later, I’m even less impressed. Through January, the president has raised an average of $24 million a month for his campaign and the DNC. Next week, the Obama campaign will release its February numbers, but the president is on track to be hundreds of millions of dollars shy of his original goal.

It’s not for lack of trying. Mr. Obama has already attended 103 fund-raisers, roughly one every three days since he kicked off his campaign last April (twice his predecessor’s pace).

The president faces other fund-raising challenges. For one, there are only so many times any candidate can go to New York or Hollywood or San Francisco for a $1 million fund-raiser. Team Obama is running through its easy money venues quickly.

For another, many of Mr. Obama’s 2008 donors are reluctant to give again. The Obama campaign itself reported that fewer than 7% of 2008 donors renewed their support in the first quarter of his re-election campaign. That’s about one-quarter to one-third of a typical renewal rate: In the first quarter of the Bush re-election campaign, for example, about 20% of the donors renewed their support.

There are other troubling signs. Team Obama’s email appeals don’t ask for $10, $15, $25 or $50 donations as they did in 2008, but generally for $3. Nor are the appeals mostly about issues; many are lotteries. Give three bucks and your name will be put in a drawing for a private dinner with the president and first lady.

This is clever marketing, but it suggests the campaign has found that only a low price point with a big benefit can overcome donor resistance among people who contributed via mail or the Internet in 2008. It also points to higher-than-expected solicitation costs and lower-than-expected fund-raising returns.

The final financial challenge facing Mr. Obama’s campaign is how fast it is burning through the cash it is raising. Compare the 2012 Obama re-election campaign with the 2004 Bush re-election campaign. Mr. Obama’s campaign spent 25% of what it raised in the second quarter of 2011, while Mr. Bush’s campaign spent only 9% in the second quarter of 2003. In the third quarter it was 46% for Obama versus 26% for Bush; for the fourth quarter it was 57% versus 40%. In January 2012 the Obama campaign spent 158% of what it raised, while the Bush campaign spent 60% in January 2004.

At the end of January, Team Obama had $91.7 million in cash in its coffers and those of the DNC. At the same point in 2004, the Bush campaign and Republican National Committee had $122 million in cash combined.

The Obama campaign’s high burn rate doesn’t come from large television buys, phone banks or mail programs that could be immediately stopped. It appears to result instead from huge fixed costs for a big staff and higher-than-expected fund-raising outlays. These are much tougher to unwind or delay. Left unaltered, they generally lead to even more frantic efforts to both raise money and stop other spending.

This perhaps explains why the White House told congressional Democrats last week not to expect a single dime for their campaign efforts from the Democratic National Committee this year. All the DNC’s funds will be needed for the president’s re-election.

His campaign’s financial situation also may explain why Mr. Obama has embraced Super PACs after decrying them as a “threat to democracy” in the midterm elections. The president was quick to criticize Rush Limbaugh’s crude comments about contraception advocate Sandra Fluke. But he refused to condemn his Super PAC’s acceptance of a million-dollar donation from Bill Maher, who routinely attacks Republican women such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann in vulgar and sexually charged terms.

That virtually all Republicans and many independents consider Mr. Obama a failure is obvious. But many Democrats are disappointed with him, too. The president’s difficulty in raising campaign cash is evidence of this. He is working a lot harder than he thought he would to raise a lot less than he had hoped.

Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of “Courage and Consequence” (Threshold Editions, 2010)

Sarkozy would like to top Hollande’s previous goal of taxing the wealthy for 75% of income…..mad i tell you.

Alex Altman

For Ron Paul, victory is finally in sight. No, not a swearing-in ceremony next January 20, or even a single statewide win. Halfway through the primary season, Paul has won only a preference poll in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and he is running dead last in delegates among the four GOP candidates for President. He has spent a lot, if not always wisely: the $31.55 he has dropped per vote (more than even Mitt Romney) is a sum that might shock even a Democrat.

But winning the presidency was never Paul’s foremost goal, and as he nears the end of his last presidential crusade, he has one more chance to promote his ideas. The Republican race is a muddled mess. Even after his southern losses, only Romney has a real shot at amassing the 1,144 delegates required to wrap up the nomination, and he would then face the task of unifying the GOP’s warring factions. Which is why Paul’s campaign has sent discreet signals to Camp Romney that the keys to Paul’s shop can be had for the right price.

Read the rest here.

Thomas Sowell

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Bell even said that he took it as his mission to say things to annoy white people. Perhaps he thought that was better than being insignificant in his academic setting. But it was in fact far worse, because the real damage was to impressionable young blacks who took him seriously, including one who went on to become President of the United States.

Read the rest here.

“(Reuters) – U.S. lawmakers are short on time and money to make the biggest cuts in agriculture in a generation and failure risks unintentionally driving up food prices and adding to an already onerous deficit.

Just as Congress took the country to the brink of an unprecedented debt default by haggling over whether to raise the debt ceiling, fractious Republicans and Democrats may wait this year until the last minute to agree to significant cuts to farm supports amid historically high crop prices.

The U.S. farm law, mammoth legislation that covers everything from food stamps to soil erosion, expires September 30.

Without a new law or an extension, a 1949 law — the bogeyman of farm bill showdowns — would automatically go into effect. It would limit plantings and have the government pay farmers up to twice what crops would sell for on the open market. Farm subsidies would rise by tens of billions of dollars and consumer grocery bills would rise while the economy is still struggling to recover from the recession.

There are fiscal and policy obstacles to a new farm law….”

Read more 

Still in the race

“U.S. legislation that would roll back securities disclosure and governance rules in the name ofjob creation is being attacked by consumer advocates and former regulators as an evisceration of investor protections in place since the 1930s.

The package of bills awaiting Senate action after receiving broad bipartisan support in a House vote last week would destroy safeguards dating as far back as the laws that created the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Lynn E. Turner, a former SEC chief accountant.

“It won’t create jobs, but it will simplify fraud,” Turner said in an interview last week. “This would be better known as the bucket-shop and penny-stock fraud reauthorization act of 2012,” he said, referring to practices banned under securities law.

The Republican-led House, in a show of election-year comity, voted 390-23 to approve measures that would among other things undo a ban on closely held firms soliciting investments, increase the number of investors such firms can have and exempt newly public companies with less than $1 billion in revenue from some reporting requirements of the Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley laws. President Barack Obama has backed the legislation as a way to help spur job creation, and Senate Democrats have said they will move quickly on their own version.

“What we’re trying to do is to regain the confidence of the people that sent us here,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican, said after the March 8 vote….”

Read more

“BRUSSELS (AP) — The United States, the European Union and Japan filed complaints Tuesday with the World Trade Organization charging that China is limiting its export of rare earths, minerals that are vital to the production of technology components.

China produces almost all of the world’s supply of rare earths but has limited exports in recent years. That worried countries with large technology industries as rare earths are used in a variety of sectors to make hard drives, car parts, electronics, fiber optics — and every smartphone in use today.

EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht said China’s export quotas and export duties give Chinese companies an unfair competitive advantage, and must be removed.

“These measures hurt our producers and consumers in the EU and across the world,” De Gucht said.

The three separate but coordinated filings with the WTO formally request dispute settlement consultation, which is the first step in a WTO complaint. If no resolution is found, the dispute can be transmitted to a WTO Panel for a ruling.

Earlier Tuesday, anticipating the complaints, China defended curbs on production of rare earths as an environmental measure.

Global manufacturers that depend on Chinese supplies were alarmed by Beijing’s decision in 2009 to limit exports while it built up an industry to produce lightweight magnets and other goods that use them. China has about 30 percent of rare earths deposits but accounts for 97 percent of the world’s production…”

Read more

Watch the video. You’ll never guess who is on the record calling this guy his “favorite congressman.”

Let’s see if this goes anywhere…NOT

“COLUMBUS – Before getting a prescription for Viagra or other erectile dysfunction drugs, men would have to see a sex therapist, receive a cardiac stress test and get a notarized affidavit signed by a sexual partner affirming impotency, if state Sen. Nina Turner has her way.

The Cleveland Democrat introduced Senate Bill 307 this week.

A critic of efforts to restrict abortion and contraception for women, Turner says she is concerned about men’s reproductive health. Turner’s bill joins a trend of female lawmakers submitting bills regulating men’s health. Turner said if state policymakers want to legislate women’s health choices through measures such as House Bill 125, known as the “Heartbeat bill,” they should also be able to legislate men’s reproductive health. Ohio anti-abortion advocates say the two can’t be compared.

Heartbeat bill sponsor Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, said comparing his bill to Turner’s would be like comparing apples to bananas. The Heartbeat bill would prohibit abortion once a heartbeat is detected, as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

“I understand some women think my bill is a personal affront,” Wachtmann said. “Protecting the unborn — to compare this to Viagra is not even related.”

Read more

via

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department’s civil rights division on Monday objected to a new photo ID requirement for voters in Texas because many Hispanic voters lack state-issued identification.

Texas follows South Carolina as the second state in recent months to become embroiled in a court battle with the Justice Department over new photo ID requirements for voters.

Photo ID laws have become a point of contention in the 2012 elections. Liberal groups have said the requirements are the product of Republican-controlled state governments and are aimed at disenfranchising people who tend to vote Democratic — African-Americans, Hispanics, people of low-income and college students.

Proponents of such legislation say the measures are aimed at combating voter fraud. But advocacy groups for minorities and the poor dispute that and argue there is no evidence of significant voter fraud.

In regard to Texas, “I cannot conclude that the state has sustained its burden” of showing that the newly enacted law has neither a discriminatory purpose nor effect, Thomas E. Perez, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in a letter to the Texas secretary of state.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot has said the Obama administration is hostile to laws like the one passed last year in Texas.

The National Conference of State Legislatures called the voter ID issue “the hottest topic of legislation in the field of elections in 2011,” with legislation introduced in 34 states.

The department had been reviewing the Texas law since last year and discussing the matter with state officials. In January, Texas officials sued U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, seeking a court judgment that the state’s recently enacted voter ID law was not discriminatory in purpose or effect.

As a state with a history of voter discrimination, Texas is required under section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to get advance approval of voting changes from either the Justice Department or the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

In a letter to Texas officials that was also filed in the court case in Washington, the Justice Department said Hispanic voters in Texas are more than twice as likely than non-Hispanic voters to lack a driver’s license or personal state-issued photo ID. The department said that even the lowest estimates showed about half of Hispanic registered voters lack such identification.

The range was so broad because the state provided two sets of registered voter data.

In December, the Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s voter ID law on grounds it makes it harder for minorities to cast ballots. It was the first voter ID law to be rejected by the department in nearly 20 years.

In response, South Carolina sued Holder; the state argued that enforcement of its new law will not disenfranchise any voters.

Other states have moved toward photo ID requirements in the past year.

Alabama has a photo ID law, but it does not go in effect until 2014. Mississippi voters approved a photo ID law, but the state legislature has not yet adopted enabling legislation. The Justice Department has not yet reviewed the initiatives in either state.

The Justice Department has said it is reviewing voter ID laws in other states, but has not identified which ones.

“Let the president be duly warned.

Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., R-N.C., has introduced a resolution declaring that should the president use offensive military force without authorization of an act of Congress, “it is the sense of Congress” that such an act would be “an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor.”

Read more 

“(CBS News) Meir Dagan has been described as “hard-charging” and “stops at nothing.” For more than eight years, Dagan made full use of those qualities as chief of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, where he focused on keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. When that job ended, Dagan did something unheard of for an ex-Mossad chief: he spoke out publicly, voicing opposition to Israel launching preemptive airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities anytime soon. Dagan believes the Iranian regime is a rational one and even its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – who has called for Israel to be annihilated – acts in a somewhat rational way when it comes to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Lesley Stahl reports.

The following script is from “The Spymaster Speaks” which aired on March 11, 2012. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shachar Bar-On, producer.

When President Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this past week, the subject was how, when and if to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu saying Israel can’t afford to wait much longer; Mr. Obama arguing there’s still time to let sanctions and diplomacy do the job. And he said some top intelligence officials in Israel side with him.

Actually, you’ll hear from one of them tonight: Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA. It’s unheard of for someone who held such a high-classified position to speak out publicly, but he told us he felt compelled to talk, because he is so opposed to a preemptive Israeli strike against Iran anytime soon.

Dagan headed the Mossad for nearly a decade until last year. His primary, if not his only mission was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. And he says there is time to wait, perhaps as long as three years.

Lesley Stahl: You have said publicly that bombing Iran now is the stupidest idea you’ve ever heard. That’s a direct quote….”

Read more

In November 1985, the Harvard Law Review published an article by Derrick Bell that was a “classic” in the development of Critical Race Theory. The article was edited by then-student Elena Kagan, and was cited by Prof. Charles Ogletree in support of her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Barack Obama in 2010. The article makes clear that Critical Race Theory sees the U.S. Constitution as a form of “original sin”–a view later embraced by Obama as a state legislator, and reflected in his actions and appointments. The following is an excerpt from the non-fiction portion of the article; much of what follows is a fictional story that Bell intended as a parable of racial “fantasy.” (99 Harv. L. Rev. 4)

At the nation’s beginning, the framers saw more clearly than is perhaps possible in our more enlightened and infinitely more complex time the essential need to accept what has become the American contradiction.  The framers made a conscious, though unspoken, sacrifice of the rights of some in the belief that this forfeiture was necessary to secure the rights of others in a society embracing, as its fundamental principle, the equality of all.  And thus the framers, while speaking through the Constitution in an unequivocal voice, at once promised freedom for whites and condemned blacks to slavery….

The Constitution has survived for two centuries and, despite earnest efforts by committed people, the contradiction remains, shielded and nurtured through the years by myth. This contradiction is the root reason for the inability of black people to gain legitimacy — that is, why they are unable to be taken seriously when they are serious and why they retain a subordinate status as a group that even impressive proofs of individual competence cannot overcome. Contradiction, shrouded by myth, remains a significant factor in blacks’ failure to obtain meaningful relief against historic racial injustice.

Read the rest here.