The Democrats’ obsession with abortion never wanes. Not even in the smaller elections. Take this ad from Deb Butler, a Democrat running for the state senate in North Carolina. She is holding a transvaginal ultrasound wand.
She is arguing against her Republican opponent who backed a bill in 2011 requiring women to see the unborn child and the beating heart before considering an abortion.
Do they have any decency? Apparently not.
Just after Joe Biden managed to disgust everyone with his swipe at Paul Ryan and his dad (see below), he outdoes himself.
At a rally in Dansville, Va., the gaffe master declared to the crowd, “We can win North Carolina!” Mr. Vice President, you might want to check and see which state you’re in before you scream that.
Fun as that was, malice surfaced in another remark at the same spot. He told a largely minority audience that Republicans “are going to put y’all back in chains.” (Y’all? From a guy out of Delaware?)
They’ve said it. Every Republican’s voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they’re proposing. Romney wants to let the—he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules–unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains. He’s said he’s going to do nothing about stopping the practice of outsourcing…
Biden knew exactly what he was doing here. It’s despicable. I don’t think they can keep this up without alienating everyday Americans.
But as if that weren’t enough, Biden managed to make fun of the sign language person there, too:
Stay classy, Joe.
Things that make you go hmmm: Today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics weekly jobless claims number was apparently released 15 minutes before the 7:30 CST a.m. announcement.
Bloomberg reported:
“Jobless claims data were available on Labor Dept. website about 15 minutes before scheduled 8:30am release today, Stone & McCarthy Research Associates economic analyst Terry Sheehan says.” Now aside from the fact that SMRA should be commended for chacking the DOL.gov website early and getting a critical advance look at today’s most important data point, we have some questions:
Who broke the embargo and why?
Who else had even earlier advance access to the data?
Why did the BLS have this glitch?
And most importantly, especially in light of the recent scandal about the BLS leaking data selectively early, just how is the BLS policing itself from such erroneous data releases, and if the answer is non-existant, can the BLS announce whether it has preferential “huddle” agreements with anyone when it comes to leaking data as it did today?”
Good questions. Remember it was discovered the Democrat governor of North Carolina, Beverly Perdue, was getting advanced notice of the monthly numbers, which is against all rules? Now here’s another instance. Hmm.
Incidentally, the jobless claims dropped 6,000 to 361,000. But before you start popping champagne, ZeroHedge alerts us to other data:
As we noted last night, inventory destocking is the great unknown as far as consensus expectations and the wholesale inventories data this morning just confirmed that this is a worrying trend. With the first drop MoM since September 2011 and dramatically missing expectations, inventories dropped 0.2% and perhaps more worryingly – given the drop in inventories – is the critical inventory-to-sales ratio has now risen two months in a row as clearly sales are dropping faster than companies were expecting.
Then, he quotes:
Bloomberg’s Consumer Comfort index slipped back below -40 this week (despite all the market ebullience) indicating empirically at least a period of severe economic discontent among the most critical segment of our economy. Worst still, the outlook for the economy is its weakest in six months and the last two months have seen confidence on the economy plunge its fastest in 13 months.
From Gateway Pundit:
The man responsible for getting Democrats elected to the U.S. Congress this fall has a message for his party’s candidates: Stay away from the Democratic National Convention.
“If they want to win an election, they need to be in their districts,” New York congressman Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Reuters Washington Summit on Tuesday.
The Democratic convention, to be held in Charlotte, North Carolina, in early September to formally nominate President Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential nominee, is viewed warily by some of the party’s candidates.
The September 3-6 gathering to fete a president whose popularity ratings have hovered around 50 percent is a particularly sensitive issue for Democratic candidates who are in close races in states or districts where Obama trails Republican Mitt Romney in voter surveys.
For such candidates, four days of mingling with Democratic leaders could turn off independent voters before the November 6 election.
“A trip to Charlotte may be interesting,” Israel said, “but why leave your districts?”
Obama’s poll ratings have little to do with his stance, Israel said.
CNN Money reported:
More than one in seven Americans are on food stamps, but the federal government wants even more people to sign up for the safety net program.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been running radio ads for the past four months encouraging those eligible to enroll. The campaign is targeted at the elderly, working poor, the unemployed and Hispanics.
The department is spending between $2.5 million and $3 million on paid spots, and free public service announcements are also airing. The campaign can be heard in California, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, and the New York metro area.
Here’s the clip:
“And they make you look good, too,” the ad says.
From Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro comes this story:
A YouTube video “uploaded on Monday afternoon apparently shows a schoolteacher from the Rowan-Salisbury school district in North Carolina informing a student that failing to be respectful of President Obama is a criminal offense. Breitbart News has uncovered that the student is a high school junior, and that the teacher is apparently one Tanya Dixon-Neely.
The video shows a classroom discussion about the Washington Post hit piece about Mitt Romney bullying a kid some five decades ago. One student says, “Didn’t Obama bully someone though?” The teacher says: “Not to my knowledge.” The student then cites the fact that Obama, in Dreams from My Father, admits to shoving a little girl. “Stop, no, because there is no comparison,” screams the teacher. Romney is “running for president. Obama is the president.”
The student responds that both are “just men.”
The teacher yells — literally yells — that Obama is “due the respect that every other president is due … Listen,” she continues, “let me tell you something, you will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom.” She yells over the student repeatedly, and yells at him that it’s disrespect for him to even debate about Romney and Obama.
The student says that he can say what he wants.
“Not about him, you won’t,” says the teacher.
The teacher then tells the student – wrongly – that it is a criminal offense to say bad things about a president. “Do you realize that people were arrested for saying things bad about Bush? Do you realize you are not supposed to slander the president?”
The student says that it would violate First Amendment rights to jail someone for such sentiments. “You would have to say some pretty f’d up crap about him to be arrested,” says the student. “They cannot take away your right to have your opinion … They can’t take that away unless you threaten the president.”
Clearly, the student should be teaching the class, and the teacher should be reading the Constitution more often.
The school district classified the exchange – which is obviously just another case of a pro-Obama teacher shoveling her views down students’ throats – a “learning experience.” It isn’t. It’s political intimidation, and it’s just another example of how the American public school system has become an indoctrination tool for the left. This teacher should be suspended or fired forthwith, if only for incompetence.
UPDATE: Breitbart News has received information that the YouTube video was shot by a friend of the bullied student. According to our source, the student had asked his friend to record the discussion to “prove to his parents what he has been trying to tell them for some time. The teacher in this video has a long history of pushing a liberal agenda, by shouting down students. She is very intolerant of other points of view that she does not share. The atmosphere at this school is not very conducive to opposing views.”
The source continues, “The student’s parents have since taken him out of school and had him registered at another nearby school.”
Here’s the video:
Here he’s targeting voter fraud in North Carolina.
Jim Geraghty of National Review writes in his Morning Jolt that the Democrats may regret their choice of Charlotte for their convention. Here’s why:
In Roll Call, Stuart Rothenberg thinks
the Democrats may regret their choice of convention city:
If national Democratic strategists chose Charlotte, N.C., for the party’s national convention because they liked the facilities, the hotel accommodations or the weather in early September, then I guess I can’t yet quibble with the choice.
But if David Axelrod and the president’s other political advisers picked the Tar Heel State to make some broader political point, then they goofed.
Simply put: North Carolina looks like a mess for Democrats.
The state’s Democratic governor, Beverly Perdue, is so unpopular — her job approval has been fluctuating from 30 percent to 40 percent for months — that she wisely decided not to seek re-election this year. A recent survey by Public Policy Polling, a Raleigh-based Democratic polling firm, showed only 60 percent of Democrats approve of the job the governor is doing. . . .
Democrats will lose three or four Congressional seats in November, victims of Republican redistricting made possible by the national GOP wave of 2010, which gave both chambers of the state Legislature to Republicans. (In an ironic twist, the governor of North Carolina had no role in the redistricting process.)
But it gets worse.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, North Carolina’s preliminary unemployment rate for March stood at 9.7 percent, lower than only three states (California, Rhode Island and Nevada) and the District of Columbia. Apparently, the Obama administration’s jobs recovery has not shifted into high gear in the Tar Heel State.
Of course, if the state’s economy is a mess, it’s still in better shape than the North Carolina Democratic Party.
Two weeks ago, the state party’s executive director, Jay Parmley, resigned amid accusations of sexual harassment. North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman David Parker, who accepted Parmley’s resignation but seemed to defend him, has also come under fire. Some Democratic activists are now demanding his resignation.
Rothenberg concludes:
For months, I’ve been including the Tar Heel State in my list of swing territory. I think I’ve been wrong to do so, no matter what current polling shows.
Unless the president wins re-election nationally by 7 or 8 points (or about what he did in 2008), his chances of carrying the state are not very good. And if he wins nationally by a large margin, he won’t need North Carolina.
Obama won North Carolina by three-tenths of a point four years ago — almost 7 points worse than his national margin of 7.2 points.
Charlotte is a wonderful city, so at least the Democrats have that going for them
Much is being made about Romney’s win in Puerto Rico. I don’t remember Puerto Rico’s vote even being mentioned in previous primaries as important, do you? Since the island isn’t a state and doesn’t vote, it seems like a Pyrrhic victory.
Santorum’s win in Mississippi and Alabama does matter.
So does this new Rasmussen poll. In it, “Obama Trails Santorum, Leads Romney in Core Four States” is the headline. In four very important states, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, Santorum beats Obama. In those same states, according to Rasmussen, Obama beats Romney. These are key swing states.
Santorum leads the president 48% to 44%. “This marks a shift from last week, when the president was slightly ahead of Santorum,” Rasmussen says.
Santorum may have lost in Ohio, but it was narrowly. He lost in Florida, but that was before his momentum began. Virginia was rigged, with only Romney and Paul on the ballot. North Carolina is yet to come. It is being called the place where the whole election could be decided. That’s why the Democrats chose it for their convention site. Specifically, the area around Charlotte (city for the DNC convention), there are 45,000 people who might determine the whole election.
“Obama remains ahead of Romney 46% to 42%, showing no change from last week,” the poll finds.
So while Romney supporters might be pointing to this meaningless win in Puerto Rico as momentum, let’s wait and see what happens in Illinois on Tuesday. That is, by far, more important.
This morning while driving, I heard an ad come on the radio. It was one of those government sponsored ads, this one urging Americans to save energy. But it wasn’t done in a straightforward manner. It was insidious.
In the ad, a man asks a kid if he would like to go to the state fair. The boy, Billy, says yes. The man then asks if he would like to ride the new roller coaster. Billy again says yes. Would Billy like to ride the super duper roller coaster? Billy’s excitement grows. Would he like to ride the new one that even goes into reverse? By this time Billy is ecstatic.
Well, sorry, you can’t the man’s voice said. Billy is crushed. Why not, he asks? The voice says well, Billy, your parents wasted too much energy in their home and didn’t have the money to go to the state fair. However, he tells Billy that if his parents are energy conscious, they would have the money to take him to the fair and ride that roller coaster. But – they couldn’t do it this year. If they saved, the voice was sure Billy would go next year.
Isn’t that jaw dropping? Think how far reaching this little vignette is. The speaker is telling the son that his parents don’t care about his needs or wants; don’t care about allocating their money properly; don’t care that the environment might suffer. In other words, Mom and Dad are dolts too stupid to run their own lives. They had better listen to the government if Billy has any chance at all of living a happy life.
This example might be an outlier, except it isn’t. This kind of thing seems to be happening more and more.
Remember last month when the four year old in North Carolina had her lunch taken away at school because it didn’t comply with the government’s requirements for a healthy lunch? There, too, the child was being told (indirectly) that Mom (and let’s face it, by inference, Dad, if there is one around) doesn’t know what a good lunch is and doesn’t care. They don’t care if the daughter is humiliated at school. They don’t care if her body grows properly. Thankfully, the government does.
Before that, there was another ad running on the radio part of the “Let’s Move” Michelle Obama exercise obsession where a daughter is hunting for her mother’s keys. The mother sends her upstairs, in the bedroom and throughout the house on a wild goose chase. Mom has the keys all along; she just wanted the girl to get some exercise. The message in this one is that mom is devious and will lie to her child. Nice, huh?
For years Hollywood has been chipping away at the image of the family. The family in Father Knows Best has morphed into one or two young people who live together with one adult – maybe the parent – maybe straight or maybe gay – but far from the wholesome Ozzie and Harriet model. The smart alack kid has always been around, but now he’s in charge. Ever see the show “Shameless”? The father hustles for disability checks, drinks and takes drugs; the mother ditched her five children for a lesbian relationship; the eldest daughter has not completed high school and has the morals of a skank; one son is brilliant but into drugs, drink and girls; the other is gay and in a relationship with his boss; one girl is too young to have found trouble yet; the baby is half black and half white. They take what they can get at any opportunity, legal or otherwise. I fear they are more the nuclear family now than I care to think.
And, from appearances, that is the way some in our government want it. Let the family dissolve, let the kids distrust the parents and Uncle Sam then comes to the rescue. Of course, his motives are not necessarily in the children’s best interests. They won’t find out about that, though, til it’s too late. Another generation and they won’t even notice.
I have come to believe the progressives would like to implement a one child policy. Again, it’s camouflaged in your own interests. We see the creeping moves towards eliminating the handicapped or retarded. It’s already being done via abortion.
Uncle Sam has upped it to Daddy Sam and Mommy Samantha. It’s frightening.