Question of the Day: Is the phase "democratic politician's sense of duty" synonymous with the parse "dereliction of duty"?
That is a good question. For the last few weeks the democrats and the media has been focused on the Anthony Weiner scandal (BTW, he resigned today as it was getting too hot for even the Dems), Sarah Palin's bus tour and then her emails, and whatever else they could find to keep the attention off:Lack of Budget by the Democrat Senate
The Misery Index
ATF Agents Ordered To Watch Guns Being Shipped Over U.S.-Mexico Border
War in Libya with no request to the Congress under the War Powers Act by Obama costing the taxpayers $9,421,000 a day.Not only are the democrats guilty of 'dereliction of duty" but so are the Obama media except in rare instances. Reuters and the Los Angles Times are a few of the mainstream media who have actually been covering other stories not making the Weiner scandal the top news of the day. One thing the tabloid journalism has done is to keep the fact that Democrats have not adopted a real budget now for two years off the radar.
The Republican House fulfilled their constitutional duties by adopting a budget which went to the Senate looks like to die if Reid has his way. Instead of offering an alternative that could then go to conference committee, Reid and the Democrats prefer not to bother with a budget and just keep passing continuing resolutions.
The Misery Index is back but what have we been hearing about it -- not much as Obama and the Democrats try to hide the poor economic numbers. Since they took gasoline and groceries out of the inflation index, it is is not as high as it should be. Fill up your tank or buy groceries and you know that their prices have risen dramatically.
Then we have investigation by Rep Issa and his committee on the problem with guns crossing the Mexican border illegally. Guess the media really doesn't want to cover that story that Rep Issa has been pointing out with his hearings that the DOJ also wants to ignore.
The Libya fiasco is the worst of all of this with not only the amount of money being spent at $941,000,000 a day but also the fact that Obama is not consulting Congress in violation of the War Powers Act and Democrats remain silent. Yet these same Democrats attacked President Bush unmercifully about Iraq and still make snide remarks to this day.
This may be the worst two plus years of Government yet under the control of the Democrats led by Obama where the Rule of Law and the Constitution mean zero, zip, nada to these liberals. From the Budget to Libya this Administration and the Democrat Senate and House (for two years) have been an abject failure by driving this Country into more deficit spending with their salacious appetite for spending the American tax dollars on their pet projects and ideas as they try to take the Country left. When Obama cannot get something passed through the Republican House, he ignores the law like the War Powers Act and acts unilaterally like a dictator.
Here is the collection of important stories that have been off the radar thanks to the Democrats and the media's tabloid journalism along with many bloggers following every move of Weiner. Even hate mentioning the lowlife's name.
Scofflaw Democrats Try to Change the Subject
June 15, 2011 Posted by John at 9:28 PM
The Democratic Congress hasn't adopted a budget in more than two years. This isn't just irresponsible, it is illegal. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has been hammering away at the Democrats' dereliction, and things are starting to get a little hot for Harry Reid and Kent Conrad. Loyal Democrats like Dana Milbank and Tim Kaine are criticizing them for blowing off the budget, and Senate Democrats who have to fact the voters next year are reportedly getting nervous. So Harry Reid, naturally, is trying to change the subject.For the last two mornings, Reid has started proceedings in the Senate with a demagogic blast at Sessions and the Republicans. Yesterday morning he said:
Madam President, on this side of the aisle for Democrats, protecting the seniors on Medicare is our top priority. I heard our friend, the Ranking Member on the Budget Committee, come here and talk for hours, and he keeps talking about things that really have no bearing on what I think is important for the country today, and that is we know that the Republicans have put forward a budget that destroys Medicare.This morning, it was more of the same. It would certainly come as a surprise to most voters that the federal budget--or lack thereof--along with the broader issues of federal spending and debt, "have no bearing on what...is important for the country today."
Funny, though, that Reid should bring up Medicare in this context, since that program raises another instance of the Democrats' flouting of their legal duties. Coincidentally, yesterday Senator Sessions and Paul Ryan, on behalf of the House Budget Committee, wrote to President Obama to ask him to comply with federal law relating to Medicare. You can read the letter in its entirety here; these are excerpts:
On May 73,201l, the Medicare Trustees not only warned us that Medicare's insolvency date had advanced five years since last year's report but also confirmed that the program is now running a $32 billion cash-flow deficit. To pay current benefits, the program is redeeming tens of billions of dollars in treasury debt instruments and dramatically contributing to our nation's surging publicly held debt. More troubling is that, in total, Medicare faces $36.8 trillion dollars in unfunded obligations over the next 75 years, according to Medicare's non-partisan Chief Actuary.
For the sixth consecutive year, the Trustees have projected that general revenues will account for more than 45 percent of all of Medicare's outlays. When Medicare breaches this limit, section 802 of P.L. 108-173, the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 (MMA), requires the President to submit a legislative proposal to Congress to respond to the warning within 15 days of the next budget. Yet again, the Medicare Trustees have issued a funding warning that requires action by your administration. In fact, the Trustees have urged action "sooner rather than later" in order to "minimize adverse impacts on vulnerable populations."
(snip)Democrats in both the executive and legislative branches are scofflaws. While they love to orate piously about the "rule of law"--usually when the law does not, in fact, say what they want it to--they happily ignore the law when it suits their political convenience. This should be a scandal, but Washington reporters have been too busy studying Sarah Palin's emails and Anthony Weiner's Twitter account to notice.
Excerpt: Read more at Powerline
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Return Of The Dreaded Misery Index
Conceived by economist Arthur Okun in the early 1970s, the Misery Index simply adds together the inflation and unemployment rates to create an effective indicator of real-world suffering.
It gained notoriety under President Carter, whose growth-choking, easy-money policies pushed the index to its post-World War II high. Now, under President Obama's equally disastrous economic policies, the Misery Index is making its return.
The annual inflation rate for May climbed to 3.6% as price spikes spread beyond oil and food. At the same time, May's unemployment rate edged up to 9.1%, yielding a Misery Index of 12.7.
That marks the fourth straight monthly increase in the index, which is now 62% higher than it was when Obama took office, and 57% higher than it was when the recession officially ended.
Obama's Misery Index average of 10.37 is higher than George W. Bush's (8.11) or Bill Clinton's (7.8).
Admittedly, we're a long way from the 21.98 peak during the Carter administration. But with Obama vigorously stirring the stagflation cauldron for the past 2 1/2 years, it should be no surprise that we're heading in that direction.
Excerpt: Read more at IBD
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ATF Agents Ordered To Watch Guns Being Shipped Over U.S.-Mexico Border
Raw Story 
Posts
By Jeremy Pelofsky
WASHINGTON -- U.S. firearms agents told lawmakers on Wednesday they were instructed to only watch as hundreds of guns were bought, illegally resold and sent to Mexico where drug-related violence has raged for years.
Agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona told the House of Representatives Oversight Committee they were told not to arrest the so-called straw buyers and instead see where the guns went.
Republicans and Democrats on the panel expressed outrage about the ATF program -- "Operation Fast and Furious" -- and demanded answers from the Obama administration about why arrests were secondary to tracking the firearms.
"We monitored as they purchased handguns, AK-47 variants and .50 caliber rifles, almost daily at times," John Dodson, an ATF special agent in Phoenix, told the committee.
"Rather than conduct any enforcement actions, we took notes, we recorded observations, we tracked movements of these individuals, we wrote reports but nothing more."
Read More at Reuters
Obama's unauthorized war on Libya costs $9,421,000 a day: Are you getting your money's worth?
The Obama administration is spending almost $9.5 million every single day to blow things up in Libya because the president has determined that is in the country's national interest, this country's national interest, not Libya's.
You may not have noticed the $392,542 flowing out of the national treasury every hour, day and night, since those first $1.5 million Tomahawks flashed from the launch tubes back on March 19.
But Libya's dictator Moammar Kadafi has. Not enough to quit, mind you, because he can hide while his troops do the dying and killing.
Thirteen weeks later Obama, who was elected running against the war in Iraq, finds himself also embroiled in an escalating constitutional conflict at home over another war that he started while touring South America with his family in March.
You may recall that nine days later the Real Good Talker did what he usually does when attacked; he gave a speech to address the outcry over the sudden conflict without meaningful congressional consultation.
When do you we get a media that covers the real news instead of tabloid journalism? With so few news outlets giving real news right now and instead delivering spin for Obama, what does that say about the American people and our being willing to settle for second rate news organizations?