From Reuters:

Republican Chris Christie discussed a possible run for president with top advisers over the weekend and needs to decide by week’s end, a Republican familiar with the discussions said on Monday.

Christie, the New Jersey governor, has been wrestling with whether to jump into the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and is under strong pressure from many donors and party activists to do so.

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Last week we released “The Rebranding of ACORN,” an important Judicial Watch special investigative report on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).  This is report is the result of an extensive JW investigation of the organization’s transformation into various “spinoffs” and affiliated organizations.

acornspecialreport08222011

The ACORN-affiliated groups existing today are ACORN in all but name.  These groups tend to occupy ACORN’s former offices, are staffed in many cases with former ACORN employees, and remain committed to ACORN’s corrupt mission.

Our investigation has documented 17 ACORN-affiliated organizations in the following states/regions:  Arizona, Arkansas, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New England, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.

Among the conclusions of Judicial Watch’s special report, which you can access by clicking here:

• ACORN lives on in the form of numerous state entities and in such affiliated organizations as Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA), The Advance Group, The Black Institute, and Project Vote.  In the words of Bertha Lewis, former chief executive officer of ACORN, “[T]hese entities are carrying on ACORN’s work of organizing low- and moderate-income folks…  [We have created] bullet-proof community-organizing Frankensteins that they’re going to have a very hard time attacking.”

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As a student of history, I’ve always wondered what must have gone through Richard Nixon’s mind when he was ordered to turn over the secret recordings that blew the covers of Watergate in 1974.

What degree of consternation must he have felt when the court order for those tapes sealed his doom?

For that matter, what was going through Bill Clinton’s mind when “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky” no longer sufficed? I’ve wondered what he must have thought when the game was uncovered, and he knew he was going to have to come clean (for a change).

Now, with the rapidity of events surrounding the investigation of “Fast and Furious,” and the extremes to which the current administration seems willing to go in order to cover its tracks, I’m actually wondering what’s going through President Obama’s mind right now?

And what is Eric Holder thinking?

In my opinion, with every release of new documents in the Fast and Furious investigation and every discovery of new aspects of the cover-ups related to the operation, Obama and Holder are inching closer to the days when they’ll be forced to admit their roles in a scandal that dwarfs Watergate and makes the crimes for which Clinton was impeached seem like misdemeanors.

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New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.

The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.

In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.

The images, presented below, also renew doubts about the transparency of the White House’s guest logs–in particular, whether Panther National Chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is the same “Malik Shabazz” listed among the Obama administration’s early visitors.

Tomorrow, J. Christian Adams, the Department of Justice whistleblower in the New Black Panther Party case, will release his new book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery).

The book exposes Obama administration corruption far beyond the Panther dismissal, and reveals how the institutional Left has turned the power of the DOJ into an ideological weapon.

Adams’s book also describes, in detail, the Selma march at which then-Senator Obama was joined by a group of Panthers who had come to support his candidacy.

Among those appearing with Obama was Shabazz, the Panther leader who was one of the defendants in the voter intimidation case that Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed. Also present was the Panthers’ “Minister of War,” Najee Muhammed, who had called for murdering Dekalb County, Georgia, police officers with AK-47’s and then mocking their widows in this video (7:20 – 8:29).

Injustice includes a disturbing photo of Shabazz and the Panthers marching behind Obama with raised fists in the “Black Power” salute.

There are even more photographs.

I have learned that Regnery initially received approval from a person who took pictures of the events in Selma to publish these additional photographs in Injustice.

After the photographer wrote Regnery reversing his permission to include the photographs in Injustice, the images were removed from the photographer’s Flickr account.  Yet we were able to capture them before they disappeared.

The photographs show Obama sharing the same podium at the event with the Panthers.

In the first image, Shabazz stands at the podium, surrounded by uniformed Panthers, including Muhammed. In the second photograph, Obama commands the same podium.

Here are the images:

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The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day. (more…)

On Friday Former President Bill Clinton spoke at the dedication of a bridge at his Presidential library.  During his address he complained that Republicans try to take too much credit for his welfare reform legislation and for balancing the budget. The two parties can argue about who was behind welfare reform, but no one deserves credit for balancing the budget.  The truth is  the United States federal budget was not balanced in any of Bill Clinton’s eight years as President. Not once!

The federal government has two types of debt public debt and intra-governmental debt.  Public debt is comprises securities held by investors outside the federal government, including that held by investors, the Federal Reserve System and foreign, state and local governments  Intra-governmental debt comprises Treasury securities held in accounts administered by the federal government, such as the Social Security Trust Fund.

Traditionally the annual federal government budget deficit or surplus is the cash difference between government receipts and spending, ignoring intra-governmental transfers. This is a trick as intra-governmental debt needs to be repaid just like the publicly held debt. This is also how Clinton claimed a surplus in three out of his last four years. (Source for all of the numbers below, US Treasury Direct).

These figures include the public debt but not the intra-governmental debt.  Its like paying off your American Express card while ignoring the fact that your Mastercard over the limit and months past due. Your Amex looks great but your budget is not balanced.

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Today, in 2008, the TARP bailout was signed into law by President Bush.

Saturday, marked the second week of the #OccupyWallSt protests. With the endorsements of union bosses now firmly in their back pockets, protesters in New York celebrated the anniversary of their campout in a New York City park by shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge. This, of course, led to the NYPD to arrest many of the—more than 700, according to the New York Times.

In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.

The police said it was the marchers’ choice that led to the enforcement action.

While some of the Neo-Communists (“Neo-Coms“) are purposely depriving themselves of shelter and (in the case of yesterday’s arrests) freedom out of sheer ideology, at least one appears to be getting paid—handsomely—to be part of the Marxist madness.

Meet Jeff Rae*:

Among Saturday’s arrestees was one Jeff Rae (@JeffRae), from Washington, DC.  Mr. Rae describes himself on Twitter as a “rabble rouser, agitator, organizer, labor activist.” According to Mr. Rae, he was arrested for ‘failure to obey order, prohibited use of roadway, and blocking traffic.’ [In other words, Mr. Rae was being a disobedient civilian.] (more…)

Why are so many scientific experts atheists? Is it because of their desire for power, their sole acceptance of physical theories, or mere denial?

Contrary to what many people think, science and religion are not always mutually exclusive. Many laws of the universe are actually consistent with Judeo-Christian beliefs.

In his recent book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, Dr. David Berlinski challenges everything from Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to the Big Bang Theory. Do these theories lack sufficient evidence? Interestingly, Berlinski identifies a conspiracy among members of the academic world as the reason for evolution’s popularity.

How can we answer the question of what exists? If there were a God, how could the Holocaust have happened? To hear answers to these difficult questions and more, watch the full interview below.

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From Reuters:

President Barack Obama’s sweeping healthcare overhaul will top the agenda in the new Supreme Court term that opens on Monday and could be the most momentous in decades.

Returning from its three-month recess, the nation’s highest court will confront legal challenges seeking to strike down Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement and a host of other charged issues in its 2011-12 term.

Other big cases pit privacy rights against new police tracking technology, involve jail strip searches and address a free-speech challenge by broadcasters to a U.S. government ban on nudity and blurted expletives on television.

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With the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests starting the catch on in the media after the arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge and protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Occupy Whatever meme is coming to a city near you. Occupy Dallas! is coming to my town October 6th and I’ll head down there to interview  people because that’s what I do. While I was looking up info about the event, I came across a Facebook page that really sums up what is really going on here.

This isn’t a protest against the government.

Not really. The is the guise that it’s under. It’s using the iconography of protest to actually SUPPORT the government status quo – specifically public employees. See, they can’t get a lot of support if they come out and say “Protest to keep out cushy pensions!” because who is going to show up for THAT, right?

Look who is holding the event on civil disobedience.. it’s the North Texas Association of Public Employees – -a group connected to the Steelworkers.

Public Employees are going to be showing people how to protest effectively against other public employees, like the police? This is a puppet show Play a little Rage Against The Machine for a soundtrack and the kids won’t notice that they are actually protesting to support the government bureaucrats.

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From the Associated Press:

Protesters speaking out against corporate greed and other grievances were maintaining a presence in Manhattan’s Financial District even after more than 700 of them were arrested during a march on the Brooklyn Bridge in a tense confrontation with police.

The group Occupy Wall Street has been camped out in a plaza in Manhattan’s Financial District for nearly two weeks staging various marches, and had orchestrated an impromptu trek to Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. They walked in thick rows on the sidewalk up to the bridge, where some demonstrators spilled onto the roadway after being told to stay on the pedestrian pathway, police said.

The march shut down a lane of traffic for several hours on Saturday. The majority of those arrested were given citations for disorderly conduct and were released, police said.

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Have you ever been told to settle for something you weren’t happy with or to ‘just deal’ with the hand you’d been dealt because … well, it is what it is?

Yeah. I’ve been dealing with that a lot lately – especially when the talk turns to politics. So it comes as no surprise that while I was enjoying my manicure earlier this week, CNN’s John King was smugly billowing orders to all Conservatives and Republicans alike to stop complaining and get used to the current Republican Presidential Candidate field.

King, who by his very nature gets on every last nerve in my body, went on to spout his wisdom by indignantly proclaiming ‘this is the hand you’re dealt and these candidates are what you have to work with.’ One could almost see the smile playing on the edge of his lips as he foresaw the future – the future of another four years of Obama-Nation …

Hum. Is this really OK? Are we stuck with what we got out there now? After the last several debates, I’d say the option of having a super-candidate to defeat the current Presidential Disaster is slim … but not hopeless. Never. Ever. Hopeless.

See, this is where we Conservatives – and a lot of Republicans – differ from the gloom and doom of our liberal counterparts. Some might call it always ‘believing the grass is greener on the other side’ or wanting something we see as not possible (i.e., Chris Christie entering the race … But what’s up with this new announcement? Can’t the drama end soon?). But it’s not. It’s simply knowing what is possible and fully understanding what we want in a candidate.

Right now, it may not seem any one candidate fits the bill for our total agenda – i.e., Perry’s lax immigration policy; Ron Paul’s older than a dinosaur; Gary Johnson, being from a state most people don’t even realize is even a state (hey, I am from NM and people still ask me if I am from MEXICO when I say NEW MEXICO) …and Mitt Romney’s joke called RomneyCare … And let’s not forget Bachmann … whose main strike against her is lack of experience and her inability to let a subject just drop (you won’t ever hear me say her biggest issue is she’s a woman … because it’s just not. A Conservative woman in a place of power can perform miracles … I believe it truly.).

So do we settle? Well, that’s not the American way, is it? In fact, we are taught throughout history that settling gets you communism, socialism and slavery.

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Commentators and pundits, some of whom ought to know better, continue to harp on the idea that the recession persists because consumers are not spending. Every Keynesian seems to believe that because consumers are in a dreadful funk, only government stimulus spending can rescue the moribund economy, given (to them, at least) that investors will not spend more because the Fed, having already driven interest rates to extraordinarily low levels, cannot use conventional policies to drive them any lower and thereby elicit more investment spending.

People, please look at the data. They are conveniently available to one and all at the website maintained by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, the outfit that generates the national income and product accounts for the United States.

According to these data, real personal consumption expenditure recovered from its recession decline by the fourth quarter of 2010. Continuing to grow, it now stands (as of the most recent data, for the second quarter of 2011) even farther above its pre-recession peak.

Real government expenditure for consumption and investment (this concept does not include the government’s transfer spending, such as unemployment insurance benefits and social security benefits) is also running higher than its pre-recession level. In the second quarter of 2011, it was running more than 2 percent higher (recall that this is “real,” or inflation-adjusted spending; nominal spending has grown substantially more).

The economy remains moribund not because consumption spending has failed to recover and not because government spending has failed to increase, but because the true driver of economic growth—private investment—remains deeply depressed. Gross private domestic fixed investment fell steeply after the second quarter of 2007, and in the second quarter of 2011 it remained 19 percent below its pre-recession peak. This figure fails to show how bad the investment situation really is, however, because the bulk of the investment spending now taking place is for what the accountants call the “capital consumption allowance,” the amount estimated as necessary to compensate for the wear and tear and obsolescence of the existing capital stock.

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Today, in 1789, George Washington sent the first ten amendments to the Constitution (the Bill of Rights) to the states for ratification.

Alcohol prohibition may have been repealed in 1933, but Americans have rarely been more intoxicated with the “noble experiment” than they are today.

Between Last Call, Daniel Okrent’s best-selling 2010 book, leading clothing designers taking inspiration from jazz age fashion, a new prime-time documentary by Ken Burns, and the new, second season of HBOs critically acclaimed Boardwalk Empire, it’s impossible to ignore the new interest in Prohibition. With a fixation on “classic cocktails” and faux-speakeasies, even drinking culture itself seems to be bellying up to the bar.

What’s fueling this fascination and where will it end? Reason.tv talks with filmmaker Burns, author Okrent, and drug policy activist Aaron Houston of Students for Sensible Policy, who argues that “Culture and art right now are reflective of a general sentiment in this society that the war on drugs has not worked.”

And that change is in air.

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From Reuters:

Democrats want tax hikes to be the first item negotiated in “super committee” deficit-reduction talks, trying to force Republicans to confront an issue at the heart of this year’s budget fights, sources told Reuters.

The tough stance by Democratic members of the powerful 12-member congressional panel reflects the party’s wariness that Republicans might try to sideline the issue of revenue increases in the negotiations.

“They’ve raised the idea of doing taxes first,” a Republican aide involved in the discussions said on Friday on condition of anonymity.

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My brand is Safer Streets 2012 because of one essence: safer streets as we all want them are an indicator of a healthier self-rule.

You will not get to safer streets nor a self-rule without smaller government first, and that will not come as long as there is gun control. Everything else, every delay, every complication, is lip service, designed to waylay our time, energy and spirit away from anything productive, giving us the feeling that we are directing things, but actually wasting our time.

We’ve made some friends and allies in Congress and we have unseated some foes of liberty, but some of us still have the impression that we’re not getting the cooperation we need. Somewhere in there, the new freshmen believe, there is such a thing as sensible gun regulation.

There isn’t. Gun laws are incompatible with liberty. All gun laws.

In Part I, I said that in time of violence, when the target of crime is armed, there is more law present, more public policy present, and more public interest served than by all 20,000 gun laws in force. With a majority of states affirming second amendment latitude, it is clear what their public consensus is. The major cities are out of step.

In Part I, I said that we are the Sovereign, and that our 2012 candidates must acknowledge this on the stump. They should be asked outright and they must affirm this by the repeal of all gun laws, please.

The repeal of all gun laws will unveil one powerful societal dynamic, and that is the personal independence of the individual. When crime is fought best at the scene of the crime and not exclusively after the fact, say, for instance, detection, interdiction, apprehension and the administration of justice, it is because independence has been brought to bear on the problem when it can do the most good. Our greater independence from our own public servants is critical to everything from personal safety to prosperity. Our independence from our servants is critical to self-rule and safer streets.

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From the Associated Press:

The deals announced Friday include a $1.5 billion loan guarantee to Florida-based NextEra Energy and other investors that bought a planned 550-megawatt solar farm on federal land in Southern California from First Solar, as well as $646 million to Illinois-based Exelon Corp. for a 230-megawatt solar plant near Los Angeles. Next Era Energy Resources and GE Energy Financial Services bought the Desert Sunlight project from First Solar, while Exelon bought the Antelope Valley project. First Solar will continue to build and operate both projects.

A third project, worth $1.2 billion, will help San Jose-based SunPower Corp. build a 250-megawatt solar plant in California, while $1.4 billion will go San Francisco-based Prologis Inc. to support installation of about 750 solar rooftop panels in 28 states.

The loan program expires on Friday.

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