From the Washington Times:

Mitt Romney won The Washington Times/CPAC Presidential Straw Poll on Saturday, and also nipped Rick Santorum as the top choice of conservatives nationwide, according to a new version of the poll conducted for the first time this year that suggests Mr. Romney retains strong support among self-identified conservatives.

Mr. Romney won 38 percent of the straw poll, which counted the votes of 3,408 activists gathered for the Conservative Political Action Conference, which ran from Thursday through Saturday at a hotel in Washington.

Mr. Santorum was second with 31 percent, Newt Gingrich was third with 15 percent and Rep. Ron Paul was fourth with 12 percent — far below his showing the last two years, when he won with 31 in 2010 and 30 percent in 2011.

In the national survey, meanwhile, Mr. Romney barely topped Mr. Santorum 27 percent to 25 percent, with Mr. Gingrich in third place at 20 percent and Mr. Paul again trailing at 8 percent. (more…)

According to a new study conducted by the Washington Times newspaper, the 2011 112th Congress was the “most futile” and least productive since records began being kept in 1947.

For many conservatives, fewer laws passing–and the spending that often comes with them– may seem like a reason to cheer. But as the Washington Times points out, because so many entitlement programs operate on autopilot spending increases, government spending grows automatically even when bills aren’t passed.

The new report appears to have sparked a new round of the Washington blame game:

Spokesmen for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, did not respond to questions about the lack of action.

McConnell spokesman Don Stewart did offer a brief statement that Democrats’ 2012 agenda appears to be the same as in 2011.

“Legislation that will be pushed will be what polls well, rather than what could feasibly be passed into law,” he said.

(more…)

From the Washington Times:

September 12, 2009. The Quincy Tea Party. Quincy, Illinois. A singer/songwriter from Los Angeles donned a baseball cap and sunglasses. What little one could see of his face was obscured by 4 or 5 days growth. He was completely out of his element…an outsider. He felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time: he felt safe.

Thousands of hard working patriots listened to Andrew Breitbart explain the dangers of being a conservative in the entertainment industry…the bias, the vitriol, the potential loss of work should the liberal power brokers of Hollywood discover one’s conservatism.

It was Breitbart who introduced this singer/songwriter to the tea party… and the tea party to living proof that conservatives do exist in Hollywood.

This was the first time I performed at a tea party. I didn’t use my real name.

I didn’t use my real name but I was hooked. I was hooked on a strain of patriotism I had not been privy to in Los Angeles but had always felt inside. Hooked on the beauty and power of the individual with a voice…and a collection of voices that could actually affect change unified by the message of freedom. The tea party was bigger than any one individual and its goals were bigger than anything I ever dreamed I’d be part of.

(more…)

As the Occupy manifestation of the “Global Peace and Justice Movement” begins to decay and break down into the predictable anarchy, violence and arrests, it is becoming clear that the protests pose special dangers for women.

Even the left has begun to admit it. The Nation tries to laud the role of women in Occupy Wall Street but can’t avoid the truth:

The dozen women I spoke to for this story—most of them queer-identified and/or women of color—have witnessed varying amounts of offensive behavior, such as unwanted touching or use of casually misogynist language, within the movement…

Ashwini Hardikar, one protest participant, recently wrote a powerful blog post about two such experiences that occurred within an hour: a male protester giving her an unwanted hug, who then expressed shock when she responded (loudly) that she found his hug unwelcome and intrusive, and a young man chanting “Lady Liberty is a whore” and defending himself when she questioned his language. This kind of explaining and educating can be exhausting for women.

Here are a just a few recent incidents:

• A 14-year-old runaway was allegedly sexually assaulted at Occupy Dallas.
• A 19-year-old student activist was allegedly raped at Occupy Cleveland.
• A man was arrested on charges of indecent exposure to children at Occupy Seattle.
• A female reporter was threatened by activists at Occupy Oakland.

And even more attacks are listed in John Nolte’s “rap sheet” on the Occupy protests. The threats to women are not confined to the periphery of the Occupy movement but exist at the heart of the main Occupy Wall Street protest in New York. (more…)

As our readers have already learned, Rep. Andre Carson gathered Capitol Hill reporters around him and told the tale of racial slurs and menacing crowds on the verge of hurling rocks at the congressmen.  Our first few videos showed the congressmen coming out of the Cannon Office Building, walking down the steps and into Independence Avenue from various angles.  None of those videos revealed the racial hatred Rep. Carson conveyed to reporters that day and none of the videos showed a mob rushing or in any way impeding the congressmen.

When Rep. Carson gathered reporters around him to spread the myth of racial slurs being hurled “fifteen times” he painted the protesters not just as racists, but as a terrorist threat.  We know this, because Kerry Picket of the Washington Times recorded Rep. Carson as he explained it all to eager reporters.

KERRY PICKET (Wash. Times): Do you think the people outside are generally dangerous or no?

REP. CARSON: Oh absolutely. I worked in homeland security. I’m from intelligence, and I’ll tell you, one of the largest threats to our internal security…I mean terrorism has an Islamic face, but it really comes from racial supremacist groups. (inaudible) Its the kind of thing we keep a threat assessment on record [for].

PICKET: From groups like this?

REP. CARSON: Oh absolutely.

And we can now see this two pronged message continuing in the narrative from Democratic politicians and the media:  The Tea Party protests are really about white rage and they are sowing the seeds for domestic terrorism.  This was the message delivered by Rep. Carson that afternoon and that is the message the media has run with.

(more…)

The Soros-linked far left Media Matters today announced that the Kevin Jennings GLSEN scandal reported here on this blog and at Big Government is a non-scandal that was rightfully ignored by the state-run media.

Here’s a question: If it is such a non-scandal then why did Media Matters write 18 different articles on the non-scandal this week?

(more…)

At first glance, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) conference call of August 10th, 2009sounds innocent enough because it’s supposedly been organized by Michael Skolnik, political director for Russell Simmons and someone not officially associated with any government agency. Skolnik appears to be acting independently as a concerned citizen and to have taken it upon himself to gather together a group of artists and art organizations hoping to move them towards “national service.” And how nice of the White House, the federal government and the NEA to make the time to participate in the call and aid this group of American artists motivated to help their country and community.

But this is only how things appear.

All evidence points to the fact that the conference call was a ruse, a front for a White House using Skolnik as a kind of beard in order to put an innocent spin on their abuse of the NEA and two non-partisan volunteer organizations (United We Serve – an initiative overseen by The Corporation for National and Community Service – a federal agency, and the White House’ Office of Public Engagement).

The goal: To motivate a group of hand-picked pro-Obama artists (grant recipients or those wanting grants) to push the President’s flagging agenda, especially health care — and to funnel this promotion through the ACORN related- Serve.gov website.

***

Documentation gathered by Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche and the Washington Times, coupled with a newly revealed audio recording of the full conference call, points to eight troubling facts that put the full context of the call in a very disturbing light. (more…)

On August 25th 2009, Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche broke the story of a conference call he attended with other “rising artist and art community luminaries”:

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

The email invite came directly from Yosi Sergant, then-Director of Communications at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and it advised this hand-picked group that the call was about laying “a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Courrielche describes the call this way: (more…)

From the American Spectator:

Here’s the Saturday morning round-up on the Census Bureau story for the formerly mainstream media, checking out their home Web pages:

Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, CBS News, CNN Sucks — story isn’t there. WashPost did run a piece about the Big Government expose’ in DC.

MSNBC, to its credit, posted a link to an AP version of the story near the top of their homepage. Some of the others above have the AP story too, but they don’t headline it on their homepages. This is significant because all the major news organizations have an auto-feed of wire service stories to their sites — MSNBC just took the trouble to link it from their homepage.

Fox News of course has followed the story all along, and the Washington Times ran the AP version.

And kudos to ABC News (top of their homepage) and reporter Jake Tapper. Unlike the other lazy and indifferent bureaus listed above, Tapper stayed on the story doing original reporting, crediting Fox News and Big Government for their scoops, embedded one of James O’Keefe’s YouTube videos in his story, and got a response that no one else did:

(more…)